The curtain comes down, and we are left with this highly quotable phrase ringing in our ears. Is this really Voltaire’s final word on the subject, the “conclusion” promised by the chapter’s title? For what it’s worth, Voltaire in his own life did not act like his characters in Candide, in fact he continued worrying about the question of Providence until his dying day. He most certainly hated dogmatism and intolerance, but he never argued that faced by a difficult problem, one should just give up. And when we look more carefully at the characters in this garden, there is surely something worrying about their desire to cut themselves off from the rest of society and to keep their heads down. If, while cultivating the garden, they were to raise their heads, “They would often see boats passing beneath the windows of the farmhouse laden with effendis, pashas, and cadis, who were being exiled to Lemnos or Mytilene or Erzerum. They would see more cadis, more pashas, and more effendis coming to take the place of those who had been expelled, and being themselves in their turn expelled. They would see heads duly stuffed with straw being taken for display before the Sublime Porte.” In other words, they would see the repeated evidence of systematic and cruel political persecution, the Ottoman Empire being as corrupt as all the other countries they have visited. Is it really the conclusion of the novel that happiness is to be found by selfishly concentrating on one’s own work and ignoring the plight of others? This would seem an oddly anticlimactic conclusion to draw. But if “cultivating the garden” is not the true conclusion of the novel, what is?
One clue might lie in the actual image of gardening: it seems mundane enough, but every eighteenth-century reader was steeped in the Bible, and sure to recognize in “cultivating the garden” an echo of “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener” (John 15:1). And if chapter 30 “concludes” with this nod to the New Testament, it is clear that chapter 1 contains an overt parody of the Old Testament: when Candide is kicked out of the castle by the old baron after kissing Cunégonde, we are clearly meant to recall God expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden after the Fall: “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Gen. 3:23, my emphasis). So the idea of cultivating the garden, mentioned explicitly only at the end of the novel, is already anticipated in the opening chapter, by means of these transparent biblical references.
Voltaire is not exactly making fun of the Bible here; he is using narratives that are intimately familiar to his readers to play with the narrative process itself, and the Bible is an obvious place to start. There is a similar effect in chapter 19 when Candide, on his return from Eldorado, loses most of his precious red sheep: impossible here not to see a playful nod in the direction of the Parable of the Lost Sheep as told in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Other moments in the narrative contain blatant allusions to the best-known contemporary novels. In the very first paragraph, for example, Candide’s genealogy is explained as follows: “The older servants of the household suspected that he was the son of the Baron’s sister by a kind and upright gentleman of the neighbourhood.” Any reader in 1759, English or French, would immediately have recognized this as a reworking of the plot of Fielding’s hugely popular Tom Jones, which first appeared in 1749 (and in French translation the following year). Having once recognized the imitation, we are given a clue to the future course of the action: Candide, like Tom, is presented as the bastard son of his protector’s sister, and we can already guess that following an amorous liaison, Candide, like Tom, will be expelled from his protector’s house, and so launched into the world. Voltaire mimics a contemporary English novel at the same time as he mimics the book of Genesis, and this narrative game is all the more amusing and unsettling because a modern novel and the Bible are placed on an equal footing.
Beyond this parody of specific texts, Candide is brimming with allusions to what one might call fictional prototypes. Modern readers, necessarily less familiar than were Voltaire’s first readers with the earlier traditions of prose fiction, may not be so immediately sensitive to this phenomenon, but it is something that we can sense in the tone of the narration. The shipwrecks, chance meetings, and amazing coincidences are all spoofs of earlier adventure novels, indeed the very structure of the journey is in some sense a reworking of the archetypal journey of Odysseus in Homer’s epic. The parody of medieval chivalric epic, by Ariosto in verse (Orlando furioso) and later by Cervantes in prose (Don Quixote), is often seen as the catalyst of “modern” fiction, and this process continues in Candide. True to this tradition, Voltaire’s hero (or antihero) is driven mad by love; when, in chapter 19, “Candide, quite carried away, carved the name of Cunégonde on trees as he passed,” he acts like the crazed lovers in Ariosto or Shakespeare. Candide embarks on a journey in search of his beloved accompanied by a more down-to-earth male servant, and the assonance between the names Cacambo and Sancho, Don Quixote’s companion, speaks for itself. It would be too simple to say that Voltaire is making fun of chivalric romance. Rather, he is exploiting our familiarity with these canonical narrative plots to play with our expectations about the shape of the story.
We began by examining Leibniz’s view that, despite appearances, there is a divine order that gives shape to the world. Voltaire counters this metaphysical position by imagining a burlesque fiction where order is absent and where chance alone rules. In this order-less (Godless?) world, the God-as-watchmaker argument becomes irrelevant: the order that might prove God’s existence simply does not exist. And how do we, as readers, find order in the world, or even in the novel, in the face of such willful randomness? Perhaps our familiarity with the standard plots of other novels gives us some ability to make sense of Candide and to impose our own order on this otherwise disordered universe. And perhaps, in the end, all any of us can do is to create meaning by telling stories, so as to impose some sort of shape on the chaos that surrounds us. The one order that does exist in Candide is the order of fiction, and reading to uncover order is in all senses a liberating experience.
