So these bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of imagination. (Pascal, Pensées, 828)
The English translator follows here the numbering of Lafuma’s edition, published in the 1960s. But the problem is that on the page left by Pascal, a few sentences were added at the end, after Pascal had drawn a line across the page. Lafuma and the English translator both assumed that this demarcated another fragment, giving it the number 829: “These great mental efforts on which the soul occasionally lights are not things on which it dwells; it only jumps there, for a moment, not for ever, as on the throne.” In contrast, recent editors like Michel Le Guern, Philippe Sellier, and Gérard Ferreyrolles think that there is a kind of continuity between the fragments and keep them together. Sellier and Ferreyrolles show the little drawn line, Le Guern only a blank space. The choice matters.
It is striking that the fable of the origin of politics that Pascal imagines takes place without any reference to God, as if the destiny of humanity was played on a pure immanent ground, far from any transcendental plan or divine power. It is only a matter of “rapports de force,” and following from that of illusion fueled by the imagination. Contrary to what apologists do, Pascal does not seem to put humanity’s fate in God’s hands. Once he makes the observation that men are drawn by their desire, and in particular by their desire for domination, everything else logically follows.
So it seems perfectly understandable that the first editors of Pascal’s Pensées decided to keep only the last section as a separate fragment (what Lafuma called fragment 829), but put aside the first. It was only in the 1779 edition that the first section appeared, but placed very far away from the second section because of the classification of the text into different “themes.” Lafuma, following the order of the first copy, moves them closer, but not together. It can seem difficult to see any continuity of thinking between the two. But the editorial decision makes it even more difficult. The choice of bringing them together opens up a new understanding of Pascal’s work: the allusion to the “throne” still keeps a reference to the order of politics, while the enigmatic beginning points toward a specific operation of the soul. It is highly probable that what Pascal has in mind here is what grace can do: when human beings, by a great mental effort against their immediate desire for domination, humbly accept their state of misery, the light of divine grace can illuminate them. But grace can always recede, and it is difficult to be able to stay in its light.
Thus, if we adopt the philological insight into a continuity between the fragments, or even a possible jump symbolized by the little line drawn between the immanent order of domination and the transcendental illumination of grace, we can see how Pascal adopts a libertine perspective on politics, even more radical than the Hobbesian version of homo homini lupus, since, for Pascal, there is no rational calculus leading to a social contract, only rapports de force and blindness. But Pascal also offers us another line of thought, if we are able to forget our desire for domination. If we decide to read them as two different fragments, one on political order, the other on grace, we emphasize the impossible jump from politics to grace. A philological issue reveals here two different understandings of one crucial theological problem.
While the duc de La Rochefoucauld’s 1665 work, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, voluntarily assumed a fragmentary nature, the same cannot then be said of Pascal’s project. But the huge success of Rochefoucauld’s Maximes legitimated the fragmentary style that Pensées, as it appeared in public, would further develop. The publication of La Bruyère’s Caractères in 1687 would definitively secure this fragmentary style within the pantheon of moral literature. It was from this point on that one could speak of the “moralists.” Instead of writing scholarly treatises, they adopted a worldly point of view, despite the fact that their challenge was, above all, to convince others of the absurdity of the world and the true existence of life after death. This is a strange twist in the history of humanity: how a patchwork apology that aimed to deconstruct human vanity became a glorious moment in French literature.
NOTES
1. Amour-propre covers a range of meanings (self-love, self-interest, vanity, conceit, self-respect, self-esteem, and so forth). The one term that conveys most of these in English is “self-love.”
2. The expression saeva indignatio is often associated with that other great satirist, Jonathan Swift, most notably in W. B. Yeats’s translation of Swift’s epitaph poem.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
All quotations in the text are cited from the translations included below.
Baird, A.W.S. Studies in Pascal’s Ethics. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975.
Bénichou, Paul. Man and Ethics: Studies in French Classicism. Translated by Elizabeth Hughes. New York: Anchor Books, 1971.
Cyrano de Bergerac. L’autre monde. Edited by M. Alcover. Paris: Champion, 2001.
