by Steven Moore
The son of a marquis, Francion la Porte is a bright boy who eventually leaves Brittany to be educated in Paris; rather than suffering at school like Pablos in The Swindler, Francion takes advantage of his pedantic schoolmaster Hortensius, the victim of his many pranks throughout the novel. (He was based on a minor writer named Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, whom Sorel loathed.) Francion tells us how he endured poverty after leaving school, of his development as a writer, how he joins a group of libertines, and the difficulties he had finding a patron until he joined the entourage of a nobleman named Clérante, with whom he participates in a week-long orgy at another nobleman’s castle. Earlier at school, Francion had seen a portrait of an Italian lady named Nays (Naïs), a spiritual contrast to slutty Laurette (whom he encounters at the orgy, making up for the missed opportunity that opened the novel), and when Sorel expanded the novel for the second edition it was to track Francion’s quest to be united with this ideal woman. Two Italian rivals for her hand trick and imprison Francion, and after he escapes he lays low for a while, playing at being a shepherd and a traveling mountebank before resuming his quest for Nays. Militantly antimarriage in the earlier part of the novel, the older Francion realizes his uncertain social status and financial situation would be best settled by marriage to this noblewoman. The long 12th chapter Sorel added for the 1633 edition postpones this with a subplot set in Rome in which Francion flirts with a virginal girl named Emilie and is arrested and tried for counterfeiting by his Italian rivals, which causes Nays to forsake him. (As in the first chapter, Francion isn’t present during much of the final chapter. Things happen to him; he’s not in control.) But he is vindicated—he was set up both by counterfeiters and counterfeit virgin Emilie—so Nays forgives him and the novel ends with their marriage.
Falling in love with a portrait, a last-act courtroom scene, and marriage on the final page are all staples from the romantic fiction Sorel ostensibly mocks in the first half of the novel, just as Francion’s aristocratic birth departs from the picaresque tradition. Subverting genre expectations, Sorel mixes up plot elements from different fiction traditions for something new, a romantic novel grounded in sordid reality, and/or a picaresque about a well-born intellectual swindler who isn’t as smart or noble as he thinks he is. No earlier romantic novel was as lewd as this, no picaresque as learned. Francion is filled with discussions of novels, reflecting Sorel’s own preoccupation with the validity of the genre. (After he gave up novel-writing, he produced two works of literary criticism, La Bibliothèque françoise [1664] and De la connoissance des bons livres [1671].) When Francion is slumming as a shepherd, he encounters an educated woman named Joconde who is reading a novel that sounds like Astrea, and which exasperates her,
for I delight altogether in reality which I cannot find in any of the histories in this book, although peradventure there may be some appearances for it. Shepherds are here as philosophers, and make love in the same manner as accomplished courtiers in the world, but to what purpose is this? Why doth not the author give to these personages the qualities of knights well-educated? He makes them the miracles of eloquence and prudence which in men of their condition is prodigious. A history true or fabulous ought to represent things as near to nature as possibly may be; otherwise, it serves but as a tale only to entertain children in a chimney corner, and not ingenious spirits whose apprehension pierces through all things. We may see here the method and order of the world turned topsy-turvy.13
A few pages earlier, the narrator had praised his own book’s realism and frank language, yet Francion tells Joconde that he himself is a nobleman in shepherd’s garb who writes pastoral poetry and conducts himself like a character out of d’Urfé’s novel. On the one hand, he defends the veracity of unrealistic pastoral novels, but on the other he pours scorn on peasants and country living. Confounding matters further, the most enthusiastic advocate for novels is the ridiculous pedant Hortensius, who wants to expand their subject matter. He first describes some sci-fi novels he plans to write—one of which inspired Cyrano de Bergerac a generation later—and then predicts the realistic, mercantile novels of the 19th century: “The romances shall be no more of love and war only, but they shall contain as well subjects of law, of merchandise, and of receipts of the exchequer. In this course of affairs, there shall be daily brave and new adventures. . . . In this manner, the draper shall make romances on his traffic and the advocate on his practice” (11). Sorel condemns novels in a novel that is as extravagant as anything Hortensius plans to write. As Joconde said, “We may see here the method and order of the world turned topsy-turvy,” as Sorel does everything he can to discredit novels, by way of a novel. This is why Sorel’s macédoine has been called “an ‘antinovel,’ a work that challenges literary tradition and questions its own status as fiction” (Verdier, 57).
