by Steven Moore
58 Though most of the novel is as light as a soufflé, there are isolated instances of death, beheading, poisoning, stalking, domestic violence, divorce, and (as here) infanticide—all of which enhance the novel’s realism.
59 The setup is similar to Chorier’s Neo-Latin Dialogues, published a few years later, and a superior use of the form.
60 From the facing-page commentary in the edition I read (96), 20 percent of which is useful and the rest crazy-talk.
61 For a noncrazy account, see Hugh B. Urban’s Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley: U California P, 2006).
62 The anecdote, along with the rest of the author’s information on elemental beings, comes from Paracelsus’s Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits, a fanciful pamphlet posthumously published in 1566, and available in Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim Called Paracelsus, ed. Henry E. Sigerist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1941), 223–53.
63 An exception is the abbé de Saint-Réal (1639–92), who in 1672 added the subtitle “nouvelle historique” to his short novel Don Carlos, a highly romanticized though carefully documented account of the eldest son of Spain’s Philip II. Engaged to Elizabeth of Valois, Carlos is deprived of her by his father, who decides to marry her himself after his own wife dies. Tension ensues. Suspecting his son of plotting against him, Philip has him imprisoned, and then orders his death, to which Carlos submits with great dignity. In fact, Carlos was an inbred, misshapen weirdo, but in Saint-Réal’s hands he became a romantic hero who inspired plays by Otway and Schiller and an overheated opera by Verdi. Essentially a historian, Saint-Réal took advantage of the freedom of fiction to whitewash the historical record rather than (as a true novelist would) use it as a springboard to explore character motivation and dramatize events to a greater extent than strict history allows. His Don Carlos is fraudulent; Saint-Réal lists his sources in the preface and cites them in marginal notes at various points in the narrative, but this is just an attempt to con the reader. “The objection,” Geoffrey Bremner explains in “The Lesson of Saint-Réal,” is that the author “put forward as truth what was to a large extent fiction” (356). It fails both as history and fiction, and thus deserves only a footnote in the history of the novel.
64 Page 161 in Cave’s edition of The Princess de Clèves, where the novella occupies pp. 157–88. The publisher of the first French edition managed to spread it out over 142 pages.
65 Lafayette evidently also had the help of Jean de Segrais, who was credited as the author of Zayde (remember he was the beard for Les Nouvelles françaises), and of Pierre-Daniel Huet, whose History of Romances first appeared as the introduction to Zayde. As I said earlier, he concludes by praising Scudéry; of the novel he’s introducing, Huet rhetorically asks the author “what success may you not presume upon from Zayde, where the adventures are so new and touching, and the narration so just and polite?” (148). That’s it.
66 During the 1660s Villedieu also wrote several plays—an almost exclusively masculine genre until then—one of which was the first written by a woman to receive a command performance before the king.
67 The last word is femelles in the original, which, as Beasley notes (and from whom I’ve adapted the quotation), “is pejorative and is used primarily to refer to animals” (264 n5).
68 Modernism, 276. For Gay, Baudelaire is the first modernist; Lafayette is not mentioned in his magisterial work.
69 #402 in the Oxford edition of his Collected Maxims.
70 From her book Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth Century France (1983), as excerpted in the Norton Critical Edition of The Princess of Clèves, 231 (and hereafter abbreviated NCE). I will be citing Terence Cave’s translation, widely considered the best, but the NCE appends a valuable section of critical essays.
71 Patrick Henry’s introduction to An Inimitable Example, 2—an excellent collection of essays on The Princess. Regarding the similar confession in Villedieu’s Disorders of Love, her translator points out that “Mme de Termes is a devastated woman whose confession, unlike that of Mme de Clèves, has no heroic implications” (3). There was no “domestic repose” to maintain in Villedieu’s case.
72 Translated excerpts from these two books—Jean-Baptiste-Henri de Valincour’s Lettres à Madame la marquise *** sur le sujet de la Princesse de Clèves and Jean-Antoine de Charnes’s Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de Clèves (which some attribute to Lafayette herself)—can be found in NCE (123–36) and in Beasley and Jensen’s Approaches to Teaching Lafayette’s The Princess of Clèves (183–91), another excellent collection of essays.