Voltaire feels the challenge of Leibniz’s ideas, and, like all Enlightenment thinkers, he is troubled by the question of evil. But in Candide Voltaire is doing more than just attacking Leibnizian philosophy. He is writing a work of fiction, not philosophy, and he uses the form of the novel to explore different and contradictory ideas, and to encourage his readers to do the same. Candide is an extraordinary and liberating work of the imagination, a novel that challenges us to rethink our assumptions about the order of our familiar world. If readers today continue to enjoy Candide, it is because we respond instinctively to this hymn to the absurd. Leibnizian optimism may no longer seem immediately relevant to modern-day concerns, but Voltaire’s militant call to treat dogma with skepticism certainly does: this lesson never loses its relevance. The caustic black humor of the film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) bears a distinctly Voltairean imprint, not surprisingly because Terry Southern, one of its cowriters, had earlier coauthored with Mason Hoffenberg the novel Candy (1958), a provocative rewriting of Candide. Voltaire’s novel is one we continue to read, and to rewrite.
The “same” book can look very different depending on how and for whom it is printed, and covers can tell us a great deal, even before we reach page one. We began with an edition of Candide printed in French in London in 1759, and we finish with a translation by Walter J. Fultz, a mass-market paperback published in the United States in 1952, in a popular series called Lion Books, which sold in drugstores for twenty-five cents (see fig. 2). The cover illustration attempts to rewrite the novel as a 1950s B-movie, while a convenient summary of the plot explains that Candide “chased a virtuous maiden through Europe’s most bawdy age.” Perhaps the greatest originality of Voltaire’s Candide is its daring rewriting of the popular fictions of its day; so it was only to be expected that after two hundred years Candide itself would be rewritten as pulp fiction.
Figure 2. Candide, translated by Walter J. Fultz (New York: Lion Bo
oks, 1952). Private collection.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Throughout this chapter, I have quoted Candide in the excellent modern translation, Candide and Other Stories, trans. Roger Pearson, Oxford World’s Classics (1990; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Readers may also like to sample one of the early English translations: Eric Palmer’s edition of Candide (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009) uses the translation published by John Nourse in London in 1759, Candide, or All for the Best. There is a fascinating online exhibition titled “Voltaire’s Candide” (2010) on the website of the New York Public Library (http://candide.nypl.org). The best English-language biography of Voltaire is Roger Pearson’s Voltaire Almighty: A Life in the Pursuit of Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, 2005); and there is a delightful biographical essay by Richard Holmes, “Voltaire’s Grin,” first published in The New York Review of Books (1995), and reprinted in his collection Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (London: Flamingo, 2000), 343–63. Roger Pearson, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s “Contes philosophiques” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) contains a chapter on Candide; see also Jean Starobinski, “On the Philosophical Style of Candide,” in Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 84–100. On Voltaire more generally, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), provides an overview of modern readings. On the historical and cultural background, see Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Charissa Bremer-David, ed., Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011). See also Aldous Huxley, “On Re-reading Candide,” in On the Margin (London: Chatto and Windus, 1923), 12–17.
Readers with knowledge of French should download the app “Candide, l’édition enrichie,” freely available at the Apple iStore, a joint production of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford. This contains the full text in French, with a range of annotations and other resources to provide context; it also allows you to listen to the text, read by the French actor Denis Podalydès. A recent collection of essays on Candide, incorporating a wide range of approaches, is Les 250 ans de “Candide”: Lectures et relectures, ed. Nicholas Cronk and Nathalie Ferrand (Louvain: Peeters, 2013).
Disclosures of the Boudoir
The Novel in the Eighteenth Century
PIERRE SAINT-AMAND
The eighteenth-century novel was written in a variety of forms over the course of the century: the picaresque novel, the first-person novel, the epistolary novel. These forms evolved in parallel, each with its highs and lows. There is, however, one feature that is common to all these forms. I shall call it “interiorization.” The latter is one way of naming a broader social and cultural development: alongside the eighteenth-century preoccupation with public space and the qualities of “public man” (at the heart of the idea of the “citizen” that was to play such an important role in the French Revolution), there is also a growing focus on private spaces and experiences. One of the most striking manifestations of this set of interests is the representation in the novel of a particular space: that of the aristocratic boudoir. The latter figures extensively in both the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. The former, however, does not always supply the richness of architectural and decorative detail that distinguishes the depiction of the boudoir in the latter, where it becomes integral to novelistic discourse (Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and Honoré de Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or come to mind).
