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Chapter 1

The Impossible Princess (Lafayette)

La Princesse de Clèves’ claims to the title “the first modern novel” are many. The historical romances that had been the glory of the previous French prose tradition were labyrinthine and interminable; Lafayette’s work is compact and linear. It replaces heroic actions and hyperbolic passions with stifled feelings, confused thoughts, wavering intentions; it is thus psychological. Its heroine’s inimitability, famously lauded in the text’s closing sentence, signals the triumph of originality and individuality over conformity and the authority of the past; it is therefore an allegory of modernity itself. We can add to these arguments a trait that has been more or less taken for granted: Lafayette invents her heroine. The novel’s congruence in this regard with what we expect of fiction is remarkable. If we are looking for formal ancestors of the typical nineteenth-century novel—that is, third-person narratives focalized through nonexistent characters placed in a firmly drawn and recognizable milieu—then La Princesse de Clèves is really a much better choice than, say, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), with its mock-epic themes and a garrulous narrator who repeatedly if facetiously affirms his story as true. One can sympathize with Ian Watt’s need to dismiss this and other French novels, in an infamous phrase, as “too stylish to be authentic”: how can the rise of the novel be British, Lockean, and bourgeois, if that sun had already broken through the Parisian clouds in the early spring of 1678?¹

But British chauvinism isn’t the only thing challenged by Lafayette’s novel. Brief reflection is enough to bring into focus the oddity of an ancestor who is separated from her descendants by so many generations. After all, it is not as if the French novel in the century between Lafayette and Balzac looked anything like La Princesse de Clèves, either. On the contrary, with a few exceptions it looked very much like its counterpart across the Channel: it was dominated by the pseudofactual forms of the memoir novel and the letter novel. For its brevity, its psychology, its modern values, La Princesse de Clèves no doubt makes a convincing “first novel.” But is it really, in spite of appearances, fiction? A positive answer entails explaining why so much time would go by before novelists imitated Lafayette’s example by inventing protagonists without asserting their existence. A negative answer frees us from that tricky task, but imposes another, that of facing up to the possibility that at least some great books are not harbingers but hapaxes. This is, I will argue, the case with La Princesse de Clèves. It is an occupational hazard of literary historians to regard the history they study as an evolution driven by innovative masterworks or, at the very least, exemplified by those masterworks. Lafayette’s novel was a lasting success at home and abroad; its patently invented heroine spurred readers to envision their relations with characters in a totally new light—to identify with her, as we will see. And yet this novel did not change the shape of the novel: third-person narrations of the doings of openly fictional protagonists set within a firmly drawn historical and geographical frame were not a thing of the immediate future. Lafayette invented her princess, but she did not invent modern fiction, because La Princesse de Clèves becomes “fiction” only in the rearview mirror of literary history. Instead, the novel was an isolated manipulation of longstanding conventions and local practices that changed precisely nothing.

Those conventions and practices belonged to the Aristotelian tradition, and they were adhered to by writers of both long historical romances and the short historical novellas proliferating before and after the appearance of La Princesse de Clèves.² Had Lafayette pushed a plausible figure into the foreground of her tale—a woman who might have existed—she would have certainly been stretching the bounds of normal practice, centered, as we will see, on real heroes of the past. Probably such a stretch would have gone unnoticed as just another example of Classical vraisemblance, of invention that is grafted so seamlessly onto history that we cannot tell where one leaves off and the other begins. But Lafayette was doing something much more radical still, and someone did take note—the otherwise unknown critic Jean-Baptiste de Valincour, who vigorously objected to the fact that Lafayette had created a protagonist who was impossible. This chapter begins, then, with Valincour’s indictment of Lafayette’s princess for being in direct contradiction with the historical record. I go on to point out how startlingly different this practice is with respect to an earlier historical novella of Lafayette’s, La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), whose heroine was, to the contrary, real to the point of indiscretion; La Princesse de Clèves’ impossible protagonist, I argue, allows Lafayette to break from a traffic in “true stories” and critique a court culture of gossip. And the invention of the Princess has another effect as well, as an appreciative Valincour points out. Far from being merely a retrograde churl, the critic readily admits the peculiar emotional bond he feels with Lafayette’s characters, a bond he goes on to praise and describe at length, and that is only possible, I suggest, because the character of the Princess disables normal reading protocol. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the implications of the type of poetic contextualization I offer. For if viewing La Princesse de Clèves through the lens of the Aristotelian tradition robs Lafayette of her stature as the inventor of modern fiction, it has the compensating effect of making the subsequent history of the novel much more comprehensible even as it overturns many common assumptions about the evolution of literary forms. (An appendix to the chapter, intended for specialist readers, describes the types of invention practiced by Lafayette’s competitors in the genre of the historical novella.)

Inventing a Princess

Immediately following the anonymous publication of La Princesse de Clèves in 1678 appeared two book-length appraisals of the novel, also anonymous: first, the fairly critical Lettres à Madame la Marquise *** sur le sujet de la Princesse de Clèves, attributed to Jean-Baptiste de Valincour, and then, in the novel’s defense, Jean-Antoine de Charnes’s Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de Clèves. Valincour is far from uniformly hostile, as we will see, yet a number of things about Lafayette’s heroine bother him—her behavior, as many literary critics have underlined; but also her existence itself, or rather the fact that she never existed. This aspect of Valincour’s criticism has received little attention, and no wonder: as readers whose codes have been formed by, say, Fabrice del Dongo’s experience at Waterloo, we are apt to take the mixture of historical precision and fabricated characters as intuitively novelistic. Indeed, on this point it is difficult not to side with Charnes, who mocks his adversary for staging confrontations between novels and history books. Such has been the position of Charnes’s modern commentators, who credit him with recognizing “the autonomy of novelistic fiction with respect to history”³; the implication, of course, is that Lafayette’s Princess is an ancestor of Stendhal’s Fabrice, and that Valincour may be right to say that Lafayette is breaking with tradition, but, turned to the past, he is blind to the novel’s future. In fact, Charnes is not clairvoyant; he mounts a serviceable defense of Lafayette’s practice, but ultimately Valincour’s incomprehension is a better guide to Lafayette’s idiosyncratic use of history and the challenge it posed to longstanding Aristotelian accounts of poetic invention.

Steeped in Renaissance interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics, Valincour cannot abide what he sees as Lafayette’s violation of a rule of literary composition: poets and novelists (faiseurs de romans; V 63), he writes in his Lettres, choose historical episodes of sufficient notoriety to pique the reader’s curiosity but not so familiar in the details as to limit the writer’s room for maneuver.⁴ The alloy of historical fact (the basic episodes and personages) and poetic invention (the maneuvering) was not of Valincour’s manufacture: it was the one found commonly in Racine and Corneille’s discussions of tragedy; Gomberville and the Scudérys say much the same thing about romance, a genre whose increasing recourse to history helped cement its prestige.⁵ And such seventeenth-century French use had deeper sanction, as makes clear Valincour’s recourse to the authoritative Aristotelian commentary of Renaissance scholar Castelvetro. For according to the latter’s Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (1570), cited toward the close of Valincour’s first letter, inventing new characters was an impermissible infraction of Aristotelian laws. That Aristotle himself had said no such thing is of little concern; Castelvetro’s position, doubtless a bit strict, followed from an interpretive tradition that consistently relegated invented characters to the comic. Serious writers, by contrast, take famous people and events from history—fame being the very basis of readerly interest—and then invent the meetings, dialogues, motivations, and very frequently love stories that had been left unrecorded. The goal, Valincour notes, is to give readers the impression of discovering “what historians forgot to write” (V 70). Authorial latitude is huge, “as long as [invention] [is] not directly opposed to historical truth” (V 71).⁶ By contrast, Lafayette does not respect this accepted practice. Setting her novel in the well-documented court of Henri II, she makes the false step of contradicting the documentation, marrying a woman who never existed to a man who did, and a man who, moreover, was never married in the first place. Lafayette’s heroine is—Valincour repeats the expression twice—“visibly false” (V 69).

