A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  In parallel, Marivaux also offers his hero the convenience of bourgeois interiority, in the form of married life. The domestic interior escapes from libertine exchange. By contrast, it is rife with irony, with mockery of religious fervor (the image of Jacob takes the place of the devotional image in his wife’s chapel). The marriage bed grows quickly cold; accommodating the husband replete with repeated infidelities, with daily flirtations, Madame de la Vallée still entreats him: “Let’s go to bed, my dear, it’s late.” At home, Jacob is not the seducer, the pseudo-gentleman who seeks to impress with his borrowed clothes. Marivaux shows rather the husband in his “dressing-gown and slippers.” In a moment of furtive introspection, Jacob sees himself as master of the house, his image reflected in the mirror of a book: “At about three in the afternoon the bells rang for vespers and my wife went to church while I read some serious book that I didn’t understand much of … which I amused myself with merely to imitate the behaviour of a gentleman in his home.”

  Another memoir-novel employs a different strategy: in Les égarements du cœur et de l’esprit (The Wayward Head and Heart, 1735–38), which inaugurates the libertine novel, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon lets his characters evolve in highly social settings (sitting rooms, dining rooms, public gardens). The lovers have difficulty finding private space. They must fend off the public, wait for the crowds to disperse. The word boudoir never actually makes an appearance in this novel. Private space is pried from social space, carved out when others have taken their leave. Crébillon’s positioning of private space betrays the fragile interiorization of the characters, poised between the opinions of others and their own self-knowledge. Thus Crébillon shows the young Monsieur de Meilcour’s panic at unwonted intimacy when he finds himself alone with a woman. Such are the circumstances that condition the narrator’s declaration to Madame de Lursay. The aristocratic salon becomes an enclosed space, confining the couple in this liminal moment so opportune for their tête-à-tête: “Our part of the drawing-room was deserted, everyone was occupied.” For Meilcour’s first rendezvous with his new mistress, the surroundings are similarly propitious, down to the furniture. Canapé and armchair become the props of desire for the occasion, but only after a seemingly interminable supper has ended: “I no sooner found myself alone with her than I was seized by the most horrible fright I have ever been in in my life. … I did not dare to look at Madame de Lursay. She easily perceived my difficulty, and told me, but in the sweetest tone imaginable, to come and sit beside her on the sofa where she had placed herself.” Night falls on the boudoir and sets the scene. The mistress of the house has seen to all the requisite details of her person: negligee, disarranged hair. Then the scene of seduction can take place: “She half reclined there, her head against the cushions, and amused herself idly and as if abstractedly by tying bows in her ribbons. From time to time she turned her eyes languishingly on me, upon which I would at once respectfully lower my own.” Crébillon fills in all the essential elements of the tableau: the kneeling lover, furtive caresses, hand-kissing, declarations of love.

  At the end of the novel, a similar scene is repeated, after another seemingly endless meal. Meilcour must await the departure of the guests, including an inopportune marquis whom Crébillon perversely introduces, before he can finally find Madame de Lursay alone: “I found Madame de Lursay reclining on a couch, musing. In spite of the boldness with which I had armed myself, I no sooner found myself alone with her than I was sorry I had got myself into this situation, and would have been glad never to have had the idea that I had so much to say to her.” Then their bodies draw close and the much-desired fatal moment can at last arrive: “It was as if my transports increased her beauty, and made all her graces more touching. … I was too young not to believe that I loved in return. The work of my senses appeared to me the work of my heart. I abandoned myself to all the intoxication of that fatal moment.”

  The young Meilcour also makes his entrance into the sacred precincts of the boudoir. A rendezvous leads him to a new conquest, in fact straight to the dressing room of Madame de Senanges. In the coquette’s mirror, Meilcour undergoes the trial of seduction by this woman of experience: “She uttered a cry of delight when she saw me. ‘Ah, you!’ she said in a familiar tone. ‘How charming of you to keep your word.’” With this encounter, Meilcour makes another conquest: in Madame de Senanges’s dressing room, he also meets his future mistress, Madame de Mongennes. The two women seek to draw out the inexperienced young man: “Is it not so, Madam? One sees very few faces like his. People admire faces all day long that do not come anywhere near it.”

  The aristocratic interiors depicted in Le paysan parvenu—boudoirs, dressing rooms—reappear in the century’s most celebrated novel, Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782). Despite the scattered effect evoked by the epistolary novel’s crisscrossing of letters, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s novel, a masterpiece of epistolary fiction, benefits from being read as a novel of space. The claustrophobia of the places in which the characters evolve is strategically employed by the libertines who lead the dance of manipulation in the text. These interiors, which often mimic the intimate space of the letter, reveal the characters in their psychological dimension, as creatures of secrecy with mysterious individual motivations that must be decoded. Here we see the true substance of these paper characters. They are obsessed with plotting.

