The Princesse De Cleves Read online

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  Roger Duchêne, in a recent biography (Madame de La Fayette, Paris, 1988), says that Marie-Madeleine was profoundly affected by the disappointment of her mother’s remarriage: ‘Never again would she trust anyone blindly… She was determined never again to depend on anyone. She would be strong…’ For the moment, the arrival of this step-father considerably influenced the course of her life. It meant that she had to look elsewhere for a husband. Secondly, it gave her an entirely unsentimental attitude to her father’s inheritance: her mother had not been able to deprive the children of their rights, but made over to her husband one quarter of Marc Pioche’s estate, the maximum she was legally entitled to dispose of in this way. As for Marie-Madeleine, she seems to have had no regrets when her two younger sisters decided to take religious vows and enter a convent. As nuns, they renounced all of their inheritance except a small annuity. Marie-Madeleine thus became heir to a substantial fortune.

  René-Renaud also introduced her, indirectly, to a world of political intrigue. He had been implicated in the movements known as the Fronde, inspired by opposition to Louis XIV’s powerful but unpopular minister Mazarin. René-Renaud and the Sévignés were allied to Mazarin’s leading opponent, François de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz; and Marie-Madeleine would certainly have recalled these factional struggles of her own day when she came to describe those at the court of Henri II, in The Princesse de Clèves.

  Finally, René-Renaud contributed significantly to her education. In 1651, he introduced her to the poet and scholar Gilles Ménage, already a friend of Mme de Sévigné, who was to become Marie-Madeleine’s tutor, confidant, ‘lover’ (at least, in the wide connotations of the time), and the most important influence in her intellectual development. A leading figure in literary circles who had just published an etymological dictionary of the French language, he has the reputation of a pedant, due partly to his caricature as ‘Vadius’ in Molière’s play Les Femmes savantes. In his poetry, he addressed Marie-Madeleine as ‘Laverna’. He was thirty-six, she was seventeen. She would tease him by refusing to conjugate the Latin verb amare, ‘to love’, in any tense except the future.

  There seems little doubt that it was not conjugated in the present when, four years later, she married Jean-François Motier, Comte de Lafayette, eighteen years her senior. Marriage gave her a name, security and two sons. It also took her away from Paris, to her husband’s property in Auvergne. For the first six years, the couple stayed alternately in the country and in Paris, returning to the capital to settle affairs after the death of her mother, then back to Auvergne, where Jean-François was engaged in a prolonged dispute over his own estates. In 1658, she went to the spa at Vichy for her health, which had been troubling her since her mother’s remarriage. Finally, in 1661, her husband returned alone to his country home.

  Perhaps it is unfair to present him, as Nancy Mitford did in the preface to her translation of The Princesse de Clèves (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1950), as merely a bore to whom Marie-Madeleine had to do her duty by producing children (two sons and at least one child stillborn), before she could persuade him that the country disagreed with her health. The two appear to have understood one another and to have fulfilled what were probably equally modest expectations from the marriage. The closeness of his relationship with Abbé Bayard leads Duchêne to hint that he may have been bisexual. She, on reaching her legal majority at twenty-five, acquired some freedom to manage her own financial affairs. Even before that, he had taken the exceptional step of giving her equal rights in the disposal of her possessions (though marriage had made her legally a ‘minor’ and subject entirely to him). Now, with her husband almost permanently absent, she was also free to pursue her social ambitions, as a wife whose status had been improved by alliance with her husband’s family.

  Her literary ambition is less distinct and was probably less important: it would contribute nothing to her standing in society to be recognized as the author of novels, which is why she always publicly denied authorship of the greatest among her works. During her absence in Auvergne, Ménage and Mme de Sévigné kept her in touch with political and intellectual life, particularly the literature of ‘preciosity’. The précieuses, satirized by Molière in Les Précieuses ridicules, sought to refine the arts of writing and conversation, and cultivated an extreme form of platonic love, analysing and classifying every stage and shade of feeling to produce the novelist Mlle de Scudéry’s allegorical Carte de Tendre, a map describing the progress of the affections, from First Acquaintance, towards the three cities of Tendre on their respective rivers of Esteem, Gratitude and Inclination, via Sincerity, Attentiveness and so on, the traveller hoping to avoid the paths that will lead to the Lake of Indifference or the Sea of Hostility. Ménage sent Marie-Madeleine the latest parts of Mlle de Scudéry’s Clélie, a ten-volume romance set in ancient Rome (and published between 1654 and 1660) in which the Carte de Tendre appeared.

