Chapter 2

Quixote Circa 1670 (Subligny)

Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie, a modest success in the years Lafayette was at work on La Princesse de Clèves and for some years after, is long forgotten.¹ On first inspection, it might not seem worth resurrecting. Its protagonist, Juliette d’Arviane, is subject to moments of madness during which she thinks she is the heroine of Scudéry’s famed historical romance Clélie, histoire romaine (1654–60). What could be clearer? Like Cervantes taking on chivalric romance, like Cervantes’s emulator Sorel attacking pastoral in Le Berger extravagant (1627), Subligny ridicules—now with a gendered twist—the heroic romances that had refused to leave the literary stage. But his confrontation of airy feminine illusion with the manly prose of everyday life seems doubly redundant. First, because the joke was old: numerous novels and plays besides Le Berger extravagant had ridiculed readers whose tastes were behind the times.² Second, because by 1670, the year La Fausse Clélie was published, even sympathetic observers seemed to know there would be no more Clélies. Hence, the critic Chapelain recognized the symbolism of the death, in 1663, of the author of the 10-volume Cassandre (1642–1650), writing, “romances [romans] … have fallen along with La Calprenède”; and Scudéry herself had already abandoned her old habits with Clélie’s last volume and started to experiment with shorter forms.³ So Subligny merely rehearsed a lesson everyone, even Scudéry, had absorbed: romance was dead. Finally.

And it would soon have its replacement. “Little histories [petites histoires] have completely destroyed big romances [grands romans],” proclaimed critic and novelist Du Plaisir in 1682; by the following century his observation had hardened into banality.⁴ Such unanimity makes sense in France, whose literary production was particularly suited to proclamations of a revolutionary upheaval: the episodic, multivolume grands romans that ruled the roost from L’Astrée’s first book in 1607 to Clélie’s last in 1660 quite simply ceased to appear, never to return, and the vogue for the historical novella took up the slack. The English data are less dramatic: though England avidly consumed in translation both the French historical romance and the French historical novella, it did not produce enough of either to leave the same telling pattern. Nevertheless, historians of the English novel have located a few Du Plaisirs of their own—in Behn, who distances her “history” Oroonoko of 1688 from “adventures … manage[d] at the poet’s pleasure”; in Congreve, whose preface to his 1693 novella Incognita not only theorizes the difference between “romance” and “novel” but even uses those terms; in Manley, who, perhaps cribbing from Du Plaisir, prefaces The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) by proclaiming, “Little histories of this kind have taken [the] place of Romances.”⁵ So in England too, by the turn of the century, the way had been cleared for the novel’s rise.

Romance, the novel: as contemporary comments like these show, the opposition is hardly a figment of the modern academic imagination. But there are multiple difficulties, many long recognized by critics. The least serious of these is terminological: in English, the romance-novel opposition took a long time to stabilize (Reeve’s 1785 critical dialogue is still entitled The Progress of Romance), and French never did inscribe the opposition between old and new forms in the language.⁶ Second, romance seems to persist as a practice as much as a term. In France, many have noted that novels after La Princesse de Clèves often fail to display its sobriety of plot and characterization, and that, though shorn of romance’s Scuderian heft, they quickly put some pounds back on.⁷ Literary historians on the other side of the Channel have had to contend with a similar sense of déjà vu, since so-called novels—starting perhaps with Oroonoko and Incognita, and extending at least to the works of Fielding—often look uncomfortably like romances, incorporating, as in France, their themes, plot devices, and modes of characterization.⁸

A third difficulty is obvious enough, yet rarely confronted. Simply put, why was Scudéry still writing romances, anyway? Didn’t she know that Cervantes had already invented the novel? In other words, it is not just that romance is supposed to go away in the latter decades of the seventeenth century but holds on; it is also that romance should have gone away earlier still, in 1605 to be precise, when Cervantes published the first volume of his international best-seller, Don Quixote. As everyone knows, Don Quixote has read too many “books of chivalry” and comes to believe he is living in the world they describe, even though it is comically obvious to everyone else that those romances are utterly inadequate to dealing with the realities of taverns and brothels and money.⁹ Unlike romance writers, Cervantes provides us with a representation of that new world—the world that will henceforth be that of the novel.¹⁰ And unlike his protagonist, who believes in the literal truth of what he reads, Cervantes’s reader is at all points made aware of novelistic illusion through the ironic references to the discovered manuscript of a certain Cid Hamet Benengeli; in contradistinction to Don Quixote, that reader has learned both disbelief and the art of its suspension, which we may call fiction.¹¹ Such is, in reduced form, the common wisdom with regard to Don Quixote’s place in literary history, and the specifics of the book appear to fit it quite well. As soon as we lift our eyes from the text, however, the “persistence of romance” problem again presents itself: if Cervantes invented the novel, why does the literary production of his century look the way it does? In 1607, d’Urfé published the first volume of his pastoral phenomenon L’Astrée; perhaps he can be excused for his romancing, since Don Quixote had not yet been translated, but over the next fifty years writers who had surely read it—La Calprenède and Scudéry, but also Gomberville and others still—made historical romance the gold standard of prose. We might, of course, set this at the door of a reactionary French aristocracy, and point out that even in France, a few writers—like Sorel and finally Subligny—absorbed Cervantes’s lesson and fought the good bourgeois fight against romance hegemony.¹² But this argument is brought up short by the fact that Cervantes himself left for posthumous publication nothing less than a romance—The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, which appeared in 1617.

Such is, I think, the puzzle that should occur to anyone trying to square the two distinct “death of romance” narratives that characterize discussions of the modern novel—one set in Spain in 1605, another in 1660s France (and holding for England). In fact, the puzzle is an illusion that evaporates once we realize that it is built on a bad premise, which is that the chivalric narratives devoured by Don Quixote on the one hand and works like Persiles, L’Astrée, and Clélie on the other all belong to one and the same “romance”—the romance that is replaced, starting with the Quixote, by “the novel.”¹³ In other words, it is our two clumsy categories themselves that generate the literary-historical problem in the first place. The answer is not to do away with historical and generic distinctions entirely, as Margaret Doody has provocatively proposed, but instead to develop categories that are more adequate to our object of study.¹⁴ This is what Subligny’s apparently redundant and derivative La Fausse Clélie helps us do. The brief synopsis I offered above is in fact misleading: Juliette d’Arviane does indeed think she is the heroine of Scudéry’s text, but the latter is not, we learn, excessive or ridiculous. Clélie is merely in need of an updating; Scudéry’s histoire romaine must be refigured as a histoire française. Subligny’s “false” Clélie is thus, counterintuitively, a “true” Clélie, a Clélie made pseudofactual. The reengineering is radical: in many respects La Fausse Clélie is as far removed from Scudéry as Don Quixote is from the chivalric universe of Amadis of Gaul (published in 1508). But only in hindsight do these new works seem to be announcing deaths or births: Cervantes and Subligny are not inventing the novel, they are doing new things with the romance forms they have at their disposal. They cannot suspect that one day, after centuries of human invention and activity, another mode of narrative, will be viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the one they are familiar with; they cannot know that time will make distinctions that they see clearly all but unrecognizable. To be sure, Cervantes and Subligny want to make the forms bequeathed by their predecessors modern—but modern in 1605 and 1670, we must remember, can’t stay modern forever.

