The Novel

by Steven Moore

  The basic plot is similar enough to that of The Princess de Montpensier to suggest Lafayette deliberately set out to rewrite and improve upon her earlier work, as Joyce did with Stephen Hero and Proust with Jean Santeuil. Again, she is said to have been assisted by Segrais and especially by La Rochefoucauld, whose dim view of love darkens the novel. (“What is least often found in love affairs is love,” he maxims.69) Critic Erica Harth provides a convenient summary:

  La Princesse de Clèves is the story of a young wife’s love for a man who is not her husband. When she was married at sixteen to the Prince de Clèves, Mlle de Chartres did not even know enough to realize that she did not love her husband. Thus when she meets the most sought-after man at court, the Duc de Nemours, she is destined for unhappiness. Struggling to live up to the lessons in virtue that her mother gave her, she feels so guilty about a love expressed only in her own mind or through involuntary glances and subtle innuendoes that she confesses her passion for Nemours [without naming him] to her husband. This scene takes place at their country home in Coulommiers. Nemours, who stalks her relentlessly, just happens to be nearby and overhears the conversation. Through a subsequent series of misunderstandings, Clèves becomes unbearably jealous and finally dies. Free at last to marry Nemours, who presses her insistently to do so, she chooses instead to enter a convent, where she ends her days.70

  Harth doesn’t mention that the novel is set in the final year of the reign of Henri II (i.e., 1558–59), for that’s the least important aspect of the novel. Though the princess and her mother are the only fictitious characters, and though Lafayette closely follows the historical record—deliberately highlighting the power women held at court—she’s less interested in giving a history lesson than in exploring ethical issues that were as relevant in her own time as in the past. Lafayette’s recurring theme is the deceptiveness of appearances, and how characters either participate in or challenge those deceptions, and appearances were just as deceiving in the court of Louis XIV as that of Henri II.

  The seductive magnificence of appearances is the focus of the novel’s opening pages, and the queen’s “profound capacity for dissimulation” (3) is shared by the characters Lafayette introduces one by one (with ironic praise in retrospect), culminating in the ladykiller Nemours, whose own mastery of dissimulation keeps everyone guessing which of his many mistresses he really loves. Beneath the glittering appearances of noble aristocrats and beautiful ladies, Lafayette gradually uncovers a snakepit of personal ambition, rivalry, jealousy, and treachery: “Ambition and love affairs were the life-blood of the court, absorbing the attention of men and women alike. There were countless interests at stake, countless different factions, and women played such a central part in them that love was always entangled with politics and politics with love. No one was tranquil or indifferent; all thoughts were on seeking advancement, gaining favour, helping, or harming; boredom and idleness were unknown, everyone was kept busy by pleasure or intrigue” (14). Into this hectic world steps Mlle de Chartres, carefully raised by a mother who tried to teach her to see through appearances; she disagreed with those mothers who keep their daughters in the dark about the nature of the world, who “avoid speaking about amorous entanglements in front of young girls in order to preserve them from contamination. Mme de Chartres believed the opposite. She often gave her daughter descriptions of love; she impressed on her how attractive it can be in order to convince her more easily of what she said about its dangers; she spoke to her of men’s insincerity, of their deceptions and infidelity . . .” (9–10).

