La princesse de Clèves: The Tension of Elegance 9783111343211, 9783110991703

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University Series Practica,

72

LA PRINCESSE DE CLEVES The Tension of Elegance

by BARBARA R. WOSHINSKY Colby College

1973 MOUTON THE H A G U E · P A R I S

© Copyright 1973 in the Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

Printed in the Netherlands

PREFACE

This book owes its existence to the combined generosity of Yale University and the Ford Foundation. The original version was completed in 1968, and has been revised considerably since. I would like to thank Professor Jean Boorsch for presiding over my early labors, and Professor Henri Peyre, whose tolerant scepticism helped keep my native perverseness in bounds. In trying to give Mme de Lafayette her due, I hope I have also given them theirs. I respect my husband too much to cast him in the role of author's helpmeet. I know he would return the compliment. B.R.W.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

5

Introduction

9

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

Society and the Individual in the moralistes: Montaigne, Descartes, Retz

15

Society and the Individual in the moralistes: Nicole, La Rochefoucauld

32

The Seventeenth Century Novel: History and Romance as Social Symbols

48

The Social Compromise in the Princesse de Cleves·. agitation sans disordre

63

The Social Compromise in the Princesse de Oeves (cont.): Rewards, Constraints and Evasions

71

The Failure of the Social Compromise

90

VII. Mme de Lafayette's Social Vision

103

Selected Bibliography

120

Index

123

INTRODUCTION Ainsi il y avait une sorte d'agitation sans desordre dans cette cour, qui la rendait tres agreable, mais aussi tres dangereuse pour une jeune personne. La Princesse de Cleves, p. 253.

The Princesse de Cleves has long received recognition as the first psychological novel, the origin of a rich fictional tradition in France and abroad. But it is also unique for another reason: it is the first novel of manners. In writing about her novel, Mme de Lafayette explains clearly what she was trying to do: "Ce n'estpas un roman, mais c'est proprement des mömoires... c'est une parfaite imitation du monde de la cour et de la maniere dont on y vit." 1 Mme de Lafayette rejected the conventional unreality of the fashionable rontons of her time and set out to describe how people really live. She chose as her subject a world she knew intimately, which she had already depicted in her Histoire de Henriette d'Angleterre: the circumscribed, inbred milieu of the French court. And according to her own statement about the novel, she felt she had succeeded in her aim. Mme de Lafayette thus viewed herself as a serious artist, making mature and deliberate choices among literary forms and areas of experience in order to communicate her own vision. Like a painter who has captured a speaking likeness of her model, Mme de Lafayette seems proud of her "perfect imitation of court life". And the realism which she claims for her work lies not in the portrayal of feeling - the 'psychological analysis' for which she is customarily praised — but in the description of a larger social reality. That is why her depiction of court life is not a superficial one, a simple decor. She approaches her subject as a historian and a moralist concerned with how human motives are woven into the social fabric. And as a novelist, she selects and transmutes literary forms for her special purpose. To arrive at the depth and complexity of Mme de Lafayette's achievement, this study views her novel from three perspectives: intellectual history, literary history, and textual criticism. The early chapters investigate the background of Mme de Lafayette's work, less in the narrow sense of the author's biography than in the wider sense of her intel•

Letter to Lescheraine, April 13, 1678.

10

INTRODUCTION

lectual and social milieu; chapter III will situate her novels within the context of literary tradition. Most important, chapters IV to VII weigh the internal evidence of the novels themselves. In the author's hands, historical trends and formal techniques are combined and transformed into a work that is quite distinct from its component parts. It is at the intersection of these three lines of force - historical trends, literary tradition, and artistic creation — that the Princesse de Cleves may best be located. The complexity and the interest of this triple perspective lies in the relations it reveals between artistic convention and reality. Literary forms do not exist autonomous of historical conditions. Each change in social and intellectual climate brings a change in the public's attitude toward traditional literary techniques and themes. Thus, Racine's neo-classical tragedies carried for him and for his public an entirely different meaning than the same stories carried to a Greek audience, or even to a sixteenth century French audience. Nonetheless, the contemporary meanings imposed on the old traditions did not entirely obliterate their original character: the motifs of Greek drama, filtered through Racine's quite different tragic mode, still kept enough of their original essence to add another level of meaning to his plays. This complex interplay between the original nature of a literary tradition, the place it comes to fill in a different time, and the intellectual associations, both new and old, that it evokes, enhances the vitality of so-called conventional forms. A critical approach that relates the conventional elements of a work to its meaning has particular relevance for classical literature. One of the primary characteristics of a classical period is the authority that literary traditions retain. In confronting a classical work, the critic therefore faces the difficult problem of distinguishing between meaning and literary convention. The triple approach I have outlined may help bring a solution to this problem, if only by stating it in a more useful form. Instead of distinguishing between meaningful expression and empty convention, it is perhaps more fruitful to ask what kinds of meaning a conventional form may have acquired for a given public at a given time; how these contemporary connotations combine with the original associations; and finally, how the disparate conventions and inventions the author employs fuse within the work itself to produce still another level of meaning. The fact that an author chooses an old, conventional form therefore does not divorce his work from contemporary reality, although it makes the relation between art and life more complex. As Jacques Ehrmann wrote in his thesis on L'Astree, "B s'agjt de reconnaitre dans les oeuvres d'imagination les formes que prennent les rapports du reel et de l'imaginaire."2 According to M. Ehrmann, even a work so heavily traditional as Astree has 2

L'Amour et l'illusion dans I'Astrie (Paris, 1963), 112.

11

INTRODUCTION

connections with social reality, but "les rapports du reel et de l'imaginaire" are oblique, because reality must be filtered, as it were, through the prism of the pastoral convention. As well as helping to interpret conventional works, an awareness of literary tradition prevents one from making too direct parallels between life and literature. Taine, who consistently viewed literature in social terms, saw Racine's plays and Mme de Lafayette's novels as a "reflection" of court manners of the time/ 3 The metaphor of reflection, dear to nineteenth century realism, is misleading when applied to the classical era. Classical literature certainly bears some relation to social reality and social ideals, but this relation is affected by the literary conventions of the time, such as biensiance and levels of style. These esthetic conventions do not prevent the author from expressing himself or from imitating reality, but, to take up again the metaphor of the prism, they deflect reality at an oblique angle. By analyzing this oblique relation between contemporary life and literary convention, one may rediscover the meaning of forms which appear out-dated, empty, and artificial to later readers. In more concrete terms, how does this approach to classical literature create a framework for analyzing Mme de Lafayette's fiction? First, a knowledge of her intellectual and social milieu is quite helpful because it supplements the scanty biographical information available. Mme de Lafayette kept her own secrets, both in conversation with friends and in her business-like private correspondence. In the face of her classical discretion, it would be futile, as well as rather impertinent, to speculate about the private feelings and experiences which contributed to her fiction. To some extent, however, a general knowledge of the intellectual and social climate can replace the personal revelations she abstained from making. One can presume much about Mme de Lafayette's views from the intellectual history of the period and the preoccupations of her close friends. Descartes, Retz, Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, the Jansenists in general, all probably contributed to the intellectual surroundings in which Mme de Lafayette moved. From the evidence of their writings, they shared a pessimism about social life and an uncertainty about human nature which also appear in Mme de Lafayette's novels. Thus, in analyzing her work, the philosophical tenor of the period is a more reliable guide than the limited biographical evidence. In understanding Mme de Lafayette, the prose literary traditions of the seventeenth century are as important as the intellectual milieu. At the time Mme de Lafayette was writing, French fiction was in a period of transition from the 'old-fashioned' romance to the 'new' historical novel. Mme de Lafayette's works clearly draw themes and techniques from both these 3

Taine, "Madame de Lafayette", in Essais de critique (Paris, 1887), 253-267.

et d'histoire,

Se ed.

12

INTRODUCTION

traditions. The labels 'history' and 'romance' were not artificially imposed on the seventeenth century by later critics; these terms were used at the time, and they carried definite meanings to classical authors and their public. To avoid confusion with modern esthetic categories, in this study the terms 'historical novel' and 'romance' should be taken in their narrow seventeenth century acceptation. Thus a romance is a fictional form which recounts the episodic adventures of a famous personage, real or mythological, against a stylized 'historical' decor. I do not use the term romanesque in the wider sense of fictional techniques in general, outside the category of romance. Similarly, throughout the work I employ the phrase 'historical novel' or nouvelle historique only in reference to the production of classical novelists, and I also try to restrict terms like 'historicity' and 'realism' to their seventeenth century meaning. While there is little controversy over the definition of seventeenth century romance, the definition of historical fiction raises basic questions. In fact, some modern scholars would deny that the seventeenth century novel is historical, in any meaningful sense: The so-called historical novels of the 17th century . . . are historical only as concerns their purely external choice of theme and costume. Not only the psychology of the characters, but the manners depicted are entirely those of the writer's own day . . . . What is lacking in the so-called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely the specifically historical, that is, derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age.4 And yet, Mme de Lafayette and other authors considered themselves to be writing serious historical fiction, and their public read it as such. This apparent contradiction arises out of a confusion between the classical view of history and our own. How does seventeenth century historiography differ from its modern counterpart? Classical and modern historians mainly disagree in the way they envisage historical change. Since the contributions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, history has come to signify the profound, qualitative change and development of all peoples and social structures. This developmental view of history imposes on the historian the complete imaginative reconstruction of the past, what Michelet called "la resurrection du passe". Since the modern historian considers past ages to be essentially different from the present, his task is only finished when he has rediscovered the entire life of a past culture. In addition, his belief in qualitative historical change leads the modern historian to investigate the psychological influence exercised on man by his 4

Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London, 1962), 19.

INTRODUCTION

13

historical environment. Collingwood, a twentieth century historical philosopher, criticized Herder's view of human nature because in it "There is still no conception of a people's character as having been made what it is by that people's historical experience". 5 For a modern historian, not only a nation's social and political institutions, but also its psychological characteristics, arise from its particular historical situation. The seventeenth century conception of historical change was quite different. Historical events do occur, nations and empires do rise and fall, but the essential nature of man and the innate principles of his society remain unaltered. Historical activity merely amounts to a reshuffling of a limited number of possibilities. Any new order, no matter how radically different it appears, turns out on examination to be only a recombination of known historical constants. According to Charles Sorel, a seventeenth century historical popularizer, close scrutiny of history reveals that nothing much has changed over the ages: Outre que cette connaissance [de l'histoire] donne du divertissement et de la r6cr6ation ä l'esprit, eile exerce la mömoire, et forme ou fortifie le jugement par la vari6t6 des exemples, et par le rapport des succös semblables aux prfesents, si 6tranges et si extraordinaires qu'ils puissent paraitre. Tout ce qui est au monde, ayant d6jä 6t6, et ne se voyant rien de nouveau sous le soleil. Paroles qu'on peut dire aujourd'hui avec plus de raison encore que Salomon, puisque tant de sifecles se sont pass6s, depuis le temps oü il a v6cu.6 For Sorel, the last 2000 years of history have only served to prove that there is nothing new under the sun. This static and essentialistic view of history makes the style and subject matter of seventeenth century historical fiction very foreign to modern tastes. The classical nouvelle historique lacks what nineteenth and twentieth century writers consider the essence of history: the evocation of a specific period through historical verisimilitude and local color. This absence of historical realism in the seventeenth century is not an oversight. It is due to a definite intellectual stance. The seventeenth century's belief in historical and psychological constants led writers to avoid concrete details, not to seek them. Thus, Mme de Lafayette's stylized, idealized portrait of the court in the Princesse de Cleves suits the historical views of her times. In this sense, the Princesse de Cleves indeed conveys the "historical peculiarity of the age" which Mr. Lukacs demands of historical writing. Mme de Lafayette wrote history, and historical fiction, as her age understood it. But her genius lies in the shaping of historical and fictional traditions so as to show their inexorable effect on individual lives.

s 6

R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, 1956), 91. La Science de l'histoire (Paris, 1665), 2-3.

I SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE MORALISTES: MONTAIGNE, DESCARTES, RETZ

Much of the dramatic tension in the Princesse de Cleves arises from the confrontation of a newly-discovered individuality with the claims of an established social structure. Mme de Lafayette gradually discloses the psychological life of her heroine both to the reader and to the Princesse herself. Once Mme de Cloves has undergone this inner awakening, she becomes a person for whom society has no place. Social life cannot sustain her as an individual, but she, or the individualism she represents, can overturn the social order. This conflict between an individual's private needs and the demands of society shows great affinity with the writings of the classical moralists. Like Mme de Lafayette, Montaigne and Descartes imply that society cannot offer a meaningful and satisfying existence to its individual members. This similarity in outlook between moralist and novelist is not surprising: Mme de Lafayette was no philosopher, but she was a sensitive and intelligent writer who reacted to the great ideas and unanswerable questions of her time. And without looking for specific 'influences', an examination of the moralistes' explicit judgments may throw light on Mme de Lafayette's implicit assumptions about the individual's place in society. As well as representing a general climate of opinion, the five moralists I will consider — Montaigne, Descartes, Retz, Nicole and La Rochefoucauld — all had some intellectual impact on Mme de Lafayette, and three of them knew her personally. Much of the seventeenth century view of man and society is already present in Montaigne's Essais. Descartes' psychological writings have an almost equal importance: whether she actually read him or not, Mme de Lafayette, like her whole age, is imbued with Cartesianism. She was personally acquainted with the Cardinal de Retz, both through Mme de S£vign6 and through her own Frondeur connections. (It should be recalled that the chevalier Renaud de βέ^ήτηέ, Mme de Lafayette's stepfather and Mme de S6vigne's uncle by marriage, fought in the Fronde in. Retz's faction and later retired to Port-Royal.) As for Nicole, he was probably the only Jansenist theologian of importance who actively engaged in the 'conversion' of the

16

SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE MORALISTES

aristocracy. Nicole frequented members of Mme de Lafayette's intimate circle: Mme de Sevigni, for one, thought highly of him. Of La Rochefoucauld it is difficult to speak. On the one hand, his influence on Mme de Lafayette is too widely admitted to require further demonstration; on the other hand, the nature of this influence is hard to determine, given the stubborn mutual discretion of both parties. In regard to La Rochefoucauld, and the other four authors as well, it will be more fruitful to speak of general atmosphere and tonality than of specific borrowings or influences. Whether she was acquainted with these men or not, whether or not she had actually read their works, her novels and their theoretical writings share a common concern with the problems of social life, and a common feeling that the old solutions have ceased to work. Mme de Lafayette's fiction reflects a growing sense among seventeenth century thinkers that the ruling social and psychological views, largely inherited from a preceding period, are no longer able to explain human behavior or preserve social harmony. Before the classical era, writers like Montaigne and Descartes, while firmly asserting their own rights as individuals, had arrived at a tentative compromise between individual freedom and social constraint. Both Descartes and Montaigne rejected society from an individualistic viewpoint: in the light of their individual reason, they found social customs illogical, absurd, and inhumane. At the same time, they thought that the only alternative to present society was individualistic chaos. This conservative fear of social change led them to make a pact with the existing order. They agreed to perform the public roles prescribed by society if society would in turn allow them total freedom in their private thoughts and feelings. This social compromise, based on a total divorce between public and private identities, lost its effectiveness during the seventeenth century. Especially after 1650, it began to break down under social and intellectual pressures. As the French state grew increasingly centralized and autocratic, quiet disengagement from society became impracticable. Montaigne could perform his social obligations without too great a personal commitment, because the French state, torn by civil war, hardly demanded wholehearted social conformity from its subjects. In the ordered monarchy of Louis XIV, however, upper class society had become a closed and rigid circle where everyone fixed his gaze on everyone else in an effort to discern his inmost secrets. Under these conditions, not even the most experienced player of the social game could maintain his inner privacy for long. At the same time, the social compromise was rendered impracticable by a change in the view of individuality itself. Where Montaigne and Descartes centered their conception of individuality on their rational faculties, later thinkers, influenced by Jansenism, found the essence of individuality in feeling and intuition. This new view of human nature made the old social compromise unworkable.

SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE MORALISTES

17

Montaigne had based his social behavior on a deliberate, conscious separation between public and personal life; but if the essence of man is unconscious and irrational, this separation is impossible to maintain. Without another pattern of social behavior to substitute for the old compromise, the post-Cartesian moralists tried to maintain the status quo, and the resultant tensions are reflected in Mme de Lafayette's novels. Both M. and Mme de Cleves try to continue playing their prescribed social roles in spite of their private emotions, and the resultant strain destroys the Prince and leads his wife to renounce social life entirely. To gain a deeper insight into the social dilemma the 17th century and Mme de Lafayette faced, it is useful to return to Montaigne. The conflict between social and personal values, as well as the compromise which attempted to resolve it, are already present in his thought. Before Descartes and Pascal, Montaigne made the discovery of his individual self, and the almost simultaneous discovery that his individual nature did not fit the social role in which he was placed. For Montaigne, man's most fitting occupation is not public action, but solitary contemplation and introspection. Although he agrees that self-knowledge helps one to act correctly, he considers introspection largely as its own reward, and indeed the activity which corresponds best to human nature: "Nature nous a estrenez d'une large faculte ä nous entretenir ä part, et nous y appelle souvent pour nous apprendre que nous nous devons en partie ä la sociit6, mais en la meilleure partie ä nous". 1 In addition, his profound skepticism turns him toward self-study as the only occupation which can offer him certain knowledge. His senses may deceive him, and his reasoning often has no connection with the real world. Therefore, he can only speak with authority about his own inner states. Selfdiscovery, not the role thrust on him by society, is his most appropriate and satisfying pursuit. The concept of the self which results from this introspection is one of surface fluctuation and inner permanence. At one moment, Montaigne despairs of ever knowing himself because he is constantly changing: "Je ne peints pas l'estre. Je peints le passage: non un passage d'age en autre, ou comme diet le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jour, de minute en minute" (II, 222, Bk. Ill, ch. ii). At other times, however, Montaigne suggests that underneath the changing appearances his essential identity remains unaltered: "il n'est personne, s'il s'escoute qui ne descouvre en soy une forme sienne, une forme maistresse, qui luicte contre l'institution, et contre la tempeste des passions qui luy sont contraires" (II, 229-30). And ι Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), II, 69 (Bk. II, ch. xviii). Subsequent references to the Essais will appear in the text, with citations of both the page number in the Gamier edition and the book and chapter numbers.

