De Maistre (1763-1852) was a soldier in the Sardinian and the Austro-Russian armies who supplemented his income by painting when he was a young officer. He eventually became a general, and in addition to these writings he published two novels.
Confined to his quarters for six weeks as a punishment for dueling [he does not tell us this in the book] de Maistre used the time for the forty-two part A Journey around my Room.
“My room is situated on the forty-fifth degree of latitude, according to the measurement of Fr Beccaria” says de Maistre, and gives his room’s dimensions only as “a long rectangle” thirty-six paces in circumference. We don’t even know the town he’s in, though he mentions late in the book that he’s on the banks of the Po, and there are some topical references to Turin.
He gives Sterne-like defenses of prolixity and digressions, saying he can’t explain why he burned his fingers unless he first explains his theory of the soul and the beast, which he calls the other. He insists that he’s not being evasive, that his journey really continues while he tells you what the soul is doing, not just the other. So Tristram Shandy argues it’s not merely his life, but his opinions he’s set out to record. And de Maistre thus gets into two narratives at once and has to sort them out, as Tristram often does with narrations of two separate points in time. And, he says, all travelers are prolix in their details.
Like Sterne, too, de Maistre incorporates sentimental passages that sometimes contain double-entendre. In advising “any man who can do so to have a pink and white bed,” he tells about these colors in his mistress’s face when she had run up to the top of a mound. This gets him so excited he has to stop, and the next section contains only blank lines interrupted by the words “the mound.”
We learn about his servant Joannetti, his dog Rosine, his portrait of his mistress, Madame Hautcastel, his bed, his easy-chair.
As in Fielding, Sterne, and others, there are reminders of authorial control and that it is a book of the sort “The reader will know more about X once he finishes the next chapter.”
Describing an engraving on his wall (a scene from The Sorrows of Young Werther), leads to a paean to friendship and a sentimental lament for a dead friend; de M. says if the reader thinks this chapter should have been omitted, “he can tear it out of his copy, or even throw the book on the fire.”
In the concluding sections, de Maistre gives us his own version of an eighteenth-century genre: the dialogue between the body and the soul, as well as a chapter on the positive effect of travelling clothes.
The last section, #42, is another eighteenth-century form: the dialogue of the dead, with Hippocrates, Plato, Pericles and his mistress Aspasia, and Dr. Cigna, a famous anatomy professor at Turin. ( )