73 Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, from reviewers every time a “difficult” novel is published.
74 Perrault had a hand in writing a different kind of fairy tale; if bi-curious, see The Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville (1696), a lightweight novella about a girl raised as a boy who marries a boy raised as a girl. Its principal author is the abbé of Choisy (1644–1724), a transvestite churchman and historian, and one of the characters, the Countess d’Aletraf, is said to have been based on Mme de Lafayette.
75 For an informative essay on Hypolitus, see chap. 5 of Duggan’s Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies.
76 Again to give Fénelon his due, France was in a mess in the 1690s—there was widespread famine despite the widespread availability of uncultivated land—and implementation of his agrarian reforms, along with some of his political reforms, would have changed the course of French history.
77 Pages 216–17 in Riley’s edition; as he explains in his introduction (xxxii), he basically follows Tobias Smollett’s 1776 translation; an excellent critical edition of the latter was published as part of Smollett’s complete works in 1997. (Riley’s version, like the French original, is in 18 books, whereas Smollett divided it into 24 books, like the Odyssey.)
78 Cf. the dismissal of territorial conflicts in Voltaire’s Micromegas: “ ‘It is all for the sake of a few mud-heaps,’ replied the philosopher, ‘no bigger than your heel. Not that any of the millions who are cutting each other’s throats lay claim to the least particle of these heaps’ ” (chap. 7, trans. Cuffe).
79 A Jansenist named Faydit in La Télémacomanie (1700), as quoted in Davis’s Fénelon, 108.
80 Clark, 232, which remains after nearly a century the only book-length study in English of this fascinating writer. On the other hand, it’s so good that there’s no pressing need for another.
81 Page 456 in Fairy Tales and Romances, where The Ram occupies pp. 445–543. Hamilton’s tales were not published until 1730, and translated into English in 1760.
82 This became a French proverb: “Bélier, mon ami, . . . si tu voulais bien commencer par le commencement, tu me ferais plaisir.”
83 Page 367 in Fairy Tales and Romances, where The History of May-flower occupies pp. 366–444.
84 Page 108 in Fairy Tales and Romances, where it occupies pp. 1–108. This edition includes two sequels, one written by the translator of part 1, Matthew Lewis (109–215), and another by the Duc de Levis (218–76). Saintsbury says “they are, after the fashion of such things, very little good” (313n2), so I didn’t bother reading them; by this point my battered Victorian omnibus was falling apart anyway.
85 Page 376 in this well-annotated edition; the Memoirs itself will be cited by chapter. (In some books the chevalier’s name is spelled Grammont, but Gramont is the correct form.)
86 One prominent English historian, in her biography of Charles II, actually lists the Memoirs in her bibliography under Gramont, as though Hamilton were merely his amanuensis. The American Library of Congress, following the Brits, catalogs it as British history, not as French literature.
87 Chapter 3 in Thomas’s 1841 translation (of the expanded edition of 1726), hereafter cited by chapter. Although not entirely satisfactory, it is more accurate than the earlier two: one by Tobias Smollett (1750, rev. 1759), which is available in a modern critical edition,
and the first English translation, published by Jacob Tonson in 1708 (expanded ed. 1729). The overly creative translator of that one actually inserted a chapter of his own in imitation of Lesage, which was retained when William Strange lightly revised the translation in 1841. (The spurious chapter is entitled “The Lovers” and persists in some reprints.)
88 See Béatrice Didier’s recent critical edition of the French original for details.
89 American Notes for General Circulation (1842), quoted in Mancini’s “Demons on the Rooftops, Gypsies in the Streets,” 114, to which I am indebted for both Dickens references.
90 “Introductory Notice,” xii; in 1898, two years after Van Laun died, a new edition was issued “revised and completed by Henri Roberts.” I’ll be citing a later edition of that version, by book and chapter except for editorial matter. The ubiquitous Smollett translated this Lesage novel as well (1748), which, like his Devil upon Crutches, is available in a splendid critical edition from the University of Georgia Press.