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SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE

MORALISTES

again: "J'ay une ame toute sienne, accoustumee a se conduire a sa mode" (II, 44, Bk. II, ch. xvii). His permanent identity thus exists somewhere apart from his passions, appetites, and superficial fluctuations. As well as resisting the daily ebb-and-flow of life, Montaigne's basic individuality stands independent of social categories. Even the name Montaigne does not express anything authentically individual, because it is shared by members of his family and even by perfect strangers (II, 23-24, Bk. II, ch. xvi). In what, then, does Montaigne's essential identity, his forme sienne, reside? Montaigne seems to locate his individual essence in the innate structure of his mind, apart from emotional and rational faculties alike. His individuality resides in his intellectual style, in the way he orders his thoughts. He derives the greatest personal satisfaction from observing the processes of his mind in order to define his own identity. Skeptical of all other pursuits, he cuts himself off from the world and plunges into the contemplation of his individual psyche. Nevertheless, Montaigne's discovery of himself could not have taken place in egoistic isolation: it both grew out of and stimulated his discovery of other people. In particular, his friendship with La Boetie apparently awakened new feelings in Montaigne which caused him to look deeper into himself; and conversely, the insights he gained into his own nature made him more aware of other people as individuals. After La Boetie's death, Montaigne married and began writing his Essais, partly to compensate for the loss of his friend. Montaigne's essays represent, then, as well as a search for self-knowledge, a striving for self-expression and communication. Montaigne shows himself to the world in the hope that some kindred soul will find him out: "S'il y a quelque personne, quelque bonne compaignie aux champs, en la ville, en France ou ailleurs, resseante ou voyagere, a qui mes humeurs soient bonnes, de qui les humeurs me soient bonnes, il n'est que de siffler en paume, je leur iray foumir des essays en eher et en os" (II, 265, Bk. Ill, ch. v). Thus, despite Montaigne's detachment and selfabsorption, or perhaps because of them, he leaves the way open for intense personal relationships, based not on social forms but on elective affinities. The reciprocal connection in Montaigne's thought between individuality and personal relationships also appears in Mme de Lafayette's work. In the Princesse de Cleves, Mme de Cleves only becomes an individual through her contact with other people. Her love for Nemours, by making her conscious of herself, causes her to have ever more intense feelings towards him. Montaigne, too, asserts that only those people who are aware of themselves as individuals are capable of real depth of feeling, and that a sense of one's individual uniqueness can make for rare friendships of infinite richness: "II faut tant de rencontres a la bastir, que e'est beaucoup si la fortune y arrive une fois en trois siecles" (1,199, Bk. I, ch. xxviii). Through his discovery of his own nature and of human nature in general,

SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE

MORALISTES

19

Montaigne soon realizes that social life has no meaning for him as an individual and impedes his relations with other people. Because he has a firm sense of his own identity, Montaigne is able to stand outside his society and to judge it by the light of individual reason. He succeeds in freeing his judgment from the blinders of custom which most men unknowingly wear. Custom dulls natural reason until man accepts tradition as a second nature: Tusagenous desrobbe le vray visage des choses" (1,122, Bk. I, ch. xxiii). Montaigne, unlike other men, realizes that customs are not founded on reason or natural law, but merely on authority and tradition. What men take for virtue is merely habit: "Les loix de la conscience, que nous disons naistre de nature, naissent de la coustume; chacun ayant en veneration interne les opinions et moeurs approuvees et receues autour de luy, ne s'en peut desprendre sans remors, ny s'y appliquer sans applaudissement" (I, 121). Knowledge of non-European civilizations aids Montaigne to gain a new perspective on his own nation. In no way absolute or inevitable, European customs merely afford one possible solution to man's universal problems, and not even the best solution at that. The cannibals are less barbarous than the French, because they have remained close to nature; they lack the vices and corruption of a decadent Europe: "Les paroles mesmes qui signifient la mensonge, la trahison, la dissimulation, l'avarice, l'envie, la detraction, le pardon, inouies" (I, 235, Bk. I, ch. xxxi). The cannibals are all free and equal, whereas the French suffer from inequality and injustice: "Qu'est-il plus farouche que de voir une nation, ou par legitime coustume la charge de juger se vende, et les jugemens soyent payez ä purs deniers contans, et oü legitimement la justice soit refusee a qui n'a dequoy la payer . . . " (I, 124, Bk. I, ch. xxiii). Montaigne gives many similar examples to show that the ways of the French are no less barbarous than the savages'. French social institutions are not only irrational, but corrupt and inhumane as well. What is worse, this corrupt society compels him to take a part in it which is foreign and distasteful to his individual nature. Montaigne would willingly cut himself off from the world completely, but the citizens of Bordeaux will not let him do so: they elect him their mayor in absentia in 1581, and again in 1583. Besides his official duties, inescapable social and familial responsibilities seek him out: "La plus part des reigles et preceptes du monde prennent ce train de nous pousser hors de nous et chasser en la place, ä l'usage de la societe publique" (II, 450, Bk. Ill, ch. x). Society forces him to play a role which has nothing to do with his individual character and inclinations; it involves him in a corrupt order of which his reason and conscience disapprove. Although Montaigne condemns society and deplores the necessity of having contact with it, he opposes any attempt to improve the existing order: no matter how bad things appear, change will only make them worse. This conservative attitude owes much to the troubled times during which

20

SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE MORALISTES

Montaigne lived. The horrors of the civil and religious wars made him justifiably suspicious of reform: no ideal is worth thousands of lives. Moreover, any innovations may throw the whole social system off balance and produce even greater evil than the ones already in existence. "II y a grand doute s'il se peut trouver si evident profit au changement d'une loy receue, telle qu'elle soit, qu'il y a de mal a la remuer, d'autant qu'une police, c'est comme un bastiment de diverses pieces jointes ensemble, d'une telle liaison, qu'il est impossible d'en esbranler une que tout le corps ne s'en sente" (I, 125, Bk. I, ch. xxiii). No matter how bad conditions are, trying to change them will only make them worse. Forced to play a role in an order he despises, Montaigne makes a compromise with society, exchanging outer compliance for the privilege of inner detachment: "le sage doit au dedans retirer son ame de la presse, et la tenir en liberie et puissance de juger librement des choses; mais, quant au dehors, qu'il doit suivre entierement les fa?ons et formes receues" (Ibid.). He insists on a total separation between his public role and his private thoughts and feelings. Anyone who stakes his inner worth on his social function loses his dignity and his capacity for independent judgment, and will likely fall victim to the immoral influence of the times. To preserve his freedom of thought in the midst of a "siecle si gaste", Montaigne refuses to commit himself personally to the public activities in which he must take part. Himself an actor, he still maintains the objectivity of a spectator: "La plus part de nos vacations sont farcesques. 'Mundus universus exercet histrioniam'. II faut jouer deuement nostre rolle, mais comme rolle d'un personnage emprunti. Du masque et de l'apparence il n'en faut pas faire une essence reelle, ny de l'estranger le propre" (II, 456-7, Bk. Ill, ch. x). Those who attempt to become the "personiiage" they are playing abdicate their individuality in exchange for hollow social prestige. For Montaigne, the tendency to confuse public and private roles not only impairs individual dignity; it also threatens the community as a whole. The religious fanatics of both parties, who have brought the country to ruin, became destructive simply because they allowed their personal feelings to become involved in their public acts. In modern terms, they committed their private ego to a public cause: "J'en vois qui se transforment et se transsubstantient en autant de nouvelles figures et de nouveaux estres qu'ils entreprennent de charges, et qui se prelatent jusques au foye et aux intestine, et entreinent leur office jusques en leur garderobe... Iis enflent et grossissent leur ame et leur discours naturel a la hauteur de leur siege magistral. Le Maire et Montaigne ont tousjours este deux, d'une separation bien claire" (II, 457). The violence of a personal passion, whether it be selfish or altruistic, combined with the power that accrues to a public function, can only provoke disaster. According to Montaigne, if everyone had been as

SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE MORALISTES

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successful as he in keeping his public and private selves apart, the religious wars might never have occurred. Unlike those who bring ruin on themselves and others by adopting the goal of social success, Montaigne governs his behavior strictly on the dictates of his conscience. As well as offering him a refuge from the outside world, Montaigne's inner conscience dictates his outward behavior. Montaigne's attitude towards social morality appears somewhat inconsistent. Though he implies sometimes that the moral code is purely social and extrinsic, he is also enough of a rationalist to believe in his innate faculty for distinguishing right from wrong. He declares that the private citizen can and must act on the promptings of his own reason and conscience: "Nous autres, principalement, qui vivons une vie privee qui n'est en montre qu'a nous, devons avoir estably un patron au dedans, auquel toucher nos actions, et, selon iceluy, nous carresser tantost, tantost nous chastier. j'ay mes loix et ma court pour juger de moy,et m'y adresse plus qu'ailleurs" (II, 225, Bk. Ill, ch. ii). Evidently, a man must judge those acts for himself which none have witnessed; but Montaigne imposes his private judgment on his public acts as well as his private ones. He rejects other people's judgments because they are often biased and insincere, and at best remain superficial. Other people have an insufficient knowledge of one's character because they see only one's actions; one's thoughts and motives remain hidden: "Voylä comment tous ces jugemens qui se font des apparences externes sont merveilleusement incertains et douteux; et n'est aucun si asseurö tesmoing comme chacun a soy-mesme" (II, 24-25, Bk. II, ch. xvi). For the same reason he refuses advice, Montaigne also rejects public approbation and glory: "Ce n'est pas pour la montre que nostre ame doit jouer son rolle, c'est chez nous au dedans, ού nuls yeux ne donnent que les nostres . . . Ce profit est bien plus grand et bien plus digne d'estre souhaitö et esperi que lTionneur et la gloire, qui n'est qu'un favorable jugement qu'on faict de nous" (II, 22). Montaigne's reliance on his own judgment implies a belief in the uniqueness and inviolability of his individual self. A man must judge himself by his own standards, not by anyone else's: "Toute personne dTionneur choisit de perdre plustost son honneur, que de perdre sa conscience" (II, 30). By keeping a moral distance between himself and society, Montaigne preserves his individual values and his self-respect. Although this separation between an individual and his social function allows him to remain true to his inner self, it may hinder him from forming relationships with other people. This drawback to the social compromise is not brought out explicitly by Montaigne, but it is implicit in the situation he describes: a lot of "personnages" playing their social roles, carefully avoiding any deep involvement with their own actions, are not likely to get very close to one another as people. Social circumstances prevent an individual from experiencing love and friendship, either by forcing him to protect

22

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his individuality, or by preventing him from discovering his personal identity in the first place. This unfortunate result of Montaigne's compromise is brought out dramatically by Mme de Lafayette. The problem of personal relationships is of course central to the Princesse de Cleves, but even a novel like Zaide shows how social considerations keep people apart who should naturally be close: husband and wife, father and daughter, lover and mistress. In this area of human relationships lies the basic insufficiency of the social compromise Montaigne bequeathed to the seventeenth century. Despite this drawback, Montaigne's views on society and the individual became the model for the following century. All the seventeenth century moralists, from Descartes to Mme de Lafayette, see society as a threat to them as individuals, and feel a necessity to keep their psychological and moral distance from it. Like Montaigne's, theirs is the philosophy of a state of siege, an attempt to defend the individual against encroaching social forces. For Montaigne, at least, this state of siege was more than just a metaphor. As he wrote: "Les guerres civiles ont cela de pire que les autres guerres, de nous mettre chacun en eschauguette en sa propre maison" (II, 410, Bk. Ill, ch. ix). But Montaigne, like his seventeenth century successors, also felt himself besieged by the outside world in a more figurative sense. Aside from the actual brigands who enter Montaigne's house, false ideas and corrupt customs threaten to infiltrate his private thoughts, and the latter are almost worse than the former, because more insidious. In selfdefense, Montaigne retires into the recesses of his study and of his mind: "II se faut reserver une arriere boutique toute nostre, toute franche, en laquelle nous establissons nostre vraye liberie et principale retraicte et solitude" (I, 271, Bk. I, ch. xxxix). Montaigne often uses metaphors of shelter to refer to his inner self, such as arriere-boutique toute ndtre and cheζ nous au dedans. For their part, Mme de Lafayette's characters feel the same necessity to withdraw into themselves in the face of social pressures, and Mme de Lafayette even expresses this withdrawal with a metaphor akin to Montaigne's. For Montaigne's rather bourgeois arriere-boutique, Mme de Lafayette substitutes an aristocratic cabinet, but the sense remains similar. By shutting herself up in her cabinet, Mme de Cleves, like Montaigne, symbolically seeks refuge within herself from a world which repels and threatens her. As well as accepting Montaigne's alienation from his social role, the seventeenth century will adopt his opposition to change and his analysis of social violence. Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, and Nicole all consider social customs irrational, and yet all assert the necessity of custom for maintaining order. And they also believe with Montaigne that the intrusion of private desires into public roles is the surest road to disaster. In the Princesse de Qeves, this mingling of roles leads to a breakdown of the social order, and

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eventually to the civil strife which is foreshadowed at the end of the novel. After the king's death, the individual nobles are no longer compelled to keep their hatreds and jealousies out of public sight. And once these feelings are allowed to come out into the open and to dominate their actions, total chaos ensues. Thus, Montaigne's compromise between private and public roles, and his analysis of social disorder, have become implicit assumptions in the seventeenth century: even the fictional society of Mme de Lafayette is built on the same compromise and is subject to the same dangers. While Descartes generally accepts Montaigne's views of society, his conception of man is more limited and pragmatic than his predecessor's. Descartes does not share Montaigne's interest in his entire corporeal being, with all its quirks, habits, and ailments. For Descartes, the body is an automaton, at the mercy of natural forces; only the mind man can truly call his own. Moreover, although his psychology accords a prominent place to subjectivity and introspection, Descartes, unlike Montaigne, does not indulge in self-contemplation for its own sake. His goal is not only abstract knowledge but also a basis for resolute moral action. Descartes' self-definition emphasizes active mental operations over static mental qualities: "je connus que j'etais une substance dont toute l'essence ou la nature n'est que de penser". 2 Instead of concentrating on the attributes of individual personality or the content of thought, Descartes places the accent on the process of thought itself, on the creative power of the mind. In this particular context, his thought displays affinities with existentialist psychology. Descartes, like the Existentialists, sees the mind as an active force rather than a passive object of study. And Descartes' morality, like Sartre's, requires firm commitment and resolute action. Though they differ in their approach to psychology, Descartes comes close to Montaigne in his appraisal of society. Like Montaigne's, Descartes' social perspective is mainly negative and critical. Descartes proclaims the falsity of social custom, politics, traditional philosophy and, even going beyond Montaigne, of accepted religious arguments. But, again like Montaigne, Descartes did his best to minimize the revolutionary implications of his criticisms. In the Discours, he expresses his firm opposition to all social and political reform: "je ne saurais aucunement approuver ces humeurs brouillonnes et inquietes, qui, n'etant appelees, ni par leur naissance, ni par leur fortune, au maniement des affaires publiques, ne laissent pas d'y faire toujours, en idee, quelque nouvelle reformation. Et si je pensais qu'il y eüt la moindre .chose en cet ecrit, par laquelle on me püt

2 Discours de la methode, ed. Etienne Gilson (Paris, 1930), 33. Subsequent references to this work will appear in the text.

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soup^onner de cette folie, je serais tres marri de souffrir qu'il füt publie" (14-15). Although Descartes made these pronouncements partly for self-protection, there is no reason to doubt his sincerity. Descartes, like Montaigne, seemed to prefer familiar social evils to evils yet unknown. Following the older writer's example, Descartes took a position of disdainful acquiescence to social custom. Even while resolving to doubt everything, Descartes adopted a provisory moral code in conformity with the ways of his country. In his letters to Elizabeth, Descartes expresses himself more radically, but his basic conservatism is unaltered. Instead of advising Elizabeth to accept the traditional social outlook, he urges her to decide on a course of action through reason alone, and to maintain a "ferme et constante resolution" to follow the chosen course at all costs. 3 However, this moral code is not so unconventional as it appears, because only exceptional people like Elizabeth and Descartes are capable of following it. Most people cannot act on the dictates of pure reason alone; they need the guiding influence of custom and tradition. Moreover, reason often tells men to observe social customs faithfully. Their own interest and the interest of the community as a whole direct them not to disturb the existing order. Despite these efforts at moderation, Descartes' defense of social stability lacks a certain air of urgency. His conservatism, purely utilitarian, does not spring from any profound respect for national tradition. Descartes informs the reader of his Discours that he decided to adopt the ways of his countrymen for practicality's sake alone: "Et encore qu'il y en ait peut-etre d'aussi bien sensds, parmi les Perses ou les Chinois, que parmi nous, il me semblait que le plus utile etait de me regier selon ceux avec lesquels j'aurais a vivre" (23). Descartes' social conformism appears offhand, cavalier; he accepts social restrictions less out of duty than out of indifference. Descartes, like Montaigne, cultivates an aristrocratic detachment from the petty affairs of the world. Since he does not hope to change society, he tries to keep aloof from it as much as possible. Descartes again follows Montaigne's lead in spending much of his life in solitude and retreat. He wrote the Discours de la methode in a secluded spot in Holland, where "j'ai pu vivre aussi solitaire et retire que dans les deserts les plus ecartes" (31). When he found it necessary to mix with society, Descartes kept his distance and refused to become involved: "je ne fis autre chose que rouler 5a et la dans le monde, tächant d'y etre spectateur plutöt qu'acteur en toutes les comedies qui s'y jouent". 4 On the occasions when Descartes could not avoid playing a more active role, he espoused an outward observance of social duties without much 3 4

To Elizabeth of Bavaria, August 4, 1645, in Oeuvres et lettres (Paris, 1953), 1193. Discours, 28. Compare with quote from Montaigne on p. 20 above.

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inner commitment. According to Descartes, the functioning of society does not require individual dedication to the public interest. If the individual simply goes through the approved social motions, society will benefit automatically: Car Dieu a tellement etabli l'ordre des choses, et conjoint les hommes ensemble d'une si 6troite soci6t6, qu'encore que chacun rapportät tout ä soi-mSme, et n'eüt aucune charit6 pour les autres, il ne laisserait pas de s'employer ordinairement pour eux en tout ce qui serait en son pouvoir, pourvü qu'il usät de prudence, principalement s'il vivait en un sifecle oü les moeurs ne fussent point corrompues.s This theory of social laissez-faire, which obviously parallels Descartes' mechanistic explanation of the universe, removes the weight of social responsibility from the individual. The automatic meshing of social gears allows man to live in society while retaining his detachment and inner freedom. Descartes' social attitude, like Montaigne's, implies a sharp demarcation between public and private roles. In the Discours de la mithode, Descartes makes this demarcation quite clear. In one particularly telling passage, Descartes reveals why he decided not to publish his projected treatise on the origin of the world: "j'appris que des personnes ä qui je defere, et dont I'autonte ne peut guere moins sur mes actions que ma propre raison sur mes pensies, avait desapprouve une opinion de physique, publiee un peu auparavant par quelque autre . . . " 6 The parallel construction Descartes uses establishes a strict separation between the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of the mind. His statement implies, in condensed form, a veritable social contract: Descartes offers to exchange complete outward compliance for complete inner freedom. His very deference to the law pays society no compliment. He submits to social authority, even going so far as to suppress his own work, because public quarrels waste time and energy that he would rather devote to private meditation. Descartes' very indifference to society makes him law-abiding by default. The ambiguity of Descartes' social views is reflected in the reception given his ideas by contemporaries. For a short time at the height of the classical period, Cartesian rationalism appeared to lend support to the social structure. By emphasizing the universality of reason, Descartes encouraged the classical tendency to ignore or suppress individual variations: "ce qu'on nomme le bon sens, ou la raison, est naturellement egale en tous les hommes . . . je veux croire qu'elle est toute entiere en un chacun, et suivre en ceci l'opinion commune des philosophes, qui disent qu'il n'y a du plus ou

s 6

To Elizabeth, October 6, 1645, Oeuvres, 1216. Discours, 60. The reference is to Galileo.Italics added.

