Sappho (novel)
novel by Alphonse Daudet
Sappho: Parisian Manners (French: Sapho : moeurs parisiennes) is an 1884 novel by the French writer Alphonse Daudet. It was serialised in L'Écho de Paris in 1884.
Plot
The book is largely autobiographical and inspired by Daudet's relationship with Marie Rieu. Jean Gaussin is a young man from a wealthy family in southern France and works for the government in Paris. He begins a relationship with Fanny Legrand, initially unaware of her career as a scandalous model under the name Sappho. They live together for five years and eventually adopt a child. Fanny is smitten with the child and becomes distant from Jean. Jean begins an affair with another woman, Irène, favoured by his parents to become his wife, only to return to Fanny with renewed affection. The relationship becomes more complicated when Jean realises the child they adopted is Fanny's biological child from a previous affair with a criminal, prompting him to reject her again. Realising his intact, strong affection for Fanny, Jean cancels his plans to marry Irène and returns to Fanny, who agrees to leave with him.
“Sappho (novel)” enters the record as novel by Alphonse Daudet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sappho, novel and Alphonse can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19231273. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1884.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sappho (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.