Merlin l’enchanteur by Edgar Quinet, here translated as The Enchanter Merlin, was originally published in two volumes in 1860 by Michel Lévy. It was reprinted in 1878 as volumes XVI and XVII of the author’s collected works, published by Hachette; that version was reprinted several times. Quinet had begun writing it in 1853, and it represented the core of his endeavor for seven years while he was living in exile, first in Brussels and then, after 1858, in Switzerland. He had been banished from his native land following Louis Napoléon’s 1851 coup, because he had previously held an administrative position in the Republican government established in 1848.
Many of the Republicans banished by the self-proclaimed emperor returned to France after a relatively brief absence, when an amnesty was offered by the new régime. They included such prominent literary men as Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas and P.-J. Hetzel, but Quinet, like Victor Hugo, refused to return while the Second Empire remained standing. When he completed the book, however, there was still no end in sight; he had no way of knowing that the Franco-Prussian War would eventually bring it down in 1870. In consequence, and inevitably—especially on the part of a writer who inserted himself into his fiction as much as Quinet did—Merlin l’enchanteur is deeply impregnated with the sensation and desperation of his exile, as well as the hopes and ideas that assisted him to bear it.
The Bibliothèque Nationale, which purchased the manuscript of the novel in 2005, captions its advertisement for that purchase with the statement that the novel constitutes “the only fictional rewriting devoted to Merlin in France during the 19th century,” and claims that, on that basis alone, it is of great importance in the history of the myth, as well as the author’s biography. We are now so accustomed to the popularity and familiarity of fiction of this kind that it is difficult to imagine a time when it seemed so extraordinary as to be bizarre, but that was the case when Quinet conceived the project of writing his fictional “biography” of Merlin. Nor was the situation in England much different at the time, even though the mythology of King Arthur’s reign and his court was not only more familiar in 1860 but was beginning to take on something of the appearance of a “national epic,” by virtue of the reprinting, earlier in the century, of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, albeit in abridged versions and under different titles.
Morte d’Arthur had not always been a popular work, although it had the distinction of being one of the earliest English printed books when William Caxton produce an edition in 1485—reportedly with some reluctance, because he did not believe that King Arthur had ever existed, and needed to be persuaded of the contrary. Wynkyn de Worde had produced a second edition a decade later, but there was no subsequent one throughout the 16th century. William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser both knew of its existence, but their references to the myth of Arthur and Merlin are fleeting, and Shakespeare did not seize upon it as he did upon two other mythical Dark Age kings, Lear and Cymbeline, in order to exploit its tragic potential. The work’s resurfacing in the early 19th century was, therefore, something of a Renaissance, and the employment of the stories it contains as a form of imaginative capital was to change dramatically in the last decades of the century.
Although the members of the British Romantic Movement had mostly steered clear of Arthuriana in their heyday, save for Thomas Love Peacock’s delightful but neglected prose romance The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” (1842) was extended over the next four decades into the verse epic The Idylls of the King, which cemented both the popularity and cultural status of Malory’s account as a kind of formative myth of England, with the heroic Arthur as a central role model whose spirit was echoed in such modern national heroes as the Duke of Wellington.
In early 19th-century France, of course, the situation of the myths of Arthur and Merlin seemed quite different, most importantly because they did not seem to be British at all, let alone quintessentially British, Malory being virtually unknown there. One of the key elements of the French Romantic Movement, however, of whom Quinet was a key member, was the quest to rediscover and revitalize mythical and folkloristic materials, which several adherents of the movement saw as vitally important to a proper understanding of both history and human psychology. Just as the German Romantics, with whom Quiet had familiarized himself during a long sojourn in Germany in the late 1820s, were seeking in their own myth and folklore for an essential volksgeist [spirit of the people] which they were attempting to celebrate and revitalize in kunstmärchen [art folktales], Quinet deliberately went in search in something similar when he had occasion to examine various manuscripts of 12th century romances, many of which had never been printed and only a handful of which could qualify as well-known.
Quinet searched that material for the “soul” of the then-embryonic French nation, and discovered his own version of it. Typically, however, he did not discover it in what would have seemed to almost anyone else to be the logical place, in La Chanson de Roland and its rich spinoff of tales of Charlemagne’s heroic knights, but in Arthuriana. From his viewpoint, however, as a Frenchman and a pacifist, Arthur could not be the key symbol in that nexus of tales, because Arthur had been a king in England, and a warrior; the symbol that Quinet thought it appropriate—and, indeed, necessary—to represent as the putative soul of France was the far more mercurial figure of Merlin. Merlin l’enchanteur is, in a sense, intended to be the ultimate quintessentially French kunstmärchen—but, like Tennyson’s Idylls, it was a long time in gestation.