Cogitations

Like all good romances since the Renaissance rediscovery of Heliodorus’s fourth-century Aethiopica, La Fausse Clélie starts in the middle of things. The device of the in medias res beginning was heralded by Amyot in the preface to his pioneering 1547 French translation of the Aethiopica as an ingenious way of providing narrative suspense: Heliodorus opens with a description of a shipwreck, viewed through the eyes of some pirates who know no more than does the reader; a series of flashbacks then slowly clarify the dramatic events and doubtful identities presented at the outset. Thinking of the detective story, we might surmise that mystery is simply a good way of interesting readers, as if something about it were profoundly suited to the act of reading. For Amyot and other Renaissance commentators, it was this and more: it provided a means of dignifying romance, which is to say, positively, narratives of amorous adventure, or, negatively, narratives that were not epic.¹⁵ To the endless forward drive of chivalric narratives—narratives built on a “quest” or “trial” structure in which the hero must triumph over successive obstacles—the Aethiopica opposed something more like plot: here were the beginning, middle, and end that Aristotle had prescribed, though—ingeniously—not in that order. Furthermore, the in medias res beginning permitted the author of romance to bring his creation in line with Aristotelian stipulations regarding epic: with flashbacks, plots could cover vast swaths of heroic lives without running afoul of the traditional one-year limit for the main action. Finally, since a similar structure characterized the Odyssey and the Aeneid, which were probably Heliodorus’s models in the first place, the Aethiopica appeared fully sanctioned by tradition. Beginning things in the middle was part, then, of the humanistic assault on popular chivalric romance, and the practitioners of French heroic romance in the seventeenth century, who were descendants of early boosters of Heliodorus like Amyot, retained the in medias res beginning.¹⁶

So, at the outset of La Fausse Clélie, the Marquis de Riberville decides to take the air at the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte one day when the court is away at Fontainebleau. Reading verse in the garden, his attention is caught by a young beauty accompanied by an older woman; he is making small talk with the former when all of a sudden this scene of banal flirtation turns into a veritable adventure. “Monsieur,” the young woman cries out, starting to run, “save me from a kidnapper who’s been looking everywhere for me!”¹⁷ And indeed, a man appears out of nowhere, pursues her, and eventually hustles his prey into a waiting carriage, which speeds off just as Riberville catches up. Riberville turns around, but the woman’s guardian has disappeared. “‘Ah!’ he said, ‘she must be in on the kidnapping’” (3). There is nothing to do but follow on horseback; onlookers he meets along his route tell him that yes, a carriage has just passed, containing only a man and a woman, and that it has taken the road for Combreux. Riberville rides on and comes across what he discovers to be a different carriage stopped in the road, and yet another adventure: four women are trying to stop two horsemen from murdering a gentleman with them. Riberville, acting like a “romance hero” (4), drives the assailants off, after which he realizes that he already knows the people he has just obliged. (The four women and one man will be, along with Riberville, the main figures of the novel. They are Mademoiselle de Barbesieux, Madame de Mulionne, Mademoiselle de Velzers, Mademoiselle de Kermas, and the Chevalier de Montal.)¹⁸ Alas, the trail of the mysterious abducted woman is now cold: his friends tell Riberville that no such carriage passed them. And at any rate, they suspect him of “just making things up [qu’il fait une histoire à plaisir]” (5). While he didn’t invent, it will turn out that he misinterpreted what did, it is true, look for all the world like a real adventure. The following day, back at Vaux, the perplexed Marquis goes to read in his “closet,” or cabinet, only to find the mysterious woman hiding there; true to his heroic role, he asks her to name his “enemy,” so that he might avenge her. She introduces herself as Clélie, daughter of Clelius, and claims to be pursued by a Roman. The “flabbergasted” Riberville realizes that he was wrong to have taken seriously “such a ridiculous adventure” (10): the woman who calls herself Clélie is clearly deluded. Her so-called abductor, who shows up asking to speak with Riberville, quickly fills in the details: Juliette d’Arviane was so struck by the resemblance between her life and the events of Scudéry’s novel—foremost among which were a shipwreck and an earthquake—that for the last six years she has been afflicted with these sudden episodes of delirium, usually triggered by any mention of things Roman. (The Marquis now recalls having flirtatiously compared her face to that of a Roman just before she ran off.) The “abductor” is in fact a former suitor, enlisted by d’Arviane’s family to try to keep her from doing herself harm.

These opening pages—merely the first twenty or so in a novel of about 320—are quite distinctive. One distinction, to which I will return presently, is the protagonist’s self-consciousness: Riberville is not merely confronted with a puzzle, as are romance heroes, he is conscious that he—a French man living in a contemporary Ile-de-France—is having what the text repeatedly qualifies as an “adventure”; it is not the adventure that the deluded d’Arviane thinks she is having, but it is an adventure nonetheless. A second distinction comes from the twist Subligny perpetrates on the standard in medias res opening. From Heliodorus to Scudéry, romance moved forward via the presentation of enigmatic events; typically, those events are followed by an explanation—sometimes nearly immediate, sometimes long deferred—that takes the form of a story recounted by someone who is in the know. That is, romance makes characters (and readers) desire information that is then furnished in the form of an embedded tale. La Fausse Clélie’s opening, by contrast, is an investigation: it too will end with a story (of “Clélie”’s malady), but not before Riberville tries his best to resolve the mystery on his own.

Subligny offers us in these pages access to a series of cognitive inferences on the part of a protagonist acting on an initial assumption—the erroneous or, in the vocabulary of the time, extravagant idea that “Clélie” has been abducted. Thus Riberville notes the guardian’s disappearance as a sign of her complicity; and when he asks witnesses whether a carriage has just passed, his judgment that it must be that of the kidnapper is “confirm[ed]” (3) upon his learning that it contains a man and a woman. Little by little, though, Riberville is confronted with facts he is unable to make sense of—the carriage stopped in the road is not, in fact, the one he was following, and the whole “adventure” is found by his friends to be dubious. Riberville is further baffled when the supposedly complicit guardian shows up back at Vaux and leaves word with his attendants that “Clélie”’s abductor, if located, must not be harmed, since he was acting on her family’s orders. “This hardly enlightened the poor Marquis … whose efforts to make some sense of these mysteries [obscurités] ended in despair” (6). We have, then, a text that initially at least presents a cognitive problem, as much to the reader as to the protagonist, whose efforts to understand double or parallel our own. But we, no more than the protagonist who focalizes (this part of) the narrative, need not wait patiently for an explanation: we take the information we have and we try to interpret it.

For truth, in La Fausse Clélie, must be assembled. The novel’s enigmatic opening, with its series of deductions and corrections, is but part of a novelistic universe that has become cognitively “thick.” The entire structure of the book—its incorporation of the embedded narratives typical of both romance and devisant-type collections like that of Boccaccio or Marguerite de Navarre—is put into service of constituting an active reader who asks where stories come from, and who puts the stories he or she hears into relation with others, all so that their truth may be verified. One of Subligny’s most serious commentators, Jean Serroy, who examines La Fausse Clélie in light of the tradition of the comic tale, is certainly right to maintain the thematic unity of many of La Fausse Clélie’s embedded narratives—say, duping, or the way women love, or the possibility of ghosts—and to point out their many antecedents. La Fausse Clélie also seems familiar on account of the main characters’ discussions about the exemplary moral value of the tales they tell—such commentary is a constant as much in the Heptaméron as in Scudéry’s romances. Yet what distinguishes La Fausse Clélie, what marks it off qualitatively from all the famous works of which it reminds us, is its persistent staging of reading less as a moral action (that is, as a way to police and codify social and amorous behavior) than as a cognitive one. So it is that when Montal, the character attacked at the novel’s beginning and rescued by Riberville’s arrival, tells the gallant story behind the attempted murder, skeptical readers repeatedly intervene: his adventures are “far from plausible [si peu vraisemblables],” mere “delusions” (34). Listeners, however do more than denounce what they hear as lies, and tellers, likewise, do not merely affirm they tell the truth. Instead, stories are evaluated, tested, and read against other things we have heard or that we know to be true. Montal’s protestations of truth are at least partially backed up when Riberville interrupts to say that he has already heard of this “adventure”—“‘but I had no idea,’ he said to [Montal], ‘that you were its hero, for no one was named’” (37). When the number of coincidences involved increases, Riberville’s skepticism reasserts itself: “‘And through what sort of adventure,’ said the Marquis to the Chevalier, ‘did [your enemy] come to meet up with you so conveniently on his route?’” (41). Riberville’s pejorative use of “adventure” is clearly the same one he used when he dismissed d’Arviane’s madness as “such a ridiculous adventure” (10). But adventures do happen, Subligny tells us, and they can be explained: “‘What adventure?’ answered the Chevalier. ‘I have no idea, unless the traitor spied me at Fontainebleau, where I saw him four or five days ago’” (41). Montal, twice challenged, has been twice vindicated.

