by Steven Moore
Unlike earlier hand-wringing protagonists of French epistolary novels, the marchioness is spirited, funny, and worldly, dismissing the count’s initial importunate pleas for an affair with the amused condescension of a woman too smart to fall for his lines. Though young (early twenties?), she’s seen enough of the world to know better, and read enough to know where he gets his material. She refers to Astrea, Clelia, and Don Quixote, mocks the language of romances, and when the couple plans to meet at a performance of Handel’s opera Rinaldo, she warns: “whatever soft things you may tell me with relation to Armida and Rinaldo, I shall remember too well that I have been the one ever to allow you to be the other” (billet following letter 60).132 She also refers to the flighty affairs of their mutual friends, revealing a gift for catty gossip:
But oh heavens! what company did I find there! I needed no ill humour to make it insupportable. The whole was a composition of indecorum and stupidity not easy to be imagined. The insipid Marquis of ***, half sick and half amorous, with a monstrous patch upon his forehead and a withered complexion, muttered out part of an opera and, at the same time, cast a languishing look at that solemn prude Lady ***, who with a devout and contrite air sighed with much sensuality for the Chevalier N***, whilst he was uttering [an] abundance of respectful dullness to the daughter of that bigot. The two Ladies *** found themselves employment in saying all the disagreeable things of the men which the men think of them. My husband, with a negligent loll, said the greatest indecencies in the world with the modestest air imaginable to soft Lady ***. (19)
Yet this woman who should know better, against her better instincts, gives in to passion, and is shocked to see the count behave afterward like every other rake in life and fiction. She drops enough hints about her unhappy marriage to make her extramarital fling understandable, and the fact she writes the count obsessively (500 letters over what appears to be a six-month period!) betrays a woman not in as much control of her life as she thought she was. She claims in an early letter “I know myself” (16), but it’s not long before she admits “My whole letter is a collection of incoherent thoughts” (38). Crébillon leaves it up to us whether we should sympathize with her psychological struggle, or snicker to see a worldly woman who thinks she’s too smart to fall for a garden-variety rake get played like an unworldly virgin. (You’d have to be hard-hearted to take the second view, but it’s defensible.)
Crébillon’s second, more characteristic novel, The Skimmer (L’Ecumoire; ou Tanzaï et Néardarné, histoire japonaise, 1734), is a cheeky satire on French sexual mores, current fiction (especially the fad for Oriental tales), and religious politics, published—according to the title page—in Bejing by the honorable publishing house of Lou-Chou-Chu-Lu. The author barely pretends it is a translation of an ancient Japanese classic set in a fairyland called Chechianea, where an 18-year-old prince, forbidden by the ruling fairies from marrying before 21, jumps the gun and proposes to a neighboring princess named Néardarné. To circumvent the fairies’ age requirement, Prince Tanzaï’s guardian fairy Barbacela gives him a yard-long skimming ladle; if he can get both an old lady and the high priest to swallow the skimmer’s thick handle, he can marry early. The prince forces the handle into the old lady’s mouth, breaking a few teeth, but the high priest refuses to cooperate—just as Cardinal de Noailles refused to allow the pope to cram his bull Unigenitus down his throat in 1713. (The bull condemned Jansenism; Crébillon scholars agree the novel parodies this power struggle between the French clergy and Rome.) The old lady the prince violated turns out to be an evil fairy, who takes revenge on the newlyweds by making their sexual organs disappear; the huge skimmer then magically attaches itself to the prince’s groin, which gives rise to smutty jokes and adds phallic overtones to the pope’s attempt to make the French archbishop his bitch.
