My Introduction identified what I take to be some regressive tendencies in French culture of the later eighteenth century, within a framework of historical explanation. My main chapters offered detailed readings of three remarkable novels which were best-sellers of the period. My Conclusion will be limited to bringing out various elements that these fictions share — broadly in turn spatial, familial, psychological and literary. We shall observe significant modifications from the mid-century time of my first novel to the Revolutionary decade of the last.
All three novels feature a protected space. In the Péruvienne we have Zilia's country house (and the initial collective Temple); in Julie there is the estate of Clarens; in Paul et Virginie we have the 'bassin'. This space however acquires increasing importance. The country house is presented only near the end of Zilia's story, but Clarens occupies the second half of Julie, and the 'bassin' is the focus almost throughout Paul et Virginie. The degree of enclosure also increases. No explicit boundaries are identified for Zilia's country house and park, whereas Clarens is deliberately closed off by its masters from the wider world, and the basin is defended naturally by its rocky 'murailles' (located in turn on an island). As social units, all three spaces are assigned economies which are more or less Self-sustaining. The country house is funded by a cupboardful of Inca gold, Clarens by private inheritance and systematic management, and the basin by the labour of all its inhabitants. But these means of maintenance show striking change. From the blithe expenditure of capital in the Péruvienne, we move to the careful husbanding of resources at Clarens, then to the daily physical toil in the basin. From aristocratic leisure to bourgeois oversight to a peasant collective, one might say. But all three spaces are rural.
These spaces are retreats from the city. The city is identified with 'le monde' — which means fashionable society, high civilization, or worldliness itself. It is always represented by Paris. The antithesis is consistent, but over our period it becomes much stronger. Zilia's country house is only a short drive from Paris. It is free of worldly social vices, but it offers all the refinement and comforts of high civilization. It is entirely a product of that civilization; but labour is nowhere visible. Clarens is much farther from Paris, and just outside the borders of France. It too is aristocratic, but it is a working estate. Luxury is banished, convenience we are told thereby increased. Clarens combines artifice with nature. Labour is sometimes proudly displayed as a manifestation of duty and community, but sometimes hidden so as to maintain the appearance of naturalness. Finally, Bernardin's 'bassin' is on an island some thousands of miles from Europe. Its inhabitants lead a simple and hard-working life in harmony with nature, and in maximum contrast to that of the privileged classes in the French capital. We could add that, as the retreat acquires greater importance in the three narratives, the amount of attention given to the metropolis declines. Zilia, Saint-Preux and Virginie all come to Paris. Each visit serves to motivate a moral and social if not also political critique. But this occupies a decreasing proportion of the text. Personal dispositions also change. Zilia begins with a certain 'curiosité', but Saint-Preux declares Paris alien, and Virginie is simply lost and distressed. All come to Paris involuntarily, as a consequence of expulsion from the place where they wish to be.
Yet, in every case, the retreat contains further retreats. Zilia's house offers three privileged places within itself: the library, the room of stuffs, and most importantly the 'nouveau Temple'. The masters of Clarens can withdraw into its 'salle d'Apollon' or notably its 'Elysée'. The basin contains the 'repos de Virginie'. These recessed spaces, though implying a lack of confidence in the primary retreat, clarify as well as confirm its signification. As several of the names indicate, the principal characteristics of the retreat are calm and the feminine. Zilia's 'nouveau Temple', recalls the original Temple of the Virgins of the Sun. The 'Elysée', also suggesting a domain of collective calm, is specifically associated with Julie and her mother. 'Le repos de Virginie', we noted, is Virginie's repose but also Virginie as repose. All three of these interior spaces also imply a retreat from present time and instability into a continuous state which resembles the first state. The new Temple recalls Zilia's childhood, before the invasion of the original Temple expelled her into the world. Elysium signifies the life after this world, but as Julie's memorial to her mother it is also associated with her earlier years. Virginie's 'repos' was destroyed literally and morally, like Zilia's, when she left childhood. All are implicitly substitutes for the place of original plenitude. Inviolateness is suggested by the locks on Zilia's new Temple and Julie's 'Elysée', as by the representations of 'nos Vierges' in the new Temple and the sense of Virginie's name.
