The Novel

by Steven Moore

  The 18th-century translations of Riccoboni’s other half-dozen novels are reportedly of poor quality, failing to catch her style; the only one deemed worthy of translation in recent years is her shortest novel, The Story of Ernestine (Histoire d’Ernestine, 1765). A sedate work with quiet charm, it has a fairytale quality: a German-born girl is orphaned in Paris, apprenticed to a painter of miniatures, and at 16 attracts the attention of one of her sitters, the young Marquis de Clémengis. Prevented for legal and social reasons from marrying beneath his station, he secretly sets her up as a financially independent young lady out of pure friendship, but when unworldly Ernestine learns that people assume she’s his mistress, she reacts as though she had lost her virginity: “I feel that I have lost something precious; I have just been robbed, deprived of . . . what? Not even wishes!” (52). Her eyes now open to society’s “prejudices, its malicious observations” (41), she retreats to a convent, but defies society when she learns the marquis has suffered a setback. An unexpected twist clears the way for their marriage on the penultimate page, but not before Riccoboni scores several hits against social prejudices and the double standard held against women. Ernestine’s loss of innocence is paralleled by her progress as an artist: she realizes her original miniature of the marquis captures his features but not his soul, and begins revising her work; his soul turns out to be pure, but Ernestine learns the glittering surface of Parisian society conceals a rotten soul.

  That glittering surface undoes a weaker woman in playwright and journalist Jean-François de Bastide’s (1724–98) curious novella The Little House (La Petite maison, 1758, rev. 1763), in which a libertine named Trémicour seduces art student Mélite with home decor. Petites maisons—love nests on the outskirts of Paris intended for erotic assignations—figure in most libertine novels of the day, but rather than merely providing the setting for a libertine seduction, Trémicour allows the gorgeously decorated house to do the work for him. As Mélite oohs and aahs over the furnishings, informed enough to recognize the work of the artists and architects that the narrator identifies for the rest of us in footnotes, she moves through the rooms as through various stages of foreplay. Trémicour insists the decor is the outward manifestation of his passion for her—“Although you have reproached me for not feeling love,” he complains, “you will at least concede that so many things here capable of inspiring it should honor my imagination” (84)—which the art-smart but heart-dumb woman comes to believe; losing her bet that she can resist him, she gives in on the final page.194 The Little House recalls Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in its eroticized descriptions of architecture and decor and in its exploration of erotic transference, in this case from the house to the house’s owner (and his army of decorators). It is also an allegory of the seductive power of art, of the aesthetic bliss an experienced artist can induce, a happy ending for the reader if not for Mélite, who is probably correct in her assumption that she’ll become just another notch on Trémicour’s exquisite bedpost.

  As conditions deteriorated in France in the decades leading up to the Revolution, many novelists understandably escaped to fantasy and utopianism. In one of the biggest best-sellers of the day, The Year 2440 (L’An 2440, 1771), Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) recounts the long dream of a man like himself who wakes up in the Paris of the future. The novel may as well have been titled The Year 1840 because he doesn’t envision any technological advances or futuristic marvels; he merely dreams of “the France of his day purged of its abuses,” as Darnton says (124). There’s not much of a story: a man of the 25th century simply leads the 700-year-old dreamer around Paris to point out changes, while the 18th-century author supplies voluminous footnotes explaining why these changes were necessary, not trusting his readers to make the obvious connections. There’s no character development or meaningful form; at one point the author remembers something he meant to say about theaters a hundred pages earlier, so he just bungs it in during a chapter on painting, shrugging “the disposition of a work is of no great moment, provided the author there includes all his ideas.”195 Given this attitude, his France of the future predictably tolerates only utilitarian art that supports official values (i.e., propaganda). Any art promoting sensuality is banned, and women were banished long ago from public life to stay home to raise children and obey their husbands. Like many utopias, it is tarred by totalitarianism.