The assertion of narrative truth is nothing specific, of course, to 1670 France: it was a staple gambit of the Heptaméron, of Renaissance travel narratives, and before that of Chrétien’s verse romances; the topos was old enough in Classical times for Lucian to mock it in his True Story (second century A.D.), and indeed seems to lead us all the way back to the Odyssey, where numerous characters make claims, often obfuscating, for the truth of their stories. But if La Fausse Clélie gives the impression of cognitive thickness whereas previous works do not, this is because its characters take such pains to verify what they are told, at least to the extent of reducing apparent improbability. In the example just cited, the teller counters his skeptics by adding new information that makes a coincidence seem less coincidental. This is a fairly frequent occurrence in the novel. Barbesieux recounts in book 4 an anecdote about the gallant lover of the wife of a magistrate who, accused of a murder, prefers being beheaded to naming his mistress as his alibi. The tale, similar in tenor to what one finds in Rosset’s Histoires tragiques (1614), is intended as part of an argument about the existence of amorous discretion (i.e., can men kiss and not tell?). Montal immediately proposes a series of objections, however. If, he reasons, the lover really did keep the secret of his whereabouts on the night of the murder, then the story could never be known; true, replies Barbesieux, but it came out later through the maid, who was privy to the liaison and who subsequently leaked the information after being mistreated by her mistress. But if that’s true, continues Montal, her testimony is suspect, since it is motivated by revenge. True again—but the real assassin was arrested and confessed both his guilt and the lover’s innocence (202–3).

This short story is followed in book 5 by a number of tales involving supernatural occurrences; these are especially scrutinized, for while other narratives—such as Barbesieux’s anecdote about how men can keep secrets—had moral value, the ghost stories are essentially about their own possibility or believability. The subject of the supernatural is prompted by another enigmatic event in the main narrative, one whose elucidation will propel the novel to its conclusion: the group of friends is informed that a man has just fainted in the gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte after seeing a ghost. This immediately furnishes an occasion to raise the subject of credulity: Montal, the same skeptical questioner who dogged Barbesieux with questions about her histoire tragique, reveals himself to be an esprit fort, that is, someone who thinks the age of supernatural occurrences (and divine intervention in the natural world) to be past.¹⁹ Mulionne, less disenchanted, counters with the story of a certain Santois, who is both a “former Paris magistrate” and well known to Mulionne: “that fellow lives in my neighborhood, and he’s a man of honor if ever there was one” (215). The story—which happened, Mulionne maintains, only last Thursday—involves some papers mysteriously torn up, apparently by a sprite (lutin) of some sort. Montal, mirthfully incredulous, refuses Mulionne’s invitations to go see for himself—“for me to go,” he says, “I’d have to think there was at least some possibility of such a thing, but I don’t” (218). The deadlock between believer and nonbeliever is broken by Montal, who brings pressure to bear on Mulionne’s reassertion of the socially unimpeachable origins of witnesses (“one must take respectable people at their word when they say they have seen something”; 218).

“Certainly, Madame,” he answered; “but show me one.”

“Ha!” she said, “I’m delighted to. The Abbé de Lanciat is all I need—the late Monsieur Fouquet de Croissy appeared to him in Tours, on his property. Or Madame la Marquise de Tessau, whose bed curtains were pulled by the same. Such people are unimpeachable….”

“Doubtless, Madame,” said Montal; “but did you get this information from the Abbé and the Marquise themselves, or from someone else?”

“I heard it only from one of their friends,” answered Madame de Mulionne. (218–19)

Mulionne tries to regain the upper hand by invoking an illustrious family—the house of Brandenburg—haunted by a ghost which appears each time a family member is to die; Montal quickly debunks this final assertion by pointing to a suspiciously similar tale in Lucian’s Dialogues.²⁰

Heliodorian romance carefully controls information, dispensing it so as to produce effects of suspense, surprise, and classically Aristotelian recognition (anagorisis); in Subligny’s variation, information must be carefully amassed and verified so as to arrive at a convincing conclusion. Which is also to say that in contradistinction to the world of romance, where the tales that elucidated the main narrative enigmas were invariably reliable, La Fausse Clélie calls into question the position of enunciation.²¹ This applies as much to the third-person narratives by reliable attendants that proliferate in La Calprenède and Scudéry as to earlier first-person narratives that were modeled on the eyewitness of the travel narrative.²² Similarly, the other model for embedded narrative that La Fausse Clélie draws on, the Boccaccian tradition, is equally the domain of reliable narrators: argue as they may about gender politics, Marguerite de Navarre’s devisants, for example, can only oppose one true story with another one, never claim that the story supporting such-and-such a position is simply invented.²³ In both romance and the Heptaméron, truth is a bare affirmation; no information is provided that would help other characters, or the reader, doubt or verify that affirmation. As it turns out, decorum in La Fausse Clélie is still safe, for on interrogation Subligny’s narrators all prove to be in perfectly good faith. Riberville, even if he was wrong about the abduction, was not in fact inventing things or hiding them from his friends. Early modern science, Steven Shapin has suggested, managed to combine a reverence for facts with preexisting codes of elite sociability.²⁴ La Fausse Clélie takes the narrative economy of romance, with its innumerable stories circulated by reliable aristocrats, and makes it safe for an empirical age.

The Real World

Romance in the Heliodorian vein uses its many reliably told stories to produce a remarkably tight narrative universe. The fact is easy to forget, since the best representatives of this tradition are seventeenth-century French romances, and if L’Astrée and Artamène (Scudéry, 1649–53) are still known for anything, it is for interminable prolixity. Nonetheless, though the number of subplots in books like these can multiply with seeming abandon, deferring resolution for many volumes and many years, those plots are carefully knit together: clues are strewn like seeds early on, only to bear fruit much later. As I’ve noted, it was architecture like this that helped give romance its Aristotelian sanction: the genre became an art in the old sense—an object worked by the poet, one that strove to create “a strictly probable or necessary sequence,” in the language of the Poetics.²⁵

La Fausse Clélie’s architecture, superficially similar, produces a different effect. Subligny has attracted modest critical attention for the particular brand of interpenetration he achieves between frame tale and embedded narrations, for the way the reader discovers slowly the relations between the characters. Serroy, for instance, has singled out as one of Subligny’s innovations the fact that, fairly systematically, his characters are the heroes of the stories they tell, and that “a whole web of relationships is knit between the protagonists.”²⁶ This is true, and it should be pointed out moreover that those relations are often open-ended. That is, romance characters are generally engaged in a vast enterprise of figuring out who they all are; enigmas turn on issues of personal identity and recognition above all. La Fausse Clélie certainly contains such recognitions, as we will see, but its characters spend most of their time mapping their world, and filling in a map is not like answering a riddle. For along with their empirically evaluative approach to the stories they hear—is this true? does that make sense?—the characters also learn that the tales they hear are extensions of the world they move in. To borrow a phrase from Alexandre Koyré, the romance world is closed, while Subligny’s universe is infinitely open: the articulation of narrative levels produces a spatiotemporal continuum.²⁷ Provided that it be true, any narrative, whether it resolves a puzzle or not, belongs to a world “out there.”

