by Steven Moore
― ― ― ―er. Why doth that name thrust itself more often, more pleasingly into my remembrance than so many others that are more dear to me? ― ― ― ― Yet ’twere nothing if ― ― ― ― But I recall it, when he goes hence and ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― hath he any charm, or some harmony that makes him more sweet to the ear than ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― I must confess, others cannot be pronounced with so much pleasure, nor remembered with so much facility. What say’st thou, fool? ― ― ― ― ― ― and since this stranger is so ― indifferent to thee, let his name be so too. (1.5)
As she seesaws between love and hate, desire and fear, Alcidiane reveals more interiority than any other character in Polexander; on the one hand, she is the most unrealistic figure in the novel—a fairytale princess reigning over a legendary island like Atlantis, a radiant symbol of the impossible dream—but on the other, these writings give her more psychological depth than anyone else.
For a love novel, Polexander is remarkably chaste, with none of the hanky-panky that gooses the novels of d’Urfé and Sorel, though Gomberville intimates that fiction-telling is analogous to lovemaking. At the beginning of part 2, Polexander is visited by the daughter of the king of Tunis and invites her to tell him her story later, which she treats as a hot date:
As soon as she saw him, she came to meet him, and made him very pleasing excuses for the liberty she took with so great a prince, and presenting him her hand led him to the innerside of her bed, and set her down on it that she might so have her back turned to the light, and that her face, naturally sweet, might receive new graces by that art. Polexander setting himself right against her, marked all her sweetness and allurements, and sat surprised rather than charmed with that address wherewithal she governed her quick and languishing eyes; she presently began to speak . . . (2.1)
Sometime later, on board a ship, they switch positions and Polexander tells her a story, again in a sexually charged setting: “After he made this reply, he came near to a little bed on which the princess was seated, and seating himself right against her, in this manner began the to-be-lamented adventures of Benzaida” (2.2). Parts of Alcidiane’s diary could be deemed autoerotic, and the concluding sentences of the novel make the equation between reading and fornicating explicit: “Those who had permission to follow our semi-gods into their sanctuary came forth as soon as the people were gone. Let us imitate them that knew so much civility, and not boldly knock at so sacred gates, but be contented to know that Polexander and Alcidiane are together; and since we have so long time enjoyed them, have so much justice as to think it fitting they should likewise enjoy one another.” But “enjoy” is hardly the word; there’s such a thing as too much foreplay, and this romantic sea cruise goes on far too long. Despite its novelties and occasional islands of interest, Polexander is a tedious read, and I can’t imagine it would appeal to a 21st-century audience. Sorel’s novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.23
Taking note of Lord Gomberville’s success was another French nobleman, Gautier de Costes, sieur de La Calprenède (1610?–63), who is thought to have assisted him with the 1637 edition of Polexander. La Calprenède spent most of the 1630s and ’40s writing tragic dramas; he took up novel-writing for personal reasons, suggests a gossip-columnist of the time named Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux: He wrote his first novel Cassandra (Cassandre, 1642–45) because “of his rejected love for Mlle Hamon, who was being kept by the father of the maréchal d’Hocquincourt. Tallemant says that he offered her his sword a hundred times for her to kill him and ‘played a lover from a novel so much that he finally wrote one, where most of the heroines are widows, because his mistress was one.’ ”24
Cassandra is enormous, published in 10 volumes over a three-year period until it reached some 5,500 pages (= 3,000 today, the length of Astrea). It deals not with the unheeded prophetess of the Trojan War but with the romantic and ethical conflicts of a dozen or so royals living through Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia and his subsequent death in Babylon in 323 bce. Our Cassandra, aka Princess Statira, is the proud daughter of Darius III, king of Persia, and is forced to marry Alexander though her heart belongs to an ambitious prince of Scythia (southern Ukraine) named Oroondates.25 The novel might have been named after him because he is the main character, whereas Cassandra makes only sporadic appearances; on the other hand, she motivates all his heroic actions and exemplifies the moral qualities La Calprenède sought to celebrate in this highly ethical novel.