  In a chilling chapter, the dreamer wanders into the royal library and sees empty shelves; the few books retained from his own time are stuck in a closet, for everything else was destroyed, the librarian explains, in order “to rebuild the structure of human knowledge”:

  By an unanimous consent, we brought together on a vast plain all those books which we judged either frivolous, useless, or dangerous; of these we formed a pyramid that resembled, in height and bulk, an enormous tower; it was certainly another Babel. Journals crowned this strange edifice, and it was covered on all sides with ordinances of bishops, remonstrances of parliaments, petitions, and funeral orations; it was composed of five or six hundred thousand commentators, of eight hundred thousand volumes of law, of fifty thousand dictionaries, of a hundred thousand poems, of sixteen hundred thousand voyages and travels, and of a milliard of romances. (2:5)

  That’s 1,000,000,000 novels. All my pretty ones? The only novels that were saved were Fénelon’s Telemachus, those of Richardson and Rousseau, a few of Voltaire’s (“where he is not ridiculous, too severe, or improperly satirical” [2:27]—The Ingenu is later singled out for praise), and a didactic historical novel called Belarius (1767) by Jean-François Marmontel.196 Elsewhere the author has a kind word to say about Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1:115), but that’s it for fiction, nor do poets and dramatists get off much better.

  An artless work, 2440 deserves some respect for its heartfelt concern for social reform. The exasperated author is driven to despair by the abuses he sees around him, and in his footnotes he roars with all the wrath of an Old Testament prophet. He’s as vicious as Voltaire, who is praised often in the novel, though criticized for his lack of depth.197 Mercier wasn’t much of a novelist, but he was a great journalist, and the Paris of the 1770s comes alive in his book; as Darnton says, “There is no better writer to consult if one wants to get some idea of how Paris looked, sounded, smelled, and felt on the eve of the Revolution” (118).

  A novel Mercier would have flung like a serpent onto his bonfire of books appeared the year following his. In The Devil in Love (Le Diable amoureux, 1772, rev. 1776), Jacques Cazotte (1719–92) mixes the sylph-lore of Le Comte de Gabalis and The Fairy Doll with the Catholic superstition of demonic possession for one of the earliest examples of the fantastic: fiction in which the protagonist (and the reader) is uncertain whether he’s dreaming, hallucinating, or witnessing something that defies the laws of nature.198 This uncertainty is masterfully sustained in this story about a young Spaniard named Alvaro de Maravillas (Spanish for “wonders”), inordinately devoted to his mother, who while stationed in Naples learns from his senior officer how to summon spirits. His first attempt conjures up a floating camel head, which agrees to serve him. Taking the form first of a white spaniel and then of an androgynous servant, Biondetta—as Alvaro calls him/her—explains that she is a sylphid who wants to escape the spirit world by marrying a human. Her gender is uncertain (as if waiting to see which way the soldier swings), and the text alternates between male and female pronouns as Alvaro hesitates how to respond to her offer of secret knowledge. Biondetta follows him to Venice at Carnival, where the masks and revels further blur the distinctions between reality and fantasy. Spying on her as she builds and then plays a harpsichord—the first edition included the score to the song she sings—Alvaro finally falls in love and sets off to take her home to meet mother, but just before they arrive Biondetta admits he’s the devil, reverts to the dread dromedary head, and disappears. Alvaro’s mother brings in a scholar from Salamanca who listens to his story and assures him it wasn’t a dream, and that the devil is ca
sting similar spells elsewhere. This opens Alvaro’s “eyes to many things that are happening: I already see . . . a multitude of possessed souls haplessly unaware of their possession” (83)—which seems to be Cazotte’s diagnosis of his trouble era. (He was right to be suspicious, for during the madness of the early days of the Revolution, he was guillotined for his loyalty to the king.) It’s left to the reader to decide whether the scholar is right or whether the whole thing was a hallucination or dream dramatizing Alvaro’s gender confusion and problematic relationship to his mother, about whom he has been obsessing throughout the mesmerizing novella. It raises many questions but answers none; as Philip Stewart confesses after wrestling with it for 18 pages, “this must be one of the most underdetermined texts in narrative literature” (Rereadings, 210).