What allows this is a dilation of La Fausse Clélie’s frame narrative. In the real Clélie, the frame is made of a type of narrative suspense: we wait for an interrupted action (in Heliodorian fashion, a marriage) to be completed after numerous interposed obstacles have been overcome. To these narrative obstacles Scudéry adds a massive accretion of commentary and judgment, so that the romance structure essentially mirrors the salon its author oversaw.²⁸ La Fausse Clélie’s structure, though, is not so easily split between layers. When Riberville’s friends, at the outset, dismiss his protestations to the effect that the story of the abduction of “Clélie” happened as he maintains, this is not only because the abduction is in itself improbable; it is also because his listeners know Riberville’s past too well not to suspect he is hiding something.

“You’re putting us on, Marquis,” Montal [told Riberville.] “You think that someone is going to set up a meeting in a garden like Vaux’s so as to kidnap a woman in broad daylight, and in the manner you’ve described? There’s no way that can even cross the mind of someone reasonable.”

“My God, of course!” said Mademoiselle de Barbesieux, who knew that the Marquis was a ladies’ man, “didn’t you know that Mademoiselle de Sencelles lives near here?” (5)

Sencelles, we will learn much later, once passed letters between Riberville and a certain Comtesse de Tourneüil; Barbesieux’s knowledge of this fact, she will explain, lies behind this initial suspicion of Riberville’s abduction story. But since we already know that Riberville is in fact acting (and recounting) in perfectly good faith, Barbesieux’s knowledge is extraneous. That is, she brings her knowledge of the world to bear on what she hears and makes a well-founded (and clever) hypothesis; but her knowledge proves to be irrelevant, and she is wrong. Riberville’s past will remain murky even as more details start to emerge: when Barbesieux does finally furnish the story of his relation with Tourneüil, Riberville claims that her point of view can only be clouded by her jealousy of Riberville’s love for d’Arviane, and then provides an alternate version of the story, one that purports to explain in a manner favorable to himself the motives behind the publicly acknowledged fact that Barbesieux ends with—Tourneüil’s delayed return from London (107–13). This is all rather complicated, of course, but that seems to be the point: the author weaves a web of events that are ultimately inseparable from one another, yet that do not resolve themselves into a neat climactic resolution or recognition.²⁹ Compared to good romance practice, Riberville and Tourneüil’s relationship is not even an enigma at all. It’s just something that we can learn more about if we pay attention—more, but not everything, and not anything like an answer. Subligny’s characters amass information and put that information to use as they try to make sense of other information. And as in La Fausse Clélie, so in life: occasionally something comes of our efforts but most often our collections of precious facts die with us, underutilized.

Romance identity, poetically blurred, was at bottom stable: the past of each protagonist amounted to little more than his or her birth. Henri Coulet, in what is to date the most far-ranging history of the early French novel, detects something special in Subligny’s characters, an unknowable psychological depth that he implies is proto-Romantic: “By confronting these different elements with one another, the reader comes to grasp characters not as finished or fixed portraits, but in their dynamism and relations with others[;] we come to realize that their truth lies somewhere beyond the contradictory indications given about them.”³⁰ Who indeed is the real Charles Foster Kane?

It is a tempting conclusion, but one that seems fundamentally at odds with a book that spends so much energy creating a world of facts—facts about actions and events, not about motives or even feelings. Riberville is not unknowable or dynamic in any psychological sense; other characters do not care what makes him tick. They care only about what he has done, in the same way, moreover, that they are interested in what anyone does: to be a good cartographer of the human world, one must have stories. This is why the stories recounted are not self-sufficient units; instead, they continually and insistently point to a world beyond, a world against which they pretend to situate themselves. A long story in book 2, which Velzers tells of her courtship by the Chevalier de La Grancour, is a case in point. Naturally, the story is advanced as true, with the intention, moreover, of convincing the audience of Velzers’s virtue. But since, in La Fausse Clélie one must always create a plausible case for truth, Velzers’s gestures to a place outside both her narrative and the frame narrative, to a world of publicly known facts to which both these narratives are connected.

“Did you hear the rumor circulating last winter about the night burglary at our home?” [asked Velzers].

“Yes,” responded Madame de Mulionne, “people said that some daggers and nooses were found on your balcony, and that someone was planning to strangle you all. It was the talk of Paris.” (80)

Velzers reveals that in fact this publicly attested fact was not as it appeared, for the daggers and ropes were part of a persistent lover’s many stratagems. Later, Mulionne reverses the direction of traffic between the independent world and her autobiographical tale of gallantry gone wrong: she explains that she was afraid for herself because she had previously read of the murder of a young woman by her suitor (see 183).

Subligny’s characters constantly build bridges like these between the stories they know and the stories they hear: they live in an information-rich environment in which everything is somehow connected. Not connected “meaningfully,” not connected by ingenious Aristotelian plotting—just connected. The most extraneous tales are carefully knit by the characters into the world they know. And La Fausse Clélie certainly contains extraneous tales: Barbesieux, Montal, Riberville produce their own narratives, but they also pass on and evaluate other narratives. These unconnected tales are generally viewed by Subligny’s few commentators as a manifest weak spot, a reversion to conventional and derivative filler.³¹ From another point of view, however, their originality is beside the point; what is significant is the way he integrates them, indicates their provenance, makes them coterminous with the world of his main characters. Book 3, for instance, takes place in Mulionne’s home; it contains three stories, all unrelated to the characters, and each a fairly predictable tale of roguery with occasional bawdy accents. One is told by Mulionne’s husband, who is of the robe; he carefully indicates that it comes from a recent court case. Another, a tale of a man fleeced of 4,000 francs, is told by none other than the victim, the prosecutor Tigean, visiting Monsieur de Mulionne on business. The third involves a man, Monsieur de Luchères, who arrives to see Monsieur de Mulionne; his story is embedded in the world of our protagonists by means of a sort of triangulation:

When [Luchères] had left, the Marquis [de Riberville] spoke up. “If I were as bold as Montal, I’d tell you an amusing story about our Monsieur de Luchères, who if I’m not mistaken is a hefty Norman who’s about as subtle and witty as his wife is innocent.”

“He’s from Normandy?” said Montal. “Well if he’s Monsieur de Luchères of Normandy, then I know him as well as you do—and his wife too. If you all allow, I’ll tell their story.”

“Go right ahead, then,” said the Marquis, “The honor is all yours.” (123)

A short but significant prelude to what is otherwise a very forgettable tale: Subligny introduces a minor character into the frame narrative who is subsequently placed on the map of France, and whose identity (and history) is confirmed by the fact that two other characters have independently heard of him. Renaissance tale-tellers pretended their tales were true; they mentioned vaguely the existence of unimpeachable sources, or alluded to their first-hand knowledge. But by and large there was a gulf between the rarefied aristocratic locus amoenus of tale-telling and the alternately tragic or bawdy tales they told. In Subligny, all narratives, finally, are one.

La Fausse Clélie gives us, then, a real world—not simply because characters claim their stories as true, or because Subligny places them in a recognizable geography; not, certainly, because they may “really” have occurred. Rather, his particular integration of narrative levels makes us see the underlying ground that is reality. We do not see it in the sense that everything becomes meaningfully interrelated; there is no pattern in the carpet, revealed as we finish the book. And we do not intimate, via the various clues we pick up about such and such a character, the mysterious and deep psyche of the individual. We merely witness a group of characters amassing and using information.

