Madame de Lafayette
When, in 2007, the French President scorned the idea that budding public servants should be required to read La Princesse de Cleves, the ensuing protests, whatever their purely political dimension, were a reminder of this work's iconic status. Naturally enough, perhaps, this spotlight left in the shade the other works attributed to Mme de Lafayette. There was also scant reference to the messy question of attribution. With no manuscript in existence the present attribution of La Princesse de Cleves was made ‘definitively’ only a century after its publication in 1678: for example, the 1764 reprint of the 1704 Paris edition cites La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Lafayette, and Segrais as co-authors. Does this matter? True, we would still watch Hamlet if it were performed by the Royal Bacon Company. However, in the case of Mme de Lafayette, biographical details are still often used to shore up critical hypotheses. At the outset, therefore, one issue deserves attention: what does ‘Mme de Lafayette’ now imply?
Lafayette's Confidence Game: Plausibility and Private Confession in La Princesse de Cleves and Zaide
In April 1678, soon after the publication of the comtesse de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, the Mercure Galant proposed the following question, now legendary in the annals of literary history, to its readers: Je demande si une Femme de vertu, qui a toute l'estime possible pour un Mary parfaitement honneste Homme, et qui ne laisse pas d'estre combatue pour un Amant d'une tres-forte passion qu'elle tache d'etouffer par toute sorte de moyens; je demande, disje, si cette Femme voulant se retirer dans un lieu ou elle ne soit point exposee la veue de cet Amant qu'elle scait qu'il l'aime sans qu'il scache qu'il soit aime d'elle, et ne pouvant obliger son Mary de consentir a cette retraite sans luy decouvrir ce qu'elle sent pour l'amant qu'elle cherche a fuir, fait mieux de faire confidence de sa passion ce Mary, que de la taire au peril des combats qu'elle sera continuellement obligee de rendre par les indispensables occasions de voir cet Amant, dont elle n'a aucun autre moyen de s'eloigner que celuy de la confidence dont il s'agit. (1) In subsequent issues, correspondents throughout the provinces responded to the call, offering their own interpretations and judgments of Mine de Cleves's dramatic confession (aveu) to her husband that she was in love with another man, the Duc de Nemours. (2) This outpouring of interest can undoubtedly be attributed to a certain voyeuristic fascination: seldom had a novel gone so far in revealing the inner emotional life of a marriage. Beyond this sensationalistic appeal, however, the scene raised troubling questions about the interplay between marital intimacy and desire. Was it plausible that a woman might take her husband as a confidant so as to regain control over her most forbidden and uncontrollable desires? And what kind of man, conversely, would be willing to be his wife's confessor? Although both the novel and many of its subsequent critics would have us believe (with some justification, as we shall see) that Mine de Cleves's confession is unique and unprecedented, (3) the aveu only becomes fully comprehensible when it is inscribed within the broader problematics of confidentiality within the text. A comparison of La Princesse de Cleves with Lafayette's other major work, Zaide, reveals that confidential ties are central to the narrative and ideological fabric of both novels: confidants are plot devices; they are a basic component of the social universe through which the novel's characters must navigate; and, perhaps most important, they are conduits of information to the reader. Lafayette, of course, is hardly the only (or the first) novelist of her period to exploit confidants in such ways; it will be argued, instead, that her originality lies in the ironic manner in which she plays these various functions off against each other. Jean-Baptiste Henri du Trousset de Valincour, author of the Lettres a la Marquise [...] sur le sujet de la Princesse de Cleves, was perhaps the novel's most sophisticated seventeenth-century critic. One of his central preoccupations was the question of what (and how) readers know about the fictional universe of a novel: D'ailleurs, pour revenir a la Princesse de Cleves, il serait difficile a ceux qui voudraient la prendre comme une histoire, de deviner sur quels Memories l'historien a travaille. En effet, les principaux faits n'ont ete sus que de ceux qui y ant eu part' et il ne parait point qu'ils les aient jamais recontes a personne, ni qu'ils aient pu jamais parvenir a la connaissance de l'auteur, que par le moyen d'une revelation particuliere. (4) Valincour begins with the premise that the La Princesse de Cleves might be read not a self-consciously fictional "roman" in the tradition of d'Urfe's Astree (what we might call a "romance"), but rather as an "histoire." Although it is difficult to find an adequate translation for "histoire," the term clearly suggests a genre that is closer in some respects to historical discourse than to the stereotypical seventeenth-century romance (something akin to an historical novel, perhaps). …
Political Developments: Some Conclusions and an Interpretation
When the political decisions and achievements of the post-Khrushchev Soviet leadership are considered as a whole, it is not immediately obvious that there is any pattern to them. It may, nevertheless, be useful to begin by devoting attention to some of the major policy tendencies and outcomes of the past decade, most of which have already been considered in greater detail by other contributors, before going on to enquire if any broad strategy underlying them may be discerned and to attempt to place the various changes in a broader political context.