Modern critical attention to the subject of verisimilitude in and around Lafayette’s novel has focused almost exclusively on what has been called cultural plausibility: what were the ideological presuppositions that made readers at the time discount episodes or actions as implausible?⁷ This interest is far from anachronistic, since cultural plausibility is thematized in the novel itself, and present both in Valincour’s comments and in the testimony of individuals such as Bussy-Rabutin and Fontenelle.⁸ Valincour, however, objects to the “visibly false” heroine because the princesse de Clèves, whatever her behavior, is factually impossible. This is not merely a variation on the age-old condemnation of poets as liars, since Valincour does not indict novels in general. Nor does he bemoan some sort of slip in standards among authors of his day. If Lafayette’s book is the only one he incriminates, it is also the only one he can incriminate: Lafayette’s contemporaries all adhere at least in spirit to the Aristotelian rigor set forth by Castelvetro one hundred years earlier, as a quick look at the three works commonly seen as predecessors of La Princesse de Clèves confirms: Lafayette’s very own La Princesse de Montpensier, routinely credited with hastening the demise of the voluminous French heroic romances; Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672), which coined the term nouvelle historique in its subtitle; and Villedieu’s triptych Les Désordres de l’amour (1675). All these books moved carefully within the blanks of a historical record that was easily available through works of vulgarized history—Davila’s Histoire des guerres civiles (translated from the Italian in 1657), the 1668 abridgement of Mézeray’s massive Histoire de France (orig. 1643–51), the publication of the memoirs of Castelnau (1659) and Brantôme (1665–66), and even something like Le Grand Alcandre (1651), a transparently keyed and much-reprinted account of Henri IV’s dalliances with his mistresses.⁹ The blanks involved love, whose entanglements—completely invented or merely amplified with respect to what was known—served to explain or motivate noteworthy past events, thus producing the sensation of reading what Valincour called “secret history” (V 70).¹⁰ It is true that Lafayette and Villedieu, against the stipulations of Castelvetro, permit themselves an invented character, but two factors absolve them of poetic wrongdoing. First, both characters, the comte de Chabannes of Montpensier and Madame de Maugiron of Les Désordres’ third novella, are spurned lovers whose presence adds tension and pathos to the main love plots, which take place between bona-fide historic personages. In this respect, they are close to Sabine or Dircis, otherwise unknown figures who appear for dramatic reasons in, respectively, Corneille’s 1640 retelling of the Horatii legend and his 1659 version of Oedipus Rex. Second, nothing in the historical record permits one to conclude that the characters could not have existed: their family names were real enough; it was just that available sources could neither affirm nor deny the existence of the individuals themselves. In a famous remark in his 1614 History of the World, Raleigh had asserted that “filling up the blanks of old histories” in this manner need not be cause for concern: “For it is not to be feared that time should run backward, and by restoring the things themselves to knowledge, make our conjectures appear ridiculous.”¹¹

Even if we can no longer quite feel the discomfort Valincour felt on seeing an invented woman pushed to the forefront of La Princesse de Clèves, we understand the reasons for his objection. Certainly, invented characters were not unheard-of in novels, but, as in the above examples, the invention almost always remained historically plausible and was typically confined to secondary characters.¹² Moreover, how would readers know that the future princesse de Clèves, Mademoiselle de Chartres, and her mother to boot, never existed? What made them “visibly false,” in contrast to characters like Chabannes and Maugiron? We need not suppose perfect mastery of Renaissance genealogy by Lafayette’s contemporaries: all they had to do was to reach for the volumes of the historian Mézeray and the memorialist Brantôme, which were not the dusty tomes they are now but best-sellers devoured by an aristocratic public fascinated by their glorious ancestors. If Valincour’s confrontation of the novel with the historical record strikes us as odd—who could imagine indicting Balzac for having invented Goriot?—in these years such a confrontation made much more sense: in a literary culture in which literary heroes were real almost by definition, the first thing readers of La Princesse de Clèves would do would be to ask for more information on the heroine.¹³

And it must be said that Lafayette fairly solicits the reader’s curiosity: Valincour’s recourse to histories of the French Renaissance is incited by the book itself. By its detail, of course, familiar to any reader of the novel’s dense opening pages. But also by what, in the midst of such exacting descriptions of the court, of the legendary affairs, of the tournaments, was so suspiciously out of focus—the origins of Mademoiselle de Chartres. Her dead father is evoked but not named; her family name would have been odd, since the house of Chartres did not exist; and, a final goad, this fatherless young woman of whom no one had heard was supposed to be “one of the greatest heiresses of France.”¹⁴ Mézeray and Brantôme were silent on the subject, but since silence was the accomplice of possibility, what permitted Valincour to declare with such certainty that the novel featured “a Mademoiselle de Chartres who never was” (qui n’a jamais existé au monde; V 62)? The best proof that Chartres did not exist was her marriage to someone who did figure in the histories—to one of the three sons of Jacques de Clèves, duc de Nevers, none of whom ever married anyone of that (odd) name. What should we possibly think, Valincour says triumphantly, of “a duc de Clèves, who marries [Mademoiselle de Chartres] even though he was never married” (V 62–63)? It turns out that Valincour is wrong in the details (he confuses the de Clèves brothers), but the contradiction is indeed there, and it gives the critic all he needs to declare the Princess factually implausible, false.¹⁵

Smelling blood, perhaps, Valincour manages to locate one more contradiction. Reading in Lafayette of the tournament in which Nemours competes under the colors yellow and black in homage to the Princess, he turns to the pages where Brantôme describes the same event. The detail, astonishingly, was true: Brantôme notes that the real Nemours, Jacques de Savoie, wore the colors in homage to an unnamed woman. This would seem be the perfect example of a historical blank, since the Princess could plausibly be just that woman about whom the historian is silent. Unfortunately, history isn’t silent enough, for Brantôme adds that Nemours chose the colors of a woman whose sexual favors he was then enjoying.¹⁶ Lafayette’s maintaining of the reference to yellow and black, Valincour reasons, is tantamount to identifying her virtuous heroine with a courtesan. The author would have done better to give alternative colors so as not to raise such a specter in the minds of readers—some contradictions, we can assume, are better than others.¹⁷

Charnes’s response to this detective work, and to the entire Aristotelian thrust of Valincour’s argument, is that contradictions mean nothing: since the Princess is “an invented person,” Charnes remarks with respect to the colors of Brantôme’s courtesan, “I cannot fathom how one can apply what was said about the historical lady to what the novel’s author tells us about the imaginary lady” (C 84). It is on account of this that François Weil, Charnes’s modern editor, detects in the Conversations the seed of a post-Aristotelian line of thought that will eventually lead to modern fictionality and the novel as we know it. While it is indeed tempting to construe Charnes’s remark in this way, his thought on the issue is a good deal less “coherent” (C xxiii) than Weil alleges, and deserves some pressure. Weil’s main proof rests on a passage in which Charnes says that novels of his day, which he calls “gallant histories,” represent a “third species” of “fiction,” a word he uses in the general sense of poetry. Neither “those pure fictions in which the imagination allows itself complete freedom, without regard for truth,” nor “those in which the author takes a historical subject in order to embellish and improve it with his inventions,” La Princesse de Clèves belongs to a different category entirely: here, “one invents a subject, or takes a subject that is not universally known, and one decorates it [l’orne] with historical details that increase its plausibility [vraisemblance] and heighten the reader’s curiosity and attention” (C 129–30).