91 Lesage translated/adapted/composed nearly a hundred plays and knew the milieu well; he used Gil Blas to vent a lifetime’s complaints about actors, critics, audiences, and other playwrights, including a young Voltaire under the name Gabriel Triaquero (10.5). For details, see Stewart’s Rereadings (108–12) and Cook’s Lesage (52–54).
92 I learned of it from the essay on “Books” included in some editions of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Voltaire based his novella Micromegas on a later science fiction novel by Bordelon entitled Gongam, l’homme prodigeux transporté dans l’air, sur la terre et sous les eaux (1711), which seems to be equally unknown to the historians of that genre.
93 The anonymous translation of 1711 (hereafter cited by page number) sticks very closely to the French original, even correcting a few of Bordelon’s learned citations, but unfortunately, a third of the way through, the printer accidentally dropped about 25 pages of material, most of chapters 16 and 17.
94 “Judicial” astrology referred to the fortune-telling sort, condemned by the Church, as opposed to medical and meteorological predictions, which were acceptable.
95 It’s not always clear when Bordelon is quoting or paraphrasing, so I’ve punctuated these footnotes tentatively and clarified a few bibliographic details (as I’ve done with the list of books on the next page).
96 I believe this is the first novel to have an index. Later novels with indexes include Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, George Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, Juan Perucho’s Natural History, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ethel Mannin’s Women Also Dream, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, John Updike’s Centaur, Harry Mathews’s Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (“Index of Plagiarisms”), Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot, Julián Ríos’s Larva and Poundemonium, Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, Malcolm Bradbury’s My Strange Quest for Mensonge, Lucy Ellmann’s Sweet Desserts, Jacques Roubaud’s Princess Hoppy and The Loop, Milorad Pavić’s Landscape Painted with Tea, Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, Alain de Botton’s Kiss and Tell, Suzanne Cleminshaw’s Great Ideas, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Anders Monson’s Other Electricities, Lawrence Shainberg’s Crust, Jeremy Davies’s Rose Alley, and Patricia Marx’s Starting from Happy.
97 “Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.2 (Autumn 2009), 263—a useful background essay that happens to mention Monsieur Oufle in passing (282).
98 The name is sometimes spelled Challes or Chasles. Just as Lesage trained for writing fiction by translating Avellaneda’s spurious sequel to Don Quixote into French (1704), Challe prepped by writing a continuation of François Filleau de Saint-Martin’s sequel to his French translation of Don Quixote.
99 The novel was originally published as Les Illustres françoises, but most critics today refer to it in the feminine. The English title I’ve been using is that of Penelope Aubin; Ann Preston’s recent translation has the hokey title Life, Love and Laughter in the Reign of Louis XIV (which will be cited by page number). Like Aubin, she omits Challe’s preface without explanation.
100 Des Frans arrives on Sunday, hears the first story on Tuesday, the second on Wednesday, the next three on Thursday, tells his own story on Friday, and hears the long seventh story on Saturday.
101 “. . . aux moins ceux de Francion,” an important literary allusion that Preston obscures by translating it as “My escapades were like something out of a picaresque novel” (441).
102 On its wealth of realistic details, see the long chapter on Challe’s novel in Showalter’s Evolution of the French Novel, especially pp. 224–35, and Stewart’s Imitation and Illusion, 162–63.
103 In Betts’s translation, hereafter cited by letter number except for appendices and editorial matter.
104 The subject continued to fascinate Montesquieu, resulting in his massive study The Spirit of Laws (1748), which had a major influence on the authors of the U.S. Constitution.
105 These juxtapositions are apparently what Montesquieu meant when he claimed there is a “secret chain” connecting the disparate letters together; see Runyan’s Art of the Persian Letters (specifically pp. 18–19 on the Jansenist example) for the lexical links in Montesquieu’s chain.