Francion is a major development in the art of the novel, retooling medieval carnivalesque fiction for modern, more sophisticated uses. Its protagonist is neither a hero nor a scoundrel, but an all-too-human character who is bright, generous, and anxious to prove his worth, but held back by social prejudices and self-doubt—Francion occasionally poses as a mountebank, a role that fits him a little too well—and is often duped by those he considers his intellectual inferiors, especially the women he lusts after. His marriage at the end is a compromise, not a victorious validation as in traditional novels, and his contempt for peasants is matched only by his contempt for nobility, the very class to which he aspires. (He values merit, not class.) He’s as frank as his name implies, but Francion’s road to self-discovery doesn’t end with the conclusion of the novel; he has a long way to go. The novel itself is a riot of delights: it’s very funny in parts, very bawdy (especially that week-long orgy), very detailed and visceral in its rendition of physical matters, very inventive in its use of slang, dialect, and verb tenses (according to those who have read the original), very erudite, very metafictional, very liberal (anti-war, pro-sex), and very clever in its unctuous use of pious moralizing to excuse depictions of lewd behavior. Moreover, Francion’s lengthy dream in book 3 is astonishing: it reads more like a sequence in Coover’s Lucky Pierre than something out of a 17th-century novel. Though Sorel didn’t destroy the contemporary French novel, he certainly gave it a much-needed kick in the derrière—or cul, as he crudely calls it.
Francion promises to write a satirical novel based on his pastoral experiences, an intertextual reference to Sorel’s other major novel, The Extravagant Shepherd (Le Berger extravagant), which was published anonymously in three installments in 1627–28 in an unusual form. Over a thousand pages long (nearly 3,000 in the small-format original), about two-thirds is a narrative in 14 chapters, and the rest a critical commentary (Remarques) on the novel by Sorel himself. The novel’s purpose was made clearer when he issued a revised version in 1633–34 bluntly retitled L’anti-roman (The Antinovel).14 Sorel opposed the prevailing trends in fiction—not only pastorals like Astrea but generic romances and adventure stories (the usual best-selling fare)—and offers an antidote, hoping to laugh them out of favor by exposing the exhausted literary traditions they exploited and the dangers they pose to naive readers. (Remember, Sorel was writting at a time when fops ands foppettes were dressing up as their favorite characters from Astrea in the salons of Paris.) The result, as Gabrielle Verdier describes it, “is an enormous parodic encyclopedia of forms and themes offering the historian a wealth of information on the state of literature in the 1620s and on the evolution toward classicism” (64).
A travesty of Astrea, The Extravagant Shepherd more closely resembles Don Quixote. A silly young Parisian named Louis loves pastoral novels so much he confuses them with reality, leaves for the western suburb of Saint-Cloud, buys a flock of mangy sheep, and begins to live the pastoral life under the poetic name Lysis. Per the novels he regards as gospel, he selects a plain-looking maid named Catherine for his ideal love, renaming her Charite, and mystifies the simple girl with high-flown declarations of love. His cousin Adrian—a conventi
onal, unimaginative bourgeois—tries to lure him back to Paris, where he plans to commit him to a madhouse, but a sophisticated Parisian visitor named Anselme, out looking for laughs, volunteers to watch over Lysis and lead him back to sanity. Telling Lysis he is taking him down to Astrea’s Forez, he actually transports him to the Brie region east of Paris; the bulk of the novel consists of the elaborate pranks Anselme and the local gentry play on deluded Lysis, encouraging his folly much as the duke and duchess do in the second part of Don Quixote. After this summer vacation, the gentry decide to cure Lysis of his bibliomania via a no-nonsense intellectual named Clarimond, who convinces Lysis that he has been duped by irresponsible writers. Chastened and sad, Louis marries Catherine (whose disdainful attitude toward him changes when she learns he’s rich) and settles into the conventional life of a country gentleman.