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du moins qu'entre les accidents, et non point entre les formes, ou natures, des individus d'une meme espece" (Discours, 2-3). With Descartes' apparent sanction, reason and traditional authority presented a united front against individualistic vagaries. However, the classical alliance between authority and reason was a short-lived one which only remained in force for a generation. Roughly before 1660 and after 1685, Descartes was regarded as a dangerous influence by both church and state. The solitary philosopher, who spent most of his life outside his home country, contributed more to social confusion than to social order. The Cardinal de Retz, an ambitious grand seigneur who plotted and intrigued his way through much of the seventeenth century, seems at first glance to have little in common with the philosophic Descartes. Retz did not hold social involvement in contempt; he eagerly took part in the public life of his time. Retz's ethic, which, with some ironic reservations, one might call 'heroic', made him view a political event as a personal adventure, an opportunity to test his will and courage, to conquer or be conquered. A product of Italian humanism and French feudal traditions, the Cardinal felt the Renaissance hero's need to put the world to his personal use. He desired to assert his individuality through dramatic action, to make an explosive impact on society. This driving need to make an impression on the world turns the most trivial-seeming occurrence into an important confrontation. Like the Due de St-Simon after him, Retz identifies the trappings of power with power itself. Thus a petty dispute over ecclesiastical precedence with Monsieur becomes a major incident: "M. le due d'Orleans vint, le jour de Päques, a Notre-Dame, ä vepres, et un officier de ses gardes, ayant trouve, devant qu'il füt arrive, mon drap de pied a ma place ordinaire, qui etait immediatement au-dessous de la chaire de Monsieur l'Archeveque, l'öta, et y mit celui de Monsieur".7 After the Cardinal explains to him that this action has violated the rights of the Church, Monsieur amenably has his kneeling cloth removed. In the following days, however, Monsieur's entourage convince him that he has been insulted, and the incident threatens to provoke a major court rupture until the Prince de Conde intervenes on Retz's side. Although Retz pretends to belittle the importance of this "historiette", it obviously accorded him a great deal of satisfaction. It is not surprising that Retz, an active political figure, should derive greater pleasure from social gains than Montaigne and Descartes. What is more unexpected is the distance and quasi-alienation from society which he manifests at the height of his political involvement. He seems to consider 7 Cardinal de Retz, Gallimard, 1956), 60.

Memoires,

Bibliotheque

de

la

Pleiade

(Paris,

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social and political activity as a game, played according to definite but arbitrary rules. This social and political game has no meaning in itself outside of the private significance its players ascribe to it. Its object is not practical results — such a goal would be ungentlemanly — but the display of one's individual style. This preoccupation with rules and style may help explain Retz's singular ineptness at intrigue; he devoted more attention to playing brilliantly than to winning. Retz had some justification in regarding social life as unreal — a game or a comedy — because he himself was cast in a role for which he was singularly ill-suited. This adventurous and dissipated young man, with no religious beliefs, let alone a religious vocation, was to become a cardinal. Retz knew his own character sufficiently to resist his family's early attempts to place him in the Church. But the death in 1641 of his patron, Louis de Bourbon, put an end to Retz's first political intrigue and fixed him in his ecclesiastical career. Retz reports that this event had a settling influence on him: "La verite est que j'en devins beaucoup plus regie, au moins pour l'apparence" (Mimoires, 32). In 1643, Retz became coadjuctor to his uncle, the archbishop of Paris. "Comme j'dtais oblige de prendre les ordres, je fis une retraite έ Saint-Lazare, oü je donnais a l'exterieur toutes les apparences ordinaires. L'occupation de mon intdrieur fut une grande et profonde reflexion sur la maniere que je devais prendre pour ma conduite . . . . Je pris, apres 6 jours de reflexion, la partie de faire le mal par dessein, ce qui est sans comparaison le plus criminel devant Dieu, mais ce qui est sans doute le plus sage devant le monde" (Memoires, 46). Since he can no longer evade a social role for which he has no personal vocation, he settles on a course of conscious and deliberate hypocrisy. Like Montaigne, Retz combines outward social conformity with satirical condemnations of social life. But where Montaigne's duplicity was passive and defensive, Retz's hypocrisy is aggressive, a means of social attack. By charging society with corruption, he defends and justifies his own conduct. He insists that his own corruption is not unique, but a universal social rule. Retz delights in revealing the hypocrisy of all social gestures, including his own. By calling pious acts "toutes les apparences ordinaires", he implies that not only for him, but for everyone, religious observances are merely empty forms. In using the required religious gestures as a camouflage for his private thoughts, Retz therefore behaves no worse than the rest of the clergy. He insists, on the contrary, that he is less contemptible than those who set the people a bad example with their open impiety and immorality: "Voilä la sainte disposition avec laquelle je sortis de Saint-Lazare. Elle ne fut pourtant pas de tout point mauvaise; car je pris une ferme resolution de remplir exactement tous les devoirs de ma profession, et d'etre aussi homme de bien pour le salut des autres, que je pourrais etre mechant pour moi-

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meme" (46). With the example of his depraved uncle the Archbishop before him, Retz refuses to take the rules for moral conduct seriously. His hypocrisy becomes a legitimate means of advancement in a corrupt world. Whereas Montaigne retreated from society to preserve his own purity, Retz decides to turn the general corruption to his individual advantage. If someone raises moral objections, Retz can reply that almost everyone else does the same or worse. Along with his desire to justify his actions and to portray himself in the best possible light, Retz reveals a contrary tendency to uncover and disclose his 'real' self. These impulses towards ostentation and confession are really complementary. The constant pressures of role-playing provoke in Retz a need for sincere self-expression and for authentic contact with others. Retz's self-revelations are also a bid for simultaneous punishment and reward. By confessing his shady dealings, he expiates his guilt. But at the same time, by admitting he is worthy of condemnation, he hopes indirectly to provoke his confidant's admiration, for the very enormity and extravagance of his misconduct, as well as for his virtuous impulse to confess. Retz repeatedly expresses in his memoirs his pleasure at revealing his inner secrets, even his weaknesses, to his unnamed reader. He regrets that he has not been able to confide a real secret to her, something quite exclusive that would strengthen the bonds between confider and confidante: " . . . j'en aurais meme davantage [raison] de me plaindre du peu de lieu que j'ai trouvi a vous en faire des confidences qui vous puissent etre de tout point particulieres". Retz continues with a touch of complacency: "en voici une qui l'est certainement, qui n'a jamais ete penetree, que je n'ai jamais faite a personne, que je n'ai jamais laisse soupgonner". And again: "Ma morale ne tire aucun merite de cette sinc6rite; car je trouve une satisfaction si sensible a vous rendre compte de tous les replis de mon äme et de ceux de mon coeur, que la raison, a mon egard, a beaucoup moins de part que le plaisir dans la religion et l'exactitude que j'ai pour la veriti" (35). In fact, Retz's claims of sincerity hardly square with the evidence. His Memoires often exaggerate the importance of his own historical role, and, on at least one occasion, he gives an eye-witness account of an adventure he never took part in. 8 And, despite his assertions to the contrary, Retz does not really indulge in intimate revelations; he is quite discreet about the details of his personal life. Nevertheless, Retz expresses a yearning for communication of a more profound nature than his social role can afford. He voices a recurrent impulse to bare his soul, to reveal facets of his personality which may not be particularly heroic, but which at least are truly his. Although he rarely acts on this impulse, he is aware of its power. 8 Cf. the episode of the "ghosts" on p. 35 of the Memoires. (See editor's note to the Pleiade edition, 1044.)

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29

Through opportunism and social pressures, Retz had adopted an artificial code of conduct which has become second nature. Trapped behind a line of defense which he is both unable and unwilling to abandon, he reaches out for the authentic self-revelation and intimate relationships which he cannot attain. In the satisfactions he draws from his social role, as well as in his furtive attempts to evade it, Retz is close in some ways to one of Mme de Lafayette's fictional types. Like Retz, and unlike Montaigne and Descartes, Mme de Lafayette's characters live in the social world and are affected by it. And many of them draw their main individual satisfaction from their ability to carry on a complicated and dangerous social existence. Alamir in Zaiäe,, and Nemours and Mary Stuart in the Princesse de Cleves, to mention just a few, are accomplished dissimulators and proud of it. But the character who resembles Retz most, both in his love of dissembling and his need for self-revelation, is the Vidame de Chartres. Like Retz, the Vidame attaches more importance to his social virtuosity than to the real advantages he might gain from it. The Vidame could gain much power at court by becoming the Queen's trusted confidant; but instead of devoting himself entirely to her, he continues seeing several other women. He refuses to give up his other mattresses, not because he is attached to them, but because he is fascinated by the game of sleight-of-hand his complicated affairs oblige him to play. Retz's psychology also resembles that of Mme de Lafayette's characters in another way: the more he desires to reveal himself, the more conscious he becomes of other people's inscrutability. According to Retz, knowledge of human events, from the historic to the trivial, is not objective and rational, but private and elusive: "Qui peut done ecrire la verite, que ceux qui l'ont sentie? Et le president de Thou a eu raison de dire qu'il n'y a de veritables histoires que celles qui ont ete ecrites par les hommes qui ont ete assez sinceres pour parier veritablement d'eux-memes" {Mem ο ires, 37). Retz's own practice of dissembling has taught him how much of themselves people always keep hidden from view. However, understanding other people is not just a question of sincerity versus deception: even if everyone were perfectly open, each would still find the other incomprehensible, because seventeenth century psychological analysis, for all its clearness and subtlety, leaves out important areas of human personality. Gassical language has no words to express the vague, half-conscious feelings and impulses which account for so much of psychological life. 9 Retz, like many writers of his period, refers to these ill-defined 9 Classical novelists were aware of this deficiency: cf. Du Plaisii, "II n'y a pas de moindres difficultes sui les mouvements du coeur, que sur les traits de l'esprit. II faut des lumieres tres-grandes pour . . . expliquer avec nettete, des choses qui par le peu de

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qualities obliquely as "le je ne sais quoi". This expression, fairly common during the seventeenth century, occurs most frequently in reference to love, the indefinable passion par excellence. Retz uses the phrase somewhat differently. In his portraits of Richelieu and La Rochefoucauld, he resorts to je ne sais quoi to denote the mysterious political flair some men possess. He says of Richelieu: "II etait bon ami; il eüt meme souhaite d'etre aime du public; mais quoiqu'il eut la civilite, l'exterieur et beaucoup d'autres parties propres ä cet effet, il n'en eüt jamais le je ne sais quoi, qui est encore, en cette matiere, plus requis qu'en toute autre" (Memoires, 69). Despite his many gifts, Richelieu lacked the mysterious charm necessary for public popularity. Retz's usage of je ne sais quoi is a political variation on its more common meaning: the same indefinable quality is needed to provoke the adoration of lovers and of peoples. In Retz's portrait of La Rochefoucauld, the je ne sais quoi appears to have much the same sense as for Richelieu, but its implications actually extend beyond the limited political context. "II y a toujours eu du je ne sais quoi en tout M. de la Rochefoucauld . . . II n'a jamais ete capable d'aucune affaire, et je ne sais pourquoi; car il avait des qualites qui eussent supplee, en tout autre, celles qu'il n'avait pas" (Mimoires, 157). On the surface, Retz directs his attention, with some malicious exaggeration, to La Rochefoucauld's political ineptitude. For some hidden reason (je ne sais quoi), La Rochefoucauld failed to achieve the success that should have been his. But the hyperbolic form of Retz's comment raises more fundamental problems than mere social achievement. Retz's use of je ne sais quoi admits the insufficiency of popular salon psychology, based on abstract qualites on the one hand and practical standards on the other. Human nature is too complicated and too elusive to be understood and communicated in such a rigid and simplistic manner. The je ne sais quoi expresses Retz's renunciation of any attempt to define personal identity through rational discourse. Both reason and social language break down when confronted with the complexities of human nature. Through his attempt to put Montaigne's and Descartes' social compromise to a practical use, Retz reveals both its social and its psychological deficiencies. From a social point of view, the segregation of public and private roles worked for Montaigne and Descartes because they both lived somewhat apart from society; their real life's occupation was solitary. But a man like Retz, who really has no function outside his social one, knows the difficulty involved in keeping his individual feelings out of his public role.

connoissance qu'on en a eu jusqu'icy, n'ont presque point encor de termes propres". (Sentiments sur l'histoire, in Romanistisches Jahrbuch, XIV [1963], 122. Emphasis mine.)

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And from a psychological viewpoint, Retz's reflections on his acquaintances point the way towards a new view of individuality, simply by revealing the limits of the old rational view. With his je ne sais quoi Retz reintroduces into psychology the mystery and ambiguity which Descartes attempted to dispel. Retz therefore bridges the gap between the deliberate, self-willed individualism of Descartes and the troubled, problematic views of La Rochefoucauld and the Jansenists.

II SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE MORALISTES NICOLE, LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, substantial changes took place in French views of human nature and society. A new generation of moralists, strongly influenced by Jansenism, discredited the self-willed, dynamic hero of Descartes, Corneille, and Retz. The breakdown of the standing social compromise, as foreshadowed by Retz and dramatized by Mme de Lafayette, arose partly from social changes already mentioned, but largely from the psychological influence of the Jansenists. In an effort to combat rationalism and to reinstate faith, the Jansenists got more than they bargained for: they actually undermined the assumptions on which the whole society was based. But their original motivation was religious, not social. The Jansenist antirationalism represents a reaction against Descartes' mechanistic view of the universe. The Jansenists correctly sensed that recent intellectual and scientific developments threatened to make man and the world independent of God. In order to safeguard belief in a personal God who was more than a celestial watchmaker, they had to refute Descartes' rational analysis. But they could only do so indirectly: unable to disprove the new scientific discoveries, the Jansenists were obliged to concentrate on denigrating human reason itself. In order to make room for God, they attempted to reduce the intellectual and moral dimensions of humanity. Where Descartes had assured man he could unlock the secrets of the cosmos, the Jansenists asserted that man was feeble, corrupt, and utterly dependent on divine grace. As the Jansenists interpret the doctrine of the Fall, original sin implies a corruption of the reason as well as of the heart. Man, in his fallen state, does not deserve to acquire knowledge of either God or the world; nor has he the intellectual power to do so. But by realizing his own unworthiness, he may achieve greater hope of salvation. Although it originated in a context of religious polemic, the consequences of Jansenist anti-rationalism were much more far-reaching: in attempting to discredit the rational individualism of Descartes, the Jansenists released a new force of individualism, ultimately far more dangerous to the existing social order. Descartes' and Montaigne's pact with society was possible because they considered themselves rational beings, capable of rationally

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controlling their behavior. And no matter how absurd they found certain of its customs, they were willing to admit that society was also based on rational assumptions, such as predictability and self-interest, which allowed it to function. They might condemn society for various reasons, but at least it had a basic rational order into which a rational being could fit himself. But once the seventeenth century discovered the unconscious — without knowing they had discovered it — the conflict between individual and society became irresolvable. If human beings are dominated not by reason, but by mysterious, half-understood forces, they cannot and should not conform themselves to the 'reasonable', orderly patterns of social intercourse. To do so would be to betray their true nature. Although the Jansenists do not carry their arguments to this extreme conclusion, they have laid the groundwork for the anarchic individualism of the Romantics, and the destructive implications of their thought weigh upon the Princesse de Qeves. Among the Port-Royal theologians, Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) perhaps illustrates most completely the unsettling psychological and social implications of Jansenist thought. In the realm of psychology, Nicole places subjective knowledge in the central position objective reason occupied for Descartes. Realizing the limits of rationality, Nicole offers intuition and self-consciousness as the only safeguards against sin. In the social realm, Nicole's thought is particularly relevant to Mme de Lafayette because, unlike some of the other Jansenists, he attempted to preserve a compromise between Christianity and society. More 'radical' Jansenists, like St-Cyran and the Solitaires of Port-Royal, refused all contact with the world. After condemning society, they showed no further interest in it. Nicole, however, recognizes no essential contradiction between Christian conduct and active participation in society; in his view, prayer and grace can sanctify and renew secular existence. The problem which Nicole faces, of living a Christian life in a corrupt world, is not unlike the dilemma which confronted Descartes and Montaigne on a purely secular level: how can an individual preserve his essential inner difference while playing a normal social role? In his attempts to reconcile sociability with Christianity, Nicole must deal with social and moral questions which did not touch his more secluded colleagues, but which deeply concerned all active members of seventeenth century society. Nicole, by his emphasis on examens de conscience, unwittingly did much to encourage individualism in the name of Christianity. Believing as he did in the limitless influence of original sin upon human nature, he asserted that man could only hope to save himself by constant introspection and self-observation. Unlike Montaigne, then, Nicole views self-knowledge not as its own reward, but as a necessary step toward spiritual well-being. The individual should strive at all costs to know himself, because the fate of his soul is at stake. If a man avoids seeing his faults in this life, he will be

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condemned to contemplate them throughout eternity. For Nicole, Hell can hold nothing worse in store than the forced and unending examination of one's sins. From a more positive angle, self-knowledge, by teaching humility, gives rise to all the virtues and prepares the soul for grace. Just as false pride makes man self-righteous and hard-hearted, true knowledge of himself renders him humble and sympathetic. No one who clearly sees his own faults can fail to show compassion and tolerance to others. And this human compassion, God willing, may give way to divine charity. However, the path to self-knowledge is strewn with obstacles. According to Nicole, although everyone is exclusively interested in himself, no one really knows himself for what he is. Man's ignorance of himself springs from his corrupted nature, which drives him to seek external pleasures and sensations until he loses the capacity to look inward. But the main reason man avoids self-examination is that he cannot bear to see himself as he really is. Because he cannot stand the truth, he creates and sustains comforting illusions about himself. He continues to contemplate these false self-images with complacency, in a travesty of true self-awareness: "il est toujours absent de lui-meme et present a lui-meme; il se regarde continuellement et il ne se voit jamais veri tablemen t parce qu'il ne voit au lieu de lui-meme que le vain fantöme qu'il s'en est forme". 1 This "vain fantöme" is the image of his social position, which the individual substitutes for his authentic self: "Un capitaine, en se regardant soi-meme, voit un fantöme ä cheval qui commande ä des soldats. Un prince voit un homme richement vetu qu'on regarde avec respect, et qui se fait obeir par quantite de g e n s . . ." (Ill, 8). Instead of drawing his own conclusions, man blindly accepts the flattering portrait the world paints of him. Even if someone happens to tell him the truth, he manages not to recognize it. To overcome these impediments to self-knowledge, one must indulge in severe and arduous self-examination. This task requires constant watchfulness: "une äme qui ne veille pas sur soi, se perd souvent de vue" (IV, 395). In the place of natural amour-propre, Nicole substitutes a salutary selfawareness which he terms vigilance chretienne. Vigilance chretienne aims at perfect self-mastery through unceasing auto-observation: "[Fame] partage son attention, en sorte qu'elle en donne une partie ä Taction, et qu'elle se serve de l'autre pour considerer ce qui se passe en elle: comme si elle avait deux esprits, l'un qui agft, et l'autre qui füt temoin et juge de ses actions" (396-397). Although he aims at instilling the perfect self-forgetfulness of charity, the means Nicole prescribes paradoxically lead to egoism, because they give dangerous weight to the inner testimony of thought and feeling. His definii Essais de morale (Paris, 1755), III, 7. Subsequent ref. to this work will appear in the text.