———. Voyages to the Moon and the Sun. Translated by Richard Aldington. London: Routledge, 1980.
Hammond, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Pascal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hodgson, Richard G. Falsehood Disguised: Unmasking the Truth in La Rochefoucauld. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995.
Koppisch, Michael. The Dissolution of Character: Changing Perspectives in La Bruyère’s “Caractères.” Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1981.
La Bruyère, Jean de. Caractères. Edited by R. Garapon. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1962.
———. Characters. Translated by H. Van Laun. London: Routledge, 1929.
La Fontaine, Jean de. Fables. Edited by J.-C. Darmon. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1998.
———. The Complete Fables. Translated by Norman R. Shapiro. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
La Rochefoucauld, François de. Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales. Edited by L. Plazenet. Paris: Champion, 2002.
———. Maxims. Translated by Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin, 1959.
Moriarty, Michael. Fallen Natures, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Pascal, Blaise. Lettres provinciales. Edited by M. Le Guern. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
———. The Provincial Letters. Translated by T. M’Crie. London: J. M. Dent, 1904. See also eBooks@Adelaide, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/pascal/blaise/p27pr.
———. Pensées. Edited by M. Le Guern. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
———. Pensées. Edited by G. Ferreyrolles and P. Sellier. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2000.
———. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Kreilsheimer. London: Penguin, 1995.
Travel Narratives in the Seventeenth Century
La Fontaine and Cyrano de Bergerac
JUDITH SRIBNAI
Ambulo ergo sum.
—GASSENDI, IN RESPONSE TO DESCARTES
Ambulo ergo sum (I walk therefore I am). This phrase could be used as a maxim by seventeenth-century travelers and storytellers alike and, in a broader sense, it speaks to a certain way of being and existing in the world. In this chapter, I consider what that meant in relation to the production of certain genres of travel writing, what broadly we can call the “informative” and the “playful.” The playful can be understood as an ironic commentary on the informative, often in terms that implicitly ironize an entire tradition running all the way back to antiquity, but most especially to the Renaissance. The latter was the moment when the early modern period was imagined as a flowering of “the age of discovery,” when travel, trade, conquest, scientific exploration, and cultural encounter created new forms of European “curiosity.” Two particularly apt examples of this trend are the writings of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac and Jean de La Fontaine (famed for his Fables but less well known as a travel writer, of sorts).1
The expression ambulo ergo sum in fact originates in a debate of the 1640s between René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, two philosophers who were almost entirely opposed. Descartes saw “I think th
erefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) as a first principle. He contended that this certainty, upon which we can build further metaphysical truths, proceeds from our existence as a thinking thing, the “I” grasping itself in its activity of reflection. Among other things, Gassendi reproaches Descartes for overlooking what this “I”—which thinks, doubts, affirms, and negates—truly is. To say that we are thinking things does not, according to Gassendi, say anything about our nature and wholly dismisses our corporeal existence. In short, Gassendi sees ambulo ergo sum as no less true than cogito ergo sum. The positions of the two philosophers become all the more irreconcilable when we take into account the way in which Gassendi gives sensory experience an indispensable role in accessing knowledge. What we see, touch, taste, our physical existence, is inseparable from us, from what we are, and constitutes our first and fundamental access to the world and to knowledge.