It’s easy enough for a talented author to parody any stylized genre, and Sorel hits all the obvious targets. When Lysis encounters his first real shepherd, he approaches him “with a gesture as courteous as if it had been Celadon or Sylvander” and asks him, “Doest thou think on the cruelty of Clorinda? How long is it since thou hast made any song for her? Prithee show me some of thy verses.”15 By vers, the baffled bumpkin thinks he means vers de terre (earthworms) and regards the fancy-talking outsider as an evil spirit. At a mountainside, “calling to mind that in the books he had read, the shepherds did interrogate the Echo in such places as that” (1), Lysis asks the oracular nymph for advice, only to hear scandalous double-entendres. (We later learn Anselme was impersonating Echo.) He attacks a “satyr” (a peasant) whom he catches kisses Charite; serves as judge in a love dispute (there are several of these, mocking those in Astrea); attends a play and—like Don Quixote at the puppet show—climbs onstage to participate; dresses as a young woman to be nearer Charite, only to be accused of promiscuity and nearly burned at the stake as a witch; is “metamorphosed” into a weeping willow and meets what he thinks are nymphs and river-gods; entertains visitors and swallows their exotic stories (more of the gentry having fun with him); participates in an adventure that he’s convinced includes flying horses, giants, and a dragon; fakes a suicide so that he can be resurrected by Charite’s healing eyes; and all the while asks his companions to takes notes for the pastoral romance that will surely be written about him. It’s all great fun, with many LOL moments.
In addition to taking the topoi of pastorals seriously, Lysis takes their figurative language literally. He assumes the sun reluctantly sets because Charite emits more light, making him superfluous, and that the flames in her eyes can literally start fires. Many of the pranks the gentry play on him involve literalizing the imagery of pastoral songs and the romantic conceits used in sentimental novels, along with the classical mythology from which their tropes are drawn. Since Anselme has seen Charite—she’s the maid to a woman he is courting—he offers to engrave her portrait for Lysis, who is shocked when he sees the hideous result. But as Anselme explains,
“Do not you see that I have done all according to your directions, and that I have represented all the features of Charite’s beauty in the same manner as you have expressed them to me?” Whereupon Lysis, discovering the artifice of the excellent painter, began to observe in order all the parts of the picture, which had amazed him when at first sight he beheld them all confusedly. Anselme had in this business acted a piece of ingenious knavery; observing what the shepherd told him of the beauty of his mistress, and imitating the extravagant descriptions of the poets, he had painted a face which, instead of being flesh color, was of a complexion white as snow. There were two branches of coral at the opening of the mouth, and upon each cheek a lily and a rose, crossing one another. Where there should have been eyes, there was neither white nor apple, but two suns sending forth beams, among which were observed certain flames and darts. The eyebrows were black as ebony, and were made like two bows, where the painter had not forgotten to express the holding-place in the middle that they might the better be observed. Above that was the forehead, smooth as a piece of ice, at the top of which was Love [Cupid], like a little child, seated in his throne. And to add perfection to the work, the hair floated about all this in diverse manners: some of it was made like chains of gold, some other twisted and made like networks, and in many places there hanged lines, with hooks already baited. There were many hearts taken with the bait, and one bigger than all the rest, which hanged down below the left cheek, so that it seemed to supply the place of a pendant to that rare beauty. (2)16
Instead of realizing how ridiculous standard romantic imagery is, Lysis is delighted at this “picture by metaphor.” Thirty years earlier, Shakespeare had rejected such diction by admitting
My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks, . . . (Sonnet 130)
Sorel was appalled that contemporary authors were still flogging these dead metaphors in their novels, and they—more than silly but harmless Lysis—are the principal target of his satire. He names names of recent offenders—not only d’Urfé’s Astrea but forgotten novels like Ollénix du Mont-Sacré’s Bergeries de Juliette (1585–98), Vital d’Audiguier’s Lisandre et Caliste (1615), Coste’s Bergeries de Vesper (1618), and Molière d’Essertines’s Polyxène (1623)—but also traces the problem back to classical fantasists like Homer, Virgil, and especially Ovid, whose Metamorphoses is mocked throughout. As John Barth argued in his seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), metaphors and tropes lose their pizazz after a while and need to be replaced by new ones, not endlessly recycled. Sorel felt the classical literary heritage had not only become exhausted by the 1620s, but made redundant by advances in science and historiography.
