Regressive Fictions

In the vast amount of criticism published on Mme de Graffigny's epistolary novel since the late 1980s, perhaps one question has remained central. Its polarities are nicely summarized in the formula Vierge du Soleil / Fille des Lumières.¹ Does the story of the protagonist Zilia offer a model of development, in the logic of the Enlightenment, bringing her finally to maturity and independence? Or does she end almost as 'virginal' as she began, in retreat from reality?² In my terms, is this fiction progressive or regressive? Responses when the issue was first defined tended to reflect the gender of the critic, but this is no longer so predictable. Some find the Péruvienne at once 'open' and 'closed', irresolvably ambiguous.³ This seems appropriate for a work of remarkable intelligence, composed on the cusp of the cultural change that I have identified in the 1750s, and a best-seller.⁴ The underlying tendency of the text however seems to me to be retreat. While taking cognizance of developmental elements, I shall propose a broadly regresssive reading of its major aspects.

Origins

The initial situation imagined by Graffigny for her novel is surely quite extraordinary. Her heroine is an Inca princess. She is barely adolescent. She is moreover one of the Virgins consecrated to the Sun-God, brought up entirely within the Peruvian 'Temple du Soleil'. Of her parents we are told nothing. Not only then does Zilia fit Marthe Robert's category of the 'enfant trouvé'. Not only is she, from her 'z/a' name onwards, a creature of exotic romance. She is a child who is at once royal, sacred, immaculate and totally protected. The contrast between this fiction and the reality lived by its creator — middle-aged and widowed, living in Paris, struggling against penury — only brings out further its mythical character.⁵ Its regressiveness is evidenced most by Zilia's 'extrême jeunesse' (Letter 2), and her perfectly enclosed and uniform life in the service of the Sun-God.⁶ She is as we have noted just one of many girls in the Temple, one sacred virgin in a whole group.

But the union of Zilia to Aza is far more strongly overdetermined than this. Her account continues: 'Si nous pouvions douter de notre origine, mon cher Aza, ce trait de lumière confondrait notre incertitude'. Yet she then says that she misunderstood the source of her emotion. 'J'étais trop ignorante sur les effets de l'amour pour ne pas m'y tromper [...] Je crus que le Soleil [...] me choisissait pour son épouse d'élite.' However, she then found in her heart only the image of Aza. One of her companions promptly tells her that she is to marry Aza. But the reason is not the recent event. 'Elle m'apprit qu'étant ta plus proche parente, j'étais destinée à être ton épouse, dès que mon âge permettrait cette union.' The youthful couple who have fallen in love are of the same family. It seems certain, though Graffigny carefully avoids saying it, that they are sister and brother.⁹ The sexual bond is already the sibling bond. As their youth and their instantaneous empathy also signal, this revelation does not make their desire culpable, but on the contrary demonstrates its innocence. Indeed, the bond between them is religious, for their marriage is required by the theocracy. It is not just an individual wish, nor even a familial imperative, but a holy obligation.¹⁰ For Zilia, it may also signify on this level too a return to the whole. She attributes her tender feeling to 'notre origine', and first takes it to mean that she is to be affianced to the Sun. This implies union with the Inca Father, an incestuous wish which is modified but also confirmed by its redirection to the son. The son is also the father, not only in royal and religious terms, but more specifically in his paternal role in relation to Zilia. It is clear that she is the younger of the two ('dès que mon âge [...]'). Emotionally she is an innocent ('J'étais trop ignorante [...]'). He directs her education, as we are told in the same Letter, towards the 'sublimes connaissances' of Inca philosophy. Union with Aza, with the solar principle (the Father of all and the power that irradiates the universe), and pursuit of a higher wisdom, are surely aspects of the same aspiration. She seeks an absolute condition which both glorifies her and takes her back into an ideal unity.11

Expulsion

This account however, as we discover only at the end of the Letter, is composed two years later. Wholeness (merged with the other Virgins, or to merge with the Sun-prince Aza) is in the past. In the earliest letters, paradise is already lost. We could see this plenitude indeed as not only the dream of its real author, Graffigny, but also of its fictional author, Zilia, It is framed by a present that is not just different but in complete contrast. For the idyll of Zilia and Aza has been destroyed on the very day that they are to be wed. This is what we are told in Zilia's dramatic first letter. That letter foregrounds writing itself. More strictly, it foregrounds knotting, as Zilia refers to the Peruvian medium of the qulpu with which she composes her missives. Within the letter recounting the idyll interrupted, she depicts herself fondly composing an account which is to 'rend[re] immortelle l'histoire de notre amour', but interrupted. This remarkable abyme reminds us that Zilia's account of the present too is all that we have. Conversely, it puts 'l'histoire de notre amour' inside a further frame of writing. Regression is also recession.

What intervenes on the very morning of her marriage is the armed invasion (by what we understand to be the Spanish Conquistadors) of the Inca Temple. This generates a rhetoric of sudden and radical loss:

The language is Prévostian, even Raciman, in its implication of a fall from primitive order. But it carries a new pathos, and perhaps also suggests a new kind of irony. For this protagonist has no responsibility or blame for the fall which has occurred. Replacing the classical irony of willful (adult) moral blindness, we have the pathos of innocent (female, childlike) suffering. The idea of a human distress to which nature and temporal succession are indifferent anticipates Romantic irony. Romantic egotism too could be discerned in Zilia's focus on her own loss rather than the public woe.¹² The very excess of her protestation might however invite a reversed reading. Though the invasion prevents Zilia's sexual union with Aza, it can also be perceived as its equivalent. She herself mistakes the incursion of the soldiers for the arrival, through the 'cent portes' of the Temple, of the bridegroom. The sacred female space undergoes another form of male penetration. Zilia's reference to 'des soldats furieux poursuivant nos Vierges éperdues' makes more explicit the subtext of sexual fear.¹³ She faints — a form of retreat from reality. 'Rangée derrière l'autel que je tenais embrassé', she could be said to be clinging to purity. Through this double displacement (Aza > Spaniards; Zilia > her companions), her own virginity is preserved from the soldiers as well as from the adult sexuality of marriage.

The Lettres d'une Péruvienne still fits into it by date, and more importantly by structure. Zilia too will report 'home' about the French. Many of her letters, which are addressed to her compatriot Aza, consist partly or almost entirely of such accounts. In her case too 'the French' means essentially the privileged classes and Paris. She too will react initially with surprise and puzzlement; she too will foreground and thus denaturalize familiar language. This visitor too will be taken on the cultural tour, making many of the usual stops, and examining social questions. Here too the criteria of evaluation will be a rather doubtful synthesis of the particular (in this case nominally Inca) and the general (Nature, Reason).¹⁶ Here too, comical and satirical misunderstandings such as those above will give way to more informed judgements. In these respects the Péruvienne still belongs to the 'old' writing, that of wit and worldliness.

The same letters give an account of the learning process in a wider sense.19 Zilia is quite unfamiliar with much of European material and social culture. Her shipboard environment was initially incomprehensible. But that world was simple compared with what is to come. Landing in France, she is overwhelmed. 'Tout ce qui s'offre à mes yeux me frappe, me surprend, m'étonne, et ne me laisse qu'une impression vague, une perplexité stupide.' Seeing her reflection makes her believe that she has found another 'Vierge du Soleil'. Déterville demystifies mirrors, but she still feels disturbed and humiliated. 'Ces prodiges troublent la raison, ils offusquent le jugement'; 'Suis-je moins mortifiée de ne trouver dans mon esprit que des erreurs ou des ignorances?' (L. 10). Her first experience of riding in a carriage prompts successive reactions: 'je le considérais avec surprise'; 'je tâchais de deviner [...]'; 'la frayeur me saisit' (L. 12). But with familiarity she appreciates this 'merveilleuse machine'. The same expression was applied to the telescope (L. 8), while the mirror becomes 'cette ingénieuse machine' (L. 12). She makes a broad judgement which is very positive: 'il faut [...] un génie plus qu'humain pour inventer des choses si utiles et si singulières' (L. 12) In general, she continues to be impressed by technological accomplishments in France.

