It tells of a young French man who falls for a fisherman's granddaughter – the eponymous Graziella – during a trip to Naples, Italy; they are separated when he must return to France, and she soon dies.

Based on the author's experiences with a tobacco-leaf folder while in Naples in the early 1810s, Graziella was first written as a journal and intended to serve as commentary for Lamartine's poem "Le Premier Regret".

Although the first few months pass in contemplative tranquility and beauty, they are forced to take refuge at Andrea's home on Procida during a surging September storm, where they spend the night.

Since coming to the city, he learns of their fortunes: Andrea and his wife are enjoying bountiful catches, while Graziella has taken up coral carving to earn extra money.

The young woman died after Lamartine's return to France; the writer Agide Pirazzini suggests that he truly loved her only after her death and that thenceforth her image never left him.

[7] His experiences with the young tobacco-leaf folder were a potent inspiration for Lamartine; Pirazzini suggests that several works, including "Le Passé" ('The Past') and "L'Hymne au soleil" ('Hymn to the Sun'), were written in her memory.

[8] Lamartine's experiences also formed the basis of his poem "Le Premier Regret", a mournful elegy focusing on an overgrown tomb of an unnamed yet still beloved Italian woman.

The author depicted as working in coral, hoping to "avoid the degrading association which an open avowal of her employment [as a tobacco-leaf folder] would suggest".

[19] In 1871, a writer in the Westminster Review described the change from the tobacco-leaf folder to coral carver as the "sole deviation from fact" in Graziella.

[20] Pirazzini, writing in 1917, noted inaccuracies, such as Lamartine's age during the trip to Italy (eighteen in the novel, early twenties in reality),[21] but considered them of little relevance, as his memories were "surrounded with light and poetry".

[14] Since then, Henri Guillemin of the Encyclopædia Britannica finds Les Confidences to mix reality and imagination,[22] and the writer Terence Cave has described the work as only "remotely autobiographical".

She suggests that the texts both resolve around tensions of island paradises and societal hell as well as a "professed pure, brotherly love", ending with the death of a character.

She notes describes Paul et Virginie as appearing en abyme within Lamartine's novel, as it is Saint-Pierre's romance which, "awakens Graziella's passion".

[11] The American literary critic Charles Henry Conrad Wright, writing in 1912, considered Graziella the best of the episodes presented in Les Confidences.

He thought it one of three novels that must be read to understand the development of emotionalism in French literature, together with Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie and François-René de Chateaubriand's novella Atala (1801).

On 20 January 1849, librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré debuted their one-act adaptation of the story at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris.

The poem, published in Corbière's 1873 collection Les amours jaunes, has been interpreted by André Le Milinaire as condemning the falsity of family life.

Commissioned by the art collector Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, the work depicts Graziella sitting on a rock, fishing net in hand, gazing over her shoulders at a smoking Mount Vesuvius.