by Steven Moore
As might be expected from these confident remarks, Ibrahim is a smooth, professional performance. Opening in medias res (as the Greeks suggested) with an elaborate description of a triumphal Turkish parade, rich in Oriental splendor and excess, we learn the grand vizier Ibrahim is facing an unwanted marriage. The sultan has just offered him his daughter’s hand, forcing Ibrahim to make a confession: he is not really a Muslim slave who has risen to to the heights of political office; his real name is Justinian, he is a noble Christian from Genoa, and he is already engaged to Princess Isabella of Monaco. Based loosely on the life of Ibrahim Pasha (1493?–1536), grand vizier to Suleiman the Magnificent (ruled 1520–66), the novel goes on to recount how he obtained reluctant permission from the sultan to visit Isabella in Monaco on the condition he return in six months; torn between his love for Isabella and his duty to Suleiman—and fearing the sensuous sultan will seduce Isabella if (as she suggests) he marries her and takes her back to Constantinople—morose Ibrahim spends most of the novel fretting over his divided loyalties. Both he and Isabella are virtuous, noble beings who wouldn’t dream of doing anything that would damage their reputations, and they fear that the grave (for him) and the cloister (for her) may be the only solutions. After six months, Ibrahim sneaks back to Turkey, where he is so depressed that the sultan—who deeply values his grand vizier’s friendship—arranges to have Isabella and her friends abducted and brought to Constantinople to cheer Ibrahim up. He decides the best way to gain his freedom is to win the war against Persia, and while he is away doing that, Suleiman predictably falls for the beautiful Isabella, and twists on the horns of his own dilemma: whether to remain loyal to Ibrahim, or be loyal to his own desires. As his passion overmasters his reason—and Scudéry makes it abundantly clear that passion and reason are irreconcilable enemies—the potent potentate is tempted to kill Ibrahim, held back only by the vow he had made to him near the beginning of the novel “that as long as Suleiman shall be living, thou shalt not die a violent death” (1.2). Told by his crafty advisor that sleeping is a kind of death, Suleiman is tempted to have Ibrahim strangled while he is sleeping, but on the night of the execution the sultan’s conscience won’t allow him to fall asleep. Experiencing a change of heart and allowing reason to return to her throne, he allows both Ibrahim and Isabella to return home, where they take part in a group wedding common to the genre. (Historically, Suleiman executed Ibrahim and confiscated his palace—which still stands in Istanbul—but the romance genre demands a happy ending, so Scudéry says the Turks put out the false story of Ibrahim’s death, which was swallowed by historians thereafter, including the very ones—like Paolo Giovio, Laonicus Chalcondyles, and Michel Baudier—she cribbed from.)
In addition to flipping the script of recorded history to meet her artistic needs, Scudéry has fun with other genre expectations via a madcap character called the French marquis, one of Isabella’s acquaintances. Mocking the ability of characters in other novels to give letter-perfect recitations of letters during their narrations, he mentions one he once received: “If I had as happy a memory as a romance hero’s, I would recite it unto you without changing a syllable, but since I have it not, it shall suffice that I do tell you in general . . .” (2.2). In other novels, when a character prepares to narrate an interpolated story, we usually get a prelude like this: “sitting down on the bedside after he had thought a while what he had to say, [Lysimachus] began his relation on this manner” (Cassandra, 2.1). Asked to resume his story, the French marquis
acquitted himself of it after an extraordinary way; yet was it not without musing attentively on that which he had to say, never regarding whether all the company were in case32 to hear him or no, and after he had performed all the ceremonies of a man that prepares himself for a long narration, he began to speak in this sort.
The Third History of the Marquis
“I loved a woman passionately that was of a condition equal to mine, she answered my affection, whether feignedly or truly I know not, but I know that I received all the honest favors from her which I could expect, and that at such time as I was the most favorably entreated by her, without having any occasion to complain on my part, nor seeking any pretext on hers, she forsook me for another. Behold the end of my History.” The whole company then broke out into such a laughter to see that his attention, his silence, and the preparation which he had brought to the hearing of a long adventure had been paid with so short a narrative as they thought they should never have given over. “It must be acknowledged,” said Leonida at length, “that if they which write our romances did make them deliver their relations in this sort, we should not admire as we do the wonderful memories of their heroes, who make narrations which cause them to pass whole days without eating and nights without sleeping.” (2.4)
In her quest for verisimilitude, Scudéry breaks up her interpolated stories into realistic lengths, and allows her characters to eat and sleep as needed. She’ll often insert an explanation for how a character came by certain information rather than allow the flagrant violations of point of view found in other novels of this genre (though she still slips occasionally), and she tries to avoid clichés; one character skims over his early courtship thus: “I will not repeat unto you the first speeches of love which I had with Hippolita, seeing they are for the most part all alike amongst worthy persons” (2.4). Further subverting genre expectations, Scudéry withholds a physical description of her hero Ibrahim until the final chapter of the long novel, by which point the reader wonders if he is reading a parody of the historic romance rather than a refinement.