  It is wrong to see the précieuses simply as they were caricatured by Molière. Their concern for language was salutary, and their attitude to love seems a valid response at a time when women could enjoy considerable influence, but almost solely through men rather than in their own right. The précieuse approached sexual relationships with a mixture of prudishness and coquetry, thus retaining the largest possible space in which to exercise power. A minute analysis of the psychology of love was a necessary science for her and its description in such apparently frivolous conceits as the Carte de Tendre, the means of establishing a set of rules for social behaviour of which she thus became the acknowledged legislator. There is nothing ridiculous about such ingenuity, except when it is judged by the standards of those who have no need to employ it.

  After Mme de Lafayette settled in Paris in 1658, on her return from Vichy, her salon was a meeting-place for the précieuses and from 1661 she herself became the close confidante of Henrietta of England, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, and wife of the King’s brother, Philippe d’Orléans. Henrietta was ten years younger than Marie-Madeleine (who wrote a life of the princess, after her tragically early death in 1770): the friendship is a clear model for that between the heroine and Mary Stuart, the Dauphine, in The Princesse de Clèves. At this time, Mme de Lafayette also made her literary début. Her first novel, La Princesse de Montpensier, appeared anonymously in 1662, and was attributed to Ménage. Her second, Zaÿde, was published in 1669 under the name of Jean de Segrais, with a preface by Pierre-Daniel Huet, which set out to give the Novel greater respectability as a genre, by tracing its origins back to classical epic poetry.

  Segrais was one of those who had started to take over the place previously occupied by Ménage, but he was by no means the most significant. From now on, the most important masculine influence in her life was François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld ( 1613–80), another former participant in the Fronde against Mazarin, who is remembered as the author of a collection of maxims giving succinct and often cynical analyses of human behaviour. As with her other mentors, the precise nature of her relationship with La Rochefoucauld is unclear, though it was hinted that they were lovers.

  Certainly, the friendship with La Rochefoucauld caused a breach with Ménage, not healed for many years. Even Mme de Sévigné acknowledged that there was a certain coldness in Mme de Lafayette’s character; there was at least an absence of sentimentality that had made her welcome the sacrifice of her sisters to religion for the sake of their inheritance, and ensured from then on that she never ceased to calculate her own best interests. Yet she retained the loyalty of many friends, most of all Mme de Sévigné, with whom she was capable of laughter and real affection. ‘You are the person whom I have most truly loved,’ she wrote at the end of her life. She was constantly subject to ill-health and, understandably, at times to depression. Perhaps the coldness is easily explained by early disappointments: her father’s death, her mother’s remarriage (to the man intended for herself) and the relative failure of her own marriage to M. de Lafayette. Perhaps it could even be seen as indicating her
maturity and intelligence (Boileau described her as the woman who had most wit and wrote best of any in France), her refusal to be carried away by emotion, and her skill in the management of affairs. Through her social position, her financial independence, her literary salon and her relations with the court, she possessed exceptional influence and power for a woman of her time. But she was too clever not to realize how fragile and limited it was, even so. The complexities of her character, her capacity for feeling and the lucidity of her mind are all evident in The Princesse de Clèves.

  The novel appeared in March 1678 and was promoted, especially through the periodical Le Mercure galant, with what Roger Duchêne describes as the first campaign of its kind in the history of publishing. It was an immediate success: the first English translation of ‘the most famed romance written in French by the greatest Wits of France’ dates from 1679.