Quinet’s initial study of verse and prose romances, based on his original research, was published as Rapport à M. le Ministre des travaux publics, sur les épopées françaises du 12ème siècle, restées jusqu’à ce jour en manuscript (1831) and reprinted in the Oeuvres complètes as “Les Épopées françaises inédites du 12ème siècle” [Unpublished French Epics of the 12th Century]. The assertions he made with therein regard to the nature of early French romances, and their importance to an understanding of French history and national psychology, were reiterated and strengthened in chapters IX-XIV of his Histoire de la poésie (1837), which was reprinted along with the earlier essay in vol. IX of the Oeuvres complètes. He remarked in the preface that he added to the essay in the Oeuvres complètes that it had been the first work that brought him to public attention, by virtue of the “strange tempest” of “violent anger” that it unleashed against him.
It now seems strange that such an esoteric essay could have unleashed a storm of controversy, and even more strange that the violent reaction was provoked by assertions that are now broadly taken for granted, but Quinet’s membership of the Romantic Movement put him in automatic opposition to “Classicist” scholars, just as it did to “Classicist” litterateurs, and there was a reaction ready to burst forth at the slightest provocation, even something as trivial as his assertion that the prose romances had been preceded by the verse romances. The contention that really brought scholarly wrath down on his head, however, was the idea that the French romances had appropriated material generously from “Celtic” [i.e. Welsh] sources.
That assertion too now seems utterly uncontroversial—and, indeed, incontrovertible—but in 1831, at least in the intellectual arena in which Quinet was working, it was a matter of some dispute, and by the time he published his Histoire de la poésie it was the focus of intense and rather intemperate argument, the brunt of which was born by another historian and folklorist associated with the Romantic Movement, Théodore Hersart, Vicomte de La Villemarqué. Hersart was a native of Brittany and was intensely interested in Breton history, folklore and culture. He made little distinction between Bretons and Britons, and regarded Medieval Bretagne as having had far closer links with Grande Bretagne, especially with Cornouailles [Cornwall] and Cambrie [Cambria, i.e. Wales] than with most of the regions that were subsequently gathered into France—with the possible exception of neighboring Normandy.
Hersart caused controversy when he published a collection entitled Barzaz Breiz [Breton Ballads, in Breton] in 1839, which ostensibly rendered many traditional Breton ballads into modern French, tacitly claiming much of French folklore for his native province. He was widely accused of falsifying the material, at least in the translation process, and probably by some outright fakery, but the collection nevertheless proved very popular. He followed it up with a two-volume collection of Contes populaires des ancient Bretons [Popular Tales of the Ancient Bretons] (1842), which is an anthology of four Medieval romances adapted into modern prose, beginning with Perceval, in a version that includes one of the several long continuation of Chrétien de Troyes’ original Conte du Graal—one of the most important Arthurian tales of the period. The collection is prefaced by a long essay examining the key elements of the Arthurian mythos, with separate essays on Arthur, Merlin and Lancelot, treating them as inventions that had arrived in Grande Bretagne from continental Bretagne, and had been initially developed there in a specifically Cambrian context before being reimported to France.
Hersart apparently began working on a much more elaborate version of that essay almost immediately, and, to all appearances, on his own prose epic summarizing the entire “tradition,” but it took him too long, and by the time his Myrdhinn, ou l’enchanteur Merlin: son histoire, ses oeuvres, son influence [Myrdhinn, or the Enchanter Merlin: His History, His Works and His Influence] was ready for publication, it was 1862, and he had been comprehensively upstaged, as he wryly noted in his introduction. Although the book is ostensibly non-fiction, its longest section by far, “Myrdhinn, personne romanesque” [Myrdhinn, Romantic Character] is presented in narrative form, and could easily have been issued separately as a work of fiction, although it remained, even in its own day, so obscure that it is unsurprising that the Bibliothèque Nationale’s caption-writer ignored it when promoting Quinet’s work.
How well Quinet knew Hersart is unclear, and he certainly cannot have had much contact with him while in exile, so such similarities as there are between their two versions of Merlin’s biography—and the differences are much more obvious—are probably due almost entirely to the common sources on which they drew, but there are a few passages where the overlap is very striking, most remarkably those dealing with the Council in Hell that prompts the Devil to sire Merlin, as described in Merlin in 1860 and Myrdhinn in 1862, although both passages must have been written many years earlier.
