by Steven Moore
Though Cyrus and Mandane are predictably married at the end, as are most of their royal friends, Scudéry pushes back against genre expectations with several arguments against marriage, advocating platonic relations instead. (It bears repeating that La Pucelle du Marais, as she was called—the Virgin (or Old Maid) of the Marais, her Parisian neighborhood—never married.) While in prison in volume 2, Cyrus listens to “The History of Philoxypes and Policrite,” set in Cyprus, where the worship of Venus Urania (who represents friendship, brotherly love) has recently supplanted Venus Anadyomene (representing sex and libertinism), where Christian agapē is preferred over pagan eros. As in Ibrahim, sexual passion is considered an offense against reason and “dangerous,” an inclination to be avoided in favor of chaste friendship, or endless courtship.
The fullest expression of these views comes near the end in “The History of Sapho,” ostensibly the tale of the Greek poet Sappho’s relationship with Phaon but actually a self-portrait of Madeleine and her relationship to a younger man named Paul Pellisson, secretary to young King Louis XIV. According to legend, Sappho threw herself off a cliff in unrequited love for Phaon, a ferryman, but Scudéry will have none of this: in her version, it’s Phaon who pesters Sapho for marriage. Clearly an early feminist, Scudéry/Sapho advocates the education of women, arguing they should spend more time reading and less on “ribbons, shoe buckles, and the trifles of ladies’ toilettes” [10.2/22]); dismisses pretty airheads, and the men who marry them for their looks (Scudéry herself was a plain woman, even ugly according to some); defines the qualities of good conversation; and equates marriage with slavery, husbands with tyrants. This novella ends as Sapho and Phaon journey to a feminist utopia called New Sarmatae, a gated community ruled over by a young queen where there is equality between the sexes, support for the arts and sciences, and respect for gallantry and constancy. (Indeed, “there are punishments for unfaithful lovers as well as for rebel subjects” [121].) Through Sapho, Scudéry makes her case “that to love always, with an equal ardor, one must never marry” (136)—the same argument the French marquis made back in Ibrahim, and much more winningly, it must be said. He wanted women to be permanently desirable, not taken for granted after a few years of marriage; Sapho wants her men to be just friends—that death sentence no guy wants to hear—and seems to fear sex, intimacy, and loss of control. She also displays considerable naïveté, wondering how any man could be attracted to a fun, beautiful woman with bad handwriting and poor spelling! Nonetheless, as Bannister notes, Sapho and many of Scudéry’s female characters “are the incarnation of a heroic ideal offered to the polite society of the Fronde period as an alternative to the militaristic heroes of earlier novels” and reflect “the increasing influence of feminism” (178–79).
Cyrus the Great is a transitional work, for Scudéry personally as well as for the French novel, progressing slowly, as Levi points out, “from the adventure story to the novel of psychological analysis” (829). But it commits too many of the faults of the older adventure stories, whose clichés Scudéry had criticized in the preface to Ibrahim, and its psychological analysis is limited to a few heroines of the intercalated stories. (Cyrus and Mandane are too idealized to evince much psychological depth.) For all its talk of feminist equality, Cyrus’s women adhere to patriarchal notions of virtue and social norms; equality here seems limited to educating women well enough to take part in male conversations. And Scudéry’s love for theatrical gallantry and exquisite manners contributed to préciosité, a fad satirized by Molière in his comedy Les Précieuses ridicules (1659), one of whose precious fools, Madelon, may be named after Madeleine, and which contains mocking references to “Cirrus the Great” and her next novel.
Clelia (Clélie, histoire romaine, 1654–60) is Scudéry’s most determined effort to redirect the roman héroïque away from superb actions to superb sentiments, from the adventure novel to the novel of manners, from male to female. It’s her most transparently “modern” novel in that she is clearly writing about her own time and society; the 6th-century bce Roman setting is merely a backdrop for a series of conversations about manners, attitudes, and relationships like those she and her acquaintances engaged in after the Fronde had shaken their world. Clelia is an attempt, as Eleanor Dugan writes, “to impose a gracious structure on chaotic and potentially messy reality” (3:17).