Oroondates fell in love at first sight of Cassandra when she was 15 and the prisoner (along with the rest of Darius’s family) of Alexander’s invading army, as we learn in the first of the novel’s many inset stories. Like Polexander, the bulk of the novel is made up of these histoires, sometimes narrated by their protagonists, sometimes by others, each one filling in a piece of the narrative puzzle. What emerges is a convoluted story of romantic entanglements and political machinations between the Greeks, Persians, and Scythians in Mesopotamia in the 320s, with a focus on the conflicts that arise between duty and love. Oroondates’s love for the Persian princess, for example, leads him to join her father’s army against his own people, which naturally enrages his own father, the king of Scythia. After Cassandra is pressured into marrying Alexander, she assumes the role of dutiful wife and, after his death (poisoned by servants), allows that sense of duty to override her lingering love for Oroondates. Their conflicted relationship is mirrored by a nearly identical one between Lysimachus (one of Alexander’s generals) and Cassandra’s sister Parisatis, which is complemented in turn by the relationships of a half dozen other couples—including the queen of the Amazons and her crossdressing admirer—who likewise have to choose between public duty (to a nation, a former love, or to their aristocratic station) and private desire.
In essence, Cassandra is a series of case studies in générosité, a recurring word in both the French and English versions of the novel.26 It encapsulates honor, loyalty, reputation, self-esteem, and fair play—the latter quality most often demonstrated when a character has an opportunity to vanquish a rival but refuses to do so because his or her opponent is at a disadvantage. Those who possess this generosity recognize and value each other across national and political lines, forming an elite, egotistical class. (As Bannister notes, “Générosité is a self-centered virtue, its main function being to confirm the hero’s assessment of himself” [145].) This was the quality most valued by French nobility in the mid 17th century, who were “experiencing a resurgence of aristocratic individualism after the death of Richelieu” in 1642 (Bannister, 152), and all the melodramatic activities of the novel can be read as larger-than-life representations of the romantic and political affairs of La Calprenède’s high-society readers. Alexander the Great’s conquest is just window dressing for Parisian salon life, and as Tallemant suggested, Oroondates+Cassandra=La Calprenède+Mlle Hamon in Persian clothes.
“A long contest between love and duty” (1.6), the long novel often pushes this obsession with générosité to ridiculous extremes, as when Oroondates’s sister Berenice threatens to kill herself rather than marry Arsacomes, the man her father is trying to force upon her; when her true love Arsaces (aka Artaxerxes, Cassandra’s brother) stormed her palace and rescued her, she resented this affront to her self-esteem, as an incredulous Arsaces later tells his listeners:
“Ah Arsaces” (said she with a sigh), “what have you done?” “I have done what you had reason to expect from my affection” (answered I); “I have pulled you out of the arms of that unworthy husband that was intended to you.” “You have so” (said she), “but you have also pulled me out of my father’s arms. . . . Arsaces” (said she), “since you have satisfied your love, satisfy my honor also. I am not offended at your action, but if you have loved me, I beseech you in the name of all the gods to restore my liberty.” “How, madam” (said I, in much astonishment), “do you
then demand your liberty of me, and are you not free, are you not sovereign amongst us, when as before you were a captive, and a prisoner in that place from whence I have delivered you?” “’Tis true” (added my princess), “I was so, but that captivity and those misfortunes I suffered were better becoming me, and more advantageous than this liberty.” . . . “And which way do you keep that promise [to marry me]” (said I, quite transported), “if you command me to restore you to Arsacomes?” “You shall not restore me to Arsacomes” (replied she) “but only to the king my father, whom my honor suffers me not to forsake without his consent, and if the king gives me to Arsacomes, I by my death can oppose his tyranny, without offending my reputation.” (4.5)
Exasperated by her masochistic moral calculus, Arsaces returns the princess to her tyrannical father, for which she thanks him. He resolves to somehow die in her presence to satisfy his self-esteem, though neither of them actually dies. No one, least of all the author, questions these suicidal values, though a century later Charlotte Lennox would have great fun mocking these values, and the genre in general, in The Female Quixote.
La Calprenède displays admirable narrative control as he slowly fills in his enormous jigsaw puzzle, adding each new piece at an appropriate, if often contrived time. (Too often a character goes for a walk and just happens to bump into a long-lost friend or enemy, who then recounts his adventures.) Both the temporal and spatial scope (about a dozen years, mostly in Mesopotamia) are narrower than those in Polexander and thus easier to keep track of, and the gradual unveiling of Cassandra/Statira’s story is well-paced. At the very beginning, Oroondates is told that Statira has been killed, which causes him to attempt suicide—the first of many: virtually every character attempts or contemplates suicide at some point in response to disappointment or dishonor—and then a page later, we catch a snatch of conversation in which “a woman of tall stature almost in a country habit” is addressed as Cassandra, with no further explanation of who she is for hundreds of pages. (We learn later that Cassandra is her given name, and Statira her official, royal name.) Dramatizing the deceptiveness of appearances, characters who are introduced as foes turn out to be friends, and vice versa, and apparent acts of “inconstancy” are inevitably the result of misunderstandings or evil rumors spread by those who lack generosity, like Alexander’s widow Roxana, the villainess of the novel who loves Oroondates. What else . . . the battle scenes are pretty good.
