The Princesse De Cleves Read online

  THE PRINCESSE DE CLÈVES

  MARIE-MADELEINE PIOCHE DE LA VERGNE was born in Paris in 1634. In 1656 she married the Comte de Lafayette, had two sons and lived on his country estate until 1659. She then returned to Paris and the couple remained largely separate from then on. She started a literary salon with her close friends Mme de Sévigné and the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who was a major influence on her intellectual development. She also mixed in court circles and wrote a biography of her friend Henriette, wife of the Duc d’Orléans, after the princess’s early death in 1670. Her posthumously published memoirs of the court are useful for historians, but she is remembered chiefly for her novels which, unlike the interminable romances of her predecessors, are characterized by a search for proportion and an overriding interest in psychology. Apart from her masterpiece, The Princesse de Clèves, she wrote La Princesse de Montpensier, Zaÿde and La Comtesse de Tende. Mme de Lafayette died in 1693.

  ROBIN BUSS is a writer and translator who contributes regularly to The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and other papers. He studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree and a doctorate in French literature. He is part-author of the article ‘French Literature’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica and has published critical studies of works by Vigny and Cocteau, and three books on European cinema, The French through Their Films (1988), Italian Films (1989) and French Film Noir (1994). He is also part-author of a biography, in French, of King Edward VII (with Jean-Pierre Navailles, published by Payot, Paris, 1999). He has translated a number of other volumes for Penguin, including Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Jean Paul Sartre’s Modern Times, Zola’s L’Assommoir and Au Bonheur des Dames, and Albert Camus’s The Plague.

  MME DE LAFAYETTE

  The Princesse de Clèves

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  ROBIN BUSS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Note on the Translation

  The Princesse de Clèves

  BOOK ONE

  BOOK TWO

  BOOK THREE

  BOOK FOUR

  Notes

  Chronology

  Further Reading

  Introduction

  Before the end of the year 1678, in which The Princesse de Clèves was published, the novel was subjected to rigorous analysis in a Letter to the Marquise de *** on the ‘Princesse de Clèves’. The author, Valincour, criticized the book’s use of language, the behaviour of the characters and the plausibility of the plot. But even he succumbed to its charm: ‘I admit that I cannot remember reading anything so vivid and touching in my life.’ And, from Valincour onwards, a story that Stendhal pronounced ‘divine’ and the first novel in French, as much for its intrinsic worth as by reason of its date, has continued to disarm critics and to delight its readers.

  Conventional histories of literature agree with Stendhal’s judgement of this as the prototype of the modern novel in French.

  There are vestiges of traditional story-telling devices… but they are intended to work in relation to the central story rather than as ends in themselves… And, even if it lacks realistic detail and local colour, this one text, by its basic credibility, depth of character analysis and capacity to embrace serious moral issues, marks the start of the novel’s evolution into the major genre into which, in later centuries, it will develop.*

  More specifically, The Princesse de Clèves is sometimes considered to have set the agenda for a peculiarly French contribution to the European novel: an overriding concern with psychological analysis, a certain ‘purity’ of language and classical simplicity of plot. The first of these led Kléber Haedens to see it as a ‘preliminary sketch’ for Proust, at the very least in its concept of love as inseparable from anguish. We can also see debts to the novel in Raymond Radiguet’s Le Bal du comte d’Orgel, in Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour tristesse, and in Cocteau, who wrote the screenplay for Jean Delannoy’s film adaptation of the novel. Its place on the syllabus is firmly established and its qualities are so immediately appealing that it might seem the least problematic of all literary classics in French.

