A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 / From the Beginning to 1800

[404] We have seen above how things were "shaping for" it, in the Pastoral and Heroic romances. But the shape was not definitely taken in them.

[405] In the following pages, and here only in this volume, the author has utilised, though with very considerable alterations, some previously published work, A Study of Sensibility, which appeared originally in the Fortnightly Review for September 1882, and was republished in a volume (Essays on French Novelists, London, 1891) which has been for some years out of print. Much of the original essay, dealing with Marivaux and others already treated here, has been removed, and the whole has been cut down, revised, and adjusted to its new contexts. But it seemed unnecessary to waste time in an endeavour to say the same thing differently about matters which, though as a whole indispensable, are, with perhaps one exception, individually not of the first importance.

[406] These words were originally written more than thirty years ago. I am not sure that there was not something prophetic in them.

[407] Madame de Fontaines in La Comtesse de Savoie and Amenophis "follows her leader" in more senses than one—including a sort of pseudo-historical setting or insetting which became almost a habit. But she is hardly important.

[408] Readers of Thackeray may remember in The Paris Sketch Book ("On the French School of Painting," p. 52, Oxford ed.) some remarks on Jacquand's picture, "The Death of Adelaide de Comminge," which he thought "neither more nor less than beautiful." But from his "it appears," in reference to the circumstances, it would seem that he did not know the book, save perhaps from a catalogue-extract or summary.

[409] The extreme shortness of all these books may be just worth noticing. Reaction from the enormous romances of the preceding century may have had something to do with it; and the popularity of the "tale" something more. But the causa verissima was probably the impossibility of keeping up sentiment at high pressure for any length of time, incident, or talk.

[410] Vide on the process Crébillon's Les Égarements du Cœur et de l'Esprit, as above, pp. 371, 372.

[411] The parallel with "George Eliot" will strike most people.

[412] But for uniformity's sake I should not have translated this, for fear of doing it injustice. "Not presume to dictate," in Mr. Jingle's constantly useful phrase, but it seems to me one of the finest in French prose.

[413] "Craze" has been suggested; but is, I think, hardly an exact synonym.

[414] This may seem to contradict, or at any rate to be inconsistent with, a passage above (p. 367) on the "flirtations" of Crébillon's personages. It is, however, only a more strictly accurate use of the word.

[415] Two remarkable and short passages of his, not quoted in the special notice of him, may be given—one in English, because of its remarkable anticipation of the state of mind of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the other in French, as a curious "conclusion of the whole matter." They are both from Marianne.

"I had resolved not to sleep another night in the house. I cannot indeed tell you what was the exact object of my fear, or why it was so lively. All that I know is that I constantly beheld before me the countenance of my landlord, to which I had hitherto paid no particular attention, and then I began to find terrible things in this countenance His wife's face, too, seemed to be gloomy and dark; the servants looked like scoundrels; all their faces made me in a state of unbearable alarm. I saw before me swords, daggers, murders, thefts, insults. My blood grew cold at the perils I imagined."

"Enfin ces agitations, tant agréables que pénibles, s'affaiblirent et se passèrent. L'âme s'accoutume à tout; sa sensibilité s'use: et je me familiarisais avec mes espérances et mes inquiétudes."

[416] Since, long ago, I formed the opinion of Adolphe embodied above, I have, I think, seen French criticisms which took it rather differently—as a personal confession of the "confusions of a wasted youth," misled by passion. The reader must judge which is the juster view.

[417] By a little allowance for influence, if not for intrinsic value.

[418] On representations from persons of distinction I have given Laclos a place in an outhouse (see "Add. and Corr."). But I have made this place as much of a penitentiary as I could.

[419] I must apologise by anticipation to the official French critic. To him, I know, even if he is no mere minor Malherbe, Restif's style is very faulty; but I should not presume to take his point of view, either for praise or blame.

