by Steven Moore
Storytelling among these sophisticates is slick with sexual innuendo; when Montal offers to tell another story, “Mademoiselle de Barbesieux challenged the Chevalier’s prowess, which he immediately performed, addressing his discourse to her in these terms” (284). As they tell their sexy stories, they often exchange knowing looks and flirt shamelessly. In the one about a tall, stuttering redhead who takes poetry lessons from a short gallant, versifying quickly becomes a metaphor for sex. After two years of studying under him, “She hatched a very natural and gallant work; but some considerations made her look upon the piece as a thing misbecoming a maid who made it a point of honour to hate all kind of gallantry. She stifled the work and the desire she might have had to publish it, at one and the same time” (360).58 After suppressing the result of her “studies,” we’re told tongue in cheek that “she had an itching desire to try the art of some others. A man of great quality passing that way to go to his government seemed to her by his looks to be a good poet. She imagined that his quality must needs suggest to him more lofty thoughts than those of Monsieur de Lusigny,” her former tutor (361). Teasingly literalizing the storytelling/lovemaking trope, Subligny ends the novel by putting the fair Breton and the saucy Hollandaise in bed together, ostensibly so that Kermas can conclude a story begun earlier. “Shortly after their discourse ended, or at least for reasons that I know,” he snickers, “I must make them conclude here” (395).
Badinage. Canards. Panache.
The final page of The Mock Clelia is a letdown; as though drained, Subligny briefly notes that “Clelia” was rescued by her Aronces, recovered from her bibliomania, and got married. “The ladies de Kermas, Barbesieux, and Velzers in time had their contentment also, and the gentlemen themselves came to see a pleasant period put to their adventures” (396), he concludes limply. But until that kiss-off, The Mock Clelia completely fulfills the author’s promise (made in the preface) to present a “new way of writing”: fresh, conversational, and worldly, a blessed relief from the ponderous prudery of the heroic romances. (The same tone would be struck 10 years later in Beer’s German Winter Nights.) The novel resembles a flirty ballet, like Poulenc’s Les Biches, and it’s a shame that it is remembered today, if at all, only as the inspiration for another novel with a similar premise, Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote.
A Brief Digression on Pornography
I write above that The Mock Clelia occasionally “verges on the pornographic.” There were of course some novels that wallowed in the pornographic at this time, in France and elsewhere, but I’ll be ignoring most of them. Yes, they present an alternative to mainstream fiction and are transgressive in their sexual explicitness, but most pornography is as formulaic and clichéd as commercial fiction. Same with her classy cousin, erotica. It’s not subject matter that makes a novel literature, alternative or otherwise, but innovative form and/or language. For example, I have in my library—I don’t know how it got there, Mom, I swear!—an old paperback copy of The School of Venus (L’Escole des filles) by Millot and L’Ange, first published in Paris in the summer of 1655. Taking its form from Aretino’s Dialogues, it consists mainly of two conversations between an older teen named Susanne and a 16-year-old virgin named Franchon. In the first, Susanne explains the mechanics of sex to her friend and encourages her to try them out on a randy suitor named Robinet; in the second, Franchon reports back with an enthusiastic account of their several encounters, so Susanne gives her student further lessons (including some tips on birth control).59 The short novel is basically a sex manual in fictional form, a plea for sex education for sheltered girls, and is surprising only for its wholesomeness and joie de vivre. The panting authors pretend it’s intended for girls, but it’s obviously written for male readers and represents a fantasy of how we wish women would talk. Its literary value is slim to none. Because The School of Venus resembles a sex manual, erotic bibliographer Gershon Legman felt “the first erotic work in French actually in the novel form” was Le Rut, ou la pudeur éteinte (Rutting, or Modesty Discarded, 1676) by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois (1646?–1700), the “Casanova of the 17th Century” (91). Gershon says this work was quickly translated into English, but I haven’t located a copy, which is perhaps just as well. Jean Barrin’s notorious Venus in the Cloister (Venus dans le cloître, 1683) has even less of a story than The School of Venus: one day 20-year-old Sister Angelica catches 16-year-old Sister Agnes masturbating in her cell, and over the course of three dialogues (expanded to five in the English translation) she reassures the wayward nun that all monastics and religious orders do it—the monks call it “The Battle of Five to One”—and goes on to shares a number of lubricious stories to prove her point, punctuating her points with kisses. Venus in the Cloister is essentially a ribald satire on Catholicism and monasticism, and an excuse to eroticize religious discipline. While it may be of some value to historians of erotica because of the reading lists the scissor sisters share, it’s of little interest to historians of the novel except as a primitive ancestor of Diderot’s Nun and Sade’s Justine. Porn has its uses, and abuses, but it’s at the sticky entertainment end of the literary spectrum, so unless a pornographic novel exhibits especially seductive form or cunning linguistics, I’ll be resisting its sleazy charms.
