Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Jacques Cazotte’s The Devil in Love

  Modern fiction is not short of sympathy for the devil. A rich tradition of literary Satanism has extended from the brief manifesto included in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840), which argues that the rebel angel was morally superior to the tyrant God. Numerous infernal comedies have suggested that Hell might not be such a bad place after all, given the interesting company to be found there. Countless deal-with-the-devil stories which accept the malevolent nature of the devil nevertheless make him an urbane and witty fellow, fit company for social occasions if not a safe custodian of immortal souls. All of this work was, however, preceded by Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), usually known in English as The Devil in Love, which is all the more remarkable for its appearance—and great popularity—in a Catholic country whose ancien régime had not yet been disturbed by revolution.

  Le Diable amoureux tells the story of an unwary young soldier seduced into the employment of magic, who conjures up the devil in the form of a lovely young woman. He falls in love with her, thus preparing the way for his damnation. Summarized in that fashion, the tale could easily pass for a conventional moral tale warning against the horrid cunning of the devil’s temptations, and perhaps that is the way that its author planned it, but its development includes a crucial extra twist, which is that the devil—seemingly, a least—enters into the guise of the charming Biondetta so wholeheartedly as to fall in love with the young man “she” has come to tempt.

  Although the title of the novel can be read as “the amorous devil” the story does indeed come to seem like a tale of “the devil in love”—and love is a humanizing emotion, at least in fiction. Cazotte’s besotted devil is, in fact, a far better candidate for sympathy than the noble rebel appointed by Shelley’s successors to be a shining example to all enemies of Divine Tyranny. Even a moralist as strict as Marie Corelli—who was very definitely on the side of those angels loyal to God—was able to find sympathy for a devil who was capable of falling in love, as she did in The Sorrows of Satan (1895).

  The imaginative step by means of which Cazotte’s devil reciprocates the love which “she” sets out to induce is not a vast one, but it is a highly significant one. It may even qualify as a daring one, in that it clearly flirts with heresy, and perhaps with blasphemy—and yet the novel was very widely read and greatly applauded. The story’s remarkable inventiveness was thus compounded by its reception, adding to the puzzle of how it came to be produced at all.

  In order to understand how this all came about, it is necessary to give detailed consideration to the story’s origins: to the particular circumstances of its author, and to the literary currents which had caught him up. These were the key components of the intellectual climate which first gave birth to sympathy for the scapegoat who had been invented and designed to serve as the embodiment of all that was vile and vicious.

  * * * *

  Jacques Cazotte was born in Dijon in 1719 and educated at the local Jesuit College. There he was extensively schooled in ancient and modern languages, in order to prepare him for a career in foreign affairs. He subsequently studied law, qualifying in 1740. Shortly thereafter he went to Paris in order to enter the Marine Department of the civil service. He was then required by the Minister of Marine to spend a further two years studying marine law in Paris.

  While he was pursuing these further studies Cazotte became a member of one of the capital’s many literary salons and produced his earliest literary works, La Patte du chat (1741) and Les Mille et une fadaises (1742; tr. as A Thousand and One Follies). Once he had taken up his official duties, however, he found himself fully occupied. He held various posts on shore and aboard ship, and was involved in various naval campaigns against the English during the War of the Austrian Succession.

  After being promoted to écrivain principal in 1747 Cazotte was posted to the island of Martinique in the Caribbean. There he had an extremely uncomfortable time, continually dogged by poor health and financial difficulties. He seems to have been very badly treated by his superiors and never received the full remuneration due to him for his services, but in 1752 he was recalled to France in order to recover his health and produce a report on the state of the colony. He was drawn once again into the literary life of Paris, producing a few ballads and contributing two pamphlets to the controversy that was then raging regarding the alleged inferiority of French Operatic music to Italian. Cazotte took up the cause of French music, most notably in a vituperative reply to a critical pamphlet issued by Rousseau.