She extends the category of the 'superflu' to cover false compliments and verbal wit. Letter 32 then points to the futility of Parisian social rituals. It closes with a disabused indictment of the whole nation. The French are like mechanical toys, with the appearance of thinking beings but 'aucune valeur réelle'. The charge sheet is however extended with two letters on the treatment of women. Seemingly given respect, women in prance are nevertheless regarded with contempt. Educated only for triviality, they lack refined feeling; they are quite unprepared for marriage and unequipped for virtue. Surrounded by bad examples, humiliated by their husbands and disadvantaged legally, they cannot be blamed for their misbehaviour. Zilia concludes with an exhortation to Aza: 'que les vices brillants d'une Nation, d'ailleurs si séduisante, ne nous dégoûtent point de la naïve simplicité de nos mœurs!'. He must continue to be her model, so that she can be worthy of him (L. 34).

This 'philosophical' critique of French society has been hailed by recent criticism. It has been rightly perceived as exceptional in the period for its radicalism, and for its composition (real and fictional) by a woman.²¹ Too often however it has been selectively if not misleadingly represented.²² If we take the critique as a whole, we can perhaps identify four motifs. One is injustice (LL. 20 and 34). The other three, which appear more consistently, are false appearance, frivolity and contradiction. Exposing false appearance and frivolity in individual behaviour is a traditional undertaking (in Christian and in 'moraliste' discourse). But here, in the Enlightenment way, emphasis falls equally on society. Less typical however of the earlier Enlightenment is Zilia's consistent moral disapproval of French social practices, and her globally censorious judgement. Implicit in all the other motifs is that of contradiction. French 'contradictions', a favourite topic in the subgenre of visitors' letters, were a theme in the Lettres persanes. But there they were identified wittily and presented ironically. Polyphony itself established plural and contradictory points of view. In the Péruvienne we have just one point of view. In keeping, contradiction here is unacceptable.

Zilia's social norm is oneness. It is represented by her Inca society, in which the divine king looks after all his people, a received wisdom is revered, and everyone (especially the nobles) has their proper place.²³ She is consistently hostile to pluralism and to mutability. Not only does she reject the civilization of the rococo. Not only does she condemn 'luxury', reflected in goods imported 'à grands frais, de toutes les parties du Monde' (L. 29). Money and the market for her represent moral corruption. In France, she reports with regret, 'le commun des hommes ne soutient son état que par ce qu'on appelle commerce ou industrie; la mauvaise foi est le moindre des crimes qui en résultent' (L. 20). Trade is intrinsically harmful to ethical integrity. Trade in books is therefore a contradiction in terms. We noted her shock that writers are obliged to 'vendre leurs pensées' (L. 22).24 The fact that in France one has to pay when travelling (unlike Peru) seems insufficient to justify her sweeping denunciation of'l'avidité de ce peuple intéressé' (L. 26). Nobles maintain false appearances, but the steward who serves them is 'un homme payé' which seems to be worse. The cult of excess in France she blames not on the nobility but on the nouveaux riches. 'Il n'y a parmi eux qu'une classe de Citoyens en état de porter le culte de l'Idole à son plus haut degré de splendeur [...]. Les Grands ont voulu les imiter; mais ils 11e sont que les martyrs de cette Religion' (L. 29).²⁵ Zilia's concern for the welfare of the aristocracy, like her condemnation of luxury and of economic exchange, reflect her hierarchical and static social ideal. The demand for reform in the treatment of women might seem to be an exception, but it too can be understood as urging a return to purer mœurs'. Its concern with education, to prepare women (and men) for virtuous marriage, also looks forward to the new civic ethos which will develop in France after 1750. Indeed, the terms consistently used in this work to designate individually and collectively the Peruvians (and even the French) — despite the monarchical context — are 'citoyen' and 'nation'. In either case, far from being liberal or individualist (as some modern criticism implies), the model is normative and collective.²⁶

'Notre petite société'

Essentially disapproving of French society, Zilia finds within it only two acceptable companions. One is Déterville. Already on the boat his 'attention plus pénétrante' has understood her wishes (L. 7). The other, first encountered when Zilia is brought by Déterville to his Parisian residence, is his sister. Zilia's account presents her as 'une jeune fille à peu près de mon âge', which already suggests that we might see her as a kind of double of the heroine. Then we learn that she exhibits in relation to Déterville an 'empressement timide', and a 'joie' which does not obscure 'un fond de tristesse intéressant'. This surely also implies or confirms much about Zilia's image of herself (presented less directly through her narrative). We are told next that Déterville 'l'embrassa [...] avec une tendresse si naturelle', which invites us to perceive here a sibling couple in parallel to Aza and Zilia. (There also seems every reason to assume that Céline, like Zilia, is younger than her brother.) Lest we should miss the parallel, Zilia continues 'Hélas! mon cher Aza, quels seraient nos transports, si après tant de malheurs le sort nous réunissait!' (L. 13). The resemblance goes beyond even the bonds of nature and 'tendresse' and the pathos of separation. The Déterville dynasty are — conveniently enough — almost comparable to the royal Incas in birth and in wealth.²⁷ The family wealth however will be misused by the bad mother against the sister, which is both a mark of the French corruption of natural feeling (money again), and a further parallel with the sorrows of Zilia.

But both brother and sister will disappoint her.29 Déterville has already been guilty of 'inattention' (L. 13). Later he will be the cause of much distress. Céline is quickly discovered to have faults. Zilia finds Céline narrow in her interests and shockingly ignorant beyond them. 'Je remarque dans les réponses qu'elle fait à mes questions, un certain embarras qui ne peut partir que d'une dissimulation maladroite ou d'une ignorance honteuse. Quoi qu'il en soit, son entretien est toujours borné aux intérêts de son cœur et à ceux de sa famille.' This judgement seems uncharitable, but worse quickly follows. Zilia has been helping Céline to maintain a clandestine correspondence with the man she loves, and consoling her during their forced separation (mirroring indeed). She receives no thanks for it. 'Son chagrin [...] répand sur notre commerce une amertume qui aigrit mes peines. Confidente perpétuelle des siennes, je l'écoute sans ennui, je la plains sans effort, je la console avec amitié, [...]' (L. 19). Céline fails to appreciate the excellence of Zilia's heart. The happy resolution of Céline's troubles improves her behaviour, but it is no less self-centred. 'Elle voit son amant tous les jours, [...] elle ne pense plus à me quereller.' Zilia rejoices in the re-establishment of what she calls 'notre petite société' (L. 27). She duly attends Céline's wedding, but the young woman's attention seems to be elsewhere. 'Je 11e jouis plus de l'entretien de Céline. Toute occupée de son nouvel Epoux, à peine puis· je trouver quelques moments pour lui rendre des devoirs d'amitié' (L. 30). Selfish Céline!

In fact Céline has a very worthy reason for being impatient with Zilia: she knows that her brother Déterville is sick with love for her. Here is a further element of mirroring: Céline is cross because she is devoted to her elder brother, as Zilia is devoted to hers. There is however a radical imbalance, for Zilia gets both men. She has long been betrothed to the one and loved by the other, which puts her at the centre. This is, after all, her story. The major parallel within the work, already suggested by the narrative, is that of her two men. In the story of her heart, it is that of two forms of tender sentiment. Having at last declared himself, Déterville begs Zilia to explain what she means by 'je vous aime'. She replies simply: what she feels for him is 'l'amitié et la reconnaissance'. However, 'le sentiment que j'ai pour Aza est tout différent [...], c'est ce que vous appelez l'amour'. The double distinction, of persons and of her sentiments, is clear. Exhibiting 'amitié' rather less than 'amour', one might feel, Zilia then asks the stricken suitor to search for the beloved. Déterville with great self-abnegation agrees to do so. But he adds a sinister warning. 'Vous vous flatteriez en vain de revoir l'heureux Aza, des obstacles invincibles vous séparent' (L. 23). Thus on the one hand Déterville reveals his love (but she rejects it), and on the other Aza is revealed to be alive (but there are invincible obstacles to their union), at the same time.