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tion of vigilance chretienne, cited above, suggests the state of morbid selfconsciousness the Romantics will describe 150 years later. In urging people to think of nothing but their inner states, for whatever virtuous ends, Nicole invites unsettling consequences. Only a saint could follow such a program without lapsing into narcissism or romantic melancholy. Thus, in striving to cultivate the authentic self-knowledge necessary for spiritual renewal, Nicole prepares the way for a cult of subjective impressions that he himself would deplore. As well as encouraging individual self-absorption, Nicole's program for inner awareness gives a new importance to the unconscious by dramatizing the inescapable limitations of self-knowledge. No matter how carefully he scrutinizes his own motivations, man will never know what is taking place deep inside him, "ä la premiere pente de l'äme", because much of his inner life is not conscious. As Nicole puts it, virtuous impulses are often not accompanied by "reflexions expresses". Even when a man consciously desires to please others, the reasons for his desire remain confused and hidden from him. He cannot discern whether his seemingly virtuous actions are inspired by genuine charity or by amour-propre in disguise, because most of his psychological life takes place below the conscious level. Nicole sees this psychological uncertainty as a consequence of man's fall from grace. In his sinful state, man does not deserve to know whether he has the divine spark that alone might inspire a truly selfless impulse in his corrupt nature. But while he cannot discover the essential quality of his motives, he must observe himself constantly anyway for fear he might lose grace if he does already have it. The constant necessity for self-examination, coupled with the awareness of its limits, gives man a salutary lesson in humility. This self-proclaimed master of natural secrets cannot even know himself; only God can see into his soul. However, it would only be another kind of presumption for man to welcome despair and self-loathing: "II faut s'humilier sous la main de Dieu, mais non pas se condamner; car ce serait s'attribuer une connaissance que nous n'avons pas" (III, 132). Taken out of their religious context, both Nicole's encouragement of introspection and his emphasis on unconscious motives have revolutionary social implications. By asserting the importance of irrational forces, Nicole demolishes customary views of human nature and lays the groundwork for a new, revolutionary individualism, based on instinct, intuition and feteling. And to reinforce these unsettling psychological insights, Nicole proffers a highly critical analysis of society. He traces the decadence of society and the depravity of individuals to the same source: the whole world, with each man in it, is entirely ruled by amour-propre. Nicole even sees amour-propre at the origin of society; it is the force which first impelled men to band together. Like Hobbes, Nicole considers war to be man's natural state. His exclusive love of self drives him to destroy

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all other selves. In order to protect himself against everyone else's aggressive impulses, each man found it in his interest to form a social order. After stimulating the foundation of society, amour-propre continues to sustain it. Within the society, all actions are undertaken either to satisfy one's own amour-propre or to placate someo'ne else's. Nicole's picture of the consequent exchanges and adjustments resembles Descartes' mechanical model of the universe: Rien n'est plus propre, pour representer ce monde spirituel forme par la concupiscence, que le monde naturel forme par la nature, c'est-ä-dire cet assemblage de corps qui composent l'univers; car l'on y voit de meme que chaque partie de la matiere tend naturellement ä se mouvoir, ä s'dtendre et ä sortir de sa place, mais qu'etant pressee par les autres corps, eile est reduite ä une esp£ce de prison dont eile s'echappe sitöt qu'elle se trouve avoir plus de force que la matiere qui l'environne. C'est l'image de la contrainte oü l'amour-propre de chaque particulier est reduit par celui des autres, qui ne lui permet pas de se mettre au large autant qu'il le voudrait (III, 142). Descartes and Nicole both share the view of a society composed of equal and separate individuals, whose free interaction automatically perpetuates the system. The only difference is in the conclusions they draw: while Descartes welcomes the situation, Nicole deplores it because grace and charity are lacking. The outer splendor and inner corruption which characterize society also characterize social language. Since man is sinful, his society is flawed, and the flaws of society, transmitted through language, compound man's original sinfulness. Taking as his text the versicle "Les discours des mechants ont prevalu sur lui", 2 Nicole explains the deleterious effects of social language on moral perceptions. More rigorous and also more pessimistic than Montaigne, Nicole declares that language, not custom, is man's second nature. Speech, like all human properties, is tainted with original sin; "le langage commun est proprement le langage de la concupiscence" (II, 56). Sin colors not only man's speech, but his inmost thoughts. Since he must think in "les mots de la tribu", even when alone he cannot escape society's corrupting influence. "Cette corruption ajoutee est infiniment plus grande que la naturelle" (II, 51): language fans the flames of sensuality above their natural level by arousing exaggerated expectations of physical pleasure; it convinces men that deplorable actions are really honorable; it turns men's thoughts away from God and fixes them on the world. In every way, language communicates and instills the false views held by society. Despite himself, almost without his knowledge, an individual's view of the world is influenced by his neighbors' misguided ideas and feelings. "Nos chutes 2

Psalm 64, v. 4.

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viennent ordinairement de nos faux jugements, de nos fausses impressions; et ces fausses impressions, du commerce que nous avons les uns avec les autres par le langage. C'est la chaine malheureuse qui nous precipite dans l'enfer" (II, 59). Against this linguistic pollution, no degree of isolation can prevail, for in Nicole's view, not just social conversation, but all of language has been contaminated to the point that virtuous thoughts can hardly be expressed. Even the "gens de bien" must speak the language of the world to make themselves understood, and their words therefore retain the meaning they have in the world. When a Jansenist and a nobleman speak of honor, for example, they undoubtedly have different ideas in mind. But since the Jansenist must share the nobleman's word, he finds it very difficult to communicate his own meaning. To counteract the corrupting effect of language, Nicole can only invoke the help of God. Although man has only false words to pray with, God will discern the truth behind them. Of all his ideas, Nicole's discussion of social language has perhaps the greatest importance for Mme de Lafayette. As a writer she faces in an esthetic context the same problem that Nicole's gens de bien face in a religious context: that of communicating their own thoughts in a social language they did not invent. And to carry the analogy one step further, within Mme de Lafayette's novels the characters themselves affront the same difficulty. Mme de Cleves, for example, tries unsuccessfully to explain to Nemours the difference between her private sense of duty and duty as seen from a social point of view. If she fails to communicate with him, it is partly because she lacks the words to do so. Both Nicole and Mme de Lafayette, in revealing the insufficiency of social language, attack the psychological and moral assumptions on which society rests. If language has become an unsatisfactory tool for moral analysis, all the judgments men make about themselves and their lives need to be re-evaluated. Men desperately need to renew their vision of the good society, which has been obscured and distorted by false values. Despite the revolutionary tendencies of his psychological and social thought, Nicole, like Montaigne and Descartes, remains conservative in social matters. It is as though all these writers, sensing the destructive effects that the extension of their ideas might have, drew back into a sort of protective conformism. No less radical in its way than the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century feared the consequences of its own radicalism. Nicole, for example, like his predecessors, argues acceptance of the world as it is because social change is either impracticable or downright dangerous. Nicole gives his approval to the social hierarchy and urges people to accord proper respect to the nobility. Explicitly borrowing Pascal's argument, Nicole admits the irrationality of hereditary succession, but praises it for its very arbitrariness: it is fortunate that society rewards birth

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rather than merit, because men are not equipped to distinguish true merit and would never be able to decide on their leaders. Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy, absurd as they are, at least maintain order through a clear principle of succession. At this point, however, Nicole's position diverges from the scornful acquiescence of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal. While Nicole goes along with them in their opposition to outward change, he hopes to improve society through a kind of inner spiritual renewal. Thanks to the chameleonlike nature of amour-propre, society already presents the outward appearance of grace: quelque corrompue que cette societe füt au-dedans et aux y e u x de Dieu, il n'v aurait rien au dehors de mieux regle, de plus civil, de plus juste, de plus pacifique, de plus honnete, de plus genereux; et ce qui serait de plus admirable, c'est que, η'et ant animee et remuee que par l'amour-propre, l'amour-propre n'y paraitrait point, et qu'etant e n t i c e m e n t vide de charite, on ne verrait partout que la forme et les caractfcres de la charite (III,

181-182). Since social behavior already imitates true charity, all that is needed is a change of heart. In his endeavor to 'christianize' accepted social morality, Nicole coins a series of new terms like vigilance chretienne, finesse du viritable bien, civilite chritienne. The composite nature of these expressions suggests the outward continuity and inner renewal which Nicole desires to effectuate. Nicole devotes a whole essay to civilite chritienne, which plays a primary role in his strategy of conversion. After having shown the disparity between civility and true charity, Nicole attempts to reintegrate the two. The outer forms of politeness, in themselves, show no incompatibility with charity, because civility, while corrupt at its source, is identical to charity in its effects. The humility, generosity, sweetness of temper and tolerance which mere civility requires merge equally well with the selfless devotion of charity. For, since charity requires man to love his neighbor, "eile enferme une civilite interieure envers tous les hommes" (II, 132). And the external considerations shown in society accord perfectly with this inner civility. To reconcile charity with civility, it is only necessary to refine the inner quality of civility, not to alter its outer forms: "II faut done travailler ä purifier la civilite, et non pas ä la bannir" (II, 139). Without upsetting traditional customs, civility offers an active outlet for charitable impulses. In other words, Nicole preaches to the Christian a sort of virtuous hypocrisy. A Christian who lives in society must accept its standards, not out of concern for wordly gains, but simply to make social life possible. If he behaved unconventionally enough to turn society against him, the resultant notoriety and conflict would involve him more deeply in the world

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than quiet conformity to social custom. By observing the social conventions, the Christian may succeed in living in the world, but not of it. He can counteract the world's corrupting influence by listening to the voice of his conscience. This inner voice will aid him to judge the world by God's law: "il faut tächer d'oublier et les hommes et nous-memes, et de considerer seulement sur chaque chose ce que Dieu en juge" (II, 72). But in his external actions, he should conform to man's law, not God's: "Elles [les pensees vertueuses] ne sont destinees que pour regier le langage interieur dont on se parle ä soi-meme et non pas le langage exterieur dont on parle aux autres" (II, 76). This dislocation between action and thought recalls the earlier social compromises of Montaigne, Descartes, and even Retz. By transposing it into a religious key, Nicole attempts to sanctify the same duplicity he condemns in its secular form: "Nos actions meme n'ont pas tout a fait la meme regie que nos sentiments. Car il y a des personnes ä qui on doit plus de respect exterieur, quoique l'on leur doive moins d'approbation et d'estime, parce que la civilite exterieure se regie sur les rangs que le monde a etablis, au lieu que l'estime interieure ne doit se regier que sur la raison. Mais comme eile n'est qu'interieure, eile ne donne sujet ä personne de se plaindre, ni de s'offencer" (II, 77). In attempting to rehabilitate the code of social conduct, Nicole is doomed to failure, because certain social standards cannot be purged of their essential amorality. As Nicole himself points out elsewhere, civility requires men to respect people not necessarily worthy of respect, to praise actions which a Christian should deplore. So when Nicole denies that civility requires the Christian to compromise his principles, his denial shows a certain bad faith: " . . . en ce qui regarde la sincerite, la charite ne doit point apprehender de la blesser dans les civilites qu'elle rend au prochain" (II, 129). While charity orders us to love all men indiscriminately, it does not command us to respect them beyond their worth. In his eagerness to meet the world half-way, Nicole risks sacrificing the purity of his principles. Because of its moral inadequacy, Nicole's social compromise rests on insecure foundations. As a Christian, he may not imitate Montaigne's empty observance of social customs he despises. Christianity, and particularly Nicole's individualized version of it, demands a complete commitment of the self in action — the translation of faith into works. For this reason, Nicole attempts to erase the contradiction between Christian principles and social conduct. But instead of establishing a new synthesis, Nicole's efforts leave a moral vacuum at the center of the social order. He has only called attention to the chasm between social and religious values, between 'inside' and 'outside', without being able to bridge it. Mme de Lafayette's novels take over Nicole's demonstration of social inauthenticity and corruption, and draw the logical conclusion Nicole is

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unwilling to draw: in a degenerate world, there can be no legitimate compromise between social and moral values. Mme de Lafayette translates Nicole's religious concern into a moral extremism which is totally secular and individualistic. While Nicole condemns society on the basis of a universal code, Mme de Cleves will condemn it on the judgment of her own heart and mind, in total moral solitude. Mme de Cleves goes farther in her rejection of society than Nicole would care to go, but by contrasting the decadence of society with the inner worth of the individual, Nicole's criticisms point in the direction Mme de Cleves will take. La Rochefoucauld shares with Mme de Lafayette the uncertain and threatening heritage of Jansenism. Numerous social contacts familiarized La Rochefoucauld with the Jansenist outlook on human nature. During the 1660's he frequented the Jansenist salon of Mme de Sable, who lived in seclusion near Port-Royal. Many of La Rochefoucauld's maxims were composed there in collaboration with Jacques Esprit, l'abbe d'Ailly, and other Jansenists. La Rochefoucauld also called often at the Hotel de Nevers, the "salon . . . mi-precieux, mi-janseniste" 3 of the Du Plessis-Guenegaud family. There he encountered the Arnaulds, Mme de Sevigne, and Mme de Lafayette, all of whom had greater or lesser connections with Jansenism. La Rochefoucauld's Maximes bear the mark of all these contacts with PortRoyal. For example, his analysis of amour-propre follows the Jansenist, Augustinian line almost exactly. 4 La Rochefoucauld agrees with Nicole that there is no such thing as legitimate self-esteem; all love of self simply detracts from love of God: "Dieu a permis, pour punir l'homme du peche originel, qu'il se fit un Dieu de son amour-propre, pour en etre tourmente dans toutes les actions de sa vie". 5 However great the psychological influence of Jansenism on La Rochefoucauld, its religious impact was minimal. La Rochefoucauld accepts the Jansenists' negative view of human capacities without admitting the redeeming intervention of God. His maxims convey a bitter disillusionment with human nature: he constantly asserts that honor and virtue are illusions, but does not seem reconciled to their disappearance. The devout Nicole does not share this sense of disillusionment, since as a believer in original sin, human iniquity cannot astound him. In addition, Nicole's faith in God brings him a solace for human weakness which La Rochefoucauld does not find. Because of its purely secular dimensions, La Rochefoucauld's vision of man is even more pessimistic than the Jansenists'. La Rochefoucauld, like the Jansenists, centers his critique of social virtue 3 Paul Benichou, Morales du grand siecle (Paris, 1948), 97. 4 Cf. Anthony Levi, S.J., French Moralists (Oxford, 1964), 229-233. s Maximes, DLXIII. For the reader's convenience, I will give as reference only the standard Roman number of the La Rochefoucauld maxim quoted.

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on the impotence of reason and will. Man, who believes himself master of his actions, is really at the mercy of his passions. The non-rational and involuntary movements of his body determine all his thoughts, feelings, and acts: "La duree de nos passions ne depend pas plus de nous que la duree de notre vie"; "La force et la faiblesse de l'esprit sont mal nommees: elles ne sont, en effet, que la bonne ou la mauvaise disposition des organes du corps" (V, XLIX). However, self-love and pride do not allow man to see his own weakness; with unconscious hypocrisy, he turns his own flaws into virtues. According to La Rochefoucauld, the conclusive proof of man's depravity is his inability to recognize it in himself. After showing man subject to natural forces, La Rochefoucauld reveals him prey to selfdeception and bad faith: "II ne faut pas s'offencer que les autres nous cachent la verite, puisque nous nous la cachons si souvent ä nous-memes" (DCXXIV). ' Filled with the awareness of man's impotence and his ill-judged vanity, La Rochefoucauld sets out to discredit the most august virtues. He particularly aims at the aristocratic cult of gloire, as the most striking contemporary instance of misplaced arrogance. As Benichou puts it, "tout son absurde prestige vient de ce qu'elle met son bien-etre dans un fantome". 6 The brave deeds on which heroes pride themselves have the same source as all human acts: passion and chance, the two mainstays of the natural order. Nor does La Rochefoucauld accept Descartes' and Corneille's defense of les grandes passions. The passions which spur men on to heroic acts are not particularly noble; in fact, they are most often mean and trivial: "Ces grandes et eclatantes actions qui eblouissent les yeux sont representees par les politiques comme les effets des grands desseins, au lieu que ce sont d'ordinaire les effets de l'humeur et des passions. Ainsi la guerre d'Auguste et d'Antoine, qu'on se rapporte ä l'ambition qu'ils avaient de se rendre maftres du monde, n'estoit peut-etre qu'un effet de jalousie . . . . Nous aurions souvent honte de nos plus belles actions, si le monde voyoit tous les motifs qui les produisent" (CDIX). Along with the passions, La Rochefoucauld stresses the influence of external circumstance on human action: "quoique les hommes se flattent de leurs grandes actions, elles ne sont pas souvent les effets d'un grand dessein, mais les effets du hasard" (LVII). The power of chance and passion serves to demonstrate man's two-fold weakness: from without and within, he is subject to irrational, natural forces. In La Rochefoucauld's words, "La fortune et l'humeur gouvernent le monde" (CDXXXV). La Rochefoucauld's exposure of human weakness on the individual level imperceptibly merges with his critique of society. Society encourages man's natural propensity for self-deception by dignifying his vices with the name 6

Morales du grand siecle, 108.

