Gabrielle De Bergerac

Gabrielle de Bergerac is an early novella by Henry James, first published serially in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869. It is one of his early French stories, written before he had spent his great years in Paris in the mid 1870s and based largely on his reading rather than on direct experience of the country.

The story is set in the late eighteenth century in the years just before the French Revolution. It is told as a long reminiscence by an aging man who as a boy had been the pupil of a young tutor named Pierre Coquelin in a chateau in southwestern France. The household includes the aristocratic Bergerac family and in particular the young Gabrielle, sister to the man of the house. Coquelin, a commoner with revolutionary sympathies, and Gabrielle, an aristocrat with her own quiet moral seriousness, fall in love. The story follows the development of the attachment and the resistance of the family, and ends with the events of the Revolution overtaking them all.

The novella is one of the more conventional historical romances of the young James, working in the kind of pre Revolutionary French setting that was popular in mid Victorian magazine fiction. It is not a piece of original historical research. The atmosphere is drawn from James’s reading of French memoirs and novels of the period rather than from any close historical study. What gives the story its interest is the quiet psychological observation James already brings to the romantic plot. Gabrielle herself is a more complicated figure than the genre would have required, and the boy narrator’s distant memory of the events gives the story a wistful frame that is closer to mature James than the surface might suggest.

The novella runs about a hundred pages. It is one of his lesser known early works and James did not include it in the New York Edition. For readers tracing his development across the late 1860s it is a useful early piece. It pairs naturally with Longstaff’s Marriage and with A Landscape Painter, two other long stories from the same early period.