At the moral centre of the protected space in each novel is a female figure. Here however is a major difference between the Péruvienne and the other two fictions. Zilia, unlike Julie and Virginie, is not part of a family unit. The country house belongs to her alone. She may share it with Déterville and his sister, but she remains in charge. This instance of female assertion we might attribute to the earlier date of the Péruvienne (in 1750 the family is not yet a major element in French prose fiction), and to social class (the woman of independent mind and means in mid-century France was characteristically of the nobility). It may well reflect too the class of the real author, Mme de Graffigny. It surely reflects her gender. Graffigny has just one protagonist, who is a beautiful Inca princess. She is affianced to the Prince of the Sun, and worshipped by a French noble of almost equal glamour. She is abandoned by the first (but maintains her own eternal fidelity), and refuses the second, opting to withdraw to an admirable house which has been gifted to her. Sexual love is to be excluded from this temple of 'amitié'. It contains, for her alone, a new Temple whose interior walls are lined with mirrors. But the essential mirrors of Zilia are her own letters, where she creates her self-image at the time of writing, and to which she returns in her retreat to fix her past self for other readers. The underlying principle of this fiction is narcissism.
Our other two novels are authored by men. Rousseau and Bernardin are both commoners. They create male protagonists who are of the people. But they too imagine heroines of noble birth. Each fiction establishes a bond of love between a male commoner (Saint-Preux, Paul) and a well-born female (Julie, Virginie). The marriage project is resisted by her family (the Baron d'Etange, Mme de La Tour), who are clearly criticized for their aristocratic prejudice. But the issue of marriage across the classes is not what these novels are about. The superior status of the female protagonist has more to do with her dominance of her lover. And though Julie and Virginie are noble, the moral and sentimental ethos that they are assigned is bourgeois.
The principal element in this new ethos is the cult of the family. Julie in the first half of Rousseau's novel is less committed to her lover than to her parents. In the second half she is an exemplary wife and mother. At the mid-point (III.18) she sets out a systematic vindication of the institution of marriage. At the end she dies, having saved the life of her son, 'martyre de l'amour maternel'. In Bernardin's novel Mme de La Tour and Marguerite devote themselves entirely to their children. Rejected by her aunt at the time of her marriage, La Tour we are told was too proud to appeal to her when first a widow; 'mais, devenue mère, elle ne craignit plus la honte des refus' (p.133). A mother puts aside all other considerations. Virginie will repay such maternal devotion by beComing an obedient and dutiful daughter. And as we have seen she will be a domestic paragon. It is these qualities which first earn her in turn the contempt of the Parisian aunt. Both filial and marital values are affirmed when Virginie resists the aunt's wish that she abandon her mother's married name. When she is drowned, the old narrator underlines the significance of La Tour's reaction. 'J'ai jugé qu'aucune douleur n'était égale à la douleur maternelle' (p. 244). Unique status is assigned to motherhood.
Both Julie's first and second families (Etange and Wolmar) are of noble lineage, but it is the nuclear model that she celebrates. With filial piety she repeatedly affirms the moral and affective excellence of her parents. Her mother is 'la meilleure des mères' (1.6; 1. 63), 'digne épouse et mère incomparable' (111.4). Julie's father is likewise 'le meilleur des pères' (I.20, 28, 29; IV.15). Together they are 'ce tendre père et cette mère incomparable' (I.36). She herself aspires to 'l'honneur d'être mère', and in due course she and Claire will both have 'le bonheur d'être mère' (III.18, 26).1 At Clarens Julie enjoys with Wolmar 'une si parfaite union', affirming that 'le rang d'épouse et de mère m'élève l'âme' (IV.I). Edouard admires how well '[elle] remplit ses devoirs d'épouse et de mère' (V.I). Saint-Preux urges her example upon all women: to enjoy 'le plus doux empire qui soit sur la terre', 'veuillez être femmes et mères' (V.3). The ideology could not be more explicit.