It gets sillier. In order to restore their genitalia, Tanzaï has to mate 13 times with a repulsive hag, and Néardarné likewise with a handsome genie, which raises difficult questions of virtue, fidelity, and sacrifice that mock those raised in more high-minded novels. With titillating innuendo and sly suggestion, the narrator/translator relates their separate sexual ordeals, boisterous and bawdy in Tanzaï’s case, teased out tediously in Néardarné’s. Their genitals restored, their lofty principles compromised by pragmatism, they return to Chechianea, convince the high priest to submit—he “licked the skimmer with a supernatural grace”—and live happily ever after; and if Néardarné suspects the handsome genie visits her occasionally at night in her husband’s form, “she took care not to blab it.”133
Not everyone was amused. Right after The Skimmer was published, Crébillon was thrown into jail for a short time because of his mockery of religious squabbles, not to mention the Chechianeans’ practice of referring to the deity as the Great Monkey.134 Abbé Prévost wrote a negative review of it (in volume 5 of his journal Le Pour et contre) and no doubt had Crébillon in mind when he suggests, in the preface to The Dean of Coleraine, “If bad writers have also succeeded, it has been either from the licentiousness of their works, with regard to morality or religion, or from the satire and detraction they contain.” After reading the parody of Marianne’s convoluted cogitations and reflections in the middle of The Skimmer (3:4–6), Marivaux gratuitously inserted a scene in The Upstart Peasant (pp. 158–60) in which an older man criticizes a younger author’s new novel—not named, but clearly The Skimmer—with pompous condescension, lecturing him on the necessity of structure (“I couldn’t see any design in your work”), selection (“One would say that you hadn’t taken the trouble to search for ideas but that you had just accepted all the fancies that came to you”), and of shielding the reader from reality, especially when it comes to sex: “The reader, though he likes some freedoms, doesn’t like extreme liberties, the excesses; they are endurable only in real life, which softens the shock; they are where they belong only there, and we pass over them because we are more truly men there; but not in a book, where they become stupid, dirty, and disgusting because of their lack of harmony with the quiet condition of the reader” (159). I hate to say it (because I admire Marivaux), but his three-page review is demonstrably wrong—the novel is clearly organized and focused on the three themes I mention above—and in fact his reads like one of those negative, fuddy-duddy reviews that unconventional novels often receive in the mainstream media. Marivaux felt insulted by Crébillon’s parody, and people often say stupid things when insulted. It’s hypocritical as well, for Marivaux himself advanced the use of sexual realism in fiction, especially in The Upstart Peasant—the very novel in which he criticizes Crébillon!—and the sex scenes in The Skimmer are too playful and wink-wink to be called dirty or disgusting. (If it were a movie, it would be rated R, not X.) Rather than upset “the quiet condition of the reader,” Crébillon simply shows the reader how love affairs are really conducted by the upper-classes, few of whom behave like the characters in romance novels: such characters may as well have been magically deprived of their genitals for all their highfalutin talk of virtue, esteem, merit, honor, and respect as the only bases for relationships. Despite its fairytale setting and farcical elements, The Skimmer is actually a realistic novel, a paradox typical of this ingenious work.