Aza and Déterville, contrastive but essentially similar ideal figures, mirror each other. But they are just part of a system of internal mirroring. On the female side it is the more evident. We noted the similarities of moral character between Zilia and Céline, and the similarities of situation (Céline too loved a man from whom she was unjustly separated but linked by letters). Taking in all four, we have youthful siblings of opposite sexes on the Peruvian side, and the same on the French side. The relationship between the Peruvian couple — younger sister devoted to older brother — is mirrored in the French couple. The fiction of a small closed group, repetition within it, and the multiplication of affective bonds (sibling and sexual love, 'amour' and 'amitié', opposite- and same-sex tenderness) is further evidence of regressive fantasy. Its function of auto-confirmation is underlined by the extraordinary excellence of all these persons, by high birth, by beauty and by moral sensibility. It all however emanates from, and returns to, the 'je' who is protagonist and narrator. Zilia finds every possible quality in Aza; but he did after all choose her. In Déterville she lauds 'votre douceur et votre bonté', telling him 'je n'ai trouvé [parmi les Français] que vos vertus dignes [...] des nôtres' (L. 31). Déterville too chose her. In Céline she can recognize the 'langage universel des cœurs bienfaisants', because it is her own.

Naïveté

Zilia's simplicity is particularly emphasized in Letter 23 for a fairly obvious reason. It is very difficult to believe that until this moment she was entirely unaware of Déterville's love.³⁵ Much of the alibi is provided by her initial ignorance of French. But we saw that from the Start, on the ship, she was struck by Déterville's ardent and adoring attitude.36 She noted his joy when she dutifully repeated his words 'oui, je vous aime', behaving nevertheless as if she understood neither the phrase nor the reaction (L. 9). Later and unbidden she addresses to him 'quelques-uns des mots qu'il se plaît à me faire répéter', as he gazes upon her in the French costume that he has provided. Not surprisingly, 'ses yeux s'animèrent, son visage s'enflamma, il vint à moi d'un air agité, il parut vouloir me prendre dans ses bras'. But Zilia has no idea why: 'je ne sais quel effet ils [ces mots] firent dans ce moment-là sur lui'. Then, she reports, 's'arrêtant tout d'un coup', he groaned, and flung himself into a chair 'avec tous les signes d'une profonde douleur'. Zilia cannot imagine what any of this means: 'Tout cela me paraît inconcevable' (L. 12). She learns French while he is away, which nicely sets up for his return the scene of the declaration. After some assiduous misinterpretation of the sense of the verb 'aimer', she finally understands. Fier behaviour in Letter 27 seems the more disingenuous. From the spoils of the Incas which Déterville has brought to her, she chooses gifts sculpted in gold foi-Céline and for him. Céline gets birds and flowers. But to him she sends 'animaux courageux', and 'une petite Statue qui représentait une Vierge du Soleil' (L. 27). Surely provocative in its effect, this act cannot be excused like that in Letter 13 by the plea of ignorance. But it is undoubtedly to be perceived still as guileless.

Zilia's 'naïveté' is foregrounded in fact throughout the work.³⁷ It is, as we noted, a new version of the failure to understand — now less an instrument of objectifying satire than a source of subjective feeling. Instead of intellectually distancing the author, and the reader, it invites emotional identification. Essentially here it has two functions. Firstly Zilia's 'naïveté' makes her innocent. She is simple and sincere in her hopes and ideals. If they are not met, she is not responsible. Reality will indeed constantly fail her, and this brings us to the second function. Her naivety is a major source of pathos. What the work presents (building on her narrative status as victim) is the story of a trust in the world that is continually disappointed.³⁸

Zilia must affirm the continuing integrity of her 'naïveté'. This is surely why we find her inexhaustibly proclaiming her love for Aza in every letter. This is why she must still believe in Aza's love for her, despite the evidence, and await his arrival with joyful confidence. She must then be pathetically astonished and devastated by his indifference. And though it is finally plain that 'Aza est infidèle!' (L. 38), this is why she must not be. Her explanation, in her last letter, seems to be twofold. Firstly, 'ma bonne foi trahie ne dégage pas mes serments'. We should note that she foregrounds the betrayal not of her love but of her good faith (her 'naïveté'). But why would any 'serments' on her part not be abrogated anyway by Aza's marriage to someone else? She continues, 'fidèle à moi-même, je ne serai point parjure' (L. 41). The obligation that she affirms seems to be less towards him than to the idea of her own faithfulness. The previous letter however suggested that she was trying to overcome her passion, but with little hope: 'de bonne foi avec moi-même, je compte peu sur ma raison' (L. 40). The quality that she claims here, rather, is truth to her own feelings. She is concerned in either case with presenting a certain image of herself. But she seems to hesitate between the notion of maintaining a timeless moral self-consistency (a value which looks back to romance and allegory) and that of accepting a more contingent or existential self, which in effect looks forward to the idea of individual authenticity.

Refuges

Zilia's refuge in misunderstanding her men is finally denied to her. She has however other forms of retreat from reality. Perhaps the most radical, manifested at the start of the work as near the end of it, is loss of consciousness. We saw that the violent invasion of the Temple prompted her to faint (L. I). This withdrawal from an unacceptable experience was repeated on the Spanish ship when her sanctuary was invaded again. 'Je ne soutins pas cet horrible spectacle, la force et la connaissance m'abandonnèrent' (L. 3). In the latter case she falls ill as well. Waking to quite new surroundings, she tells us, 'je refermai promptement les yeux' (L. 3). Then, discovering what lies beyond the cabin porthole, she attempts suicide — the most extreme form of escape from an unbearable reality (LL. 6-7). Forced at last by Déterville's declaration to recognize his passion (L. 23), she retreats into another illness. Finally Aza comes in person to declare his infidelity. She reacts initially with a kind of hysteria, albeit very conventional in its language and its exclamatory, fragmented, expression: 'Aza infidèle! Que ces funestes mots ont de pouvoir sur mon âme ... mon sang se glace ... un torrent de larmes ...' (L. 38). Then comes a collapse which takes her close to death and leaves her in protracted state of oblivion: 'environnée des ombres de la mort [...] j'ai longtemps ignoré ma propre existence' (L. 39). She emerges to seek a way of living which will protect her from all 'sentiments tumultueux', offering instead a primary and pacific 'plaisir d'être' (L. 41).

Finally Zilia will have a refuge in the literal sense. She has been endowed, quite unexpectedly and through the agency of Déterville and Céline, with a country house. Her joy ful account of the endowment itself constitutes Letter 35; the decision to '[s]e retirer' to this estate is announced and the way of life she proposes is adumbrated in Letters 40 and 41 (the last two in the work). The episode of the country house has prompted much critical interpretation. Clearly its possession and occupation represent a form of independence for Zilia. According to a certain feminism, this is a space where she can devote herself to reading, the pursuit of knowledge and her own writing. She herself calls it (in all the three letters just mentioned) a 'solitude'. She also however invites Déterville to enter it, as a space of 'amitié' to the exclusion of love and marriage (L. 41). Should we see in this final episode an affirmation of Zilia's mature identity, or a withdrawal from society and from sexuality? There is wide agreement that it represents a kind of retreat. But this has been seen variously as signifying a woman's freedom from patriarchy, as disillusion or alienation, as excessively privileged (aristocratic or individualistic) if not solipsist, as Edenic or pre-oedipal, and — under any of these heads — as a kind of fantasy.⁴³

The day begins, emblematically, with a journey away from the 'fatigues' of Paris. Zilia is taken by Céline, her new husband and Déterville, on what Céline announces as a visit to 'la meilleure de ses amies'. They arrive, Zilia relates, at 'une maison de campagne dont la situation et les approches me parurent admirables'. She continues:

In this initial presentation, everything is wondrous. The open doors are an oneiric motif.⁴⁶ They are liminal markers, offering privileged entry.⁴⁷ Zilia experiences enchantment. Making the identification explicit, this domain is placed under the aegis of fairy-tale. It is also under the sign of the feminine: Céline, the 'fée', 'la maîtresse du logis'. Zilia is requested to take the role of mistress of the house, 'En me prêtant à la plaisanterie' (she insists), she signs a document of 'consentement'. The term is appropriate, for she remains entirely passive, and everything continues to happen apparently of itself. The foursome are served an admirable meal, accompanied by a 'musique charmante'. Then they stroll through the extensive gardens, in which 'l'art et la symétrie ne s'y faisaient admirer que pour rendre plus touchants les charmes de la simple nature' (certainly a remarkable combination). Seated on a green sward by a wood, they are treated to a performance by a 'troupe de paysans' and another of 'jeunes filles vêtues de blanc'. Here fairy-tale embraces pastoral. The villagers, reports Zilia, sang 'des chansons, où j'entendis avec surprise, que mon nom était souvent répété'.

