by Steven Moore
She might have taken a cue from a younger woman writer causing a stir in Paris at the time, Marie-Catherine Desjardins, better known by her pseudonym Madame de Villedieu (1640?–83). In 1661, barely out of her teens, she published the first volume of a roman héroïque entitled Alcidamie, a knockoff of Gomberville’s Polexander, which she then abandoned, perhaps because she realized the market for such fare was shrinking, and/or because of pressure from the family whose scandalous history provides the main plot. Or, as Bruce Morrissette suggests, Villedieu “probably sensed that her own talents hardly appeared at their best in such an imitative work” (52). “Feeling her way toward the forms best suited to her temperament,” as he goes on to say—a passionate, bohemian temperament—she announced a new genre in the subtitle of her Lisandre: nouvelle galante (1663), the first of many novellas she published over the next dozen years. In contrast to the idealistic historic romances, these gallant novellas are worldly and modern, a shiny reflection of love à la mode during the reign of the Sun King. She also tried a pastoral (Carmante, 1668) and novellas purporting to reveal the love lives of ancient figures.66 But from 1664 onward she worked away at something more suitable to her wild talents, resulting in an innovative fiction that her translator describes by what it is not: “neither an autobiography, nor a novel, nor memoirs, nor an epistolary novel, but a text that has something of all those genres” (Introduction, 13). Nor is it a picaresque, a nouvelle galante, a legal novel, a confession, nor lesbian erotica, though it has elements of those too. Whatever it is, it’s quite a show.
Published anonymously, Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1672–74) consists of six long letters addressed to someone identified only as Madame or Your Highness, the same format as Lazarillo of Tormes and a similar attempt to justify one’s life to a superior. Subject to years of scandalous rumors, Sylvie wants to set the record straight with a true account of her admittedly unconventional life in order to earn Madame’s sympathy—and to titillate her along the way. After a prefatory “Fragment of a Letter” that could be by Sylvie or Villedieu herself, already blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, Sylvie explains that she was born an orphan, and though she suspects an aristocratic father, her parentage is never established, which separates her from the orphans of romance novels who invariably turn out to be noble. Throughout, Villedieu both adopts and subverts the conventions of romantic fiction; Sylvie’s suspicion of a noble heritage is part of her tongue-in-cheek conception of herself as like “some fiction heroine” (26), the first of many playful references to the similarity between her “true” memoir and the novel, further blurring its status. Some readers and early critics did indeed regard the Memoir as an autobiography by “the George Sand of her time,” as one of them called her, but Morrissette insists that, “though faint suggestions of Mlle Desjardins’ own life may be discerned in the novel, it cannot be regarded as intentionally autobiographical: neither the characters, their motives, not their actions have any counterpart in the real life of its author” (141).
Sylvie is raised by peasants and at age five catches the eye of a passing nobleman who gets his financier, a man named Molière (a common name at the time and not necessarily a reference to the playwright, whom Villedieu knew), to adopt her. While still a tween, she goes out hunting with Molière in the forest, where he tries to rape her; no cowering victim, Sylvie shoots him twice and escapes on horseback. Eat lead, patriarchal hegemony! She is offered the protection of the Marquis de Birague, who is having an affair with her foster mother, but he too takes a carnal interest in the beautiful girl. (Sylvie will spend the rest of the novel dodging dicks like these—every man she meets wants to stick it to her—and she understandably develops a loathing for men.) After the first of many retreats in a convent, she comes under the protection of the widowed sister of the abbess of her convent, Madame d’Englesac, and falls in love with her son, and there all her troubles multiply: much of the rest of the novel concerns her on-and-off relations with the son, persecution by the mother and by Birague (who hopes to make her his someday), and related events that make her appear to the scandalized world as a scheming adventuress—the opinion many contemporaries held of Villedieu herself. She disgusted Tallemant, for example, though he coarsely admitted that others admired her literary talent: “They placed her above Mlle de Scudéry and all the rest of the bitches.”67
Villedieu’s Memoirs shares a major theme with Lafayette’s Zayde: Felime warns Alamir of rumors “formed on the basis of relatively plausible appearances; but I assure you nonetheless that these appearances are misleading” (168). And even more than Lafayette, she pours scorn on those who jump to conclusions and spread rumors based on appearances. But Villedieu takes a lighter approach to the theme; while clearing herself of the malicious gossip that dogs her, Sylvie plays a teasing game with her audience, ostensibly Madame but actually the readers of her novel, a special treat for those who have always wanted to be addressed as Your Highness. (You know who you are.) While insisting she’s a good girl, she focuses on the many times her “free and playful manner” (112) gets her into hot water, leading us time and again right to the lip of a sexual encounter before skipping away leaving hints and innuendo. “(How impudent I am, to recount all that to Your Highness!)” she winks parenthetically (70). She especially likes to hint at lesbian possibilities, which are frequent because Sylvie often disguises herself as a man—blurring the nature of her sex as she does the genre of her text—and which seems calculated to appeal to Madame’s bent. Though she does this to escape difficulties, the coquette can’t resist having fun with some of the ladies she meets while in drag, some of whom call her bluff. (Nor is she the only one: during her many adventures she meets other women dressed as men, and in one instance switches clothes with a young man, who seems a little too eager to wear ladies’ clothes.)
