Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche and Princess Bovary” (1903/05)

Draft translation of “Nietzsche et la princesse Bovary,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1902–1904 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), p. 131, dated February 1903. A caustic portrait of pretension to Nietzschean worldliness.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

It was said she read Nietzsche, that lamentable little princess whose ideal was to resemble those unhinged and idiotically perverse little bourgeois girls; and that her husband deplored her frequenting a stupefying moralist. These words were written; had they been said, Prince Bovary would be a fool. But there is no doubt that he has not read Nietzsche himself; and certainly if his wife has read him, she has understood nothing of him. Otherwise she would have stayed at home, would have disguised her vices, presented her people with at least the appearance of an aristocratic superiority. Nietzsche never counselled anyone with weakness; but to princes and to masters he preached hardness, towards themselves first of all. Had she read her Nietzsche, she would have learnt that the search for happiness (the happiness of romance and roman) is the blatant sign of a slave-sensibility, and that, of all lapses, the worst is that of the privileged who abdicate their power or merely renounce its outermost expressions. Nietzsche’s power is not stupefying; but, like alcohol, it may be too stiff a brew for stupefied organisms.