  In one of the major plot lines of the novel, the orders that Valmont receives from Madame de Merteuil entail exploiting the locale by using a deliberately spatial tactic: “[H]er daughter must be seduced. … She must be ruined too,” Merteuil instructs Valmont with regard to Cécile de Volanges (part 1, letter 44). Letter 96 recounts Valmont’s success in this endeavor. In his quest to violate the girl’s intimate space, the libertine meticulously studies the chateau’s premises. The bedroom that protected the naive heroine who is engaged to be married becomes the site of sexual experimentation, of her first lessons in love. The libertine has foreseen everything: from ways to preserve the hush of the night, to the duplicate keys that leave the room open to compromising intrusion. He also supplies writing materials for the forbidden correspondence: paper, pens, and ink (part 2, letter 73).

  Cécile’s sleep will never be the same again. Moreover, the young girl wakes up transformed by the incursion, as her mirror reveals the following dawn: “When I woke this morning and looked at myself in the mirror, I frightened myself, I was so changed” (part 3, letter 97). Here Laclos reverses the tableau of female seduction. Appearing in the stark light of day, the stigmata of the sexual act disfigure the heroine. The libertine takes delight in this “mien of the morning after,” where the brand of disgrace stamps itself like an indelible tattoo (part 3, letter 96).

  The novel’s central plot, Valmont’s seduction of Madame (Présidente) de Tourvel, also entails the conquest of a private universe, a veritable fortress. Laclos multiplies the occasions on which the space of the pious Présidente is violated. Letter 99, which announces Tourvel’s “fall,” is not only the declaration of an inveterate libertine, but also that of a clever architectural strategist. In order to carry out his “plan,” the libertine studies Madame de Tourvel’s apartment in minute detail. Valmont adopts this approach quite early in the novel, in letter 23, when he describes watching the Présidente through a keyhole: Madame de Tourvel reveals herself on the other side as a portrait of devotion and of misery (part 1, letter 23).

  Before his conquest of Tourvel in her husband’s chateau, Valmont engages in rigorous observation. The vicomte doubles his gaze by employing as a spy his valet, Azolan, who enters the home in lieu of his master to misdirect letters to unintended recipients. Throughout the day, the Présidente can be observed in the details of her routine, her every move minutely watched. “On their arrival Madame went to bed”; “In the afternoon Madame the Présidente went into the library, and removed two books which she carried to her boudoir”; “then she came home, took breakfast, and afterwards began writing
, continuing until nearly one o’clock” (part 3, letter 107). The narrative of the famous scene that occurs on “Thursday the twenty-eighth, the day chosen and stipulated” is a paragon of the genre, using all the clichés of military conquest and heroic strategy: “But so as to lose not a moment of time that was precious to me, I carefully examined the locale, and there and then marked down the theatre of my victory. I couldn’t have chosen a more convenient one, for there was an ottoman in the room. But I observed that, facing it, hung a portrait of the husband, and I was afraid, I admit, that with so extraordinary a woman, a single look directed by chance in his direction might in a moment destroy the work of so much time and trouble” (part 4, letter 125). The room becomes the stage for Valmont’s possession of the Présidente: first an ocular prison (she is surrounded by his gaze), it becomes a chamber of crises and convulsions, and finally a witness to the transgressive pleasure.

  Matching this scene in its meticulous preparation is the rendezvous between Madame de Merteuil and Prévan (part 2, letter 85). The marquise receives the officer in her boudoir, but she has transformed the entire house into an impregnable fortress, with a trained guard dog, servants on the lookout, alarm bells. The seduction reverses into an attack, and Prévan is trapped at the very moment when he was about to emerge victorious. This tableau inverts the roles depicted in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s celebrated painting Le verrou, which depicts a woman trapped in a bedroom with a sexual champion. The only element common to the two scenes is the “disordered bed” (part 2, letter 85). From Merteuil’s apartment Prévan goes straight to prison. Earlier in the novel, the boudoir in the marquise’s country house proved more hospitable, when she set out to educate the Chevalier de Danceny. In fact, she tells us, the room is even “in its full splendour” (part 1, letter 10).

  Les liaisons dangereuses also enlists the genius of architecture in situations that smack of comedy, in contrast to the scenes of cruelty discussed above. Letter 71 recounts such a story: how the vicomte “disinterred an old affair” with the vicomtesse of M. Here Valmont exploits the proximity of their bedrooms, which are “directly opposite,” allowing him to orchestrate a party of four: both the husband of the vicomtesse and her lover, Vressac, are in turn tricked in this masterful scene. By cover of night, doors are discreetly opened and closed. And this is where things become interesting. The vicomtesse, who is in Valmont’s bedroom and wishes to return to her own, must be saved in the nick of time: “I obtained the Vicomtesse’s consent to giving loud shrieks of alarm such as ‘Thief! Murder!’ etc., etc.; and it was agreed that, at the first shriek, I should break open the door whereupon she would run to her bed. … The door gave way at my first kick” (part 2, letter 71). For the time being, the secret remains under wraps, and appearances are saved before the story can spread.