In Britain, not unnaturally, the attempt to “reclaim” Arthurian folklore from its early literary deployments in France has focused entirely on Wales rather than Brittany, and probably with justification, but the British Arthurians, from Malory onwards, like Quinet and Hersart, have always been more interested in myth creation than historical clarification, even though some of them might not have been entirely conscious of the fact. Whatever the actually evolutionary pattern of the oral folklore that provided the seeds the Arthurian mythos might have been, there is no doubt at all that its growth and flowering was primarily a literary process, and that much of what is now taken for granted (in Britain at least) as “Celtic folklore” relating to the Arthurian mythos was imaginatively projected “backwards” from French literary sources in a period when much of the British Isles was under the sway of the “Norman Conquest.”
Modern literary works based on the stories of Arthur and Merlin, especially when they represent explicit, earnest and artistic endeavors in myth-creation, as Quinet’s, Hersart’s and Tennyson’s do, thus have very complex historical roots, at which it is worth looking more closely if the specific features of Quinet’s Merlin are to be better understood. Because the original seeds of Quinet’s endeavor were drawn from the 12th century manuscripts he studied in order to make his 1931 report, it is undoubtedly helpful to look a little more closely at the content of those manuscripts of the genre of “romances” to which they belonged.
The word “romance,” in both French and English, is ultimately derived from the Old French romanz, whose approximate meaning was “vernacular,” and which was initially used to refer to documents translated from Latin. By the 12th century, however, the term and its evolving derivatives were more frequently and more particularly used with reference to a nascent genre of poetry and prose fiction that had moved on from translations of Latin epic poetry to prolific original composition. Just as the translations had referred to what was by then a distant mythologized past, the imitations and pastiches also looked back nostalgically to a whole series of mythologized distant pasts.
The best-known of the verse romances of which 12th century copies survive is La Chanson de Roland, which describes the ambush in the Pyrenees of a company of Charlemagne’s knights returning from fighting Moors in Spain. Another cycle of poems referring back to the same era is the “Guillaume cycle” featuring Guillaume d’Orange, of which no 12th century manuscripts survive, but which presumably dates from the same era and has slightly better connections with actual history. Other early examples of the burgeoning genre included the story of verse Floire et Blanchefleur, about the love of a pagan prince for a Christian captive, and several versions of the story of Tristan’s highly problematic love for Iseult, the intended bride of his liege-lord King Mark of Cornwall, of which two substantial—but still fragmentary—12th century texts survive, as well as numerous later manuscripts.
One version of the story of Tristan and Iseult that has not survived is known to have been written by Chrétien de Troyes, who became the most popular of the late 12th century writers of romance, and was also the most inventive. He was the great pioneer of romances featuring the court of King Arthur, beginning with Erec et Enede, which focuses on the conflict of conscience the knight Erec experiences as he tries to reconcile the demands of his chivalric ideals, which summon him to errant adventure, and those of his love for his wife, which incline him to stay at home. Le Chevalier de la Charrette, also known as Lancelot, tells the story of the much sharper conflict generated by the knight’s deeply problematic love for Arthur’s wife, Guenièvre. It became far better known than Le Chevalier au Lion, also known as Yvain, a story of moral progress and redemption whose hero loses the love of his life but eventually recovers her after a period of madness in the wilderness.
All three of those completed works were eventually outshone, however—at least in terms of modern pseudoscholarship—by Chrétien’s unfinished allegory Le Conte du Graal, also known as Perceval, which was apparently intended as a further story of progress and redemption with a more definite Christian decoding, but whose incompleteness left it with an intriguing aspect of mystery, further supplemented by confusion caused by the fact that it was bundled together for posthumous publication with another unfinished work, featuring the adventures of the knight Gauvain.
Although the particular popularity of Chrétien de Troyes was undoubtedly a major factor in establishing Arthurian romance as a core topic of the genre, contemporary politics also played a leading part, many of the key events of the period being the slowly-unfolding consequences of the event that subsequently made 1066 the best-known date in British history, when William I defeated his Saxon rival for the English throne, Harold, at the Battle of Hastings. The wealthiest and most powerful woman in Western Europe throughout the latter half of the 12th century was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who first married Louis VI of France but almost immediately after the annulment of that marriage, in 1152, married Henry, Duke of Normandy, who became Henry II of England two years later. The sons she bore Henry included the future kings Richard Coeur-de-Lion and John.