Yet, as we have seen, Julie's first family is radically dysfunctional. Her mother's moral laxity, and her father's class prejudice, are to blame for her own improper relation with the Tutor (see notably 1.28). But she is filled with guilt. Her father's former philandering is the cause of his wife's early death from sexual shame. He uses physical violence on his daughter to exclude her choice of husband, and then emotional blackmail to impose his own choice. In Julie's second family, violence is abolished; but guilt and shame are institutionalized. In the same letter as Julie proclaims her perfect union with Wolmar, she calls her situation an 'état affreux' — because of the secret of her sexual past. 'Je ne suis jamais seule avec cet homme respectable que je ne sois prête à tomber à genoux devant lui, à lui avouer ma faute et à mourir de douleur et de honte à ses pieds' (IV. 1)! Nor is motherhood so satisfying, as she also reveals. 'L'amour maternel [...] a besoin de communication, et quel retour peut attendre une mère d'un enfant de quatre ou cinq ans?'2
But the essential is the relation with Wolmar. The feudal regime represented by the Baron is replaced by the modern regime of Wolmar. As Wolmar invites Saint-Preux to Clarens, Julie at last avows to him their former intimacy. But she and then Saint-Preux discover — when he reveals their letters — that he already knew. The superego already knows your secrets (especially your sexual secrets)! Julie we recall resolves not only to tell her husband everything that she does while he is away, but to write each of her letters 'comme s'il ne la devait point voir, et de la lui montrer ensuite' (IV. 7). The physical absence of the authority-figure only increases her need for exculpation and her desire for approval. Her disposition in relation to Wolmar is like that of Saint-Preux. At the supposed conclusion of Wolmar's 'cure', Saint-Preux avers 'je ne crains point que son œil éclairé lise au fond de mon cœur' (V.7). But of course he does still fear this inspecting eye, or else he would not mention it. He and Julie are similar. They internalize the law. They fear the patriarchal judgement, and (therefore) they want to confess. It is just part of the genius of Rousseau in this work to establish the ideal of the bourgeois family and at the same time reveal it to be the domain of coercion, guilt and perpetual anxiety.
The new familial order tells us too about the new political order. We saw that in the great letter after her wedding (111.18), Julie declared marriage to be part of 'les devoirs de la vie civile'. She also recorded her own moral and psychological 'révolution'. The experience occurs during the ceremony, which is public and under the eye of her father ('l'aspect imposant de mon vénéré père [...]'). In her account, 'une puissance inconnue sembla corriger tout à coup le désordre de mes affections [...]. L'œil éternel qui voit tout, disais-je en moi-même, lit maintenant au fond de mon cœur; il compare ma volonté cachée à la réponse de ma bouche'. The inspecting eye here is religious and social. But again it sees into one's secret heart. We were just told that it cannot be misled or mistaken (for it is 'éclairé' — meaning Enlightened?). Now we are told that it watches all the time and sees everything. Anticipated here is the giant eye which will feature in the civic iconography of the Revolution. We noted (in the Introduction) the parallel with Bentham's concept of the Panopticon — the instrument for collective control and individual reformation of deviancy. Julie's 'révolution' already seeks to realize the individual and collective dream of eoine back to the beeinnine, cleansed of history, to make a fresh start.
From this point Julie has supposedly become a full member of the new order, but Saint-Preux has not. When he arrives at Clarens, he finds her occupying 'le rang d'épouse et de mère'. He is quickly dominated by both the Wolmars. Entering the 'Elysée' alone, he improperly anticipates escaping from 'tout cet ordre social et factice', so as to enjoy 'la seule nature', with 'l'ouvrage de celle qui me fut si chère [...] tout autour de moi'. But then recalling Wolmar's severe words his dispositions are corrected. 'J'ai cru voir l'image de la vertu où je cherchais celle du plaisir. Cette image s'est confondue dans mon esprit avec les traits de Mme de Wolmar [...]. Je voyais à ces côtés le grave Wolmar [et] je croyais voir son œil pénétrant et judicieux percer au fond de mon cœur' (IV. 11). Saint-Preux is required to develop from the pleasure principle to that of virtue. Though entering the garden 'avec l'empressement d'un enfant', he is required to attain adulthood. But lie says 'j'ai cru voir l'image [...]' and 'je croyais voir son œil'. He is, precisely, interiorizing the law of his 'parents'. Julie of her marriage experience said 'sembla'. The inspecting eye may not exist except in their own aspiration to satisfy it. Julie says 'disais-je en moi-même'. The manacles are forged in, if not by, the mind.