Charnes’s argument, however, is problematic on at least three counts. First, the difference between his third species—the one that holds a tantalizing resemblance to modern fictionality—and fiction’s second species seems close to a quantitative argument: the novel, Charnes suggests, is simply less historical than history.¹⁸ Second, and more serious, both species resemble the poetic composition Valincour himself prescribes: contemporary authors, Charnes writes, try to produce such “faithful copies of true history” that readers take them “for history itself”; they concentrate on the actions of “private persons” recounted in a way in which the reader often understands those actions “as the secret motivation [ressorts] behind the memorable events History has taught us” (C 135–36). The difference between species two and three is that the former treats the great actors of history, whereas the latter treats unknown people whose lives may nonetheless have put into motion public events. It is a perfectly good distinction, but one that in no way parts company with traditional plausibility, as is suggested by Charnes’s assimilation of “invented subjects” and subjects that are “not universally known.” The invented subject here remains plausible through and through: readers cannot distinguish it from a subject that is true but unknown. The final and greatest obstacle to viewing Charnes as the first theorist of a modern articulation of invention and history is simply that his assumption that Lafayette is merely doing what the authors of other “gallant histories” of the 1670s did is dead wrong. As I’ve mentioned, Saint-Réal and Villedieu do not create characters and plots to which they add a little decorative “history,” nor do any other authors of the fifty-odd examples of the genre.¹⁹ Charnes may seem open-minded and forward-looking, but his permissiveness results only from his inability to see what is so particular about Lafayette’s practice.

Instead of being someone from whom La Princesse de Clèves needed to be saved, Valincour may have been just the kind of reader Lafayette wanted—someone who would tug the obvious historical threads until they pulled out in his hand. If you follow the yellow and black, you will find a courtesan in place of the virtuous Princess; look up the junior de Clèves brother: he is married to someone else. Accidental or inconsequential contradictions these are not: each time we look for the precise point of suture between history and invention, we find that the place the Princess occupies in the novel is already occupied in history by someone else. Which is also to say that Lafayette makes that suture point problematic and brings the contradiction into being by inventing a heroine who cannot exist. Invention alone, I’ve said, can be accommodated to Aristotelian poetics; characters who might have existed may be less interesting than real ones, but they still bathe in the soft glow of reality. The Princess is invented in a different manner. She alone can be proved not to exist, since her space, as Valincour helps us see, is already occupied. This is not a mistake, as Valincour seems to think it is; nor is it of no concern, as Charnes suggests with a shrug. Rather, Lafayette has constructed what may be literature’s first deliberately counterfactual heroine. And if the Princess’s counterfactuality is no accident, it is also not a meaningless detail: Lafayette’s twisting of the Aristotelian party line is registered in the innovative strategies contemporaries developed to deal with her most unusual protagonist.²⁰

True Stories

We might start to look for the reasons behind Lafayette’s play with the historical record by returning briefly to the work of hers usually regarded as the first historical novella. Despite its cast of largely real characters, including the heroine of the title, La Princesse de Montpensier was advertised as a work of pure imagination: its short “note from the bookseller” prominently proclaims the adventures therein to be “imaginary” and “invented at whim” (L 4). The tone of the note is deferential, as it should be: the novella does, after all, attribute an adulterous if unconsummated affair to Renée d’Anjou, the great-grandmother of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, Louis XIV’s cousin and the richest woman in Europe. No insult intended to persons living or dead, the “bookseller” gingerly states. The modern reader of course barely registers the note, so much does it state the obvious, rehearsing the legal disclaimers of our time.²¹ Since only a pedant would read with the goal of baring the truth underneath the fiction, why would we expect that this be a story that really happened? But for the public of 1662, adept at using keys to decipher oblique references to real people, these lines would surely have raised suspicions and implied the direct opposite of what they said.²² And anyone who consults the relevant genealogies is rewarded with a delicious “coincidence”: the duchesse de Montpensier’s grandfather, Henri de Bourbon, was born to Renée d’Anjou on May 12, 1573, nine months after an “imaginary” nocturnal episode described in the book in which the princesse de Montpensier lowers the drawbridge of her castle and admits her lover, the duc de Guise, into her chambers. (The adulterous meeting is easily datable since it takes place in the run-up to the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre, August 24 of the previous year.)

It is impossible to know why Lafayette might have wanted to hint at the bastard birth of the Grande Mademoiselle’s not-so-remote ancestor; the available record permits only speculation.²³ Not speculative, however—unless one chooses to accept the bookseller’s note at face value and dismiss the suspicious nine-month interval as true coincidence—is the light this scandalous allusion sheds on the flagrantly unreal princess of Lafayette’s last novel. For the princesse de Clèves emerges as the diametric opposite of the earlier heroine, who was real to the point of indiscretion. In itself, their antithetical relationship might mean only that Lafayette has dropped one mode of writing and adopted another mode, no doubt more cautious or prudent. Yet the entire plot of La Princesse de Clèves seems to revolve around the circulation of true stories—the instructive lessons told to the young heroine, for example, but also a misplaced love letter and, most important of all, the story of the Princess’s own adulterous desire, which in one gripping scene is told back to her, minus the name that would identify her as its protagonist. So it is not only that the two heroines are antithetical in the type of extratextual referentiality they presuppose, but also that the novels that bear their names are antithetical, or more precisely that the later book is somehow about the earlier one, an implicit critique of its mode of being.²⁴ La Princesse de Montpensier was a work of gossip—this is a statement not about its literary quality but about its referential status—while La Princesse de Clèves is a novel about gossip. A novel about gossip, moreover, that has been proofed against turning into gossip itself by dint of Lafayette’s careful husbanding of its heroine’s counterfactuality.