  Apart, that is, from the question of authorship. The Princesse de Clèves was published anonymously and Mme de Lafayette publicly denied any claim to the work. It is now generally accepted that the book is hers, and that her friends La Rochefoucauld and Segrais contributed, at most, minor corrections. There is also the matter of origins: not so much the sources for the historical part of the novel, which is set roughly a century before it was written, as the extent to which Mme de Lafayette drew on her knowledge of court life in her own time and intended the story to be read as a kind of allegory, or even a roman-à-clef. But the specificity of the historical details suggests otherwise. If the court of Henri II is used as a figure for anything, it is to serve as an enclosed, at times claustrophobic stage for the action, where the actors are prisoners of their privileged status: from the first meeting, Mme de Clèves is forced into intimacy with the Duc de Nemours and her attempts to escape her dilemma through flight are repeatedly thwarted by the obligations of court life. So what we have is an imagined love story, given authenticity by its author’s experience of aristocratic society and by conscientious research into the historical events against which it is set. Why suspect anything more devious than that?

  Nothing devious, then, or esoteric, but the contrary: a story that is moving precisely because it is simple. Yet, the more one considers the meanings of the text, the more intriguing it seems. The structure, the characters, the treatment of love, politics and, above all, of serious moral issues, appear full of ambivalence. There is an intellectual framework behind the touching emotions and presumed moral values, which is puzzlingly at odds with them. The Princesse de Clèves is a romance against love, with a hero who is an anti-hero and a heroine who is a victim of circumstance, whose life is destroyed by passion, and yet who convinces us throughout that she retains control of her fate. The plot and the language are so direct that they become opaque and invite questions, both about the nature of passion and about the nature of power. Even the opening words of praise for the splendour of Henri II’s court turn out to be more than just a conventional device for setting the scene, which is how we are likely to read them at first.

  On that first reading, the beginning of The Princesse de Clèves is tedious, and particularly frustrating in a translation. Not only do we have to contend with those details of the sixteenth-century French nobility, given as a bewildering list of personalities and factions (it is a relief to come across the familiar figure of Mary Stuart); but the information is presented in terms that seem designed to make us doubt their authority. Henri II’s court, we are asked to believe, was unsurpassed in splendour and magnificence, inhabited by the most handsome men and the most beautiful women that ever lived. This does not even have the merit of a history lesson, and we soon suspect that the author is exaggerating the attractions of her historical setting as a means to enhance the appeal of the story.

  We are right to think that she has some design on us in the use of all these superlatives, but quite wrong if we imagine that they are just for purposes of advertising. The idea of a golden age, a privileged moment in historical time, plays an important role in the novel. It is not introduced either for nationalistic reasons, to promote an image of a glorious past, or for hedonistic ones, to induce a sense of well-being. The last years of Henri II’s reign are described in these opening pages as improbably fine, but only in contrast to the civil unrest that followed – and not by accident: this court of beautiful people is the site of bitter conflicts, and all its inhabitants, as we gradually discover, are destined for tragic fates. In shor
t, as Mme de Chartres tells her daughter, the heroine of the novel, ‘if you judge by appearances in this place… you will often be deceived, because what appears to be the case hardly ever is.’

  What is true of the court is true of the novel. The historical background is neither purely decorative, nor a history lesson, but a morality, giving a social and political dimension to the story of Mme de Clèves and her love for the Duc de Nemours. At a symbolic level, the love between the princess and the duke is reflected in the history of their time.

  Having said that, the lasting appeal of their story depends on something else that, at first sight, may not appear to be the case: The Princesse de Clèves is a story of erotic love. So deceptive is its eroticism that the statement could seem ridiculous, especially to modern readers. After all, the two central characters in this love story never so much as touch hands; in fact, we are told that the first time they even meet each other alone is also the last. The author is mistaken about this, because she has forgotten the episode of the letter earlier in the book, but the detail is academic. Surely it is straining the meaning of the term to call the emotions that the author describes ‘erotic’?