For a parallel to the Fronde, Scudéry chose the equally tumultuous period in Roman history when the tyrant Tarquin the Proud was overthrown and the republic established (c. 509 bce). When Tarquin and his Etruscan allies then attacked Rome to regain his throne, a temporary truce was called and some young Roman hostages were sent to the tyrant’s camp just across the Tiber river; in the historian Livy’s account of what happened next, Scudéry found her heroine:
Cloelia, an unmarried girl, was one of the hostages, held, as it happened, in the Etruscan lines not far from the Tiber; one day, with a number of other girls who had consented to follow her, she eluded the guards, swam across the river under a hail of missiles, and brought her company safe to Rome, where they were all restored to their families. Porsena [the Etruscan king] was furious, and sent to Rome to demand Cloelia’s return—adding that the loss of the other girls did not trouble him; soon, however, his anger gave way to admiration of her more than masculine courage. . . . Friendly relations were thus restored, and the Romans paid tribute to Cloelia’s courage, unprecedented in a woman, by an equally unprecedented honour: a statue representing her on horseback was set up at the top of the Sacred Way. (2.13)35
This heroic act, which earned Cloelia a cameo in Virgil’s Aeneid (8.763), is the seed that bloomed into Scudéry’s 10-volume, 2,500-page novel. She gave her heroine conventional good looks and a convenient backstory: Clelia (as her name is spelled in the mediocre 17th-century English translation) is the daughter of a Roman aristocrat named Clelius living in exile in Carthage because of his opposition to Tarquin. Clelia was raised with a foundling Clelius rescued and named Aronces, later revealed to be the son of Porsena, and the two children predictably grow up to fall in love with each other. The novel opens on their wedding day, interrupted by a cataclysmic earthquake that separates bride and groom; Clelia is then abducted by a stalkerish rival named Horatius, and later captured by Tarquin himself, who also falls in love with her, in spite of (or perhaps because of ) his marriage to an ambitious harpy named Tullia. Like Cyrus, Clelia details the male protagonist’s repeated attempts to rescue the female, ending just as predictably with their wedding.
Aronces is a typical storybook hero—a foundling who turns out to be a king’s son—and like Oroondates finds himself torn between following his heart and following his national duty, since his father Porsena is allied with Tarquin. Clelia, on the other hand, is atypically active in a genre laden with passive heroines. Long before her history-making swim at the end of the novel, she finds herself, during one of her innumerable abductions, needing to distract some soldiers from going after Aronces, so “she did an act which was worthy her great soul, for turning her horse upon her left hand and lifting up her hood, ‘Oi, cowards!’ she said unto them, ‘are ye not ashamed being thirty to fall upon three men, who have no other design but to set me at liberty?’ This great and generous action did so surprise Horatius, Aronces, and the commander of Tarquin’s men, and wonder did so suspend their thoughts as they stopped and stayed awhile before they could tell what to do” (1.2). It surprises the reader too, as does Aronces’s decision on the final page to allow his plucky bride to take control over his father’s abdicated kingdom, content to serve as her consort (not recorded by Livy or Dionysius). Aronces displays old-school générosité and performs well enough on the battlefield, but Scudéry doesn’t dwell on these testosterone-fueled conflicts as in her previous novels, and even deflates the air from such “heroic” brawls by observing “when a battle is fought betwixt four or five hundred thousand men, commonly a great part of them are only spectators of the fight, and the victory is often times gotten more by a pa
nic fear or a tumultuous rout, which huge multitudes are subject unto, where order is hard to be kept, than by any true actions of valor or conduct of the captains” (1.2). Touché, brother Georges!