Although the prevalence of loose tongues and wayward speech in La Princesse de Clèves has long been recognized by Lafayette scholars, the compulsion to repeat true stories merits revisiting in the context of the “visible falsity” that Lafayette has installed at the heart of her novel.²⁵ The crucial scenes are familiar to students of the book, and they invariably delineate a two-stage process: faced with what are billed as true stories, listeners—figurative readers, I propose—strive to complete the referential circle by supplying the real names of the provisionally anonymous protagonists. Such is the case with the unsigned love letter misplaced by the Vidame de Chartres, which may thereby “apply”—the word was in routine use in both England and France—to multiple parties, including the Princess’s lover Nemours. More relevant still is the complicated trajectory of the Princess’s avowal, made in private but quickly transformed into narrative and put in promiscuous circulation. Here, the problem of names is present on several levels: on the one hand, the Princess decides to admit to her husband her love for a man she refuses to name, leaving therefore a blank that ends up exciting the listener’s thirst for more information; on the other, the story of this story is then circulated in such a way that the wife becomes herself a blank that listeners must strive to fill in. The Princess’s extraordinary avowal fails not only because of male indiscretion (that of Nemours and Clèves), but also because she had the mistaken hope that a narrative might be made some sort of sign of good faith—an avowal in the feudal sense of pledge of fidelity—whereas narratives in this world are oppressively and relentlessly tied to real people.²⁶

Indeed, from the outset the novel’s protagonists appear under the sign of the compulsion to name. Madame de Clèves’s first acquaintance with the duc de Nemours illustrates the process by which a known name is hesitantly fitted to a face:

the ball commenced, and as she was dancing with Monsieur de Guise, a rather loud noise was heard coming from around the door to the room, the sound of space being made for someone entering. Madame de Clèves finished her dance, and while she was looking around for a new partner, the King cried out for her to take the one who was arriving. She turned and saw a man she at first felt could be no one but Monsieur de Nemours. (L 274)

The passage marvelously sets up Nemours first as a blank, an unidentified “someone” emerging from the inchoate background noise or bruit, which in Lafayette’s day possessed the added and perhaps significant meaning of “gossip”; this person, again designated periphrastically as “the one who was arriving,” is then assigned to the Princess, who finally names him for us. The scene culminates with the Princess denying, as the official introductions are made, her prior knowledge of the identity of the “someone” with whom she has just danced. With disturbing symmetry, she now occupies the place that was that of her new husband upon the couple’s first brief meeting: glimpsing Mademoiselle de Chartres at a jeweler’s shop, the prince de Clèves is instantaneously possessed by the urge to learn “who this beautiful woman was of whom he knew nothing” (L 261). While he puzzles over the strange circumstances—why is she so young, and yet unaccompanied by her mother?—the mysterious young woman leaves the shop, and the jeweler is of no help. Then, for the first but not the last time, it becomes apparent that the closed culture of gossip can always be counted on to fill in such blanks: that evening, at the King’s sister’s, Clèves tells the story of the unidentified beauty, and a listener is quick to supply a name for the face. Thus later, at the ball, the Princess experiences for herself the involuntary impulse to put names to faces and seems to sense obscurely—she “appear[s] a little embarrassed”—that being able to identify this incomparably handsome stranger is already a kind of guilt, an act of infidelity. For Lafayette, the desire to name names is a step on the road to sexual congress. It is not just that the court loves gossip, it is that, in its way, gossip is a form of love, possesses the structure of desire itself: your own imperious drive to identify is a sure sign you yourself are caught up in the court’s concupiscence.

Lafayette’s play with the historical record now starts to assume its full significance: the counterfactuality of her heroine has made it impossible to read her novel as the characters in that novel “read” each other. While those characters give themselves over to gossipy reading that always refers narrative to the real world, Lafayette’s real readers are discouraged from such a mode of consumption. They are not warned off by a disclaimer, since in Lafayette’s day saying that there are no keys is the best way to ensure that readers will look for them. They are discouraged, rather, by the author’s bypassing the normal rules of poetic invention. Had Lafayette supplied a historical cast of characters with plausible or attested adventures, as she did in La Princesse de Montpensier and as the historical novella generally did, she would have been guilty of involvement in the very trafficking her tale denounced.²⁷ Her guilt would clearly be no less great had she set the narrative in the present and hinted at keys, as many other stories of the day did. But La Princesse de Clèves is not a true story, and there is no key. Only an impossible heroine, set safely in the past, could keep Lafayette’s readers from being implicated in the culture of gossip that brings misfortune and death down on her characters.²⁸ Quite simply, the Princess permitted Lafayette to write about intrigue without participating in intrigue.²⁹

Implausible Identifications

Such obliquity represented, then, a gain for Lafayette: it enabled a noncomplicit critique of a culture’s narrative promiscuity, that is to say, its unceasing circulation of sexual secrets. Yet an impossible heroine implied disadvantages as well. After all, historical truth underwrote not only Aristotelian poetic production but also theories of consumption; without it, what were readers supposed to do with this novel? Placing a nonexistent heroine at the center of the novel’s web disables the pretense of teaching about the illustrious events and figures of the past; and being impossible, the Princess cannot help us entertain hypothetical “secret” causes of those events. Nor can one read for edifying examples of good and bad behavior, since the ethics of exemplarity likewise presupposed the assertion of historical truth.³⁰ And veracity enabled even the dominant explanations of emotional response to the artwork. For theorists of the Italian Renaissance as well as of Classical France, the emotions audiences took away from books and plays were predicated on the historical reality of heroes, whose emotion was in a sense channeled by the poet before flowing outward to the actor or character and finally to the spectators or readers.³¹ So what was a nonentity good for?

Of course, even leaving aside comedy, readers of the period did have experience with characters lacking in real-world attestation. And the most obvious thing to do with them at the time was to look for the hidden historical referents—to look for keys. The success of Le Grand Alcandre, the disguised account of Henri IV’s love life to which I have already alluded, clearly indicated such interest in veiled accounts of scandal; originally destined for private circulation, Bussy-Rabutin’s Histoire amoureuse des Gaules on publication in 1665 cloaked its referents in disguised names (and earned its author a stint in the Bastille); Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie (1670), the subject of the following chapter, was meant to be interpreted as an account of current events. Keys were used moreover in works, like Scudéry’s Clélie, whose characters maintained a nominal historicity. Curiously, however, no one appears to have taken a key to La Princesse de Clèves.³² The fact that keyed readings are not attested in contemporary documents is admittedly surprising, given that part of the novel’s publicity campaign would seem to incite them: in the January 1678 issue of Le Mercure galant, Donneau de Visé published a story, La Vertu malheureuse, having the same basic plot outline as La Princesse de Clèves but recast as the purportedly genuine story of a woman who has just retired from court life. The lack of historical antecedent for the Princess, coupled with the framing of La Vertu malheureuse—the real Princess is out there right now, in a convent somewhere in France—could have made people read Lafayette’s work as a “fake” historical novella that was in fact about a present-day adulterous love. Yet it didn’t. Putting a nonhistorical character into an otherwise historical setting was evidently not interpreted as an invitation to look for a real person.³³

There was, however, a second mode of reading that could accommodate Lafayette’s invented princess. This reading was ethical: the Princess, and specifically her avowal, was taken as posing a general problem of conduct to be parsed and debated. Antecedents for this are manifold. In Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, the commentary of the tale-tellers on their true stories can be viewed as a colloquial version of humanist exegesis.³⁴ The shepherds of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, meanwhile, embody certain transparent bents, passions, or ways of loving. Hence, to L’Astrée’s Celadon, a virtual allegory of steadfast faithfulness, was opposed his mirror image Hylas, eloquent spokesman for the virtues of change; numerous other characters illustrated additional approaches to amorous service. Such an ethical concept of character manifestly has nothing in common with the creation of a “deep” individual; but nor do these characters function as types in the comic sense. Rather, they are more like hypothetical instances through which readers can work through problems of conduct. By the time of Scudéry’s great romances of the 1640s and 1650s, the use of characters to illustrate amorous conundrums—what were known as “questions of gallantry” (questions galantes)—was typical. And Lafayette knew the practice well: her own Zayde is effectively built around one such conundrum, borrowed in fact from Scudéry: is knowledge of a possible partner an impediment or a stimulus to love? The cast of Zayde (1670–71) illustrates the possible permutations of the question. Hence, one man will insist on knowing everything about his love object, another will demand that his lover not know anything about him, while the hero, Consalve, who knows absolutely nothing about the eponymous heroine, will alone find his love rewarded.

