La Fin de Lucie Pellegrin

by Paul Alexis

Une romance sombre et atmosphérique qui se joue dans les coulisses d’une société en pleine agitation

Dans La Fin de Lucie Pellegrin, l’intrigue se déploie autour d’un amour interdit et des regards jaloux qui traversent une petite ville et ses lieux publics. Le récit mêle passion, mémoire et désir, figés dans des silhouettes nocturnes et des conversations feutrées qui révèlent autant qu’elles cachent. Ce livre invite le lecteur à suivre des personnages pris entre rêve et réalité, entre apparencesEt tension sociale.

Plongée dans une atmosphère où les gestes ordinaires (un dîner, une promenade, une attente à la gare) deviennent le théâtre des passions humaines. Les passions et les secrets s’y mêlent, entre amour tendre, ambiguïtés et les conséquences imprévues des choix du cœur. Le livre offre une lecture immersive, portée par une écriture lucidement evocatrice. Un cadre social riche, où le quotidien devient une scène de drame intime Des personnages complexes, pris dans des désirs qui défient les conventions Des descriptions sensorielles qui donnent vie à des lieux — gare, plage, salons Une narration qui alterne introspection et dialogues, avec une tension croissante Idéal pour les lecteurs qui aiment les romans d’atmosphère, les portraits psychologiques, et les histoires où le cœur parle plus fortement que les mots.

395 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1875

About the author

Antoine Joseph Paul Alexis, French author and journalist.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

First published in 1875, The End of Lucie Pellegrin is a short story about a group of four prostitutes who decided to check in on one of their own, Lucie Pellegrin, who had been fabled among the women for having briefly done well for herself, but now was in decline and hadn’t been seen in sometime. They find Lucie alive in her apartment, having assumed she might well be already dead. Their unspoken reason for the assumption? Lucie clearly has tuberculosis, is frail, in debt, and her apartment is wide open for any debt collector to take whatever he sees fit. Together, the five women have a drinking party, at Lucie’s insistence, paid for with the pawn money from her last diamond. It’s a brief slice-of-life narrative, with joy and grief and a lot of foolishness in between. Alexis was apparently an acolyte of Zola’s, and this brief sample of his brand of Naturalism makes me interested in reading more by this author, who apparently otherwise remains untranslated into English.

[Richard Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Alexis has a very nice narrative style, very light at times, very nuanced. His hand is gentle, his eye is observant. Beneath the Naturalistic style of choosing images, one sees a psychology. He's a very good writer and it is surprising that most English-speaking audiences know nothing about him or his work

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Predictable.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

A consumptive courtesan on her death bed is visited by friends from her ignoble youth. Good, but a bit thin. An early work by a young disciple of Zola.

[Richard Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The End of Lucie Pellegrin (recently translated into English, September 1, 2020, Snuggly Books, https://www.amazon.com/End-Lucie-Pell...) is an entertaining short story or novella by Paul Alexis -- most widely known as the biographer of Zola. Like his master and friend, Alexis was a Naturalist writer (of the French Naturalist movement of literature). This story is no exception of genre. It tells, in colorful detail, the story of a beautiful, but naive and simple, prostitute, who has a taste for absinthe, who has seen better days, indeed she's either dead, faking it, or on her deathbed (or both or all three). She's viewed mostly through the eyes of her friends, but later one gets a glimpse of her "for reals" -- how so, in what way, and what do you actually mean? you'll have to read it. Well-written, as all Alexis' works are (that I've read), it's an entertaining and engaging story of a period of time, The Belle Epoque, that is no longer. One should read the novella to see what Naturalist writers besides Zola (and early in his career Huysmans) were capable of. It could not take more than a couple of hours to complete.

English book on GoodReads.com is here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

Interestingly, Leon Bloy has ne'er a good word to say for Paul Alexis, and one has to wonder whether his dislike of the man was more personal that critical.

For those more modern readers, on the cutting edge of societal norms today, they will be interested in seeing herein a character, Chochotte, who is the quintessential lesbian butch type; it's hard to tell whether he's a proxenete of Lucie, or her erstwhile lover (as some have said, but I don't see it), or something else altogether. Whatever she is, she's a bully, and not someone to mess round with (physically primarily, but probably on all other levels, except maybe at the card table).