  Mademoiselle’s “youthful appearance” is enough to capture the heart of Clèves. Though they barely know each other and scarcely exchange a word—Lafayette cunningly keeps the girl silent for the first 20 pages—she follows her mother’s advice and marries him, even though “she felt no particular attraction for his person” (20) and never does develop any passion for him, to his immense disappointment. After “the wedding took place” (21)—Lafayette’s passive dismissal of the event speaks volumes—the new Madame de Clèves settles into dutiful-wife mode and remains there, even after she notices Nemours’s interest in her and notes—to her great surprise and embarrassment—her own interest in him. It’s that sense of duty that compels her to confess her attraction to Nemours to her husband. (And that’s all it is, attraction: there are no secret meetings, passionate conversations, or stolen kisses. It’s as chaste as a Scudéry novel.) Knowing she’s about to do something unheard-of, she tells her husband, “I will make you a confession which no woman has ever made to her husband” (95), and when word gets out (thanks to eavesdropping Nemours), people are astonished at “the extraordinary behavior of the woman who had confessed to her husband her passion for another man” (105). They are astonished because any other woman would have concealed her feelings, or would have enjoyed the fling: Lafayette has already shown this is a society where extramarital affairs were normal and usually open secrets. What makes the princess’s act extraordinary is her calculated “modernist” offense against conventionality: indignant at the idea of being as secretive and hypocritical as everyone else, she tells her husband, “It was not weakness that made me confess: it needs more courage to admit such a truth than to seek to hide it” (96). She defies convention again when she refuses to marry Nemours after her husband’s death, and then offends conventionality a final time by throwing it all away and joining a convent, preferring “peace of mind” over riches, status, and power. Like Bartleby the scrivener, she prefers not to participate in normal life.

  Lafayette’s readers were shocked, as one newspaper learned when it conducted a poll shortly after the novel appeared. “The overwhelming majority of the responses, most of which came from the provinces, condemned the princess’s behavior, often, ironically in retrospect, for having destroyed ‘domestic repose.’ ”71 While the Princess of Clèves’s unexamined sense of decorum and her retreat to a nunnery (a secular getaway, not a religious calling) may not seem very rebellious, her act anticipates the modernist tendencies to criticize the status quo and to champion unconventional individualism over conformity, integrity over phoniness, openness over secrecy, authenticity over inauthenticity. “The passions and attachments of the world now appeared to her as they do to those whose vision is more elevated and more detached” (155), certainly more elevated than those in the provinces who respond to newspaper polls, and this 17-year-old emerges at the end as some kind of existential hero.

  More than its épater le bourgeois rejection of conventionality, it’s “the exploration of subjective experience” that qualifies The Princess as one of the first modern novels. It begins with exterior, public views of the main characters, but later gives interior, private views of the workings of certain characters’ minds, and it is this interiority that distinguishes the modern novel. We are so used to this mode now that it’s difficult to imagine how novel a passage like the following was to readers in 1678:

  She [the princess] was astonished never to have thought how unlikely it was that a man like M. de Nemours, who had always displayed such a superficial attitude towards women, was capable of a sincere, lasting attachment. She felt that it was almost impossible for her to find happiness in his love. But even if I could, she said to herself, what can I want with it? Do I really want to tolerate it? respond to it? Am I ready to embark on a love affair? to be unfaithful to M. de Clèves? to be unfaithful to myself? Do I wish to expose myself to the cruel remorse and mortal sufferings that love gives rise to? I am conquered and overcome by an inclination that carries me with it in spite of myself. All my resolutions are of no avail; my thoughts yesterday were no different from what I think today, yet today I do the very opposite of what I decided yesterday. (91–92)

  Note how the pronouns shift from “she” to “I,” how the long, classical opening sentence breaks apart into the jumpy fragments of interior monologue. By means of this technique Lafayette exquisitely tracks the princess’s gradual awareness of Nemours’s interest in her, her
own confused reactions, and Nemours’s startled realization that he truly loves this virtuous woman. Earlier novelists would tell us what was going through characters’ minds, but Lafayette shows us, allowing the reader to hear them process bits of information via their own subjective view of the world. Because of the nature of the world they live in, they have to make do with hints, gossip, looks, coded statements, body language, all of which are open to interpretation. “If you judge by appearances in this place,” Mme de Chartres had warned her daughter near the beginning, “you will frequently be deceived; what you see is almost never the truth” (26). Yet appearances are all most characters have to go by, and for some, appearances are more important than truth. When jealous Clèves learns that Nemours has visited his wife in the country at night, he stops his informant and doesn’t need to hear the rest: he’s convinced she has committed adultery, and even when his wife tells him the truth, he’s so committed to his subjective worldview that he states, “I feel I am close to death, and I want to hear nothing that might make me sorry to die” (138). A page earlier we’re told that “the scales fell from her eyes” (137), for the princess is the only character to see clearly; everyone else keeps those scales in place, like sunglasses shielding them from glaring objectivity.