But if civic marriage is so important, why is this state not for Saint-Preux, or for Paul and Virginie, or for Zilia? All affirm their own passionate desire to be joined with the beloved. Yet in each of our three novels the union is prevented. In each moreover, as we saw, this is brought about by a curious imbroglio of motivations and factors. Their multiplicity and confusion suggest that the logic lies elsewhere. The underlying imperative seems to be to keep these youthful protagonists from having to take on mature sexuality. We move more clearly from the social representation of the family to its psychological or mythical representation. Telling us more about the imaginaire of the real authors, and the real readers who were so enthused, in all three of our novels we have an oedipal drama. We start not with the child but with the Father. The Father or Patriarch is in possession of the Horde of women. In the Péruvienne the Royal Inca has his closed Temple of the Virgins. In Julie the Baron d'Etange while philandering keeps his wife and daughter at home. Bernardin's Old Man runs his little harem in the basin. With the advent of the child comes the drama, which takes varying forms.
The classic form is most clearly and richly illustrated in Rousseau's novel. The 'son' Saint-Preux wants to remain with the mother and daughter in the house; but he is driven out by the 'father'. (The Baron as we have seen is a patriarch of murderous possessiveness who has already killed his own son. By killing his grandchild in Julie's womb, he destroys the sexual potency of his aspirant son-in-law; and he will soon kill his wife who admitted him). The father keeps possession of the daughter, and gives her to his own companion. Wolmar duly takes over the role of patriarch in relation to his wife and especially to Saint-Preux. But Wolmar is a good father, who proceeds not by assaulting bodies but manipulating minds. He encourages the young persons to enter the new order (as Julie has already done), conditioning them to forget their history and grow up. (He even offers Saint-Preux two substitutive roles within his own little horde at Clarens: to be tutor to his children, and to be husband to Julie's cousin; Saint-Preux accepts the former role on the understanding that he can still be their son too, and declines the latter.) The son's dilemmas are resolved by the mother, who dies (saving her real son), confirming in death that really she always loved not the father, but him.
In Graffigny's novel the Royal patriarch and his eldest son the Prince enter the temple of young women to take a bride together. There is no oedipal conflict between son and father — because this is an aristocratic story, or because it is a woman's story. The 'daughter', the protagonist Zilia, is permanently faithful to her 'father' Prince Aza, even though he has taken another woman — as primitive patriarchs do. Déterville, the younger brother who came later and woos submissively (the three characteristics confirm each other) has no chance. But he serves to gift the heroine with her own protected space, and to preserve her story. In Bernardin the mothers bear and raise their children in the 'bassin' under the eye of the patriarch. It is he who recalls to Virginie, the daughter and little mother, the law of virtue for women, and in her absence takes the son Paul to himself. At the end he has survived them all. Rousseau's story in effect embraces the other two. His first patriarch the Baron looks back to the Inca royals in his arbitrary rule. His second patriarch, Wolmar, is moral and benevolent as Bernardin's old man will be. Within Rousseau's novel, authority is transferred from the feudal Baron to the Physiocrat Wolmar. This goes some way to figuring the shift from Graffigny's blue-blooded few to Bernardin's collectivity of the people, or historically in this period in France from ancien régime to res publica.3
Yet we cannot really speak of oedipal struggle, for none of our young protagonists challenges the authority of the father. All, apart from Julie who embraces positively what is imposed on her, are extraordinarily passive. Zilia seems not to take a single initiative in the whole of her story. Saint-Preux is directed by others throughout. Virginie is an obedient daughter; Paul's revolts are emotional and momentary. Their passivity is assisted or justified by their naivety. Both are reflected in a propensity to seek the ideal. Inaction, incomprehension and idealism alike, I suggested, serve to establish innocence. Doing nothing, not knowing and always wishing mean that one is not to blame. Here however we come to an important difference. Zilia, Saint-Preux and Paul fail to understand the feelings or situation of the person who loves them (Déterville, Julie and Virginie). Therefore they are not responsible for that other person or for reality. Julie and Virginie understand more, Each is partially exculpated by resisting her sexual love: their 'vertu' is aided by repression (during marriage) in the first case, by bafflement (during separation) in the second. But 'vertu' means accepting responsibility for oneself, and for the other. It also means dealing with the world. From start to finish, with Saint-Preux's eager acquiescence, Julie took charge of them both. From infancy, we saw, Virginie protected Paul. 'Vertu', as Rousseau and Bernardin remind us, signifies strength. Julie is far stronger than Saint Preux throughout. Virginie is stronger than Paul. Completing the gendered pattern, Zilia is stronger than Déterville. Julie and Virginie take responsibility for their men, whereas Zilia does not. But all three men attach themselves to a stronger woman who will look after them.
