The New International Encyclopædia/Agoult, Marie Catherine Sophie de Flayigny, Comtesse d'

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The New International Encyclopædia
Agoult, Marie Catherine Sophie de Flayigny, Comtesse d'
1450870The New International Encyclopædia — Agoult, Marie Catherine Sophie de Flayigny, Comtesse d'

AGOULT, a'goo', Marie Catherine Sophie de Flayigny, Comtesse d' (1805-70). A French author, whose pseudonym was Daniel Stern. She was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main. but was educated at Paris, where, in 1827. she married Count d'Agoult. Afterward she lived with Franz Liszt, and of her two daughters by him the youngest was married to Richard Wagner. After a series of novels, including Herve (1841), and Nélida (1845), she published several political works, of which the best known are Lettres républicaines (1848), criticising the government of Louis Philippe, and the Histoire de la Revolution de 1848 (3 volumes, 1851-53). Her best work is Esquisses morales et politiques (1849), a volume of political and nioral aphorisms in the style of the Maximes of Rochefoucauld. Though her moral laxily made her the subject of much unpleasant notoriety, the Comtesse d'Agoult's salon was, for many years, the rendezvous of many leading statesmen, poets, critics, painters, and musicians. There Alfred de Vigny and Sainte-Beuve were frequently seen; there Ponsard read his tragedy of Lucrèce for the first time; and there Prince Liehnowski appeared between his adventures in the Carlist War and his murder by the rabble at Frankfort. During the period from 1838-48 her salon had merely a social character. When, however, the fall of Louis Philippe in the revolution of 1848 led her to join the ultra-democratic party and to begin her crusade against "property and capital, orthodoxy and family," society was closed against her, and it was then that such men as Rodrigues, Enfantin, Lamartine, and Louis Blanc sought her company.