  This conflict between subjectivity and objectivity is what makes the final, lengthy conversation between the princess and Nemours the emotional climax of the novel. Until then, their exchanges have been limited, and always conveyed in the code of polite manners, leaving them to ponder afterward the significance of what they’ve heard. (The one exception is a playful afternoon spent trying to reconstruct a purloined letter they had both seen, but nothing serious is said during this charming if incongruous scene.) Ten pages before the end of the novel, they have their first real conversation, and it is a veritable orgy of words as both bare their souls and come clean on all their unspoken feelings. The silent girl of the novel’s opening pages has become a voluble psychologist of love, and makes her suitor see the world as she sees it, which has no place for him, or for any man after the death of her husband. Afterward, Nemours “was out of his senses with joy and sadness, confusion and wonder” (151).

  The princess’s retreat to a convent at the end has a medieval ring to it—it’s what King Arthur’s Guinevere does—even though women of Lafayette’s time, like Villedieu, continued to do so to take a break from the real world. But it is one of many allusions to medieval romance—there are tournaments, stag hunts, prophecies, a prince lost in the forest coming upon his lady’s castle—and represents a much more sophisticated handling of the conventions of fiction than in Zayde. There are interlaced stories in The Princess as in heroic romances, but they are only 5–10 pages long, formally integrated into the narrative rather than set off with their own titles, and are integral to the main story, even heuristic because they teach the princess and the reader valuable lessons. She flouts the rules that both society and the conventions of the romantic novel expected a princess of the realm to follow. There’s a reference to Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron, which the princess has apparently read hot off the presses—it was published in 1559, the year this novel takes place—and her reference to “the cruel remorse and mortal sufferings that love gives rise to” sounds like a capsule summary of the book. The Princess is a cleaner transition from romance to novel than Zayde, retaining only enough of the older conventions to add some fairytale sugarcoating to the bitter pill the reader swallows in this darker, more pessimistic work.

  The Princess de Clèves is an antilove story, for Lafayette qualifies the appeal of love by describing it in paradoxical terms: after the princess confesses to her husband, he says, “You have made me unhappy by the greatest proof of fidelity that a woman has ever given her husband” (96), and after eavesdropping on this confession, Nemours “was at once deliriously happy and unspeakably miserable” (99). Later, her “indulgent words and glances would not, perhaps, have increased M. de Nemours’s love as effectively as this austere conduct” (102). Pain and sweetness, regret and delight: in The Princess love is an oxymoron, not the straightforward passion of earlier novels but twisted and more complicated, even perverse. Voyeurism is the preferred position in this sexless novel: Nemours spies on the princess at Coulommiers “and could scarcely control his rapture at the sight. It was hot, and on her head and breast she wore nothing but her loosely gathered hair”; and she, after toying with a phallic cane belonging to Nemours that she stole, takes a phallic “candlestick and went over to a large table in front of the painting of the siege of Metz that contained the likeness of M. de Nemours. She sat down and began to gaze at it with a musing fascination that could only have been inspired by true passion” (128). When he exposes himself a page later—that is, makes his presence felt—she bolts.

  A final mark of the novel’s modernity is the effacement of the narrator. Like the characters in the novel, readers get no clear guidance on how to interpret what they see; the subtle narrator gives only a few hints and nudges, leaving the text open to interpretation. The reader’s own subjectivity comes into play, which is why I can champion Mme de Clèves as a brave nonconformist while another might dismiss her as a cowardly naïf who throws her life away in mindless deference to her mother’s patriarchal view of a woman’s role. (The novel’s devastating final sentence unsettles any pat interpretation.) Since the novel was published anonymously and Lafayette never acknowledged it as hers, its early readers didn’t even have an author to turn to for guidance; the burden of interpretation was on them.