On the other hand, La Calprenède too often forgets who is narrating the inset stories and has his characters recreate scenes at which they were not present, recite letters from memory, and tell stories within stories from the wrong point of view. This method often robs the stories of any drama; when Lysimachus tells of the time he was thrown into an arena to face a lion, the fact he obviously survived to tell the tale weakens the dramatic tension. The author relies on wild coincidences way too often, and lazily gathers all his characters together in one place to facilitate their encounters. In the present of the novel, set a short time after Alexander’s death, nearly everything happens at a country estate near Babylon belonging to a man named Polemon, who runs a kind of heartbreak hotel where all the major characters eventually wind up to lick their romantic wounds and tell their sad stories before the big battle at the end, in which Oroondates and Lysimachus storm Roxana’s Babylonian palace, free their princesses, kill the bad guys, and then celebrate a group wedding with all the other principals. The whole thing is a throwback to the chivalric novels of the previous century, too reliant on clichés, and too goody-goody to appeal to readers today. Even some readers in La Calprenède’s day scoffed at Cassandra; the above-mentioned Tallemant admitted that “the content is fine and rich, because it’s the story of Alexander: there is even a well-ordered plot; but the heroes are as alike as two drops of water, all talk pretentious nonsense, and are a hundred leagues above ordinary men” (Levi, 396).
But enough readers lapped it up to encourage La Calprenède to write a second novel. In 1647, he published the first installment of Cléopâtre, concluding it 10 years later in 12 volumes. (Reportedly he wanted to stretch it out to 30 volumes.) At about 4,100 pages—around 2,500 in modern terms—Cleopatra is a little shorter than Cassandra, but they are as alike as two sisters. The titular heroine is not the famous serpent of old Nile, though she appears early on, but her daughter by Marc Antony, Cleopatra VIII (40 bce–6 ce). Again, the novel’s principal characters converge on a safe house—Tyradates’ palace in Alexandria, Egypt, or at the Roman governor’s house there—where they or (more often) their servants tell their tales, the same sort as those told in Cassandra: the romantic problems of royalty.
There are three main narrative arcs: one involves Coriolanus, the future Juba II of Mauritania (northern Algeria/Morocco), who is a 15-year-old in Rome when he witnesses the 10-year-old Cleopatra paraded through the streets after the deaths of Antony and her mother, falls in love with her, endures the usual romantic rivalries and misunderstandings while she endures kidnapping by pirates and other maidenly perils until Caesar Augustus allows them to marry. (As in Cassandra, a mass wedding of all the principals concludes the final volume.) A second narrative arc features Cesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, who at age 15 is sent to the court of the king of Ethiopia; he falls in love with the king’s 10-year-old daughter Candace, who is later kidnapped by pirates etc. etc. until they too are granted marriage by Augustus. And then there’s the Roman Artaban, who likewise goes to the Ethiopian court; he wants Candy too, is banished for doing so, goes to Armenia and falls for the king’s sister, strikes out again, then falls for the king of Parthia’s daughter, and after the usual complications marries her and inherits her father’s throne. There are about a dozen subplots (one involving the poet Ovid [7.3]) that dramatize minor variations on the problems of love, jealousy, divided loyalties, and other staples of romantic adventure novels.27 The novel is as chaste as Cassandra—no sex before marriage (the author preserves Cleopatra VII’s respectability by insisting she secretly married both Caesar and then Antony)—and women are consistently portrayed as more moral and civilized than men.
