by Steven Moore
At this point, two-thirds through the novel, the narrator abandons these characters to tell the story of the ludicrous rivalry between an old has-been author named Charroselles (who was at the salon Javotte attended), a “litigious bitch” (184) named Collantine, who spends all her time filing frivolous lawsuits, and an incompetent magistrate named Belastre, who tries to woo Collantine à la mode with poetry before conceding to Charroselles, who marries Collantine. She sues for divorce the very next day. To tell the rest of their story, “ten volumes would hardly suffice,” the narrator explains, “and I must pass the limits prescribed by the most swollen romances” (243). So instead he concludes with a brief fable about a fairy dog who can catch all animals and a fairy hare who can outrun all predators. “The solution of this difficulty is that they run still. So it is with the suits of Collantine and Charroselles: they have ever pleaded, plead still, and plead will, as long as heaven spares their lives” (244).
That cock-and-bull ending is the last of many sardonic departures from the conventional novel. Beginning by parodying the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, the narrator quickly disavows that tradition; unlike epics and heroic romances, he doesn’t plan to start in medias res, which can puzzle readers:
This usually engages them in a confusion that ends not till some charitable squire or waiting gentlewoman comes to illustrate what hath passed, by the discovery or surprisal of what tends to understanding the history.
Instead of deceiving you by such vain subtleties, I will honestly and plainly tell you some little tales or gallantries happened amongst persons that are neither heroes nor heroines, that neither defeat armies nor subdue kingdoms, but being honest people of an ordinary condition fairly jog on the highway. . . . To avoid the over-worn paths which others have beaten, the scene of my romance shall be movable, sometimes in one quarter of the town, sometimes in another. I will begin with that which most of the city called Place Maubert.
An author less faithful and more desirous to appear eloquent would be very loath to omit a magnificent description of this place. (2–3)
But not our plain-dealing author. Throughout, he tells us he’s skipping over predictable stuff, the set-pieces that swell heroic novels into many volumes, “blowing them up as butchers do their meat” (154). Reading this novel is like watching a DVD with the director’s commentary on; as we follow the action, the narrator tells us about his narrative choices, especially what scenes he has left out, like a description of Place Maubert above, substituting mocking remarks on the exaggerated nonsense a heroic novelist would tell you. (“But when he came to describe the Carmelites’ church, . . . he would present you a temple as beautiful as Diana’s of Ephesus, supported by 100 Corinthian pillars, fill all the niches with statues made by Phidias or Praxiteles . . .” [3].) He withholds a complete description of Javotte “as is usual on such occasions” (6), races through Nicodème’s courtship, then announces their wedding plans on page 18, even though he realizes readers reared on multivolume romances will feel rushed:
I am afraid there is not any reader (be he never so courteous) but will cry out here is a pitiful romancer. This story is neither long nor intricate, and a wedding resolved already which is not wont to be till the tenth volume; but I beg his pardon for cutting short and riding post to the conclusion, and think him not a little obliged to me for freeing him from the impatience that torments many readers to see an amorous history last so long without being able to divine the conclusion; yet he may please to observe that many things fall between the cup and the lip, and this wedding is not in such forwardness as he imagines. (19)
Though it’s in his “power to form here a heroine that shall be stolen away as often as I have a mind to write volumes,” he is not going to pad his novel with the “common materials that build the intrigues of romances” (46). However, for the benefit of those still addicted to heroic romances, he makes a few mock concessions; the first time Javotte attends the salon, she doesn’t say anything, so while the narrator records what others say, he suggests: “To make this digression excusable whilst it lasts, imagine if you please that it happens here as in other romances: that Javotte is gone to sea, that a storm casts her on a foreign shore, or that some ravisher hath carried her to parts so remote we cannot in a long time hear from her” (87). Similarly, when Nicodème drops out of the story, the narrator states, “He is now at liberty to furnish matter for some other history of a like nature, and I believe he will not come any more on the stage; that [this] may not surprise you, suppose him to be slain, murdered, or massacred by some misfortune, which might easily be effected by an author less conscientious” (139). Later, he invites readers to fill in what they finding wanting; when Pancrace tries to convince Javotte to elope, the author sighs:
