by Steven Moore
Une Liaison dangereuse is the title of a modern edition of the letters of the fascinating Isabelle de Charrière (1740–1805). Born into an aristocratic Dutch family, educated to a level far beyond that of most women of her time, Belle van Zuylen (as she was known in Holland) made her literary debut at age 22 with a pert novelette—written in French and published anonymously—entitled The Nobleman (Le Noble, 1763), in which the spirited daughter of a stuffy nobleman defies him by tossing their ancestral portraits out the window as a bridge over muddy water to elope with a young aristocrat whose nobility is of more recent vintage. Loving her father but refusing to be a victim of his “ridiculous prejudice,” Julie pursues her own happiness while her dissolute brother, as snobbish as his father, marries a lady with “a squint and a hunchback; but the honor of uniting his arms and quarters to hers encouraged him to overlook all the rest. In any case he counted on consoling himself with less noble and less ugly creatures, and had too much greatness of soul to think it was obligatory to love the person one marries.”212 Belle’s uptight Utrecht parents didn’t appreciate this mockery of their class and suppressed the delightfully impudent work.
Charrière didn’t resume writing fiction until her forties, by which time she was unhappily married and living in a village in Switzerland, where she remained the rest of her life, whiling away the hours playing the harpsichord, instructing her maid in Locke’s philosophy, and corresponding with a number of intellectuals, including Johnson’s Boswell (whose marriage proposal she declined) and later the novelist Benjamin Constant. In 1784 she published her third novella, Letters of Mistress Henley (Lettres de Mistriss [sic] Henley), a metafictional critifiction of “startling modernity,” English Showalter said, deserving to “become a curricular standard like ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ or The Awakening.”213 Annoyed by the male bias of a controversial novel entitled Le mari sentimental (The Sentimental Husband, 1783) by Samuel de Constant (Benjamin’s uncle) about a reasonable husband driven to suicide by his unreasonable wife, Mrs. Henley informs a friend that she wants to send her a series of letters describing her frustrating experience with her own “reasonable” husband, giving her permission to publish them someday if she judges them “likely to arouse interest,” for “I think many women are in my situation” (5). A lively, imaginative woman stuck with a fuddy-duddy husband devoted to “reason and moderation” who takes her away from London to live in the country, she slowly goes crazy with boredom and from guilt over her inability to settle down. Charrière conveys this with “startling modernity,” as Showalter says: it reads like a New Yorker story from 1984, not something written in Switzerland in 1784, in that it favors small, telling gestures over big, dramatic events. For example, after her husband notes with polite disapproval that his wife’s Angora cat is scratching his antique chairs—“‘Ah!’ said Mr. Henley, ‘what would my grandmother say, what would my mother say, if they were to see . . .”—Mrs. Henley argues that she should be able to feel at home in her bedroom. As he leaves “gently and sadly, resignedly,” she calls out after him, “No, it’s not the cat” (14)—implying it’s the marriage. (The cat, braver than its mistress, eventually runs off into the woods.) Charrière carefully chooses trifles like this to symbolize the larger problems the couple is having, trifles that few earlier novelists would have bothered with but that would ring true to other women in her situation. Unhappy and bored, anxious to please her husband and feeling guilty for failing to do so (and resenting having to do so), stuck with his child from a previous marriage who gets on her nerves, this desperate housewife is reduced to staring out her window:
An old lime tree screens a rather charming view from from one of my windows. I wanted to have it felled; but when I looked closely, I myself could see that that would be a pity. The best I can find to do, in this verdant season, is to watch the leaves appear and unfold, the flowers blossom, a cloud of insects fly, creep, run every which way. I don’t understand any of it, I apprehend it but superficially; but I contemplate and admire this world that is so full, so alive. I lose myself in this vast whole that is so wonderful, I do not say so wise, for I am too ignorant: I know not its ends, I know neither its means nor its purpose, I do not know why the voracious spider is entitled to so many gnats; but I watch, and hours pass during which I have not thought even once about myself or my childish sufferings. (35)
That sounds like it was lifted from a story by Alice Munro or Ann Beattie, doesn’t it. Also quite modern is Charrière’s avoidance of closure: no one commits suicide or runs off with a secret lover. Pregnant, exhausted after a near-miscarriage, Mrs. Henley leaves us hanging at the end of her last, despondent letter: “In a year, in two years, you will learn, I trust, that I am reasonable and contented, or that I am no more” (42). Charrière’s readers were frustrated: which will it be? But the author knew the novella would be more powerful if it simply trailed off in quiet desperation. It became as controversial as the “appealing and cruel little book” (3) that provoked it, more so because it called into question the institution of marriage: the novella opens with an epigraph truncated from La Fontaine’s Fables: “I’ve seen many marriages, etc.”—leaving out the rest: “none of them tempts me.”