Such a mode of reading was immediately pressed into service by Donneau de Visé, who in a successful bid to solicit the involvement of readers of Le Mercure galant used the Princess’s dilemma to pose a general problem, nowhere articulated in Lafayette’s novel itself: should a virtuous woman who respects her husband tell him of her love for another man so that her husband will allow her to leave court, and thereby to distance herself from the source of her temptation? Or does the calculus of happiness and pain dictate that she suffer in silence? Donneau de Visé was able to construct an elaborate chart in which possible opinions about the Princess’s avowal—its positives and negatives—are organized. And readers wrote to him, explaining why this or that reasoning seemed to them the strongest. Even lacking in historical credentials, the Princess could, then, be treated like any other romance character, that is, as an occasion for posing a general problem.

At least one reader, however, found this ethical mode of reading inadequate to a novel in which for the most part characters do not act in accordance with some governing temperament or philosophy. This was Valincour, and once again he is critical of the novel: La Princesse de Clèves has no proper heroes, with the Princess herself being, unsurprisingly, the worst offender. In situation after situation, she cannot respond to challenges in a manner the reader expects of a serious protagonist, which, in the court culture of wit and repartee, largely comes down to verbal mastery. Valincour accumulates examples of the Princess’s consistent failure to come up with the right words—or any words—at the right time (V 76–79). Had the Princess replied in one way or another, readers could debate her tactics, as they can debate whether her avowal to her husband was a good idea. But outside the avowal scene, and her final withdrawal, the Princess, confused, blushing, and embarrassed, seems to employ no tactics at all. And Valincour has already noted toward the beginning of his text that the Princess is not alone in being afflicted with a type of social incompetence that normally belongs to the comic genre: the prince de Clèves, after all, is unable to speak to Mademoiselle de Chartres upon their first meeting at the jeweler’s (V 37). Even more worldly men such as Nemours and the Vidame de Chartres are censured for losing the presence of mind the reader normally associates with the “romance hero” (héros de roman; V 51); the Vidame, for instance, talks too much. Valincour is quick to say that he does not demand perfection from the protagonists, only some basic social competence. How indeed can readers sit in judgment over the ethics or decorum of the characters’ actions if those actions are so manifestly botched, if the author has peopled her novel of court intrigue with such a sorry band of intriguers?

As with his objections to Lafayette’s use of her sources, Valincour’s nitpicking here seems to me historically significant. When Donneau de Visé asks people to write in with their judgment on the Princess’s avowal, he is effectively using the Mercure galant to do something that the novel itself refuses to do. In Marguerite de Navarre, in d’Urfé, in Scudéry, and still, residually, in Lafayette’s own Zayde, the characters themselves perform acts of judgment: L’Astrée even includes mock trials where characters take turns ruling on the behavioral crimes of others. Another way of putting this would be to say that the editor of the Mercure galant is trying—to all appearances successfully—to fit reception of the novel into older patterns,³⁵ but by the same token, as Valincour observes, the novel appears to resist this ethical use of character. Yet Valincour does not only critique. If he regrets the characters’ lack of poise, he also recognizes that purging the novel of conventional heroics and the grand passions that go with them has allowed the author to instantiate a more intimate relation between reader and character.

Indeed, given his frustration with the protagonists, it is striking how much Valincour likes and feels for them, heaping praise on the novel for its expression of “what happens in the depths of our hearts” (V 91). The vocabulary he uses to describe his reaction to the book is consistently one of sympathetic identification: readers are able to recognize themselves in the characters rather than feel the more familiar Aristotelian emotions of admiration, pity, and compassion. Lafayette’s achievement is immediately described as the expression of things that everyone has already felt. Hence, accounting for the peculiar “charm” of a passage such as the one in which the princesse de Clèves finally becomes aware of her love for Nemours, Valincour writes, “One cannot imagine anything more agreeable or natural; it expresses admirably well how certain movements arise in our hearts, movements that we hide from our closest friends and that we try to hide from ourselves out of fear of having to fight them” (V 38). “Charming,” “agreeable,” “natural”: these are recurrent terms in Valincour’s text, far removed both from the language of ethical judgment and from forms of aesthetic response that stressed a kind of contagion or fury that overwhelms the reader or spectator with the heroes’ extreme feelings. Lafayette’s art gives voice to things we have already felt, or describes the way we are. So of the Princess’s dumbfounded reaction to seeing Nemours pocket her portrait, Valincour comments, “Admit that Madame de Clèves’s embarrassment is perfectly expressed. As for myself, I’m sure that of all the women who have found themselves in the situation she was in, not one could help but recognize herself here, as if she herself had been depicted” (V 42). Of her husband’s ill-fated urge to have Nemours followed: “This whole passage seemed to me subtle indeed; it expresses perfectly the fact that people given over to love or jealousy don’t see things as others do” (V 80). Of the Princess’s frequent inner monologues in which she debates her course of action: “one must concede that the author excels at showing what happens in our heart. Its many movements have never been perceived so well, nor expressed with such force and subtlety. Madame de Clèves’s reflections on her own situation, her agitations, these different thoughts that destroy one another as they arise are all things that happen every day inside us, things that everyone feels but that few can depict as we see done here” (V 98). Characters do not provide models for our behavior; they act as readers act, enabling us to see ourselves as if in a mirror.

The irony, as Charnes himself remarks, is that this expression of common experience is made possible by the very trait that Valincour cannot get his mind around, to wit, the pedestrian quality of the novel’s heroes.³⁶ It is a shame that the Princess cannot respond to Nemours’s outrageous theft of the portrait with more aplomb, and yet it is precisely in her embarrassed reaction that readers will see themselves; she cannot follow through on any of her resolutions, but her inability to act in her best interests is what makes her representative of the way we are. That the protagonists’ antiheroic bumbling actually endears them to us is made clearest in a famous passage in which Valincour juxtaposes the scene of avowal in La Princesse de Clèves with a remarkably similar one in the second story of Villedieu’s Les Désordres de l’amour. Critics often assume that Valincour is accusing Lafayette of having plagiarized the key scene of her novel,³⁷ but he clearly brings up the Villedieu passage to demonstrate why Lafayette’s is so much better. And its superiority turns on just this question of heroic behavior. Villedieu’s Madame de Thermes names her lover boldly and unhesitantly, as Valincour notes: she “approaches the conversation with a much more superior tone than that of Madame de Clèves” and “does not show any of the timidity of the Princess.” Moreover, her husband responds with self-sacrifice, ceding to his rival.

Villedieu’s characters thus comport themselves with a forthrightness that seems to call out for the reader’s approval or censure; but as Valincour says to the interlocutor who proposes the parallel, “I much prefer the duc de Clèves even with all his chagrins.” The interlocutor agrees, waxing sarcastic on the behavior of Villedieu’s characters: “maybe people lived more heroically back in the time of the Marquis de Thermes.” For heroism is quite literally a turnoff: Madame de Thermes’s “great gift for explaining herself,” Valincour continues, “seems to me as likely to extinguish love in a husband’s heart as Madame de Clèves’s avowal was to foster and maybe even increase it” (V 104). Villedieu’s heroine is admirable; Lafayette’s is something more: “one loves Madame de Clèves” (V 122).