In 1670, a mysterious novel was published in Paris that would hardly be worth mentioning except that it inspired a number of later writers. Le Comte de Gabalis is a short novel by Nicolas de Montfaucon de Villars (1635–73), an urbane, erudite priest who apparently wanted to poke fun at the growing number of Rosicrucians and Freemasons. Hearing that the count has just died, the narrator dismisses rumors that he was killed by an avenging angel for revealing occult secrets, and recounts a visit Gabalis once paid him. Over the course of five conversations, the mystic informed him of the existence of elemental beings—sylphs (representing air), nymphs (water), salamanders (fire), and gnomes (earth)—who have human form but lack a soul. In order to qualify for eternal life, they need to mate with a human, and Gabalis encourages the narrator to give up human women in favor of these soulless creatures, for conjoining with them will aid him in his spiritual evolution “from darkness into light, from knowledge into understanding, and from understanding into Wisdom Found which is the consciousness of the Universal Mind.”60 There’s a certain amount of bantering back and forth—the narrator is skeptical, the count taunts him for his skepticism—and mixed in with all the theological/mythological material are many sexual innuendos hinting that the mysterious conjunction of humans with elementals is a precursor of the Tantric sex magic embraced by various cults in Europe and America beginning in the 19th century.61 Half the time, Gabalis sounds like he’s recommending a libertine lifestyle involving mistresses of various temperaments (ethereal, fiery, wet ’n’ wild, earthy) instead of a wife, and it’s difficult to take him seriously when he uses anecdotes like the following to illustrate his mystic teachings: “A certain Philosopher, with whom a Nymph was engaged in an intrigue of immortality, was so disloyal as to love a [mortal] woman. As he sat at dinner with his new paramour and some friends, there appeared in the air the most beautiful leg in the world. The invisible sweetheart greatly desired to show herself to the friends of her faithless lover, that they might judge how wrong he was in preferring a woman to her. Afterward the indignant Nymph killed him on the spot” (137).62 On the last page of the novel, the narrator tips his hand by expressing the hope his readers will “not take it amiss that I amuse myself at the expense of fools,” nor suspect him “of seeking to give credit to the Occult Sciences under the pretence of ridiculing them . . .” (201). Many took it seriously: it was a hit in Paris, was translated into English twice a decade later—and reprinted in 1714 after Pope referred to it in a footnote to “The Rape of the Lock”—and to this day it is revered as a sacred text by some, rather than appreciated for what it surely is: a learned, occasionally amusing satire on occultism, perhaps a fairy tale for the “sylphs” and “nymphs” of the Parisian salons where the suave Abbé de Villar
s was always welcome.
Instead of continuing along Sorel’s way, most French novelists took a shortcut through d’Urfé’s way. They continued to write historical novels, but much shorter ones and set closer to their own time, and began blurring the distinctions between history, fiction, and memoir. Voilà: la nouvelle historique. And by “they” I mean Frenchwomen, who dominated the genre for decades.63 One of the earliest examples is a jewel of a novella entitled The Princess de Montpensier, published anonymously in 1662 but written by Madeleine de Scudéry’s young friend Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette (1634–93), perhaps with some help by her former tutor Gilles Ménage, a scholar and poet (and another friend of Scudéry). Set not in ancient times but a mere century earlier—like a novelist today setting a romantic story during World War I—the novella’s alignment of the affairs of the heart with the affairs of the nation is announced in its clever opening sentence: “In the reign of Charles IX [1560–74], when France was torn apart by civil war, Love continued to conduct his affairs amid the disorder and to cause many disorders in his own kingdom.”64 Love’s victim is a beautiful young heiress who at age 13 falls for the young Duc de Guise, who returns her affections; for political reasons, however, she’s married three years later to the Prince of Montpensier, and dutifully tries to forget her first love. But de Guise can’t forget her, and is joined by others who fall in love with the young beauty: first, Montpensier’s close friend, the Comte de Chabannes, who chaperons her during the prince’s many absences; and later, the Duc d’Anjou, the future King Henri III. Lafayette exquisitely tracks the jealous tension that develops between the prince and the two dukes, as well as Chabannes’s unrequited love, while the princess remains cool, calm, and collected. But when she learns de Guise has become engaged, she revives her earlier affection for him, exhibiting that irritating tendency of women to ignore a guy until another woman takes an interest in him. Slipping off her pedestal of virtue, she recklessly agrees to an assignation with de Guise, aided by heartbroken but devoted Chabannes, which is interrupted by the astounded prince (though before anything actually happens). She faints, and the men scatter, losing themselves in the country’s sectarian violence. (The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre of August 1572 occurs during the novella.) Further shocked by news of Chabannes’s death and de Guise’s engagement to yet another woman, not to mention “the pain of having lost the esteem of her husband” (187), the Princess of Montpensier withers and dies.