Descartes traveled for a time across Europe but preferred the solitude and comfort of his stove-heated room (son poêle) to think in peace. Gassendi, who was more sedentary, moved between Provence and Paris, passing his nights outside gazing at the stars and observing Mercury. The seventeenth century is often, for better or for worse, assumed to be driven by the Cartesian standpoint, which gave birth to modern science. Examining the seventeenth century through travelogues allows us, in some respects, to see it apart from Descartes and Cartesianism. Wanderers and explorers are often required to investigate who they are and what they thought, until then, to be immutable and unquestionable: Are they different from those they encounter? What defines or legitimates their customs and habits? Do animals also have souls? Are time and space always and everywhere measured in the same way? Are understanding, knowledge, and what we consider true universal? The questions that Gassendi poses to Descartes are, in many ways, those that preoccupy other travelers and witnesses in a century that was more complex and less sure of itself than we often think. This is nicely demonstrated by the two authors considered here: Cyrano de Bergerac and La Fontaine—both of them detractors of Descartes, if not readers of Gassendi—appear to be very different, but in reality they share certain doubts and hesitations
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55) and La Fontaine (1621–95) have, on the face of it, seemingly little in common. The former, often associated with “the Libertines,” was fairly close to the Baroque aesthetic, an author who had a few successes during his lifetime and was rather quickly forgotten after his death. He was rediscovered only in the nineteenth century (by Charles Nodier and Théophile Gautier), before becoming the legendary character that we know today, thanks to Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac. In contrast, La Fontaine was close to power, elected to the Académie française in 1684, celebrated while alive for his Fables, and quickly became an emblematic figure of seventeenth-century poetry and French literature in general. These differences are reflected in their texts and are of interest perhaps above all as illustrations of the highly varied character of the works subsumed under the general—and generic—heading of “travel literature.”
Cyrano’s travel novel, in fact, consists of two texts: L’autre monde (The Other World) or Les Etats et Empires de la Lune (The States and Empires of the Moon) and Les Etats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun). They were published posthumously, the first in 1657 and the second in 1662. The character-narrator, who is sometimes known by the name Dyrcona, a play on the name of the author, Cyrano, one night takes a walk with friends while “the moon was full”: “The various thoughts provoked in us by the sight of that globe of saffron diverted us on the road.” Carried away by his enthusiasm, he proclaims: “For my part, said I, I am desirous to add my fancies to yours and without amusing myself with the witty notions you use to tickle time to make it run the faster, I think the Moon is a world like this and that our world is their Moon. … Perhaps in the same way, said I, at this moment in the Moon they jest at someone who there maintains that this globe is a world.” It is this double recourse to imagination (What if the moon was a world?) and reversal (What if we are the moon of the moon?) that launches the story. The narrator, stung by “these feverish outbursts,” attaches to himself “a number of little bottles filled with dew,” which the sun’s heat attracts. His first stop is New France, where he builds a machine that takes him to an earthly paradise and then to the moon, where he encounters the daimon of Socrates. An Ethiopian, who seemingly appears from nowhere, then brings the narrator safely back to earth. Les Etats et Empires du Soleil begins with the narrator’s arrival in Toulouse, where he is quickly thrown in prison because of the publication of the account of his voyage to the moon. He escapes thanks to his ability to construct an icosahedra and flies to a macula, “one of those little Worlds that fly around the Sun,” and from there makes his way to the sun. The story ends abruptly when the main character, guided by Tommaso Campanella, visits the Province of the Philosophers and waits impatiently for Descartes, who has just arrived, to take the floor.
In these two novels, we see that fiction and imagination play an essential role. It is often the imagination of the narrator that triggers the journey or invention that makes possible the discovery. The “Why not?” is, as a result, a recurrent engine of action that allows the narrator to convert fantasy into possibility: Why not visit the moon? What if the world were infinite? What if youth had authority over their elders? What if trees could speak? Cyranian fiction becomes then a place to explore unproven hypotheses that were important subjects of debate in the seventeenth century: the infinitude of the universe, he-liocentrism, the existence of the void. In the course of his voyages, the narrator meets a number of characters, some drawn from literature and mythology, others from the philosophical or scientific tradition. On the moon, as we have seen, he meets the daimon of Socrates; on the sun, Campanella, Italian philosopher and author of the utopian dialogue, relevantly titled, La cité du soleil (The City of the Sun, 1623), is his interlocutor. On the sun, the descendants of the oaks of Dodone, trees that were used to build Jason and the Argonauts’ boat, speak Greek and recount the love stories of Orestes and Pylades, of Narcissus or Hermaphrodite. The governor of Montmagny, the wise men of the moon, the little man of the macula, the prophet Elijah, each expound their theories concerning the generation of children, the materiality of the soul, the movement of the earth, or the birth of erotic passions. The story buzzes with all these voices that, though at times contradictory, always amusingly disturb our habits and conventions of thought.