  The Devil in Love builds on the older traditions of fairy tales and the occult to create something closer to the psychological horror fiction of Gothic novelists and, in the 19th century, the tales of Hoffmann and Poe. (In fact, Hoffmann’s “Der Elementargeist,” essentially an adaptation of The Devil in Love, includes two characters who discuss it.) Despite its deal with the devil, it’s more Kafkaesque than Faustian. Cazotte wrote some other novellas that spoofed popular genres of his time—A Thousand and One Follies (1742) alludes to Crébillon’s Sofa and His Unlooked-for Lordship (1767) exploits the fad for English novels—but with The Devil in Love he introduced a startling new mode that to this day continues to be exploited in fiction and film.

  Robert-Martin Lesuire (1737–1815) first raised eyebrows with a Voltairish novel called The Savages of Europe (Les Sauvages de l’Europe, 1760), in which a pair of French lovers and a Chinese scholar visit England and suffer every species of abuse at the hands of its violent yobs. The Mandarin had warned the French couple that the only “difference between the English and their brother-savages of Africa is that, among the latter, the fair sex meet with some consideration” (21). The Frenchman was inspired by the novels of Fielding and Richardson to visit England, but discovers to his sorrow that fiction can be misleading. (He is, however, fought over in one of literature’s first catfights: “The caps soon disappeared, the shifts soon followed their example . . .” [92].) But Lesuire is remembered today, if at all, for an outlandish novel entitled The French Adventurer (L’Aventurier françois, 1782). This 500-page novel borrows freely from a number of genres: it begins as a picaresque when the aristocratic Gregoire Merveil (cf. French merveille: marvel, wonder) is kidnapped and becomes a beggar, scraping by until age 10 when he meets both the love of his life—six-year-old Julie de Noirville—and his nemesis, her evil father, who we learn at the end is the one who kidnapped him. Conflicts ensue, sending Gregoire off on other picaresque adventures, until he is tricked into becoming a monk and then imprisoned in a dungeon, as is Julie, at which point the novel morphs into Gothic horror. After escaping, the lovers are separated and Gregoire is banished from France; heading for South America, he is shipwrecked on a desert island, where he imitates Robinson Crusoe (named at 2:102) for four years, recapitulating the growth of civilization. He sets out in a homemade boat and arrives down in the land of the Alsondons, a race of gnomes who live underground. Most of the rest of the novel operates in this fantasy world: after two years among the gnomes he is rescued by a French explorer but robbed, then stumbles upon an alternative France in Brazil (apparently), whose inhabitants have built a replica of Paris.199 Ruled by a 16-year-old queen named Ninon—descended from the famous 17th-century hostess Ninon de Lenclos—this New Paris is only marginally better than the original, and allows Lesuire many opportunities to criticize his own society from a distance. Gregoire eventually impregnates the queen, becomes king, and has further adventures while exploring his kingdom: he is imprisoned by a tribe of Viragoes, who treat men like beasts of burden until Gregoire leads a revolt and returns relations to their “natural” order; comes across a band of ageless people who practice cryogenics, freezing themselves to prolong their lives; and finally visits a democratic utopia where “All the children were brought up in common,” where there’s a cap on income so that “there were no rich, nor consequently no poor,” no nobility, and where there is universal suffrage (3:201–5). Returning from this isle of sanity to the irrational world, Gregoire puts down a revolt in New Paris, is poisoned and cast adrift in the sea, rescued by an English ship, and makes his way back to old Paris, resumes his search for his beloved Julie, and then marries her after the secret of his aristocratic origin is revealed.