Though the novel ends with the requisite marriages of nearly all the principals, Scudéry mocks this practice by the refusal of one couple to participate: the French marquis and his girlfriend Emilia. Clearly inspired by d’Urfé’s swinger Hylas, the marquis of Touraine opposes marriage for the same reason Scudéry herself did (as articulated in her next novel): to speak of marriage is to speak “of that destroyer of love, of that tyrant of liberty, of that enemy of pleasure, which most commonly disjoins all that love hath united, which discovers all the defects of the mind and humor to persons that believed they were altogether perfect, and that which was worse than all the rest for him, to introduce into the stead of it jealousy of honor, a false constancy, and domestic cares.” Touraine goes on to quip, “the greatest proof of affection that I can render unto a maid when I become enamored of her is not to marry her; yea, and I have met with some, unto whom the more favorably to receive my affection, and to testify unto them the respect which I bear them, I have declared at first sight that in becoming their servant, I had no design to become their master, and in assuring them that I was their slave, I assured them I would never be their tyrant” (2.1). The other characters laugh at “the merry humor of the marquis,” but it is obvious from Scudéry’s life (she never married) and later works that Touraine is her spokesman, and in a novel filled with literal tyrants and slaves (and no happily married couples), we need to regard Touraine as more than comic relief (though his stories are truly hilarious). His toujours gai attitude makes a mockery of the overly serious Ibrahim and Isabella and subverts the very premise of the heroic novel, namely, the dramatization of noble ideals. (It must be noted, however, that Touraine merely flirts with women; he’s not sexually active like Hylas. This is a very chaste novel.) Scudéry marries her two ideal characters as expected, but she gives the final word to Touraine, who on the last page of the novel delivers “a satire against marriage” and renews his vow of “inviolable friendship” with worldly Emilia, who shares his antimarriage views: “I could never without aversion behold a man who of my slave would become my master, or at leastwise my equal” (4.5). The wedding party “then burst out laughing, and believing that their discourse was nothing but sport,” but Scudéry was dead serious.
And though the gravitational pull of her giant novels is hard to resist, I can’t leave the smaller world of Ibrahim without admiring a few more of its features. We are treated to a quick history
of the Ottoman Empire by way of a portrait gallery of all its sultans, with Ibrahim as docent. Scudéry occasionally widens the single perspective of most novels to record multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints; at the beginning of the fourth book of part 1, for example, the narrator notes the different reactions of the passengers on a ship as they approach Genoa, and on the next page we get the various reactions of Genoans to the approaching ship, ranging from joy to fear. This recognition of subjectivity feels very modern, as does a later scene when the narrator records gossip about Ibrahim and Isabella: “To conclude, they said all things except the truth, which was not known to any but the princess and Justiniano” (end of 2.4). Questioning the pursuit of “greatness” (which devoured her brother Georges), Scudéry gives us the story of a scheming beauty named Roxelane, who eventually becomes Suleiman’s sultana; the narrator heaps as much scorn on the word “greatness” as Fielding would a century later in Jonathan Wild (1743). And though some critics have ridiculed the quibble over living/sleeping that Suleiman is tempted to exploit to sidestep his vow—similar to the pound of flesh loophole at the end of The Merchant of Venice—Scudéry carefully links these terms to the opposition between reason and passion, the latter representing the sleep of reason, and concludes that the use of reason is the defining quality of a true hero – a very humanistic view for the 17th century, when faith and reason were butting heads. (The latter conflict doesn’t get much play in the novel; both Ibrahim and Isabella are devout Catholics, and during their troubles he feels he’s being punished by his god for passing as a Muslim, while she feels she’s being tested, though the narrator provides enough mundane explanations to dispel these superstitious notions.) And for all its fidelity to Turkish history and local color, Ibrahim can just as easily be read as a fictionalized account of contemporary Parisian life as a historical novel, for as Bannister points out, “What is under consideration here is effectively a refined version of the honnêteté [sincerity/honor/refinement] which was establishing itself as the social ideal in Parisian society, an extension of the social norms which the reader might be expected to obey” (139). This last concern is what made Scudéry’s next novel such a success.