Not only is this endowment really hers already, because acquired with the treasures of 'her' Inca kingdom.49 The whole process of acquisition of the estate and refurbishment of the house is almost ellided ('ennuyeuses formalités').⁵⁰ Indeed Déterville will smilingly speak of a 'métamorphose', telling Zilia that Peruvian artefacts have changed into a French estate through a 'pouvoir magique'. For its upkeep, he shows her in a cupboard 'une cassette remplie de pièces d'or', which he calls 'les débris de l'opération magique'. The language could hardly be more pointed. The estate comes to her, magically, already perfect and secured for the future. Her two dear friends, Céline concludes, just wanted to surprise her with it. Thus Zilia need only accept — in happy astonishment, passively except for delicate protests, innocently. She flings herself into the arms of Céline, She professes herself 'transportée de joie en pensant au plaisir que j'aurai à te consacrer cette charmante demeure'. In her relationship with Céline (and Déterville), the estate is a sentimental correlative, a token of feeling, a means of expressing tender affection.

Zilia nevertheless takes moral possession of her domain. Everything around her, she writes, 'me parut prendre une nouvelle forme'. Only once before has she said this, following her first encounter with Aza, when she reported that 'tous les objets me parurent nouveaux' (L. 2). Again we have the birth of a new world and the pathos of belief ('me paraître'), in a moment of apparently equal intensity. She wanders through the house 'dans une ivresse de joie'. On her tour, three rooms will be singled out (a hint of the magical motif of three wishes?). The first she presents as

Letter 35 thus proceeds, in more than one sense, from Letter 27. At their centre are the 'ornements du Tiemple du Soleil' (L. 27) which take Zilia back to where she began. This lost Inca treasure, restored to her by her loving friends in the earlier letter, funds the estate and structures the room that they reveal to her in Letter 35.51 In effect, the Inca artefacts first rediscovered passionately are then deployed formally. They serve in Letter 35 both to secure the house for her future and to furnish the room of her earliest past. The room however has a special status. It is interior, closed and private to Zilia. It alone is accessed with a golden key.⁵² It must be a uniquely wondrous space. The focus in Letter 27 was principally on Zilia's celebration of the Inca religion and Aza. The hidden room offers a more diffused and aestheticized presentation focusing on Zilia herself.⁵³ Admirably depicted on the panelling are some of the 'jeux' (innocence) and the 'cérémonies' (ritual) that she had described to Déterville. Everywhere are Virgins of the Sun, and they all seem to look like Zilia. The dazzling mirrors must further this effect, returning to the real Zilia in the room multiple reflections of herself. The absence from this room of the 'chaise d'or' (explained by Déterville) has been perceived by some critics as a repudiation of patriarchy. But the Sun still presides overhead.⁵⁴ Zilia rejoices in what she calls 'cette charmante solitude'. The country house is itself a dream-house (designated as 'mon palais enchanté': LL. 35, 36). It contains centrally the room of memory and origins. Within a series of regressive frames is Zilia's retreat of purity, narcissism and indifferentiation.

Retreat however also allows self-assertion. After the tour of the house, Zilia rejoices in her new status. The rest of the day is spent with brother and sister 'dans les délices de la confiance et de l'amitié'. In this foretaste of the life that Zilia proposes at the end of the work, Céline's husband is simply forgotten.⁵⁵ Zilia, knowing that the game of her authority is now real, presides with more delight. 'Je leur fis les honneurs du souper encore plus gaiement que je n'avais fait ceux du diner.' Ownership makes her quite gleeful: 'j'ordonnais librement à des domestiques que je savais être à moi. Je badinais sur mon autorité et mon opulence'. This is new behaviour for Zilia,⁵⁶ Power evidently gives her pleasure. But other manifestations of a fantasy of power have appeared in her text. Her moral domination of Déterville is perhaps the most obvious. At one point he offers her a notable pleonastic tribute: 'Puissante Zilia, continua-t-il. quel pouvoir est le vôtre!' (L. 31). She herself seems to be completely dominated by the idea of Aza. But long before the country house, even before France, she dreams a kind of revenge. On the second ship, exhausted by suffering, she tells him

It was, she says, 'ce même amour qui me rendait féroce' (L. 3). This strange outburst suggests an underlying feeling of resentment at her own dependence. It will not emerge again, perhaps because from this point on she has Déterville who is so dependent on her.

During her early time in France, as we saw, she feels confused and humiliated by French society. But she discovers the great spectacle of nature. She declares nature to be superior to all the works of man, and even compares it favourably with the closed world of her Inca childhood.57 Nature expands her sense of her own being. Looking over the countryside, she says, 'on croit ne trouver de bornes à sa vue que celles du monde entier. Cette erreur nous flatte; elle nous donne une idée satisfaisante de notre propre grandeur, et semble nous rapprocher du Créateur de tant de merveilles'. The majestic disorder of a sunset, 'attire notre admiration jusqu'à l'oubli de nous-mêmes'. But then the night brings a more contemplative mood. 'Alors, revenant à nous-mêmes, un calme délicieux pénètre dans notre âme, nous jouissons de l'univers comme le possédant seuls, nous n'y voyons rien qui ne nous appartienne' (L. 12). Here is the double aspiration that we noted at the start, and which is implicit too in her proclivity for loss of consciousness or states of illusion. On the one hand is the wish to merge with the whole, on the other the dream of dominating. This passage on what she herself calls 'douce rêverie' is, again, unique in the work.

Most extraordinary of all however is an avowal in Letter 34. Having set out how Frenchwomen should be educated to virtue, this letter goes on to denounce the current mistreatment of wives. Women in marriage are immensely patient, 'mais qui peut résister au mépris!' Essential to our self-esteem is how we perceive '[le] cas qu'on fait de nous'. We need to believe indeed that we are 'nécessaire au bonheur d'un autre'. The passage continues:

Proprietorship will promptly follow, in Letter 35. When possession of the beloved is denied, almost as promptly, she will withdraw to her estate. In Letter 37 she will urge Déterville to return from Malta: 'que les devoirs de l'amitié vous ramènent; elle est le seul asile de l'amour infortuné'. In her last letter, she will invite Déterville (and Céline, though not Céline's husband) to join her, but on her terms. They are to share a kind of Utopian retreat, devoted to 'les plaisirs innocents et durables'. These are the literal and the moral places of her refuge from worldly society and from Sexual passion.

Writing, and the Body

A refuge that Zilia provides for herself, through much of the work and in a sense after it, is her letters. In those letters she repeatedly says that she depends on them to replace and thus survive a reality without Aza. We cited her statement that composing a quipu message to him 'me fait une illusion qui trompe ma douleur', constituting indeed 'mon bien et ma vie' (L. 4). Eventually in France she exhausts her stock of 'ces nœuds, qui me semblaient être une chaîne de communication de mon cœur au tien'. Then, she says, '[...] l'illusion me quitte, l'affreuse vérité prend sa place' (L. 17). Her next letter begins by recalling '[le] bonheur artificiel que je me faisais en croyant m'entretenir avec toi'. But fortunately she can maintain this artificial state, for she has now learned the system of writing. 'Je me sens ranimer par cette tendre occupation. Rendue à moi-même, je crois recommencer à vivre' (L. 18). 'Le dessein que j'ai de continuer à t'écrire' enables her to 'conserve[r] mon illusion' (L. 19). Composition replaces communication, the more evidently so in that Zilia has known ever since Letter 3 that she cannot send these messages. Indeed she cannot even be sure, till Letter 25, that their destinataire is alive.⁶² Quite independent of any reality beyond herself, composition maintains what she wants to believe. At this point, even Céline will no longer hear her woes. Only one confidant remains. 'Il ne me reste que la seule et pénible satisfaction de couvrir ce papier des expressions de ma tendresse, puisqu'il est le seul témoin docile des sentiments de mon cœur' (L. 19). Zilia's letters alone will offer her without contestation the reflection of her heart. Writing becomes narcissism.

