by Steven Moore
An extended thought-experiment, Casanova fantasizes how a utopian society might work—Protocosmo is a highly regulated, mathematically determined, class-conscious society of naked androgynes devoted to the arts—and then imagines the changes he would make, indifferent or unaware that most of the changes are for the worse. (Edward displays the smug confidence of a colonizer or missionary.) Despite some farsighted inventions—the automobile, airplane, fountain pen, hot plate, television, telegraph poles, chemical warfare, and acoustic engineering—Casanova is surprisingly conservative, imagining a world very much like his own, only one where he could display the full range of his talents and be better appreciated by his patrons. (Aside from the incest, it’s sexually conservative as well, critical of the libertinism for which his name is synonymous.) Brooding often on the Garden of Eden myth, Edward introduces Christianity to the sun-worshiping Megamicres and makes himself pope, but he doesn’t allow his disciples to examine this new religion and in fact encourages religious ignorance, especially in his most devout son: “How could I undeceive him? The whole edifice of belief might crumble” (160). As Edward’s sons move out and take control of other lands, political conflict and diplomatic treachery lead to war, yet Edward remains curiously unmoved by his destruction of Eden. This was the realpolitik world Casanova knew, and it’s odd that after imagining a utopian alternative he would slowly make it resemble his own.
Like Casanova, Edward spends enormous amounts of time and resources trying to impress others: “I realized that to make a fortune for myself and my posterity, I had to win the Megamicres’ respect by means of some dazzling achievement. A beautiful fireworks display would surpass all my previous productions” (135–36). Icosameron is a fireworks display of Casanova’s encyclopedic knowledge of music, science, theology, optics, mathematics, architecture, politics, history, philosophy, chemistry, genetics, medicine, economics, and literature. The novel has some innovative touches, like Casonova’s transcription of a sentence in Megamicran that Elizabeth sings-speaks:
It also raises some interesting philosophical questions; the Megamicres know in advance the day they will die, and Edward ponders: “Would we here be better off if we also knew? If we knew, perhaps we would not waste our allotted time in inconsequential activities. As it is, we prefer not to know. We reject the thought of death and delude ourselves into thinking that we will never die” (159), which is a heretical but honest thing for a Christian to admit. But Icosameron is a little too much like a fireworks display: interesting while it lasts but leaving behind little of value. Even for a fantasy novel it is marred by implausibilities and inconsistencies: Casanova often forgets his Englishmen are three times bigger than the Megamicres; Edward’s 17th-century listeners are comfortable with the idea of incest; and the idea of an English lad becoming a Leonardesque inventor within a few years is hard to swallow, as even Casanova came to realize: on the 12th day of the narrative, an auditor notes Edward “had a good education and he was clever” but “he had no experience in the arts and not much more of science than would be expected of a fourteen year old. Yet over there, with no books to help, he became an artisan, an architect, an engraver, an alchemist, a mathematician, a theologian, an excellent oculist, a poet and a great politician,” while another auditor “keeps wondering about the learned words and phrases Edward uses in discussing some of the Megamicran affairs. They surely did not know Greek so he must have supplied them himself in his narration” (131–32). Edward says he learned a little Greek in school—which is where he presumably picked up the word icosameron—and “read a great deal in physics and the arts,” but he dodges further questions and quickly gets back to his story. In essence, Casanova gives a tour of his own mind, not of Protocosmo, which is one reason Icosameron doesn’t really work as a novel: it’s the wrong vehicle for that destination. (I remind myself that I read a severely abridged edition, but I doubt the material that wound up on the translator’s cutting-room floor would redeem it.201) Casanova was crushed when he realized the novel would not make him rich or famous, and only then took up a suggestion made years earlier to write his memoirs. He died before knowing that fascinating book was the one that would assure his immorality; I read it 30 years ago and consider it one of the great reading experiences of my life.