Lafayette’s characters, then, are not so much examples of amorous temperaments that one can laud or chastise as they are people defined by a fundamental inadequation between interior and exterior, feelings and actions. And Valincour signals that inadequation as the source of our identificatory pleasure: the author must have avoided giving the princesse de Clèves perfect presence of mind precisely because in the antitragic logic of the novel, weakness is what inspires the reader’s “inclination” for the character: “it is in this manner that the reader is touched by [s’intéresse pour] Madame de Clèves, and that he feels, as it were, compassion and pity with respect to all the embarrassing situations in which he sees her trapped, whereas he would have had only aversion or maybe even contempt for a woman whose quick wit and resoluteness couldn’t keep her from falling into such dire straits” (V 76). I mentioned a moment ago that on the whole Valincour’s lexicon of identification avoids emphasizing the emotions familiar to the Aristotelian tradition, and so this passage is an exception: pity and compassion are of course staples of the cathartic vocabulary of the period. But a quick look reveals the anti-Aristotelian thrust of Valincour’s use. Here, pity and compassion (and the critic hints that these terms may be inappropriate) stem not from seeing a strong if imperfect man brought low by circumstances, but from the contemplation of a weak character. Readerly contempt and pity switch sides: whereas according to traditional understanding the former is reserved for the weak and the latter for the strong, now the exact opposite is the case. Whence the indifference Valincour expresses with respect to the grand emotions of Villedieu’s Monsieur and Madame de Thermes. Who can identify with a hero?

The silences Valincour initially ascribed to a kind of misplaced comic frustration have become the very focus of the critic’s praise. “Don’t you agree, Madame, that by not saying anything Madame de Clèves nevertheless says everything she should say, and everything she could?” he asks his fictitious correspondent, referring to the scene in which the prince de Clèves exhorts his sorely tempted wife to be strong (V 107). (“They spent some time without saying anything and separated without having the strength to speak,” reads Lafayette’s text [L 359].) The model of affective response can no longer be that of Aristotelian pity and compassion, for these silences remind Valincour of an alternate tradition in which the strongest effects are produced in the spectator by not giving voice to the emotions of the character. This is the tradition of the sublime, evoked by Valincour through the shorthand of the Greek painter Timanthes, who, unable to represent the grief of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, simply veiled the father’s face. The affective charge of scenes like the one between the de Clèves, or the deathbed conversation between Madame de Chartres and her daughter, is achieved by favoring mute tears over an eloquence that would misleadingly imply continuity between feelings and their exteriorization.

Valincour is the first in a long line of critics to praise La Princesse de Clèves for its psychological turn, for its inner monologues depicting “these different thoughts that destroy one another as they arise” (V 98), for, in short, putting the magnificence of heroic actions and witty speech into eclipse and thus allowing a vast inner domain to come into view.³⁸ If the factual impossibility of the Princess keeps us from reading for information and gossip, her behavioral shortcomings—her actions do not follow clearly from her will, and her words are rarely the right ones—discourage us from sitting in judgment over her, and instead simply put us in her place. Lafayette’s protagonist is an open fabrication and a strikingly imperfect one to boot, and yet still, in spite of the rules of poetics and the norms of romance, the reader “loves” her. In Valincour’s text, identification with the heroine replaces identification of her historical referent. Since the Princess refers to no one but readers themselves, the novel’s grounding in reality undergoes a seismic shift: its truth lies not in its correspondence to real historical actors but in its uncanny resemblance to the reader’s psychic reality. The radical effect of La Princesse de Clèves is to demonstrate that it makes no difference at all that the Princess never existed and never could have, provided that you read with one new thing in mind: its real subject is you.

Exceptionality

To all La Princesse de Clèves’ other claims to modernity, we may now add one more: Lafayette invents fiction as we now know it. Or does she? As I’ve already remarked, the fictionality of her protagonist is untimely: it comes too soon. Certainly too soon for the critics of the English novel who have attempted to chart the rise of a properly fictional practice, typically starting from the “hesitant” works of Defoe.³⁹ But too soon as well for the amended timetable proposed in my Introduction. For by my own reckoning, the publication of La Princesse de Clèves comes at a moment in which the novel was ceasing to be composed along Aristotelian lines (as it was during the heyday of the French historical romance) and was taking on instead the pseudofactual mantle; the book can hardly be made out to be part of what I have been calling fiction, a phenomenon of the very late eighteenth century at best. Catherine Gallagher has tentatively proposed that Lafayette’s novel may indicate the early French beginnings of a process that will occur only later in Britain;⁴⁰ unfortunately, the data do not support the hypothesis, since French novelists after Lafayette adopt roughly the same pseudofactual postures as their British counterparts. What, then, is the place of La Princesse de Clèves in a history of fiction?

Franco Moretti has noted the literary historian’s instinctive use of “typological thinking,” a term he borrows from evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr: we readily assume that masterworks stand in for entire genres, that is, that they are examples of a type.⁴¹ Or we follow the more diachronic understanding found in a dictum frequently attributed to Walter Benjamin: “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one,” which is to say that we like our masterworks to be either revolutionary and foundation-laying, or else able to put a tradition to rest with a culminating flourish.⁴² Either way, individual works are presumed to be profoundly contiguous with more widespread literary practices. Yet in the case of Lafayette, at least, such habits of thought seem to be out of place. Of course, in a cultural sense there are all sorts of ways in which her novel can (and should) be seen as the perfect expression of the stifling court culture of Louis XIV, but morphologically speaking La Princesse de Clèves is every bit as exceptional as its heroine. It does not invent the historical novella, which before and after 1678 is composed according to the Aristotelian stipulations that Valincour accurately holds Lafayette to be breaking. And by the same token it does not do “better” the sort of thing its competitors do: its impossible protagonist, who induces in readers feelings of identification that are not those shared with more conventional heroes, is fundamentally unlike the protagonists of other historical novellas.

But Moretti’s own effort to provide a new theory of the relation between innovative works and broader literary practice—of how, in short, literary forms evolve—is similarly unable to account for the data. Moretti has used the detective story as a paradigmatic case for observing the generational aspect of formal evolution. The device of the decodable clue, first used (though only sporadically) by Conan Doyle, eventually came to define the genre itself; but the success of the clue did not happen overnight. In fact, Conan Doyle’s contemporaries—and maybe even Conan Doyle himself—did not appear to realize the device’s usefulness; only a second generation of writers would latch onto the clue and make it a mainstay of the genre. Thus a lag of twenty or more years is necessary between the initial discovery and its generalization. The difficulty, however—beyond worries over the explicitly Darwinian mechanisms of selection that Moretti sees as guiding cultural evolution⁴³—is that a later generation of writers does not pick up on La Princesse de Clèves’ very special, non-Aristotelian sort of invention, even though the book is widely known and admired. Instead, they exploit the possibilities of the pseudofactual. Even the type of identification Valincour describes appears to have no close analogues until eighty years later, with Rousseau’s Julie (1761) and Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson (1762).⁴⁴ One is reduced to the vague language of “anticipation” to describe the relation between Lafayette and subsequent developments in the history of literature.⁴⁵