It has been argued that the shift from Peruvian quipus to French script marks for Zilia a process of separation from original wholeness.⁶³ Certainly knots are more corporeal than script. Knotting is three-dimensional, using simple materials and organic manipulation to produce meaning. Zilia herself foregrounds these characteristics, associating them at the same time with with referential and expressive truth. 'Get amas innombrable de Cordons devenait sous mes doigts une peinture fidèle de nos actions et nos sentiments, comme il était autrefois l'interprète de nos pensées [...]' (L. I). The quipu is used in this novel (or rather misused, making what was actually a quite limited mnemonic device into an expressive verbal medium) as a richly Suggestive conceit. We could add that knotting is for Zilia a 'given', like her mother tongue, whereas her linguistic apprenticeship in France is slow and difficult. Zilia herself also contrasts the ways in which the Peruvians and the French use language. The 'children of the Sun' never lie (L. 3), whereas Parisians practice 'flatteries outrées' (L. 29). The former express themselves with 'simplicité', whereas fashionable French utterance is wilfully ambiguous, requiring one to 'saisir les différentes significations des mots et à déplacer leur usage' (L. 29).

That aspiration is reflected in her enthusiasm for the idea of a universal natural language. This idea is set out principally in Letter 17. Her position here seems doubly strange. In apparent self-contradiction, she devalues all verbal languages (including therefore both the Peruvian of her original wholeness and the French of her truthful letters). Secondly, the idea is developed through an absolute contrast between tragedy and opera, although these two genres had much in common (theatrical mode, heroic-sentimental ethos, even stories treated). These illogicalities might suggest to us that the idea itself must be important. Having denounced the tragic stage as the glorification of 'les insensés et les méchants' (L. 16), Zilia is then taken to the opera which she hails as 'un spectacle totalement opposé'. Here feelings are conveyed through 'des chants et des danses'. She finds herself 'affect [ée] parles différentes passions', which shows that 'l'intelligence des sons [est] universelle'. Verbal language is merely a human invention, 'puisqu'il diffère suivant les différentes nations'. (Difference again is the mark of defectiveness.) But 'la nature, plus puissante et plus attentive aux besoins et aux plaisirs de ses créatures', has given them a shared means of expression. Thus 'de tendres gémissements frappent nos cœurs d'une compassion bien plus efficace que des mots dont l'arrangement bizarre fait souvent un effet contraire'. As for dance, 'est-il dans aucune langue des expressions qui puissent communiquer le plaisir ingénu avec autant de succès que ne font les jeux naïfs des animaux? Il semble que les danses veulent les imiter; du moins inspirent-elles à peu près le même sentiment.' Art, then, is to imitate closely the spontaneous expression of the passions and of pleasure. This encomium of a non-verbal or pre-verbal language of nature (that of moans and animal behaviour) is almost literally regressive. But it can also be understood as a mise-en-abyme and even a literary manifesto for Zilia's own writing. That writing too deals centrally in 'tendres gémissements'. Zilia's inexhaustible expression of her own suffering presents itself indeed, as we have seen, as 'naïf'. Occasionally that writing also conveys a 'plaisir' which is again insistently 'ingénu'. It too is utterance from 'la nature' and directly to 'nos cœurs'.

Is Zilia's writing, too, to speak from the body (like dance), or speak lyrically (like Song)?65 Corporality and lyricism are arguably the two most remarkable characteristics of the style of the letters. Both are present in the collection's very first sentence: 'Aza! mon cher Aza! Les cris de ta tendre Zilia, tels qu'une vapeur du matin, s'exhalent et sont dissipés avant d'arriver jusqu'à toi'. The simile is striking. It is poetic not only by its figurative reference to the dawn mist and by its length, (as the ligature 'tels que', instead of the everyday 'comme', is itself poetic by its higher register). By sound and repetition too the verbs mime breath and its dissipation.⁶⁶ The status of such corporeal utterance is soon affirmed:

After the incipit with its use of apostrophe (and the dramatic opening in medias res), we have here balanced and intensifying negatives ('loin de [...] même', 'pas mieux') and rhetorical questions. The second quotation is heavily ideological (tears are glossed successively as 'mon langage', '[les] signes de la douleur', and 'la nature gémissante'). But this makes the anticipation of Letter 17 the more clear. Tears and other corporeal signs are Nature's voice, to which only those without humanity could be insensible. The immediate expression of suffering should touch and move.

At the other extreme from suffering, moral or aesthetic pleasure is expressed in language which is often intensely sensual. The terms which recur particularly are 'délicieux', 'goûter' and 'jouir'. 'Jouir' appears five times in the first two letters, and in Letter 3 in the surprising collocation 'je jouissais de ta douleur'. 'Goûter' tends to be used for refined forms of gratification. 'Volupté' also appears, with the three more recurrent terms, during the remarkable evocation of 'rêverie' in nature (L. 12).⁶⁷ Two later letters drawing on these terms are also set-pieces. They can be seen as compensations for her loss of original plenitude. Letter 35 recounts the 'journée délicieuse' during which Zilia receives her estate. Outdoors the party sit on a 'gazon délicieux'; indoors, shown the locked room, Zilia rejoices in its 'solitude [...] délicieuse'; then she enjoys with Déterville and Céline 'les délices de la confiance et de l'amitié' — all of this at what she calls in Letter 36 'mon délicieux château'. But this adjective will never appear again. In the next four letters, recounting Aza's repudiation of her and its aftermath, 'plaisir' itself is understandably absent. However it reappears insistently in the final letter. 'Plaisir' features six times, along with four instances of 'jouir', to qualify the way of life that Zilia proposes to Déterville in her retreat.

Can we say that the style of the letters as a whole is lyrical? The principal rhetorical feature of this writing seems to be a 'rhythme ternaire'.68 This could be regarded as emotionally expressive by its principle of accumulation, but the procedure is rather rigid. The vocabulary of the letters, heavy with words like 'nature', 'vertu' and 'humanité', combines classical abstraction with Enlightenment moral didacticism. Language and style risk monotony.⁶⁹ One simple measure of repetition and colourlessness is the recurrence of 'hélas', which appears 35 times in the 41 letters. This reminds us however that the whole text is infused with dissatisfaction and longing. Repetition itself is a basic poetic principle. The complaints and the sententiae, the moralizing but sensuous vocabulary, the rhetorical balance and rhythmical prosody, together give the text a certain incantatory power. Music, and especially opera, is a reference but also perhaps an aspiration.⁷⁰ The new sensibility seeks an expressive mode of writing which also marks its alienation from the real by creating and sustaining a more satisfying world of feeling.

How the work's 41 letters came to us is explained in an initial editorial 'Avertissement'. We are assured that what it presents is not 'une fiction' but 'lettres originales'. The missives in Peruvian were translated by Zilia herself. 'Le recueil n'en serait pas parvenu jusqu'à nous, si la même main ne les eût écrites dans notre langue. Nous devons cette traduction au loisir de Zilia dans sa retraite'. According to some feminist critics, this means that Zilia is to be a writer.⁷¹ But such a claim is, by any measure, a contradiction of the evidence. Firstly, no lady in earlier eighteenth-century France would wish to 'become a writer' in our modern professional sense.⁷² Secondly, Zilia herself is a noblewoman of the most delicate sensibility. In her letters she has shown a strong distaste not only for the public sphere, but for exchange (of money, books or views) and for heterogeneity of any kind. The emphasis within the letters falls constantly on their identity with herself.