I do not hold it necessary to give you here particularly all his passionate expressions and arguments to win her to this, no more than the virtuous resistances made by Javotte with the combats between love and honour in her heart, for you are little versed in romances if your memory (be it never so bad) retain not twenty or thirty of them. These use to be so common that I have known some, that to express how much of a history they had read, would say, I am at the eighth stealing away the lady, instead of I am at the eighth tome. . . . The greatest orator or poet in the world, let him be never so inventive, can tell you nothing in this kind that you have not heard a hundred times before. . . . You may interlard this [present scene] with such as best pleases you, and suit best with the subject. I thought once to have ordered the stationer [printer] to have left here some empty sheets for the more convenient reception of that you make choice of; . . . (150–51)
—like the blank page Sterne leaves in Tristram Shandy for the reader to write his own description of the widow Wadman (6.38). Like Scarron, our “conscientious” narrator often admits he’s not certain what happens at some points because he lacks the omniscience of characters in heroic romances (especially those who weren’t present at the scenes they describe), but no matter; when the narrator tells the experienced reader “that our lord was in love with Lucrèce &c, you may easily guess and add what he said, or at least might have said to charm her” (41–42). But he doesn’t avoid the staples of fiction out of laziness; it’s because these staples “have been presented in so many forms, and so often turned and patched, they can no longer be made use of” (46). As Barth wrote in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” literary conventions wear out after a while and then need to be either treated ironically (as Furetière does) or replaced, not recycled endlessly by unimaginative hacks.
So Furetière replaces the predictable with the unpredictable. He gives us realistic details new to the novel, such as the morning sickness a pregnant woman suffers (“vomitings, qualms, and pains at her heart and stomach” [59]). Characters speak naturally, and there are realistic descriptions of the muddy streets of Paris, of the clothes, food, and pastimes of the bourgeoisie, parents who coax their children to perform for company, convinced that visitors will find them as cute as they do, and details about household furnishings.
There are other novelties. Furetière was the first French novelist to make judicious use paragraphs. (Earlier novels went on for pages without a paragraph break.) Shortly after commencing “The History of the Bourgeois Lucrèce”—which parodies the inset tales of heroic romances—the narrator notes that the city girl’s ill-gotten dowry (about $100 grand) now qualifies her for a husband of a certain economic status and provides us with a price list for the marriage mart:55
For a girl with a dowry of $5,000, or up to $15,000 She should expect a shopkeeper at the Palais-Royal, a junior clerk, or legal agent
For one with $15,000 and less than $30,000 A silk or cloth merchant, controller of weights and measures, counsel at the Paris district court, steward of a lord
For one with $30,000 and less than $50,000 A high court solicitor, court officer, notary, or registrar
For one with $50,000 up to $75,000 A barrister, treasury inspector, inspector of rivers and
forests, assistant prosecutor, and inspector of the mint
For one with $75,000 up to $112,500 An auditor, tax commissioner, or bond treasurer
For one with $112,500 up to $187,500 A tax judge or member of the king’s council
For one with $187,500 up to $375,000 A member of the parliamentary court or treasury secretary
For one with $375,000 up to $750,000 A high court judge, Treasury inspector, secretary to the privy council, law lord
For one with $750,000 up to $1,500,000 A Lord of Appeal, a real marquis, treasury lord, duke and peer
A character proposes “publishing a gazette which in the form of a journal should acquaint the world with what is new” in fashion (37), more than two centuries before the debut of Vogue. At the literary salon Javotte attends, a guest reads aloud “A Tale of Cupid Run away from His Mother,” an allegorical history of love from bestial couplings up to the “mercenary love” of the novel’s present, when Cupid contracts syphilis. (The tale includes a cruel, caddish portrait of Madeleine de Scudéry under the name Polymathia; the character Charroselles is an equally nasty caricature of Charles Sorel during his declining years.56) Near the end of the novel, just where the climax would be in a traditional work, we’re given a 40-page inventory of the papers of a recently deceased hack writer named Mythophilacte, previously unmentioned. We get to read his will, a catalog of his unpublished manuscripts—including “The Perpetual Motion, or Project of an Universal Romance. Divided into as many tomes as the stationer is willing to pay for” (221)—the detailed table of contents of his 4-volume Of Dedications of Books, a price list for characters and situations in novels, another for different kinds of poems, and finally, a dedicatory epistle to the hangman, who performs a valuable service when starving writers, “unable to support contempt and poverty, are reduced to despair: now these wanting the courage of Judas to hang themselves, you by taking that pains might ease them of a great deal of misery” (235). This is a remarkable sequence, creating a tragicomic portrait of a character solely from documents, and documents rarely seen in novels before. “The novelty of this surprised all of them, for the like had not been seen posted in Paris” (237).