In other words, returning to the oedipal configuration, all three males want to be mothered. They do not want to grow up to deal with sexuality and reality, but to remain like children. They do not want to challenge the father but to stay under the protection of the mother. This is spelled out in many ways and repeatedly, as I have shown, in the case of Saint-Preux. For Déterville it is only suggested, but the Péruvienne is the earliest of our three narratives. In the latest it becomes literal: Paul is and remains a boy. Mother implies house: Saint-Preux enters successively Julie's first and second houses; Virginie keeps house; Déterville gives Zilia ... a house. Mother means nourishment: Julie is associated with milk; so is Virginie, and especially the mothers La Tour and Marguerite.4 Mother means family, but preferably without male sexuality. Saint-Preux is sheltered first in a house of two women, then in a family. Paul is raised in a 'petite famille' of three women. Motherhood and the family are idealized by the two works for much more than ideological reasons. In these male-authored fictions, the male protagonists love their mothers.
But the same fear of sexuality, or of the paternal interdiction, prompts guilt. This guilt is projected on to the woman. Julie and Virginie are assigned stronger sexual desire than their young men, and it is designated in both cases as their 'mal'. They are made to blame themselves and to feel shame, (In Rousseau however the sense of guilt is shared by the male. Bernardin, in the next generation, confines it to the female.) Placed in charge of the relationship, required to guide and restrain, the women fail their responsibility. Angelized as the beloved, they are also seen as dangerous seductresses?5 Blame is extended to other women, if not all women. Julie's mother too, we were told, had a penchant for Saint· Preux. She is accused of moral laxity not only by him and by Julie but in Rousseau's editorial commentary ('la mère seule est inexcusable'). The innocent Tutor is pursued sexually not only by Julie but also by Claire. In Rome he must help Edouard to fend off two scarlet women who are their doubles. After all this, Julie comes at him again ('cette redoutable Julie me poursuit'), to urge him to marry Claire. No wonder he cries 'Femmes, femmes!'. Little wonder — though here Rousseau shows profound self-awareness — that he wishes her death.
Virginie tries to control her desire for Paul. But under stress she avows to him 'tu m'es beaucoup plus cher qu'un frère', then duly denounces herself as 'fille sans vertu' (p.193). Paul in his male innocence still does not understand. From Paris Virginie sends Paul an astonishingly erotic gift (the purse of seeds embroidered with her hair). We recall that Julie sent the Tutor in Paris a provocative portrait of herself with instructions for daily use. As to the other two women in Virginie's 'family', we were told that, despite their commitment to motherhood and each other, they might feel 'd'anciens feux plus vifs'. Her mother is blameable for social ambition, and for allowing Virginie to be taken from the 'bassin'. She is sent to the aunt, who is odiously wicked even by Parisian standards. But Paul knows what women are like in Paris. He learns about their immorality from novels — perhaps he read how they seduced the unfortunate Saint- Preux — and from the old man. He wonders whether Virginie might become unfaithful there, and the narrator seems to share his suspicion: 'il craignit, non sans quelque apparence de raison, que Virginie ne vint à s'y corrompre' (p. 201: my emphasis). Virginie must die, for her name obliges her to virginity and she is weary of struggle. Julie is glad to die, suggesting in her final letter to Saint-Preux that she might not have remained virtuous much longer. Having made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve their 'sons', they ascend to Heaven so that the men can safely mourn them.