What the genealogy in the 'Avertissement' establishes is the authenticity of the letters — not only as authorial expression but as what has reached us. Transmission, from origins 'jusqu'à nous' (not to mere 'publication'), is an unbroken chain. The suppression of mediation is initially literalized through synecdoche: Zilia's missives were composed and then translated by the very same hand ('la même main'). The account continues: 'la complaisance quelle a eue de les communiquer au chevalier Déterville, et la permission qu'il obtint de les garder les a fait passer jusqu'à nous'. From her they are graciously communicated (the verb is strong) to the noble Déterville. He has sought and received her authorization to 'garder' (retain, but also maintain and protect?) the letters. From him (the devotee of Zilia and of her letters, thus doubly the model for ourselves) they have reached us. The final paragraphs again affirm authenticity. We are told that some alien figures of speech have been removed from the letters, and certain metaphysical expressions have been simplified. However, 'on a été scrupuleux de ne rien dérober à l'esprit d'ingénuité qui règne dans cet ouvrage'. Unmediated expression ('ingénuité') has been given unmediated transmission ('ne rien dérober').

Notes to Chapter 1

1. Vierge du Soleil / Fille des Lumières: La 'Péruvienne' de Mme de Graf[f]igny et ses 'Suites' (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1989).

2. The developmental reading was established notably in several articles published around 1990 by Janet Altman; more subtly in ch. 6 of Nancy Miller's Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and more directly in the Introductions by Miller and Joan DeJean to the MLA edition of the Péruvienne (New York: MLA, 1993). The most remarkable expression of the alternative 'closed' reading probably remains Jack Undank, 'Graffigny's Room of her Own', French Forum, 13 (1988), 297—318; see too Paul Hoffmann, 'Les Lettres d'une Péruvienne: Un projet d'autarcie sentimentale', in Vierge du Soleil / Fille des Lumières, pp. 49-76.

3. For example, Diane Fourny, 'Language and Reality in Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 4 (1992), 221—38; Laurence Mail, 'Langues étrangères et étrangeté du langage dans les Lettres d'une Péruvienne de Mme de Graffigny', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 323 (1994), 323—43; Anne E. Duggan, Ά View from the "Other" Side: Zilia as Cultural Critic', Studi francesi, 136 (2002), 41—53. Jean-Paul Schneider, 'Les Lettres d'une Péruvienne: Roman ouvert ou roman fermé?', examines the issue directly and systematically in Vierge du Soleil / Fille des Lumières, pp. 7—48.

4. Eighty-two editions (including re-issues and translations) up to 1800 are listed in David Smith, 'The Popularity of Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne: The Bibliographical Evidence', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 3 (1990), 9—20.

5. On Graffigny's personal situation in the mid-1740s, see English Showalter, 'How Mme de Graffigny Made Ends Meet', SVEC 2002.06, 17—26. More generally, English Showalter, Françoise de Graffigny: Her Life and Works, SVEC 2004.11 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004).

6. References, by Letter (most are short), are to the edition by Jonathan Mallinson, Lettres d'une Péruvienne (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002).

7. 'Quoique vous ne me connussiez pas, je me persuadai que vous m'aviez remarquée entre toutes celles qui étaient avec moi', wrote the Portuguese nun of her first encounter with the French officer: Lettres portugaises (1669), Letter 4. Marivaux's Marianne, singled out in turn by the handsome Valville, reported feeling at their first encounter 'un mélange de trouble, de plaisir et de peur': La Vie de Marianne (1731—41), ed. by Frédéric Deloffre (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 66.

8. In fact the Inca Virgins did not live in the Temple of the Sun, and their House was closed to all men including the king, according to Graffigny's first source on all matters Incan, Garcilaso de la Vega's Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. See Vera L. Grayson, 'The Genesis and Reception of Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Cénie', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 336 (1996), 1—152 (p. 9). This forcing of the material makes her imaginary scenario the more significant.

9. Graffigny's editorial footnote at this point ('Les lois des Indiens obligeaient les Incas d'épouser leurs sœurs, [...]') seems fairly clear. So does the reaction of the Catholic priest to whom Zilia later reveals the object of her love, in L. 22. See too Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance, pp. 41—51, on incest in this novel as — adopting Foucault's expression — the 'Indispensable Pivot'.

10. This imperative is admirably formulated in Montesquieu's tale of another Sun-worshipping youthful couple. The Zoroastrian brother in love with his sister evokes 'ces alliances saintes, que notre religion ordonne plutôt quelle ne permet, et qui sont des images si naïves de l'union déjà formée par la Nature' (Lettres persanes, L. 67). Nature founds and religion confirms an alliance which is at once primitive and familial, a personal desire and a sacred duty. Graffigny's Inca setting, however, also makes the alliance specifically (and exclusively) royal.

11. Broadly similar readings of the significance of the Temple and the betrothal to Aza are offered by Fourny, 'Language and Reality', and Hoffmann, 'Un projet d'autarcie sentimentale'.

12. In Letter 2 she will propose to Aza that he abandon the 'devoirs' of his imperilled throne, and run away with her to live for love. The idea is very Racinian, but in Racine it represents a temptation, a form of moral cowardice that must be condemned: 'Ah! lâche, fais l'amour et renonce à l'empire. / Au bout de l'univers, va, cours te confiner', Titus upbraids himself (Bérénice, 11. 1024—25). In the Péruvienne it seems to be just another expression of Zilia's tenderness: the issue of moral blindness or weakness is replaced by the effect of pathos.

13. On this scene as '[1']image transparente d'un traumatisme de la défloration', see Martin, Espaces du féminin, p. 263.

14. 'Quelques réflexions sur les Lettres persanes', accompanying the 1754 version of the work.

15. See my Playing Simplicity: Polemical Stupidity in the Writing of the French Enlightenment (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002).

16. In a revelatory slip, the 'Avertissement' in the 1747 edition attributes to Zilia 'termes et comparaisons orientales' — hardly Peruvian, and presumably reflecting the paradigm of the Lettres persanes, which has a similar (but playful) reference to oriental style in the 1721 'Introduction'. This is changed in the 1752 version, which also contains a new 'Introduction historique'.

17. The Lettres turques (1730), by Poullain de Saint-Foix, featured a female reporter; likewise, explicitly, if less exotically, Bridard de la Garde's Lettres de Thérèse *** ou Mémoires d'une jeune demoiselle de province pendant son séjour à Paris (1739): see Mallinson, ed., Péruvienne, pp. 19—27, 39—48. But only in the present case is the real author also a woman.

18. De-familiarization of language too is no longer here a device for satire, but the expression of the subject's alienation. See Barbara Knauff, 'Figures of Female Alienation: The Uses of Periphrasis in the Lettres d'une Péruvienne', Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 26 (1998), 125—38.

19. Studies of the whole of Zilia's 'learning process' in the novel are offered by Janet G. Altman, 'Graffigny's Epistemology and the Emergence of Third-World Ideology', in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Boston: North-Eastern University Press, 1989), pp. 172—202; and John C. O'Neal, The Authority of Experience (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), ch. 5.

20. Letter 29 (like much of Letter 28) was added in the edition of 1752. This particular sequence, unique in its evocation of a desired collective condition which is other not in space but in time, seems to echo two passages in Rousseau's recently-published Discours sur les sciences et les arts ('ils sourient dédaigneusement [...]' and 'l'image de la simplicité des premiers temps OC ni, pp. 19 and 22). On the possible influence of the Discours on Letter 29, see Laure Challandes, 'Mme de Graffigny et Rousseau', in Françoise de Graffigny, femme de lettres: Ecriture et réception, ed. by Jonathan Mallinson, SVEC 2004.12 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004), pp. 149—58.

21. Ά voice of social satire'; '[in] her critique of French society [...] Zilia becomes a far bolder practitioner of this dominant Enlightenment discourse than are the heroes created by any of Graffigny's male contemporaries': Joan DeJean, 'Introduction' to the MLA edition of the Péruvienne (1993), p. xii.