Though the tale is tragic, there is a je-ne-sais-quoi quality about it, a certain aesthetic distance between the tale and its teller that occasionally reveals a slight smile from her, an arched eyebrow. It’s the wry asides—“being in love, and thus self-interested . . .” (159); “We are very weak when we are in love” (179); “Things are not at all as they appear” (185)—and the novella’s too-pat exit line: “she was one of the most beautiful princesses in the world, and would doubtless have been the happiest, if virtue and prudence had guarded her actions” (188). It’s the deft imagery, as when Chabannes suggests the princess can let d’Anjou sneak in by lowering “the little drawbridge” connecting her room to the garden – more elegant than Subligny’s “hole” but signifying as much. Most of all it’s the self-consciousness about the old genre Lafayette was renovating. When the dukes de Guise and d’Anjou accidentally come upon the princess in a boat near her estate, “They thought it was something out of a romance” (164), and a few pages later Chabannes “foresaw all too easily that this first chapter of the romance would not lack a sequel” (166). Subsequent events are called “adventures.” With her “supernatural” beauty, the princess does indeed seem to have stepped out of a roman héroïque at first, but as she grows up and the narrative progresses, they both develop enough psychological depth to indicate we’re not in Forez anymore. The historical details are mostly accurate and, as the opening line promised, they metaphorically link personal turmoil with civil turmoil caused by France’s religious wars; at the same time, Lafayette could be describing the latest scandal from court. (She had been one of Queen Anne’s maids of honor and continued to mingle with the aristocracy.) The Princess de Montpensier is a superbly poised debut, deservedly became very popular, and promised great things from its 28-year-old author.
Seven years later, Lafayette published her first full-length novel (though under 200 pages), a sophisticated dramatization of epistemology that is strikingly modern in its psychological acumen. But instead of taking one step closer to the psychological novel that would make her famous, she took a sidestep, if not a step backward, with Zayde: A Spanish Romance (Zayde, histoire espagnole, 1669), as though she wanted to add her dainty foot to those of Scarron and Furetière kicking the roman héroïque to the curb. Once again, Lafayette seems to have worked with an older male collaborator, in this case the duke de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80), whose famous Maxims appeared in 1664. Zayde certainly suggests Lafayette shared his sour view that most people display too much self-interest and not enough self-knowledge.65
The novel is set in the early 10th century, mostly in Spain but with a long flashback set in Cyprus, and though Lafayette researched the era, there isn’t enough material to provide the kind of history lesson Scudéry’s novels do. Indeed, there are anachronisms aplenty, enough to suggest Lafayette was more interested in dealing with contemporary philosophical dilemmas than in exploring medieval Moorish–Spanish relations. It’s unclear, then, why she decided to hitch her modern concerns to an old horse like the romance. In the introduction to his excellent translation, Nicholas Paige suggests, “Lafayette set out to subvert the genre from the inside: her work is both a romance and a pastiche of romance” (13), perhaps in an effort to wean her audience away from that readerly form and prepare them for more writerly works. Paige goes on to note, “Lafayette treated her reader to an enigmatic in medias res beginning, and to a picture-perfect wedding finale—but in between, nothing is quite what one would expect” (16).