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of virtue: "Ce que le monde nomme vertu n'est d'ordinaire qu'un fantöme forme par nos passions, ä qui on donne un nom honnete, pour faire impunement ce qu'on veut" (DXLVI). La Rochefoucauld agrees with Nicole that social life compounds man's natural corruption: "Nous sommes si accoütumes ä nous deguiser aux autres qu'enfin nous nous deguisons ä nous-memes" (CXIX). This hypocrisy, whether natural or acquired, draws encouragement from false social values: "Le monde recompense plus souvent l'apparence du merite que le merite meme . . . II y a des gens, qu'on approuve dans le monde, qui n'ont pour tout merite que les vices qui servent au commerce de la vie" (CCLXXIII). La Rochefoucauld elaborates his argument with attacks on specific forms of social behavior: "La bienseance est la moindre de toutes les lois, et la plus suivie . . . . La flatterie est une fausse monnaie, qui n'a de cours que par notre vanite" (CDXLVII, CLVIII). Society is a fabric of lies, held together by hypocrisy and willful selfdeception. For all his disillusionment with social rules, La Rochefoucauld does not care to abandon them, because he has a definite sense of social obligation. Unlike Montaigne, Descartes, and Nicole, La Rochefoucauld seems to regard his social role less as an imposition than as a duty. He owes it both to himself and to society to continue behaving as a civilized being. La Rochefoucauld feels, perhaps on account of his Fronde experiences, that the unbridled expression of individuality is fruitless and destructive, harmful both to personal dignity and social stability. Any man who really respects himself will refrain from unseemly displays and cherish an ideal of civility and moderation — the ideal of the honnete homme. This is not to say that La Rochefoucauld gives up his individuality: önce La Rochefoucauld adopts the code of the honnete homme, he is able to find individual satisfaction within his social role itself. The individual reward of the honnete homme lies in his very capacity to suppress unruly manifestations of individuality, to remain in constant control of his mien and behavior. While most men follow blindly where custom and passion lead them, the honnete homme is able to control his passions and to take his stern rule from himself. La Rochefoucauld prides himself on this freedom from passion: with a stoicism reminiscent of Descartes and Corneille, he refuses to indulge in open displays of feeling. Indeed, La Rochefoucauld's 'classical' reserve has its attractiveness: it avoids the self-pity, the sentimentality, the cult of inaction, and the occasional brutality into which later 'anti-classicists' sometimes lapse. La Rochefoucauld is also proud to maintain his self-imposed code of social behavior independent of social influences. Although he follows accepted social rules, he does so out of choice, not out of mindless obedience. And by deliberately choosing his code of conduct, he makes of it an inner, individual necessity, independent of social circumstances: "Quand

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on ne trouve pas son repos en soi-meme, il est inutile de le chercher ailleurs . . . . La parfaite valeur est de faire sans temoins ce qu'on serait capable de faire devant tout le monde" (CCXVI, DXIII). By embodying the ideals of his social class better than anyone else — even Retz calls him the "parfait honnete homme" — La Rochefoucauld actually asserts his superior worth as an individual: he transforms the social code into his own private ethic. La Rochefoucauld's personal solution to the problems of social life becomes one of the important moral alternatives in the Princesse de Cleves. Both Mme de Chartres and the Prince de Cleves transform the public social code into a private imperative. Mme de Chartres is fully aware of the court's immorality, but she feels a personal and a social obligation to play the social game well. Civilized adults do not refuse to accept the world in which they live: they adopt the roles which are assigned to them, and they attempt to interpret those roles with as much elegance, and as much virtue, as they possibly can. M. de Cleves, who also takes his social role personally, forces himself to hide his despair and jealousy from his wife, because passionate outbursts not only would injure his own individual dignity, but would also insult Mme de Cleves, by failing to accord her the respect due her. Mme de Cleves herself refuses in the end to follow the aristocratic code of her husband and mother, but all through the novel Mme de Lafayette presents this position with a great deal of sympathy and force. While La Rochefoucauld bases his compromise with society on his confidence in his own will and reason, at the same time his insight into other people's motives leads him to reject rationalistic appraisals of human nature. In endeavoring to discredit the socially accepted image of man, La Rochefoucauld indirectly refutes rational psychological analysis, without putting any other method in its place. La Rochefoucauld's "portrait du coeur de l'homme" is most striking for what it leaves out. By throwing a glaring light on a small area of human personality, he only dramatizes the extent of the surrounding darkness. After proving that men are not what they seem, La Rochefoucauld finds himself at a loss to explain what they are. In a world of appearances, it is almost impossible to interpret people's actions correctly: "II y a une infinite de conduites qui paraissent ridicules, et dont les raisons cachees sont tres-sages et tres-solides.... II est difficile de juger si un procede net, sincere et honnete est un effet de probite ou d'habilete" (CLXIII, CLXX). Even leaving social appearances aside, human beings are inescapably mysterious because each individual possesses a unique inner life, wrapped in secrecy: "II est plus facile de connaftre les hommes en general qu'un homme en particulier" (CCXCV). Finally, man is as much a mystery to himself as others are to him: "On est quelquefois aussi different de soi-meme que des autres" (CXXXV). The tentative and problematic quality of La Rochefoucauld's observations betrays the insufficiency of classical psychological analysis. La

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Rochefoucauld, the .most classical of classical writers with his passion for simplification and rational classification, appears aware of the inadequacies of his own approach. With great clarity, he defines the limits of his own reason. Like the Cardinal de Retz, he retreats before the mystery of individual identity, that je ne sais quoi which frustrates rational explanation. Although he senses the limits of his own method, he cannot go beyond it. Like Nicole and even Descartes, La Rochefoucauld has an intuitive awareness of the unconscious mind, without having the words to express it. What La Rochefoucauld and the Jansenists call amour-propre is in some ways very like the Freudian Id. But since nothing in the psychological tradition of La Rochefoucauld's time corresponds to the Freudian conception of unconscious structures, La Rochefoucauld must express his new ideas in the indirect language of metaphor and simile. His famous reflexion on amourpropre uses the resources of poetic language to explore the unconscious: Rien n'est si impetueux que ses desirs; rien de si cache que ses desseins, rien de si habile que ses conduites; ses souplesses ne se peuvent representer, ses transformations passent Celles des metamorphoses, et ses raffinements ceux de la chimie. On ne peut sonder la profondeur, ni percer les tenfcbres de ses abfmes: lä, il est ä couvert des yeux les plus penetrants; il y fait mille insensibles tours et retours; lä, il est souvent invisible ä lui-meme; il y con?oit, il y nourrit et il y eleve, sans le savoir, un grand nombre d'affections et de haines; il en forme de si monstrueuses que, lorsqu'il les a mises au jour, il les meconnoit ou il ne peut se rösoudre ä les avouer (DLXIII). In this passage, without using the words 'irrational' and 'unconscious', La Rochefoucauld evokes very well the irrational and unconscious workings of the mind. Although La Rochefoucauld himself does not appear to see the contradiction, his intuition of the unconscious lies in direct opposition to his rational ideal of honnetete. By discovering people are not rational, La Rochefoucauld, like Nicole, exposes the irrelevancy of social rules. From the social point of view, an individual's mental states are inconsequential and problematic; only his outward behavior really counts. Nicole and La Rochefoucauld, on the contrary, prove that man's social role is totally superfluous; only his irrational inner life is 'real'. Nicole dramatizes the insubstantiality of social status by calling an army captain a "fantöme ä cheval". La Rochefoucauld makes a similar use of the word fantöme: "Ce que le monde nomme vertu n'est d'ordinaire qu'un fantöme forme par nos passions" (DXLVI). By revealing the ghostly tenuousness of social values, both authors lay the foundations for a new individualism, based not on external manifestations of will, but rather on quality of mind and mode of feeling. From Montaigne to La Rochefoucauld, French thought contains a steady undercurrent of what might be called subversive individualism. This indivi-

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dualism has certain constant characteristics. For one thing, all the writers discussed in the preceding two chapters judge society in the light of individual reason and morality, and all find it wanting, even corrupt and condemnable. Further, they all agree on a modus vivendi which allows them to cope with social existence. They observe the outward restrictions of society while maintaining a stubborn inner sense of individuality. Even the Frondeurs, who expressed their individualism more overtly than the others, are conscious of having played a predetermined social role: Retz's and La Rochefoucauld's actions during the Fronde followed a long-established pattern for feudal revolt. Like the other writers under consideration, they are aware of a divorce between their inner and outer self, between feeling and social gesture. One of the Chevalier de Mere's letters quotes the following statement .by La Rochefoucauld: "Nous devons quelque chose aux coütumes des lieux oü nous vivons, pour ne pas choquer la rdverence publique, quoique ces coütumes soient mauvaises; mais nous ne leur devons que de l'apparence; il faut les en payer et se bien garder de les approuver dans son coeur, de peur d'offencer la raison universelle, qui les condamne." 7 Almost a century later, La Rochefoucauld echoes Montaigne's scornful acceptance of social appearances, along with his inner condemnation. Despite their own efforts to maintain and renew this social compromise, mid-century moralists undermined it with new psychological discoveries. Through them, the very conception of personal identity underwent drastic changes. While Descartes and Retz founded their individuality on reason and will, both Nicole and La Rochefoucauld point the way towards a different vision of individual man. These two writers, with Jansenist thinkers in general, denigrate reason and magnify the importance of natural, irrational forces in man. Descartes and Retz, who were also aware of these forces, paid them only secondary attention. Descartes strived to organize everything, even his intuitive discoveries, into rational categories. The Jansenists, in order to denounce Descartes' intellectual presumption, reversed the hierarchy he established between reason and intuition. To humble proud reason, Pascal extolled the wisdom of the heart. And Nicole explicitly took up Pascal's defense of subjective, non-rational knowledge. Nicole's remarks on the individual conscience, on introspection, and on the ambiguity of motivation, all emphasize the subjective and non-rational aspect of human nature. This new psychological perspective was partly necessitated by the classical accord between reason and authority. If reason and will have passed into the public domain, they can no longer serve as a basis for individuality. In order to guarantee their individual privacy and uniqueness, La Rochefoucauld and Nicole then located personal identity in the obscure depths of 7

In La Rochefoucauld, Reflexions . . . (Paris, 1920), 322-323.

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MORALISTES

the unconscious. By basing individuality on unconscious movements, they protected it from public scrutiny: "lä, il est ä couvert des yeux les plus penetrants" (Maxime DLXIII). Their discovery of the unconscious also created more range for individual divergences. As Boileau states: "La raison, pour marcher, n'a souvent qu'une voie". 8 Passion, on the other hand, adopts a protean diversity of forms. Hence, by basing identity on the unconscious mind rather than the conscious will, classical moralists guaranteed their besieged inner privacy and their individual uniqueness. Thus, long before the Romantics, even before Locke, the classical moralists were groping towards a psychology of the irrational, the unexpected, and the instinctive. They saw the authentic expression of the self not in the deliberate constructions of reason, but in the spontaneous and impulsive upsurge of the passions. However, they merely sensed this new view; they lacked the means for expressing it, or even for investigating it more fully. In his study of French moralists before 1650, Father Levi stresses "the uncertainty which the moralists of our period left as a legacy to the age of classicism". 9 By the middle of the century, moralists had developed a superbly ordered and rational mechanism for psychological analysis which, unfortunately, did not account for the facts. But since they had nothing better, they had to make the best possible use of this rational scheme, filling in the gaps with references to je ne sais quoi and sentiments troubles. The social and psychological uncertainties of the period find a reflection in Mme de Lafayette's novels. Like the Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Lafayette perceives the insufficiency of classical psychology; like La Rochefoucauld, she condemns the artificiality of her social milieu. But, also like them, she has no means at her disposal appropriate to the expression of her feelings: she must employ a social language not her own and a novel form molded by social pressures. The time has passed when critics considered Mme de Lafayette as the ex vacuo creator of the "first psychological novel". Classical restrictions, and indeed her own esthetic perspective, kept her from inventing drastically new forms. The enormous disparity in talent and vision between Mme de Lafayette and other seventeenth century novelists should not disguise their relative similarity of means: the Princesse de Cleves did not start a new trend, but rather climaxed the gradual development of the classical historical novel. Given the prescribed limits of this form, whatever originality Mme de Lafayette's novels possess must come through indirectly, 'between the lines'. In this connection, one might even consider Mme de Lafayette's entire literary evolution as a search for indirect, metaphorical means of expression: like La Rochefoucauld, she must communicate new 8 9

L'Artpoetique, ch. I, v. 48. Levi, 338.

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ideas in old forms. And just as La Rochefoucauld made use of the maxime, the most conventional social form imaginable, as a vehicle for the most unsettling and revolutionary ideas, so Mme de Lafayette made a form that was uniquely hers of the nouvelle historique.

III THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL: HISTORY AND ROMANCE AS SOCIAL SYMBOLS

The tensions between individual and society perceived by seventeenth century moralists find a symbolic expression in the literary form Mme de Lafayette has chosen: the nouvelle historique. The artistic and social trends of the seventeenth century gave to the historical novel an ambivalent social perspective. On the one hand, esthetic standards of the time required stories to be set in an increasingly realistic social and historical context. On the other hand, even during the classical period the nouvelle historique retained elements of an older, non-social and unrealistic tradition, that of romance. In keeping with the traditions of her age, Mme de Lafayette's novels combine these two fictional trends. She cast most of her works in the nouvelle historique form: La Princesse de Montpensier, La Princesse de Qeves, and La Comtesse de Tende all belong to this genre. Zaide, which springs from the older tradition, also contains whole sections which paint a nouvelle historiqueAike picture of social life among the great. Still, most of Zaide and portions of her other works present events that flaunt the rules of historical causality and enter the domain of romanesque. In this respect, she is at the very center of literary developments which caused history and fiction to be blended into the nouvelle historique. The emergence of the nouvelle historique in the middle of the seventeenth century resulted from various psychological, esthetic and social factors.1 In the psychological realm, seventeenth century history and fiction already were quite close together: they both strongly emphasized the role of the passions in human life. Since historians attributed historical change to the actions of great men, history, like fiction, had to explore personal motives and feelings. St-Real, who was both a novelist and a historian, defined history's province thus: "Savoir l'histoire, c'est connaftre les hommes qui en fournissent la matiere, c'est juger de ces hommes sainement; ι For the development of the nouvelle historique, see Frederic Deloffre, La Nouvelle en France ά l'epoque classique (Paris: Didier, 1967). For an analysis of the terms nouvelle and roman, see Claudette Delhez-Sarlet, "La Princesse de Cleves: Roman ou nouvelle?" Romanische Forschungen, LXXX (1968), 53-85, 220-238.

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etudier l'histoire, c'est etudier les motifs, les opinions et les passions des hommes, pour en connaftre tous les ressorts, les tours et les detours, enfin toutes les illusions qu'elles savent faire aux esprits, et les surprises qu'elles font aux coeurs". 2 For St-Real, the basis of history is not policy but passion. Seventeenth century thinkers and historians inherited this view of the passions from the Renaissance. The Renaissance historians, drawing on both classical and Christian traditions, saw man as a creature who was both dominated by his passions and used them to dominate others. Machiavelli explained the politics of Florence by reference to the jealousy, zeal, ambition or pride of its leaders. Their passions spurred them on to glorious achievements, but their control over them was imperfect: the same passions that caused leaders to rise also brought about their precipitate fall. 3 Like the Renaissance, the so-called Age of Reason granted the passions enormous influence in human life, for both good and evil. In the Traiti des passions, Descartes defined the passions as a prime mover in human life, and stressed their relative autonomy from the intellect. For Descartes, the passions provide the impetus necessary for all activity: without desire, man cannot function. However, it is possible for man to direct his passions towards appropriate goals and thereby to live a useful and moral life. In the wake of Descartes, the classical moralists also placed passions at the base of all human action, but they were less optimistic about controlling them. For La Rochefoucauld, human existence is "une generation perpetuelle de passions" 4 which escapes the dictates of the conscious will. St-Real's views on this subject are very similar to La Rochefoucauld's. According to St-Real, kings and princes are no more, and often less, reasonable in their actions than ordinary people: Raisonner sur les affaires, deliberer long-temps, chercher la verite et la justice avec application, selon eux, c'est ä faire au vulgaire: mais suivre aveuglement la premiere impression de Sympathie ou d'antipathie, qu'ils sentent dans le coeur, affecter de se determiner par la plus legere circonstance de nom, de temps, ou de lieu, enfin par quelque rencontre fortuite; c'est ce qui leur paroit grand, extraordinaire, au-dessus du commun. St-Real's view of history represents a social and political extension of seventeenth century psychology. For him, history, like all human endeavor, relies upon the dynamism of individual passions. The emphasis which the seventeenth century placed on the passions provides one link between history and the novel. The historian's interest in 2 3 4 5

Abbe de St-Real, De i'usage de l'histoire, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1672), 3. See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, 1956), 57. Maximes, X. St-Real, De I'usage, 17.

50

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

internal motivation leads him to abandon historical facts for psychological conjecture and even pure invention, "ä interpreter des actes qu'il connait mal, ä reconstituer, au gre de sa fantaisie, les antecedents moraux d'evenements dont les sources authentiques ne donnent qu'un brut expose. Et tres vite l'on en arrive ainsi au roman". 6 Conversely, the attention the historians gave to the passions caused novelists to encroach on the domain of history. A view of history which gave so much emphasis to passion opened up endless possibilities for fiction, and novelists hastened to explore these possibilities. The historical novelist, like an inquisitive courtier, uncovered the loves, hates, and jealousies behind a colorful historical event. Or if he could not find any secret motives that were suitably romantic, he did not hesitate to invent them. The history of Don Carlos, for example, offered excellent material for fiction. According to the seventeenth century historical novelists, the rivalry of the Spanish king and his son for the same woman, Elizabeth de France, changed the course of history. Don Carlos' fate forms the basis for St-Real's most famous work, 7 and Mme de Lafayette also manages to introduce Carlos into the Princesse de Cleves. Both these authors ignore whatever political motives Don Carlos might have had and emphasize the purely romantic ones. By blaming love for historical calamities, the novelist receives a double benefit. First, he gives his inventions a veneer of authenticity. And at the same time, he causes romance to triumph over cold fact. As Mme de Villedieu repeats on every possible occasion: "ce n'est pas dans cette occasion seulement qu'on a donne ä la politique et ä l'interet des Princes, ce qui n'appartient qu'ä l'Amour". 8 Mme de Villedieu's assertion, though very different in tone, has visible affinities with St-Real's views discussed above. Without Mme de Villedieu's coy enthusiasm, St-Real also descries passion at the base of historical action. And both these authors derive their attitudes from the view of the passions prevalent in their century. The seventeenth century therefore saw a convergence of history and the novel through their portrayal of human passions and motives. In addition to these psychological affinities, history and the novel also shared similar esthetic characteristics. The rules of classical esthetics required history and fiction to resemble one another not only in content but in mode of presentation as well. According to La Mothe le Vayer: "En effet l'histoire nous represente les choses avenues et veritables, du meme air ä peu pres que

6 Gustave Dulong, L'Abbe de St-Real: Etude sur les rapports de l'histoire et du roman au XVlf siecle (Paris, 1921), 1,41. ι Don Carlos, nouvelle historique, 1672. 8 Maiie-Catherine Desjardins, known as Mme de Villedieu, Journal amoureux, Oeuvres (Paris, 1721), X, 54.

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la poesie nous depeint les possibles et les vraisemblables".9 In other words, once they have been given an artistic form, history and fiction should appear indistinguishable. Thus, while fiction invaded the realm of history to acquire new material, history moved closer to the novel in order to fulfill the esthetic requirements its readers imposed. Seventeenth century history, already considered an art rather than a science, steadily became even less scientific and more artistic. In addition to retaining its traditional rhetorical devices — invented discourses, ornate descriptions, lavish spectacles — seventeenth century history emphasized the dramatic and romanesque elements in past events. Mezeray culled from French history the details most likely to astound and touch his readers; whether they were true or not was of secondary importance. The index of the Abrige historique gives a good indication of Ntezeray's predilections. For example, in volume IV (sixteenth century) under P, are listed "Pere traite barbarement par son fils", "Ρίέίέ qui succede ä la galanterie", and "Portrait d'un homme trace dans la paume de la main de sa femme avec des lineaments de sang". 10 In addition to these striking details, Mezeray also dwells on unlikely coincidences, predictions, and marvels. Before Mme de Lafayette, he exploited the dramatic potential of Henri II's sudden death. Mezeray's account of the ill-fated tournament is as highly colored as a novelist's: "Comme la Cour etait en rejouissance pour les noces de la fille du roi, avec Phillippe Roi d'Espagne, qui s'etaient celebrees par procureur dans Notre Dame le vingtseptieme de juin . . . la mort, pour ainsi parier, s'etant cachee au milieu des plaisirs, fit un coup aussi fatal qu'imprövu, qui convertit toutes ces belles livrees en habits de deuil". After recounting the tournament accident, Mezeray adds a final touch which Mme de Lafayette will not see fit to include: Des personnes de qualite m'ont autrefois assure qu'ils avaient souvent ou'i raconter tres-affirmativement au Due Charles de Lorraine, gendre de ce roi, qui se trouva ä Paris lors de ces funestes rejouissances, que la nuit precedente du jour qu'il fut blesse, une Dame logee dans son hotel, pres de la Bastille, avait vu en songe fort distinctement qu'il avait 6t6 atteint et abattu par terre d'un coup de lance dans l'oeil, et que l'eclat en avait rejailli dans l'oreille du Dauphin qui en avait ete renverse mort aupres de son pere.11 The Princesse de Cleves also contains a prediction of Henri II's death, but Mme de Lafayette works the incident into the main action to make it appear more credible. Whereas Mme de Lafayette, a novelist, desires to

9 Discours de l'histoire, Oeuvres (Pfoerten, 1756), IV, ii, 300. 10 1st edition, Paris, 1667-1668; the edition I refer to is Amsterdam, 1722. π Mezeray, Abrige, IV, 4 0 7 ^ 0 8 .