Charrière followed this iconoclastic work with a longer, two-part epistolary novel entitled Letters from Lausanne (Lettres écrites de Lausanne, 1785, 1787), whose second half, subtitled Caliste, became Charrière’s most popular work—possibly because it’s the only one with a traditional ending.214 A smart satire on Swiss society, the first half consists of letters written by a mother in Switzerland to a friend in Languedoc describing the trouble she’s having finding a husband for her teenage daughter Cécile. Nothing remarkable happens, which is in itself remarkable; Charrière was content to describe the daily lives of these two women without melodrama, focusing on their unusually strong relationship. After a minor incident with a young English lord—he sneaks a kiss from Cécile while she’s bandaging his cut hand—the mother has a frank talk with her daughter about men, going so far as to tell her that sometimes a suitor will get worked up by a visit to a nice young lady like her and, “should he have met a light woman in the street,” will relieve himself into that common vessel.215 Charrière isn’t as frank as Laclos or Restif,216 but her advice is refreshingly free of cant. Aware she’s writing a different kind of fiction, Charrière distances herself from typical novels: “But recollect that my daughter and I are not a romance,” Madame de C— tells her correspondent, “nor a moral lesson, nor an example to be cited” (93), and dismisses her conventional-minded questions: “you thought you were discussing a book or questioning an author” (94). (Charrière is obviously anticipating reader responses.) When the mother and daughter decide to take a break from Lausanne society at the end of part 1, they take with them The Arabian Nights, Hamilton’s fairy tales, Gil Blas, and Zadig, but these fanciful fictions remain unread; Charrière isn’t working in that male mode.
Part 2 goes off in an unexpected and disappointing direction. It consists almost entirely of a novella-length letter to Madame de C— from the governor of the English lord paying suit to Cécile, an overly sentimental account of how he fell in love with an actress-turned-kept woman named Caliste—she played that role in Nicholas Rowe’s popular play The Fair Penitent—but didn’t have the courage to defy his father’s objection to their marriage. They both reluctantly marry other people, then later coincidentally run into each other at a performance of The Fair Penitent, and once again fail to defy society (with lightning overhead threatening divine disapproval as well). She dies in the odor of sanctity, leaving him heartbroken. Like Rousseau’s Julie, Caliste is an idealized figure, and though Charrière again exposes the ridiculous prejudices held by high society, the novella is too soap-operatic, fitter for the Ladies Home Journal than the New Yorker, in this man’s opinion.217 It does have autobiographical interest; like Mrs. Henley, Caliste is a portrait of the artist as a frustrated woman: “Caliste is Madame de Charrière’s hidden self,” Geoffrey Scott
suggests in his charming and elegant biography, “or, if you will, her anti-self. Caliste is made up, singly and limpidly, of all those emotions she knew she could have lived by, and had not.”218
Far more interesting, aesthetically and thematically, is a later novel by Charrière entitled Three Women (Trois femmes, 1796) published in London in the messy middle of the Revolution. Formally, it’s an innovative hybrid of frame-tale narrative and epistolary novel, with selections from a Voltairean philosophical dictionary included near the end. It begins with some salonnières discussing a perennial literary question: in times of political crises, how should novelists respond, and in what manner:
“For whom should authors be writing nowadays?” asked the Abbé de la Tour.
“For me,” replied the young baroness of Berghen.
“These days people think, and dream, about nothing but politics,” the abbé continued.
“I detest politics myself,” said the baroness, “and the ravages of war on my country [the Netherlands] make me long for distraction; so I would be most grateful to any writer who could agreeably engage my thoughts and feelings, for even a day or two.”
“My God!” the abbé exclaimed, after a moment’s silence. “Baroness, if I might . . . ?”