Tipping the scales at around 3,200 pages, Artamenes, or Cyrus the Great (Artamène, ou le grand Cyrus, 1649–53) is the Mount Everest of les romans héroïque, the longest novel in French literature (after the medieval Perceforest). Like Ibrahim, it begins with a bang: “The conflagration of Sinope [a city on the Black Sea] was so great that the very sky, the sea, the valleys and tops of mountains, though far remote, were all illuminated by its flames, so that, notwithstanding the black mask of night, all things might mournfully be discerned: . . .”33 But rather than improving on Ibrahim, as one might expect, the first half of Cyrus is a surprising step backward, committing the same faults Scudéry criticized in the preface to her first novel, and that her characters mocked. Anthony Levi is correct when he says “the novel starts in almost crude, quasi-plagiaristic rivalry with La Calprenède”—specifically Cassandra—and “with a probable change at least of principal author from the fifth volume” (830, 829), implying Georges began the novel and Madeleine finished it. The opening chapters contain many stagey soliloquies of the sort Georges excelled at—he was a successful dramatist—and some of the battle scenes are based on unpublished documents he had access to, so this may be a case where his name on the title page is justified.
“Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story,” as E. M. Forster laments (45). Here the story is about how the famous Persian emperor Cyrus the Great (ruled 550–530 bce) conquered the Near East. To hear Scudéry tell it, Cyrus’s conquests were merely a by-product of his attempts to rescue the girl he loved, Mandane of Cappadocia (a fictitious character). Traveling like La Calprenède’s Oroondates under an assumed name to see something of the world, “Artamenes” falls in love at first sight with this princess, “planet-struck” by her beauty and reputation for “severe virtue,” then spends the entire novel pursuing her as she is abducted by one rival after another. Each time he conquers the kingdom of an abductor, she is spirited away by yet another rival. (None of them lays a finger on her, though; like Ibrahim, this is a frigidly chaste novel.) Scudéry compacts two decades of the historical Cyrus’s military campaigns into an event-filled year when he was 24, ending with the rescue of Mandane from the evil queen of the Massagetai (a tribe that occupied present-day Kazakhstan) and the obligatory marriage of the long-separated lovers, along with that of several members of their entourages. In historical fact, Cyrus died in that battle against the Massagetai, but as Scudéry did in Ibrahim, she rewrites history, claiming that “the noise of his death was so universally divulged in all remote places, and so generally believed, that many excellent histories were deceived by the mistake, and historians have left this supposed death of Cyrus in their histories” (10.3), such as Herodotus, one of Scudéry’s principal sources. Instead, she followed Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus by granting him a long, happy life, in this case as a reward for his gallant devotion to his beloved.
Xenophon took liberties with recorded history to portray Cyrus as the ideal king; for Scudéry, he is the ideal lover. In her rose-colored view, a lover is obligated to be miserable when separated from the beloved; as a woman tells her potential lover in one of the novel’s 27 interpolated tales, “I declare to you that I will never be satisfied with you if you do not become the most unhappy of men from the moment I am out of your sight” (10.2/113–14).34 Sad Cyrus displays this attitude throughout the novel, and for that reason—not for his military prowess—he is rewarded: on the interminable novel’s final page, the exhausted reader blearily reads, “Thus the great prince in the world, after he had been the most miserable of all lovers, became now the happiest man upon earth” (10.3). One of the few premarital tiffs he has with Mandane occurs after he spied her smiling at something while he was in hiding—she is supposed to be as miserable as he is!—and the only entertainment Cyrus takes is listening to tales of romantic misery. Cyrus’s great length is due to its dozens of variations on this theme of suffering for love: “so many persecutions, so many wars, so many shipwrecks, and so many misfortunes” (2.2), all narrated at an escargot’s pace. Published in installments over a four-year period, Cyrus—like all heroic romances—resembles a long-running soap opera, a feuilleton télévisé as they call them in France.
While Scudéry thoroughly researched the historical background to Ibrahim, she took a more casual approach for Cyrus, picking and choosing among details in Herodotus, Xenophon, and Diodorus Siculus, rearranging and modernizing them as she wished, and inventing whatever else she needed; rather than apologizing for these liberties, she winks at her educated readers in the preface to assure them that they “can put their minds to rest by imagining that the sources for the work have been taken from an old Greek manuscript by Hegesippus which is in the Vatican, and which is so precious and rare that it has never been printed, nor will it ever be” (Aronson, 69; the preface was omitted from the English translation). For Scudéry was less interested in recreating 6th-century Persia than in celebrating her own circle of acquaintances and their notions of gallantry. Cyrus is a roman à clef containing idealized versions of the aristocrats she mingled with at the Hôtel de Rambouillet and other Parisian salons, who spent their time dissecting the nature of love and defining gallantry. Both the principal narrative arc about Cyrus and Mandane and the novella-length histoires concern modern love, not ancient history. (Make that upper-class love, for commoners are dismissed throughout Cyrus as little better than animals.) Scudéry also took liberties in order to align Cyrus’s warring era with her own; as publisher Humphrey Moseley notes at the beginning of the English translation of Cyrus, “our author in this hath so laid his scenes as to touch upon the greatest affairs of our times, for designs of war and peace are better hinted and cut open by a romance than by downright histories, which, being barefaced, are forced to be often too modest and sparing, [whereas] these disguised discourses, f
reely [im]personating every man and no man, have liberty to speak out.”