Remarkably enough, most of the elements in this male myth of women are already sketched in the Péruvienne despite its female optique. The protagonist Zilia entered a family: that of Déterville. That family too was fatherless; it too was comprised mainly of women (his mother and his sister). Mme Déterville too was blamed, for being hostile to Zilia and a bad mother to Céline (Zilia's double).6 In this case the account is entirely negative, and she is killed off to free her daughter. Déterville is as submissive and hopeless a lover as his successors. Zilia is as provocative as her successors, contriving to say to him unintentionally, yet on three separate occasions, that she loves him. The gift that she sends him — sculptures of 'animaux courageux', along with 'une petite statue qui représentait une Vierge du Soleil' (L. 27) — is almost an invitation to rape. But it is she who dominates him throughout. In complete contrast is her relation with Aza, the 'husband' and 'father' whom she hails repeatedly as her moral guide. He rejects her, but she maintains her duty to him. Her retreat from sexuality and society anticipates that of later protagonists. But she does not die.
The parallels in Graffigny's novel further confirm the oedipal family paradigm. But the differences exhibit the gendering of Oedipus. The two male-authored fictions show the son wanting to cling to the mother, but it is she who has to carry the burden of guilt. She redeems herself by dying for her son (and for moral exemplarity). He and she are almost entirely submissive to the father, The female-authored Péruvienne on the other hand has the daughter hostile to the mother (who is dispatched without ceremony). Loving the father, she basks in what she believes to be his preference, and even when disabused she remains faithful. The woman's novel is free of the guilt which shapes the male fictions.7
The love that son and daughter can have in common is that of each other. Graffigny's fiction makes central the idea of a love between brother and sister, which will be an element in Rousseau and central again for Bernardin. Sibling love is from nature and origins (thus given not actively chosen). It stays within the family; it is intimate, tender, habitual, on a continuum from affection to eroticism, and requires no effort in the world. But unlike love of the mother, sibling love is between persons of similar age who can mirror or complete each other. Graffigny dares to make her lovers quite literally brother and sister — though their sibling relationship remains implicit, and the sexual bond never becomes carnal. Assigned to royal adolescents in a distant place and time, warranted by Inca sources scarcely less exotic, this love belongs to the genre of romance. It is the mark of first innocence, and for Zilia in exile the link back to Peruvian plenitude. It is paralleled in the non-sexual bond between the French siblings Déterville and Céline. In each case the brother dominates the younger sister. But in France the duos are quickly diffused into a childlike trio bound by 'la confiance et l'amitié' (LL. 13, 15). This anticipates the model of the country house where male domination and sexual love will be replaced by sibling affection and tender friendship.
Rousseau and Bernardin will assign the dependent role to their own male surrogate, and insert the sibling relation into the family. Saint-Preux wants to be a child in Julie's family.8 The sibling model is just one in a web of relations — familial, sexual, amical — which this novel establishes and constantly seeks to rework or draw tighter. The sexual duo of himself and Julie is quickly diffused into a trio with Claire (1.6) which is claimed to exist 'dès notre première jeunesse' (III.7); the women are cousins (born to sisters) and bound by the most tender affection; both love him; they represent 'amour' and 'amitié', but each proffers both; Edouard offers him male 'amitié', to supplement then replace heterosexual 'amour'. Julie marries Wolmar who will be another father to her and to Saint-Preux. The family at Clarens takes in Saint-Preux, then Claire and Edouard too; Julie and Claire plan to unite their children in marriage; Saint-Preux is to be tutor to Julie and Wolmar's children, and perhaps also husband to Claire, which would make them all 'des sœurs et des frères' (VI.6). Sexual relations are contained or replaced by those of family and 'amitié'. But while familial relations are what Saint-Preux seeks, improper sexuality within the family is denounced at the start as '[le] plus vil inceste' (I.5). In Paul et Virginie the incest taboo becomes central (while the term itself is excluded). The couple are now literally children; their idealized relation is constantly presented as that of siblings within a 'petite famille'. Without male sexuality, it is located in a tropical and pastoral world which assimilates the children to organic vegetation and innocent animals. Their own sense of the sibling relation is the mark of innocence in him but becomes that of guilt in her. Her redemptive death however is the means of bringing together the whole community, and particularly the common people, in shared feeling.