Other People’s Adventures

In the above I have largely left “Clélie” behind. Subligny does much the same: Juliette d’Arviane is in fact a scant presence in the novel; her delusions kick things off, but once we learn her story, we move on to other stories. Subligny, say commentators, has little control of his material, no sense of structure or plot. And he seems unable to push the comedy very far; we might expect his novel to reprise, in a burlesque mode, scenes from Scudéry’s romance, but it does not. Serroy again expresses surprise, and rightly so: in all other previous instances of the Quixote motif, starting of course with Cervantes, onlookers take advantage of the protagonist’s illness; here, no one does.³² On the contrary, the other characters seem to have a version of that illness themselves. Like Riberville at the novel’s outset, they note that many of the adventures they live or witness or hear about would be perfectly worthy of a good romance. So what, precisely, is wrong with Juliette d’Arviane? And, by extension, with Scudéry?

The universe in which d’Arviane moves is not “realistic” by a long shot, not even in a sense that would be comprehensible to a seventeenth-century audience. Subligny’s characters continually marvel at the tales they encounter, which is why they are skeptical. But as I’ve said, only in one or two cases of the supernatural are stories revealed to be downright false. Subligny’s world is, massively, one of truth—a truth repeatedly put to the test, to be sure, but truth nonetheless. Suspected of lies or inventions, his characters inevitably confirm their reliability, no matter how far-fetched their stories may be. That Montal objects to the idea of daylight kidnappings in the gardens at Vaux, or that the group conclude that Velzers’s tale of her affairs with La Grancour must be true because no one could possibly “improvise such a coherent plot” (105)—examples like these confirm that Subligny’s characters are applying criteria of intrinsic plausibility. At the same time, however, the book does not banish implausible stories to a childish never-never land. La Fausse Clélie, in spite of its satiric ancestors, is hardly an anti-Clélie: it does not subvert romance commonplaces in favor of something more earthy and quotidian, it just brings them close to home.

For the novel’s ending, which largely revolves around the mystery of the “ghost” seen by the man who has fainted in the garden at Vaux, is essentially plucked from romance. Faced with explaining the apparition, as well as the equally mysterious fact that Kermas has decided to don a mask, the members of the group ask the man, the Marquis de Kimperbel, to tell his story. Kimperbel claims to have seen the ghost of his dead and much regretted mistress, whom he had been prevented from marrying years ago on account of a family feud. The mistress, naturally, will be identified as Kermas herself, who, after an intervening story involving a new character, Lusigny, will explain just how it happened that she did not die in childbirth as Kimperbel thought, and ended up alive and well at Vaux. Kermas’s “strange adventure” (276)—she had been erroneously thought dead, buried alive, rescued, only to be shipwrecked and marooned for three years on an island—as well as the coincidence of her turning up masked at Vaux immediately strike all concerned as worthy of romance: “I swear, even in a romance you couldn’t find a better plotted story than that one,” says Lusigny (284). La Fausse Clélie’s interlocking stories, I have maintained, do not usually come together in the manner of Heliodorian romance; their relationship is more diffuse. But the pleasures of good plotting are also celebrated, which is why Subligny does not refuse or ridicule improbable devices—abductions, pirates, shipwrecks, and a final recognition scene. He merely sets them in the present and then validates them through the construction of the fact-checking reading apparatus I have been examining.

Which brings us, then, to d’Arviane’s problem—a very slight problem, it turns out. The abductor who fills Riberville in on the events he has incorrectly interpreted is the first to point out that “a strange sympathy” (20) exists between d’Arviane’s life and Clélie’s: the former rightly noticed that things that happened to her also occurred to Scudéry’s heroine.³³ Much later in the book, d’Arviane’s story is briefly taken up again; and after a second disappearance, a new carriage, and another pursuit, the group of friends return again to the fundamental resemblance of life and literature: “They talked for a long time about the novelty of these incidents, judged completely worthy of a young lady who imagined that she was Clélie” (308). And d’Arviane, after all, is hardly the only example of this. Riberville, we have seen, behaves bravely like a “romance hero” (4); d’Arviane’s pseudo-abductor prefaces his story by noting that he seems to be playing “the character of a Romance attendant [écuyer]” (16). Subsequent mysterious events in the frame narrative—Velzers’s attempted repossession, for example, of the dropped letter Riberville has impolitely started to read—also furnish “enough to make up the prettiest romance in the world” (43). In La Fausse Clélie, the real world does not take the place of romance; it is rather romance that colonizes the real world.

D’Arviane, then, has made a simple error, that of believing not in romance’s incredible plots but in romance’s historical remove. Greece, Rome, Turkey, Egypt: these are the places Scudéry and others set their romances. But they might as well set them in France, suggests Subligny, which has no shortage of adventure itself. D’Arviane, then, shares the romance writer’s prejudice for historically removed, exotic locales; her illness, and perhaps theirs, begins at the point she realizes that the genre in fact describes contemporary life. To put the matter differently, one can say that faced with the fact that her life parallels Clélie’s, d’Arviane concludes that she must be Clélie, rather than following the resemblance in the opposite direction. The proper conclusion, according to Subligny’s reading lesson, would be closer to realizing that Clélie is in fact Juliette d’Arviane, or less literally, that the adventures we read about are transpositions of our lives. On hearing the unfathomable coincidences of Kermas and Kimberbel’s relationship, Velzers, whose own life resembles a well-plotted story, comes to a realization: “‘Romance stories’ are what we call other people’s adventures [On nomme les aventures des autres des histoires Romanesques]” (311).

The comment, I believe, can be taken two ways. Romanesque here has a strong hint of the unbelievable: what happens to us is an adventure, but when the same thing happens to others, we dismiss it as unbelievable. But at the same time, we think that only the adventures of other people—the heroes of the far-off past—are worthy of being put in a romance. In both cases, we unaccountably separate our lives and our books. The lesson, then, is not conventionally Quixotian, for Subligny does not reject Scuderian romance as Cervantes rejects (though seemingly with some reluctance) chivalric romance. The only reform needed is setting. Romance is a form that is completely adequate to our lives—if only authors like Scudéry would stop using those silly Roman names.

The Key to Romance

If d’Arviane unnecessarily renames herself Clélie, Subligny, by contrast, constructs his novel on the opposite principle and converts all those romance names back into French. This is, he feels, “a new way of writing,” one that may not be appreciated by “romance-minded readers”: “Few before me,” he writes in his preface, “have taken upon themselves to give French names to their heroes” (n.p.).³⁴ The boast is sometimes cited in histories of literary realism as evidence of a real change, and indeed, from this point on French names, either historically accurate (in the nouvelle historique) or plausible-sounding (in the various nouvelles galantes purporting to tell of present-day affairs), do make inroads, even if pseudo-Greek names—Philandre, Clitandre, Philis—continue to be used well into the eighteenth century.³⁵ But “realism”—taking the term in the very general sense of a strategy for easing readers’ suspension of disbelief—has little to do with Subligny’s choice. For one thing, the cast of La Fausse Clélie shows the same obsession with gossip that we have seen in La Princesse de Clèves: characters constantly fit names of people and places they already know to the new narratives they hear. For another, their obsession is a transposition of Subligny’s reader’s own: Subligny has not given realistic names to invented characters, he has hidden real people under invented names. La Fausse Clélie is a roman à clef.

Subligny cut his literary teeth on the nascent “society” press: his weekly newsletter in verse, La Muse de la cour, which appeared in the mid-1660s, catered to the news demands of those at court and in the city. And indeed, one fruitful way of approaching the tale-telling of La Fausse Clélie is to dissociate it from the Boccaccian tradition to which it admittedly appears related and fit it into the very specific moment between La Muse de la cour and the foundational periodical Le Mercure galant (which begins publication in 1672).³⁶ From this point of view, his characters do not exchange tales for their distraction and moral profit; they metaphorically gather and distribute news. This is obvious even in the way the protagonists of the novel’s third-person embedded narratives—faits divers, tales of roguery, and so on—are carefully named.³⁷ The man whose papers are torn up by a sprite is “Santois, Paris magistrate”; the bawdy tale of Luchères is told at Mulionne’s chateau precisely when the protagonist’s name comes to light; even Barbesieux’s histoire tragique about the lover who refused to compromise his mistress’s alibi contains his name (the Comte de Bernilly). (On occasion names are missing, but other information is supplied that would seem to encourage readers to find a name to go with the narrative—as in the case of the magistrate from Ardivilliers, who finds his chateau “haunted” by some crooks who want to force him from it.) Thus reading his novel is very much like reading a gazette—only one that does not limit itself to the goings-on of a given group, but like the Mercure galant, canvasses all of France for appropriately diverting tales.

