by Steven Moore
There’s a frustrated desperation to the narrator’s tone because Bordelon was writing at a time when trials for witchcraft and magic, though on the wane, were still held – in England a woman was executed for witchcraft as late as 1727 – and when superstition and folklore still possessed most people outside what historian Edward Bever calls “the social and cultural elite.”97 Bordelon emphasizes the havoc caused by superstitious belief whenever he can (just as Cervantes keeps reminding us that Don Quixote is a dangerous madman): after Oufle’s werewolf adventure, a beggar is almost torn apart by a crowd convinced he’s the werewolf, and “In one quarter of the city they got together in clusters and dolefully bemoaned an ecclesiastic who, being going to the assistance of a dying person, was obliged to return home by reason of the violent pursuit of this wolf-sorcerer, so that the sick person died without its being possible for him to give him the help which he wanted” (32). As noted earlier, Oufle’s daughter is denied marriage “by reason of the disagreeable predictions of her horoscope” (101), and his wife is continually saddened and mortified by her husband’s capers, “more ready to cry than laugh” (255). Oufle kills numerous animals for magical purposes, including his servant’s pet blackbird, and assaults a carpenter he mistakes for a demon. In the penultimate chapter Oufle accuses an old, single woman of being a witch, and though in this instance she is exonerated, the episode is a chilling reminder of the thousands of women who were burned for witchcraft on the testimony of people as ridiculous as Oufle. Beliefs often have deadly consequences, a point lost on cheerleaders for multicultural relativism and tolerance.
“The tradition of ridiculing magical beliefs began with the early seventeenth-century libertins érudits,” Bever tells us, “but their mockery was that of a small avant garde bolstering its sense of exclusivity in the face of an overwhelming majority who did not share their beliefs” (282). Erudite libertines were associated with atheists, and the narrator nervously notes that rationalists like himself are often lumped in with them; Oufle’s library contains some books that refute superstition, but he ignores them and looks “on the authors of these performances as impious and men without religion, for people of his sort commonly believe all those to be atheists who are not superstitious” (2). For writers like Bordelon, this presented a problem: questioning the wonders ascribed to sorcerers implicitly called into question the miracles in scripture and hagiography. In her introduction to the Garland reprint of Monsieur Oufle, Josephine Grieder says of Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s De l’Origine des fables (1684), “though ostensibly its target was pagan superstition, alert readers were not slow to see its application to Christian beliefs” (9n3). Dutch authorities were not slow to see the application of Balthasar Bekker’s World Bewitched (1691), included in Oufle’s library, which attacks sorcery and superstition but was accused of fomenting atheism. Throughout Monsieur Oufle the narrator keeps harping upon the necessity of questioning nonfiction books “which treat of surprising, prodigious, and extraordinary things” (61–62), and though Noncrède unctuously exempts books containing “religious truths”—“I allow you are not to examine them strictly with an intention to inquire whether you have reason to believe what is affirmed to you concerning them. Holy, learned, and great men have done it before you, and the Church exacts your belief of them” (193–94)—this so blatantly contradicts the narrator’s fierce allegiance to reason and inquiry that either Monsieur Oufle is a libertine attack on Christianity as well as other superstitions, or Bordelon was in denial. But he describes so many of Oufle’s beliefs in religious terms that I suspect he knew exactly what he was doing.
A few years ago, A. J. Jacobs published a humorous book entitled The Year of Living Biblically; Bordelon’s novel could be repackaged as The Year of Living Magically, and I can’t imagine a more relevant book. Monsieur Oufle doesn’t end with a recovery scene as in Don Quixote, The Extravagant Shepherd, and The Mock Clelia because Oufle is the type who doesn’t learn, and “who will never own themselves in the wrong” (285). His descendants are among us today, reading their horoscopes, phoning psychic hotlines, playing “lucky” numbers, spooking themselves with ghosts, romancing the occult, mainlining mysticism, casting the I Ching, conning themselves with Kabbalah, adopting animal spirit-guides, calling down the moon, attending those institutions of superstition doing business as religions, bankrolling Scientology, self-medicating themselves with New Age nostrums, flirting with goddess-worship, spreading tarot cards, swallowing and regurgitating urban legends, practicing Wicca, calling on angels, and building a mystery out of the trash found in books likes those in Oufle’s library, many of which are still available today in the occult/mysticism section of book stores. What for some of us are quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore are for many citizens handbooks for living. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the French say.