  Another epistolary novel would follow a very different path, opening the way to the sentimental novel with its moralistic treatment of familiar places. This is the best seller of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761). Here the author offers a different approach to intimacy; the libertine strategy is abandoned in favor of a radical conversion of the characters. This transformation is reflected in the spaces of the novel: Rousseau leaves behind the familiar sites of seduction for private spaces devoted to the rituals of marriage and family that Rousseau introduces into literature, providing them with robust ideological support.

  La nouvelle Héloïse can be seen as the end of the boudoir novel. Rousseau’s lovers abandon secret spaces. The confinement that favors all sorts of transgressions becomes suspect: love must instead be revealed in the light of day, it must submit to the world’s transparency. We see here the pressure on private space of Rousseau’s “republican” convictions and his belief in the “public” virtues, as against aristocratic codes of “secrecy.” Letter 54 (part 1), written by Saint-Preux, Julie’s lover, describes a scene that will not be repeated, when the wayward lover ends up “in his Mistress’s wardrobe,” as Rousseau phrases it in the title he gives this letter. This narrative of folly, of fetishistic perversion, of imaginary decadence par excellence, shows the distracted lover pursuing substitutes for the object of his desire in the exalting obscurity that cloaks her personal effects: “Julie! Here I am in your dressing room, here I am in the sanctuary of all my heart worships. The torch of love guided my steps.” As he explores the room, Saint-Preux imprints his desire on all the objects he encounters. The absent lover is multiplied in all these enticing fetishes that seduce the intruder. A sort of Pygmalion, Saint-Preux reconstructs this feminine universe in a sort of undress without the body, enacting the sensual pleasure of possession without the resistance of the other sex. All the elements of the rococo erotic tableau are present (negligee, mules, neckerchief), as if in an interior painted by Boucher. His epistolary ode to her accoutrements serves as a metaphor for desire, a substitute that compensates for emotion in an exchange that is at once cathartic and erotic:

  How enchanting is this mysterious abode? Everything here flatters and feeds the ardor that devours me. O Julie! It is filled with you, and the flame of my desire spreads to your every vestige. Aye, all my senses are intoxicated at once. Some almost imperceptible fragrance, sweeter than the rose, and lighter than the iris is breathed forth from all over this place. I fancy I hear the flattering sound of your voice. All the scattered pieces of your raiment present to my ardent imagination those of your person which they secrete. This light bonnet which is graced by long blond hair it affects to cover: this happy neckerchief of which at least once I shall not have to complain; this elegant and simple dishabille which so well states the taste of her who wears it; these dainty slippers which fit easily on your lithe feet; this slender corset which touches and enfolds. … what an enchanting shape. … two slight curves in front. … oh voluptuous spectacle. … the whalebone has yielded to the form pressed into it. … delightful imprints, let me kiss you a thousand times! … Ye gods! ye gods! What will it be when … ah, I think I already feel that tender heart beating under a happy hand! Julie! my charming Julie! I see you, I feel you everywhere, I breathe you with the air you have breathed; you permeate my whole substance; how your abode is burning and painful for me! It is terrible on my impatience. Oh come, fly to me, or I shall die. (part 1, letter 54)

  Saint-Preux will have to flee Julie and the Etange house. He can regain the intimacy of her circle only under the newfound protection of Julie’s husband, Monsieur de Wolmar. The lover is domesticated as a friend; only thus can he be received in the household. Rousseau arranges interior scenes—unprecedented in the eighteenth century—to show the family tableau centered on the mother and mistress of the house. The cabinet of dreams is a thing of the past: Saint-Preux has graduated to the seduction of new sites. One of these is the salon, but it is no longer the aristocratic salon where people mill about in a sea of artifice. Here Julie reigns amid her children: “I saw her surrounded by her Husband and children; this awed me” (part 4, letter 6). The famous Clarens house is now dedicated to the cult of the family, to a strict domestic economy. The house formally banishes the rococo aristocratic space that was dedicated to spectacle and ostentation. It is carefully reconceived by its owners: “Since the masters of this house have established their home here, they have put to their use everything that served only as ornament; it is no longer a house made to be seen, but to be lived in” (part 4, letter 10).

  Rousseau provides the keys to this new architecture, in the simplification of space and the condensation of ceremonial areas into more intimate spaces. The bourgeois house is born, enfolding its residents upon themselves in a hygienic confinement: “They have walled up long rows of rooms to change doors that were awkwardly situated, they have divided rooms that were too large so as to have lodgings better laid out. They have replaced oldfashioned and sumptuous pieces of furniture with simple and convenient ones. Everything here is agreeable and cheerful; everything bespeaks plenty and elegance, nothing
reeks of wealth and luxury” (part 4, letter 10). Later Rousseau will explain this architecture by praising its rationalism: palatial grandeur gives way to an abode of utility and convenience. Domestic space is recalled to order, aligned with nature. It offers a new political image, that of the community reunited in self-sufficiency and transparency. The house enforces a generalized morality of behaviors: “But the sight of this house and of the uniform and simple life of its inhabitants imparts to the soul of onlookers a secret charm that grows and grows. A small number of gentle and peaceable people, united by mutual needs and reciprocal beneficence, here work together through various tasks toward a common goal” (part 5, letter 2).