Another writer more famous for his memoirs than his novels is the inkstained “Rousseau of the gutter,” “the chambermaids’ Voltaire” (as early critics derided him): Nicolas-Edme Restif (originally Rétif), usually called Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806). Trained as a printer, inspired by Marie Riccoboni’s novels (some of which he typeset), he wrote 50 books occupying some 200 volumes, half of them novels, including Les Contemporaines (My Contemporaries, 1780–85), a 42-volume collection of 272 novellas and 444 stories, and a 2,000-page autobiography, Monsieur Nicolas (1794–97), which is ranked by some up there with Rousseau’s Confessions and Casanova’s memoirs. During the last 20 years of his life, Restif literally lived for writing; a typical day consisted of “writing in bed from daybreak until three o’clock in the afternoon, dining in bed, and spending the rest of the day correcting proofs or working on his own books at the printer’s. Often, as in the later stages of the publication of Monsieur Nicolas, he actually composed his works at the printer’s, to save time and money, so that some of his books never went through the manuscript stage, but were set up in type straight away by the author.”202 Only a few of Restif’s novels have been translated into English, which is perhaps just as well—even a sympathetic critic says he wrote “too many dozens of unreadable volumes”203—but fortunately those few include his best novel as well as two interesting others from the beginning and end of his career.
Lucilla, or The Progress of Virtue (Lucile, ou les progrès de la vertu, 1768), Restif’s second novel, is noteworthy because 15-year-old Lucilla owes her progress to virtue not to religious or moral teachings but to novels. Forced to marry a debauched “monkey of a man,” Lucilla allows her father’s clerk to take her to Paris to hide, where they become separated and Lucilla is scooped up by a bawd who preps her by giving her racy Italian plays to read, then sells the ingenue to a young aristocrat named Durichemont. Struck by her innate qualities, he and his father decide to educate her in virtue by giving her uplifting novels to study—“Books have misled her,” said the sage mortal [Durichemont’s father], “and books will set her right” (chap. 15)—beginning with Riccoboni’s Story of Ernestine, which she loves so much that she is given the rest of Riccoboni’s works and three other moral novels: Rousseau’s Julie, d’Arnaud’s sentimental Julie (1767), and The Virtuous Family, which happens to be Restif’s first novel, published the year before! (It was a failure, so he probably hoped to shift some unsold units by saying Lucilla liked this one best, even though the narrator admits it’s “inferior to the two others.”) Lucilla takes the correct approach to books, the narrator argues, unlike “so many others [who] seek only the aliment of an inordinate passion, a preservative against their weariness of existence, or at most an innocent amusement; . . . Others suck only poison from them, because their corrupted souls are blind to what is good, and catch solely at evil; Lucilla collects only their honey” (chap. 16). Restif said the novel was inspired by Voltaire’s Ingenu, a debt he pays when Lucilla adds Voltaire to her reading list. But Restif’s motive was didactic, not metafictional: as Porter explains, Lucilla’s education via fiction reveals “a singular naïveté that Restif shares with at least his generation, a naïveté that in his case is doubled by the high idea he has of the author’s role in society. Restif really believes that virtuous novels change people’s lives for the better” (45–46), and sometimes they do.
Eventually Durichemont discovers that Lucilla is not the daughter of a bawd, which clears the way for their marriage and happy ending, but not before Restif indulges in the licentiousness that laces much of his work. The debauched man Lucilla was intended for takes out his displeasure in a whore’s arms, who infects him with syphilis; and returning to the bawd’s house,
Lucilla and her financé listen to an old lecher drool over the blonde teen:
do you conceive what pleasure it would be to have in one’s power, were it but for an hour, an honest girl, beloved by another, who believes her chaste, to – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – The old villain said here things at which my imagination starts back with horror, and which my pen dares not to write. (chap. 23)
Restif’s early novels tease the reader with such titillations, but later his pen will dare to write these things out.