Bordelon’s bold novel ends with this addendum to Oufle and son’s description of a witches’ sabbath: “But yet that I may conclude conformable to what the demonographers teach us, I inform you that the cock has crowed; for according to them, his crowing disperses this diabolical assembly and causes it to vanish” (303). After exposing the darkness of superstition for more than 300 “critico-comical” pages, the author hopes his readers will see the light. With the novel’s insistence on critical thinking, empirical evidence, and the rejection of spurious authorities, Bordelon’s cockcrow greets the dawn of the Enlightenment.
Lesage said the only purpose of Gil Blas was “to represent life such as it really is”; that goal was achieved with far greater success and sophistication in a stunning novel published anonymously in 1713 entitled The Illustrious French Lovers (Les Illustres françaises) by Robert Challe (1659–1721).98 Though popular and influential during the 18th century, it dropped out of sight after its last edition in 1780 and wasn’t rediscovered until 1959, when critic Frédéric Deloffre published a new edition. (Similarly, Penelope Aubin’s loose 1727 English translation came and went, and a new, superior translation didn’t appear until 2008.) Challe’s realism is startling; The Princess de Clèves may be France’s first “modern” novel, but The Illustrious French Lovers is the first that reads like a modern novel.
Set in the 1660–70s, it begins in a traffic jam; a man surnamed Des Frans has returned on horseback to Paris after seven years, and is rescued from the crush by an old friend in a carriage, a lawyer named Des Ronais, who invites him to lodge with him. They quickly catch up on news of mutual friends, tossing around names that mean nothing yet to the reader; this is how many modern novels start, in contrast to most older novels, where characters are formally introduced as each appears on the page. Des Frans only has time to change before he rushes off to a prior engagement, the story of which we won’t hear for several hundred pages. (The novel is nearly 600 pages long.) Another friend, Dupuis, hearing of Des Frans’s return, drops by several times but keeps missing him; Des Ronais had been engaged to Dupuis’s cousin Manon and promises to give Des Frans the details of what went wrong there, but holds off when Dupuis returns the next day, at which point they all discuss the recent deaths of their friend Gallouin and a woman named Silvie (to whom Des Frans was engaged), the recent wedding of their friend de Jussy (which is what Des Frans rushed off to attend), and Dupuis’s forthcoming marriage to Gallouin’s sister, the widow de Londé. This traffic jam of names and relationships is deliberately confusing for the fly-on-the-wall reader, and a daring opening ploy for an author writing in 1713—Aubin even apologizes for the confusion in the preface to her translation—but it’s remarkably lifelike and modern-sounding, aided by Challe’s plain prose and naturalistic dialogue.
Clarification comes slowly via seven long stories these characters tell each other and mutual friends over the next week. Superficially The Illustrious French Lovers resembles frame-tale novels like the Decameron and the Heptameron, but Challe dissolves the frame into the stories to create something new. Unlike those earlier works, the narrators in Challe’s novel are also
participants in each other’s stories, with each successive narrator filling in gaps and mysteries in the earlier stories until the complete, multi-angled story of this group emerges. (As in The Mock Clelia, the auditors often interrupt the narrator to ask a question or to supply further details.) In form, it anticipates Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), where the first three novels occur simultaneously “as a challenge to the serial form of the conventional novel,” as Durrell claims in his preface. In content, Challe’s novel challenges the conventional mores and manners of the time, specifically the tyrannical power parents exerted over their marriage-minded offspring and the antiquated, patriarchal codes of honor imposed on women. Through his upper-middle-class characters, Challe criticizes religion, traditional marriage, obsession with money and social status, and institutional corruption (especially tax collection). Every story pits young lovers against old, repressive society, and dramatizes the negotiations they have to make to achieve personal happiness. Although men narrate the stories, the real heroes of the novel are “the illustrious Frenchwomen,” as the title literally translates.99
As story follows story, they grow longer and more violent, tracking (as Lawrence Forno notes) the “greater passion and boldness on the part of the protagonists in pursuit of their goals” (117). In the first story, in which Des Ronais tells Des Frans how he fell in love with Dupuis’s cousin Manon and then broke up with her, the young lovers are blocked from marrying by Manon’s father, a gruff old soldier who has arguably legitimate reasons for postponing their marriage, but allows them to continue seeing each other, instead of immuring his daughter in a convent or forcing the couple to meet secretly, as in other romantic tales. Des Ronais is left “with the choice of either giving her up, or playing the role of the perfect hero of romance until his death” (29)—one of many facetious references to novelistic conventions—and is rewarded for his patience when the father dies 18 months later, only to break with Manon after he discovers a compromising letter in her possession. Manon patiently waits for her hotheaded fiancé to cool down, confident the truth will out. (We don’t learn the true story of that letter and Manon’s innocence for another 100 pages.) She even jokes about it when she sees Des Frans the next day.