  Cazotte returned to Martinique in 1754 but fared no better than before; his health deteriorated again and the hostility of his superiors was renewed. His awkward situation was further complicated by the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, during which the British tried unsuccessfully to capture Martinique. After being partially blinded by scurvy, Cazotte again returned to France in 1759, but was unfortunate enough to attempt to liquidate his assets by handing them over to a Jesuit Mission in exchange for notes of credit payable by the Society in France. These notes turned out to be virtually worthless, because the Mission’s credit was already over-extended (although the refusal of the Society to honor them added to the burden of disrepute which eventually led to the suppression of the French Jesuits in 1764).

  Cazotte’s financial troubles were compounded by the fact that the Ministry of Marine would not offer him an adequate pension following his premature retirement. He would have been in a parlous state had he not inherited from his brother—who, being a clergyman, had no children—a large house in Pierry, near Epernay. Here Cazotte stayed for the remainder of his life. Shortly after taking up residence there he married the daughter of an officer he had known in Martinique, and the couple had three children.

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  It was while living quietly at Pierry, at some distance from but not completely out of touch with the literary world of Paris, that Cazotte wrote his most considerable works. He developed the substance of one of his ballads into the longest of his works, Ollivier (1763), a burlesque of the chivalric romances which had flattered and delighted the feudal barons of Medieval France. It was a success with the public in spite of the scorn heaped upon it by unkind critics. This was followed in 1767 by a comic novel, Le Lord impromptu (tr. as His Most Unlooked-For Lordship), and in 1772—although it may have been written as many as eight years earlier—by his most famous work, Le Diable amoureux.

  In addition to these three long works Cazotte produced numerous minor pieces, of which several are of some note. La Nouvelle Raméide (1766) is a curious “sequel” to a eulogistic poem issued in the same year by Jean-François Rameau, the nephew of a famous composer, whose eccentricities were later to be immortalized by Diderot in Le Neveu de Rameau (written 1761; published 1823; tr. as Rameau’s Nephew). In the same period Cazotte dabbled in the production of fables, after the fashion of La Fontaine. These were later collected in 1788 along with various other items, including “La Belle par accident,” a Quixotic fairy tale in the same vein as his earliest publications, and “Rachel” (1788), a new version of a Spanish legend. Cazotte’s last major work was a series of Oriental tales—some of them based in authentic Arabian folklore—issued as a Continuation des mille et une nuits (1788-89; tr. as Arabian Tales).

  Cazotte’s interest in the fantastic and the occult, exhibited in almost all his literary works, extended in the latter part of his life to a close involvement with the Martinists, an Illuminist sect claiming affiliation to the Rosicrucian Order and Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati. The founder of the sect, Martinez de Pasqualis, had established a series of quasi-Masonic lodges in various French cities during the 1760s; after his death in 1768 he was succeeded by the self-styled Saint-Martin, whose close associate Madame la Croix became a member of Cazotte’s household, collaborating with him in séances and other occult experiments (somewhat to the discomfort of Mme. Cazotte). It is not
clear exactly when Cazotte was initiated into the Order, but the occult apparatus of Le Diable amoureux is certainly not taken seriously, and it is not until the Oriental tales written in the late 1780s that the inspiration of Martinist ideas becomes obvious in the author’s work.

  Cazotte did not remain within the Martinist fold for long; he broke with Saint-Martin in 1789 because the latter favored the revolutionists while Cazotte himself remained steadfastly loyal to the king. In fact, Cazotte’s loyalty went so far as to encourage him to draw up plans for a hypothetical counter-revolution, which he laid out in letters to an old friend who was an assistant to Laporte, the controller of the Civil List. When Laporte was arrested and his papers seized these letters fell into the hands of the revolutionists and Cazotte was promptly arrested, along with his daughter Élisabeth. They were imprisoned in the Abbaye Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and although they survived a massacre mounted by the Marsellais Cazotte was brought before a revolutionary tribunal, condemned to death, and guillotined in September 1792.

