Reading the Princesse today, we are often put off by the first pages, which bristle with the complicated relations between various aristocratic families. But for the seventeenth-century reader, tracing these names was part of the pleasure of the text. The Princesse is a historical novel, but it provided its original readers with what we might call a history of the present. Written in 1678, but set in 1558, the novel presents a past world that looked very familiar, as though it could be a novel about the elaborate court culture of Versailles under Louis XIV, also a gossipy, factional court where “there reigned … a kind of orderly unrest which made life very enjoyable but also very dangerous for a young girl.” Indeed, seventeenth-century readers, accustomed to acclaiming Louis’s court as the greatest ever, were troubled by the novel’s opening line, which seems to suggest that the court of Henri II surpassed that of the Sun King for “courtly magnificence and manners.” But Lafayette’s strangely familiar court was also a lost world: the names traced in the opening pages are the not-so-distant ancestors of Lafayette’s first courtly readers, and those readers would have known that many of those mentioned were soon to come into cataclysmic conflict during the Wars of Religion that from 1562 to 1598 had set Catholics and Protestants in violent opposition to each other.
The novel’s particularity was also apparent in its form: compared with the most popular readings of the day, this text looked rather strange. Seventeenth-century readers were familiar with both much longer and much shorter versions of fiction in prose. In the early to midcentury, the most popular texts were lengthy multivolume romances, like Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée (1607–27), or Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie (1654–61, translated into English soon thereafter). These books were set in a distant past and featured lovers separated through external forces, like earthquakes or unkind parents (in contrast to Lafayette’s novel, in which the lovers are kept apart only through the princess’s own objections).
Such novels often began life as conversations in salons, and in reconstituting conversational profusion on the page they would produce a similar effect among their readers. Midcentury novels revolved around endless and often joyful conversations between friends, about the right way to be friends, or whether it is easier to love melancholy or merry women. These conversational set-pieces take place frankly and straightforwardly within the pages of the book, and gave rise to a host of further discussions, imitations, and satires. In a series of debates about the emotions in Clélie, for example, the heroine maps “the land of tenderness” in a foldout map that showed readers—and other characters—how to get from a new friendship to a tender one. The map established “tenderness,” somewhere between dear friendship and romantic love, as a buzzword of the period, a complex early modern concept that reveals the paucity of our own vocabulary for thinking about friendship and affiliation. Clélie tells her readers that tenderness can be reached through one of three routes: the easiest and fastest is to follow the river of inclination, a key term of the period, which indicated a firm attraction. But one can also reach tenderness along the slower paths toward admiration or recognition, following small villages marked “love letters,” “assiduity,” “generosity.” The paths to tenderness gave the seventeenth century an important vocabulary for negotiating relationships, to be found everywhere in fiction of the period.
In contrast to these meandering tomes, another popular form of prose fiction came in a shorter form: this was known as the nouvelle historique. These were shortish stories about more recent historical events—often the religious wars of the sixteenth century—and often featuring characters who, like those in the Princesse, were almost titillating in their familiarity to the contemporary reader. Where the multivolume romances featured outlandish adventures and surprises, this shorter form proclaimed its allegiance to a hotly contested category known as vraisemblance, or “verisimilitude”: according to such strictures, events or conversations portrayed had to be historically allowable even if they did not actually happen. This kind of writing was pioneered and fostered by women writers—including Lafayette herself, whose Princesse de Montpensier (1662) is often thought of as the first of the genre—and it allowed readers to watch writers maneuvering in delicate terrain, claiming to show the intimate stories of public figures without overstepping into vulgarity or historical impossibility.
Lafayette, whose family had many literary connections at court and elsewhere, had grown up on the midcentury romances, and the precise parsing of emotions and their vocabulary that we see in the Princesse de Clèves certainly owes something to romances like Clélie. But where in Clélie characters would pause to address explicitly a particular keyword, in the Princesse those keywords accrue, slowly refracting so that where initially they seem almost without weight, their careful repetitions nudge us to see how significant they are for the novel: a good example is the word éclat, which might be translated as “brilliance,” and which characterizes the pale beauty of the princess herself, the wonders of the court, the conversation of its inhabitants, and so on. But one can die of too much dazzle: an éclat is also a splinter, and in a scene that seems to insist on the darker side of all these brilliant things upon which to look, the king himself dies of a splinter from a lance that pierces his eye.