These two texts by Cyrano represent the topoi of travel literature: the encounter with “otherness” forces the main character to relativize his convictions, whether they be theological, scientific, or ethical. Using the principle of reversal, Cyrano holds a mirror to his readers, showing them their inconsistencies and their fragility. However, the burlesque tone, the comic displacement, and the play with language prevent us from seeing clearly the novel’s actual thesis. Perhaps the earth turns because the damned, who are imprisoned in its center with the fire of hell and are “flying from the heat of the fire to avoid it, clamber upwards and thus make the Earth turn, as a dog makes a wheel turn when he runs round inside it?” The polyphonic aspect of the two novels, along with the proliferation of theories and foolish explanations that are often subversive, thus endow the texts with a remarkable heterogeneity and make it very difficult to place them in a genre: are they “comic novels,” precursors of science fiction, “epistemic novels,” or utopian visions? The voyage is, precisely, the opportunity for us to encounter these genres and tones. Ambulo ergo sum: the more the narrator walks around and visits these worlds, the more the identity of the novels blurs, the more the identities of the characters become uncertain. The narrator is taken for a man, an animal, a monkey, a creature of God, an aggregate of atoms. In the end, neither he nor the reader can decide what he is. The more the narrator walks, the more the worlds, the theories, and the genres seem to multiply without necessarily excluding each other.
The Lettres à sa femme (Letters to
Madame de La Fontaine), which Jean de La Fontaine addresses to his wife, Marie Héricart, between August 23 and September 19, 1663, does not fall within the category of extraordinary journeys. Published posthumously, they are subtitled Voyage de Paris en Limousin, the only voyage that the author accomplished. It is an epistolary narrative comprising a mix of prose and verse (what technically is known as “prosimetrum”), composed of six letters written by La Fontaine while in exile. As the faithful protégé of Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finances who was condemned and imprisoned on the order of King Louis XIV, La Fontaine left Paris, it would seem, out of loyalty to his patron. In his fourth letter, he refers to the incarceration of Fouquet at Amboise: “All of this poor Monsieur Foucquet could never, during his stay, enjoy for a single moment; they had closed up all the windows of his room, leaving only a hole up above.” During his voyage, La Fontaine is accompanied by M. Jannart, uncle of his wife, who has also gone into exile because of Fouquet. We see that the referential anchor, the genre, and the scope of the voyage are very different from those we find in Cyrano. Although coerced into leaving, La Fontaine transforms necessity into choice by deciding to make curiosity the cause of his trip: “The fancy of traveling had entered my mind some time before, as if I had had presentiments of the King’s order. It had been more than a fortnight since I spoke of nothing else, than to go soon to Saint-Cloud, soon to Charonne, and I was ashamed of having lived so long without seeing anything. I shall no longer be reproached for that, thank heavens! We were told, among other marvels, that many of the Limousin women of the highest bourgeoisie wear hoods of sharp-pink cloth over caps of black velvet. If I find one of these hoods covering a pretty head, I will be able to amuse myself in passing, but only through curiosity.”
The desire to explore; the drive of “fantasy,” which in the seventeenth century belongs to both imagination and caprice; and the excitement of “wonder”—in short, the “curiosity” that incites one to lift the veil of the secret of Limousines2—all these elements parody the beginning of a travel narrative. Each letter recounts the steps of the convoy: from Meudon to Clamart (1), from Clamart to Orléans (2), from Orléans to Amboise (3), from Amboise to Richelieu (4), and finally, from Richelieu to Limoges (6). Only the fifth letter is entirely devoted to the description of Richelieu’s château. Elsewhere, the narrator decides a priori what will capture his attention. Between Châtres (Arpajon) and the threatening valley of Tréfou (in fact Torfou, in the Maine-et-Loire), he unceremoniously avoids several landmarks: “After the meal, we again saw many châteaux on the right and left; I will not say a word, as it would be an infinite labour.”3 Certain places, like Tréfou, are but an occasion for inward reflection: “For as long as the road continued, I didn’t talk about anything else but the advantages of war.” At other moments, the travelers pass their time debating religious subjects or by recounting local amorous anecdotes or by going for a stroll.
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