  * * * *

  Cazotte’s literary work exemplifies many of the popular literary fashions of his day. All of it was written to amuse, and the greater part of it is tongue-in-cheek. Although he was presumably grateful for the money earned by Le Diable amoureux and the Oriental tales, there was never any sign of burgeoning professionalism in his career; he remained an amateur throughout. He never laid claim to any considerable talent or artistry, and most of his critics have agreed with his modest stimation of is capability. Even Le Diable amoureux, which is universally considered to be his masterpiece, is something of a curate’s egg, brilliant in some respects but distinctly ham-fisted in others. Appropriate assessment of the work is not helped by the fact that the extant text appears to be only half the work which Cazotte originally planned. Whether he actually wrote any more is unclear, but the story’s ending was certainly rewritten because the first version was deemed unsatisfactory by readers of the first edition.

  In spite of these reservations it must be asserted that Cazotte is a key figure in the development of modern fantastic fiction and one of the most important of its founding fathers. He was active in an age when the fantastic materials of oral tradition were first being exploited by littérateurs, not in a purely imitative fashion but in an exploratory spirit. He was one of the pioneers who demonstrated that ideas of the supernatural which were incapable of sustaining real belief (his conversion to Martinism cannot be seen as a redemption of the notions deployed in his fiction) were more useful to the writer of amusing, satirical and moralistic fictions than those which can. Le Diable amoureux is by far his most important work because it proved, in a particularly audacious fashion, that literary dealings with a metaphorical devil can offer a commentary on the tribulations of temptation far more pointed than any pietistic sermon.

  * * * *

  Cazotte’s earliest stories reflect the fashionability in early eighteenth century France of the remade folktale. Although Charles Perrault initially issued his collection of Contes de ma mère Loye (1697; tr. as Tales of Mother Goose and many other titles) under his son’s name in order to protect his reputation the book took the salons of Paris by storm, and inspired dozens of further collections of contes de fées, many of them written by aristocratic ladies or clergymen.

  Perrault’s stories had all been based on traditional tales, reshaped to sustain the moral lessons which were scrupulously appended to them, but those who followed in his footsteps made little or no distinction between original and borrowed materials. Within a few years fairies were popping up in heavily ironic tales of the contemporary French court, adding an element of burlesque which excused but did not blunt the cutting edge of the satire.

  The license which the deployment of fairies gave to writers was by no means confined to satire. The presence of such elements within a story also defused charges of indecency. Galland’s translation of the classic anthology of Arabian folktales, the Mille et une Nuits (1704-17), not only introduced Oriental elements into the genre but also gave a healthy boost to its eroticism. The satirical irony of the newly-composed tales lent itself very readily to fusion with flirtatiously licentious material, and the importation of such an element did no harm at all to the popularity of such tales in Parisian salons. The French haut monde agreed—as if it were entirely obvious—that such tales were mere literary confections, and that they should in consequence allowed a latitude which was not yet to be extended to more seriously-inclined work.

  Inevitably, the Orientalized fairy tale was itself satirized, most notably by Antoine Hamilton, although Hamilton’s most famous work, and the only one to be translated into English—Les Quatre Facardins (1710-15)—remained incomplete. It is not surprising that Cazotte, writing in the early 1740s, should have moved rapidly from the light-hearted but relatively earnest La Patte du chat to the chaotic absurdity of Les Mille et une fadaises.

  La Patte du chat, openly imitative of Thomas Gueullette’s pastiches of Galland, describes the amazing adventures of the long-nosed Amadil, exiled from the country of Zimzim for treading on the paw of the queen’s favorite cat (which turns out, in the end, to be an evil magician in disguise). Les Mille et une fadaises establishes its credentials by posing as a tale concocted by an abbé as a cure for the insomnia of two bored ladies of leisure. Its opening parodies the tale of the sleeping beauty, although the multiply hunchbacked evil fairy is somewhat inconvenienced in delivering her curse by virtue of getting stuck in the chimney. Its penultimate sequence parodies the most celebrated of the licentious fairy tales, Le Sopha (1740) by Crébillon fils, in featuring a room entirely furnished by people magically transformed into appropriate pieces of furniture. The middle of the story is interrupted by an entirely irrelevant account of the adventures of a knight from the moon who has descended to earth by filling his head with ideas, thus rendering himself vulnerable to the force of gravity which is impotent to affect his light-minded fellow lunarians.

