Julie de Lespinasse, a close friend of the encyclopedists—she is a major character in Diderot’s 1769 Le rêve de D’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream)—was initially employed by Marie du Deffand to read for her. They quarreled when the “marquise” discovered that her young protégée—who was in fact her brother’s illegitimate daughter—was having private conversations with her salon guests. Julie de Lespinasse moved out and started organizing her own regular receptions. Many of Lespinasse’s letters were preserved because she was so closely involved in the daily life of the philosophes in Paris. Myriads of other witty and clever women also doubtless penned missives, but these either lie dormant in archives or have been destroyed. Increased interest in private life over the past few decades has led to the uncovering of family correspondences in which women played a prime part, and new corpuses will doubtless become available in the future.
Letter writers speak of their own lives. A field that has drawn recent interest from specialists is that of diaries and journals. While Rousseau provided the impulse for the development of autobiography as we know it, throughout the eighteenth century, others committed their feelings and ideas to paper. Many women, once literate, kept commonplace books in which they jotted down recipes, useful facts for the household, or accounts and so on, but sometimes they actually spelled out their hopes or fears, told of their experiences, and took possible readers—often just their immediate family—into account. A spirited early autobiographical text is the Mémoires of Marguerite-Jeanne de Staal-Delaunay (1684–1750), which gives greater scope to introspection and character analysis than most contemporary writings. Brought up in a convent in Rouen—her mother had fallen on hard times—Staal-Delaunay became a lady of the bedchamber and then confidante to the duchesse du Maine, who plotted against Philippe d’Orléans, the regent, and held a sort of parallel court in Sceaux, just outside Paris. Witty and self-deprecating, the memoirist recounts different episodes of her life from her childhood onward, remembers her adolescent crushes, and details some of her struggles, including the time she spent in the Bastille as one of the conspirators in the duchesse’s shady political dealings. She describes prison as a curiously liberating experience: though behind bars, she was free to do what she wanted with her time and not subject to her employer’s whims. She also recounts how, although she married a baron, she was never treated completely as a noblewoman by the duchesse, and she adds that original sin may be wiped out by baptism, but not the indelible stain of having been a chambermaid by the sacrament of marriage! Staal-Delaunay’s writings were printed posthumously. She clearly did not feel it possible for them to be published during her lifetime.
Jeanne-Marie Phlipon (1754–93) also lived at the intersection between public and private spheres. A reader of Rousseau, she was the only daughter of a Parisian goldsmith and his wife. They brought up young “Manon” as a sensitive soul, taking her on excursions to the countryside and providing a loving environment. She married an older man, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, and seems to have played a part in composing his speeches and official letters when he became minister for the interior under the Girondin government (1792–93). She wrote her memoirs in prison after the fall of the regime. She knew she was unlikely to escape the death penalty and wanted to leave her daughter something to live on after her death. Her Mémoires particuliers, which include the account of a scene in which an apprentice in her father’s workshop fondled her inappropriately, are only one wing of the diptych. The other is made up of her political memoirs and shows how closely involved she was in major events during the revolutionary years. A picture thought to be of her, by a talented woman painter, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (Quimper, Musée des Beaux-Arts), portrays the sitter, elegantly clad in pearly white, with a powdered wig and lace cap, at a desk, pen in hand, staring out at the spectator as though interrupted as she writes. Whether or not it represents “Manon” Roland, it corresponds to the idea of an engaging modern person who is both an intellectual and a woman of fashion—one who knows her own mind whether drafting a pamphlet or choosing a dress.
In her professional capacity, Félicité de Genlis used diaries and reports to control the Orléans princes whose education she supervised. She encouraged mothers to keep notes about their children’s upbringing. Many appear to have done so, within the upper-middle classes. Their texts are precious illustrations of the way family life was evolving. The age of reason witnessed the blossoming of expressions of feeling that were considered legitimate per se and did not require any informative value to serve as an excuse. Such documents were kept to be read and reread within the family circle. Women and children when traveling, whether with a father or husband who had business overseas or as tourists visiting Rome, for instance, were sometimes encouraged to keep a journal. Anne-Marie Du Bocage (1710–1802), who wrote an epic about the bringing of Catholicism to the Americas—La Colombiade ou la foi portée au Nouveau Monde (The Columbiad or faith brought to the New World)—and a relatively unsuccessful play called Les amazones, published travel letters ostensibly to her sister as a literary text. The frontispiece of her complete works is a portrait with the caption Forma Venus, arte Minerva (She has the looks of Venus and the art of Minerva) as though only by hyperbolic comparisons with Greco-Latin divinities could one salute the exceptional talents of a woman who composed works in the most noble and challenging of genres: epic poetry and tragedy. Du Bocage’s chatty letters from Holland or Britain were considered less impressive achievements than her more serious works, but they were probably more widely read.