  The world according to Lesuire is a topsy-turvy one where the “real” world of France is as absurd as the unreal lands he visits. It’s a duplicitous one: he fills his novel with doppelgangers and illusions, false paradises and imitation cities. Gender and class are fluid, roles reversed: for various reasons young Gregoire often dresses as (or is mistaken for) a woman, or his twin (there’s a prince-and-the-pauper subplot); he’s a beggar one day, a king the next, mistaken for a madman, changing clothes and occupations as fate decrees, trying his best to navigate an uncertain world with only Julie as his polestar. (During his adventures he has sex with a number of women, but remains faithful to her in his fashion.) The French Adventurer is both a vivid picture of the chaotic uncertainty of the 1780s and a vacation slide-show of fantasy alternatives. The subterranean world of Alsondons, for example, has its charms; resourceful Gregoire introduces a number of technical innovations, including clockwork: “Visitors however may prefer the old method of measuring time,” the editors of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places note, “in which a young bare-breasted girl stands on a pedestal in the main square and a youth places his hands on her breasts, counting her heartbeats out loud, each beat being the equivalent of a second” (16; see 2:162–63). The gnome-priests have worked out a scam in which they drug young women with opium and take them aboveground to witness “paradise,” where they engage in the exploitative “intercourse of souls” before the gnomides are drugged and returned to the “real” world underground. (Priests, monks, and spiritual advisors are bitterly satirized throughout the novel.) Gregoire gets in on this scam, but also celebrates the beauty of nature while revealing it to his benighted girlfriends: indeed, the novel contains some of the best nature writing since Julie. As the author acknowledges in his preface, The French Adventurer is pop fiction rather than great literature, more Verne than Voltaire, but it does accurately diagnose France’s many ills and offers potential cures, none of which, of course, were taken. Like Mercier, Lesuire was powerless to save France from self-destruction and could only fantasize about an alternative reality—and continued to do so for three more sequels.

  The most elaborate fantasy novel published in French at this time was written by the famous Giacomo Casanova (1725–98). Nearing 60 after an adventurous life (to put it mildly), he decided he wanted to immortalize himself in a novel. As he explains in a letter to Count Max Lamberg dated 15 April 1785,

  Three years ago in Venice, displeased with everything, I suddenly had the fantasy of setting myself up as a creature of a new world, of a new human race, a new code of civil laws, a good religion, another way of providing food and lodging, of living together and engendering fellow creatures, and I saw myself obtaining the approval of the whole world, everyone feeling obliged to say, after reading my work, Oh! happy world. . . . At the end of this work, which will be divided into two volumes in 8°, each 500 pages long, I will say as Ovid did about his Metamorphoses: Here is a work that will vault me to immortality. I have written two-thirds, but I am making brisk progress and I will hand it in in a year. (Flem, 212)

  In 1788 Casanova privately printed his huge novel Icosameron (20 Days—the time it takes for the narrator to relate his tale) in an edition limited to 350 copies, selling fewer than half to subscribers, few of whom, apparently, ever bothered to read it.200 He had begun it in Italian, but decided to rewrite it in French, for he felt it would be better appreciated in that language. (He was very familiar with French literature, and in fact had cowritten a play with Prévost [Le
s Thessaliennes, 1752], translated one of Voltaire’s, and adapted novels by Tencin and Riccoboni into Italian.) Drawing upon Plato, Erasmus, Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Holberg’s Niels Klim, among other sources, Casanova concocted the tale of two English teenagers on an Arctic expedition in 1533 who accidentally descend through the Maelström in a kind of bathysphere to a vast island beneath the Earth’s surface called Protocosmo, where a sun shines permanently in a rose-colored sky, populated by androgynous, color-coded humanoids called Megamicres (Big Littles, probably taken from Voltaire’s Micromegas) who are 18 inches high and speak in musical tones. Suspecting they have stumbled upon the original Garden of Eden, Edward and his sister Elizabeth spend the next 81 years there (about a dozen Earth years) interacting with the Megamicres, making changes to their society, and leaving behind 4 million descendants. (They mate shortly after arrival and continue doing so once a year, always producing twins who marry each other, etc.; Edward/Casanova includes an elaborate defense of incest based on his reading of Genesis.) The English giants gradually Westernize and thus spoil paradise, largely because of Edward’s technological “advances,” including gunpowder and weaponry. A mistimed explosion in fact blows Edward and Elizabeth back up into a cavern that leads to the surface in Slovenia. The two make their way back to England in 1615, then tell their story to their astonished, aged parents and some neighbors.