“You might,” she said.
“But no, I couldn’t,” said the abbé. “You’d find my style insipid compared with today’s writers! Could people used to watching daring feats and flying somersaults enjoy watching a man simply walk in an ordinary way?”
“They certainly could,” replied the baroness. “They would be happy to watch anyone who walks with sufficient grace and speed toward an interesting destination.”219
As the abbé promises to provide the baroness with a story that illustrates Kant’s doctrine of duty,220 which the salon has been discussing recently, we see Charrière metafictionly preparing the reader for her own novel, which will be both “distracting” and politically engaged, and written in a graceful manner, not like a circus act. (She probably had in mind Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage around My Room, published in nearby Lausanne in 1795, and marveled over a few more pages below.)
In part 1, a delightful, self-contained novella, the abbé tells how he recently met three interesting women in a small village in Germany: 16-year-old Emilie, fleeing the Revolution with her aristocratic parents who die upon arrival; Emilie’s earthy maid Josephine;221 and Constance, a rich widow who inherited an ill-gotten fortune made in the Indies, on the run from those who want her to return the money. Emilie attracts the attention of Théobald, the young lord of the manor nearby, who decides to dump the insipid countess he’s engaged to in favor of the French émigré, and Josephine attracts the less noble attention of Théobold’s servant Henri, who impregnates her. In a novel where each major character represents a philosophical doctrine (but without the trappings of allegory), the pregnancy of hedonist Josephine causes utilitarian Constance to soften intuitionist Emilie’s blind allegiance to stiff moral principles, while Kantian Théobald abandons duty (to his parents and to his fiancée) to elope with Emilie. It all works out for the best, only because everyone realizes that it’s better “to relax the commitment to a moral theory,” as translator Rooksby writes in her introduction, to practice “other important values such as benevolence, gratitude, and friendship” (xx). At a time when competing philosophical and political theories were tearing Europe apart, they wisely decide to cultivate their own gardens in Westphalia.
Part 2 begins with the abbé (i.e., Charrière) discussing his story with the rather dim baroness—“Your three women did not seem to me to prove anything in particular” (99)—then shares with her a series of letters from Constance updating him on events in the village after he left. Part 1 was largely about Emilie’s moral education; part 2 is about communal education. A great admirer of both Voltaire and Rousseau (whose Emile is evoked), Charrière describes a number of sociological experiments Constance and Théobald perform: when Josephine’s baby and that of a different countess are born the same day and accidentally mixed up, our two philosophes look forwarding to seeing if “innate” class differences emerge, and when twins are born to a woman who dies in childbirth, Constance determines to name the girl Charles and the boy Charlotte, raise them identically, and see what if any gender differences develop. Théobald starts a school for the villagers and begins writing a Political, Moral and Rural Dictionary for their use in the manner of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. (The entry for liberty reads: “Oh what a word! We never understand it, and nobody ever explains its meaning. It is a grimy flag; but as soon as it is unfurled, we march and follow it onward, toward any virtue, any crime, and to our deaths” [165].) This section displays the remarkable range of Charrière’s interests and her suggestions for how society might be reorganized following the chaos of the Revolution. Constance realizes “We have been jolted out of the familiar rut that our lives used to follow” (121), and it is interesting to overhear Charrière rethinking cultural and gender matters and to offer new alternatives to old prejudices. The novel breaks off as Emilie, learning that French soldiers are hunting down aristocratic fugitives like herself, goes off with Constance and Théobald’s father to hide in a small town, avoiding inflexible principles in favor of mobility, improvisation, and situational ethics, “despising all other grandiloquent nonsense” (175).
Three Women is a superb achievement: smart, innovative, irreverent, iconoclastic, fun to read but intellectually stimulating, and a demonstration that women—shut out from public discourse by French revolutionaries—were as qualified as men, if not more so, to suggests ways that France could reinvent itself. Isabelle de Charrière is easily the most impressive French woman novelist of the 18th century;222 and if she’s not quite at the level of Challe, Marivaux, Voltaire, Diderot, and Laclos, she has a distinction they lack: an asteroid is named after her—9604 Bellevanzuylen.