And Lafayette’s novel is significantly shorter and clearer in plot structure than those unwieldy romances; it looks more like a slightly longer version of the nouvelle historique, those historically plausible short stories. But it does something quite distinct and new within that tradition: it fleshes out the historical record by inventing a character who, although she might have existed, never did in the way the other named figures had done. And as if that invention was not enough, Lafayette gives that central character an extraordinary and subtly manipulated form of interiority, brought about through various innovative narrative turns. In this curiously impersonal narrative, featuring a deeply reticent heroine, we see a careful maneuver around the notion of character and depth—like the princess’s anxious husband, we strain to see whether the character has hidden depths that she is refusing to show us, or whether she is so restrained that she is entirely constructed from propriety. Lafayette works hard to take us into the princess’s private world, but also at times to push us out from it.
That impenetrability or inscrutability is brought to a skillful peak at the ending of the novel, often particularly troubling to modern readers familiar with the marriage plot conventions of nineteenth-century novels, in which difficult courtships are followed by nuptial relief. Here, even as the novel promises an ending we think we might applaud, that ending is foiled by the retreat of the princess, a retreat that is both precisely explained—we know where she is, when, and for how long—and not explained enough—we know little of her emotions or inner life at the end of the novel, and the reader may well feel as stranded as her admirer Nemours, who has the door shut in his face with no further explanation. The novel’s closing sentence (“Her life, which was quite short, left inimitable examples of virtue”) leaves us wondering quite what an example that cannot be imitated might be, and what we who are left in the novel’s wake should make of this heroine we are not able to follow.
If the debates around the novel centered largely on the heroine’s propriety (one critic, Bussy-Rabutin, even wondered why she sinks to her knees when speaking to her husband, and what sort of physical abandon that might indicate), they also participated in a larger cultural anxiety about the propriety of women’s writing. In this period, women often published their works anonymously, lest the behavior that took place within the text be imagined as an autobiographical transfer of their own life. In this case, Lafayette’s text was published anonymously, but there was much talk about the identity of the author: in certain circles it would have been an open secret who the writer was, and easy to identify her. Her other works circulated before publication in the salons where she was well known, and she was not given to denying authorship when accused of it.
Part of the strategic game of anon
ymous publication can be gauged in what we call the “paratext,” the often playful notes and blurbs attached to books. But in English translation, the publisher’s note affixed to the opening of the Princesse loses something of its provocatively equivocal quality, since in English one has to gender the possessive pronoun, referring to his or her identity when one speaks of the author, whereas French allows more ambiguity; as the Terence Cave translation puts it, “the author has not felt able to declare his identity; he was afraid that his name might diminish the success of his book” (my emphasis). But in this period, it was very often women who chose to publish in such ways, so that their readers might give them as “fine and equitable” a reading as possible. And Lafayette plays games with these questions even within the novel itself: in the lengthy account of a misplaced letter that circulates at court, and the assumptions and blunders made about its author, Lafayette lets us see something of the apprehension that pertained in this period to the question of an author’s identity.
Of course, it is one thing to speculate about the author of something that has been launched deliberately into the world. But as the plot of the novel makes clear, it is not only published stories that circulate and fascinate those who hear them. In a painful development after the princess’s confession, she has her own words repeated to her by the dauphine, at which point she understands that at court even the most private stories can be set inexorably into public conversation (although she thinks her husband is to blame, rather than Nemours, the eavesdropper). This alarming turn of events might have recalled, for the seventeenth-century reader, a recent furor over the publication of some private love letters written by a woman writer—Marie-Catherine Desjardins, known as Madame de Villedieu—which in 1668 were published against her will and under her own name by her former lover.
Lafayette was a regular at the court of Versailles, where courtiers and king alike engaged in careful surveillance of each other. And her novel is punctuated by a series of scenes of intrusion or surveillance that are suffered and then rebuffed by the princess: most famously the extraordinarily suggestive multiplication of viewing, in which the princess is alone in a room at her country estate gazing at a portrait of Nemours that she has had brought there for that purpose, not knowing that Nemours is spying on her through the window, neither of them knowing that her husband’s manservant is watching the both of them.
Like many other moments in the novel, this is a scene that appears to promise a moment of mutual devotion: “To see a woman he adored in the middle of the night, in the most beautiful place in the world, to see her, without her knowing he was there, entirely absorbed in things connected with him and with the passion she was hiding from him—what lover has ever enjoyed or even imagined such delight?” But the princess and Nemours are divided on the significance of her practice: Nemours, hopeful that his moment has finally come, tries to enter her room, but when his scarf is caught in the window, she hears the sound and seems to recognize him, retreating promptly into another room where her companions await her. The princess pays homage to the painting as the sign of her beloved, rather than wanting her devotion to bring about his actual presence.