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THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

eliminate the marvellous from her narration, Mezeray, a historian, plays it up to the utmost. In addition to their common interest in dramatic scenes, both history and fiction were subject to classical demands for vraisemblance. In all ages, esthetic enjoyment requires a certain degree of vraisemblance, but classical vraisemblance was particularly strict and far-reaching. Classical esthetic theory makes practically no distinction between illusion and reality; the same standards for belief apply to fiction, history, and real life. This stringent and wholesale application of vraisemblance arises from the rationalistic bias of classical esthetics. Classical rationalism sees as the object of art the revelation of universal truths made manifest by human reason. Reason reveals to all men 'l'idee universelle des choses', which transcends the accidents of time and circumstance. Because of its rationalistic perspective, classical 'realism' bans from art the concrete and the individual, which for a later age will form the very essence of realism. As M. Bray has remarked, the classical conception of vraisemblance totally distorts the meaning of realistic imitation of nature: "avec les apparences du realisme, l'art classique aboutissait ä l'idealisme". 12 Rational and theoretical in its principles, vraisemblance is universal in its application: no case is too special, no situation too anomalous to fall into reason's jurisdiction. Classical vraisemblance rules over the whole literary spectrum, from history to fantasy. Even poetry receives no special license. Chapelain writes of the Odyssey: "Sous les accidents d'Ulysse et de Polypheme, je vois ce qui est raisonnable qu'il arrive en gen6ral ä tous ceux qui font les memes choses". 13 To keep within the bounds of vraisemblance, Polyphemus must behave as one would expect a reasonable being in his position to behave, whether Cyclops or not. Vraisemblance, as a universally applied principle, provides a link between the purely esthetic and the social forces at work on seventeenth century fiction. These social and esthetic considerations are inseparable, because the seventeenth century conception of vraisemblance combines both artistic and moral criteria. That vraisemblance should serve a social function is not surprising, for classical vraisemblance was in many respects a moral category, which often took the place of bienseance in defining the social proprieties artists were required to observe. This alliance of bienseance and vraisemblance may puzzle a modern reader, for whom realism and morality hardly appear compatible, let alone interchangeable. In fact, according to Professor May, already in the eighteenth century the conflict between moral and esthetic criteria, between biensiance and vraisemblance, created an irresolvable

12 Formation de la doctrine classique, 214. 13 Preface to Adonis, ed. E. Bovet, in Aus Romanischen Sprachen und Literaturen: Festschrift Heinrich Morf (Halle, 1905), 38.

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dilemma for the novelist. Even if he succeeded in satisfying the demands of realism, by the same token he immediately provoked accusations of immorality. 14 Although this conflict was already present in the seventeenth century, it had not yet acquired alarming proportions; it had not yet developed into the eighteenth century dilemma. Vraisemblance and bienseance did not form opposing categories; in many respects, they overlapped and reinforced one another. In speaking of the seventeenth century, it is impossible to call vraisemblance a wholly esthetic category, or bienseance a wholly moral one; each has both moral and esthetic elements. Erich Auerbach says of bienseance: "in it morality, rules of social conduct and esthetic measure are scarcely distinguishable".15 And Rene Bray: "On joint, sous le meme vocable, des conseils moraux, des preceptes techniques, et des principes esthetiques". 16 Bienseance, in the sense of 'appropriateness', often exerted more influence for realism than vraisemblance. When Boileau urges the playwright: "Conservez a chacun son propre caractere / Des Sifccles, des Pais, etudiez les moeurs", he appeals to the authority of bienseance rather than vraisemblance: "Mais la scene demande une exacte raison. / L'etroite bienseance y veut etre gardee".17 While bienseance is partly an esthetic standard, vraisemblance is partly a moral one. "Chez Aristote, la theorie de la vraisemblance se rattache ä celle de limitation de la nature. Chez nos classiques, eile trouve son fondement dans la fonction moralisatrice de la poesie". 18 If the basic purpose of art is to reveal moral truths, verisimilitude will depend upon faithfulness to an acceptable moral code, and not upon an 'objective' imitation of reality. This moral conception of vraisemblance is evident in Chapelain's famous commentary on the Cid. Chapelain "refuse la vraisemblance . . . au mariage de Chimene et de Rodrigue: une fille vertueuse ne peut se resoudre a epouser le meurtrier de son pere". 19 In weighing the verisimilitude of the play, Chapelain unconsciously founds his esthetic judgments upon moral considerations: Chimene's marriage to Rodrigue is improbable because such things are 'not done'. In Chapelain's thinking, immoral and invraisemblable become practically synonymous. This classical accord between biensiance and vraisemblance rests on a previous and fundamental accord between social ideals and social realities. 14 Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIHe. siecle (New Haven, 1963), 71. is "La Cour et la ville", in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959), 159. 16 Formation, 206. 17 Art poetique, III, w . 112-113, 122-23. 18 Bray, 206. 19 Bray, 199. See also Chapelain's "Sentiments de l'Academie", in Opuscules critiques (Paris, 1936), 164.

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THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

Vraisemblance requires the artist to show things as they are; bienseance as they should be. The artist can only satisfy both these demands if the ideal and the real are akin to one another, if the moral values of his society reinforce its existing institutions. Such a harmony prevailed during the classical era. Until 1685 or so, the reading public saw no basic contradiction between its institutions and its values. Unrest and dissent were certainly not absent; but the gap between real and ideal, though widening, appeared bridgeable. This union of ideals and realities gave to vraisemblance a real social and moral authority. Under the pressures of vraisemblance, art was required to represent the view of the world accepted by society. During the classical age, realistic art reinforced accepted standards; it presented the public with their own way of life, polished and idealized, but essentially unaltered. Seventeenth century art confronted society with its own image: like the magic mirror in the fairy tale, it assured the beholder of his own perfection. In response to these pressures for vraisemblance, seventeenth century fiction moved steadily closer to history. Several critics have thoroughly traced the growth of historical realism in the seventeenth century novel. 20 To summarize their findings briefly, already before the classical period authors of romance made historical claims for their works. As early as 1661, La Calprenede dissociated himself from the auteurs de romans. Speaking of his earlier works, he claimed they were not romances, but histories: "Au lieu de les appeler des Romans, comme les Amadis,et autres semblables, dans lesquels il n'y a ny verite, ny vraisemblance, ny charte, ny Chronologie, on les pourrait regarder comme des Histoires embellies de quelque invention et qui par ces ornements ne perdent peut-etre rien de leur beaute". 21 Although La Calprenede's historical assertions are greatly exaggerated, a gradual 'historization' did indeed take place within the romance genre. While all 17th century romances were essentially non-realistic, certain gradations are apparent in their non-realism. A medieval chivalric romance like Amadis de Gaule, translated from Spanish into French in 1540, possessed the vaguest of geographical and temporal settings. L'Astree (1607-1627), while its characters and events belong to the conventional fantasy-world of the pastoral, does take place at a definite time — between 450-475 A.D. — and in a real setting, D'Urfe's own pays du Forez. The next fictional generation,

20 Cf. Dorothy Dallas, Le Roman frangais de 1660 a 1680 (Paris, 1932); Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman and "L'Histoire a-t-elle engendre le roman?" Revue d'Histoire Littdraire, LV(1955), 155-176; Moses Ratner, Theory and Criticism of the Novel in France from I'Astree to 1750 (New York, 1938); Marie A. Raynal, Le Talent de Mme de Lafayette (Toulouse, 1926); Klaus Friedrich, "Eine Theorie des 'Roman nouveau' ", Romanistisches Jahrbuch, XIV (1963), 105-117. 21

Preface to Faramond

(Paris, 1664), 12.

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which includes Gomberville and Desmarets de St-Sorlin, weaved its romances around real figures taken from ancient history. 22 Despite their flagrant trespasses against historical truth, these writers did situate their works at fairly precise moments in history. Moreover, they treated historical periods which came closer and closer to the present time 2 3 During the 1660's, while the Scuderys were still writing their historical romans ä c/e,24 and still finding plenty of readers for them, a new form, the nouvelle historique, began to gain favor. Although credit for the success of the nouvelle historique has been alternately given to Boileau, Mme de Villedieu, and Mme de Lafayette, in reality Boileau's pronouncements and the two romancieres' practice only served to crystallize a new trend already present in public taste. Du Plaisir, who wrote a treatise on the novel in 1683, observes this change in taste: Les petites Histoires ont entiferement detruit les grands Romans. Cet avantage n'est l'effet d'aucun caprice. II est fonde sur la raison, et je ne pourrois assez m'etonner de ce que les Fables ä dix et douze Volumes ayent si longtemps regne en France, si je ne savois que c'est depuis peu seulement que l'on a invente les Nouvelles . . . Ce qui a fait hair les anciens Romans, est ce que l'on doit d'abord eviter dans les Romans nouveaux. II n'est pas difficile de trouver le sujet de cette aversion; leur longueur prodigieuse, ce melange de tant d'histoires diverses, leur grand nombre d'Acteurs, la trop grande antiquite de leurs sujets, l'embarras de leur construction, leur peu de vraysemblance, l'exces dans leur caractöre, sont des choses qui paroissent assez d'elles-mesmes.25 As Du Plaisir suggests, what the classical readers liked about the nouvelle was its brevity, realism, and simplicity of construction. These qualities were in harmony with the classical ideals of vraisemblance, clarity, and economy. Thus, the same esthetic trends that had already influenced romance to move in the direction of greater historical accuracy also contributed to the success of the nouvelle. The rising popularity of the nouvelle historique during the 1660's coincided with the republication of several sixteenth century memoirs: Le Laboureur's edition of the Memoires of Michel de Castelnau appeared in 1659, and Brantöme's memoirs of the Valois court in 1665-1666. This new historical material led to a series of fictional works about the French wars of religion, including Mme de Lafayette's Princesse de Montpensier (1662). 22 See Philip Wadsworth, The Novels of Gomberville (New Haven, 1942), for a description of this type of romance. 23 Cf. Professor May, Dilemme du roman, 49. 24 Clelie (10 vols.) was published from 1654-1660, Almahide (8 vols.) from 1660-1663. 25 Sentiments sur I'Histoire, published in Romanistisches Jahrbuch, XIV (1963), 105-117.

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Because of the availability and fictional potential of these sixteenth century memoirs, novelists were encouraged to write about recent French history. In addition, historical novelists chose recent French subjects to conform to standards of vraisemblance: they could write most convincingly about a period which was relatively well-known and relatively similar to the present. Mme de Lafayette seriously undertook this task of laying a realistic historical groundwork for her fiction. She had already tried her hand at actual historical writing in the Histoire de Madame Henriette d'Angleterre. Mm. Chamard and Rudler 26 have shown the dedication with which Mme de Lafayette pursued her research for the Princesse de Cleves, reading both sixteenth century memoirs and more recent histories of the period. She paid meticulous attention to chronological and genealogical details, often supplying from one source what was lacking in another. By weaving actual events into a fictional plot, and by reporting these events as accurately as possible, she aimed to give her novel the air of historical truth. The nouvelle historique established itself as a separate genre during the 1670's and continued to maintain its popularity until at least the end of the century. R.C. Williams' Bibliography of the 17th Century Novel in France27 lists a fairly steady stream of works subtitled nouvelle historique between 1672 and 1700. Mme de Lafayette aside, the authors of these stories did not have any serious historical pretensions. Often, history supplies no more than a backdrop to the amorous or salacious adventures of the characters. 28 And the literary pretensions of the nouvelles historiques were usually no greater than their historicity; their modest aim was to entertain their readers. M. Adam judges the nouvelle historique severely: "De toutes ces oeuvres, il n'en est aucune qui ait merite de survivre".29 Nevertheless, these little novels betray the increasing seventeenth century tendency to combine history with fiction. In his study of Mme de Villedieu, Bruce Morrissette summarizes this process of historization: The historical novel of the seventeenth century emerged gradually from the heroic and pastoral novels which followed the As tree. D'Urfe, in that work, had placed in a milieu which he thought to be more or less historically accurate a group of imaginary characters involved in a fictitious plot. 26 "Les Sources historiques de la Princesse de Cleves", Revue du XVIe Siecle, II (1914), 92-131, and V (1917-1918), 1-20, 231-243. According to Chamard and Rudler, Mme de Lafayette's main sources were Brantöme's memoirs, Le Laboureur's edition of Castelnau, Mezeray's Histoire de France and Abrigi historique, Matthieu's Histoire de France (1631), and P. Anselme's Histoire de la maison royale de France (1674). 27 New York, 1931. 28 Cf. Bussy-Rabutin, Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1655), Mme de Villedieu, Journal amoureux (1669), among others. 29 Histoire, IV, 176.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

57

Desmaretz followed the same procedure in Ariane, adding a few details taken from historical documents. La Calprenfcde chose famous characters from antiquity (or from legend, as in Faramond) and involved them in a plot of his own invention. Mile de Scudery represented her own acquaintances in a false cadre of antiquity, using historical names which were merely masks designed to conceal the identity of her contemporaries. Segrais and Mme de Lafayette, the earliest of whose efforts in the field precede those of Mile Desjardins, introduced "bon sens" into the historical novel, and reduced it to almost the dimensions of the nouvelle.30 In borrowing material and stylistic devices from history, the writers of nouvelles historiques also inherited the historian's attitude towards his subject matter. Historians like Mathieu, Mezeray, and St-Real wrote for an aristocratic, even royal, public, who took an almost proprietary interest in French history. To please their influential audience, historians attempted to "faire du passe national une compagnie agreable pour les honnetes gens". 31 Besides, their own high opinion of their duties caused them to look at the past with respect. The classical novelist, facing the same audience and subject as the historian, also glorified the monarchy and the nobility. And he carried this glorification even further through his technique of literary idealization. The effect of literary idealization becomes apparent when one compares the treatment of the same theme by novelists and historians. For example, the splendor of the Valois court is emphasized by the novelists even more than the historians. Brantöme's and Mathieu's descriptions of Henri II's court do not begin to equal Mme de Lafayette's version in magnificence and dignity. 32 And while Mme de Lafayette's praise of Henri II's court in the Princesse de Cleves at least has some basis in historical fact, Mme de Villedieu's eulogy of Henri III at the beginning of Desordres de l'amour is totally misleading: "Les glorieux commencements du R£gne de Henri III promettaient des suites semblables. C'etait un prince charmant par sa personne, qui avant dix-huit ans avait gagne deux batailles, et qui par un apprentissage de Royaute devait savoir l'art de gouverner sagement un peuple". 3 3 To compare Mme de Villedieu's description of Henri III with Mezeray's: On pourrait ä proprement parier, appeler le Rfegne de ce Roi le Rfcgne des Favoris. La mollesse de son äme et sa faineantise le livrfcrent entre les mains de ces gens-lä; lesquels achevfcrent d'dnerver ce qu'il avait de ferme, et de le 30 The Life and Works of Marie-Catherine Desjardins (Mme de Villedieu), 1632-1683 (St. Louis, 1947), 83. 31 Jean Ehiaid, L'Histoire, Collection "U", serie Lettres fran9aises (Paris, 1964), 26. 32 I am particularly referring to the presentation of the court at the beginning of the Princesse de Cleves. 33 Oeuvres, 1,1.

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THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

dissoudre dans les voluptes. Tellement qu'ils effac^rent l'eclat de toutes les belles actions dont on lui attribuait 1'honneur; et ils eussent fait douter s'il y eüt eu aucune part, n'eüt ete qu'au travers de tous ces defauts on admirait encore en lui beaucoup de qualitds Royales. 34 The two descriptions do not really contradict one another, but they create entirely different impressions. By describing the promise of Henri's reign, as it looked when he was only eighteen, Mme de Villedieu avoids having to show the King in an unfavorable light without actually lying; but of the two, Mezeray certainly comes closer to the real Henri III. Mme de Villedieu's idealization of Henri III is not an effect of political partiality, but of literary tradition. She treats real figures in a nouvelle historique the way she would treat the heroes of heroic and pastoral romances. Not that the Desordres de l'amour displays the same kind of idealization as Clelie and Le Grand Cyrus: Mile de Scudery's heroes are renowned for bravery and chastity, whereas Mme de Villedieu's characters excel less in virtue than in charm, elegance, and social graces. But each in her own way paints a more attractive picture of the world than historical facts would warrant. As a combination of fictional idealization with historical concreteness, the nouvelle historique touched the susceptibilities of the classical public more successfully than its predecessors, the heroic romance and the roman ä cle. Although romance's psychology was often penetrating, its cadre remained too conventional for readers to identify satisfactorily with its characters. And as an attempt to connect fictional past with present-day reality, the roman ä cle met with only partial approval. 35 The nouvelle historique was much more successful. In the nouvelle, the virtues that romance had attributed to antique and legendary heroes were bestowed instead on members of the sixteenth century nobility, whose seventeenth century descendants still bore the same names and titles. For them, reading an historical novel became a ceremony of recognition. 36 The glorified image of the recent past lent dignity to their present existence, reinforcing and justifying their own feelings and actions.The nouvelle historique, as a form of idealized dynastic history, gained the favor of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie who shared the nobility's aristocratic attitudes. Its tactful blending of history and fiction produced a formula just to the taste of polite society. While the influence of vraisemblance molded the nouvelle historique into a socially pleasing form, it could not entirely do away with the prose ro34 Abregi, V, 191. 35 Cf. criticisms of Boileau mentioned above. 36 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la litteraturel (Paris, 1948), 111-125, for a discussion of the 17th century public.

