by Steven Moore
I don’t think this is what Father Bougeant had in mind when calling for novelists “treading original paths, never before explored.” The selections are hallucinatory and horrific, like a cross between H. P. Lovecraft and William S. Burroughs; here’s Lamékis in the belly of a whale-sized bee:
But bit by bit the muscles of the bee’s stomach were hammering away so furiously that the parts of my body were quickly losing their distinctiveness and were gradually merging into the blood. . . . My eyes first looked for my head in the devouring stomach of the terrible beast, and then found it in the region of the heart. My head was punctured with holes through which could be seen an enflamed red spirit which was slowly consuming the skull, while the brain itself, as black now as ink, was throbbing in agitation. . . . I was astonished and wondered how my eyes could continue to think and feel without a body or soul when I realized that the pupils were attached by a nerve to my soul which was still struggling to free itself. (34)
In a previous essay on the novel (from which his headnote is taken), Fitting argues that Mouhy wasn’t making any satirical or utopian point, as most imaginary voyages do; instead, the novel seems “to lack any purpose other than the exercise of the author’s imaginative abilities,” taking “sheer delight in invention and textual play” (321, 329). Mouhy fills his novel with marvels, terrors, strange creatures, weird customs, and bizarre humor. Like the experimental writers of the time, he sports with the conventions of fiction; in addition to the metafictional elements mentioned in the headnote, Mouhy litters his novels with mock-scholarly footnotes—some real, some spurious—including some where he pretends to have difficulty with his text. (In one note, he complains that the censor eliminated more than 30 pages from a scene.) Mouhy’s later novels sound like knockoffs of popular novels,150 but this first one sounds like a remarkable literary performance, a “delirium of textual play and vivid imaginings,” as Fitting says in his headnote (30); “the novel’s extravagances go far beyond anything written at the time and should be seen as an important precursor of the fantastic,” he writes in his earlier essay (318). I hope someone is working on an English translation of Lamékis; unlike its conclusion, no pen is going to translate it by itself.
For the banner year of 1735, the editors of the esteemed New History of French Literature feature not Prince Fan-Feredin nor Lamékis—neither of which is even mentioned in its 1,158 pages—but Memoirs of the Count of Comminge, published anonymously that year and only later revealed to be by the Marquise de Tencin (1682–1749), the woman on whom Marivaux modeled the admirable Mme Dorsin in The Life of Marianne. Tencin’s slim novel takes the form of an end-of-life confession by a Trappist monk about the doomed love that sent him into dumb seclusion. The love of his life was an ice princess of the strictest virtue, a saint of self-sacrifice named Adelaide. Given Tencin’s wild youth as a Parisian party girl, the novel is surprisingly (hypocritically?) sentimental and religiose, of no real interest apart from being one of the relatively few novels written by a woman during this period.151 The narrator anticipates the melancholy romantic of later novels who enjoys the gloomier prospects of savage nature and takes masochistic pleasure in his misery; like Prévost’s man of quality, he withdraws to a monastery, “and that my whole life would be spent in the exercise of affliction administered me some consolation” (162). In fact it reads like something Prévost might have knocked out in a fortnight to buy Lenki some new jewelry.
Tencin hosted a popular literary salon that was attended by the leading novelists of the day: Montesquieu, Marivaux, Prévost, and Crébillon’s good friend Charles Pinot-Duclos (1704–72), who published two short novels at the beginning of the 1740s that provocatively dramatize both forms of libertinism, philosophical and sexual. The Story of Madame de Luz (Histoire de la baronne de Luz, 1741), set for no particular reason at the beginning of the 17th century, is the brutal, cynical story “of a woman destroyed by her own virtue.”152 Married “when little more than a child” (that is, around age 12) to a much older man whom she respects but doesn’t care for, platonically in love with the cousin she grew up with—the admirable Marquis de Saint Geran—the young baroness is raped three times over the next five or six years: first by a magistrate who holds incriminating evidence against her traitorous husband that he’ll trade for sex, forcing himself on the girl when she refuses; second by a friend who stumbles across her unconscious and nearly naked after bathing in a river and is “swept away by a burning desire impossible to resist” (59); and third by her “spiritual advisor,” who is used to dealing with older women repenting their profligate youth, not alluring teenagers. Stalking her like a Crébillon libertine, he drugs her with opium and then has his way with her, waking her with his “violent embraces and furious convulsions” (74). Ashamed by these multiple assaults, the teen wastes away; even the death of her husband and the consequent opportunity to marry her childhood sweetheart doesn’t prevent her from dying, though not before she tells devoted Saint Geran of her rapes. He vows to avenge her, but in a final ironic twist, all three rapists elude him and he suffers a stroke and dies, “with the name of his beloved on his lips” (80).