Later that day, Des Ronais tells Des Frans how, while he was away, their rich friend Contamine courted and married an orphaned chambermaid named Angélique, who held out for a wedding ring and intelligently maintained her virtue until Contamine decided to ignore the gap between their social standing. Thus an “unsuitable” marriage is made by adhering to the rules of snobbish society, allowing a clever orphan to beat it at its own game. Their story is a little unconventional but not too challenging to the status quo, and may be the weakest story in the bunch, especially from a technical point of view; Challe seems to forget Des Ronais is narrating a secondhand story he didn’t witness and gives him unearned omniscience.
On the next day, a Thursday,100 Des Frans and Des Ronais join a few other friends to trade further stories, which are darker and more transgressive. The third story features a cruel father who forces his daughters into a convent to avoid paying their dowries—Challe’s views on monastic life are scathing—and blood is shed as a young couple defies church and state in the pursuit of happiness. A fierce Frenchwoman named Babette Fenouil dominates the fourth story, narrated by Des Frans after lunch; she defies convention and cohabits with her mild lover, gets pregnant, and lives outside the law for several years, and her sterling fidelity eventually results in a legal marriage. (These are the Jussys, whose wedding Des Frans attended the day he arrived.) The fifth story, the first to end unhappily, is narrated by Dupuis over supper and concerns a friend named Des Prez. Again, parental disapproval frustrates young love, which leads to a secret marriage, pregnancy, jail, mother–daughter abuse, and a terrible accident that results in his young wife’s death.
On Friday everyone gathers chez Contamine to hear Des Frans tell the novella-length story of his tragic relationship with Silvie, now dead. After falling for this mysterious beauty, he secretly marries her because his disapproving mother withholds permission, convinced Silvie’s just a gold-digger. They live “in sin” for a while, but one night Des Frans catches her asleep in bed with a mutual friend named Gallouin, who drugged her with an aphrodisiac (as we learn in the final story, along with a shocked Des Frans). He resists the impulse to kill them both, but thereafter brutally mistreats Silvie and eventually dumps her in a convent, where she soon dies. Des Frans’s auditors are struck dumb at this violent, tragic tale. In the first four stories, passion is portrayed as a driving force that allows couples to triumph over adversity, but in the fifth and sixth, to quote Forno again, passion is “a merciless, inexplicable, inexorable, and implacable evil force causing doom and destruction to whoever is unfortunate enough to be afflicted with it” (150–51). The group reconvenes the next day after lunch to hear Dupuis’s lighter (but no less shocking) account of how he graduated from libertinism to respectability with the help of a good woman, whom he plans to marry next week. She and the unmarried women are sent out of the room for this Adults Only tale of a rake’s progress, which is so licentious that some 18th-century critics called it pornographic, which in turn probably contributed to the novel’s obscurity for the next two centuries. Beginning with his rowdy schoolboy days, which Dupuis compares to those of Sorel’s Francion,101 he brazenly tells how he lost his virginity at 13, then how he later joined a gang of libertines that included Gallouin. (This is where he explains how Gallouin drugged Des Frans’s Silvie to have sex with her.) With brutal realism and coarse humor, Dupois recounts other sleazy exploits, admitting he was “the most despicable of men” (486) during this period of party-animalry. He straightens out only after meeting a nameless young widow whose cynical views on conventional marriage and advocacy of sexual fulfillment appeal to him, and who helps him mature over the next five years of their common-law marriage. They amicably agree to part ways, by which point he is worthy of Gallouin’s sister, now the widow de Londé, whose virtue and sense of propriety drive him to the point of suicide but complete his transformation from rake to gentleman. These last two widows conclude Challe’s gallery of “illustrious Frenchwomen.”