As in La Princesse de Clèves, however, the name game usually requires the active participation of the characters: names are not supplied, they must be fit to anonymous adventures. As we have seen, Riberville is able to verify Montal’s story—felt by most listeners to be highly improbable—because it enables him to fill in a blank opened up by a previous narrative: “I heard about that story … but I had no idea that you were its hero, for no one was named” (37). Anonymity is an invitation to be curious, and to start the process of identification. Speculation regarding Riberville’s past reaches a fever pitch when d’Arviane reveals that she knows “the woman with whom his last adventure happened” (51). Riberville begs her not to name names if she continues with his story, but he only succeeds in piquing everyone’s interest even further—“he’s afraid of having people named … [so] this must be an important story” (52). D’Arviane obeys Riberville’s request for anonymity to the letter, but certainly not in spirit, for as he laughingly points out at the end, “Oh yes, the solution is difficult to guess, now that you’ve mentioned Toulouse and said that the lady went to her rendez-vous while her husband was at the courthouse” (59). Such details, Riberville implies, are intended as clues, and the consumption of narrative has become an explicit game of identifications.

In this context, Subligny’s “realistic” names are nothing more than a type of temporary anonymity designed to be penetrated. And for the most part they are simply anagrams. Hence Alain Niderst has suggested that the Abbé de Ruper can only hide the Abbé de Pure (a fellow traveler of the précieuses), and that Lusigny must be Subligny himself: “One hardly needs a key, since the real names are respected, or in any case barely modified.”³⁸ A contemporary key, moreover, does exist, and was printed and included in at least one copy of the 1672 Amsterdam edition, published by Jacques Wagenaar.³⁹ It confirms some anagrams Niderst detected, and offers others—“Clélie”’s abductor, the Comte de Sarbedat, is given as a certain Saubedac; Santois, the “Paris magistrate” who was spooked by the sprite, is “Monsieur de Santeüil,” who was, the key confirms, a “Paris magistrate”; another minor character, the Marquis de Luseau, is the Chevalier de Lauzain.⁴⁰ The key identifies most, if not absolutely all, of the characters in the novel, down to the most minor walk-ons (“the friend wearing the blue doublet” featured in one short anecdote, is, apparently, the Marquis de Carvois). The characters’ constant mapping of narrative onto their “real world” has, it seems, spread outward to Subligny’s own readers, now expected to relate his tales to the real “real world” of 1660s France. Their lives read like a tabloid because La Fausse Clélie is indeed a tabloid.⁴¹

For thoroughly historical reasons, modern readers tend to be put off at the idea of keys. Yet the latter were demonstrably, and in remarkably diverse ways, part of an earlier horizon of expectations.⁴² Unsurprisingly, given the novel’s title, the relevant context for La Fausse Clélie’s particular use of keys is Scuderian romance. The extent, nature, and significance of Scudéry’s use of keys has been hotly debated ever since Victor Cousin proposed in 1858 that the plots and characters of Artamène and Clélie offered a veritable window onto the lives of the aristocrats in the circle of Scudéry’s famous Samedis.⁴³ The authenticity of the manuscript key, purportedly dated 1657, that Cousin reported having dug up in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal has been put into doubt, partially on the basis of its disappearance (suspiciously, Cousin was the only one to have seen it); moreover, various internal problems make Cousin’s view of Artamène as a barely disguised relation of Grand Siècle life highly problematic.⁴⁴ Other doubts riddle attempts to use keys to decipher Scudéry’s works. Not only are the keys proposed usually bewilderingly contradictory, but the author herself apparently refuted their existence: “I have never provided any key for Cyrus or Clélie, and I don’t have one myself,” she wrote in a letter.⁴⁵ Yet Scudéry’s phrasing of her denial seems cagey, and at any rate the fact that she made it suggests that keys were very much on the minds of readers at the time, as much anecdotal evidence around Clélie confirms.⁴⁶ The point that keyed reading is most definitely not anachronistic projection on the part of Cousin is brought home by the fact that Scudéry herself incorporates such expectations into the Clélie: her characters wonder about—and then exchange—possible keys before going on to discuss the pros and cons of this type of reading.⁴⁷

Subligny’s keying, however, bears little relation to Scudéry’s. When the latter’s characters engage the question of keys, they do so in the context of a story concerning a certain Artaxandre, who is nowhere present in the main plot of the novel. The detail is crucial: Scudéry’s characters, citing the need for “diversity” and “entertainment” [divertissement], do on rare occasions claim to recount recent gallant adventures under supposed names, but those adventures and their protagonists are completely separate from the romance’s main plot. Clélie is far, then, from a compendium of contemporary gossip; on the contrary, it is quite decorous. In the main, the type of keyed reading it demands has nothing to do with amorous adventure or scandal; it concerns, rather, the physical and moral portraits that are offered each time a new character makes an appearance. Such portraits, which became a socioliterary fashion in these years, were the element of Clélie that provoked guessing games, not this or that narrative, which instead pose questions of behavior from a much more abstract perspective.⁴⁸ Clélie’s frame narrative, as has long been recognized, is a transposition of Scudéry’s salon; its coterie of distinguished participants politely and discreetly debate issues of love and taste. When on rare occasions they let themselves go and gossip, they are careful to gab only about people who are not members of their circle. Clélie may be keyed, but it does not, on the whole, purport to traffic in true stories.

Gossip, by contrast, is what La Fausse Clélie is all about. That Subligny drops Scudéry’s practice of pseudonyms, which came straight from the extra-literary games that characterized gallant society, appears fully logical—not so much a move in the direction of increasing “realism” as a recognition that the ideal of the coterie was inadequate to the type of reading he was attempting to put into place.⁴⁹ Anagrams and more minor onomastic deformations, by contrast, suited his purpose much better: they were not a code, but clues capable of underwriting investigation. (This is why we have seen Riberville pointing out that once one gives a name of a town and a husband’s profession, listeners can start guessing.) Moreover, there are at least a couple of indications that unlike Scudéry, Subligny is actually keying the action of his novel, or at least its embedded stories. The key identifies Riberville as the Chevalier de Rohan, while the unhappily married Comtesse de Tourneüil, whom Riberville helps escape from her jealous husband, and who takes refuge in England, is keyed to Madame de Mazarin.⁵⁰ Here, the parallels with what we know—indeed, what everyone at the time knew—are clear, for Hortense Mancini did indeed enlist her presumed lover the Chevalier de Rohan so as to flee to Italy, in June 1668. It is also doubtless significant that the adventure that occurs between Riberville and the unnamed Dame de Toulouse (the one about whom the friends learn enough to identify her, Riberville thinks) is keyed not to Rohan but to “the Marquis de Trerigni and Mademoiselle de Keravioir, sister of the magistrate Laelant’s wife.” Riberville’s character can, it would seem, serve as a “host” for miscellaneous pieces of gossip. Further biographical research—into the identity of this “Keravioir” or anyone else for that matter—is probably unnecessary: whether or not all the adventures recounted here refer to real-world affairs, Subligny wants us—with an insistence that never characterized the age-old topos of the “true story”—to think they do. Hence the inclusion of hints that enable his readers to do more or less what his characters do, which is to undertake the work of fitting narratives to the world they know.

