Gabriele D’Annunzio

Gabriele D’Annunzio appears as a poet whose social prestige and art of praise could make a woman feel like the center of the universe. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, his power lies not simply in attraction but in seeming to confer reality and value: he raises a beloved into a realm of radiance, then leaves her exposed when his attention turns elsewhere.

The Lover as a Source of Recognition

The passage places D’Annunzio within a wider account of why prestigious men can inspire passion even without physical charm. Their social standing allows them to seem like embodiments of Law and Truth; when such a man praises a woman, she can experience herself as a priceless treasure. Love, in this arrangement, makes the woman’s face, body, memories, clothes, habits, and surroundings feel newly necessary rather than merely contingent. D’Annunzio’s particular force is to turn that recognition into an apparent elevation above ordinary life.

The Radiance of Praise

Simone de Beauvoir conveys this effect through Isadora Duncan’s recollection of D’Annunzio’s romances. Duncan describes him as lifting a woman’s spirit toward the divine and making her feel part of a sacred essence. He casts each favorite in a shining veil: she seems to rise above ordinary mortals, surrounded by an unusual radiance. The image makes his praise both intimate and theatrical. His beloved appears transformed, but the transformation depends on the poet who supplies the veil.

Duncan’s account also makes the transformation’s end inseparable from its beginning. When D’Annunzio’s caprice is spent, the veil vanishes and the radiance is eclipsed; the woman falls back to common clay. Duncan likens the experience of hearing his praise to Eve hearing the serpent’s voice in Paradise, an allusion that gives his charm a tempting and potentially dangerous quality. His gift is to make a woman feel central to the universe, but that apparent sovereignty remains dependent on his attention.

Desire, Infidelity, and Aftermath

The discussion returns to D’Annunzio when Simone de Beauvoir considers the costs of absolute love. The passion and vitality that made him so captivating also carried the price of infidelity. His ability to exalt a beloved therefore coexists with a pattern in which the woman may be abandoned: the same force that makes him compelling directs him toward other loves. The contrast is sharp between the poet’s continuing life and the woman’s possible sense that, outside him, nothing remains.

This example supports the book’s broader account of love as a fragile reconciliation of erotic desire and narcissistic self-regard. A woman may receive from a lover the recognition that makes her feel precious, yet that recognition can become perilous when she treats it as the foundation of her entire world. D’Annunzio’s shining veil thus signifies both the intoxicating power of praise and its instability: when the lover withdraws, the woman must either rebuild an existence beyond him or suffer the collapse of the identity his admiration seemed to confirm.