He put most of these arguments in the mouth of Clarimond, who delivers a lengthy tirade against fanciful literature in chapter 13.17 He begins with a scathing attack on Homer, where one can “find all the fopperies imaginable,” then slashes and burns his way through Virgil, Ovid, Ariosto, Tasso, France’s own Pierre de Ronsard and other poets, then doubles back to condemn unrealistic novels, starting with ancient Greek romances and working his way through pastorals, chivalric novels, and ending with Astrea. A companion who has adopted the poetic name Philiris for the gentry’s cosplaying adventures defends these works, arguing that Clarimond is taking books meant for entertainment too literally and seriously, and then a woman calling herself Amaryllis adds that romances are the only way women who are denied an education can learn about the world and how to conduct themselves in love affairs. (Ironic in one sense, given everything Sorel says against novels, but sadly true in another.) All of these arguments are presented to Anselme during a literary tribunal, an impressive display of Sorel’s vast reading that anticipates the ancients versus the moderns debate that would occupy French and English intellectuals later in the century. Anselme equivocates, judging Clarimond too harsh and Philiris too lenient, though Sorel’s attitude is closest to that of Clarimond, who takes on the task of bringing Lysis to his senses in the final chapter. He points out that Lysis’s pagan-myth-based pastorals violate the tenets of Christianity, reveals the rational explanations behind his mystifying adventures, and argues that his bucolic pose has alienated Charite, not attracted her. Like Don Quixote, Lysis is illuminated by the light of reason and renounces his pastoral ways, but Sorel ends the novel on an ambiguous note: the only person who sides with Clarimond is dull, unimaginative cousin Adrian, and (like Francion) Lysis’s capitulation to conventionality feels more like a defeat than a victory.
Sorel/Clarimond’s principal complaint against fanciful novels is their repeated offenses against verisimilitude, so he makes sure his antinovel reeks of realism. As in Francion, there is lots of scatological humor as well as some brutally realistic sc
enes. Early in the novel, for example, a bridal party accompanies a wedded couple to their bedroom (a custom of the time), and when the lights unexpectedly go out, a servant takes advantage of the confusion to jump the bride and rape her. While Lysis’s courtship of Charite is ludicrous, the mature affairs of the gentry are conducted in a believable manner, and peasants act peasantly, not like extras in a costume drama. Characters urinate and defecate in this novel, vomit and suffer hangovers. We’re given a coarse example of French picaresque in chapter 8 when Lysis’s Sancho Panzan servant Carmelin gives a lengthy account of his hard life. (Of all the interpolated tales in the novel—all parodies of fashionable genres—this is the only one Clarimond approves of, because it is the only one that’s realistic.) Given the sordid reality Sorel depicts, Lysis’s retreat to the idealized world of pastoral is understandable and even admirable, for he insists on living in a nobler, self-made world, just as Don Quixote did—and without inflicting any violence, unlike the armed and dangerous Spaniard.
And like Cervantes, Sorel leads the game reader into a merry metafictional maze. Lysis is very self-conscious about being the hero of a future novel, and just to make sure he hasn’t already been written up, he asks a bookseller if he stocks The Loves of the Shepherd Lysis; answered in the negative, he replies, “I am very glad on it, . . . you shall see such a thing one day” and promises it will be a best-seller (3; cf. Don Quixote’s visit to a bookstore in DQ2). When the novel’s gentry pretend to be shepherds like Lysis, we have fictional characters playing fictional characters, a situation doubled when these characters impersonate gods and nymphs and, later, agree to participate in the plays Lysis stages outdoors in chapter 9, piling artifice upon artifice. During these pageants, Lysis further blurs the distinction between art and life by insisting on using the natural world as a backdrop: “because, said he, sometimes they had to represent things done in diverse countries, he therefore desired that what was done in a village should be done in a village, and that which had been done on a mountain should be done on a mountain. . . . This was Lysis’s way, and not to build upon the stage castles of pasteboard and to call the scene sometimes Thrace, sometimes Greece. You may easily perceive by these extraordinary imaginations that his desire was to come as near as he could to the truth” (9). All the world’s a stage for Lysis, who incorporates a passing wagoneer into his play, refusing to make any distinction between life, truth, and art. Make that bad art, based on myths and fabrications, which pretends to be true. In his preface, the author explains that he has renamed his book “The Anti-Romance, and that because romances contain nothing but fictions, whereas this must be thought a true history,” yet he concludes the novel by questioning its status: