The Novel

by Steven Moore

  123 The Art of Poetry, ll. 343–44 in Fairclough’s translation (p. 479).

  124 The original 1731 edition was simply book 7 of the Man of Quality; Prévost gave it the above title when he published a revised, toned-down edition in 1753, but nowadays the novel is misleadingly called Manon Lescaut—it’s Des Grieux’s story, not hers. Current translations are based on the 1753 text, which is more sympathetic to Manon, but I’ll be citing Waddell’s translation of the 1731 edition because it represents the author’s initial conception of the character and is more aesthetically consistent with the rest of the Man of Quality.

  125 The fact Manon betrays Des Grieux with a tax-collector caps the rising disgust with nouveau-riche financiers that runs through the Man of Quality. Near the end, Renoncour notes the financial crises caused by bourgeoise speculators and, boldly anticipating Freud’s identification of money with excrement, reports that an abbe told him the late treasurer general of war had an appetite “as vile and corrupt as his mind, for he assured us his favorite dish was human excrement, which he purchased at any rate from the first healthy person he met in the streets whom he judged poor enough to make the bargain. He added that for this purpose he always carried a gold spoon in his pocket” (6/2:161).

  126 Regarding the father’s death, the revised edition of 1753 adds: “to which I fear, with only too much cause, my errors have contributed” (trans. Scholar, 146).

  127 This elicits the only arresting thing Manon ever says: she thought nothing of sending him a sexual surrogate “for the fidelity I want from you is the fidelity of the heart” (177), not of the body, which explains why she is so free with hers.

  128 Quoted in Scholar’s excellent introduction, xxviii. And just to be clear, Manon is contemptible not because she’s a whore—I support the legalization of prostitution—but because she’s a lying, thieving, conniving, insensitive one, unlike Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier.

  129 This is one of the many ways in which Cleveland anticipates suicidal, Romantic types like Rousseau’s St. Preux and Goethe’s Werther. For more on this aspect, see Woodbridge’s “Romantic Tendencies in the Novels of the Abbé Prévost.”

  130 Page 567 in The Libertine Reader (where the novel occupies pp. 553–717), a luxurious anthology I’ll be using for several subsequent novels, and (I’m guessing) a provocative book to be seen reading in a university-area bistro.

  131 Preceding letter 29, hereafter cited by letter.

  132 That is, she’s been betrayed before, just as the Christian Rinaldo rejected the love of Armida, the powerful witch-queen of Damascus.

  133 Both quotations are from book 4, chapter 9 of the anonymous 1735 translation, hereafter cited by book/chapter.

  134 Given the novel’s Japanese setting, it’s fun to note that, according to William T. Vollmann, the Noh term sarugaki “can mean either ‘monkey’ or ‘god,’ depending on the pronunciation” (Kissing the Mask, 66).

  135 Page 768 in Feher’s Libertine Reader, where the novel occupies pp. 767–910, preceded by an insightful introduction by Catherine Cusset.

  136 Later Versac says “to be really well bred a man should have a mind that is ornate but not pedantic, elegant without affectation, gay without being vulgar, and easy without being indecent” (889).

  137 Conroy (133n10) cites several passages from Will and Ariel Durant’s Age of Voltaire (1965) that confirm the accuracy of Crébillon’s picture.

  138 The quotation is from p. 29 of Eric Sutton’s 1925 translation. Marketed as erotica, it has been reprinted under the titles A Lady of Quality (1928) and, in a sleazy bid for attention, Sextravaganza (1932).

  139 The nom de roman, you’ll recall, of the book-mad heroine of Marivaux’s Pharsamond, which was finally published the year Crébillon wrote this novel.

  140 But it’s Clitandre, not the editor, who provides the novel’s most metafictional comment: denying Cidalise’s request for the story of Julie, Clitandre protests “this would be the most singularly inappropriate moment for such a story. . . . So much so, that if our adventure of this night were written down and if, at the present juncture, any question of this story arose, no one would hesitate to omit it, however promising it might appear” (85).

  141 Page 37 in Wilfrid Jackson’s rather fusty translation, which occupies pp. 13–103 in her anthology Three Stories of the French Eighteenth Century (1927). It would be wonderful to have Crébillon’s two dialogue-novels newly translated and published together, perhaps under the Firbankian title Inclinations.

  142 Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, 212–13. Kavanagh’s long chapter on Crébillon is well worth seeking out.

  143 “Preface” in Bonamy Dobrée’s 1927 translation, reprinted in Feher’s Libertine Reader (pp. 178–331), hereafter cited by chapter number.

  144 Of all the pop songs with that title, I’d recommend the sugar-rushing one by Talulah Gosh (1988).

  145 This too is something Crébillon had done before: in The Skimmer, Tanzaï and Néardarné debate literary techniques during the Marivaux parody.

  146 An authorized collaboration that, alas, never appeared was suggested by one of Crébillon’s English admirers. In a 1762 letter to Garrick, Laurence Sterne wrote: “Crebillon has made a convention with me, which, if he is not too lazy, will be no bad persiflage—as soon as I get to Thoulouse he has agreed to write me an expostulatory letter upon the indecorums of T. Shandy—which is to be answered by recrimination upon the liberties of his own works—these are to be printed together—Crebillon against Sterne—Sterne against Crebillon—the copy to be sold, and the money to be equally divided” (1:252).

  147 Chap. 2, hereafter cited by chapter. This anonymous 18th-century translation is quite fluent, but the translator misses the point by translating the country of Romancie as “Arcadia”; “Novel-Land” is the preferable rendering of Margaret Anne Doody, who devotes a page to Prince Fan-Feredin (284). The country has a two-page entry (under “Romancia”) in Manguel and Guadalupi’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

  148 He is especially critical of the writings of Thomas-Simon Gueullette (1683–1766), who wrote such things as Breton Evenings: New Fairy Tales (1712), Tartar Tales, or A Thousand and One Quarters of Hours (1715), The Wonderful Adventures of the Mandarin Fum-Hoam (1723), Mogul Tales (1725), and Peruvian Tales, Related in One Thousand and One Hours (1733). I haven’t read any of them (though they’re available in 18th-century translations), but they sound fun; a serious literary scholar, Gueullette also edited the works of Rabelais and Montaigne, among others. For more on him, see Ballaster’s Fabulous Orients.

  149 Both have lengthy entries in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, and a portion of Alan Moore’s graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is set in Amphicléocles.

  150 After Marivaux published Le Paysan parvenu, Mouhy wrote La Paysanne parvenue (1735); he likewise switched the sexual and textual orientation of Prévost’s Memoirs of a Man of Quality Who Has Withdrawn from the World with his Memoirs of a Girl of Quality Who Hasn’t Withdrawn from the World (1747). Mouhy’s name crops up in novels by Voltaire (The Princess of Babylon) and Diderot (The Indiscreet Jewels). See Fitting’s informative essay for more on the career of this minor writer.

  151 Of the 344 authors in Jones’s List of French Prose Fiction, from 1700 to 1750, only 43 are women (12.5 percent), though a few of the anonymous novels he lists were undoubtedly written by them. Tencin wrote a few other novels, one translated with the promising title The Female Adventurers (Les Malheurs de l’amour, 1747), which I was not able to locate.

  152 Page 4 in Parmée’s one-volume edition of both novels, where Madame de Luz occupies pp. 3–80. Reviewers praised the translator’s accuracy, but the book was negligently copy-edited and proofread.

  153 Page 28 in the 1925 translation by H. B. V.—that is, Vyvyan Beresford Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son.

  154 Letter 3 in Mallinson’s translation, hereafter cited by letter. This recent edition adds many supplementary materials, including passages
from from Garcilaso de la Vega’s book and selections from some of the sequels others wrote (including one by Lamékis author Mouhy).

  155 The early letters are “written” in khipu, a system of knotted fibers I described in my previous volume (398). Later Zilia translates them into French to join those written in her adopted language. Miller has a perceptive chapter on this aspect of Graffigny’s novel in her Subject to Change, 125–61.

  156 Pages 7–8 in Smith’s fine translation. I’m surprised Feher didn’t include this short novel in his Libertine Reader; it’s certainly more fitting than Prévost’s Story of a Modern Greek Woman.

  157 On two occasions his characters refer to Gervaise de Latouche’s “awful” Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des Chartreux (1741) to imply a distinction between d’Argens’s novel and that anticlerical porno. In the spirit of scholarly thoroughness, I read a little of an old English translation and it is indeed pretty awful, just one clichéd sex scene after another.