D’Arviane does not live in a world of romance that everyone else has left behind. She lacks, rather, the code that would allow her to profit from the intricate web being spun between romances and contemporary society. She notes a conformity between romance and her life, and concludes she must be Clélie. A better inference, Subligny suggests, would be to look at things the other way around: Clélie and all the other characters we read about are actually us. Juliette d’Arviane has her key upside down, or inside out.

Neo-Romance

For some time Don Quixote has given its critics a kind of proleptic madness, not too different from the madness of Cervantes’s hero: the Don projects what he has read about the past onto his windmills, while we perceive those windmills through the filter of our convictions about what is to come.⁵¹ This is to say that if he has read too many old romances, maybe we have read too many modern novels to see what is before us. And the texts before us—Don Quixote and La Fausse Clélie, but also Persiles, L’Astrée, and Clélie—are simply manipulations of romance in the wake of Heliodorus. Let us call them neo-romances, to mark their self-conscious modernization of a form from which they do not even imagine “breaking.” The authors of these works were not behind the times; on the contrary, they were looking forward and they had a program for the future. But the future, which goes on for so long, soon outdistanced their plans. Subsequent generations of writers experimented with new forms—the pseudofactual forms of the long eighteenth century, but also the nouvelle historique of the tail end of the seventeenth—that looked as different from Heliodorian romance as the Aethiopica was, the neo-romancers felt, from Amadis of Gaul. Search as we may, these later forms are not to be found in any of the earlier works—not in La Fausse Clélie, certainly, and not even in Don Quixote. Only the magical thinking of a certain brand of literary history can make it appear otherwise.

Cervantes’s program for the future was, by and large, that of Italian, French, and Spanish humanists. Like the clash between partisans of Tasso’s new epic vision and supporters of Ariosto’s self-conscious and erudite take on the medieval marvelous in Orlando furioso (1516–32), Amyot’s translation of the Aethiopica became one of the flashpoints in the battle to accord modern poetic production with the production, and prescriptions, of the ancients. We now imagine chivalric romance as a crusty remainder of a superstitious age, but this image comes to us precisely from Cervantes and, before him, Amyot, who already had labeled books like Amadis of Gaul “the delirium of some madman’s feverish dream.”⁵² In fact, it is good to recall that Amadis’s publication in France, directly contemporaneous with Amyot’s Heliodorus, was an undertaking of some prestige. Whether it be true or not that François I discovered Amadis during his imprisonment in Spain following the battle of Pavia (1525) and later pressed Nicolas de Herberay des Essarts to translate it, Herberay’s dedications make it clear that the king took close interest in the eight pricey folio volumes that appeared from 1540 to 1548.⁵³ Amadis wasn’t a remaindered leftover, it was a sign of the times: like Orlando furioso, the translation fed what Francis Yates has called the “imaginative re-feudalization of culture” in the sixteenth century.⁵⁴ This is to say that mid-sixteenth-century audiences did not read Amadis with the quixotic absorption Cervantes suggests; their fad was as self-consciously modern as any revival, in that it acknowledged the pastness of the past.⁵⁵ But there was a competing route to the future, leading not through a reimagined medieval past but through the Aethiopica, a text that seemed to be the missing classical pendant to the epics of Homer and Virgil.

I have already noted how the in medias res beginning helped bolster the Aethiopica’s humanist credentials by giving it a structure that recalled epic, but there were other factors behind Amyot’s attack on chivalric romance. Where Amadis was religious, and heterodoxically so, the Aethiopica was secular; the former relied on the supernatural for its wonders while the latter was filled with only the disenchanted surprises of plot; military heroics and adulterous courtly love were replaced by the chaste love of long-suffering and steadfast youth. And of course one was medieval, the other classical: chivalric romance, deprived of the least “erudition” or “knowledge of antiquity,” was at best a degraded version of ancient epic.⁵⁶ Amyot’s attack stung. Herberay des Essarts stopped promoting diffusion of Amadis’s remaining parts and provided other chivalric works with prefaces that tried to demonstrate their congruence with Heliodorian practice; in the long verse preface to the eighth volume of Herberay’s translation, Michel Sevin was already taking into account Amyot’s blast, delivered only a few months earlier; prefaces to subsequent volumes became increasingly defensive; the text itself of those volumes often turned antichivalric and satirical, and by the end of the century, even one of the apocryphal additions to the Amadis corpus was tightly modeled on Heliodorus.⁵⁷

So, as Cervantes scholars sometimes note with perplexity, chivalric romance was something of a dead horse by the time Don Quixote finally ran it through in 1605—not only because of Amyot’s critiques, but also because the affectionately nostalgic Amadis translations were themselves a recognition that the age of chivalry had past. But how to move forward—besides of course furnishing more editions and translations of Heliodorus, which was done? Cervantes took two approaches. The first was Don Quixote. If we may safely dismiss as anachronistic the Romantic embrace of the Don’s madness as a loyalty to the ideal in a debased world, the Quixote nonetheless constitutes a profoundly sympathetic revisiting of chivalric romance, squarely in the line of Orlando furioso, referenced some twenty times by Cervantes.⁵⁸ One hundred years after Ariosto, Cervantes could only bring back chivalric romance as a mad dream. But it was a dream he hung on to—not in the Man of La Mancha sense, of course, but quite literally: the curate and the barber spare Amadis (and a few other items) the bonfire prepared for the rest of Don Quixote’s library. And Amadis’s reprieve is repeated on another level by Don Quixote itself, which allows the memory of chivalry to live on for a bit longer than it otherwise would have. Cervantes was much kinder to chivalric romance than literary history would be, kinder in any case than his own contemporaries.

Those contemporaries were voting with their works, and the versatile Montreux furnishes a nicely symbolic figure: this continuator of Amadis (his translation of volume 16 appeared in 1577) jumped ship and published a counterfeit ancient Greek novel, Oeuvre de la chasteté, which appeared in three parts from 1595 to 1601.⁵⁹ Cervantes could hardly neglect this more obvious approach to the modernization of romance—romance that in the right hands might become roughly what epic was to the ancients, the capstone to a poet’s career. Persiles was to all appearances just that for Cervantes, who unlike Montreux had no interest in making ersatz Greek novels but sought to modernize Heliodorus along the lines of Tasso’s modernization of Virgil. He brought the action into the recent past and spread it out over Europe; he multiplied and interlaced his plotlines with bewildering ingenuity; and he made the book’s many roads lead to Christian Rome. And Persiles’s success, “comparable to that of Don Quixote,” lasted nearly two centuries.⁶⁰

Amyot won: nearly a century and a half later, Heliodorus was known by heart by Racine, whereas Amadis had become a downmarket offering of peddlers of the Bibliothèque bleue. All seventeenth-century romancers did not take precisely Cervantes’s route in modernization; on the contrary, Persiles, with its modern European setting, is anomalous. The acknowledged masters of the form were French, and though their production certainly varied—d’Urfé’s L’Astrée combines Heliodorus’s structure with the setting of Amyot’s other translation coup, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe; Gomberville accentuates the adventure aspect, while Scudéry’s frame tale starts to look a lot like a salon gathering—there were clear trends. One was to up the Aristotelian ante on Heliodorus’s tight plotting and love of recognition scenes by weaving their narratives out of classical history, just like tragic or epic poets.⁶¹ More important still, the French turned the genre into a school for manners, one that taught its now-domesticated aristocratic readers (and would-be aristocratic readers) how to live and love and above all be sociable: “he was not to be admitted into the academy of Wit,” declared Louis XIII’s minister Richelieu, “who had not been before well read in Astrea.”⁶² Combining ingenious plotting and politesse, writers of the French seventeenth century took up Heliodorus’s mantle and purged romance of its perceived medieval decadence. “Monsieur d’Urfé was the first to deliver [it] from barbarity,” wrote Pierre-Daniel Huet in his widely read 1670 treatise on the origin of romance.⁶³