22. Usually singled out is Letter 34 ('some of the most vehement feminist protest in eighteenth-century literature', 'unflinching critique' and so on: loc. cit.). For an alternative account of Letter 34 in its period context, see my 'Le Féminisme de la Péruvienne, in Mallinson, ed., Françoise de Graffigny, femme de lettres, pp. 299—310.

23. This ideal however is not exactly 'feudal', as suggested by Anne Duggan, 'Zilia as Cultural Critic', pp. 41, 52. The feudal model too is unchanging, but it is local and thus multiple. Here all is to flow from and to the centre.

24. Zilia's enthusiasm for books ('ces merveilleux ouvrages') has nothing to do with literature or the arts in our sense. She describes their content as 'ce que les hommes ont fait, et [...] pensé', which clearly means history and philosophy. It does not mean fiction (no Peruvian, after all, has ever told a lie: L. 3). If she refers to their authors as 'des hommes divins', and likens them to the Sun, it is surely because she perceives here the equivalent of the teachers or Amautas who purvey their 'sublimes connaissances' in Peru. Books for Zilia are not imagination or debate but annals and wisdom.

25. Zilia denounces this 'religion', which we would call conspicuous consumption, as a 'dérèglement de l'imagination'. She seems to favour sumptuary laws, which would allow 'certaines décorations dans chaque état qui caractérisent la naissance ou les richesses' (L. 29).

26. A similar conclusion is reached by Anne Duggan, who sees here the expression of 'a resistance to modernism' (op. cit., p. 52).

27. Of the family we are told that 'la maison quelle habite est presque aussi magnifique que celle du Soleil' (L. 13). We will later learn that 'Déterville, par sa haute naissance et par son mérite personnel, étant dans une grande considération, pourrait tout ce qu'il voudrait' (and his power is not confined to France, for he also has 'un Oncle tout-puissant à la Cour d'Espagne': L. 21).

28. 'The French characters of the Lettres d'une Péruvienne are divided into two camps, according to whether or not they are sensitive to the plight of the heroine': Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, p. 144.

29. Zilia complains of 'tant de contrariété et de peine de la part du frère et de la sœur L. 24.

30. It is significant that Aza, heir to his father's throne, is the eldest son, the patriarch-in-waiting. Déterville is explicitly a younger son (LL. 13, 19), who will therefore never inherit but remain in a sibling or indeed infantile relation with Zilia within the symbolic family.

31. As sexual violation by Aza is displaced on to the Spanish, one might suggest that any residual sexual threat from Déterville is displaced on to the doctor (L. 4) and most strikingly on to the young man who touches her breast (while Déterville is present but inactive again) in Letter 14.

32. The motivation for Aza's infidelity is far from clear. What are called the 'obstacles invincibles' to Zilia's union with him (L. 23) are left not only unexplained but mysteriously plural. They could include geographical distance, captive status, personal consanguinity, Aza's conversion to Christianity, his love for the 'rivale' belatedly evoked in Letters 38—39 (alongside religion and consanguinity), or something else again. This muddiness suggests that the rejection itself is what matters.

33. An alternative motivation can also be detected for the exclusion of marriage with Déterville. The text associates him with the Knights of Malta (see LL. 19 and 37—39). Full membership of this religious order would mean that he was vowed to celibacy, thus 'ne pouvant avoir Zilie parce qu'il est chevalier de Malthe', as Graffigny herself briskly notes in an earlier plan for her novel (Correspondance de Mme de Graffigny. ed. by J. A. Dainard et al. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988—), VI, 548). Implicit here is the idea of a 'chivalric' renunciation of sexuality on his side. Multiplicity or ambiguity of motivation again suggests that what matters is mythical function.

34. 'Les peines qu'il aurait fallu me donner pour pénétrer le cœur des femmes, et la crainte de n'y pas trouver la franchise que j'y désirais, ne m'ont laissé pour elles qu'un goût vague ou passager; j'ai vécu sans passion jusqu'au moment où je vous ai vue.' We see again how other women are not only devalued but assigned negative characteristics (here, lack of openness) in relation to Zilia. Between this existential deprecation and the theoretical solidarity in Letters 33 and 34 (which suggest that the faults of Frenchwomen are to be blamed on their mistreatment by society) no connection seems to be made.

35. Some of Graffigny's first readers thought the same. 'On a peine à se figurer que connaissant l'amour par sa propre expérience, elle n'en retrouve pas les caractères dans les soins empressés de Déterville. [...] mais elle voulait se faire un mérite auprès d'Aza de sa simplicité ingénue', suggests Fréron, in the most intelligent of the several contemporary 'reviews' of the Péruvienne. The point is made more generally, and maliciously, by La Porte: 'Cette fille du Soleil était quelquefois un peu dissimulée; rien ne le prouve mieux, que l'ignorance affectée qu'elle fit paraître sur les premières marques que Déterville lui donna de son amour'. See Mallinson, ed., Péruvienne, pp. 261—62, 275.

36. She notes in Letter 7 'le feu de ses yeux'. In Letter 9 she says 'Rien ne peut se comparer, mon cher Aza, aux bontés qu'il a pour moi: loin de me traiter en esclave, il semble être le mien'.

37. It is also foregrounded editorially in advance. The short 'Avertissement' preceding the letters affirms 'l'esprit d'ingénuité qui règne dans cet Ouvrage'.

38. One of the roles of the Fool, serving to show us the reality of the world, is to undergo its habitual violence. Here too we see how the world's assaults are no longer presented principally from the outside, and comically (as the repeated battering of Don Quixote's or Candide's body is related to us by an amused narrator), but from the inside, and pathetically (as the repeated battering of Zilia's moral sensibility is related by the distressed protagonist herself).

39. As indeed she never does. At the end, refusing Déterville once more, she will affirm 'mon penchant invincible pour Aza' despite his infidelity, but also in the same regressive logic 'le regret de n'être pas née en France' (L. 41).

40. 'Hélas! si tu m'aimes encore, pourquoi suis-je dans l'esclavage? [...] Tu crois sincère les promesses que ces barbares [espagnols] te font.'

41. The real issue emerges already from her reaction to Déterville's amorous declaration. We saw that when asked whether it is true that she does not love him, she exclaims 'Moi! [...], je ne vous aime point!'. She continues, 'Ah, Déterville! comment votre sœur peut-elle me noircir d'un tel crime? L'ingratitude me fait horreur; je me haïrais moi-même, si je croyais pouvoir cesser de vous aimer'. Her concern is not for his feelings but for the vindication (and re-exhibition) of her own.

42. While this is a denunciation of the bad faith of men (recalling Letter 34), it also — once again — sets Zilia apart from and superior in suffering to Frenchwomen.

43. The most attentive version of the 'progressive' reading probably remains Miller, Subject to Change, ch. 6. Richly suggestive around the idea of disillusion is Undank, 'Graffigny's Room of her Own'; alienation is the focus for Barbara Knauff, 'Figures of Female Alienation'. A noble sensibility is central for Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, pp. 147—50; privileged solipsism in Diane Fourny, 'Language and Reality'. Pre-oedipal tendencies are identified in John C. O'Neal, Authority of Experience, ch. 5; in Anne Duggan, 'Zilia as Cultural Critic'; see too Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance. On the Edenic, J. David Macey Jr, 'Eden Revisited: Re-Visions of the Garden in Astell's Serious Proposal, Scott's Millenium Hall, and Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1997), 161—82. Broader tendencies to idealization and fantasy are perceived in Bonnie Robb, 'The Easy Virtue of a Peruvian Princess', French Studies, 46 (1992), 144—59; Christine Roulston, 'Seeing the Other in Mme de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1997), 309—26.

44. The anticipation could be attributed to Déterville, reflecting his foreknowledge of Aza's infidelity, but this is not clear. Recovering later from the rejection, Zilia will thank Déterville for his 'prévoyante bonté' in having provided her with the house. But just before the visit he suggests (and she affirms) that she and Aza 'unis ensemble' by marriage will occupy it together (L. 36). Had Déterville foreseen the repudiation, why would he have fled to Malta? If nevertheless he is in the know, so it seems is Céline. For beforehand it is she who makes the most apparently pointed remark, telling Zilia that she now has, 'à tout événement, une demeure [qui vous] assur[e] une vie indépendante ' (L. 35).