  158 “An Essay on Novels,” in The Crimes of Love, 10.

  159 See Brumfield’s informative essay listed in the bibliography.

  160 Zadig, COS 122; since there isn’t a one-volume edition of Voltaire’s complete fiction in English (and why not?! It would only be about 700 pages long), I’ll be citing various translations by these abbreviations: C=Cuffe’s Candide; COS=Pearson’s Candide and Other Stories; CT=Walton’s Complete Tales; M=Cuffe’s Micromégas and Other Short Fictions.

  161 Pearson, Fables of Reason, 4. This is the best book in English on Voltaire’s fiction.

  162 Pearson: “It went through at least ten editions within the first year and on 24 September [1768] was condemned and ordered to be burned by the Paris Parlement, who also sentenced two booksellers to three days in the pillory and subsequent despatch to the galleys for having had the audacity to purvey it. The Vatican authorities finally placed it on their Index of forbidden works on 29 November 1771. For one of Voltaire’s books, therefore, a fairly standard launch” (20).

  163 Many of the English names are oddly one letter off—Birton, Mountjouy, Primerose, Wirburton—though Freind is based on the brothers John and Robert Freind, a physician (1675–1728) and an Anglican clergyman, respectively. “Jenni” is a Frenchman’s phonetic rendering of “Johnny,” and Birton “was a character somewhat in the style of that of the late Earl [of] Rochester” (CT 1:143), the rakish Restoration poet.

  164 Voltaire’s motto Écrasez l’infâme comes from a line in a 1762 letter to Jean le Ronde d’Alembert that can be translated “Whatever you do, trample down abuses, and love those who love you.” D’Alembert, by the way, was the illegitimate child of la Tencin, who abandoned him at birth; he is also the protagonist of Diderot’s dialogue-novel D’Alembert’s Dream.

  165 It should go without saying that religion is not synonymous with morality, which Voltaire championed. By “religion” he meant dogma, ritual, priestcraft, biblical literalism, sectarian violence, and intolerance for other religions. Though Catholicism was his main target, Voltaire included all religions under the category of institutionalized superstition.

  166 The first version of Micromegas was written in 1738–39 as Voyage du baron de Gangan, partly inspired by Bordelon’s Gongam (see p. 275n92 above), partly by Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which Voltaire read upon publication in 1726 and greatly admired. The early version disappeared after he sent it to King Frederick II of Prussia.

  167 These eccentric works may also have been encouraged by Tristram Shandy, which Voltaire began reading shortly after publication in 1759 and pronounced “a very unaccountable book; an original one” (letter dated September 1760, written partly in English).

  168 After studying astronomy, Zadig “saw men then for what they really are, insects devouring each other upon a tiny speck of dirt” (COS 151). Cf. the Earthling’s explanation of warfare to Micromegas: “It is all for the sake of a few mud-heaps . . . no bigger than your heel” (M 32).

  169 Voltaire makes the same point in The Man with Forty Crowns when a character complains “that a hundred women read the Arabian Nights to one that reads two chapters of Locke” (1:317). John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was one of Voltaire’s favorite books and is alluded to several times in his novellas.

  170 The Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755, about which Voltaire also wrote a poem, had a catastrophic effect on the European intelligentsia’s belief in a god: what kind of “loving” god would destroy the just with the unjust in such a callous manner?—the same question Jews asked two centuries later after the Holocaust.

  171 Calvino, 175–76. This marvelous essay originated as the preface to an Italian edition of Candide (1974).

  172 He edited and contributed to the grand Encyclopédie (1751–72, 28 vols.), the Enlightenment’s massive public works program to end the great depression that set in at the beginning of the Christian Dark Ages. Voltaire was an early contributor, but objected to its interminable length and high cost; he wrote his Philosophical Dictionary (1764) partly as a compact alternative.

  173 “Eulogy of Richardson,” Selected Writings, 108.

  174 Chap. 7 in Hawkes’s translation, hereafter cited by chapter. (It can also be found in Feher’s Libertine Reader, 344–541.) Diderot’s immediate source of inspiration was apparently Nocrion, conte allobroge (1747), a novelette by the Count de Caylus in which a fairy gives a knight the power to make vulvae speak, but the pudenda loquens is a folk-motif that can be traced at least as far back as Garin’s 13th-century Le Chevalier qui faisait parler les cons, a verse-tale about a knight “who had a truly remarkable talent,/ for he could make cunts speak, this gallant,/and conjure arseholes from all parts/to answer his summons by magic arts.” (An English translation can be found in Hellman and O’Gorman’s Fabliaux, 105–21.) The concept hasn’t lost its appeal over the ages: see (or hear) the “talking asshole” in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and/or the “cunt auction” in Coover’s Lucky Pierre.