  One answer to that depends on a reading of the text that would not have occurred to Mme de Lafayette or her contemporaries. The Princesse de Clèves and the Duc de Nemours fall in love at first sight, and from that moment the sense of sight becomes the channel and the figure for their desire. Take the scene where the duke observes Mme de Clèves from the garden of her husband’s country house at Coulommiers. The circumstances are of the kind that Valincour rightly criticized as far-fetched: spied on (indirectly) by her husband, Nemours has made his way into the garden and observes her in a pavilion, or sort of summerhouse, where she is binding up a malacca cane that once belonged to him. She then turns away from this to gaze at a painting that happens to include his portrait.

  While she looks at his image, he looks at her. Unaware that she is being observed, she is sitting on a divan, casually dressed, with nothing around her head or shoulders but her hair, loosely tied.

  He saw that she was alone, but saw such astonishing beauty in her that he was scarcely able to contain himself at the sight… To see – in the depth of night, in the loveliest spot in the world – to see the person whom he adored, to see her without her knowing that she was seen, and to see her entirely occupied with matters relating to himself… is something no other lover has ever enjoyed or imagined.

  The conclusion – in the literal sense absurd, since no one can deny that other lovers have imagined and enjoyed intenser pleasures than this – merely serves to underline what is really going on. The writing may be constrained by literary convention, but this does not prevent Mme de Lafayette from evoking the intimacy of the encounter and the vulnerability of the heroine, who unconsciously offers herself to Nemours with her hair casually tied and her throat uncovered; or from the obsessive repetition of the verb ‘to see’. The duke remains ‘motionless’ and the pair are transported outside time in an act of what could be described as mutual voyeurism.

  But to make the sexual nature of the encounter explicit is to put an unnecessary gloss on it: the emotions, and the nature of the emotions, are all there in the text. The problem we may have in discerning them, on a superficial reading of the novel, is partly to do with literary and social conventions, and with the language in which they are expressed. Mme de Lafayette, in the passage I have just quoted, and throughout the book, uses the word amant of her two main protagonists; today, this means ‘lover’ and, as in English, implies a sexual relationship.

  However, in seventeenth-century French, the word was both more specific and less: a standard modern dictionary of classical French (the Larousse Dictionnaire du français classique, 1988) defines a ‘lover’ as any man who declares his love to a woman, regardless of whether or not he may be sincere; and this emphasis on the act of speech, with none on the act of sex, entirely displaces the relationship from the private to the social sphere, where it acquires an element of play. Love is not just a matter of inclination, but part of a social game in which the expression of feeling may be a move as crucial as physical intimacy and where, as a result, everything depends on the degree of sincerity behind what is said.

  This is why Mme de Clèves, forced into daily contact with him by her obligations as a member of the court, makes such strenuous efforts to avoid any situation in which Nemours can cross this barrier and declare what he feels (or may be pretending to feel); why, too, the characters attach such importance to honesty in the statement of feeling, which is also one of the themes around which the whole story revolves. The sincerity of the players clearly decides the course of the game.

  Yet not altogether in the way that one might expect: M. de Clèves claims to attach great moral importance to sincerity, and tells his wife a cautionary tale to illustrate the fact, but when it comes to the point, he finds himself unable to abide by his principles. The word ‘lover’ may be used indiscriminately for any participant in the courtly game of love, regardless of whether his feelings are real or feigned, but this does not mean that the reality of the feelings is unimportant. On the contrary, for the book’s original readers as much as for us, what makes Mme de Clèves and the Duc de Nemours ‘lovers’ is also the nature of the feeling they arouse in one another and its difference in kind from other varieties of love.

  Irrational, instantaneous, inspired by the mere sight of its object, this passionate love is in essence uncontrollable, threatening and, consequently, subversive of the very idea of the social ritual that is played out in its name. This is the destructive emotion that implants itself in M. de Clèves when he first sees his wife, and it can only be satisfied by evidence of a corresponding feeling in her. And, clearly, this love is not mere affection, respect, esteem, or indeed any reasoned or even primarily altruistic feeling, but an erotic passion, regardless of whether we interpret this as meaning sexual desire, romantic love or the interference of a playful and ill mannered god in the course of human affairs.