The main characters in Zayde are shrouded in uncertainty, and the novel explores the tendency of people to shrug off such shrouds by jumping to conclusions, usually based on appearances that turn out to be deceptive, and largely from their instinct to believe what they want to believe. The reader shares their uncertainty at first. We’re uncertain why Consalve, the son of a count, has fled the court of Leon for a secluded spot on the coast of Catalonia, or why another nobleman named Alphonse left Navarre under similar vague circumstances for the same hideaway five years earlier. Uncertainly doubles after they rescue the survivors of a shipwreck, two beautiful ladies who speak an unknown language. Consalve falls in love with the younger—this is our Zayde—and immediately begins spinning a crazy story in his head about a romantic rival, then decides to seek him out and “kill her lover before her very eyes” (90). While the ladies wait for another ship to rescue them, Consalve and Alphonse compete to see who’s sadder by comparing backstories, dismal accounts of misplaced trust and betrayal (Consalve) and self-inflicted jealousy (Alphonse) that are weak in action but strong on psychology. Later we learn that Zayde was making assumptions about her sad rescuer that are as imaginary as Consalve’s about her. Even after they learn each other’s language and are reunited later in the novel, the prospect of their marriage seems doomed by misassumptions about the religious objections of Zayde’s father (which prove illusory) and about the subject of a portrait that resembles Consalve but in Arab dress to whom Zayde has committed herself, aided by an astrologer’s prediction. Turns out the artist of the portrait simply liked Arab dress and clothed all his subjects in it, and that she misinterpreted the astrologer. Instead of providing the foregone conclusions of heroic romances, Lafayette keeps readers guessing until the very end, teaching them to mistrust the claims of confident protagonists (hitherto fairly trustworthy in fiction) and providing considerably more suspense than usual in a genre known for its predictability.
The almost psychopathic displays of jealousy, self-loathing, and misanthropy by Consalve and Alphonse are offset by the amoro
us adventures of an Arab prince named Alamir, whose attempts to woo upright Zayde after a series of Muslim pushovers add some comic relief to the somber novel. (Pursuing one girl entails hiding out in a ladies’ bathhouse and disguising himself as a woman in a mosque.) But most of Zayde focuses with great psychological perception on the inner workings of jealousy: the tendency to spin damning scenarios out of shreds of “evidence,” to project one’s own fears and suspicions on others, to rush to judgment rather than suspend it until one can gather and evaluate the facts, and in general the egotistic tendency to privilege subjectivity over objectivity. Lafayette doesn’t resort to moralizing or condemning her deluded protagonists; she lets the facts, gradually revealed, speak for themselves.
But Zayde’s psychological sophistication is at odds with the clunky machinery of its roman héroïque form. There are shipwrecks, prophecies, mistaken identities, falling in love with a portrait, fickle Fortune, extraordinary coincidences, disguises, embedded histoires with the inevitable violations of point-of-view (no French novelist gets that right), and stereotypical characters described in superlative terms: every woman is beautiful and charming, every man generous and brave, and even a minor character “was one of the few men on earth who had as much merit as gracefulness” (100). Lafayette does make some improvements to her models: her embedded stories flow organically in and out of the main narrative; she avoids theatrical extravaganzas (earthquakes, burning cities, unbelievable physical feats); and she reinforces her high-level concern with epistemology at the lexical level by reiterating words with “know” (connaître) at their root (knowing, knowledge, unknown, etc.), often in opposition to “imagine.” Lafayette downplays the weddings with which romances always conclude: Zayde’s shipwreck companion, Felime, dies of unrequited love before the end, a departure from the norm; and even though Consalve and Zayde do marry, the author is loudly silent on whether they lived happily ever after. “The happy ending, therefore,” Anne Green suggests, “must be seen as an ironic one. There is nothing to suggest that the jealousy, anguish and despair that have arisen from the inability of Zaïde and Consalve to communicate with one another will suddenly end with their marriage” (54). And of course the fact that Zayde is a fraction of the length of the average roman héroïque makes for a tauter, more unified work. It’s a fine novel, but could have been finer if Lafayette had left behind the baggage of the romances she grew up on. DeJean feels “in Zayde, Lafayette builds her own funerary monument to the fiction that had dominated the literary horizon during her reign as a young précieuse” (Tender Geographies, 65), but I feel her talents would have been better spent imagining fiction’s future rather than mourning its past.