The Bourgeois Romance is a revolutionary novel, from its oxymoronic title (which sounded as incongruous to readers in the 1660s as “rock opera” sounded in the 1960s) to its fairytale ending, achieving its artistic cohesion not from conventional story arcs but from thematic concerns (the abuses of law and literature) and iterative imagery generated from the obsession with money by the bourgeoisie, people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. (This includes bourgeois writers like Charroselles and Mythophilacte.) Fusing social and literary criticism, Furetière mordantly exposes the emptiness of the predictable novels they read (and write), offering in their place an unpredictable if unflattering novel about them in the vain hope the corrective lenses of satire will help them see themselves more clearly. Such people live their lives according to unexamined rules as artificial as those the heroic romancers followed in their fictions; hence, as Katherine Wine points out, “bourgeois society is portrayed as possessing no more utility or inner substance than the most trite of fictional productions” (56). You are what you read.
Furetière’s novel, though like most experimental fiction not very popular, had some influence in its day: both Jean Racine (in Les Plaideurs, 1668) and William Wycherley (in The Plain Dealer, 1676) borrowed the Charroselles/Collantine subplot for their plays, and various French and English comic novelists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries learned from it. Tallemant called Furetière a “pest,” and his caricatures of Scudéry and Sorel are reprehensible, but he’s a key figure in the history of the alternative novel. The Bourgeois Romance is #4 on André Gide’s 10 desert-island novels.
The sharp reader can divine the basic story of our final French farce from its full title: The Mock Clelia, Being a Comical History of French Gallantries and Novels in Imitation of Dom [sic] Quixote (La Fausse Clélie, histoire françoise galante et comique, 1671), by a dramatist named Adrien-Thomas Perdou de Subligny (1636–96). Set in the present, this delightful novel opens one summer’s eve as the playboy Marquis de Riberville, strolling through his estate at Vaux-le-Vicomte, encounters a beautiful stranger and her matronly attendant. Next thing he knows, she is abducted by someone; “He had too bravely begun the evening not to play the hero of a romance,” we’re told metafictionally (5), so Riberville pursues but loses them. The next morning in bed, however, hearing a sound in the adjoining study, he finds her there asleep and “half naked.” After he admires the view and steals some kisses, she wakes, and when asked who she is, “The beauteous lady made answer in this manner: ‘Know, generous stranger, that I am daughter to the valiant Clelius, who was forced to fly to Carthage, thereby to avoid the fury of the last of the Tarquins, and who upon his return contributed so much to the liberty of Rome. My name is Clelia, and my actions are so famous that none but they who live in the most distant countries can be ignorant of them’ ” (11). I nearly fell off the couch laughing. We soon learn that this “Madam Quixote” (as she’s called the in the book’s running heads) is named Juliette d’Arvianne. As a child, she went to England with her father, who took refuge there for political reasons (like Clelius in Carthage) after saving and raising a shipwrecked foundling (like Aronces) who later turns out to be an English nobleman. After they return to Paris, the 14-year-old Juliette reads Scudéry’s Clelia and is astonished at the parallels to her own life; “for two years together she pursued them day and night,” reading the huge novel a hundred times (22). The day she is to marry her Aronces in Bordeaux, an earthquake erupts and a rival (actually her jealous cousin) abducts her; “a fever supervening so discomposed her mind as, little by little, she came at length to imagine herself to be Clelia” (24). Now 20, she is largely recovered, but still goes into a fit whenever she hears anything that reminds her of Scudéry’s novel. At one point she even dives into a canal, believing she is crossing the Tiber.