The letter was also popular as a vehicle for novels during the eighteenth century. Letter and memoir forms made fiction seem closer to authentic documents. Fictional letter writers could express subjective feelings, and the women characters, though often unlucky in love, still have depth and color and are given at least as much place as their male counterparts: the individuals who hold the pen are trying to find themselves and discover how their interactions with others affect the balance of their relationships. Many epistolary novels were written by successful women writers. “Beauty and the Beast” author Leprince de Beaumont penned several, which address questions of education and social issues like breastfeeding or illegitimacy. Her Nouvelle Clarice (1767) shows the extent to which Richardson’s Clarissa influenced writers throughout Europe. The title emphasizes the importance of the heroine, like that of Staël’s first novel, Delphine, published in 1802. Its epistolary polyphony charts a doomed love story that unfolds with the French Revolution as its backdrop. It is a moving presentation of how generosity can get one into trouble and the dilemmas that social pressure, prejudice, but also a man’s lack of moral courage can put on a woman. In some ways, its reverse reflection is Tencin’s 1736 Mémoires du comte de Comminge in which the anonymous author—mother of an illegitimate son who became famous under the name of d’Alembert—takes on a male voice and recounts how his shortcomings led to him losing his beloved Adélaïde not once, but twice.
Other important novelists who chose the epistolary genre include Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (1713–92) and Isabelle de Charrière (1740–1805). Most of Riccoboni’s novels tell of unhappy romances, often set entirely or partly in Britain, where her correspondents David Garrick and David Hume lived, and some, though original, pretended to be translated from English—this was a commercial ploy as “Anglomania” struck the Continent. Their titles betray the author’s shaky command of the language, as in her successful 1757 Lettres de mistriss Fanni Butlerd à milord Charles Alfred de Caitombridge, comte de Plisinthe, duc de Raftingh, which contemporaries initially believed to be a true correspondence, in part thanks to a journalistic hoax in which a letter purportedly from an abandoned woman called Fanni to her seducer Milord Charles C., duke of R., was published as authentic. We only have the woman’s letters. They show that in the love story that they chart, her emotional investment is greater than his. She starts by idealizing him, and her lucid discovery that he is not what she believed and hoped him to be gives th
e volume tragic overtones. Many women novelists, in depicting such relationships, were showing that public perceptions of affairs of the heart compounded inequalities between the sexes: a woman’s reputation could be lost and her lover’s enhanced if news of the liaison circulated. Society, in Riccoboni’s novels, allows men to avail themselves of unfair perspectives: they exploit situations that leave their sensitive mistresses facing the consequences of their actions. The stories center on individual relationships but also show how such ties play out in public. There is implicit social criticism in Riccoboni’s writing. Like many female novelists, whose tales often take place in the provinces, she does not resort to complicated plots, and the shipwrecks or duels that are ten a penny in certain authors’ works are disregarded in favor of moral weakness or inconsistency and the havoc they wreak on everyday existences.
Riccoboni’s fiction was translated into different languages, and her books were reprinted several times well into the next century. From the outset, they were popular, particularly among women readers—Sainte-Beuve makes an unverifiable claim that Marie Antoinette had them bound like a prayer book to read during mass. Although this is probably untrue, it is a way of indicating their success—particularly as the queen of France was not an avid reader. Because they were generally set in modern times, the stories allowed contemporaries to identify with the adventures. Such books, which display an acute consciousness of social conventions as they affect both sexes, are often intimate works, with a handful of characters. The epistolary form encourages such closed circuits. It gives unparalleled and unmediated access to the letter writer’s moods, like reading over someone’s shoulder. Riccoboni is also famous nowadays because of a private correspondence with Laclos after the publication, in 1782, of Les liaisons dangereuses. She was concerned with the immorality of the marquise de Merteuil and the question of verisimilitude in the depiction.
While Riccoboni—the illegitimate daughter of a bigamous father—was a Parisian from her birth to her death, Isabelle de Charrière was a cosmopolitan like Staël. She was born in the Netherlands, had married a Swiss nobleman, lived near Neuchâtel, and wrote in French. She is, as Caroline Warman, who published the first English translations of several of her works pithily puts it: “the French, Swiss and Dutch Jane Austen all rolled into one.” Charrière’s first published text, the 1763 novella Le noble, put her on a collision course with her family: it tells of a young aristocrat whose father forbids her to marry the man she loves: he is not quite noble enough. The feisty girl, who wants nothing more than to be in her suitor’s arms, elopes. She crosses the castle moat by using the portraits of her ancestors as stepping stones. The author’s horrified family attempted to buy up the whole of the print run even though their as yet unmarried daughter’s name was not on the title page.
In her subsequent works, which include novels, pamphlets, and twenty-six plays, Charrière often deals with political issues. Twists in her storyline involve societal questions like what to do with illegitimate children and whether boys and girls or the rich and the poor should be brought up differently. In the Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés (Emigré Letters, 1793), there are ideological and class differences between the heroes’ families, and we do not know to what extent revolutionary affairs as well as social pressure may influence the shape of things to come: the Terror offers unexpected and dramatic twists in the storyline—like in Staël’s later Delphine—and shows that by writing truly contemporary fiction, the novelist put herself and her readers on the razor’s edge, implicitly admitting that it was impossible to know where the world was heading. Not only does Charrière go far beyond the traditional marriage plot, but one of the characteristics of her fiction is to eschew traditional happy endings—or indeed tragic ones.