Belittling virtue and duty, the novel’s sarcastic narrator challenges the guiding principles of earlier novelists and their self-sacrificial heroines. “A virtuous woman doesn’t seem to fit into the scheme of things,” he observes in the opening line. “So, since it’s so difficult to be virtuous, what’s the point? Even if she succeeds in remaining virtuous, society will regard her as odd: men will ignore her or avoid her company, while women will indulge in malicious gossip behind her back” (3). Though she doesn’t love the husband arranged for her, she feels it’s her duty to be faithful to him, but “Mother nature will always take precedence over duty,” the narrator notes, “which in any case often involves resisting her” (9). The narrator implies that multiple rapes are what a woman can expect if she clings to unsociable, unnatural notions like virtue and duty: “Torn by remorse, she failed to realize that it was caused less by her crime than by her virtue itself” (62). He enjoys rubbing reality in her face, most notably in the scene where the lusty magistrate counters her threat to complain to the king by giving her a three-page lecture on how the law really works (33–36; Duclos studied law when younger, though he spent most of that time chasing women and tangling with the police). Of the two suitors who later take an interest in her, an obnoxious one and a nice one, it’s the nice one who rapes her by the river, and it’s the spiritual advisor who is the real libertine of the novel. Not surprisingly, several critics have noted that this tale of the misfortunes of virtue anticipates Sade’s Justine.
Shifting from the third-person historical novel to the first-person memoir-novel, The Confessions of the Comte de *** (1742) takes the same form as Manon Lescaut: a man pushing 40 tells a visiting younger man why he has abandoned his promiscuous life in Paris for a solitary one in the country, shared only with “a true friend” (84). As a rich, handsome teenager with the right connections, the count was introduced to society sex by an older woman, began sowing oats while in the army with “garrison ladies” and a woman he meets in Spain (whose husband he kills), then returns to Paris to tramp through a cattle call of coquettes (mostly married women), sows more oats in Italy and England (where he drives a woman to suicide), then back to Paris to bed more social butterflies, ballerinas, hypocritically pious women, and lawyers’ and bankers’ wives during the swinging Regency, including a salon hostess based on the Marquise de Tencin. Eventually deciding to trade up from pleasure to love, he begins courting a reserved young widow named Mme de Selves; she seems to reform the rake and clean him up for marriage, but he backslides into his tomcatting ways. Remarkably, she patiently waits until he gets it out of his system, and when the count finally sobers up from the “reckless intoxication of the senses” (191), he marries her and they retire to his country estate. Mme de Selves turns out to be the “true friend” sharing his solitude.
