#vigny

...Not that he was not tempted.  He was of his time, and he glimpsed, like so many others the end of Evil and the great reconciliation.  It is true that the "mysteries" he published do not much give this impression. "Eloa" and "Le Deluge"show souls that are too pure, too loving, victims of a higher law: Eloa, who intends to glorify love in heaven and who thinks she is obeying this divine exhortation when she tries to save Satan, sees herself helplessly abandoned to the seducer; Emmanuel and Sara perish in the waters of the flood because each refuses to be saved alone if it meant renouncing the other...

...But his drafts and sketches of "mysteries" betray a thought that is more complex.  We have seen that he was planning a "Satan" of which numerous fragments and sketches have survived, and from which "Eloa" as it was printed seems to have been taken.  As a project it precedded "Eloa"; and if on occasion it became identical with the latter poem in Vigny's mind, the project nevertheless outlived "Eloa". The fragments that remain contain "Les Reproches de Satan" in which the Devil no longer appears as the tempter of innocence arguing for obscure and marvelous delights but as an accuser of the tyrant-God; he refuses to submit to the Almighty's arbitrariness and preaches a sort of heroic pride of the creature.  Other fragments show the Rebel, redeeemed at the end of time, and with Evil abolished, reclaiming his place in heaven: this is the future romantic outline of more than one End of Satan.  

Thanks to the character of Eloa, who reappears in these fragments, not even the theological promotion of the Feminine as agent of redemption, which was the obsession of the heresiarchs of these times, is lacking. Much has been written about Vigny's thought in this group of texts.

At the bottom, the three types of Satan - seducer, rebel, redeemer - are not irreducible to one another; they reproduce, with a positive value, the traits orthodoxy combines to create the single figure of the Demon: perversity, pride, and guilty conscience. The sympathetic interpretation of these traits obviously signifies an identification of the satanic and the human; that is a refusal, if not of God, at least of the traditional representation of the divine order.  The redemption of Satan puts an end to this representation...

...But it is a great scandal to proclaim the Evil One to be innocent, and one may quail at taking so bold a step.  This is what Vigny seems to have done in only publishing, out of his entire project, this "Eloa", a poem of demonic seduction, whose argument conforms to dogma. He knew very well that by concluding the poem with Eloa's perdition, and in showing by this end all the preceeding seductions of the demon in their true light, he rejoined orthodoxy.  "I have just written accursed verses," he writes to Emile Deschamps, "...they make me fear excommunication... you will guess I am speaking of 'Satan' which is almost finished.  I am going to blacken the ending to save myself." To blacken the ending - that is to ruin Eloa - is to avoid the heresy of rehabilitating Satan; but by the same stroke, Vigny also avoided the characteristic optimism of this heresy which went quite against the grain of his nature.