Often pessimistic about women’s condition in society and never afraid to illustrate the tedium of domesticity, Charrière sets out individuals’ choices but leaves the resolution hanging in the balance for the reader to decide or work out. Such choices constitute a refusal to take things for granted or to cede to facility, and they proved particularly interesting at a time of social and political upheaval. Charrière writes with acuity of hope and despair and clearly wants to get readers thinking about societal questions. She uses a medium that allows her to do so by creating engaging and varied figures and putting them in awkward situations. In her 1784 Lettres neuchâteloises (Letters from Neuchâtel), the heroine has to forgive her beloved Henri who has fathered an illegitimate son with a seamstress (one of several important working-class women in Charrière’s works) and make provisions for his upbringing—far away from them all. On the whole, she is much more decisive and savvy than her well-intentioned but somewhat hapless fiancé.
We may never know the extent to which women took up their pens in eighteenth-century France. Many did not write texts to publish them, or if they did allow them to go into print, did not sign them; or, they confided their ideas to a man who would then develop them on paper—a case in point is that of Elisabeth Ferrand (1700–1752), to whom Condillac dedicated his Traité des sensations, recognizing her invaluable intellectual input and crediting her with inventing the conceit of the statue coming to life as its senses receive external stimulation. Had he not included profuse thanks in his prefatory text, we would know nothing about her. Though she was in close contact with Charles-Edward Stuart, Clairaut, d’Alembert and others, we have only sketchy biographical details about her and a splendid pastel by La Tour of an elegant woman with a large volume of Newton’s works (Munich, Alte Pinakothek). Condillac’s statue, who learns through the experience of the senses, building on such cognitive channels for reason to play its part, is in some ways emblematic of the emotional economy of women’s writing.
Fear of reprisals for particularly scandalous texts led some men to circulate them anonymously or in manuscript form—think of a major Enlightenment figure like Diderot. In women’s cases, social prejudice rather than the nature of their writings is at play. Women were often seen as intellectually inferior. Their productions could be deemed negligible by definition. Some feared for their reputation were they to step into the limelight as authors—the talented Franco-Swiss translator Aimée Steck-Guichelin (1776–1821) resisted friends’ encouragements to publish her poems: she was quite happy being an anonymous channel to convert someone else’s (a man’s) prose into another language for it to circulate, but to see her own verse out in the open would be, she said, like walking down the street clad only in undergarments.
Even among women who did hope to see their works published, there were economic implications of admitting to being a female author: one would get paid less and could, on the whole, expect biased reviews. Françoise de Graffigny (1695–1758), a scion of the minor nobility of Lorraine, is a case in point. Her marriage was an unhappy one, and she left her violent husband. In Paris, she was part of a circle of intellectuals. She sent copious letters to François “Panpan” Devaux about literary life, her health, her conversations. She wrote an epistolary novel about a Peruvian princess, Zilia. Seized from the Temple of the Sun by Spanish invaders, the heroine ends up in eighteenth-century France, under the wing of a tolerant Frenchman, Déterville, who falls in love with her. Zilia, though, considers herself to be pledged to the “Son of the Sun,” the heir to the Inca throne, and even when it becomes clear that he has abandoned her, she opts for a single and contented life, accepting friendship but not marriage from her French suitor. The novel is remarkable in that it writes the male voice largely out of the story: we have only Zilia’s letters, to her fiancé Aza and her friend Déterville, along with one note from the latter in which he hands over gold treasure from the ransacked Incan temple that will allow the Peruvian princess to live an independent life. After Aza’s betrayal, Zilia will grant men space only on her own terms. Her letters offer a tantalizing dissenting option that might hardly have been practical for Graffigny’s contemporaries but at least afforded a glimpse of wider horizons.
Like the
characters in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Zilia details European life, in her letters to Aza, with an impartial eye—all the more so because she has had to learn to read and write in French, having run out of quipos, Incan knotted cords that initially allowed her to record her life. She depicts Westerners as taken in by appearances and artifice, whereas the culture from which she hails is portrayed by her as virtuous and simple: in an iconic scene, when she has just arrived in Europe, she glimpses a young woman dressed like herself in the costume of the Virgins of the Sun. She rushes toward her and discovers something unknown in Peru: a mirror reflecting her own image. While writing her novel, Graffigny took advice, in person and by letter. When it came to finding a publisher in 1747, she got a male friend to submit it, believing he would get a better deal than she would. The book, which came out anonymously, was a runaway success—more than forty editions were published before 1800; it was translated into five languages; and it served as the basis of a popular method for Italians to learn French and vice-versa. Graffigny admitted to being the author and basked in the glory it brought her. She had a revised edition published in 1752 and included extra passages, in particular a letter purportedly written from a convent in which young girls are educated, as a way of criticizing the poor deal they got. By choosing to make her heroine a Peruvian princess who learns to speak and write French, Graffigny was showing that to many of her contemporaries women were like foreigners.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 42