  With the exception of Zaÿde, which is Mme de Lafayette’s attempt at a conventional romance, her novels suggest comparisons with drama rather than with earlier prose fiction. The characters, moral universe, ‘unity of action’ and, above all, the language of The Princesse de Clèves belong recognizably to the same cultural milieu as the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. Mme de Lafayette’s vocabulary, though larger than the austere dictionary of Racine, similarly loads certain key terms with exceptional weight of significance: passion, inclination, galanterie, honnêteté, attachement, amant, péril. Even when such words have not changed perceptibly in meaning since the seventeenth century (as amant has, for example), they acquire peculiar connotations by the frequency of their use in the novel. The modern French reader needs to treat them with care and they offer special problems to a translator.

  This inhibited language and the uncomplicated plot give The Princesse de Clèves an appearance of clarity and simplicity that is not deceptive, since it directs us to the idea that a single word, like honnêteté, necessarily implies a complex of social meanings, and passion, a chaos of emotions. The words most charged with significance in the novel’s description of its characters’ feelings are the simple terms trouble and inquiétude, which recur over and over, to convey the turmoil and anguish of passion, with different overtones according to whether the reaction is inspired by desire, jealousy, uncertainty or joy. People may (and, in The Princesse de Clèves, do) die for love – or renounce it for what is contained in the word repos (which consequently implies something more profound than merely ‘rest’ or ‘peace and quiet’).

  If the words are plain signs for complex realities, so is the novel. In terms of the narrative, an extension outwards from the particular towards a wider significance is suggested by the interpolated episodes: Mme de Chartres’s story of the Duchesse de Valentinois (Book One); the stories of Mme de Tournon and Anne Boleyn (Book Two); the story of the Vidame de Chartres (Books Two and Three). Each of these enriches the narrative or the historical background and makes some point about the relationship between men and women: Henri II’s fidelity to his mistress, the Duchesse de Valentinois, in contrast to the vulnerability of King Henry VIII’s wife, Anne Boleyn; the insincerity and infidelity of both Mme de Tournon and the Vidame de Chartres. No particular moral is stated, but the four stories contribute to an underlying message about the perils of sexual love, while forming part of Mme de Clèves’s education in the ways of the society around her and nourishing her reflections – and ours – on her situation.

  In terms of the characters, the novel creates a sense of depth by varying the mode of discourse to allow different viewpoints on the action. The feelings of Mme de Clèves, M. de Nemours and M. de Clèves are conveyed through dialogue and monologue, interior monologue or free indirect speech. In M. de Nemours’s case, he appears first as he looks to the court: the handsomest among many handsome men, who impresses Mme de Clèves and is captivated by her beauty. In their conversations, he expresses himself in the oblique terms of the gallant lover making flirtatious advances, while observing her reactions (for example, her jealousy over the lost letter) with the cool eye of a man well-practised in the conduct of such affairs.

  As the story progresses, we penetrate further into the man. His thoughts and feelings are directly described (‘… how agitated he felt! What terror that he might annoy her!’) or revealed in interior monologue (‘ “For she does indeed love me,” he said…’). Even here, as has frequently been remarked, he retains the instincts of a predator, calculating his best move, but the privileged access that the author allows us engages our sympathy by convincing us of the sincerity of his emotions.

  Nonetheless, there is a continuity between the duke’s public and private personae that distinguishes him from the female characters in the book: the emotions that he pretends in the guise of a conventional lover are the same as those revealed in his most intimate interior monologue, however subject to erosion by time and absence, because convention permits him, as a man, to express his desires through the rituals of courtship. The same is not true, for example, of the Queen, as she reveals in her conversation with the Vidame de Chartres (at the end of Book Two): in appearance, she tells him, she tolerates the King’s affair with the Duchesse de Valentinois, but in private it torments her; and it is necessary, especially for those of her rank, to have one person, at least, in whom to confide. The irony is that she is wrong to trust the Vidame, and we only learn that she has taken him into her confidence because he is giving a verbatim account of her remarks to the Duc de Nemours.