45. In the original version of 1747 it was the longest, but the new Letter 34 added in 1752 outdoes it.

46. 'Elle s'approche d'un palais brillant [...] et aussitôt les portes s'ouvrirent d'elles-mêmes' (in Voltaire's short dream-taie Le Crocheteur borgne). Don Quixote, following romance models, claims to have seen in the Cave of Montesinos 'a sumptuous palace' and then 'two great doors open': Don Quixote 11.23. One might also note, with Odysseus (Odyssey 19) and then Aeneas (at the end of the Aeneid 6), that dreams are transmitted through Gates of Ivory or Gates of Horn.

47. We may recall that the 'cent portes' of the Temple were to open only for Aza (L. 1).

48. In her previous account of a chorus in celebration of herself (the men in the salon), she claimed not even to understand it: Letter 11.

49. It was not of course Déterville and the French who plundered the treasure from the Incas, but the wicked Spanish, from whom they rescued it. The treasure is however the patrimony of Peru; only in the logic of sentiment can it be said to belong to Zilia.

50. This is an aristocratic attitude: contact with what Letter 20 disapprovingly called 'commerce ou industrie' is never mentioned. But rather more than class is at stake.

51. The moral pattern in both letters is the same: Céline playfully presides, Déterville tenderly endows, Zilia protestingly accepts. In particular, compare the incipit of the episode of the trunks with that of the Temple room. The lines beginning 'Céline me dit, en me présentant des clefs [...]' in Letter 27, anticipate almost phrase for phrase those starting with 'Céline [...] me faisa[it] souvenir d'une clef [...]' quoted above from Letter 35.

52. In the first edition of the novel emphasis was also laid on the hidden nature of this room: 'la porte quelle devait ouvrir [était] confondue avec art dans les lambris; il était impossible de la découvrir sans savoir le secret' (Mallinson edn, p. 209, variant i). The revised edition drops this sentence, but retains the essential indices of the secret treasure: a locked door and a golden key.

53. 'Dans le couvent, tous les objets d'or lui rappellent Aza, mais dans sa maison, tout la reflète elle-même', observes Jonathan Mallinson, ed., Péruvienne, p. 55.

54. This is indeed a restoration of original order, for the Spanish invasion saw 'l'image du Soleil foulée aux pieds' (L. 1).

55. He has already been morally dismissed for his lack of sensibility: 'le mari de Céline, moins intéressé que nous à ce qui se passait [...] nous engagea à retourner dans la maison pour en examiner, disait-il, les défauts'! We saw earlier how he distracted Céline from her duty of 'amitié' with Zilia.

56. 'For the first time in the novel Zilia truly comes alive in this scene' (Diane Fourny, 'Language and Reality', p. 235). In fact Letter 27 again offers some anticipation. There, in what one might see as a preliminary and displaced version of the dream of power, it is Céline who suddenly becomes rich and independent. She showers Zilia with girlish gifts, Zilia's 'délicatesse' is offended, but when the matter is resolved, 'la gaieté s'est rétablie entre nous'.

57. 'Ce que j'ai vu des prodiges inventés par les hommes ne m'a point causé le ravissement que j'éprouve dans l'admiration de l'univers'; 'Renfermée dans le Temple dès ma plus tendre enfance, je ne connaissais pas les beautés de l'univers; quel bien j'avais perdu!' (L. 12).

58. A reading of Zilia's trajectory as cumulative expansion and then final retreat is presented most clearly in O'Neal, Authority of Experience, ch. 5.

59. The first of the letters on France (L. 20) seems already fully instructed. The last (L. 34) presents itself as a new advance in understanding; but it and the whole sequence end with the affirmation that Aza remains her guide and model.

60. She proclaims to Déterville: 'Je vous laisserai voir avec une égale franchise le regret de n'être point née en France, et mon penchant invincible pour Aza; le désir que j'aurais de vous devoir l'avantage de penser, et mon éternelle reconnaissance pour celui [= Aza] qui me l'a procuré' (L. 41).

61. 'Vous ornerez mon esprit de ce qui le peut rendre amusant; [...] je tâcherai de vous rendre agréables les charmes naïfs de la simple amitié' (L. 41).

62. 'The primary function of Zilia's love letters is to call Aza into being': Fourny, p. 230.

63. See notably Miller, ch. 6, who offers an account of the whole work in terms of a 'coming to writing'.

64. Both this account of writing and the earlier evocations of Peruvian knotting will be cited in the Encyclopédie, in the articles 'Ecriture' and 'Quipos'. See Mallinson, ed., Péruvienne, pp. 300—02.

65. Writing might thus embrace the other two kinds of emotional refuge identified earlier: retreat into minimal (corporeal) consciousness, and into ideal illusion.

66. Already too we have here the abyme of the letters themselves, verbalized plaintive cries addressed to Aza which fail to reach him (literally after this first letter and perhaps morally including this first letter).

67. The passage beginning 'Que les bois sont délicieux, mon cher Aza!' (in its almost identical 1747 form) is singled out for admiration by both Fréron and La Porte: see Mallinson, ed., Péruvienne, pp. 265, 269.

68. The identification and the term are due to Jean-Paul Schneider, who offers a very useful account of aspects of the novel's style. Alongside ternary and binary rhetorical structures, Schneider points to 'une métrique qui tend vers celle du vers classique', citing utterances which approximate to alexandrines or which can be broken into short lines of blank verse. He recognizes in this writing 'd'indiscutables réussites poétiques'. See Schneider, 'Roman ouvert ou roman fermé?', pp. 13—16. To my knowledge, this is the only sustained stylistic analysis of the letters, a question surprisingly neglected.

69. Graffigny herself was at least partially aware of the problem. Sending Devaux a draft of what becomes the first part of the novel, she comments on 'ce qui m'en choque le plus: c'est une insipide uniformité de tours de phrase'. See Correspondance, VI, 540 (Letter 887, 17/18 August 1745).

70. 'L'attrait pour la musique se double chez Mme de Graffigny de l'invention d'un style musical et harmonieux', is the nice formulation of Pierre Hartmann, 'Les Lettres d'une Péruvienne dans l'histoire du roman épistolaire', in Vierge du Soleil, pp. 93—111 (p. 109). Jack Undank, noting the echoes in Zilia's Letter 17 of Rémond de Saint-Mard's Réflexions sur l'opéra (1741), sees the whole work in terms of a retreat from harsh realities into 'estheticisation'.

71. 'Inside the "château of her own", she becomes a writer' (Joan DeJean, 'Introduction' to Péruvienne, p. 16). This claim might be understood as psycho-cultural, or as socio-cultural. In the former sense, it has been proposed that 'Zilia revenant à ses quipos pour les traduire surmonte l'immédiateté de l'épistolarité [... et] accède à l'autorité de l'écrivain' (Laurence Mall, 'Langues étrangères', p. 342). In the latter sense, another critic gives the heroine's 'vocation as writer' a wider historical significance: 'Zilia is in fact quite active in what Habermas called the "public sphere", a space he defined in large part by the exchange of money and of books' (Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance, pp. 49, 55).

72. Graffigny herself explains in such terms her decision to compose her projected full-length play not in verse (usual for the professional stage until the 1750s) but in prose: 'Je crains trop le nom d'auteur. Si j'avois une embition, ce ne seroit pas d'etre Mde Deshoulieres, mais bien Md. de La Fayete' (Correspondance, VI, 549 (Letter 889, 22 August 1745)). If she must be known, let it be not as a proficient poetess but as a lady amateur (whose name did not appear on her work).

Chapter 1
Lettres d'une Péruvienne

Origins

Expulsion

The Visitor

French Society

'Notre petite société'

Naïveté

Refuges

Writing, and the Body

Notes to Chapter 1

Chapter 1 Lettres d'une Péruvienne

Origins

Expulsion

The Visitor

French Society

'Notre petite société'

Naïveté

Refuges

Writing, and the Body

Notes to Chapter 1

Chapter 1
Lettres d'une Péruvienne