Eleanor’s court was undoubtedly an important source of patronage for writers and performers of romances, especially the epic-imitating chansons de geste, and her concerns undoubtedly help to shape the substance of the genre. Many subsequent historians credited her with the importation of an important element of southern “troubadour culture” into the chivalric romances of Northern France, hence generating the stories of problematic love that played a central role in the genre from Tristan and Iseult onwards. Although her personal role might have been exaggerated, the effective fusion of the Duchy of Aquitaine with Normandy undoubtedly formed the practical background to the amalgamation, as well as assisting its symbolization. The confusion of influences, however, extended much further than that central marriage.
The conquering Normans, who had originated as invaders from Scandinavia, were pillars of the feudal political system, glorified in romance by the retrospective extrapolation of the contemporary hierarchy of kings, barons and knights into imaginary pasts, where it could be more easily credited with imaginary virtues. Much of that mythology was, as Hersart de La Villemarqué argued, borrowed from the Normans’ neighbors in northern France, the Bretons, who were already taking a nostalgic delight in the twelfth century in looking back to lost glory days of heroic preux chevaliers [gallant knights]. Meanwhile, the rulers of large parts of both France and England had long been descended from invaders—the Franks and the Saxons—who had partly displaced and partly absorbed previous cultures, loosely describable as Gauls and Celts, which had been previously conquered, at least briefly by the Roman Empire. In consequence, the mythological pasts cooked up in France and England in the 12th century were blessed with a rich complexity and confusion of inherited and improvised materials.
Literary romance was an inherently syncretic genre, tacitly celebrating the kind of blending obtained by conquest and reorganization that was inherent in the actual history of feudalism as well as the flattering ideological image that romancers tried to construct. Central to that syncretic process was the fundamental marriage of the Breton/Norman “chivalric romance” glorifying knightly prowess in combat with the Provençal/Aquitanian “courtly romance,” which offered idealized depictions of intimate relationships. The writers were also willing, and often enthusiastic, to embrace other local folklores and superstitions, and to gather them into their generalized melting-pot—always, of course, with the proviso that threats originating from such dubious imaginative apparatus could not withstand the ideological forces of Christian faith and knightly heroism. It is against this background that the mythology of Arthur and Merlin was invented. Although Chrétien de Troyes was the principal literary progenitor of the Arthurian subgenre of romance, he was not the inventor of its substance, and he made no contribution to the development of the myth of Merlin, who was almost entirely the brainchild of a writer nowadays known as Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Galfridus Monumentensis, as he referred to himself in Latin, lived in the first half of the 12th century, and might well have been born in the Welsh marshes, although there is no evidence that he could speak or read the Welsh language. Most of his adult career was spent in Oxford, where he was probably associated with one of the teaching institutions that subsequently evolved into a university—the first in England—in 1167, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. Although he was appointed Bishop of St. Asaph in 1152 there is no evidence that Geoffrey visited the see in question before his death, not long thereafter. The first of his works to survive is known as the Prophetiae Merlini [Prophecies of Merlin], in which the prophet Merlin is asked by an English king, Vortigern, to interpret a dream in which a red dragon is defeated in a fight by a white dragon. Merlin interprets it as an allegory of the defeat of the Britons by Saxon invaders—a prophecy whose accuracy, like that of almost all accurate prophecies, comes from having been made after the fact. Other “prophecies” cited in the text have the same advantage, which doubtless helped make the work popular, providing an entirely illusory “basis” for a few gnomic remarks related to events as-yet-untranspired.
Geoffrey subsequently included the substance of that brief early text in a much more elaborate Historia Regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain], dating from the late 1130s, which relates the supposed history of Britain from its first settlement by refugees from Troy to the death of a king named Cadwallader in the 7th century. Other 12th century writers, who referred to Geoffrey’s work, including William of Newburgh and Giraldus Cambrensis, were extremely scathing about its lack of accuracy, regarding it as a romance in disguise, but time lends a certain gloss to documents, and many later scholars took it more seriously. It does, in fact, draw upon the very few earlier “histories” that existed at the time, but it transforms their material very considerably, and is best regarded as one of the great classics of genre of “scholarly fantasy”: works of imaginative fiction that pose as non-fiction, often contriving by that imposture to impose upon the reader’s credibility to a far greater extent than responsible writers of fiction generally feel entitled to do.