  Men and women are equally subject to this passion, which is the motive force of the novel, but suffer unequally from the effects. The only happiness for a woman, Mme de Chartres tells her daughter, the heroine of the book, is to love her husband and to be loved by him; and we accept the statement, at first reading, at face value, assuming that it reflects the author’s point of view as well as a conventional one. But in that case, why does Mme de Chartres knowingly allow her daughter to marry a man whom she does not love? The ostensible motive is social advancement: the Prince de Clèves is a good match and Mme de Chartres’s other plans have fallen through. Does she then sacrifice her daughter to ambition? And what are we to make of her distress when she realizes that Mme de Clèves is falling in love with the Duc de Nemours?

  Again, on the face of it, there is no reason why Mme de Clèves should not enjoy the happiness that comes from loving her husband, who does love her. They are well-matched, in social status and age. We may have the impression that he is older than the Duc de Nemours, and perhaps this is deliberate: M. de Clèves, we are told, has a prudence ‘hardly ever found in young men’ and his wife’s willingness to confide in him suggests that she sees him as a father-figure. Yet the difference between him and Nemours is not one of age, but the Prince de Clèves’s exceptional ability to remain loyal in love, contrasted with the Duc de Nemours’s exceptional ability to inspire it. The princess is caught in a tragic dilemma, offered the possibility of happiness with a loving husband, but driven to reject it by an impulse more powerful than the desire for happiness.

  ‘I may be led by passion,’ she says, ‘but it cannot blind me.’ It does not blind her to the faults of the Duc de Nemours or to the likelihood that she would not ultimately find lasting happiness with a man who is almost irresistible to other women, as much as to herself. She has discovered that she is the same as these others in her capacity for falling in love, and different from them in her ability to withstand his advances. Men and women
share the same passion but are different in their capacity to sustain it, the novel implies, either because of some innate difference, or because of the roles that marriage and society impose on them. For the heroine of the book, renunciation – and a form of death, if not death itself – may be the only path that allows her to keep control of her fate.

  And when he falls on his knees, she replies, smiling, that what she has told him, he knows only too well. With that smile, bought at the price of a terrible lucidity, the victim triumphs, over the man who is pursuing her, over her own misery, over her social role, over her fate. But the triumph is in no way consoling: this novel, motivated by the power of passionate love, is not in either the usual or the literary sense, a romantic novel, but quite simply anti-romantic, refusing to believe that passion can bring anything but pain, even in a romance, and creating a powerful tension out of this conflict between its simultaneous acknowledgement and rejection of erotic love. Nor is this conclusion based on conventional Christian morality, but on a view of human nature that is largely uninformed by notions of right and wrong.

  ‘Man is a reed,’ the Duc de La Rochefoucauld wrote, ‘… but a thinking reed’; in other words, bent by passion, without being blinded by it. Not surprisingly, in view of his friendship with Mme de Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld has been suggested as a possible contributor to The Princesse de Clèves. But it is far more likely that these characters were created by Mme de Lafayette alone, which makes one curious about her; because, as she remarks in relation to the Duc de Nemours, it is a fairly common indiscretion ‘to speak in general terms of one’s particular feelings and to describe one’s own adventures under assumed names’.

  Mme de Lafayette was born Marie-Madeleine de la Vergne, in March 1634, the eldest daughter of Marc Pioche de la Vergne and Isabelle Péna (herself daughter of the king’s physician). Her parents, who had two other daughters, were comfortably off; her father, a mathematician and scientist, held various government posts and was able to have a house built at the corner of the Rue de Vaugirard and the Rue Férou, which Marie-Madeleine was to inhabit for most of her life. But he died when she was only fifteen, and in 1650 her mother married René-Renaud de Sévigné, a family friend who appears to have been considered originally as a husband for Marie-Madeleine. Through this lost husband, she found a friend: René-Renaud was the uncle by marriage of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, whose correspondence (though not published until the following century) was to make her the most celebrated letter-writer in European literature.