Borrowing the form of Richardson’s Pamela (which he loved) and the title of Marivaux’s Paysan parvenu, Restif published in 1775 Le Paysan perverti (The Perverted Peasant), an 800-page epistolary novel about a good-natured if sex-crazed hayseed named Edmund Rameau who succumbs to the temptations of city life. Restif followed that a decade later with the even longer Paysanne pervertie, about Edmund’s sister Ursule, who follows a similar trajectory, then combined the two in 1787 for Le Paysan et la paysanne pervertis, which Alan Hull Walton translated as The Corrupted Ones.204 Marivaux’s peasant made out OK in the big city, but Restif’s novel is a darker, dirtier version of that archetypal journey, and in Edmund’s case is based closely on Restif’s own experiences (as a comparison with the corresponding sections of Monsieur Nicolas reveals). After Edmund leaves his Burgundy farm for Auxerre (about 100 miles SE of Paris) to apprentice himself to an artist, he gets railroaded into marrying a flirty girl named Manon who has been knocked up by Edmund’s employer, encouraged to do so by Edmund’s spiritual advisor, Gaudet d’Arras, who was forced into a monastery at age 16 and after that developed a libertine philosophy combining hedonism with social reform. Edmund’s boner for every woman he sees (including his cousin and his employer’s wife) plays into Gaudet’s hands, resulting in pregnancies and suicide. Ursule joins him in Auxerre and likewise becomes sexually active, with Gaudet’s approval, and after the siblings move to Paris they go on a sex spree: Ursule becomes a flashy courtesan until—ignoring Gaudet’s advice to observe the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would be done by” [131]) and to avoid gambling and luxury—she descends to “the lowest depths of degradation and dishonor” (168). Restif piles on the horrors as she endures multiple rapes and a career as the lowest kind of whore, soon consumed by syphilis that renders her “not only ugly, but loathsome and terrifying” (180). Edmund likewise deteriorates into a sleazebag, a sexual predator who loves to trick women into thinking they’re having sex with someone else, and a bullying pimp who rents out his own sister. Unashamed of what he’s become, he wallows in his degradation: “I find, in the lowest degrees of vice, a certain restfulness, a certain repose,” he writes his disappointed mentor (171), admitting that, like his sister, “I don’t always follow the advice you give me” (181). (Restif is careful to show that it’s not Gaudet’s libertine philosophy that corrupts them, but their inability to live by his sophisticated doctrine.) Gaudet gives up on pox-ridden Ursule—“In all honesty we must admit that an ugly woman is good for nothing,” he writes coldly (180)—but he enlists Edmund in one final scheme to become rich and powerful by marrying elderly rich ladies. After Gaudet’s bride dies mysteriously and he resists arrest, he defiantly commits suicide while Edmund is sentenced to the galleys. Years later, a broken man, Edmund returns to his childhood village, mistakenly kills his reformed sister, then is crushed beneath the wheels of his own carriage (a symbol for his self-destructive tendencies) after the horses are spooked by a stone thrown by a former mistress.
The Corrupted Ones is the ugliest French novel of its time, relentless in its depiction of the miseries caused by an undisciplined sex-drive— the perverted peasants’ mentor is all in favor of sex, but in moderation— and daringly realistic in its representation of life among the lower classes. A psychologist of perversion, Restif notes the exultation some people take in degradation—Edmund revels in his like a pig in mud, and Ursule speaks of “the joy which comes after having been beaten” (178)—which led critic F. C. Green to claim “Rétif is moving in a region never before frequented by the novelist. More than a hundred years before Gide or Proust, he stretches the confines of the novel to admit the analysis of abnormal psychology” (443). Restif describes the protagonists’ sordid surroundings with Hogarth’s eye for symbolic detail: at one low point, Edmund holes up “in a garret lit by a skylight, but very gaily wallpapered, since it was decorated with theatre posters applied directly to the lathes (174), a metaphor for this grim, gaudy novel.
The novel’s homespun message (Farmers, don’t allow yer young ’uns to go to the big city) is complicated by the fascinating Gaudet d’Arras; only a peasant would regard him as the villain of the piece. An older, noble-looking man with homosexual leanings, Gaudet is an avowed atheist who tries to cure the Rameau teens of their provincial “prejudices” regarding sentimental love—“In love I value only the physical, and that in convenient moderation” (52)—and argues “that pleasure is the highway to well-being,” qualifying that as “true pleasure, because there are also counterfeits” (51), which are the ones our perverted peasants embrace once they hit Paris, heedless of the distinction. “When you wish to judge the virtue or moral turpitude of any action,” he adviced them back in Auxerre, “you must put the following question to yourself: ‘What harm can come of it? Could it possibly prejudice my existence?—or would it only affect the approbation of those who know me?’ After this it is necessary to examine the advantages and the pleasure which the action can afford you. If the good exceeds the bad, then carry on, riding roughshod over prejudice!” (51–52). It’s the failure to apply this moral calculus that leads to the Rameaus’ ruin, not the principles behind it. But Gaudet has a larger goal than personal pleasure in mind: his final scheme, he tells Edmund, is intended not for self-aggrandizement but to reform France, “even at the risk of ruining ourselves” (41). Like many Enlightenment philosophes, he wants to abolish the monastic system, redistributing its wasted wealth to those who have served their country in some capacity, and redistributing the excessive wealth of the idle rich to the deserving peasantry. He plans to tax luxury, provide inexpensive public entertainments, decriminalize prostitution, and to lead a “moral revolution” so that “philosophy reigns supreme” and can “restore to earth the reign of reason and happiness” (201–2). Gaudet d’Arras is an amazing creation: a libertine social reformer, a gay hedonist who wants to save the world. Unfortunately, Edmund and Ursule adopt only the libertine part, unworthy of this visionary Übermensch in a monk’s cowl. “Until we come to Balzac,” the aforementioned Green writes with some exaggeration, “there is no character in European fiction who may be compared in stature or in originality with Gaudet d’Arras” (441). Green has Vautrin in mind, the homosexual criminal mastermind who preys on the young protagonists of Balzac’s best novels, but Restif’s huge novel, along with his vast Les Contemporaines, provided the blueprint for the later novelist’s Human Comedy cycle, not to mention Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, whose dirty realism and social conscience pungently recall Restif’s.