Some of the material in Geoffrey’s history is appropriated from De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae [On the Ruination and Conquest of Britain], a polemic written in the 6th century by a monk named Gildas, complaining about the sad state into which Britain has fallen since the Romans pulled out. The rather bizarre text is heavily swathed in flamboyant rhetoric and imagery borrowed from prophecies featured in the Biblical books of Daniel add Revelation, including a symbolic dragon, but it also includes a account of a victory of Briton forces over invading Saxons won by one Aurelianus Ambrosianus. Gildas was himself mythologized by two highly fanciful (and contradictory) accounts of his life, the second of which was written in the mid-twelfth century by Caradoc of Llancarfan, whom Geoffrey cites at one point and with whom he might have been acquainted.
Geoffrey’s principal source for his history, however, was the Historia Brittonum, apparently written in the 9th century, although the oldest surviving manuscripts date from the twelfth; it is sometimes attributed to Nennius because a preface with that name attached appears in some versions, although it was obviously not part of the original work. The history contained therein begins with the fictitious settlement of the British isles by refugees from Troy, and its subsequent rule by a descendant of Aeneas named Brutus, who was appropriated by Geoffrey. One of its passages concerns a king named Vortigern, who allows the Saxons to settle in England, and who also recruits a magically-talented youth named Ambrosius to solve a problem involving subterranean dragons—the obvious source for the materials of Geoffrey’s Prophetiae Merlini, which are further elaborated in his Historia, where Ambrosius is said to be an alternative name for Merlin.
By that means, Gildas’ Aurelianus Ambrosius and the earlier Historia’s Ambrosius are rather awkwardly fused by Geoffrey into the character of Merlin. It is, however, not with Vortigern that Geoffrey’s Merlin is primarily associated but a different Saxon-fighting king, Arthur, who is credited with winning a whole series of victories against the invaders. Manuscript references to Arthur prior to Geoffrey’s are very thin on the ground, and are mostly made in passing, as if to someone whose name is assumed to familiar, thus strengthening the hypothesis—although it remains a hypothesis—that he was a significant figure in Welsh folklore long before the eleventh century. If so, that would also explain why there is absolutely no mention of him in any chronicles of the period produced in England. If Arthur was well-known in Welsh oral folklore, that probably helped the character to take wing, throwing the many other kings cited by Geoffrey entirely the shade, and would certainly help to explain why Geoffrey associated him with Merlin, whose name and prophetic abilities are clearly adapted from that of a character featured in several Welsh poems, Myrddin Wyllt (the suffix means “Wild” or “Mad”).
Myrddin, who was supposed have lived in the 6th century, was said to have been so traumatized by his patron’s death in battle that he went to live wild in the woods for the rest of his life, occasionally harassed by his patron’s killer, but receiving in the process an alleged gift for prophecy. The oldest surviving text referring to him is the 10th century Armes Prydain [Prophecy of Britain], the obvious model for Geoffrey’s Prophetiae Merlin. Geoffrey might have introduced the l into Merlin’s name simply for the sake of variety, although the philologist Gaston Paris (writing some time after Quinet) has suggested that he did not want to Latinize the name as Merdin because his readers might have linked it with the Latin merda [faeces]—the root of the French merde, which is frequently used as an offensive obscenity. Geoffrey’s invention of Merlin was the principal factor in the speculative attribution to him of a third Latin work featuring the character, the poem Vita Merlini [Life of Merlin]; although its depiction is much closer to the image of Myrddin Wyllt than the Merlin of the Historia, it does refer to the madman’s previous acquaintance with both Vortigern and Arthur.
The earliest French Arthuriana, including Chrétien de Troyes’ romances, do not make much of the association between Arthur and Merlin, but later ones did, to the extent that he soon became intimately entwined with such obviously-French additions as Lancelot, Gauvain and the Holy Grail—sufficiently, in Quinet’s estimation based on the romances he studied, to be representable as a symbol of French cultural identity and a presiding spirit of the evolving nation of France. Merlin’s apparent Welsh origins are, of course, deliberately blurred by Quinet, taking his cue from later 12th century writers as well as from Hersart: a tactic supported by Quinet’s refusal in his own romance to make any substantial distinction between Bretons and Britons, thus effectively making Wales (and Cornwall) an extension of Brittany, and hence of at least part of France.
Geoffrey’s Historia, written in Latin, was notionally readable throughout Christendom, but its popularity among the laity in France was greatly assisted by a rapid adaptation into French verse, the Roman de Brut (1155), credited to Henry II’s court chronicler Wace. Wace’s version amplified the Arthurian component considerably and added several new details thereto, including the Round Table and the prophecy of Arthur’s future return from the isle of Avalon. Wace treats that additional material as fanciful folklore rather than history, but the distinction was unimportant to the romancers who borrowed from him. Marie de France, also a member of Henry II’s court, must have known Wace, and his work is the source of the Arthurian material she incorporated into some of her Lais, written in the 1160s and 1170s. Wace was also a key source for a further scholarly fantasy based on Geoffrey’s Historia, entitled Brut and produced around the year 1200 by Layamon, which not only elaborates the story of Arthur but those of Lear and Cymbeline, thus providing the basis for two of Shakespeare’s plays.
