SOURCE: “Vigny's ‘Le Mont des Oliviers’ and Amos,” in French Studies Bulletin, No. 32, Autumn, 1989, pp. 5-8.

In the following essay, McGoldrick describes the influence of the Old Testament on Vigny's poem “Le Mont des Oliviers” and, by implication, his other late poetry.

“Le Mont des Oliviers” is one of the best known of Vigny's poems. Vigny recounts Jesus' mental anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane, with a wealth of detail culled from the Gospels. Vigny's own footnotes to his manuscript attest to his precise and detailed knowledge of all four Gospels, and the selective use he made of them. The poem is confusing to a considerable degree because the Gospels are chronologically distorted to make Jesus enumerate actual details of his crucifixion. But critics have assumed that Vigny's Biblical borrowings were taken solely from the New Testament, and, understandably, have discounted the possibility of any borrowing from an...