In this feminocentric novel, the important action takes places not on the battlefield but in the drawing room. Aronces and especially Clelia are surrounded by an entourage of sophisticated friends, most of whom are introduced in flattering verbal portraits, and Scudéry creates numerous occasions for them to sit around and tell romantic stories—as in her previous two novels, every chapter contains an embedded histoire—and to discuss a wide range of topics: ambition, jealousy, blondes versus brunettes, anger, glory, letter-writing, grief, old age, fear of death, ingratitude, idleness, talkativeness, conversation, social gatherings, flowers, joy versus cheerfulness, court life, religious tolerance, Pythagoreanism (which is mocked, despite the plea for tolerance), keeping secrets, unauthorized publication of private writings, punctuality, doubt and uncertainty, lying, happiness, novel-writing, raillery, constancy, indeed “a hundred different things” (4.2). These spirited discussions replicate the ones Scudéry enjoyed with her friends at her salon held on Saturdays; Paul Pellisson is here under the name Herminius, another Roman exile; the poet Jean-François Sarasin plays the gallant Amilcar (who is surprisingly killed off near the end; Sarasin died a few months after the first volume of Clelia appeared in 1654); I don’t know who modeled for Plotine, Clelia’s BFF, but her sarcastic wit enlivens many of the conversations; and Scudéry herself appears as Aricidia, the most popular hostess in Capua. In book 4 she introduces the Greek poet Anacreon into the mix—he would have been about 60 at the founding of the Roman republic, but he’s portrayed here as the life of the party—and shortly after, Amilcar reads a story about the poet Hesiod, which includes a dream-vision of the future of poetry that allows Scudéry to show off her extensive erudition as the muse Calliope discusses all the major poets from Hesiod’s time down to the 17th century. (Anacreon perks up when she comes to him.) In the concluding book 5, when a male author would be vigorously racing to the climax, Scudéry continues to cuddle the reader with leisurely descriptions of landscapes and architectural wonders (based on the palaces at Vaux and Versailles), taking her time to include in this, her last extended-length novel, the entire contents of her well-upholstered mind. Most of this material is self-indulgent and unrelated to the main plot—Clelia and Aronces cool their heels in captivity during these digressions—but it constitutes Scudéry’s fullest display of her talents and interests. No matter how far afield she goes, however, she keeps circling back to the topic of love and friendship, specifically the subtle gradations between the two.
The most famous example of the latter occurs two-thirds through the first chapter; in an account of Clelia’s younger days, we’re told that after Herminius met her, he asked how he might progress from her new acquaintance to a close friend; she playfully responds by drawing La Carte de Tendre, a Map of [the land of] Tenderness, which is included in the novel and is reproduced in virtually every book on Scudéry. (English versions can be found in Duggan [63] and Dugan [3:76–77].) It not only depicts the allegorical villages one must pass through—Sincerity, Goodness, Sensibility, Great Services—but also the wrong turns through Forgetfulness, Obloquy, or Mischief that can land one in the Lake of Indifference or the Sea of Enmity. The map resembles France, and up north where the English Channel would be is the Dangerous Sea, and beyond that Countries Undiscovered, both of which represent sensual love and wild passion, neither of which appealed to the spinster Scudéry, who favored tender friendship over love and/or marriage. In the novel, the map works fine as something a 16-year-old virgin would invent; in the real world, the fact that a 46-year-old woman would create this and share it with Pellisson and other middle-aged friends invited ridicule from those who got hold of a copy. They read it as a coquettish board game, whereas for Scudéry the map was about “the investing of relationships with a new dignity through the rediscovery of genuine emotion,” and “a desire to revalue the role of women, to create a framework for relationships in which women will be treated not as objects but as subjects, not as possessions but as individuals in their own right” (Munro, 9, 81). Scudéry lashed back in the novel by having Clelia complain that a bagatelle she “made to be seen but by five or six persons which have noble spirits should be seen by two thousand who scarce have any, and who hardly understand the best things” (1.1). It can be read as a map of Sapho’s feminine utopia, but the banishment of sex from her land of Tenderness nonetheless betrays a certain immaturity.
Scudéry’s discomfort with sex is also apparent in her handling of the most notorious episode in the founding of the Roman republic: the rape of Lucretia by Tarquin’s son Sextus. Her subsequent suicide triggered the revolt—led by her admirer Brutus—that ousted Tarquin. Livy provides the sordid details, luxuriously elaborated upon in Shakespeare’s famous poem, but squeamish Scudéry can’t bear to dramatize the scene; it is so far off her map of civilized behavior that she merely hints at “this terrible accident, which all the world hath been acquainted with” and moves on (2.3). Her prudery also handicaps Clelia’s 100-meter dash across the Tiber. Fleshing out Livy’s account, Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes the hostages “had asked leave of their guards to go to the river and bathe, and after obtaining it they had told the men to withdraw a little way from the river till they had bathed and dressed themselves again, so that they should not see them naked; and the men having done this also, the maidens, following the advice and example of Cloelia, swam across the river and returned to the city” (5.33).36 In all likelihood—though the whole incident probably belongs more to legend than history—the girls swam naked, but Scudéry not only keeps her young ladies fully clothed but adds that “their clothes were also of some use in this occasion to bear them up” on the paddleboards a sympathetic soldier built for them all (5.2)—all but Clelia, who swims fully clothed until she happens upon a horse midstream and somehow rides it back to shore. And then, “because these fair virgins were not in condition to go through the streets,” Scudéry hurries them “to a house standing near the side of the river, where they dried themselves and changed their clothes which they sent for from their parents’ houses.”