The year 1670: we are starting to come back around to Subligny, who actually faced a much different situation from the man whose masterpiece he was imitating. A lot had changed in 65 years. For Cervantes, romance’s “other way,” the way of the Aethiopica, hadn’t yet been explored; for Subligny, it had, and was again in need of modernization. We can postulate a number of reasons for the abundantly testified contemporary belief that French heroic romance was exhausted: a shift in the cultural orbit away from autonomous, self-policing aristocratic groups to the “absolutist” court; the growth of the book market and expanded, mobile readerships; sheer “genre fatigue” and the aspirations of a new generation of writers.⁶⁴ But modernization is not necessarily replacement. It is sometimes said that Huet’s treatise arrived a bit late, that the form whose genealogy he traced was “dying.”⁶⁵ The metaphor implies far more than we should venture. It is more reasonable to suppose that Huet felt that, after many ups and downs and transformations, new writers would simply transform romance—“fictions of amorous adventure,” according to his definition—once more.⁶⁶ Why should he feel that romance was dead, when his treatise was the preface to Lafayette’s Zayde, histoire espagnole, a work that represented a self-conscious return to romance’s Heliodorian roots. Similarly, though it is typical to see Lafayette’s return as a nostalgic farewell by a talented writer to the type of book that had formed her, our view is skewed by our knowledge of the novel’s future. In 1670, Zayde probably felt completely up-to-date, for one thing because it cast aside the chastity and generosity of romance heroes and invested Heliodorus with the new, more “Racinian” passions of jealousy and spurned love.

There were other ways forward, to be sure. Scudéry, in her production of the 1660s, retained her faithful lovers and gallant rivals, choosing instead to eliminate subplots and intercalated stories and to set her new romances in medieval Spain (Mathilde, 1669) or even in the present (La Promenade de Versailles, 1669). The Lettres portuguaises of 1669 introduced the motif of the discovered bundle of letters. The first nouvelles historiques, or historical novellas, started to appear around 1670 as well; Saint-Réal coined the term for the subgenre in his 1672 Dom Carlos. And the literary career of Villedieu offers a full spectrum of formal possibilities for the novel: Scuderian romance (the early and unfinished Alcidamie, 1661), updated romance (Les Exilés de la cour d’Auguste, 1672), the historical novella (Les Amours des grands hommes, 1671), the letter novel (Le Portefeuille, 1675), even a pioneering memoir novel (La Vie de Henriette Sylvie de Molière, 1671–72) whose foundling heroine, unsurprisingly, lives a life that takes many a romance twist and turn. The knowledge that there would be no more Clélies did not mean that the age of “the novel,” conceived as a complete abandonment of all of romance’s devices, had arrived; it just meant that, for reasons I’ve alluded to and probably many more, stories of amorous adventure needed forms in which to recycle (and supplement) those devices.

But hindsight is surely a gift as well as a curse: in the end, what is Subligny’s relation to a future he cannot see but that we can? In the terms that define the present study, La Fausse Clélie grafts romance plot devices onto post-Aristotelian pseudofactual stock. No doubt the keyed novel is not pseudofactual in the precise sense I have described in the Introduction: pseudofactual novels pose as found documents while giving reason for disbelief, whereas keyed novels inevitably say they are invented while inviting the reader to look for the real story under the pseudonyms.⁶⁷ Nonetheless, keyed novels are hardly brute fact. They key some characters and actions while fabricating others; readers are warned that there are indeed real figures hiding under pseudonyms but that the clues have been shuffled so that, as Furetière puts it in his Roman bourgeois (1666), “[the key] will be no good to you”⁶⁸; when readership becomes national or international, and the personages depicted cease to be drawn from the most visible princely nobility, most readers cannot possibly have enough gossipy knowledge to identify protagonists anyway. In short, the keyed novel was slippery: it hitched the novel to the world, but with enough play to ensure a certain amount of autonomy, so that reading La Fausse Clélie (or Gulliver’s Travels) can be amusing even if you are stuck in a foreign country or for that matter in the twenty-first century. Like letter novels or memoir novels, La Fausse Clélie fudged its factuality; it too was pseudofactual. A romance made pseudofactual through its use of the key.

It is sorely tempting to ask of La Fausse Clélie that it be a novel in a sense we can recognize—that it be realist, realistic, connected to the quotidian here and now. That’s what Don Quixote does, after all—gets rid of (chivalric) romance and introduces the modern novel, with its taverns and prostitutes and money. But Subligny doesn’t pursue the implications of his model. He announces a satire on Clélie and then gives us another Clélie, minus the Roman costumes. He regresses (like Cervantes and his maddening Persiles). He doesn’t have the force of his convictions. He sees the bankruptcy of romance and reinvests anyway. He is, of course, a third-rate writer, on the wrong side of literary history.⁶⁹

Third-rate, maybe, but our frustration is uncalled-for. It comes directly from a quixotic reading of Don Quixote, one that seeks in it the novel—the-modern-novel-that-is-antithetical-to-romance—just as the Knight of the Sad Countenance searches the Manchegan countryside for giants. I mentioned in the previous chapter that early modern readers did not see one of Lafayette’s novels—Zayde—as pointing back and the other—La Princesse de Clèves—as pointing forward. Since they didn’t know the future, they weren’t tempted to construct the genealogies that we do, and they were right not to: La Princesse de Clèves has no more or less to do with the evolution of the novel than Zayde, and only an accident of history has made it appear otherwise. Similarly, Don Quixote and Persiles were both popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they were different, certainly, and Don Quixote provided a device—the protagonist whose bad reading has changed the way he views the world—that was found nowhere else. But one was no more or less modern than the other to readers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who still appreciated Heliodorian romance and who did not know that in the nineteenth century the novel would largely become a sort of “Dutch painting” of everyday banality rather than Huet’s “fictions of amorous adventure.”⁷⁰ It was that transformation that allows modern critics to view Don Quixote as containing both the old and the new within it, the latter driving out the former. But from another perspective—their perspective, this time, and not ours—Don Quixote and La Fausse Clélie are “modern” only in that their authors update forms perceived as outdated. In Cervantes’s case, the outdated form had lost all prestige, and could only be revisited ironically, through the shaky gaze of a madman. In Subligny’s case—and this is why Juliette d’Arviane is not subject to the irony the reader of Don Quixote expects—the basic subject matter of heroic romance, amorous adventure, retained its prestige; the problem was just that certain formal conventions (especially setting and length) had become obstacles. But in neither case was there a “discarding” of the old, only its modification or reuse. This is why Don Quixote can well be considered a “neo”-chivalric romance, just as La Fausse Clélie (and Persiles) is a “neo”-Heliodorian romance. Neither first-rate writer nor third-rate epigone invents a qualitatively new “novel,” which is in the power of no man or woman to invent anyway.

Doubtless, Subligny’s willing indulgence in the commonplaces of romance is counterintuitive for the literary historian trained to be on the lookout for the novel’s rise; after all, Ian Watt long ago pointed to an explicit mistrust of traditional plots—and they don’t come more traditional than the recognition plot—as a signal characteristic of the realist novel.⁷¹ But it is really our expectations that are to blame for our disappointment with the results of La Fausse Clélie. Certainly, in his preface Subligny vaunts his “new way of writing,” which he defends in advance against “romance-minded readers [esprits romanesques]” (n.p.); but only someone with knowledge of the future can see here the announcement of the birth of the novel. La Fausse Clélie’s “new way” simply lies in updating romance by bringing it into the present; “romance-minded readers” are those who are stuck in their ways and still want their characters to be called “Tiridate” or “Cléante,” not Riberville or Velzers. We joust with windmills when we interpret such prefatory declarations anachronistically and then fault the book’s reality for failing to live up to our dreams. As writers, how modern were Cervantes and Subligny? Like most of us, they were being just as modern as they could.