Lafayette’s fictional heroine is probably the single best counterexample to my main historical narrative; she must be explained. Let’s start with the observation that there is little evidence that La Princesse de Clèves was appreciated for its distinctive mode of invention, for its “fictional” form. Valincour of course critiques it; Charnes erroneously claims that all novelists now do the same thing and does not seem to think of it as anything noteworthy. And later readers proved equally unable to single out the novel as the shape of things to come. On the contrary: when discussion in the eighteenth century turned to selecting the most excellent French novels of the preceding century, alongside La Princesse de Clèves very often figured Lafayette’s other major novel, Zayde.⁴⁶ Since Zayde’s morphology is patently that of the heroic romance—interlocking stories are exchanged by characters in a remotely historical third-person frame—the irony is that prior to the advent of the realist novel, readers were incapable of distinguishing which form looked “forward” and which “back”: both felt modern to eighteenth-century readers, but for reasons unrelated to what makes it a comfortable fit for people who think of the novel along the lines of its nineteenth-century forms. (Praise was bestowed on the novels’ downplaying of heroics, their focus on everyday situations, and so on.)

We might of course say that these readers were simply not able to process Lafayette’s “innovation.” But an alternate explanation is that there was no innovation, properly speaking, only a one-time twist on age-old habits and local practices. The local practice was of course the genre of the historical novella, which by 1678 was emerging as the replacement for the historical romances that readers appear to have looked on as outdated.⁴⁷ This practice was not by any means stable (the Appendix to this chapter provides a summary of its major variants), but it did obey the old rule of literary composition, which was that heroes should be real people, or at least plausibly real. Only Lafayette would break that rule with her “visibly false” heroine.⁴⁸ The reasons for her transgression, I have surmised, lay in the type of critique of court culture she wanted to make; her nonexistent heroine allowed her to denounce the invasive traffic in women’s secrets without using, hypocritically, a real woman’s destiny to do so. What prompted such a critique no doubt lies in Lafayette’s biography. While salon sociability suited the young Lafayette, who was demonstrably proud of her tacitly acknowledged authorship of La Princesse de Montpensier, in later years, for reasons unknown, her attitude toward publicity became much more guarded. But the point is that her critique, and her particularly canny and consistent means of making it, was idiosyncratic: its success did not keep readers from continuing to enjoy the “real” historical novella, a subgenre that existed because it responded to widespread assumptions about what novel reading was for—information and gossip, examples and heroics. Nor did Lafayette’s “fictional” protagonist offer a solution for future generations: subsequent writers, modeling their work no longer on historiography but on pseudofactual forms that would allow a tighter bond with present-day reality—say, the memoir or talk-of-the-town news—could hardly reproduce Lafayette’s counterfactual intrusions into history.

If Lafayette, therefore, is not a good predictor of the French novel to come, this is mostly because the form she was working with had no future. In studies of the French novel, it has become customary to think of the advent of the historical novella in the 1670s as the key step in the direction of modernity: the extinction of the dinosaur that was historical romance left the terrain open for colonization by the mammalian novel, of which the tiny historical novella was the first example. There is much to be said for this version of events, which is close to the version that Lafayette’s contemporaries told. But in one important matter the hypothesis hides from view the profound commonality between the historical novella and the historical romance: notwithstanding its different structure (it was both short and not built around the exchange of its protagonists’ stories), and notwithstanding its increased emphasis on documentation or its downplaying of physical acts of heroism, the historical novella was perfectly Aristotelian in the type of invention it practiced: it was often (but not always) “more” historical, in that it made greater use of source texts, but at bottom it was historical in the same way. Only pseudofactual forms, which as Lennard Davis has pointed out masqueraded as something like “news,”⁴⁹ were different: their authors were either the interested parties themselves, or eyewitnesses; they were not poets, picking and choosing between attested versions of illustrious events and then inventing what was needed for the demands of their plot. The pseudofactual was no direct shock to the Aristotelian system, as I’ve noted in the Introduction, since it did not question the preeminence of characters’ reality; but at the same time it represented a distinct mode of composition. From this point of view, then, La Princesse de Clèves tinkers with Aristotelian principles, subverts them even, but in no way opens the door to the regime that will supplant Aristotelian poetics. Subligny’s now-forgotten La Fausse Clélie (1670), the subject of the following chapter, may in fact be much more representative of the novel’s future than Lafayette’s masterpiece.

La Princesse de Clèves looks like fiction: it refuses to assert the existence of its protagonist, who is not even a plausible poetic construction. And it behaves like fiction: it causes readers (or at least Valincour) to envision their relation to that protagonist in a way that does indeed recall later sentimental identification, or better still, the type of engagement proper to the realist novel, which makes accessible to readers the “transparent minds” of its characters.⁵⁰ But what does it mean to call La Princesse de Clèves fiction? Almost inevitably, such a declaration brings with it a host of erroneous historical corollaries, foremost among them that this novel must therefore be related to later ones, or that it is a first sign of a conceptual change. To say that despite its invented heroine La Princesse de Clèves is not fiction is not to indulge in academic casuistry. It is to remind us that the resemblances between it and later novels are not signs of a pattern but accidents of history. For fiction is not only a sum of characteristics, it is a practice, and practices are communal. From practices individuals can and do deviate, and sometimes in ways that either contemporaries or later generations may consolidate into new practices. But deviations do not always bear such fruit, even if, as with La Princesse de Clèves, they are appreciated, lauded, kept alive in the literary memory. Lafayette’s example does not mean that France knew fiction before Britain did; she did not divine what the novel would look like 150 years later, or recognize, in the midst of general confusion, what fiction “really was.” Her book is a hapax, a one-off, an isolated short-circuit in the Aristotelian machine; Lafayette did not have it in her power to rewire literary creation along the lines of what would become, so much later, “fiction.” If La Princesse de Clèves did not exist, no one would have to invent it; we wouldn’t even miss it, because the history of the French novel would look more, not less, comprehensible in its absence.

Appendix: History and the Historical Novella

To Valincour’s objection regarding Lafayette’s “visibly false” heroine, Charnes responded with the argument that La Princesse de Clèves belonged to a “third species” of modern novels of whose compositional principles Valincour was ignorant. The move was astute, rhetorically speaking, since it allowed Charnes to cast his adversary as a pedant behind the times. As I’ve remarked, however, Charnes’s taxonomy was pure sophistry: there was no contemporary species of novels that, like La Princesse de Clèves, advertised the nonexistence of protagonists. This appendix provides justification for my claim that in spite of the fact that historical novellas of the period displayed much variation in their use of history, Lafayette’s contribution remained sui generis.