Collection

Idees

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

59

mance. The romance continued to survive as almost the last artistic bastion against realism and rationalism in the classical period. The pastoral romance L'Astrie, a continuing favorite with seventeenth century readers, places its characters in a totally non-realistic situation: as 'shepherds', they have no serious occupation, no social functions, no responsibilities. The characters are therefore free to work out their personal destinies governed only by the conventions of romance, not by the laws and customs of the real world. As seventeenth century society became increasingly complex and restrictive, the romance universe remained what it had always been: the domain of love and chance, passion and passivity. The characters in L'Astrie have no contact with society, and little with sheep; they devote all their time to love. According to romance canons, love is only possible under these conditions of perfect leisure. As Jacques Ehrmann has pointed out, society And passion are mutually contaminating; if love saps ambition, ambition also poisons love. Pure love is impossible at court, because everyone is occupied with political intrigue; true, spiritual love can only be born in the society of shepherds. 37 The conventional irreality of L'Astrie and of later romances thus symbolizes the divorce between love and society necessary to their mutual survival. As well as proclaiming the empire of Love, romance tradition also asserts the omnipotence of Fate. This conception of an all-powerful destiny draws on ancient sources. In both Alexandrian and medieval romance, the fate of the hero turns on the wheel of fortune. Even the structural principle of these romances is supplied by fate: their plot consists of a series of separate adventures, strung together, literally, au hasard. And the etymology of the word adventure bears the mark of fate upon it: it originally had the imperative, inescapable connotation of what is to come. During the middle ages, the word 'adventure' kept fateful resonances. The knight errant who went off in search of adventure maintained an attitude of disponibiliti, of calm openness towards what would come. In the courtly novels of the twelfth century, as in ancient Greek romance, the hero does not choose his destiny; he is chosen by it. In the seventeenth century romance, the heroic adventure still retains its connection with fate and destiny. Seventeenth century romances create a sense of fatality by their use of traditional themes and devices: they abound in coincidences and eavesdropping, chance meetings and inopportune departures. To emphasize the power of the fates and the feebleness of man, Mile de Scudery's works contain numerous acts of God. In Clilie, the lovers are separated just before their wedding by a timely earthquake. Clelie and her betrothed then must undergo numerous storms, floods, and shipwrecks 37

Un Paradis desespere·. l'amour et l'illusion dans I'Astree (New Haven, 1963).

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THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

before they are reunited. Gomberville's Polexandre contains fewer natural disasters; instead, Fate controls the hapless hero indirectly, through the actions of mortal men. Gomberville's characters are abducted, sold as slaves, mistaken for other people, captured by pirates and imprisoned before they receive their well-earned reward on the last page of the novel. Seventeenth century romances also dramatize the force of destiny by giving ample space to the supernatural. D'Urfe, Scudery, and Gomberville fill their works with astrologers, magicians, omens and predictions. Moreover, these prophecies usually come true. Even Segrais, a self-proclaimed partisan of the historical novel, inserts into his nouvelles historiques supernatural incidents straight out of romance. At the beginning of Euginie, the comte d'Almont saves the comte d'Aremberg from a band of brigands. At a climactic point in the story, Aremberg unwittingly gives Almont a mortal injury. Feeling himself close to death, Almont recounts that an astrologer had once predicted the whole tragic outcome: "ä Rome un fameux astrologue, qu'Aremberg et lui avaient consulte separement, leur avait dit, sur leur horoscope qu'il avait 6tudiee, a lui qu'il sauverait la vie ä celui qui lui donnerait la mort, et au comte d'Aremberg, qu'il aurait le plus grand malheur qu'un homme puisse avoir puisqu'il tuerait son meilleur ami". After telling this anecdote, Almont concludes fatalistically that "on ne peut eviter son destin". 3 8 This passive attitude towards destiny permeates seventeenth century romance. Its characters are under the control of an external force which often leaves them helpless, with no recourse but lamentation. In Eugenie, the movement of the planets governs not only the characters' external circumstances, but their passions as well. Fate irresistibly compels d'Aremberg to fall in love with his best friend's wife. He first sees her at the church, during their wedding. Realizing he has begun to love her, he tries to avoid seeing her again, but to no avail: in the next few days he meets her by 'accident' several more times. Finally, he gives himself up to Fate: "Ah, disait-il soudain en lui-meme, il faut que l'amour triomphe, puisque le Destin s'en mele!! J'ai fui, j'ai combattu et j'avais peut-etre vaincu. Mais enfin, si c'est un crime d'aimer l'objet du monde le plus aimable, l'amour me l'a propose, mais c'est le Ciel ou le hasard qui l'acheve"(28). Aremberg absolves himself of the guilt for his passion by blaming it on Heaven. "Puisque le Destin s'en mele", he is no longer responsible for his actions. This view of reality is incompatible with a historical and social view. For love (or at least the debilitating amour-passion which goes by that name in novels) is an anarchic force which threatens to upset any social order. Because of its demanding and all-engrossing character, amour-passion inter38 In Marie Raynal, ed., La Nouvelle (Paris, 1926), 70.

franfaise

de Segrais ä Mme de Lafayette

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

61

feres with people's normal social responses. It is a subversive influence. In Mile de Scudery's Clelie, for example, when Aronce's identity is revealed and he becomes king, he says to his beloved: "sans quitter les chaines que vous me faites porter, je publierois hardiment qu'il me serait plus glorieux d'etre votre Esclave, que d'etre Roi de plusieurs Royaumes". 3 9 Aronce's indifference to his kingly estate has symbolic implications for seventeenth century society. According to Auerbach, the conventional renunciation of political power in romance is a response to the real social disenfranchisement of the aristocracy. The author of romance, writing for an aristocratic audience, makes a virtue out of their forced political inactivity: "The nobility is a class without a function, yet recognized as a privileged class, and to all outward appearance occupying a position of real power. This results from the century's tendency to obscure the functional, organic realities, its penchant for the representational and decorative". This aristocratic cult of non-functionality also exercises a great attraction for the bourgeoisie, to the detriment of the economy. Auerbach observes during the seventeenth century a "phenomenon of mass flight from economic life". 4 0 And the romance, as an art form primarily designed for the noble public, enacts a symbolic escape from economic realities into a never-never land of true love. This fatal view of love is opposed to both historical realism and social morality as the seventeenth century understood them. By ascribing an overwhelming power to passion and chance, romance undermines the rational foundations of an ordered society. Moreover, it invites active citizens to abandon their social functions and to seek love and happiness in aristocratic inaction. Classical critics thus had moral reasons as well as esthetic ones to throw discredit on the romance form. By introducing the socially-based criterion of vraisemblance, they attempted to destroy the non-realistic universe of romance and to substitute a rational and predictable one in its place. Despite all the attempts of classical critics to discredit romances, the classical public still continued to read them. The post-Fronde nobility, to which Mme de Lafayette belonged, preserved a long-standing attachment for the romances they had read in their youth. Mme de Sevigne, for example, confesses rather sheepishly to her daughter that La Calprenede's novels still entrance her. 41 Mme de Sevigne reads Cleopätre as educated persons of our century read spy and adventure novels: for escape literature. She is touched by the heroic code of chivalry, the idealized characterizations, "la beaute 39 Paris, 1666,1, 378. 40 "La Cour et la ville", 167, 179. 41 Mme de Sevigne, letter to Mme de Grignan, July 12, 1671, Lettres, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, I (Paris, 1953), 332.

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THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

des sentiments" — all the 'romanesque' elements which conjure up a more exalted and exciting life than she now enjoys. At least in this rather innocuous sense, romance fiction provided an antidote to social existence during the 1670's, and this effect of liberation from social and psychological constraints may help account for romance's survival alongside the more 'modern' nouvelle historique. Mme de Lafayette, like her cousin Mme de Sevigne, read most of Cleopätre's ten volumes and conserved a long-lasting taste for romances. However, as she belonged to a younger generation than Mme de Sevigne, Mme de Lafayette preferred the 'tender' love novels of Mile de Scudery to the earlier, more heroic works of La Calprenede and Gomberville. Before her marriage, while still a young girl of 20, Mile de la Vergne eagerly devoured Le Grand Cyrus. She wrote to Menage in April, 1654: "Je vous prie, mandez-moy un peu si Mile de Scudery ne songe point ä faire quelque autre Cyrus: pour moy, je ne m'en scaurois passer et je perdray tout ä fait, si eile cesse de travailler". 42 When the first volume of Clilie, Mile de Scudery's next work, came out a few months later, Mile de la Vergne read it immediately and conveyed her approval to Menage: "Je vous renvoie Clelie, apres l'avoir lue avec tout le plaisir imaginable". 4 3 And for the next few years, as each successive volume of Clelie appears, Mme de Lafayette pesters the faithful Menage to send it along. She writes in her typically imperious style on August 27, 1655: "Je m'impatiente fort de n'avoir point encore le deuxieme tome de Clelie". She repeats the same complaint a few weeks later, on September 18, and registers a similar impatience for volume III, in January, 1657. 4 4 A confirmed reader of both histories and romances, Mme de Lafayette incorporated themes and episodes from both traditions into her own novels. Once they are combined in this way, these contrasting themes take on new meanings in relation to one another and to other elements of Mme de Lafayette's fictional world. While the historical episodes paint a rich picture of aristocratic society, the romance scenes reveal unconscious and irrational facets of human personality. The new awareness of unconscious impulses and feelings — the je ne sais quoi of classical moralists — reappears in Mme de Lafayette's fiction, translated into the idiom of romance. This mixture of romance with history enlarges the range of her writing by allowing her to describe feelings and actions which classical French cannot express, and to show their effect on social life.

42 43 44

Mme de Lafayette, Correspondance (Paris, 1942), I, 38-39. December, 1654 or January, 1655,1, 45. 1,53,93.

IV THE SOCIAL COMPROMISE IN THE PRINCESSE DE CLEVES A GIT A TION SANS DESORDRE

In the Princesse de Cleves, Mme de Lafayette's absorbing theme — the reconciliation of human and individual needs with social requirements — receives a full and balanced development. Although the novel reveals the values and the satisfactions of social existence, it also records the eventual failure of society to resolve individual problems. Mme de Lafayette's view of sixteenth century society, like Montaigne's, assumes a complete separation between public and private roles. Despite its success in certain respects, this compromise shows fatal weaknesses: it represses individuality and precludes the formation of personal relationships. To explore these tensions between public and private life, Mme de Lafayette exploits to the fullest the potentiality of the historical form. In the Princesse de Cleves, the historical period and the court setting make the social compromise and its effects the central fact of life. The dichotomy between public and private roles determines the social structure and the social structure in turn determines individual .behavior. The characters experience an inescapable necessity to lead double lives, because they themselves are simultaneously private individuals and historical symbols. For the characters in the Princesse de Cleves, history is an unavoidable aspect of life. Their exalted rank thrusts historical roles on them almost from birth. Even if they wished to, they could not avoid influencing the course of history and being influenced by it. But these historical figureheads are individual human beings as well, with personal needs and desires. At each moment, the characters are obliged to reconcile public gesture with private emotion. Thus, the characters' historical stature allows Mme de Lafayette to explore the relation between public and private life in a court setting, where this relation is of enormous consequence to the whole social system. The duality intimately experienced by the historical figures themselves also imposes itself on social life, and even on the historical process. Mme de Lafayette characterizes the condition of the court as "agitation sans desordre". Court society is static, stable, majestic; but it is also passionate, individual, and turbulent. Moreover, the majesty cannot subsist without the

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THE SOCIAL COMPROMISE IN THEPRINCESSEDE CLEVES

underlying turbulence. Personal passions supply the dynamic force of history, the energy which causes historical change and growth. This agitation is prevented from falling into desordre by the social structure, which maintains the continuity of society. Power changes hands, heroes grow old and die, but the social framework endures. In the Princesse de Cleves, Mme de Lafayette reveals both the dynamism and the stability of the court and shows how they are combined in the daily lives of its members. History follows a continuous, orderly pattern, from father to son, from dynasty to dynasty. One way Mme de Lafayette conveys the continuity of the court structure is by introducing various chronological levels into the novel. Through the use of secondary 'historians', she creates the effect of historical events stretching indefinitely into the past. From the omniscient narrator's point of view, history forms a monolithic block. But when the characters begin to speak in their own right, new historical dimensions appear. The stories they tell about Diane de Poitiers, Queen Mary, or Anne Boleyn are potential novels, microcosms of the Princesse de Cleves pushed back a step in time. The years 1558-1559, during which the novel takes place, possess a temporal duality: the reader's past forms the characters' present. So the events of the 'old court' described by Mme de Chartres look doubly distant. And the novel itself takes on the form of a composition en abime: the tales characters tell represent a shrunken reflection of the whole work. Mme de Chartres herself gives the clue to the novel's composition: "Si je ne craignais . . .que vous dissiez de moi ce qu'on dit de toutes les femmes de mon age, qu'elles aiment a conter les histoires de leur temps, je vous apprendrais le commencement de la passion du roi pour cette duchesse, et plusieurs choses de la cour du feu roi qui ont meme beaucoup de rapport avec celles qui se passent encore presentement" (264, italics added). By identifying herself with Mme de Chartres, Mme de Lafayette emphasizes the narrative mirror play within her novel. She makes us perceive an endless chain of stories within stories, reaching ever further into the past. This device accords the novel greater scope and substance. More important, it shows to what extent the characters are prisoners of past history. Experienced courtiers, like Mme de Chartres, Mary Stuart, and Mme de Lafayette herself, can see the effect the past has upon the present. They are fascinated by history because they sense its importance in their own lives and in the collective life of the court. Mme de Lafayette also finds a historical constant in the cyclical recurrence of certain events. Throughout the novel we follow the periodic rise and fall of important historical figures. The Constable de Montmorency, the King's favorite, is mentioned several times in the novel, although his fate has no effect on the main plot. We learn at the outset that he has already experienced mixed fortunes: "Le roi avait toujours aim£ le connitable, et

THE SOCIAL COMPROMISE IN THE PRINCESSE DE CLEVES

65

sitöt qu'il avait commence ä regner, il l'avait rappele de l'exil oil le roi F r a n c i s premier l'avait envoye" (244). A little later, Mme de Chartres describes the circumstances of Montmorency's return, along with the other changes which took place at F r a n c i s ' death: [ F r a n c i s I] recommanda ä Μ. le dauphin de se servir du cardinal de Tournon et de ramiral d'Annebauld, et ne parla point de Μ. le Connetable, qui et a it pour lors relegue ä Chantilly. Ce f u t ndanmoins la premiere chose que fit le roi, son fils, de le rappeler et de lui donner le gouvernement des affaires. Mme d'Etampes fut chassee et re?ut tous les mauvais traitements qu'elle pouvait attendre d'une ennemie toute puissante: la duchesse de Valentinois se vengea alors pleinement, et de cette duchesse et de tous ceux qui lui avait deplu . . . elle a fait chasser le cardinal de Tournon, le chancelier Olivier, et Villeroy (268). After Henri IPs death, the court reverts in many respects to the order of Francois I's day. The Connetable is again exiled. In addition, "La duchesse de Valentinois f u t chassee de la cour; on fit revenir le cardinal de Tournon, ennemi declare du connetable, et le chancelier Olivier, ennemi declare de la duchesse de Valentinois. Enfin, la cour changea entierement de face" (358). This 'changement de face' merely reveals the other side of the coin. Now, as in previous generations, the court continues to be dominated by one of two warring factions. Or at any rate, the historical distance makes it appear so. Seen from a historical perspective, the upheaval of the court is traceable to events of twenty years before. Of course, the court in the Princesse de Cleves is perched on the brink of the Wars of Religion, which will violently disrupt these historical cycles. But within the bounds of the novel, history maintains an orderly progression; the aristocratic families change places like figures in a court ballet. If history presents this stable aspect from above, seen from below all is feverish activity. And the activity is necessary to historical continuity: the basis of history for Mme de Lafayette is not policy, but passion. She shares the view of most seventeenth century historians, that the individual passions — love, ambition, hate, envy — supply the impetus that spurs men on to historical action. In a long passage near the beginning of the Princesse de Cleves, the author describes the underlying agitation of the court: L'ambition et la galanterie etaient l'äme de cette cour, et occupaient egalement les hommes et les femmes. II y avait tant d'interets et tant de cabales differentes, et les dames y avaient tant de part que l'amour 6tait toujours mele aux affaires et les affaires ä l'amour. Personne n'etait tranquille, ni indifferent; on songeait ä s'elever, ä plaire, ä servir ou ä nuire; on ne connaissait ni l'ennui, ni l'oisivete, et on etait toujours occupe des plaisirs ou des intrigues. Les dames avaient des attachements particuliers pour la reine, pour la reine dauphine, pour la reine de Navarre, pour

66

THE SOCIAL COMPROMISE IN THE PRINCESSE DE CLEVES

Madame, soeur du roi, ou pour la duchesse de Valentinois . . . Toutes ces differentes cabales avaient de l'emulation et de l'envie les unes contre les autres: les dames qui les composaient avaient aussi de la jalousie entre elles, ou pour la faveur, ou pour les amants; les interests de grandeur et d'elevation se trouvaient souvent joints ä ces autres interets moins importants, mais qui n'etaient pas moins sensibles. Ainsi il y avait une sorte d'agitation sans desordre dans cette cour, qui la rendait tr£s agreable, mais aussi trfes dangereuse pour une jeune personne (252-253). This continual ferment, which Mme de Lafayette considers the courtiers' natural medium, is really a kind of pre-history. At any moment, historical consequences may arise from private acts. The secret passions of the courtiers, which never appear in official histories, actually furnish history's motivating force. Passion provides the stuff histories are made of. Because this passionate side of court politics should not appear in official history, its portrayal creates technical problems for Mme de Lafayette. The passage cited above is attributed to the historical narrator, because she alone can give an overview of court politics. But this narrative excursion behind the scenes causes difficulties. By revealing l'envers du decor, the narrator diminishes the value and dignity of the court. To a certain extent, Mme de Lafayette must show the court's amorality in order to highlight the superior moral position of Mme de Cloves. But if social criticism becomes too pronounced, Mme de Cleves' renunciation loses its tragic force. Her retreat from society has no great price if society proves totally corrupt and worthless. In order to give Mme de Cleves' sacrifice its full due, the author must allow the court to retain its lustre. Moreover, the historical narrator is responsible for maintaining a tragic tone in the novel. If the narrator constantly dwells on the detail's of undercover intrigues, history loses its dignity and the novel its tragic elevation. To avoid these consequences, Mme de Lafayette again turns to secondary narrators. The official history of the court, all dignity and splendor, gives way to eye-witness accounts of passion and intrigue. The reader no longer sees the.court from above, through the eyes of the narrator, but from below, on a level with the characters. The historical 'digressions', which have received so much criticism 1 therefore play an essential role in the novel. Mme de Lafayette requires these secondary narrations in order to reveal secrets the historical narrator cannot reveal herself, without disturbing the tone of the novel. By giving the floor to the characters, Mme de Lafayette makes the best case possible for the dark side of court history. The first-person monologues reveal the court's corruption, but they also display its scintillating attractive1 See J.W. Scott, "The 'digressions' of the Princesse de ClevesFrench Studies, XI (1957), 315-322. Also Claudette Delhez-Sarlet, "La Princesse de Cleves·. Roman ou nouvelle?"Romanische Forschungen, LXXX (1968), 53-85.