[420] There is a separate bibliography by Cubières-Palmézeaux (1875). The useful Dictionnaire des Littératures of Vapereau contains a list of between thirty and forty separate works of Restif's, divided into nearer two than one hundred volumes. He followed Prévost in Nouveaux Mémoires d'un Homme de Qualité as he had followed Marivaux in the Paysan Perverti. He completed this work of his own with La Paysanne Pervertie; he wrote, besides the Pornographe, numerous books of social, general, and would-be philosophical reform—Le Mimographe, dealing with the stage; Les Gynographes, with a general plan for rearranging the status of women; L'Andrographe, a "whole duty of man" of a very novel kind; Le Thesmographe, etc.,—besides, close upon the end and after the autobiography above described, a Philosophie de M. Nicolas. His more or less directly narrative pieces, Le Pied de Fanchette, Lucile, Adèle, La Femme Infidèle, Ingénue Saxancour, are nearly always more or less tinged with biography of himself and of persons closely connected with him, as La Vie de Mon Père, his most respectable book, is wholly. It may be added, perhaps, that the notice in Vapereau, while not bearing very hard on Restif on the whole, repeats the words cynisme and cynique in regard to him. Unless the term is in part limited and in part extended, so as to mean nothing but "exposure of things generally kept secret without apparent shame," it is entirely misplaced. Not merely outside of, but actually in his erotomania, Restif was a sentimental philanthropist of the all but most genuine kind, tainted indeed with the vanity and self-centredness which had reached their acme in Rousseau, but very much more certainly sincere, and of a temperament as different as possible from what is commonly called cynicism.

[421] There are, however, contradictory statements on this point.

[422] Nicolas [Edme] Restif being apparently his baptismal name, and "de la Bretonne" merely one of the self-bestowed agnominal nourishes so common in the French eighteenth century. He chose to consider the surname evidence of descent from the Emperor Pertinax; and as for his Christian name he seems to have varied it freely. Rose Lambelin, one of his harem, and a soubrette of some literature, used to address him as "Anne-Augustin," Anne being, as no doubt most readers know, a masculine as well as a feminine prénom in French.

[423] Some, and perhaps not a few of their objects, may have been imaginary "dream-mistresses," created by Morpheus in an impurer mood than when he created Lamb's "dream-children." But some, I believe, have been identified; and others of the singular "Calendar" affixed to Monsieur Nicolas have probably escaped identification.

[424]

It has not been necessary (and this is fortunate, for even if it had been necessary, it would have been scarcely possible) to give biographies of the various authors mentioned in this book, except in special cases. Something was generally known of most of them in the days before education received a large E, with laws and rates to suit: and something is still in a way, supposed to be known since. But of the life of Pigault, who called himself Lebrun, it may be desirable to say something, for more reasons than one. In the first place, this life had rather more to do with his work than is always the case; in the second, very little will be found about him in most histories of French literature; in the third, there will be found assigned to him, in the text—not out of crotchet, or contumacy, or desire to innovate, but as a result of rather painful reading—a considerably higher place in the history of the novel than he has usually occupied. His correct name—till, by one of the extremest eccentricities of the French Chats-Fourrés, he was formally unbegot by his Roman father, and the unbegetting (plus declaration of death) confirmed by the Parlement of Paris—was the imposing one of Charles Antoine Guillaume Pigault de L'Épinoy. The paternal Pigault, as may be guessed from his proceedings, was himself a lawyer, but of an old Calais family tracing itself to Queen Philippa's protégé, Eustache de Saint-Pierre; and, besides the mysterious life-in-death or death-in-life, Charles Antoine Guillaume had to suffer from him, while such things existed, several lettres de cachet. The son certainly did his best to deserve them. Having been settled, on leaving school as a clerk in an English commercial house, he seduced his master's daughter, ran away with her, and would no doubt have married her—for Pigault was never a really bad fellow—if she had not been drowned in the vessel which carried the pair back to France. He escaped—one hopes not without trying to save her. After another scandal—not the second only—of the same kind, he did marry the victim, and the marriage was the occasion of the singular exertion of patria potestas referred to above. At least two lettres de cachet had preceded it, and it is said that only the taking of the Bastille prevented the issue, or at least the effect, of a third. Meanwhile, he had been a gentleman-trooper in the gendarmerie d'élite de la petite maison du roi, which, seeing that the roi was Louis Quinze, probably did not conduct itself after the fashion of the Thundering Legion, or of Cromwell's Ironsides, or even of Captain Steele's "Christian Hero." The life of this establishment, though as probably merry, was not long, and Pigault became an actor—a very bad but rather popular actor, it was said. Like other bad actors he wrote plays, which, if not good (they are certainly not very cheerful to read), were far from unsuccessful. But it was not till after the Revolution, and till he was near forty, that he undertook prose fiction; his first book being L'Enfant du Carnaval in 1792 (noticed in text). The revolutionary fury, however, of which there are so many traces in his writings, caught him; he went back to soldiering and fought at Valmy. He did not stay long in the army, but went on novel-writing, his success having the rather unexpected, and certainly very unusual, effect of reconciling his father. Indeed, this arbitrary parent wished not only to recall him to life, which was perhaps superfluous, but to "make an eldest son of him." This, Pigault, who was a loose fish and a vulgar fellow, but, as was said above, not a scoundrel, could not suffer; and he shared and shared alike with his brothers and sisters. Under the Empire he obtained a place in the customs, and held it under succeeding reigns till 1824, dying eleven years later at over eighty, and having written novels continuously till a short time before his death, and till the very eve of 1830. This odd career was crowned by an odd accident, for his daughter's son was Émile Augier. I never knew this fact till after the death of my friend, the late Mr. H. D. Traill. If I had, I should certainly have asked him to write an Imaginary Conversation between grandfather and grandson. Some years (1822-1824) before his last novel, a complete edition of novels, plays, and very valueless miscellanies had been issued in twenty octavo volumes. The reader, like the river Iser in Campbell's great poem, will be justified for the most part in "rolling rapidly" through them. But he will find his course rather unexpectedly delayed sometimes, and it is the fact and the reasons of these delays which must form the subject of the text.—There is no doubt that Pigault was very largely read abroad as well as at home. We know that Miss Matilda Crawley read him before Waterloo. She must have inherited from her father, Sir Walpole, a strong stomach: and must have been less affected by the change of times than was the case with her contemporary, Scott's old friend, who having enjoyed "your bonny Mrs. Behn" in her youth, could not read her in age. For our poor maligned Afra (in her prose stories at any rate, and most of her verse, if not in her plays) is an anticipated model of Victorian prudery and nicety compared with Pigault. I cannot help thinking that Marryat knew him too. Chapter and verse may not be forthcoming, and the resemblance may be accounted for by common likeness to Smollett: but not, to my thinking, quite sufficiently.