This innovative novel is a fusion of several earlier genres—the frame-tale novel, the Sorelesque comic novel, the memoir-novel (in his preface Challe says his tales are based on true stories)—but it also qualifies as French literature’s first realist novel. Earlier comic novelists from Sorel to Lesage included realistic incidents mostly for laughs, or to expose the seamy side of life. But that’s not enough to call such novels “realistic,” as Ian Watt insists: “If the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it” (11). This is the sort of wall-to-wall realism Challe introduced to the French novel, removing the older literary filters to render everything more realistically.102 For example, when Dupuis throws himself at the feet of Mme de Londé to proclaim his love, he admits, “She raised me from the ground, an action for which I was grateful, as the gravel was biting painfully into my knees” (562). Challe is not merely deflating the romantic gesture but registering its physical sensation, something that wouldn’t have occurred to any previous novelist. He describes the physical signs of sexual arousal with an attention to detail previously found only in pornography, reproduces dialogue with high fidelity, and unflinchingly describes numerous acts of domestic violence. The novel is psychologically realistic as well; as Philip Stewart notes, “La Princesse de Clèves justly passed for the first psychological novel of the modern tradition in France, yet even there psychology is stylized, fitting the moral categories characteristic of seventeenth-century analysis. It was Challes who heralded the descriptive psychology of the eightee
nth” (Imitation and Illusion, 281). There are remarkably frank discussions of the sexual aspects of marriage (and alternatives to unsatisfying unions), unromantically realistic descriptions of waning passion, the money and paperwork involved in legal relationships, instances of the psycho physiological ravages of women’s obsession with reputation, and exposures of personal defects that go far beyond Lesage’s comparatively softer treatment. Unlike Lesage, Challe doesn’t pull his punches.
If the French novel was floundering in the decades following the 1687 publication of Lafayette’s novel, then Challe’s worldly, tough-minded work put it back on solid footing and opened the way for the stream of great French novels that would soon follow (and perhaps even some English ones; his novel is believed to have influenced Richardson’s). As Showalter shows, The Illustrious French Lovers is “the headspring of the major themes as well as techniques of eighteenth-century fiction” (261), a breakthrough novel that every serious student of literature should read.
The novels of Hamilton, Lesage, Bordelon, and Challe, though sometimes hinting at current events, were firmly set in the 17th century. The first significant novel set in the 18th illuminates why that century became known as the Age of Enlightenment (Le Siècle des Lumières) and why the novel in particular became a favored torch of its luminaries.
In 1721, the year Challe died, Charles de Montesquieu (1689–1755) published an equally innovative fusion of fictional genres; his Persian Letters (Lettres persanes) combines elements of the oriental tale—still trendy at that time—and the fantastic journey in the form of an epistolary novel. But instead of sending his protagonist to the Moon or Lilliput, Montesquieu cleverly inverts the formula and describes the travels of a Persian named Usbek to the wondrous land of France. Consisting of 161 letters exchanged between 20 or so correspondents during the years 1711 and 1720, Persian Letters is a novel bursting with provocative ideas held together by a slim plot, which concerns Usbek’s midlife crisis. He announces in the first letter that he and his young traveling companion, Rica, have left Persia for France “in order to pursue the laborious search for wisdom.”103 But we learn in letter 8 that the real reason he left was because he felt his life was threatened by enemies he made at court while fighting corruption and promoting reform; we also learn that he is undergoing a crisis of faith along with having difficulty keeping his harem in line. His desire for wisdom is nonetheless sincere, and during his nine years in France, Usbek gradually converts to European rationalism (without, however, abjuring Islam) while his wives abandon themselves to disorder (lesbianism, disobedience, adultery). Increasingly disturbed by the French people’s inability to act rationally, by religious doubts, and by dire reports of the revolt of his harem, Usbek confesses in his final letter that he has hit rock bottom: “I am prey to sombre melancholy and fall into dreadful despair; I seem not to exist any more . . .” (155). The novel ends on a tragic note as Usbek learns that his favorite wife, the treacherous Roxane, took a lover and then committed suicide—her suicide note is the final letter in the collection—and that European rationalism wasn’t enough to prevent France from slipping into political and financial chaos in the years after Louis XIV’s death (1715). All the time Usbek was comparing the laws of Persia with those of France, he neglected the only laws people like Roxane obey: “the laws of nature” (161).104