While all this is titillating, there’s some desperation on the narrator’s part to keep the reader entertained; during the second half of the novel especially, when Sylvie is being sued by various parties, mocked in novels written about her, betrayed by the man she loves, and losing control over her increasingly chaotic life, she will reluctantly interrupt her narrative to recount a facetious anecdote for Madame’s benefit, even apologizing for getting too serious. For example, after learning of the death of a friend and describing its impact on her, Sylvie writes, “However, I may be spending too much time on a matter that is not amusing and, to provide amusement I must return to the funny adventures that were subsequently not in short supply” (93). The show must go on. At the end of a few letters, Sylvie tells us she needs to rest and “think about what I still have to say” (123) to remind us this novel isn’t writing itself, that behind it is a woman working hard for the money. Unlike other women writers of her time, Villedieu supported herself by her pen, but that meant catering to her readers’ perceived tastes and fending off their curiosity about her private life, while taking care not to alienate them (something that didn’t concern Furetière in his reader-baiting Bourgeois Romance). Memoirs is a fascinating enactment of the author–reader relationship, one of the first to hint at the small print in that devil’s bargain.
Though her smile may be a little forced, and though she may very well be playing us, Sylvie is a thoroughly engaging narrator, and a new type of woman in French fiction. Did I mention she shoots and kills the first man who lays a finger on her? No one is going to abduct this heroine. Though she gives in to pressure at age 16 to marry an old man (who dies a few years later, and whose legacy is one of her many legal problems), she is remarkably independent, proactive, and resourceful. She travels all over France and the Netherlands to pursue her lover, fights the legal battles others wage against her—a suitably modern counterpart to the military battles of the roman héroïque—and never compromises. She’s certainly not a blind adherent to old-fashioned virtue; sounding more like a swinging chick of the 1960s than one from the 1660s, she boldly states, “frankly I’ve never been able to accept
some forms of jealousy: those that seem to me too centered on the physical. The assurance of an undivided heart has always been enough for me, and always will be. Everyone has his or her own way of loving; I believe myself to be more refined, by loving in such a way, than those who profess refinement” (69). She goes on to say “the greatest misfortune that can strike a lady is . . . to be unable to love two men at the same time” (79), and perhaps a few women as well. She is consistently amusing, especially in her metafictional asides about being the heroine of a novel, she’s self-deprecating in a way utterly foreign to the humorless heroines of earlier French novels, and she laughs out loud at gallant attempts to woo her. Her language is refreshingly colloquial, and the entire novel is seductively realistic as she name-drops actual celebrities and famous figures of the day, provides dates and datable events—the novel takes place between 1647 and 1672—and in one hyperrealistic instance Sylvie rents a carriage from a certain Blavet, who, scholars have discovered, is the name of a real “merchant who rented coaches and chaises” at the time (103 n9). This beguiling work represents a novel approach to fiction, as well as to life, and deserves to be better known.
Villedieu was right behind Lafayette in formulating the newfangled genre of the nouvelle historïque, and in 1675 published a bitter example that some believe influenced the latter’s Princess de Clèves. As though Sylvie, fed up with love, decided to turn historian and write a diatribe against it, The Disorders of Love (Les Désordres de l’amour, 1675) exposes the baleful role desire played in the civil/religious wars of the late 16th century. It consists of three linked novellas—the book is divided into four parts, but the third and fourth form a continuous narrative—occasionally punctuated by poetic “maxims” that reiterate the novel’s thesis: “Misfortunes have always and do always accompany love and its mania” (Maxim 3, 38). Set a few years after the events of Lafayette’s Princess de Montpensier and featuring many of the same characters, part 1 is dominated by a clever coquette named Charlotte de Sauve, “who juggled five or six affairs simultaneously” (36). Since her suitors are powerful people, her politically calculated flirtations create rivalries and tensions that erupt into warfare. In part 2, very reminiscent of Lafayette’s first novella and the part that allegedly influenced The Princess de Clèves, a young woman dutifully marries an older marquis, but soon becomes miserable because, she confesses to him, she’s always been in love with the marquis’s nephew. Her husband gallantly offers to divorce her to allow her to follow her heart, and even conveniently dies, but her second marriage to the nephew soon falls apart due to boredom and jealousy and leads to further civil disorders. The third and longest novella features a young nobleman who becomes the obsession of one woman he doesn’t really love, and the object of scorn by the one he does, a conflict that eventually drives him to seek death in battle. Covering the period from 1574 to 1590, The Disorders of Love shows how the personal becomes the political when love’s victims are in positions of power.
The plots are much more intricate than I’ve indicated, and hue closely to Villedieu’s sources—so closely that the famous philosopher and critic Pierre Bayle, who has an entry on Villedieu in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), chastised her for confusing readers by blurring the line between history and fiction. But she saw fiction as a means to deepen our understanding of history, not falsify it for entertainment purposes, by going behind the scenes and dramatizing the private motivations behind public events. Anticipating Dumas’s advice Cherchez la femme, she looks for the women—often ignored or downplayed by historians—who helped influence history via their romantic entanglements with the “great men” of history, and she literally gives voice to these silenced women by inventing dialogue for them. Villedieu doesn’t idealize these women (as Saint-Réal did with Don Carlos); the novel isn’t a feminist rehabilitation of women unfairly vilified by male historians, for many of her females are indeed haughty, egotistic schemers. She wants to show that they too are subject to love’s “mania” and, while under its influence, can cause just as much damage as men in the public sector.