  It is interesting to contrast these early tales, which are consciencelessly slapdash, with “La Belle par accident,” a story of the same type first published nearly half a century afterwards. Here the hero Kallibad is an avatar of Don Quixote, deluded by overindulgence in the delights of fantastic fiction into an inability to separate fact from fancy, but Cazotte is far more forgiving than Cervantes had been and he is careful to excuse and endorse a moderate level of affection for fantasy.

  Ollivier attempts to do for the chivalric romance what La Patte du chat had done for the fairy tale, but in order to do so it extends to a much greater length. Cazotte seems not to have been entirely comfortable with a project of this magnitude, probably because he was used to making up his plots as he went along, and the confused nature of the story owes more to lack of organization than calculated satire. The four subplots are untidily entwined, and the eventual dénouement is both anti-climatic and incomplete. If, as is sometime alleged, the model of the story was Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the imitation is very pale indeed.

  Just as he returned to the conte de fées in the latter part of his career, so Cazotte returned to the chivalric romance, with the much shorter “L’Honneur perdu et recouvré” (published 1788). The irony in this later tale is so muted as to be almost imperceptible, and it passed for a genuine example of the species—with the ironic result that it became popular with a wider readership than most of the author’s other works.

  Le Lord impromptu is a more interesting experiment than Ollivier, although it stands almost alone in Cazotte’s oeuvre in having no supernatural elements. It masquerades as a translation from the English and its models are to be found among the less earnest of early English novels—it is closest in spirit to Fielding’s parodies of Richardson, especially Joseph Andrews (1742). The story’s hero, Richard O’Berthon, is raised as a gentleman and a scholar, but loses his income and is forced to seek employment as a servant. Thus misplaced within the class structure (a fate which he shares, of course, with the her
oes and heroines of countless English domestic melodramas) he is inevitably drawn to commit the cardinal sin of falling in love with the daughter of the house in which he is employed. In the wake of a tragic misunderstanding he is forced to flee the vengeance of his employer, and spends the greater part of the plot disguised as a girl, under the protection of the enigmatic and resourceful Captain Sentry (who ultimately turns out to be his mother in male disguise).

  The outsider’s view of English manners and the clichés of English popular fiction which Cazotte lays out in Le Lord impromptu is understandably jaundiced, and it is not entirely surprising that in spite of its setting and subject-matter the novel was not translated into English until 1927. Few English commentators have had a kind word to say about the work, but it certainly demonstrates that Cazotte was not a one-book writer, and although the story is utterly incredible it is the most coherently-plotted of all his works.

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  Le Diable amoureux is by far the most original of Cazotte’s works, taking fantastic fiction into fields which were then entirely fresh. The idea of erotic temptation was by no means new, the danger posed by demonic succubi having been included in the preaching of churchmen for several centuries, but that myth arose from and remained connected with erotic dreams. Although there is a point in Le Diable amoureux when Alvare wonders whether his entire adventure has been delusory there cannot possibly be any suggestion that it could all have been the dream of a single night. Although some of Alvare’s adventures are written off as purely subjective experiences there is no doubt that Biondetta is real and that her attendance upon the hero extends over a long period.

  Cazotte was later to say that the work as originally envisaged had two parts, the first describing Alvare’s seduction and the second following his subsequent career as the devil’s minion. He explained the non-publication of the second part (which, if it ever existed, has been lost) by saying that it was too dark to be welcomed by an audience in search of amusement and distraction. The removal of the second part was initially compounded by a softening of the ending of the first part; in the version presented in the first edition Biondetta does not complete her seduction but gives away her true nature by her calmness in the face of the storm, and is commanded to vanish—which she does, after briefly showing her true form for a second time. This abrupt conclusion proved unsatisfactory, however, and so Cazotte added (or perhaps restored) the episode of the farmhouse, in which Alvare finally yields to temptation.