Riberville shares her story with some aristocratic visitors, who are the main characters in this sparkling novel: his friend the Chevalier de Montal, a judge’s wife named Mme de Moulionne, and three fun-loving society girls: Mlle de Barbesieux, Mlle de Velzers from Holland, and a Breton belle, quiet Mlle de Kermas. Like the aristocrats who humor Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel and Lysis in Sorel’s Extravagant Shepherd, they have some fun with the madwoman, but also try to nurse her back to health by sharing stories. Most of these consist of racy gossip about their aristocratic acquaintances, a scandalous series of sexcapades and bedroom farces, assignations and adulteries, playfully narrated in a flirty manner. It’s all repartee, double entendres, divertissements, and other French-derived words. Raillery. Ripostes. Persiflage.
The silly premise is just an excuse for Subligny to demonstrate a new mode of fiction: sleek, sophisticated, and sexy. Fiction for adults, not for 14-year-old girls. Like the novels of Segrais, Scarron, and Furetière, The Mock Clelia is a repudiation of the old-fashion roman héroïque, an attractive alternative that, as Sorel urged long ago, uses French names and contemporary settings. There are embedded “novellas” in imitation of those in the heroic romances, dramatizing “the various transmutations of love” (210), but most of them are brief and more like conversations: the other characters will frequently interrupt the narrator to ask a question or respond to some aspect, like friends listening to a story over drinks. The dialogue is natural; they use a conversational tone, even imitate a foreign accent or a stutter. (When Juliette has one of her fits and begins speaking as Clelia, the tone is comically elevated.) The ladies throw around the word “slut” pretty freely—in reference to mischievous chambermaids, not each other—and dish stories as risqué as the men’s. As these bon vivants swap tales, they self-consciously construct a novel of their own, commenting on its progress from time to time and enjoying themselves immensely.
Drollery. Bon mots. Coquetry.
The Mock Clelia rejects the idea
ls and values of the heroic romances as well as their aesthetics. Near the beginning of one of Velzer’s stories, the Dutchwoman (sounding like Furetière’s narrator) says of her troubled protagonist, “Any other but I might have a fair occasion here to speak of the tears she shed before she could bring herself to that resolution, and of the conflict that passed between her virtue and love, but that I leave to some Mademoiselle de Scudéry. . . .” “ ‘Consider a little,’ said Madam de Moulionne, ‘how that lady tells her story, and speaks of virtue in a jocose way!’ ” (330–31). Living up to their stereotypes, the rakish Frenchmen in this novel pursue sex at every opportunity and meet little resistance from the equally lusty women, who are less concerned with their “virtue” than with hoodwinking their husbands or fathers.57 Some stories verge on the pornographic, held back only by the narrator’s recourse to double entendres; in one, a nobleman cuts a hole in the wall of a young wife’s bedroom and plasters over it with a board to facilitate his coming and going, which leads the narrator to wink about the new bride’s “hole”: “ ‘The husband had a hundred times viewed all his wife’s chamber and believed that the new piece was the former plaster, because the wall was new; and nobody could ever have imagined that the hole which was shut so close could open and shut when one had a mind. You laugh, fair ladies,’ said he interrupting himself, ‘and perhaps think that I forge a story?’ ‘Go on,’ said they, ‘if the thing be not true, it is at least well invented . . .’ ” (294).