After Chrétien de Troyes’ death in 1185, and especially after the posthumous publication of Le Conte du Graal, imitations of his works became commonplace, including several continuations of the unfinished works, the grail story attracting particular interest. By the end of the 12th century, the monks of Glastonbury had claimed that they had discovered the tombs of Arthur and his wife, and they went on to produce their own version of the grail story. That claim was apparently familiar to Robert de Boron, who is known to have produced three Arthurian significant texts in verse during the 1190s, Joseph d’Arimathie, Merlin and Perceval, although only the first and fragments of the second survive. The fragments of Boron’s poem indicate, however, that it was the source of a prose adaptation known as the Estoire de Merlin or the Prose Merlin, which became an important source not merely for Quinet but many other writers. It is sometimes credited to Boron, although there is no evidence that he wrote it.
The Prose Merlin helped popularize the notion, obliquely mentioned by Geoffrey, that Merlin was sired by an incubus on a virgin, with a view to his becoming the Antichrist, and it also introduced his teacher Blaise and several other significant motifs borrowed by Quinet, although Quinet studiously ignores its heavy emphasis on Merlin’s shapeshifting abilities. The Prose Merlin’s importance was further amplified by the fact that it was integrated into a series generally known as the “Vulgate Cycle,” apparently dating from 1220-1230, which included works apparently based on Robert de Boron’s other two titles, as well as a sequel to the Prose Merlin entitled Suite de Merlin.
The Prose Merlin also introduced the character of Viviane, with whom Merlin falls in love. The character was, however, to be greatly elaborated in the Suite de Merlin, in which she puts an end to his career by using the magic he has taught her to imprison him permanently, and further complicated in an imitative “Post-Vulgate Cycle” of 1230-1240. Initially a huntress, in later works she became the more ethereal Lady of the Lake, and her name began a process of extensive variation that produced, among others, Niniane, Nimue, Elaine and Evienne, some of which are probably due to careless copyists. Although Quinet’s primary interest was in 12th century texts, it was in the 13th century, with such linked cycles as these, that Arthurian romance really took off on a large scale, and much of the material used in his Merlin is taken from 13th century sources. Few of the writers who developed the Arthurian mythos in France after Chrétien are known by name, but they allegedly included Wauchier de Danain, Manessier and Gerbert de Montreuil, all of whom were credited with producing continuations of the Conte du Graal in the early decades of the century, and Raoul de Houdenc, who wrote two long poems featuring Gauvain in the 1220s, and might have played some part in influencing the substance of Merlin l’enchanteur by virtue of his subsequent authorship to Le Songe d’enfer, an account of an allegorical voyage to Hell far in advance of Dante’s.
It was also in the early 13th century that the Arthurian mythos began to spread more widely in Europe, most spectacularly in Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzifal (c1210), which expanded Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du graal vastly, although it claims to be based on an entirely different source—obviously hypocritically, although that has not deterred scholars from searching for the work in question. Its adaptation into the evolving English language was more belated, and decidedly eccentric, in the enigmatic 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Malory’s 15th century Le Morte D’Arthur is heavily dependent on the Vulgate cycle, especially the Suite de Merlin, but develops the material in a fashion that is very much his own. Quinet, however, although he was certainly well aware of the Suite de Merlin, preferred the Prose Merlin as a key source—and his development of the material was even more distinctive and adventurous, not only because he was writing in a very different era and with a very different political agenda, but because of the intensely personal elements that he imported into his version of Merlin’s story.
The most striking thing about Merlin l’enchanteur, especially from an English point of view, is the radical de-emphasization of the character of Arthur, to the point that he is not even called Arthur, his name being deliberately varied as Arthus. He is, of course, indispensable to the story, and he retains his status as the ultimate model of benevolent kingship, but he remains in the background for by far the greater part of the story, only appearing in the narrative foreground occasionally and briefly until he dies—or, rather, goes into a long suspended animation. Indeed, he is far more prominent in the story after that incident than before it, because he is always far more important as an idea than an active individual. Although he has a reputation as a warrior, we never see him strike a single blow—nor does any of his knights, whose presence is even more fugitive; Lancelot and Perceval are only mentioned in passing and Gauvain only appears on stage once, in very peculiar circumstances.