[425] He had a younger brother, in a small way also a novelist, and, apparently, in the Radcliffian style, who extra-named himself rather in the manner of 1830—Pigault-Maubaillarck. I have not yet come across this junior's work.—For remarks of Hugo himself on Pigault and Restif, see note at end of chapter.

[426] At least in his early books; it improves a little later. But see note on p. 453.

[427] For a defence of this word, v. sup. p. 280, note.

[428] It may be objected, "Did not the Scudérys and others do this?" The answer is that their public was not, strictly speaking, a "public" at all—it was a larger or smaller coterie.

[429] It has been said that Pigault spent some time in England, and he shows more knowledge of English things and books than was common with Frenchmen before, and for a long time after, his day. Nor does he, even during the Great War, exhibit any signs of acute Anglophobia.

[430] Pigault's adoration for Voltaire reaches the ludicrous, though we can seldom laugh with him. It led him once to compose one of the very dullest books in literature, Le Citateur, a string of anti-Christian gibes and arguments from his idol and others.

[431] Yet sometimes—when, for instance, one thinks of the rottenness-to-the-core of Dean Farrar's Eric, or the spiritus vulgaritatis fortissimus of Mark Twain's A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur—one feels a little ashamed of abusing Pigault.

[432] There was, of course, a milder and perhaps more effective possibility—to make the young turn to the young, and leave Madame de Francheville no solace for her sin. But for this also Pigault would have lacked audacity.

[433] For the story "species" of Gil Blas was not new, was of foreign origin, and was open to some objection; while the other two books just named derived their attraction, in the one case to a very small extent, in the other to hardly any at all, from the story itself.

[434] Not that Jacob and Marianne are unnatural—quite the contrary—but that their situations are conventionalised.

[435] Corps d'Extraits de Romans de Chevalerie. 4 vols. Paris, 1782.

[436] The link between the two suggested at p. 458, note, is as follows. That Victor Hugo should, as he does in the Preface to Han d'Islande and elsewhere, sneer at Pigault, is not very wonderful: for, besides the difference between canaille and caballería, the author of M. Botte was the most popular novelist of Hugo's youth. But why he has, in Part IV. Book VII. of Les Misérables selected Restif as "undermining the masses in the most unwholesome way of all" is not nearly so clear, especially as he opposes this way to the "wholesomeness" of, among others—Diderot!