Unlike Cassandra, this novel favors gallantry and romantic sentiments over battle scenes and violence, no doubt due to the changing tastes of readers after the success of Madeleine de Scudéry’s softer heroic novels (next in line for review). As Bannister notes, Cleopatra “reflects the less warlike atmosphere of the period following the end of the Fronde,28 when the virtues of the warrior were coming to be less highly regarded and when strongly feminist views were being heard in the salons” (166). But this is not necessarily an improvement. Perhaps it’s the fault of the English translation—an unabridged one produced by a team of translators beginning in 1652 (while the original was still in progress) under the odd title Hymen’s Præludia—but the narrative is flat and uninspired, as though the author felt the story material (derived from ancient historians) was lively enough that it needed no embellishment. (Levi remarks, “La Calprenède is not a careful writer, and his prose style is almost insultingly negligent” [397].) Like Cassandra, the complex story unfolds out of chronological order, a calculatedly confusing method the author seems to acknowledge proudly when he notes a warrior’s “confusedly filleted” armor “as if art had studied disorder” (1.4), and again at the end when he describes the pre-wedding gathering of all his characters as “the most delightful disorder, and the most pleasant confusion in the world” (12.4). Like television soap operas, which are what La Calprenède’s novels formally resemble, the multiple story arcs are not too difficult to follow, but they are too reliant on clichés and stereotypes to hold much appeal today.
La Calprenède began one more heroic novel—Faramond, based on the legendary king of the Franks—but died before he could finish it. (He wrote seven volumes; another novelist named Vaumorière completed it in 1670 with five more, amassing 8,700 pages in the original edition.) It is considered the weakest of his novels, so we’ll skip over it.29 By 1661, when the first volume
s of Faramond were published, this kind of fiction was falling out of fashion in France; however, it was picked up in England, not by novelists but by dramatists like John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, who for the next half century plundered La Calprenède’s novels for material, just as Elizabethan dramatists did a century earlier with Italian novellas.
La Calprenède’s principal rival, and the only one still read today, is the queen of historical romances, Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), the best-selling novelist of the 17th century and the first Frenchwoman to support herself by her pen. Her novels were published under the name of her “swaggering and abrasive” older brother Georges (1601–67),30 but his input was limited to discussing the plots with her, furnishing some details for the battle scenes (he had been a soldier), and helping with proofreading, though he seems to have taken a larger hand in her second novel. At the time, it was considered unladylike to publish a novel—only a few attributed to women appeared during the first half the the 17th-century—so Mademoiselle was content to let her brother take credit on the title page, for as Tallement tattles, tout le monde knew the novels were written by her. (Georges did eventually write a novel, Almahide [1660–63], heavily influenced by Pérez de Hita’s Civil Wars of Granada, but it was cowritten by his young wife and appeared as the fad for heroic novels was passing.)
Her first novel, Ibrahim, or the Illustrious Bassa (Ibrahim ou l’illustre bassa, i.e., pasha) was published in 1641 in four volumes (amounting to about 900 pages in modern terms), and is both a contribution to and critique of the heroic romance. Gomberville and La Calprenède were only two of many novelists cranking these things out in the 1630s, so she (and maybe Georges) begins with a lecturing preface that tries to establish some rules for the genre and to repurpose it from artless entertainment to entertaining art. Aside from Sorel’s early remarks embedded in his novels, this preface represents the first attempt at a theory of French fiction, and is all the more audacious coming from a virgin writer rather than an experienced professional. Evoking ancient Greek novelists like Heliodorus and recent ones like “the great and incomparable Urfé,” Scudéry first requires of novels that “all the parts of them should make but one body, and that nothing be seen in them which is loose and unprofitable.”31 They should be based on reliable historical sources and be fairly realistic—that is, they shouldn’t include monsters or superhuman feats by their heroes, or rely too often on melodramatic devices like shipwrecks. (In a dig at Polexander, she notes that some unnamed novelists are way too attracted to the dramatic possibilities of the sea and “have named it the theatre of inconstancy.”) Like Sorel, she advices novelists to use realistic names for their characters, and, unlike Sorel, not write anything “which the ladies may not read without blushing.” Elaborate descriptions are OK, especially of buildings, as long as one doesn’t overdo it like “Poliphile in his dreams, who hath set down most strange terms”—a surprising reference to Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and an indication of Scudéry’s wide reading. It’s also fine to borrow subplots from others, as she freely admits she has done, which has been corroborated by scholars such as Clarence Rouillard, who has tracked down most of her sources in his erudite book The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature. She advices using these subplots to add diversity to the plot, and concludes by insisting “that a narrative style ought not to be too much inflated, no more than that of ordinary conversations; that the more facile it is, the more excellent it is; that it ought to glide along like rivers, and not rebound up like torrents.” In a word, ladylike.