All three fictions posit the existence of a universal natural language. The idea is not so much argued as affirmed, because it is desired. This reflects the period retreat from elaborated verbal forms in favour of the truth of sentiment, which is univocal and accessible, expressed and understood immediately. As Rousseau admirably puts it: 'c'est ainsi que le cœur sait parler au cœur' (Second Preface). In all three works, the forms of this language are said to be musical and corporeal. In the Péruvienne, opera singing is linked with 'tendres gémissements' which incite compassion (for 'l'intelligence des sons [est] universelle'), while its dances recall 'les jeux naïfs des animaux' (L. 17). Julie celebrates Italian vocal music, which conveys '[la] puissance invincible des accents passionnés' (I.48). The potential of dance is also suggested.9 Paul et Virginie bestows the accolade of 'premier langage de l'homme' on mime, which may be accompanied by rhythmic sounds (p. 164). Each work presents these claims in relation to a specific performance. Here however we see a notable development. Zilia is reflecting on her experience at what must be the Paris Opera — an aristocratic public entertainment for a passive audience. Saint-Preux adduces a musical rendition in a private house by some of his characters for their own pleasure. But they are still of the leisure class, and they still perform from a written score. The cadre of social privilege, and the fixed forms of received high culture, are finally shed in Paul et Virginie. There we have an extempore mime-show by children and slaves in a jungle clearing. The subject matter is tales from the Old Testament, learned from Virginie's mother; these are chosen for their truth to the lives of the little group itself, and engender shared tears. The theatre of nature reflects and reinforces the collective sentiment.
Novelists must make do with words on the page. But our three all attempt a new kind of writing, which creates and conveys a unity of feeling. One important means is style. All three employ a poetic or lyrical style. In the Péruvienne this is still quite formal or classical in its elevated diction, hyperbole, regular rhetorical structures and rhythmic prosody. The language of La Nouvelle Héloïse is even more overheated, but high sentiments and corporeal sensibility are more successfully integrated. Again we encounter parallel verbal structures, but the rhythms are far more spacious (long clauses, sentences and paragraphs), and the diction harmonious. 'Geometrical' style, still strong in Graffigny, becomes in Rousseau organic, closer to breath and body. Sense data from the external world however remain very thin until we reach Paul et Virginie. Bernardin gives us colours and textures, shapes and sounds. Natural description is sensually specific but functions symbolically to exhibit meaning. Bernardin alone achieves lyrical simplicity, by adopting the generic characteristics of tale or pastoral. All three works are heavily freighted with sententiae and sentimental pieties. These are for the improvement of the reader. Or are they rather to stimulate the moral sensibility that the reader is required already to possess, as they exhibit and vindicate that of the writer?
This is probably also true of the cult of 'illusion' which we found in Graffigny and Rousseau. Their protagonists are constantly disappointed by reality. But instead of learning the classical lesson of self-limitation, they go on wishing and seeking. Zilia must have recourse to 'douce erreur', cherishing in particular the illusion of presence and the mirror of her own sensibility offered by her writing. Rousseau's trio similarly cultivate illusion as the necessary refuge of those who feel and suffer. But Zilia's pathos of wishes becomes more explicitly a 'Platonism of the heart' which exhibits its aspiration to the ideal. The lovers have each other, and then community, but the real must fail to satisfy them. Saint-Preux: in particular makes a cult of writing and of letters. Like Zilia but much more clearly he is the surrogate of the real author, demanding that we as the real readers believe in this writing. Bernardin does not use the letter-form, but still calls on first-person narration and witness to give authenticity. He replaces illusion with an immanent understanding of what is, but also by the aspiration to Heaven.
Poetic prose, insistent moral feeling and ideal aspiration are of a piece. They tell us that these are not novels of worldliness, and they take us into better worlds. 'Mondanité' is still shown, but in order to be criticized and then repudiated. It is a decreasing element, increasingly distant from the retreats of imagination and desire. These domains (an interiority, an estate, an island) expand and become more self-consistent. They are to some extent removed from place and time. Within the Péruvienne there are few place names or particulars, and no dates on the letters. This is in part the legacy of the French classical focus on human passions (and a means of obscuring the leap from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth). But in Julie too the letters are undated and the place names few. There the topography of the desired place is specific, but its essential location is literally another country for French readers. Exotic specificity characterizes Paul et Virginie, which treats time by providing terminal dates (the arrival of Mme de La Tour on the island; the death of Virginie) but presenting the life of the children as a continuum. Overall we move from Graffigny's single interior voice, by way of the shared language of Rousseau's letter-writers, to Bernardin's authoritative and almost omniscient narration.
The refuge is ever further from Paris and France. But Zilia's 'Peruvian' values (nature, reason, virtue, Sentiment, beneficence) are remarkably like those of the French Enlightenment. Rousseau's novel of 'l'autre monde' was adored by the Parisian 'monde' and had its greatest success in France (as he avows at the start of Book il of the Confessions). Bernardin's quasi-Edenic 'Ile de France' is in the other hemisphere, but its name makes it also the region containing Paris and the island within France. Diachronically we can in fact trace a parallel with the social ideology that leads to the Revolution. The Péruvienne at the mid-century offers a strong critique of the frivolity and excesses of the privileged classes. Rousseau's novel shows feudal power denying bourgeois aspirations, but then a rebirth to a new order of familial and communitarian virtue. Paul et Virginie vindicates the popular and reintegrates the human into an 'eternal' natural order.
1. Zilia had thanked Aza for not limiting her to 'l'humiliant avantage de donner la vie à ta postérité' (L. 2)! The distance from this aristocratic (and thoroughly un-Peruvian) female disdain for childbearing to the bourgeois pride in motherhood in Julie is remarkable.
2. The life of the female mind, essential for Zilia, remains so for Julie within the framework of family duties, and will not be abnegated till we reach Bernardin.
3. Here we come close to Lynn Hunt's psycho-historical reading which has the royal 'father' overthrown by the 'sons' (The Family Romance of the French Revolution). It is certainly true that our patriarchs become personally less powerful (from the Inca to Bernardin's ineffective Old Man). But it is the Baron, Wolmar and the 'Vieillard' who culpabilize.
4. Saint-Preux spells out the broader significance of diet: 'le laitage et le sucre sont les goûts naturels du sexe [féminin] et comme le symbole de l'innocence et de la douceur qui font son plus aimable ornement'. Women go with children: 'quelques laitages' are the first item in his list of 'mets du goût des enfants et des femmes'. But we saw that he also emphasizes his own pleasure in consuming the products of 'une laiterie où Julie préside' (IV. 10; pp.451—53). Saint-Preux constantly seeks the infantile state, which is that of Paul. Bernardin's little family is vegetarian: we are told of'[leurs] repas champêtres qui n'avaient coûté la vie à aucun animal' (p. 159). But of course it too is entirely composed of women and children.
5. Julie is Israel but also Armida (the pagan seductress of the Christian knight Rinaldo in Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata): 1.24; IV.13. Virginie has 'la dignité et la sagesse d'Antiope, avec les malheurs et la tendresse d'Eucharis' (the good daughter and the bad nymph loved by the hero of Télémaque): p. 201.
6. Revealingly, Graffigny in an earlier plan had Mme Déterville lusting after Aza. In her informal summary, 'la vielle mere en devient amoureuse, et veut l'epouser parce qu'il est prince, jeune et fort' (Correspondance, VI, p. 548).
7. Guilt however seems to be less the mark of male writing than the product of family. This is reflected in the two key novels of the eighteenth century: Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa. Pamela is outside her family and without guilt (and she triumphs in the world). Clarissa in the bosom of her family is culpabilized (and they in effect drive her into the arms of Lovelace and death). The shift from Pamela (1740) to Clarissa (1747) anticipates the wider shift in France in the ethos of prose fiction which occurs around the mid-century.
8. Most curiously, in the very letters to Julie's mother and father in which he offers to renounce his marital claim, he asks them to be his parents (III.2 and 11).
9. The complaint that French Opera ballets offer 'ni sentiments, ni tableaux, [...]' at least indicates the possibilities of dance, which Saint-Preux says he has developed in a dissertation on 'la véritable constitution du drame lyrique' (II.23).