Further ingenuity is revealed after stepping back and looking at the frame rather than the picture. Making fun of the prefaces to French novels that pretend they’re history rather than mere fiction by explaining how a third party acquired a manuscript or bundle of letters, then tidied them up for publication, Crébillon prefaces The Skimmer with an elaborate, three-part account by the “translator,” who first explains that the work was traditionally ascribed to a pre-Confucian Chinese Mandarin named Kilo-hoee until a scholar named Cham-hi-hon-chu-ka-hul-chi proved—in the first volume of his Literary History of China (Beijing, 1306)—that Kilo-hoee’s work was a translation of an older Japanese novel, which itself was translated from the literary remains of the Chechianeans, long extinct. Working forward, the translator then tracks the nove
l’s translation into Dutch, then Latin—attended by commentaries and glosses—and then into Venetian, all by translators with a weak grasp of the languages they were translating from. Capping this farce, the French translator admits his Venetian is shaky because “he studied Italian but two months, under a Frenchman, his particular friend, who had lived but six weeks in Rome” (1:viii). In the course of the novel, the translator occasionally admits he may be mistranslating something—like the evocation of the Chechianean deity as “O Luminous Ape” (2:9)—but finally, about two-thirds through the novel, he comes clean and admits he has, in effect, been writing his own novel:
The only duty of a translator is to render his author literally, except in those places where he does not understand him, for in this case he is allowed to paraphrase, comment upon, or dress him as he pleases. The translator of this book owns frankly that, as he does not understand his author perfectly, he has added as many silly things at least as he suppressed; that he has been prolix where the Chinese author was concise, exact where he was inaccurate, dark where he was clear, jocose where he was serious, courtly where he was philosophical, and that with regard to the several errors he may have committed, he does not apologize or beg the noble reader’s pardon on that account, since this would not make his work a whit the better, nor would he himself be more esteemed for such groveling condescension. (4:13)
At this point in the novel he’s trying to describe an ancient Chechianean opera, but opts for describing a modern French one instead, focusing on French actresses who alternate between roles of virgin and whore, like most women of the translator’s acquaintance. The translator’s obviously off on a frolic of his own, satirizing current French culture with only superficial reference to the ancient text he’s supposedly translating, and which he often mocks in his chapter titles—“Containing Events of Very Little Importance”; “The Least Diverting in the Whole Book”; “Trifles Treated on Too Seriously”; “Which Perhaps Will Not Be Understood By Everybody” (the Marivaux parody); “Which Is of No Use but to Spin out the Work”—a practice Crébillon picked up from Cervantine writers like Scarron and one that he would employ again to much comic effect. And of course behind the translator, holding up the frame, stands Crébillon, confident he has created a novel, as another chapter title has it, “Which Will Make More Readers Than One Gape.”
After an epistolary novel and an Oriental fairy tale, Crébillon turned his hand to the memoir-novel, which resulted in his finest work, The Wayward Head and Heart (Les Egarements du coeur et de l’esprit, 1736–38). In his game-changing preface, Crébillon proclaims “Every age, every year even, introduces a new taste,” and that it is time to retire novels like Prévost’s: “instead of filling [novels] with farfetched and obscure situations, with heroes whose characters and adventures alike are always incredible,” novelists should aim for a more accurate “picture of human life. . . . Events artfully invented would be naturally expressed. There would be no more sinning against propriety and reason. Sentiment would not be exaggerated; man would at last see himself as he is. He would be dazzled less, but instructed more.”135 This sounds like the recipe for a respectable mainstream novel, but The Wayward Head and Heart is startling, even shocking compared to the fiction of its time. Crébillon blows the whistle on the standard French novel and announces Adult Swim, then releases a few sharks into the pool.
Reliving a two-week period back during the profligate Regency (1715–23), the Comte de Meilcour recalls all the stupid mistakes he made when he was 17 and thought he was ready to enter adult society. Several older women, beginning with the 40-something Mme de Lursay, offer to show him the ropes, only to have their stratagems exposed by a sardonic libertine named Versac, all while Meilcour struggles with his love-at-first-sight attraction to his indifferent cousin Hortense. Finally consummating his affair with Lursay but still in unrequited love with Hortense, unsure whether his mentor Versac is the smartest or most corrupt man in Paris, Meilcour is left with “an emptiness in my heart” that echoes the “void in my heart” he felt at the beginning of the novel” (771, 909).
As in his first novel, Crébillon works under self-imposed constraints, an exercise in minimalism: a brief time-frame, a small number of characters and settings, minimal decor, and a limited point of view. He keeps the novel brief by omitting, with been-there-done-that impatience, the stuff most novelists would include: “The imaginings of lovers, their doubts, their changing resolutions, are sufficiently well known for the conflicting emotions that tormented me to be very easily divined, and I have spoken too often of my inexperience—my story shows too clearly how many delusions I owed to it—for me to have to dwell further on the subject” (874). Shaved off 100 pages right there. The language, as promised, is “naturally expressed”; the prose is hard and clean, with almost no metaphors or imagery. The dialogue is highly realistic, and deliberately eschews “novelese.” Here, for example, is Versac wising up Meilcour regarding a cougar trying to sink her claws into him:
“When a man of your age visits a woman like Mme de Senanges, appears in public with her, and permits a correspondence to be established, he must have his reasons. One does not commonly do such things without a motive. She must think that you adore her.”