“And Bernardin de Saint-Pierre?” someone asks during a literary discussion in Three Women (123). This military adventurer and naturalist (1737–1814) wrote the once popular but deservedly forgotten Paul and Virginia (Paul et Virginie, 1788). A religiose confection of sentimental pap, it concerns two kids born to French émigrés on the island of Mauritius (east of Madagascar), who live in paradisaic circumstances until they reach puberty. Virginia’s menarche is accompanied by a cataclysmic night of thunder and lightning, suggesting divine disapproval and the loss of Eden; the next day, her little garden “was completely devastated; dreadful gullies scored its surface; most of the fruit-trees had been uprooted; great piles of sand covered the borders of the meadows and had filled in the basin of Virginia’s pool” (75). (I’m guessing an erection from Paul would have triggered the apocalypse.) Virginia’s mother reluctantly sends her back to France to claim an inheritance from a mean old aunt; Virginia returns to Mauritius a few years later dressed in the latest fashion, but when a shipwreck forces her to choose between stripping and swimming or going down with the ship, she choses “to lose my life rather than violate my modesty” (132). Heartbroken Paul dies a few months later, followed quickly by everyone else—even their faithful dog Fido (Fidele)—except for an old man who narrates this Sunday-school lesson to a visitor 20 years later.
Paul and Virginia, like other pastorals, is a celebration of innocence, which less sentimental authors than Bernardin knew is too close to dangerous ignorance. Asked what she thinks of the novel, Charrière’s Constance diplomatically says, “Paul and Virginia have no more enthusiastic admirer than myself” (123), but we recall that earlier she noted, “Innocence is a beautiful thing, . . . but it is still only a negative virtue. It offers no resources for handling difficult situations; it neither amuses nor consoles and provides neither advice nor assistance” (69). (In Virginia’s place, Constance or Josephine would have stripped and dove overboard; Emilie may have required a little coaxing.) Ignorant of the evils of slavery, innocent Paul and Virginia return a slave to her master and asks him to pardon her; “filled with joy at the thought
of the good action they had performed,” they later learn she was “chained by the foot to a block of wood, an iron collar with three hooks fastened around her neck” (53, 56). There are a few other scraps of irony in the short novel: none of the French émigrés object to slavery (which Bernardin abhorred), and though Virginia is praised for her submission to authority (her mother, her confessor, her god), for the old man Virginia’s ludicrous death illustrates the tendency to “rush to our ruin, deceived by the very prudence of those in authority over us” (129). The author puts some stinging criticisms of France into the mouth of the old man, but the novel is such a pious paean to motherhood, innocence, and religion that these criticisms are toothless. Only its closely observed nature descriptions, based on Bernardin’s own stay on Mauritius (1768–70), elicit admiration.
Of course Paul and Virginia was a huge best-seller and generated merchandising tie-ins for decades to come; but even though it is technically flawed and intellectually weak, it deserves a place in the history of the novel. It’s a prime exhibit of the sentimental novel then in fashion, a key novel in the long tradition of pastoral extending from Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe to Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar and beyond, and its praise of nature and solitude provides a link between Rousseau and the Romantics. It is evoked in novels as various as Balzac’s Old Goriot, Edgeworth’s Belinda, Dickens’ Little Dorrit, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and Gaddis’s Recognitions. It can even be blamed for the movie The Blue Lagoon.
Bernardin traveled all the way to the Indian Ocean for the setting of his novel, but Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852) found his without even leaving his room. Confined to quarters for 42 days in 1790 for dueling, this soldier wrote a short, 42-chapter novel entitled Voyage around My Room (Voyage autour de ma chambre, 1794) that takes advantage of the vogue for books of exploration to log a journey around his mind, boasting, “Cook’s voyages, and the observations of his traveling companions, doctors Banks and Solander, are nothing compared to my adventures in this single region.”223 An admirer of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (cited in chap. 24), Maistre’s delightfully eccentric voyage is nonlinear, “following no rule or method. . . . I too, when traveling in my room, rarely follow a straight line!” (4), because each object he notices sends him off on a tangent into either philosophical speculation or remembrance of things past. The noise his valet makes with the coffeepot in the morning, like Proust’s tea-soaked madeleine, evokes his childhood, and his pink-and-white bedspread recalls the day he went walking in the hills with his mistress, which Maistre expresses with Sternean sentimentalism: