Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen
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D'Adelswärd-Fersen in 1905
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| Born | 20 February 1880 Paris, France
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| Died | 5 November 1923 (aged 43) Capri, Italy
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| Resting place | Cimitero acattolico ("Non-Roman-Catholic cemetery"), Capri |
| Occupation | Writer and poet |
| Known for | Lord Lyllian Akademos Being the subject of Roger Peyrefitte's novel L'Exilé de Capri |
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Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen (20 February 1880 – 5 November 1923) was a French novelist and poet. His life forms the basis of a fictionalised 1959 novel by Roger Peyrefitte entitled The Exile of Capri (L'exilé de Capri).
After 1903 and for much of the rest of his life, he took up residence on Capri. He became a "character" on the island in the inter-war years, featuring in novels by Compton MacKenzie and others. His house, Villa Lysis, remains one of Capri's tourist attractions.
Contents
Early life
He was born in Paris, France as Jacques d'Adelswärd on 20 February 1880, son of Axel d'Adelswärd and Louise-Emilie Alexandrine d'Adelswärd (née Vührer; 1855–1935), who came from Catholic Alsatian family. As he was related on his paternal side to Axel von Fersen, a Swedish count who had had a supposed relationship with Marie Antoinette, d'Adelswärd took on the name Fersen later in his life to advertise his link with his distant relative. On his father's side, his family can be traced back to Baron Georges Axel d'Adelswärd, a Swedish officer who was captured by the French in 1793 and imprisoned in Longwy. There, he married the daughter of the French notary Bernard. D'Adelswärd's grandfather, Renauld-Oscar (1811–1898), became a naturalized French citizen in 1832 and married Amélie Steiner in 1843. After serving in the army, he founded the steel industry in Longwy-Briey. D'Adelswärd went to school in Paris and studied briefly there at the École libre des sciences politiques, and afterward at the University of Geneva. D'Adelswärd's maternal grandfather, Thomas Michel Alexandre Vührer (1817–1886), was a referendary at the French Ministry of State, director of Le Paris-Journal as well as founder of the Parisian newspaper Le Soir. D'Adelswärd's father, Axel d'Adelswärd, died from fever in Panama when Jacques was seven years old. He was assigned a guardian, Viscount Elie Marie Audoin de Dampierre (1846–1909), who was a friend of the family. During d'Adelswärd's teenage years, the family spent long summer vacations at his grandfather's estate on Jersey, where d'Adelswärd reportedly had an intimate encounter with a blond Eton schoolboy.
In 1897, d'Adelswärd visited Capri and other parts of Italy with his mother. The family steel furnaces had become profitable enough to make d'Adelswärd a rich and 'eligible' bachelor when he inherited at the age of 22. Apart from joining the military, he traveled extensively and settled down as a writer. He published Chansons légères (1900) and Hymnaire d'Adonis (1902), and other poems and novels. In 1902, he holidayed in Venice, where he associated with the novelist Jean Lorrain. On his return to Paris, he published a novel, Notre Dame des mers mortes.
On Capri
Construction of Villa Lysis and world travels
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After his marriage plans were foiled, d'Adelswärd remembered the island of Capri from his youth, and decided to build a house there. He stayed originally at the Grand Hotel Quisisana and then bought land at the top of a hill in the northeast of the island, close to where the Roman emperor Tiberius had built his Villa Jovis two millennia earlier. He commissioned his friend Édouard Chimot to design a villa, initially called Gloriette, but was eventually christened Villa Lysis (later sometimes referred to as Villa Fersen) in reference to Plato's Socratic dialogue Lysis. When the construction started, d'Adelswärd left Capri to visit the Far East. He mostly spent time on Ceylon, where he wrote Lord Lyllian. He returned to Capri in the autumn of 1904, visiting the United States on the way back.
At some point after his return, he had to flee Capri temporarily, since some islanders blamed d'Adelswärd for a local worker's accidental death during the construction of Villa Lysis. He went to Rome, where he met a construction worker selling newspapers, Nino Cesarini. D'Adelswärd obtained Cesarini's family's permission to take him as secretary. In the spring of 1905 d'Adelswärd and Cesarini visited Sicily, where they met with Wilhelm von Gloeden in Taormina.
The construction of the villa was completed in July 1905. Villa Lysis is a notable building. Its style is described by some as "Liberty" but is not Liberty or Art Nouveau in the French manner but may perhaps be described as "Neoclassical decadent". The large garden is connected to the villa by steps leading to an Ionic portico. In the atrium a marble stairway with wrought-iron balustrade leads to the first floor, where there are bedrooms with panoramic terraces, and a dining room. The ground-floor sitting-room, decorated with blue majolica and white ceramic, overlooks the Gulf of Naples.