Possessing “a good heart, a true heart,
but a frivolous mind,” as his future wife tells him (188), the count is less a cold-blooded libertine than a warm-hearted man-about-town with a healthy libido (like Duclos himself in the 1720s). The women he consorts with are as promiscuous as he is—no need to rape, as in Duclos’s earlier novel—and in one instance when a beautiful 16-year-old is offered to him in gratitude for a loan to a distressed widow, he magnanimously refuses and arranges for her to marry her sweetheart. The novel was enormously popular in its time, but only partly, I suspect, because it’s the “true confessions” of a dashing playboy who eventually finds true love with a good woman. Rather, the count’s uncensored candor gives the reader the impression she’s getting the inside scoop on the sexcapades of the upper classes. In conversation, Duclos was notorious for his blunt talk, which he deploys in the novel to create realistic effects not seen in the French novel since Challe’s Illustrious Frenchwomen. Marivaux would never have referred to “the anemic chalky complexion of a rather suspect blonde” (146), and even Crébillon wouldn’t have casually noted that a woman’s husband “had become rather heavily involved with a young man and had drifted away from her” (113). Though the count isn’t explicit about his sexual encounters, he is about cultural matters, and his straight talk allows us to realize how little people have changed over the centuries. During the Regency, France suffered an economic disaster as bad as the crash of 2008, which was caused by exactly the same kind of people: back then, “whatever his background, a man could launch himself into the money business determined to make a fortune without any special aptitude other than basic greed and avarice, no scruples as to how sordid the work might be at the start, a conscience free of any qualms as to the methods he would use and, having made his pile, no thought of remorse” (141). And today’s Sex and the City wannabes resemble their Regency sisters so closely as to question evolution:
[T]his is a species of woman who has no principles, passions, or ideas. She can’t think and yet imagines she can feel; her mind and her heart are equally cold and vapid. She’s interested only in trivia and talks in platitudes, which she thinks are original ideas. She brings everything back to herself or to some other petty detail which has attracted her attention. She likes to appear knowledgeable and thinks she is indispensable. She’s in her element when quibbling, her main interests lie in jewelry, fashion, and clothes in general. She’ll interrupt an interesting conversation to point out that this year’s taffeta is in appalling taste and a disgrace for the whole country. She takes a lover in the same way as she chooses a dress, because it’s the fashion. (155)
Duclos’s gallery of not-so-illustrious Frenchwomen and the count’s caustic cultural criticism are accompanied by some memorable maxims, such as “Women should never complain about men, we are what they have made us” (165–66). The Confessions of the Comte de *** isn’t a great novel, but its frank tone impressed Duclos’s friend Rousseau (who may have titled his Confessions after it), and it left its scent on Diderot and Laclos.
Duclos’s Confessions appears, and that maxim illustrated, in what must be the most precious libertine novel ever, The Fairy Doll (La Poupée, 1744) by Jean Galli de Bibiena (c. 1709–79). A stinging satire on foppish abbés and a primer on how a gentleman should treat a woman, it concerns an inexperienced abbé named Philandre who is rescued from his ludicrous attempts to impress the ladies by a sylphid—an elemental being (actually a cleaned-up succubus) popularized by Abbé de Villars’s Comte de Gabalis. Having failed to seduce any society women, Philandre is about to rent a shopgirl’s hourly affections when he is transfixed and aroused by a beautiful eight-inch doll in her shop—the form the sylphid Zamire assumed to attract his attention. It’s love at first sight, especially when he dishevels her clothes and notices she’s anatomically correct. After he gets her home, the doll comes to life and, seating herself on a copy of Duclos’s Confessions, explains that sylphs attain immortality only after they fall in love with a human and—more importantly—cure him of his “faults and follies.”153 She explains how she wasted four months on an irredeemably vain abbé in a comic adventure featuring Clitandre and Julie from Crébillon’s Opportunities of a Night, then goes to work on Philandre.
Zamire grows taller at each stage of Philandre’s redemption, beginning when he wipes off his man-makeup and renounces his various foppish affectations. When she reaches the height of a five-year-old, Philandre nervously explains that his ardor disappeared, lest anyone suspect a priest of pedophilia, but it reignites when she’s the size of a 14-year-old. The living doll lectures him on how “rational” women want to be treated—not “the empty-headed and disreputable ones” (117), who seem to prefer douchebags—and stresses the importance of allowing women to dominate a relationship, especially after marriage. Philandre goes along with all this, and is rewarded with a full-grown 16-year-old beauty in his arms. But when he abandons “delicacy” and “became silent, sullen, and bold, and I tried to plunge straight into the full intoxication of the senses” (143), the lady vanishes. He apologizes, she rematerializes, and taking things at her tempo, he loses his virginity and she attains immortality. It’s all very smart and charming, and (I’ll confess) kind of hot.