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ness in a way the dignified official narration cannot match. Nevertheless, as a structural device, the first-person narrations are not a complete success. Particularly the longer passages, such as the Vidame's story, throw the novel's composition out of balance. Such narrations bulk too large within the restricted limits of the novel. The Vidame's monologue, for example, is much longer than Mme de Cleves' confession to her husband, although the latter scene is unquestionably more important to the novel. But all in all, Mme de Lafayette's choice of stylistic means is a good one for her purpose: to convey life at court as tellingly and as truthfully as possible. The secondary narrators reveal society's flaws, but they celebrate its vitality at the same time. By allowing the characters to speak from their own experience, Mme de Lafayette makes history come alive. The stories characters tell plunge us directly into the historical atmosphere, and what the narration loses in dignity it gains in vividness and intensity. The spokesmen Mme de Lafayette chooses — Mme de Chartres, Mary Stuart, the vidame de Chartres — all know society intimately and speak of it with gusto and good humor. They convey a feeling for court life which the historical narrator cannot communicate. Even when the central narrator penetrates behind the scenes, she keeps her distance; her descriptions of court cabales remain abstract, dispassionate, almost theoretical. The secondary narrations, however, cause us to be present at the very instant when private impulse turns into historical action. The close relation between private passion and history is particularly visible in the Vidame de Chartres' confession to the due de Nemours. The Vidame is a confirmed reprobate whose amorous involvements astonish Nemours himself. But for all that, he never really alienates the reader. The Vidame's light-hearted amorality carries us along at least for the duration of his monologue. One perhaps excuses him the more readily because his machinations produce so little practical effect. The Vidame carries hypocrisy to gratuitous and self-defeating extremes. He would gain much more, and risk less, by serving the Queen faithfully instead of trying to manage three affairs at once. But quiet well-being bores him. He prefers to stake his historical fortune, and even his life, on a dangerous game of amorous intrigue. His manipulation of intrigue is esthetic and almost disinterested. Political triumphs concern him less than his own adroitness at 'playing the game'. Despite his perilous position, the Vidame tells his story with an undeniable air of self-satisfaction. He is proud of his fascination for women, proud of his political influence, even proud of the entanglements he has created, because they prove his adeptness at court intrigue. Before taking him into her confidence, the Queen had warned him that the identity of his mistress was known. The Vidame explains to Nemours:

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Voyez, je vous prie, quel pifcge me tendait la reine et combien il itait difficile de n'y pas tomber. Elle voulait savoir si j'etais amoureux; et en ne me demandant point de qui je l'etais, et en ne me laissant voir que la seule intention de me faire plaisir, eile m'ötait la pensee qu'elle me parlät par curiosite ou par dessein. Cependant, contre toutes sortes d'apparences, je demelai la verite. J'dtais amoureux de Mme de Th6mines; mais, quoiqu'elle m'aimät, je n'6tais pas assez heureux pour avoir des lieux particuliers ä la voir et pour craindre d'y etre surpris; et ainsi je vis bien que ce ne pouvait etre eile dont la reine voulait parier. Je savais bien aussi que j'avais un commerce de galanterie avec une autre femme moins belle et moins s6v£re que Mme de Themines, et qu'il n'etait pas impossible que l'on eüt decouvert le lieu oü je la voyais; mais, comme je m'en souciais peu, il m'6tait ais6 de me mettre έ couvert de toutes sortes de perils en cessant de la voir. Ainsi je pris le parti de ne rien avouer ä la reine . . . (315). The Vidame, who had come to Nemours pleading for his aid, still cannot help boasting about the success with women which causes his predicament. He also brags about his ability to "demeler la verite", but his supposed perspicacity avails him nothing; he still decides to persist in his foolhardy course. The Vidame meets his downfall because he overestimates his own powers. Intoxicated by a sense of historical importance, he feels himself omnipotent. He believes that he will be able to control historical events through controlling others' emotions. This intoxication makes him blind to the dangers he faces. Or else, the very risks inherent in the situation attract him all the more. Either way, he keeps complicating his own situation until he finally destroys himself. The narrator reveals the disastrous historical consequences: "Pour le vidame de Chartres, il fut ruine aupres d'elle [Catherine de Medicis] . . . Leur liaison se rompit, et eile le perdit ensuite ä la conjuration d'Amboise oil il se trouva embarrasse . . . " (329). The narrative glimpse into the future places the Vidame in the historical past, and thereby seals the causal connection between passion and history. The Vidame's historical fate will be decided not by political issues but by the Queen's secret jealousy. In his attitude towards the political game, the Vidame incarnates a recurrent type in French life and letters. The Vidame's history recalls the Cardinal de Retz's real-life adventures, and prefigures the fictional actions of characters as different as Valville and Mosca. These people, who all look upon political and amorous intrigue chiefly as a personal testing ground, hold as great a fascination for Mme de Lafayette as they will for Stendhal 150 years later. Mary Stuart and Diane de Poitiers belong to this type, as did Nemours, before his passion for Mme de Cleves. When these characters stand before us, moral judgments somehow fade. Ruthless, arbitrary, voracious for experience, they are still the creatures of history. Without the spur of their jealousies, ambitions, pride and desire, no historical events would

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occur; the court mechanism would grind to a halt. Although the undercover and furtive play of the passions is a necessity for the court's survival and a main stimulus for the historical process, the open expression of these same passions would bring disaster. While everyone at court participates in passionate intrigue, everyone must keep his passions and his intrigues out of sight, because sincere self-expression is destructive of the social order. For one thing, the spontaneous expression of feeling would destroy the perfectly arranged image the court presents to the world. Maintaining this image is of importance both to the individual nobles and to the country as a whole, because the splendor and magnificence of the French court symbolizes the power and glory of the French nation. The aristocratic members of the court, rightfully conscious of their historical role, constantly strive to present a sublime public spectacle, for their own prestige, and the prestige of France, are at stake. These courtiers, on permanent display before one another and before History, shrink from the public show of feeling as they shrink from all spontaneous expression. Passion, in this setting, appears eccentric, unesthetic, and undignified. To preserve social appearances, these untidy aberrations must remain hidden from public view. As well as marring appearances, passion also poses a deeper threat to the social structure. In the Princesse de Cleves, passion and social structure exist in a precarious balance; upset this balance, and anarchy will ensue. Mme de Lafayette uses the destructive effect of passion to explain the breakdown of the court structure after Henri II's death. Without his controlling influence, the court order gradually disintegrates until individual ambitions and passions reign supreme amid the chaos of civil war. Once society fails to keep individual passions within bounds, the whole system will inevitably collapse. What is true of the society as a whole is also true on the individual level. To ensure order and permanence, individual passion and social institutions must occupy entirely separate realms. Seen in this perspective, the politically-based marriage has a certain rationality. Marriage must be built upon permanent interest, not upon the shifting sands of passion. Not only the 'normal' members of society,but even 'deviants'like the Prince and Princesse de Cleves accept this view of marriage. One of the more painful aspects of M. de Cleves' predicament is that while he desperately loves his wife, he can never really feel justified in doing so. He knows that marriage, as a social institution, can get along perfectly well without love. Society does not expect a husband and wife to love one another. In fact, the couple who remain tediously faithful to one another may lose certain political advantages: we have seen to what extent amour and affaires are intertwined at the court. Aware of all this, M. de Cleves feels oddly ill at ease. Even to him, his

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passion for his own wife does not appear "convenable dans un mari". For this reason, he often thinks of himself as a lover rather than as a husband. "La qualite de mari lui donna de plus grands privileges; mais eile ne lui donna pas une autre place dans le coeur de sa femme. Cela fit aussi que, pour etre son mari, il ne laissa pas d'etre son amant, parce qu'il avait toujours quelque chose ä souhaiter au-delä de sa possession" (260). After her avowal, Cloves remarks to his wife: "J'ai tout ensemble la jalousie d'un mari et celle d'un amant" (334). And again: "peu d'hommes . . . ont ressenti en meme temps la douleur que cause Pinfidelite dans une maitresse et la honte d'etre trompö par une femme" (373). With geometrical precision, the narrator outlines the oppositions between the passionate and social realms. A mistress's infidelity causes personal sorrow (douleur); a wife's treachery inflicts social shame (honte), because it affects the public position of the husband. Since no one in the novel, including M. de Cleves, connects intense passionate involvement with the qualite de mari, M. and Mme de Cleves are treated as two couples: husband and wife, mistress and lover. This doubling of woes and, more important, this necessity of playing two conflicting roles at once, prove too much for M. de Cleves. When his private feelings become involved in his public role, the results must be disastrous. Since private passion is both dangerous and necessary to the social system, the court tolerates it within strictly defined bounds. Characters may let their feelings run their course, as long as they keep their individual eccentricities from breaking through the surface of court behavior. This separation between public and private roles supplies the unifying principle of the novel on the esthetic, the social and the individual level. The separation of Mme de Lafayette's narrative style into histoire officielle and histoire secrete corresponds to an actual dichotomy in court behavior: each member of the court tries his utmost to segregate his official and secret lives. It remains to be seen what this separation of roles means to the individual characters, and precisely how the daily life of the court reconciles the rigid social code with individual needs and weaknesses.

ν THE SOCIAL COMPROMISE IN THE PRINCESSE DE CLEVES (CONT.): REWARDS, CONSTRAINTS, AND EVASIONS

In Mme de Lafayette's court, the separation between public and private behavior brings to the individual both satisfactions and frustrations. He has the knowledge that he is displaying his own prestige to the world and fulfilling a necessary social and political function at the same time. And, even when the constraints of his role outweigh its rewards, he has at his disposal unofficial means of circumventing social requirements and restrictions. This chapter will examine the advantages and drawbacks of social life, and the means by which an individual can escape, at least partially, from the exigencies of his public role. In many ways, the individual members of Henri II's court are able to draw personal satisfaction from the performance of their social duties. The prestige of their rank is enhanced by the splendid life they lead at court. In order to convey the majesty of court life, Mme de Lafayette adopts the elevated and authoritative tone of historical narration. From the very first line the narrator-historian sets the tone, and sets it very high. The narrator proclaims with all her authority the magnificence of the court: "La magnificence et la galanterie n'ont jamais paru en France avec tant d'eclat que dans les dernieres annees du regne de Henri II" (241). This exalted opening brings to mind the set eulogies of a funeral oration. Mme de Lafayette has composed, one feels, the notice necrologique for an entire generation. The same eulogistic tone dominates in the individual portraits. M. de Nemours, that "chef-d'oeuvre de la nature", stands in a class by himself; but the other nobles also come in for their share of praise: "- . . la reine dauphine etait une personne parfaite pour l'esprit et pour le corps . . . Le roi de Navarre attirait le respect de tout le monde par la grandeur de son rang et par celle qui parafssait en sa personne . . . Le chevalier de Guise, que l'on appela depuis le grand prieur, etait un prince aime de tout le monde, bien fait, plein d'esprit, plein d'adresse, et d'une valeur celebre par toute l'Europe" (242-43). This passage owes its power to the historical distance: we know that all these beautiful people died long ago, and that no one since has surpassed their perfection. The oft-repeated jamais has an inexorable ring: "La

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CLEVES

magnificence et la galanterie n'ont jamais paru en France avec tant d'eclat", "Jamais cour n'a eu tant de belles personnes","[Nemours eut] un agrement dans son esprit, dans son visage et dans ses actions que Ton n'a jamais vu qu'ä lui seul". These superlatives foster the image of a chivalric golden age, when knighthood was in flower. And the archaic flavor of the court amusements - tournaments, jousts, tilting at the ring - contributes to this chivalric atmosphere. Mme de Lafayette did not invent this image of the Valois court. Even Brantöme, who treats Nemours quite unceremoniously at times, proclaims him "la fleur de toute chevallerie". 1 But the novelist carries this idealization much farther in order to glorify her characters as social and historical figures. In her effort to elevate the nobles above the rest of humanity, Mme de Lafayette goes so far as to address the reader directly, for the first and last time in the novel: "Mais ce qui rendait cette cour belle et majesteuse, etait le nombre infini de princes et de grands seigneurs d'un merite extraordinaire. Ceux que je vais nommer etaient, en des manieres differentes, l'ornement et l'admiration de leur siecle" (242). The narrative je, so rare in Mme de Lafayette's writings, gives her assertions an added weight. It does not, of course, betray any lapse into 'personal' narration; the historian's I conveys no more of a subjective response than her habitual il. What it does is to suggest the existence of an objective, disinterested historian, whose judgments possess incontestable authority. When the historian-narrator tells us Henri II's nobles were "l'ornement et l'admiration de leur siecle", we are likely to take her word. The narrator makes her presence felt particularly often at the beginning of the novel, in order to guide the reader's first impressions. But throughout the action, the historical narrator intervenes to reaffirm the "merite extraordinaire" of Mme de Chartres, the due de Nemours, the Prince de Cleves or the heroine herself. In this way, she emphasizes the prestige and elevation which grow out of their social rank. This historical idealization of the nobility is carried to its highest point in the description of the tournament festivities. The court appears in all its hierarchic splendor: "Enfin, le jour du tournoi arriva. Les reines se rendirent dans les galeries et sur les echafauds qui leur avaient ete destines. Les quatre tenants parurent au bout de la lice, avec une quantite de chevaux et de livrees qui faisaient le plus magnifique spectacle qui eüt jamais paru en France" (255). To create this magnificent spectacle, some individual rights are sacrificed, but most denizens of the court find the sacrifice worthwhile. By repressing their individual feelings, they achieve historical immortality. Their short-lived passions will fade, as all passions must, but their official portraits will remain preserved forever in history.

ι

Vie des hommes illustres. Oeuvres, III (Paris, 1823), 160.

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Besides enhancing their historical prestige, the nobles at court also serve an essential social function. By doing what their role requires of them, they ensure the continuation of the whole social system: the maintenance of order at court is necessary to the peace and tranquility of the country as a whole. By imposing an impersonal code of behavior upon everyone at court, by assigning to each a clear position in the social hierarchy with clear duties attached, the court keeps control over an arrogant and ambitious nobility. Without this rigid system of ranks and duties, the court (and thereby the whole country) would fall the victim of jealous and openly-warring factions. Perhaps because they realize this danger, and even if they are not wholly satisfied with their prescribed roles, the more responsible members of the court continue to perform them. By accepting their social responsibilities, they at least have the satisfaction of knowing they are helping to preserve order in the land. Along with their social and symbolic importance, the members of the court enjoy the satisfaction of behaving as civilized human beings. Polite social intercourse, according to the refined rules of the French court, has a prestige of its own, apart from its utility. Instead of claiming the freedom to behave as they please, the characters in the novel make a virtue out of their own graceful conformity: they are proud to be the model of decorous, and decorative, behavior. Even the Princesse de Cleves, when she finally renounces society, keeps up the proper social appearances: "Elle se retira, sur le pretexte de changer d'air, dans une maison religieuse, sans faire paraftre un dessein arrete de renoncer ä la cour" (394). The Princesse's decorum is not merely a social reflex. Despite its rigid formality, the ideal of politeness holds a positive value for Mme de Lafayette's people. Our time, which tends to regard civility as sham, would hardly think of according moral significance to mere good manners. But in the classical age, which had more faith than we in the power of civilization to control and order the world, polite self-command was a sign of culture and of humanity itself. Politeness, like speech, serves to distinguish man from the beasts; only animals, children, and the lower classes may behave impulsively. This is one reason why children are absent from the Princesse de Qeves', people only become interesting — and fully human — when they have acquired self-consciousness and selfcontrol. The code of social conduct in the Princesse de Cleves gains added prestige from its origins. It arises out of the old chivalric ideal, of which traces remain throughout the novel. Medieval courtoisie has degenerated into courtesy, but it has not yet become the 'common courtesy' of a democratic age. The social code in the novel still retains elements of the heroic tradition it replaced. In particular, court courtesy remains profoundly individualistic. Politeness does not demand any sensitive response to another's feelings. Members of the court are not expected to put themselves

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in another's place: on the contrary, polite behavior consists in keeping one's own place and putting everyone else in theirs. Courtly discretion is really an inverted means of self-assertion; one behaves with perfect politeness in order to demonstrate one's personal worth. Paradoxically, social conformism, in this setting, becomes a sign of individual merit. Everyone must follow the same social rules, but some play the game with more finesse than others. Thus, even within the rigid confines of etiquette, the nobles find a way to manifest their individual style and to express their superiority. In return for the really noble rewards it brings, social life at court places enormous constraints on both public and private acts. The Princesse de Cleves depicts a social class constrained by ritual and dependent upon ritual for its very existence. The social world of the aristocracy is a small and circumscribed one: in many ways, it resembles a prison. The court is not a prison in any usual sense since its inmates are not prevented from entering the outside world. However, there really is no outside world; they are imprisoned because they have nowhere else to go. The court marks the outer limits of the social universe. Those who are banished or retreat from court disappear into chateaux or convents where their social existence is at an end. Mme de Lafayette accentuates this feeling of claustration by the vagueness of her spatial designations. Her indications of living quarters are so indefinite that everyone appears to inhabit the same building. Although the sixteenth century aristocracy really had their own establishments scattered over Paris, the Princesse de Cleves evokes the beehive existence of Versailles, with its interconnected apartments and escaliers derobes. When Mme de Cleves "va chez la reine dauphine" we feel she is going across the hall, not across a real city. In the Princesse de Cleves, the outside world has been abolished. Aside from these restrictions on physical movements, the court places severe limits upon the kinds of activities in which its members can engage. Important battles are fought and treaties signed during the novel, but these events take place on the very outskirts of the court world: at court, nothing is allowed to happen. Characters spend their time paying court to their betters; they must remain, body and soul, at the disposition of others. Mme de Lafayette constantly reminds us of the constraint that paying court places upon her characters. For example, they must constantly be present or absent when they would much rather do the reverse. Directly after Mme de Cleves has confessed to her husband, the king's messenger calls him away to court: "M. de Cleves fut contraint de s'en aller et il ne put rien dire ä sa femme, sinon qu'il la suppliait de venir le lendemain" (336). On the other hand, Mme de Cleves must remain at court when she longs to leave: "il lui parut difficile de se trouver ä toutes les ceremonies du mariage et d'y paraftre avec un visage tranquille et un esprit libre; neanmoins, comme eile devait porter la robe de Mme la Dauphine et que c'etait une chose ou eile

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avait ete preferee ä plusieurs autres princesses, il n'y avait pas moyen d'y renoncer sans faire beaucoup de bruit et sans en faire chercher des raisons" (351). A less dramatic, though painful, consequence of social constraint is the boredom it produces. Mile de Chartres owes part of her social success to the pervasive dullness of the court: everyone is overjoyed simply to see a new face. In the Prince de Cleves' first impression of Mile de Chartres, the attraction of novelty also plays a part: "il ne pouvait comprendre qui etait cette belle personne qu'il ne connaissait p o i n t . . . il fut bien surpris quand il sut qu'on ne la connaissait point" (249). When the Prince describes his unknown beauty that evening, the company receives his tale with scepticism: "Madame lui dit qu'il n'y avait point de personne comme celle qu'il depeignait et que, s'il y en avait quelqu'une, eile serait connue de tout le monde" (250). Even after Mile de Chartres is presented at court, the interest in her continues: "Cette nouvelle beaute fut longtemps le sujet de toutes les conversations" (251). Despite Mile de Chartres' perfections, one doubts whether enough can be said of her to make her "longtemps le sujet de toutes les conversations". The eagerness with which the courtiers snatch and exploit a new topic of conversation points up the dullness and emptiness of their lives. They are bored with themselves and with each other. 2 The impression of social claustration is more strikingly conveyed by the royal family's inbred character: the royalty frequently marry — or execute — their closest relatives. The relationship between Henry VIII of England and Anne Boleyn is particularly equivocal: "Henri VIII avait ete amoureux de sa soeur et de sa mere, et l'on a meme soup