In the earlier novels, often just a handful of descriptive specifics are provided; a few strategically chosen pieces of furniture suffice to highlight the significance of the setting. This economy of descriptive detail is not a disadvantage. It throws the structural function of the site into even sharper relief and thus provides an indication of why this particular topos is more than just a particular, but also, so to speak, a narrative door opening onto a central and defining pattern of eighteenth-century French fiction. The plots of novels unfold in time of course, but space too can become an important element of plot, in addition to its descriptive functions. Often announced as a plot element, the boudoir in the eighteenth-century novel becomes the territory where emotions take shape (“interiorization” hence understood as both physical and psychological “interiors”) in accordance with broadly three narrative types. The libertine novel places the boudoir in the domain of scandal; the Rousseauist novel transforms it and accords it a moral dimension; finally, Sade instrumentalizes it as a locus not only of pleasures but of philosophical experience.
There is a celebrated description of the boudoir by the architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières. In his treatise The Genius of Architecture; or the Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations (1780), the boudoir is defined as the quintessence of rococo aesthetics. The architect registers the term’s evolution from its original designation of a simple dressing room in which a woman may find solitude, to its evocation of a woman’s temple, where all is purposed to the perfection of her image and to the pursuit of love, the place where the mystery of the bed is choreographed: “The boudoir is regarded as the abode of delight; here she seems to reflect on her designs and to yield to her inclinations. With such thoughts in mind, dictated as they are by the manners of our age, spare no pains to make the room as pleasing as you can. All is to be subordinate to luxury, comfort, and taste. … This delightful retreat must arouse none but the sweetest emotions; it must confer serenity upon the soul and delight upon all the senses. It must aim for the ultimate perfection: let desire be satisfied without impairing enjoyment.”
Le Camus de Mézières takes pains to evoke certain selected aspects of the decor of this haven—the details of lighting (candles), furniture (a daybed; an ottoman), colors (white and blue). The room itself adopts the contours of the female form, a circularity that pays homage to Venus: “Consider a beautiful woman. Her outlines are gentle and well rounded; the muscles are not pronounced; the whole is governed by a simple, natural sweetness, whose effect we can recognize better than we can express it.” Yet “expressing it” is one of the self-appointed tasks of the eighteenth-century novel, employing and deploying the imaginary resources of this place of secret and mystery in ways that highlight the newfound importance of private moments for the individual. Here I shall focus on five examples by five different authors: Marivaux, Crébillon fils, Laclos, Rousseau, and Sade.
Le paysan parvenu, 1734–35 (Up from the Country) by Pierre Carlet de Marivaux belongs to the genre of the memoir-novel, a form of first-person narrative that flourished in the eighteenth century. It might well have become a picaresque novel: Marivaux’s conveyor of wine, a peasant from Champagne, has all the makings of the adventurer that populates the century’s early fiction. He might have taken to the open road of the novel, but Marivaux suspends his character, parking his wine cart and settling him in Paris. Jacob’s journey is cut short when he enters into service with his new masters. We leave behind the surprises of highways and byways, their chance encounters, for adventures of a more interior sort. Le paysan parvenu is actually a novel of transition: in it we are never far from the street; carriages are placed at the service of love’s traffickings, the fixing of rendezvous. The master’s house quickly becomes Jacob’s experimental laboratory. In particular he discovers, to his enchantment, a series of feminine places: first of all, the mistress’s bedroom, where his character is put to the test. Here we find ourselves squarely in the realm of the psychological novel. Jacob marvels up close at these new interiors that exude an air of the fabulous. The peasant meets the inflamed gaze of the lady at her toilette, with the gulf of social class between them. It is as if his vision is transformed by this artifice of flirtation: “At that she went back to her dressing and I too
k myself off, still turning back to look at her. But she didn’t miss anything I did, and her eyes followed me to the door.”
Once this space has been breached, in a sense transgressed, Jacob de la Vallée will show less naïveté. Later in the novel, when he winds up in a wardrobe used by Mme de Ferval, he is prepared for the scene that awaits him, able to negotiate the secret moment, the private exchange: “Could there be some servant in there listening?” Jacob makes the most of the moment, quickly kissing her hand. Later, in the boudoir of the very same Madame de Ferval, the peasant redoubles his efforts at seduction. He enters the bedroom of his “goddess” as if stepping into a period painting. Marivaux has set the scene to perfection: stretched out on a sofa with a book, the lady is in a state of dishabille. The novelist delivers Ferval’s body by degrees: the foot, the leg, the unknown masterpiece; in short, Jacob confronts an unfamiliar vision, at the outer limits of the possible. His senses instantly awaken, and he discovers the feminine, the other sex: “it was the first time in my life that I really appreciated the value of a woman’s foot and leg … having seen only women’s faces and figures. But now I found out that they were women all over.” Marivaux surveys the novelty of the female body in stages, dividing it into a series of moments of pleasure: “Look at that arm, that beautiful form, eyes the like of which I have never seen in anyone else.” The peasant must also learn the muted eloquence that secrecy demands: “Speak softly … my maid might be in there (pointing to the anteroom).” These scenes show how the character’s intensity has been displaced: no longer fueling the energy of the picaresque journey, it is now interiorized in emotions, in the curiosity indulged by the unveiling of bodies, the surprise of love.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 38