D'Adelswärd and Cesarini travelled to Paris, where d'Adelswärd delivered a manuscript to publishers and went directly to Oxford. After returning to Capri, d'Adelswärd, Cesarini and their four boy-servants travelled to China. They all returned to Villa Lysis at the beginning of 1907.
Temporary exile from Capri
D'Adelswärd published his novel about Capri Et le feu s'éteignit sur la mer… ('And the fire was smothered by the sea') in 1909. The novel told the story of young sculptor Gérard Maleine on Capri. Some islanders, recognising themselves in the book, tried to prevent its distribution. Roberto Ciuni reports that the Communal Council of Capri decided to pursue d'Adelswärd's expulsion from the island at its formal meeting on 16 September 1909.
Local authorities used the parties d'Adelswärd threw to celebrate Cesarini's army enlistment and twentieth birthday as an additional reason for expelling him from the island. Authorities asked d'Adelswärd's brother-in-law, marquis Alfredo di Bugnano, who was married to d'Adelswärd's sister Germaine, to intervene. The marquis summoned d'Adelswärd to Naples and presented him with two options – either to leave Italy voluntarily or be expelled officially. D'Adelswärd chose to leave. He returned to France in November 1909 and stayed briefly in Paris at 24 rue Eugène Manuel. Cesarini left Capri with d'Adelswärd.
The couple did not stay in Paris for long. They left for Porquerolles on the Îles d'Hyères near Toulon, and later moved to Villa Mezzomonte in Nice. D'Adelswärd also travelled to the Far East again, returning in early 1911. Cesarini was discharged from military service in September 1911 and d'Adelswärd took him on a trip through the Mediterranean to the Far East. They returned to Nice at the end of Spring 1912.
D'Adelswärd acquired permission to return to Capri in April 1913. He dedicated the poem, Ode à la Terre promise ('Ode to the Promised Land') to the Italian Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti as a celebration of his return.
Later life
When war broke out in 1914, d'Adelswärd was asked to report for military service by the French authorities. He was found unfit for service by specialists in the French consulate in Naples and sent to a hospital. After d'Adelswärd came back to Capri, doctors declared him incurably ill. He mostly spent his days without leaving the villa.
He spent the rest of his life based in Capri, and died there in 1923. His lover, Nino Cesarini, returned to Rome.
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Akademos revue
Akademos. Revue Mensuelle d'Art Libre et de Critique (1909) was d'Adelswärd's short-lived attempt at publishing a monthly literary journal. It was a periodical of a luxurious kind, each issue printed on several sorts of deluxe paper, with contributions by well-known authors, like Colette, Henry Gauthier-Villars, Laurent Tailhade, Josephin Peladan, Marcel Boulestin, Maxim Gorky, Georges Eekhoud, Achille Essebac, Claude Farrère, Anatole France, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Henri Barbusse, Jean Moréas and Arthur Symons.
In each issue, as is clear from d'Adelswärd's letters to Georges Eekhoud, a homosexual element was carefully introduced: a poem, an article, or a hint in the magazine's serial Les Fréquentations de Maurice by Boulestin. As a magazine with homosexual agenda it was the first of its kind in the French language, although only about 10% of Akademos may be counted as homosexual. In its 'gay' content it trod similar ground to that of the German journal, Der Eigene, published between 1896 and 1931 by Adolf Brand. This is not a coincidence, as d'Adelswärd studied the German publications that tried to push for the social acceptance of homosexuality before launching Akademos. Also he corresponded with Brand and Magnus Hirschfeld.
Akademos lasted only one year—there were twelve monthly issues, amounting to some 2,000 pages. Perhaps its production costs were too great; but in a letter to Eekhoud, d'Adelswärd complained of the lack of interest of the press and the public; and a general hostility from press or society cannot be ruled out.
Film
- Capri – Musik die sich entfernt, oder: Die seltsame Reise des Cyrill K. , 1983. — Made-for-TV movie directed by Ferry Radax for the WDR featuring d'Adelswärd-Fersen, Nino Cesarini, and other historical Capri celebrities.
- Music video of soprano Nicole Renaud singing d'Adelswärd-Fersen's poem, Mon cœur est un bouquet, shot in super 8 film at Villa Lysis, Capri, by Karine Laval.
Music
- The lyrics of the song Les amants solitaires by French soprano Nicole Renaud consist of four poems by d'Adelswärd-Fersen.