  175 See his essay “On Women” (Selected Writings, 309–17), but he was sympathetic to their plight: “In almost all countries, the civil laws have merely served to reinforce nature’s original cruelty to women: they have been treated like imbecile children” (314).

  176 Introduction to Hawkes’s translation, ix–x (reprinted from a 1979 essay). Rather than pursue this thesis, Vartanian spends the rest of the essay unlocking the historical elements of this roman à clef, where the king and his mistress transparently portray King Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour.

  177 Jacques Proust, as quoted in Wilson’s Diderot, 387. (Wilson also notes that Diderot had a younger sister who went insane in an Ursuline convent.) In 1760 some convents were still staging mock crucifixions in which nuns were nailed to a cross for hours at a time: see Furbank’s Diderot, 210. These two are the standard biographies; Furbank’s is less detailed but more insightful in its literary analysis.

  178 In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud writes: “the two criminal wishes of the Oedipus complex were recognised as the true representatives of the uninhibited life of the instincts long before the time of psychoanalysis. Among the writings of the Encyclopaedist Diderot you will find a celebrated dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau, which was rendered into German by no less a person than Goethe. There you may read this remarkable sentence: ‘If the little brute were left to his own devices, and remained in all his ignorance, combining the undeveloped mind of a child in its cradle with the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would wring his father’s throat and go to bed with his mother’ ” (quoted by Furbank, xi).

  179 Page 79 in This Is Not a Story and Other Stories, where the novella occupies pp. 60–112.

  180 Two hundred and thirty years later, David Markson would publish a novel entitled This Is Not a Novel that contains this two-line sequence: “Ceci n’est pas un conte. Diderot, 1772. [¶] Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Magritte, 1929” (138).

  181 As with his other novels, a version of this appeared in an extremely limited-edition magazin
e called Correspondance littéraire, but not in book form until 1796.

  182 Some critics believe this ending is the “true” one, but I side with those (like Nicholls, 82–83) who feel the improbable happy ending is a phony alternative.

  183 A chapter title in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a novel very much in the spirit of (if not directly influenced by) Jacques the Fatalist.

  184 Le Compère Mathieu (Godfather Matthew, 1766) is a freewheeling, gratuitously erudite libertine novel by Henri-Joseph Du Laurens that unfortunately has never been translated into English. In a 1970 essay describing the relationship between it and Jacques, Cherpack argues that Diderot is being self-deprecating in citing this superficially similar but artistically inferior work.

  185 I’m thinking of Jack Gibbs’s constantly interrupted efforts to write his book and Gaddis’s career-long obsession with Rameau’s Nephew’s theme of failure and genius, not to mention his preference for dialogic form. Gibbs refers to Diderot in the context of his encyclopedic ambitions (588).

  186 “Conversation about Novels,” aka the second preface to Julie, 14. Prefatory and editorial matter will be cited by page number, but the novel by book/letter number.

  187 Geoffrey Bremner, “Rousseau’s Realism or a Close Look at Julie’s Underwear” (1982), which is worth taking a look at—Bremner’s essay, that is, not her undies. He’s referring to a scene where St. Preux hides in Julie’s dressing room and drools over her discarded clothes, especially her corset (1.54).

  188 Jackson makes the case for Diderot in chap. 3 of her book Rousseau’s Occasional Autobiographies. In early 1757 Rousseau sent Diderot the first two parts of Julie, which six months later he still hadn’t read, so “Diderot agreed to let Rousseau read aloud to him from Julie, but complained afterward that he droned on ‘pitilessly’ from ten in the morning until eleven at night, allowing no interruptions even for meals, so that when he finished there was no time left to listen to anything by Diderot in return. All Rousseau says in the Confessions is that Diderot called the manuscript feuillu, ‘leafy,’ a term he apparent invented on the spot. (Rousseau understood it to mean ‘redundant’ and admitted that it was accurate)” (Damrosch, 293–94). Their friendship ended shortly afterward.