The Fairy Doll has a Russian doll structure: the narrator is writing down a story he overheard Philandre tell his lawyer-friend one day, and which the narrator already told the woman for whom he’s writing this. In the center of the novel is the long story-within-a-story Zamire tells Philandre about the other irredeemable abbé. In a sense, the whole thing is the narrator’s demonstration to the woman who requested it that he too has learned his lesson about how to treat women, and who’s in charge: “be good enough to remember that I have obeyed you” (153) he ends his work, hoping to be rewarded as passionately as Philandre was. All silliness of sylphs aside, Galli de Bibiena reiterates Duclos’s maxim that women have the Lysistratan power to shape male behavior, if only they had the will to wield that power more often.
Duclos was also a friend and literary advisor of Françoise de Graffigny (1695–1758), who after a rough early life took up creative writing in her forties; attending a performance in 1743 of Voltaire’s Incan tragedy Alzire and following it up with Garcilaso de la Vega’s 17th-century Royal Commentaries of Peru, she wrote a subversive epistolary novel entitled Letters from a Peruvian Woman (Lettres d’un Péruvienne, 1747; rev. ed. 1752) that became a surprise best-seller and, after a long period of neglect, has been deservedly crowned a feminist classic. In 41 letters written over the course of about two years’ time, the Incan princess Zilia tells how she was abducted from the Temple of the Sun by “savages” (Spaniards) on what was to have been her wedding day to a prince of the realm named Aza, and then shipped to Europe, only to be rescued after a sea battle by a benevolent Frenchman named Déterville, who falls in love with the young girl and installs her in his family’s home in Paris. Grateful to him but devoted to Aza, she gets Déterville to track him down in Spain, where he has converted to Catholicism. (She remains faithful to the sun-god of the Inca.) Aza travels up to France only to tell her his new religion forbids him from marrying her (they’re related), though in truth he has fallen for some señorita; the unrequited lover Déterville has traveled to Malta to drown his sorrows, and in her final letters Zilia urges him to return to France, not to take Aza’s place in her heart (which will always belong to him), but to become her platonic friend and intellectual companion.
The ending upset readers of the time, who expected a conventional ending: either marriage to devoted Déterville or reconciliation and marriage to her true love Aza, but Zilia is not a conventional girl and this is not a conventional novel. First, Graffigny combined two hitherto-segregated types of epistolary novel: the romantic confessions of women (Letters of a Portuguese Nun etc.) and the cultural criticism of foreign men (Persian Letters etc.). The first half of Letters from a Peruvian Woman follows the female version as Zilia pines for Aza to the point where she contemplates suicide, but after she’s been in France long enough to get the lay of the
land, she turns into a caustic social commentator, upbraiding the upper-classes for their frivolity, insincerity, hypocrisy, and especially their demeaning treatment of women. And to a far greater degree than her male predecessors, Graffigny deploys enstrangement to sharpen her criticism and to convey a foreigner’s disorientation. When she was hustled under cover of darkness on board the Spanish galleon—a vehicle she had no prior knowledge of—she is baffled by a “house” that was “not fixed to the ground, but seemed to be somehow suspended, in a state of perpetual rocking.”154 She uses alien imagery, as when describing the difference between her Spanish and French captors: “The stern and fierce appearance of my first abductors shows that they were made from the same substance as the hardest metals; the men before me now seem to have slipped from the Creator’s hands before he had done more than assemble for their composition just air and fire” (4). Once in France—which she initially assumes is an outpost of the Incan empire—she describes its people and customs in the same terms an ethnocentric Spaniard would use to describe the heathen Inca, heightening their ridiculousness. As daring as any libertine of the time, Zilia zings Catholicism: “As for the origins and principles of this religion, they did not seem to me any more incredible than the story of Mancocapa, and of the lake Tisicaca,” she admits, but she sees such a “striking inconsistency” between Catholicism and its followers “that my reason flatly refuses to believe” it (21). She prefers her own nature-based religion to the “illusions” of that “strange” system (38).