Comtesse de Noailles

Extract

Anna de Noailles has died recently in Paris

To anyone with a rudimentary interest in French currents of thought or literature the fact signalizes at once a loss and a liberation. The loss is to a pul'He of readers, the liberation has come, one hopes, to herself. Madame de Noailles, in a generation of poets obsessed to an unprecedented extent by the fear of death, was pre-eminent in that fear. Two motives may be said exclusively to inspire her poems and, of the two, the horror of death predominated.

Although by birth a Princess de Brancovan, of the Bibescos who so long ago as in 1300 were prince-rulers of Valachia, Anna de Noailles was born, in 1876, in Paris where her family possessed, in the Avenue Hoche, a strange eastern palace straight from the Thousand and One Nights. Her mother was a Greek and also a princess, of the house of Musurus. ‘I am of that country,’ wrote her daughter, ‘which begins in Asia and stretches as far as Sicily.’