  ‘I set… great store by sincerity,’ M. de Clèves claims to Sancerre, in a conversation he subsequently reports to his wife: there is more here, however, than simply the dramatic irony which Mme de Lafayette points out in the next paragraph (‘she saw some reference… to her own situation’). Yet the virtues that people proclaim are not always those they expect, or those that are beneficial to individuals or to society. Even as he acknowledges the exceptional honesty of her confession to him, M. de Clèves is tormented by the idea that she might show equal ‘sincerity’ to Nemours, and let him know his feelings are reciprocated. The dictates of absolute morality are repeatedly shown to be an uncertain guide to conduct in the real world, where the best motives may lead to the worst outcomes. Mme de Clèves’s confession destroys her husband, but the tragedy is ultimately attributable to Mme de Chartres, ‘a woman of outstanding goodness, virtue and merit’, motivated by the apparently laudable desire to find a suitable match for her daughter and to protect her against the pitfalls of love.

  Moral absolutes may seem to apply equally to men and women, but the novel recognizes a force in social relations that goes beyond ‘virtue’ and morality. While there is no danger to Nemours in revealing his desire for Mme de Clèves, for her to show her intimate feelings in the public domain would be to breach a taboo. It is a similar taboo – indicated by the stress on the exceptional nature of what she is doing – that she disregards in her confession to her husband and later, fully accepting the consequences, in her final conversation with Nemours. The penalty in the first instance is the death of her husband, in the second her own. And, while the writer asserts the importance of women in the social and political spheres, at a court where politics is undissociable from love, she does not imply that men and women participate on equal terms. A woman must either preserve the divide between her public face and private thoughts, or perish. In this unequal contest, it is not sincerity, but the balanced separation between public and private beings that helps a woman to achieve the ideal state of repos.

  A similar precarious balance is reflected in the political sphere, which thus becomes continuous with the private one. Henri II, a monarch faithful in his love for one woman, married to another, addicted to outward show, has contrived to keep peace among the potentially hostile factions at court. Of the minor characters in the novel who represent these factions, only two stand out: the Reine Dauphine (Mary Stuart), a vivid portrait of a young woman who loves teasing and fun; and the Vidame de Chartres, hopelessly enmeshed in his romantic intrigues. Both act as foils for th
e two central characters, the Dauphine bringing out the youth and vivacity of Mme de Clèves, the Vidame showing Nemours’s essentially frivolous attitude to romantic affairs. They are, as it were, respectively what Mme de Clèves and M. de Nemours would be, were they not carried away by their passion for each other.

  Yet neither the Reine Dauphine nor the Vidame de Chartres was destined for any happy fate. The novelist’s view of happiness is as ambivalent as her view of love. Even the ideal that Mme de Chartres recommends to her daughter, of loving one’s husband and being loved by him, appears unattainable, since the outcome of Mme de Clèves’s education teaches her that a man’s love cannot survive possession. The tranquillity she ultimately achieves is the result of renunciation, and indistinguishable from death. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this work is that cold message, expressed in the austere dialect of French classical literature; because The Princesse de Clèves is moving precisely by its refusal of excess in the expression of emotion, and attests to the permanence of those feelings that its heroine renounces out of a conviction that they cannot endure.

  The more one considers the moral of this book, the less ‘moral’ it seems. Like affairs of state, which are subject to sudden and disastrous change as the result of a trivial accident such as the death of Henri II, the lives of individuals are tragically determined by fate and by circumstance. Within these constraints, people act, driven by egotism and impulse, rather than by virtue or moral imperatives, and are punished for disregard of social, rather than religious taboos. If Mme de Clèves is heroic, it is not because she is virtuous, but because in the end she chooses the one course that will permit her to preserve her integrity and to remain, relatively, free. She is the heroine of her story, in fact, for no other reason than that she is the central consciousness around which the rest revolve, led by her feelings but not blinded by them. She alone is allowed to share her creator’s sense of irony; and while Nemours may laugh at the ridiculous entanglements of his friend the Vidame de Chartres, only she, at a moment of the most intense emotion, seeing her lover, the handsomest of all the handsome men at court and almost irresistible to women, fall on his knees in front of her, could smile at the scene before, a few minutes later, walking triumphantly out of the room.