“What she supposes is of no interest to me,” I answered. “I know how to undeceive her.”
“That would be very ill bred,” he replied,136 “and you give her some right to complain of your behavior.”
“It seems to me,” I answered, “that I have more right to complain of hers. What reason has she to think I owe her my heart?”
“Your heart!” said he. “Novelists’ jargon. What makes you suppose that is what she is asking for? She is incapable of so ridiculous a pretension.”
“What does she want then?” I asked.
“A kind of intimate connection,” he answered. “A warm friendship that resembles love in its pleasures without having any of its foolish niceties. In a word, she has a fancy for you, and that is all you owe her in return.” (878)
Mocking his younger self’s trust in novels, the older narrator wryly notes, “I was deeply in love because the passion had been implanted in my heart by one of those bolts from the blue that characterize all great affairs in novels” (788), and later condemns their uselessness: “I remembered in that instant all the episodes in novels I had read that treated of speaking to one’s mistress, and was surprised to find that not one of them was of any help to me. I kept hoping she might trip, that she might even twist her ankle” (803), like Marivaux’s Marianne. “Sentiment would not be exaggerated” Crébillon predicted of the new novel, and here sentiment is raped by cynical worldliness, which may be exaggerated—the novel is a scathing attack on the leisure class, especially women, and the dialogue burns with “polite acidity” (863)—but which nonetheless results in a more accurate “picture of human life” than other novels of the time.137 His characterization is refreshingly realistic and psychologically acute; his analysis of society women prompted the French novelist/critic Sébastien Mercier to write shortly after Crébillon’s death, “He knew women as much as it was possible to know them” (Levi, 182), and in the outrageous Versac—who tosses off epigrams like a Wildean dandy—he resuscitated the libertine figure from d’Urfé’s Astrea: Count Versac is Hylas transplanted from the forest of Forez to the salons of Paris. His relationship to Meilcour anticipates that of Vautrin to Eugène de Rastignac in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (as Mylne points out [135]) and of Lord Harry to Wilde’s Dorian Gray (as I’m pointing out). And for a novel obsessed with the sexual games aristocrats play, it’s quite chaste, free of the schoolboy naughtiness Crébillon’s name used to conjure up.
The three-part Wayward Head and Heart may be incomplete; summarizing the novel in his preface, Crébillon writes, “The first and second parts deal with [Meilcour’s] ignorance and with his first experiences of love. In sections that follow, he is a man full of false ideas and riddled with follies, who is still governed less by himself than
by the persons whose interest it is to corrupt his heart and mind. You will see him finally, in the last part, restored to himself, owing all his virtues to a good woman” (769–70). Whether the public’s response wasn’t strong enough to inspire him to continue (a condition he sets at the end of the preface), or whether, like Marivaux, he felt he had made his point and didn’t need to press it, is impossible to say. (Specialists of the period are divided on this point.) At any rate, the ambiguous ending leaves the novel more open to interpretation, one of many reasons the novel feels uncannily modern; aside from its period details, it sounds like a novel that could have been written in 1963, the year Barbara Bray’s fluent translation appeared. Even the title sounds modern: The Wayward Head and Heart rather than Memoirs of the Count of Asterisks. I’m not a fan of minimalist fiction, but Crébillon worked the fat off the French novel to admirable effect, helped it to slim down and grow up, and established a leanness (and even meanness) that would characterize much French fiction for the rest of the century.