Unfortunately, the only other novel of his available in English, and one that contributed to Restif’s rather grubby reputation in some literary quarters, is a wretched piece of pornography entitled The Anti-Justine (1798). The narrator is ashamed to admit that after reading Sade’s notorious Justine (1791) he was aroused to imitate its brutal characters: “I got myself astride a whore, rode her roughshod, plied the crop and dug an implacable spur—bit her breast, kneaded her flesh, took a stick to her. . . .”205 Deciding to write an erotic novel more respectful toward women, “sweeter to the taste than any of Sade’s and which wives who would be better served will bring to the notice of their undiligent husbands” (9), Retif launches into a raunchy tale of incest (brother–sister, father
–daughter) and shoe fetishism, which is so pronounced here and in his other novels – an early one is called Franchette’s Foot (1768) – that retifism became the term for that kink. There’s no plot to speak of, just the lubricious adventures of “Cupidonnet” spurted out in gobs of coarse language, a parody of Sade at his worst, and almost as violent in spots. Restif’s contempt for Sade was mutual: writing from prison in 1783 to his wife, who often supplied him with books, Sade told her, “Above all, do not buy anything by Monsieur Rétif, in the name of God! He is a Pont-Neuf author, fit only for the bibliotheque bleu.”206 After The Anti-Justine appeared, Sade publicly attacked Restif in his “Essay on Novels,” denigrating “A style which is crude and pedestrian, nauseating adventures invariably set in the lowest company, and no merit other than a prolixity for which only spice-sellers will be grateful.” These criticisms certainly apply to The Anti-Justine, which was merely an excuse for Restif “to exercise some of his most hidden and damnable urges,” and to pile up “obscenity and irreverence with absolutely no intent other than delight in being bad” (Porter, 386, 389). Even if you share his passion “for prettily turned feet in cunning little shoes” (11), you would be well adviced to look elsewhere to get your freak on.
While Restif was sniffing along the footpaths of the libertine novel, others were taking the high road for increasingly refined works in which jaded sophisticates pursue young ingenues not simply for pleasure but to play complex mind-games, taking an icy thrill in flaunting the concepts of decency, reputation, and discretion to which their decadent set paid lip service. A superb, compact example can be found in the bleakly titled No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain, 1777) by Vivant Denon (1747–1825). In this novelette an unnamed narrator recalls a whirlwind one-night stand back when he was only 20—which he emphasizes often to excuse his naïveté—when he was seduced by the friend of his current lover (both older married women), who picked him up at the opera and took him to her château in order to hide her current lover from the husband she is reuniting with after eight years, who plays along in order to continue pursuing his own affairs. Denon propels the plot along with Voltairic velocity so that the reader is as disoriented as the narrator, both of us willing victims to seductive sophisticates. The next morning the narrator tries to sort out what happened: the husband “M. de T— had ridiculed and then dismissed me; my friend the Marquis was duping the husband and mocking me; and I was paying him back in kind, all the while admiring Mme de T—, who was making fools of us all, without losing her dignity” (32). In the final lines of the tale, when the narrator usually points the moral, he admits, “I looked hard for the moral of this whole adventure . . . and found none” (32).