106 It has remained popular over the centuries. Mariane cherishes it in Nicolai’s Sebaldus Nothanker (3.5).
107 Both quoted remarks are from Goldsmith’s Exclusive Conversations, 143, 151.
108 Letter 6, in Haywood’s translation. The French original doesn’t use all those dashes and italics but is just as choppy. Among Boursault’s other novels is a comic Spanish romance entitled Seeing and Believing Are Two Things (Ne pas croire ce qu’on voir, 1670), which I read a little of; it’s notable only for being the first French novel to use a colorful phrase for a title.
109 Its publication history is mysterious: after the first French volume appeared, seven more volumes appeared in English from 1691 to 1694. The jury’s still out on whether these were translated from Marana’s manuscript or invented by his English publisher. For more on The Turkish Spy and its similarity to Persian Letters, see Ballaster’s Fabulous Orients, 145–62. Among Defoe’s many works is A Continuation of the Turkish Spy (1718).
110 Greene’s Marivaux, 18—the best book on him in English.
111 For a discussion of Marivaux’s nuanced and innovative use of spoken language in his novels, see the chapter on him in Mylne; she concludes: “Marivaux was more keenly aware than any previous French novelist of the value of words, both for indicating external distinctions of class and education, and for suggesting permanent traits of personality or changing emotive attitudes. Because he utilizes a wider range of linguistic usage, and because he is skilled in choosing the crucial revelatory phrase, his picture of society has a new depth and precision. It is as though, by his exploration of the resources of speech, he had discovered how to suggest a new dimension in portrayal, never fully mastered by previous novelists” (113).
112 Volume 1, pp. 4, 7, in Lockman’s pleasant if antiquated translation (1750). He Anglicized the characters’ names and transported the setting to a London suburb, but otherwise seems to have stuck close to the original. But I’d give anything for a modern, faithful translation.
113 See Booth (370–75) for Marivaux’s key role in this tradition. Sterne owned a copy of the English translation of Pharsamond.
114 Dismissing this claim, Hodgson feels Marivaux inserted the two novellas “to illustrate the disastrous effects of interpolated stories which are not integral parts of the structure of the novel” (345); that is, Marivaux sabotaged his own novel just to score another point against the roman héroïque.
115 The English edition accidentally omits the bracketed word; original reads: “ce ne sont point les choses qui sont le mal d’un récit.”
116 Palimpsests, 149. Genette goes
on to discuss Marivaux’s Télémaque travesti (153–56) in such a tantalizing way to make me regret further its unavailability in English.
117 Miller, The Heroine’s Text, 25.
118 Vol. 1, pp. 60–61 in the early translation (1736–42) attributed to John Lockman, the translator of Pharsamond. This is a more literal translation than the popular one by Mary Mitchell Collyer, retitled The Virtuous Orphan (1742), which bowdlerizes the text—she censors the striptease above and the one I quote next—pumps up the piety and sentimentality, and takes other liberties with the text. (She includes her own sequel as well, whereas Lockman stops where Marivaux stops.) Nonetheless, Collyer’s is more accessible than Lockman’s—there’s an excellent annotated edition of the Collyer translation from 1965—and generally reads better than Lockman’s, so I reluctantly cite her version (by page) and his only for the parts she omits (by volume/page). It’s an outrage that such an important novel isn’t available in a modern translation.
119 As noted earlier, convents then were like women’s hotels, or the YWCA; unwanted daughters and distressed ladies stayed there without actually taking vows.
120 Marivaux put this more bluntly in Pharsamond, where the narrator wryly notes “the prodigious number of crazy people in the world” (2:275).
121 Because there isn’t a complete English translation of the novel, I have to resort to a tag-team of translators: the anonymous, somewhat abridged 1738 one of books 1–6, Robertson’s unabridged translation of the first half of book 5 (set in England), and Waddell’s translation of the original version of book 7. Citations will be to book/page numbers.
122 While in Italy, portrayed as a land of magic and superstition, Renoncour excavates an ancient subterranean cavern devoted to the Three Furies. With its Latin inscription, frightening statues, and coffins filled with putrefied human remains, it’s a scene straight out of a Gothic horror novel of the 1790s.