Not all obsessions are bad. Certainly not that of the French novelist Camille Laurens with Edgar Degas and his famous sculpture of a young ballet dancer. It has resulted in a charming little book, translated from the French by Willard Wood and published by Other Press as Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, subtitled as “The True Story Behind Degas’s Masterpiece.”
With notes and a select bibliography, it comes to no more than 166 pages, including profuse illustrations, making for a couple of hours of pleasurable reading that are likely to leave you with much longer fruitful speculation about what you have just read. “La petite danseuse de quatorze ans,” as the statue and book are titled in the original, is a little masterpiece of research, guesswork, and authorial meditation about everything that has been said and written about Degas and the famous statue, casts of which inhabit museums the world over, including the original in Washington’s National Gallery.
Laurens’s book brings in innumerable references to the sculpture and its history, along with what relatively little is known directly or indirectly about Marie (Geneviève) van Goethem, as the fourteen-year-old model was called. It is wonderful, the seamless way in which the narrative spreads out in ever wider ripples, covering art history, literary history, and just plain history of the fin de siècle. Laurens has tracked down often far-fetched and yet relevant details, including ample citations from such important writers or epistolarians as Balzac, Zola, Huysmans,
