Valéry Larbaud, Thomas Hardy and The Dynasts, with two letters from Larbaud to Hardy

Abstract

Valery Larbaud was born in Vichy, central France, in 1881, only child of a wealthy elderly pharmacist and owner of local spas, including Saint-Yorre, who died when he was 8. Dogged by ill-health from infancy, he was cared for by an attentive mother who compensated his irregular formal education with wide reading and extensive travel. From age 10 to 13, he was placed in a private school outside Paris among children from a cosmopolitan and multi-lingual background, which no doubt stimulated his interest in foreign languages and cultures. It would be used as the setting for his first novel Fermina Marquez (1911). After a year back at home, he spent the rest of his teenage years in a sequence of lycees, in Paris and Moulins, continuing to travel widely during the holidays: at 17, he went as far as Russia. While his mother thought she was grooming him to handle the family’s extensive business affairs, he had already decided he wanted to be a writer, and a volume of verse was privately published in 1896.