That relative absence reflects and embodies the fact that the central concept of Quinet’s version of the Arthurian Mythos is not heroism but what he terms “justice.” Arthur is a great king, in this view, not because he slays Saxons but precisely because he is rigorously opposed to anyone slaying anyone, wanting everyone to live in peace and harmony, and to be happy—a utopian state of affairs that cannot be achieved by violence, but which Merlin’s magic contrives, for a while. Merlin is, however, deeply committed to the notion that the end in question ought to be achievable without the necessity of magic, by the force of human desire and will alone, and it is the perverse failure of human beings not only to achieve it, but even to desire it, that provides one of the two determining features of his bleak character and his anguished sentiments. The other determining feature of that mental trouble, in Quinet’s epic, is his relationship with Viviane.
That Bibliothèque Nationale’s advertisement for the manuscript summarizes the story of Merlin l’enchanteur, a trifle brutally but not unreasonably, as an account of Merlin’s “perfect love” with Viviane, cruelly interrupted by a fatal separation. Although Viviane is off stage for the bulk of the narrative, her absence provides the essential context for everything that Merlin does and feels during his travels and exploits, and their peculiar correspondence provides more narrative energy than any of his actions. The text was initially published with a sets of brief endnotes by the author, mostly serving to indicate which elements of the story were “in the tradition,” but the second edition of 1878 and reprints thereof contain a second set of notes added by “Madame Edgar Quinet”—his second wife, Hermione, who edited several posthumous volumes of his work and wrote her own commentary in order to identify some of the links between the story and Quinet’s own life story. Hermione’s notes are, however, limited in their analysis by their tendency to gloss over the fact that many of those links reflect the importance of Quinet’s relationship with his first wife, Minna.
Minna had died in March 1851, before the coup, and Quinet married Hermione, the daughter of the Rumanian writer and political activist Gheorghe Asachi, during the first year of his exile, in 1852. He and Hermione were, therefore, together for the entire period during which he was writing Merlin l’enchanteur. Given that circumstance, the character of Viviane, insofar as she reflects aspects of Quinet’s life story, must be a composite, embodying elements of both his wives, although the plot, where the authority of the “tradition” only equips Merlin with one passionate love-affair, does not permit that to become obvious within the text. It might also be as well to bear in mind that Hermione must have read Merlin l’enchanteur while it was in progress, and that Quinet must have written it with that consciousness, which surely affected the references in the text that relate to Minna as well as those to that relate to Hermione.
Merlin l’enchanteur was only Quinet’s second significant work of prose fiction, although the earlier one, Ahasvérus (1834; tr. as Ahasuerus),1 had been preceded by a kind of preliminary sketch of its central motif, and it was his last. In between, he had written two verse epics, Napoléon (1835) and Promethée [Prometheus] (1838). Although he undoubtedly identified with his own version of Prometheus, just as he had earlier identified with the Wandering Jew while writing the earlier prose epic, his poetry is considerably more distanced than his prose, so the two major prose works form a pair, not merely in reworking myths in a fashion that is quite unparalleled in its scope and ambition, but also in the intricacy and fervor in which the author’s own sentiments are interwoven with his cosmic themes. It is significant, in comparing the two, that Ahasvérus was written before Quinet married Minna, at a time when he was far from sure that he would be able to do so, and that the entire work is thus figuratively located within one of the periods represented in the latter novel by Merlin and Viviane’s estrangement.
The principal reason why Quinet thought that his separation from Minna might be permanent following a disastrous return to Germany in 1831 was that her family, who had welcomed him previously, had turned against him, her father having died and Minna having recently acquired two brothers-in-law who were extreme Lutherans highly disapproving of French freethinkers; on their instructions she broke off the relationship. The rupture lasted throughout his subsequent trip to Italy, and was not repaired until late in 1934, not long before their marriage. That rupture is clearly mirrored in the rupture between Merlin and Viviane in Merlin l’enchanteur—in which Merlin and Viviane’s relationship is necessarily far from perfect—and it is significant in this context that the first edition of Ahasvérus carried a dedication to another woman, which was removed from all editions published subsequent to the marriage. The transfiguration of the relationship in the second novel would have been bound in any case to be markedly different from the transfiguration represented in the earlier novel by the similarly remarkable relationship between Ahasvérus and Rachel, but the presence of Hermione’s observing eye must also have colored the spectrum of those differences in a more vivid fashion.