Knowing precisely what to count as a nouvelle historique is not necessarily an easy matter, even if the generic tag was applied by contemporaries—appearing almost simultaneously with the genre itself, on the title page of Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672). Roughly twenty works from the last three decades of the seventeenth century would identify themselves thus. But there are complications. First, works with this subtitle do not always designate the same thing. Generally, the historical novella was set in the past; its protagonists were historical in the sense that they were attested in histories, memoirs, genealogies, and so on. On occasion, however, the tag was applied to works set in the present. Second, many works that bear the hallmarks of the genre (including both Lafayette’s efforts) have no such subtitle; in rare cases, an alternate designation such as histoire tragique takes its place. Third, although a title containing a proper name and aristocratic title often announced a historical novella, in some cases, especially in the genre’s infancy, novels bore more general titles—as in Villedieu’s Annales galantes (1670) or Désordres de l’amour (1675); and conversely, the titular proper name could announce “true stories” set in the very recent present—as with Boursault’s Le Marquis de Chavigny (1670), Salvan de Saliès’s La Comtesse d’Isembourg (1678), or Du Plaisir’s La Duchesse d’Estramène (1682). Titles alone, then, are only a rough guide to the actual content of these novels. Searching this content for works set in the past leads to a list of a bit more than fifty historical novellas published in the last three decades of the century, at which time the genre more or less went into eclipse.⁵¹

How historical, precisely, was the historical novella? To readers of Lafayette, or those familiar with the extremely careful use of sources evident in the other commonly read examples of the genre, Dom Carlos and Les Désordres de l’amour, the answer would probably be very: nothing could seem farther from the vague historicity of d’Urfé’s Gaul or Scudéry’s Rome than the patient marquetry of Lafayette, Saint-Réal, and Villedieu, in which sources of different types—memoirs, genealogies, official historiography, even manuscript material—are fitted together. Yet the divide between the two may not have seemed quite so unbridgeable to contemporaries. Of about twenty surviving works of the period that incorporate the generic designation into their title, and even if we exclude outlying quirks, we find texts that vary widely in terms of the period treated and the amount of historical detail provided.⁵² The production of 1678 can serve as representative; this was the year in which the most historical novellas were published, including of course La Princesse de Clèves. Six of nine historical narratives that year were subtitled nouvelle historique. Two took place in the early Middle Ages, and far from France: Le Comte Roger, souverain de la Calabre ultérieure, whose author is known only under the initials “L.L.B.”; and Alfrede, reine d’Angleterre, attributed to Antoine Torche. If the main lines of the biography of Roger Guiscard (c. 1016–85) were fairly well known, the number of sources was very limited, and their precision nil; the general impression is of a “soft” historicity reminiscent of a late romance such as Zayde, that is, of a thoroughly Aristotelian plausibility.⁵³ A third novel, Méroüée, fils de France (by a certain “H.F.M.”), took as its backdrop Merovingian France. Here, because of the illustriousness of the title character, documentation did exist and was cited in detail in the work’s preface; historical pretensions are more evident than in the previous works, but the mode of invention was not qualitatively different. The same “H.F.M.” also brought out Tachmas, prince de Perse; like a good number of other novels of the period, not to mention Racine’s tragedy Bajazet (1672), Tachmas takes place in the Turkish court of the mid-seventeenth century, and moreover is claimed to be derived from an oral source. Rousseau de La Valette’s Le Comte d’Ulfeld, grand maître de Danemarc, is similarly set in the recent past; the author points out that some people still living in France knew the hero, and claims to derive his story from unpublished memoirs from Denmark. The final work, and the one that looks most like what we would tend to expect from the genre, is Dom Juan d’Autriche; this novel, attributed to Courtin and unfolding during the heated rivalry of Charles V and François I, contains a gallery of distinguished protagonists taken from the usual Renaissance memoirs. The nouvelle historique appellation could apply, then, to quite different works—covering periods from the recent to the remote past, incorporating protagonists of varying degrees of familiarity to readers and documentation of disparate sorts and quantity. The sense of the genre as a continuum, one that made room for historically “hard” and “soft” works, is not changed by widening the corpus to include two additional titles of 1678 that were not explicitly labeled nouvelles historiques, Cotolendi’s Mademoiselle de Tournon and Préchac’s Yolande de Sicile, both brought out by Lafayette’s publisher, Claude Barbin: the former advertises its careful work with Renaissance sources, while the latter’s late-medieval plot remains dreamily vague.

Given that La Princesse de Clèves was the talk of the town, it is no accident that Valincour chose it and not another of these works to critique. But a look at the competing works from 1678 makes clear that had he wanted to he could not have accused them of the kind of violence to accepted rules of poetic invention he found in Lafayette: all followed Aristotelian precepts. I have alluded to the fact that Villedieu’s Désordres de l’amour gives a prominent place to the invented Maugiron: the invention of “plausible” supporting characters was generally accepted and practiced. Yet nouvelles historiques on the well-documented Renaissance usually did not stretch history even this far. Boursault’s Le Prince de Condé (1675), whose historical frame overlaps partially with the one subsequently chosen by Lafayette, is more typical of novellas focusing on this period: all its characters, primary and secondary, are attested in the historical record; the sexual liaisons that are its main subject mix well-known affairs (say, between the title character and the Maréchale de Saint-André), more covert “dirt” of the sort we have seen in Lafayette’s Montpensier (Boursault furnishes the date Mademoiselle de Limeuil gave birth to Condé’s illegitimate son in the Louvre), and purely hypothetical trysts (between François II and Mademoiselle de Saint-André). Not one of these works on Renaissance France, or the many others like them, invents a heroine, never mind a heroine whose existence is proved impossible by historical sources.⁵⁴

If other examples from before or after the publication of La Princesse de Clèves would only repeat what we have already seen, one small subcategory of nouvelles historiques merits special consideration. For, like La Princesse de Clèves, a few novels give over their titles and narratives to female characters whose family names ring familiar but whose precise identity no doubt hovered below the threshold of a contemporary reader’s historical awareness. Here too, however, we search in vain for proof of Charnes’s assertion that the historical novella commonly traded in Lafayette’s admixture of fact and visible falsity. The liberties taken in Bremond’s La Princesse de Monferrat (1676) are unsurprising because it takes place in medieval Italy; just as Lafayette herself did in Zayde, Bremond uses familiar family names and the license provided by sketchy sources to create characters whose historical counterparts may or may not have existed. The precise identity of Mademoiselle de Tournon, from Cotolendi’s 1678 eponymous novel, would probably have been a mystery to most readers, even if members of her clan occupied positions of power in the Renaissance. But this particular Mademoiselle de Tournon did exist, and the author tells us in his preface that he retrieved her story from Marguerite de Valois’s memoirs, where, sure enough, she really figures. Boyer’s early La Comtesse de Candale (1672), situated toward the end of the reign of Louis XI (1461–83), is a more promising possible antecedent for Lafayette’s novel: once again, the name of the titular character would have been familiar (the house of Candale still existed), but it is a fair guess that the comtesse de Candale herself was unknown to Boyer’s readership. Any analogy with the princesse de Clèves quickly falls apart, however: Candale had existed, even if little was known about her; and she is used to explain the antipathy—duly noted by professional historians—between Anne de France and the duc d’Orléans. The heroine thus performs the familiar function of plausibly motivating an event in the historical record. Monferrat, Tournon, and Candale are not, after all, the figurative sisters of Clèves.⁵⁵

The omission of the generic tag nouvelle historique from the title of La Princesse de Clèves in itself means nothing: more than half of seventeenth-century historical novellas contain no such designation. Yet in Lafayette’s case, the omission seems almost willful, so much does her variation on the genre’s admittedly elastic characteristics seem a transgression of its very reason for being—telling us about heroes of the past. French literary history has long consecrated La Princesse de Clèves as the best example of the nouvelle historique. The irony is that it may be about the worst.