  The Princess of Clèves hit Paris like a bombshell. The first printing quickly sold out, translations were commissioned, and it immediately generated the kind of criticism a new Pynchon novel would today. Within months of its appearance a book-length study was published, analyzing it almost line by line with both praise and misgivings, which was followed in 1679 by another one attacking it and defending Lafayette’s novel point by point.72 Valincour, the conservative critic who was first off the mark, was upset by its novelty and its demands on the reader: “In these little texts extraordinary fictions are intolerable to the reader, because he is not prepared and he only expects a simple and natural story, that he can believe without forcing himself” (NCE, 135).73 Unprepared for an extraordinary fiction like The Princess de Clèves, intellectuals realized the novel was a genre they needed to start taking seriously, and that the better ones would require some work on the reader’s part.

  As is frequently the case in literary history, a game-changing masterpiece clears the floor for a while, and no French novels of any great significance appeared over the next few decades. Matters were not helped after King Louis XIV signed in 1685 the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, stripping Protestants (Huguenots) of their rights and booting them out of the country if they didn’t convert to Catholicism. The primary result of what several historians call this “final solution” to heresy was a brain drain as talented, hardworking people fled theocratic France for more tolerant countries in Europe; but the secondary result was a chill that descended on the freedom of expression: no novelist wanted to incur the wrath of the king’s moral police, so they played it safe for a while, confining themselves to unobjectionable commercial fare and escapist fiction. Joan DeJean notes that there were some women writers in the 1690s—like Catherine Durand Bédacier, Madame de Tenain, and the Comtesse de Murat—who continued to challenge the repressive status quo in pseudomemoirs and historical novels exposing the love lives of famous men, but since their novels have not been translated, I must refer the interested reader to chapter 4 of her essential Tender Geographies.

  One novel from this period that has some claim to fame is Hypolitus Earl of Douglas (L’Histoire d’Hypolite comte de Duglas [sic], 1690) by Madame d’Aulnoy (1650?–1705), hostess of a popular Parisian salon. This short novel, set in the middle of the 16th century when similar Catholic–Protestant conflicts plagued England, is a mildly interesting historical romance, though way too dependent on stale fictiona
l conventions: separation at birth, pirates, abductions, disguises, incredible coincidences—so incredible that the climax reads like parody—tyrannical parents, complicated contrivances, love versus duty, crossdressing, and endless misassumptions based on misleading or insufficient evidence. (The only exercise these people in French novels get is jumping to conclusions, as the Danny Kaye character in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty would say.) There are some teasing hints of incest and lesbianism, but the reader is warned in advance of the true state of things to avoid any outrage to her morals.

  As I say, a routine romance. But at one point the eponymous hero of the novel is asked to tell a story to a woman having her portrait painted; “then recalling to his mind a certain story not unlike one of the old tales of the Fairies” (176), he tells the pretty tale of a Russian king who visits the Isle of Felicity, where he learns that happiness doesn’t last. D’Aulnoy was the first author to use the term “fairy tale” (conte de fées), and so popular was this episode that she went on to publish two collections of fairy tales, which appeared the same year that Charles Perrault published his more famous Tales of Mother Goose (1697).74

  There is a touching scene at the end of Hypolitus I must tell you about. Julie, the much-persecuted, oft-abducted orphaned object of Hypolitus’s relentless devotion, at one point evades her enemies by cutting her hair short and disguising herself as a pilgrim, only to attract the love of an Italian marchioness who takes her for a him. After the recognition scene when Julie reveals herself as a woman and is married to Hypolitus, the heartbroken marchioness decides to bury her disappointment in a convent; but before she leaves, she asks Julie to dress up one more time as a man for her benefit. “Julie, being then alone, was willing to comply with her desire, soon put on her pilgrim’s habit, and came to the marchioness . . .” (255). That’s a splendid gesture on Julie’s part, and a daring one on d’Aulnoy’s, given the sexual prudery of the king’s censors.75