Scudéry’s ludicrous obsession with decorum, her unworldly fear of sex and the body, and her old-maidenly concepts of relationships are the main reasons why she was accused of preciousness, and they undercut her earnest attempts to introduce more civility and graciousness into her society. It’s true that Scudéry injects a little sexual tension into her story—Sextus has his lustful eye on Clelia, whose fear of rape motivates her famous escape in Scudéry’s version—but her G-rated view of the world became a target for ridicule. Regarding her Carte de Tendre, one French wag suggested a visit to the village of Jewelry was the quickest way to a woman’s heart. As noted earlier, Molière got big laughs by portraying two provincial girls who, under the influence of Scudéry’s novels, put on airs and expect their suitors to emulate Aronces and Cyrus. (To be fair, he is making more fun of naive readers than of Scudéry.) The conservative critic Nicolas Boileau, who loved the classics, was especially annoyed at Scudéry’s romanticized history and mocks her protagonists in his Heroes of Romances (1664), a satiric dialogue after the manner of Lucian. In this amusing farce, set in Hades, Pluto is outraged to learn that great heroes like Cyrus, Brutus, and Horatius have been emasculated into foppish lovers by Scudéry and other heroic romanciers. (Boileau also parodies the idealized verbal portraits Scudéry used to introduce her characters.) He also went after her in his verse satires, and in canto 3 of his Art of Poetry (1674), he warned would-be poets: “Be careful, then, not to do as is done in Clélie, to give a French air and a French spirit to ancient Italy, and, painting our own portrait under Roman names, to make Cato a gallant and Brutus a beau.”37 By that time (as we’ll see later), novelists were treating her works as fodder for parody.
Scudéry had a few defenders, such as Bishop Pierre-Daniel Hu
et; in his compact History of Romances (1669), French literature’s first critical study of the novel, he announces the principal aim of a novelist is “the instruction of the mind, and correction of manners” (5), and not surprisingly, given Scudéry’s didactic agenda, he concludes his survey by praising her novels as the culmination of the entire history of fiction. (Huet and Scudéry were friends, but even so, that must have delighted the old girl.) And Charles Sorel, surprisingly, praised her work. But after she died in 1701, her novels, along with all the other heroic novels, gradually fell out of fashion—though they left their scent on the 18th-century sentimental novel—and today Scudéry is appreciated only by a handful of feminist critics, who rightly argue “her thousands of pages of analysis of the problems of the human heart certainly paved the way for the development of the psychological novel in France” (Orenstein, 60; cf. DeJean’s Tender Geographies, 86–87). After Clelia, Scudéry went on to write a few shorter novels, which sound mildly interesting—they are summarized in chapter 3 of Aronson’s monograph—but they’ve never been translated, and since I’ve given four months to this woman, I need to move on. She would charge me with “inconstancy,” but ars longa vita brevis.
In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which is as long as a roman héroïque, the young narrator describes two paths he could take from his house, Swann’s way and the Guermantes’s way. The authors of the heroic romance took d’Urfé’s way; let’s retrace our steps to follow those who took Sorel’s way.
Near the end of Clelia, Amilcar hears “a certain noise” and turns to behold “a little machine painted, gilded, and covered with a kind of little canopy. It was surrounded with curtains, and carried by two slaves. Upon the top of this canopy was the portrait of a young and handsome man . . . [with] a cheerful and sprightly aspect. . . . And then a slave drawing a curtain which hid [the passenger], it was seen that he did not at all resemble his picture; and nevertheless, through all the alteration that had befallen him, he seemed still to have a certain laughing air which promised wit” (5.3). This is Scudéry’s friend Paul Scarron (1610–60), a writer who specialized in burlesques and parodies, and who at the age 30 suffered a debilitating illness that left him “twisted like a pretzel, his head pulled left and down, and . . . in constant pain” (Dugan 1:180). But he continued to write, and in 1651 published the first volume of his Comic Novel (Le roman comique, 1651, 1657), a roisterous account of a provincial theater troupe that couldn’t be more different from Scudéry’s aristocratic fantasies. Just as Sorel proposed a more realistic alternative to the adventure novels of his time, Scarron felt that Spanish novellas of the sort written by Cervantes and Zayas provided a better model for new French fiction, and so during the heyday of the roman héroïque he countered with a roman comique.