As fictionalized history, The Disorders of Love is certainly illuminating, though Villedieu inhibits her creativity by tethering herself so closely to the historical record. The novelist in her is unleashed only when her characters bewail the power love has over them, as in the wife’s confessional scene in part 2, and especially in the scenes in the last part featuring the unrequited lover Madame de Maugiron, one of the novel’s few fictitious characters. Willing to be burned at the stake of love, she insists she will always love her man even after he coldly rejects her: “ ‘Be even more cruel still!’ interrupted Madame de Maugiron, ‘and say that you hate me now more than you ever did love me. I shall love you no less for it. My fatal passion needs no encouragement nor any hope to subsist. For a long time now, it seems to have become even more intense without either. You owe me no gratitude for it; this is not a voluntary love’ ” (110). Vows of eternal love are common enough in romantic fiction, but there is a desperate, masochistic intensity here that is new, as is Villedieu’s clinical analysis of her disorder: “Unfortunately, it is far easier to become infected with love’s germs than it is to be cured of the malady. She continued to love him in spite of his efforts” to dissuade her (110). Nor is she ever rewarded for her fidelity, as she would have been in a Scudéry novel; on the penultimate page, we’re told merely that “she succumbed finally to a lingering illness” (120). The novel ends with Villedieu’s bitter view of love: “If, on the one hand, one experiences it only slightly [like the characters in part 1], it is an inexhaustible source of perfidy and treason; and if, on the other hand, one embarks upon its path in good faith [like the characters in the other parts], it leads to the very depths of disorder and despair” (120). There is no third option. Villedieu elevates her own disappointment in love to a universal principle, and calls upon history to validate it.
The Disorders of Love certainly defends its thesis, and demonstrates remarkable insights into the psychology of love, but Villedieu doesn’t trust her material enough to let it speak for itself. Too often the historian in her interjects didactic comments on the lessons the novelist in her has provided. For example, part 2 ends thus:
If, by the examples provided in this first and second volumes [i.e., parts], I have proven, as I believe that I have, that love is the force behind all other human passions and that it can not be combatted too soon since its smallest sparks produce deadly fires, I hope to provide equally convincing evidence that not only does it activate our other passions but also that it deserves often all of the blame directed towards these passions. I hope to prove equally that it pushes us to the edges of despair and that the most beautiful works of nature and art depend often on a moment of its caprice and its fury. I am sure that at this point more than one reader is saying, somewhat ironically, that I have not always spoken in this manner. That is precisely why I am now justified in speaking so negatively. And, finally, it is because I have provided irrefutable proof that I am authorized to paint love with such dark colors. (70–71)
It’s understandable that an author notorious for her tales of gallantry would want to justify this about-face, but such passages dilute the dark colors of her novel. Villedieu the novelist does a good enough job that we don’t need Villedieu the historian to point the moral; the unusual poetic maxims she inserts from time to time fill that function. Nonetheless, The Disorders of Love exemplifies why the nouvelle historique is a welcome addition to the novel family: while earlier romances concluded with a problem-solving marriage, these newer novels explored what happens after the honeymoon is over. We leave behind the relatively simple concerns of the young adults of the roman héroïque for the more complex difficulties married adults face, which encouraged novelists to add more psychological depth to their characters. And by drawing upon recent, familiar history, they gave greater verisimilitude to their fictions and could even claim (as Villedieu does) that they are equal if not superior to histori
ans in enabling readers to understand the past, and specifically the roles women played in shaping that past.
If Mme de Lafayette did indeed read Mme de Villedieu’s novel, she might have decided to step up her game and show her who was the real queen bee of French fiction. More likely (and less silly), by 1675 she was already writing the novel that would be published, anonymously but with much fanfare, in March 1678 as The Princess de Clèves (pronounced “klev”), without doubt the finest example of the nouvelle historique and the one that shows the greatest psychological depth. It is regularly described as France’s (even the world’s) first “modern” novel; given its 16th-century setting and occasional fairtytale elements, I suspect most readers today would find a more modern sensibility in Villedieu’s Memoirs, Scarron’s and Furetière’s subversive novels, or even Cyrano’s Other World. Some would find it easier to identify with the gossip girls and playboys in The Mock Clelia than with Lafayette’s kings and courtiers. But to a greater degree than any of those works, The Princess de Clèves displays what cultural historian Peter Gay identifies as the two quintessential qualities of modernism: “committing calculated offenses against conventionality” and “the exploration of subjective experience.”68 It is the latter quality especially that distinguishes Lafayette’s novel from most of its predecessors and that set the agenda for most modern fiction. The former quality is less obvious and is what, along with the novel’s subtle artistry, makes it a revolutionary masterpiece.