It would, however, be misleading to read Merlin l’enchanteur simply as a complicated transfigurative love story, just as it would be a mistake to read Ahasvérus that way, viewing its extraordinary macrocosmic embellishments merely as a narcissistic magnification of microcosmic issues. If, for Quinet, the personal and the political were so intimately bound up as to be inextricable, it was not because he was inclined to a species of quasi-solipsism, but because he saw similar underlying principles, causes and conflicts active in himself and the world. The cosmic issues that he addresses in both Ahasvérus and Merlin l’enchanteur are taken very seriously, in their own right, and it is that seriousness rather than any exaggerated self-awareness or self-importance that drives and produces their unparalleled scope and originality.
There is a sense in which the imaginative scope of Ahasvérus left no scope for further melodramatic inflation, in that God’s “Last” Judgment is not only appealed but successfully overturned, with the result that Ahasvérus is not only redeemed from his tedious punishment but gets to choose the form and conditions of his redemption, while God withers and dies in future irrelevance. That was a conclusion whose imaginative reach could not be exceeded, and the conclusion of Merlin l’enchanteur wisely does not try—but that does not mean that the novel does not attempt to explore imaginative realms untouched in Ahasvérus, or in any other work of imaginative fiction produced before or after.
In fact, Merlin l’enchanteur boldly embraces the one cosmic archetype deliberately omitted from account in Ahasvérus—the Devil—and deals with him, and with the Hell whose king he is, in a suitably extravagant symbolic fashion. Typically, however, Quinet casually sidesteps precedent; when Merlin first goes to Hell to meet his father, he is offered a tour by Virgil, who is hanging around with a very long wait in prospect before Dante turns up to exploit his services, but he treats the invitation lightly and his observations of Hell are skimpy in the extreme. Nor does he cast more than a sidelong glance at Heaven, and ignores the very possibility of Purgatory. Instead, he takes an elaborate extended tour of Limbo, conversing not with the regretful spirits of the dead but with the embryonic spirits of the not-yet-born: an experience that gives him, and the reader, a new and unique perspective, not only on the nature of life and the history of the world to come, but also on his long and equally idiosyncratic relationship with the spirits of the ruins, and with the tomb itself, as he eventually has to experience it. That shift in perspective is not labored in the commentary provided by the narrative voice, but it is nevertheless crucial to the work’s epic quality and the uniqueness of its essay in myth creation.
Modern readers, especially those familiar with other narrative reconfigurations of the Arthurian mythos, might well find Merlin l’enchanteur a trifle lacking in action. Popular fiction thrives so heavily on violence, almost to the point of a consistent and extreme sadism, that is by no means lacking even in modern love stories, that the very idea of pacifist fiction can seem alien as well as tedious to habitual readers, who are unwilling to entertain it even as an intriguing exercise in contrast. One of the things that Quinet’s narrative asks of its readers, in fact, is to consider that aspect of themselves, and what it might indicate about them. It is very much a book written by an exile, but it is a narrative of an exile far more profound than a casual banishment by a despicable usurper: an exile, in fact, that cuts far deeper than the political, almost to amount to an estrangement from the human condition, if not the human race.
Paradoxical as it might seem, that is a sensation with which a not-inconsiderable minority of people can easily associate themselves and sympathize, and those readers, at least—most of them are, inevitably, inveterate readers—will find that very few books can speak to them as intimately and as interestingly as this one, because rather than in spite of the fact that it is a narrative that revels in its own paradoxicality. That is evident from the very beginning of the extant version, because Quinet took the trouble to write a second preface for the book, flatly contradicting the preface he had attached to the first, which his editor wisely juxtaposed with it in the Oeuvres complètes. He had already indulged a similar paradoxicality in the conclusion, by continuing to provide further text after having declared the story finished. At both narrative poles, however, the form and content of the work alike make it very obvious that Merlin l’enchanteur is, fundamentally, a book about uncertainty and the essential impossibility of certainty, on both a personal and a cosmic scale.
This translation was made from copies of the version contained in volumes XVI and XVII of Quinet’s Oeuvres complètes, published by Hachette. I have not reproduced either Quinet’s notes or Hermione’s notes in full, the first being rather vague, mostly reporting that certain elements of the story are “in the tradition” without giving specific references, while the second frequently include long quotations of dubious relevance and eulogies that make no substantial contribution to the understanding of the text. I have, however, integrated the material that I consider to be useful into my own footnotes, crediting the sources of the information more specifically whenever I am able to do so.
Brian Stableford