Nemours, in contrast, acts like a hero of the romances popular earlier in the century; in imagining he can climb through a window and disregard the physical as well as moral barriers that separate the two, he could be in a different kind of text entirely from that of the princess, who scrupulously observes the distance between emotion and action. Stuck on the window, Nemours is figuratively stuck on the edge between two genres, the swashbuckling romance and the plausible novel: the one where you can climb in windows, and the other where such a thing is unthinkable. Indeed in the defense of the novel by the abbé de Charnes, brought out by the same publisher as the book itself, readers teasingly suggested that Nemours’s night spying on the princess was the ultimate sign that the text draws on the romance tradition, since only a hero of romance could spend a night wandering outside without coming down with a heavy and unromantic cold. Likewise, the philosopher Fontenelle scoffed that this scene “stank of Astrée,” that earlier novel about adventurous shepherds and their mostly pliant beloveds. Nemours’s inability to understand the new and more austere rules of the game, his propensity to get stuck while doing what comes naturally to a hero of romance, points to quite how far Lafayette had moved from those older prose narratives.
This much-discussed spying scene is only the most extraordinary of a range of narrated encounters that insist on the demarcation of public and private space only to cross its line. Such a structure is central to the plot of the novel and to its strange ending, which is explained according to spatial terms, for the princess chooses to remove herself physically from difficult situations in order to break herself of bad habits, to retreat to her “cabinet” or private room or to her estate at Coulommiers.
Even as it observes the princess’s desire for privacy, the novel asks the reader to participate in the intrusion into her space apart. But despite its heavy flagging of spatial structures, the text does not figure a clearly defined private individual who resists an encroaching public surveillance. For the novel also seems to suggest that without the larger world there would be no self, or rather that the princess comes to know who she is and what she thinks only by participating in the cacophonous circulations of public life at the court. Thus the princess comes to consciousness of her desire, that most intimate of feelings, only through rumor: hearing talk of Nemours and the dauphine, she blushes, and shutting herself away then realizes an interest in Nemours that she had not yet admitted to herself. In this version of events, gossip leads not to confusion but to clarity and self-knowledge. A little later, the princess recognizes herself as the unnamed object of gossip when the dauphine tells her that Nemours is in love with someone who won’t respond. Lafayette’s configuration of events indicates that the self becomes aware of its position only in public circulation.
Lafayette’s novel was not the only text of its day that turned around the question of gossip and eavesdropping. Seventeenth-century France was deeply fascinated by the conversation of women, by its virtues and charms and capacity to construct vibrant intellectual and emotional gatherings, but also its potential to wreak social havoc. All kinds of texts sought to listen in to what women had to say: in a rambunctious series that appeared in eight installments throughout 1622, known as the Caquets de l’accouchée, a man convalescing from a grave illness is told to listen to women gathered round the bed of a woman who has given birth, on the grounds that listening to this conversation would improve his own health. More refined texts were keen to break into the bedroom and listen to women’s conversation, too: the grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas’s magisterial Remarques sur la langue française of 1647 formed some of his reflections on the ideal French speech by hearing the spirited conversations of women in the salons, the influential and innovative social institutions of the period. Women’s conversational abilities and practices were scrutinized by all who observed them, and those women who could best play the game could adroitly manage their reputation through the deployment of verbal exchange.
The most prominent salon of the period was that of the marquise de Rambouillet, who had arranged her rooms for the express purpose of encouraging conversation, in a series of small spaces in which one could talk easily. She welcomed aristocrats but also writers and other cultural figures, and the conversations that she fostered and directed were central to cultural and political innovation throughout the midcentury: the chief minister, Richelieu, was so concerned about the salon’s political significance that he tried to recruit the marquise as a spy.
Lafayette was a regular at the Rambouillet salon, as were writers such as the playwright Pierre Corneille and the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry, whose romance Clélie mapped the emotions of the midcentury and who later in life would also publish a series of conversations purportedly stemming from her own salon. The favorites gathered in the marquise’s best blue bedroom, the famous ch
ambre bleue—a space made for entertaining visitors—and especially in the space between the daybed and the wall, known as the ruelle, or “alleyway.” Out of these spaces arose much of the literary production of the century, much of it specifically drawing on the figure or form of conversation, as in the dialogic exchanges of Clélie or Lafayette’s own novelistic attention to conversations promised, overheard, and betrayed. The salons established that the best conversation arose from certain spatial configurations and that people who wanted to know what was happening needed to listen in to women talking. This was a private space with a public significance, directed by a woman.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 27