Of the thirty stories Sade had planned to include in his Contes et Fabliaux du XVIIIe siècle, only eleven were retained in Les Crimes de l’Amour. One of these, Eugénie de Franval, has already appeared in our earlier volume of Sade’s writings. In the present volume we include two others: Florville and Courval, or The Works of Fate and Ernestine, A Swedish Tale. The latter tale will be found in Part Four, together with the play Oxtiern, or The Misfortunes of Libertinage, which was adapted from it. Florville and Courval is rightly ranked by Lely as among the best of Sade’s shorter fiction, on a par with Eugénie de Franval. This is the story which especially offended and incensed Villeterque, for in it Sade, relying upon coincidence—or fate—to a degree unusual even for him, renders the heroine guilty of a series of crimes as heinous as they are involuntary. Pierre Klossowski has commented judiciously on this tale:
To her future husband, Florville appears an honest and sincere young woman who seems bent on clarifying her strangely burdened past. . . . Not only does Monsieur de Courval not seem jealous of those who have happened to precede him in his intended wife’s affections, but is, one might say, immersed in a kind of trance from which he slowly awakens. This unconsciousness has its meaning: Courval seeks happiness in conjugal life—in oblivion, actually. He too is guilty; that is the true source of his sympathy for Florville. When she completes her confession, everything seems to arrange itself: Courval, described to us at the beginning as a man who asks for nothing more than a mild, peaceful calm in wedded life, is only anxious to conclude his marriage in all haste—thanks, it would seem, to the scabrous adventures of his fiancée. It is evident that, under the cover of exceptional generosity, Courval incarnates that Sadean satisfaction derived from possessing Florville’s apparently unveiled secret; but actually, Sadean suspicion is incarnated in the heroine. Florville is an enigma to herself, quite as the human spirit is at the start of its itinerary, before being able to know itself as only God knows it. The author’s demon lodges itself in Florville and proceeds to possess her until she is at last exposed to herself for what she is.9
Reflections on the Novel
We give the name “novel” to any work of imagination fashioned from the most uncommon adventures which men experience in the course of their lives.
But why is this kind of literary work called a novel?1
Amongst what people did the novel originate, and what are the most famous examples that history has to offer?
And, finally, what are the rules one must follow in order to succeed in perfecting the art of writing the novel?
These are the three questions we propose to discuss.
Let us begin with the etymology of the word. There being no trace of this term, as it relates to this type of composition, amongst the peoples of antiquity, we must, it would seem to me, concentrate upon discovering how the term, which we still use today, first came into our language.
The “Romance” language was, as we know, a mixture of Celtic and Latin,2 in use under the first two dynasties of our kings.3 It is reasonable to assume that the works of the kind to which we are referring, written in this language, must have borne the same name, and the term une romane must have been used to describe a work in which the emphasis is upon amorous adventures, as the term romance was used to describe ballads or lays of the same type. All efforts to discover any other etymological origin for this word come to naught; as common sense offers no alternative, it would seem simplest to adopt the above.
Let us move on then to the second question.
Amongst what people did the novel originate, and what are the most famous examples history has to offer?
The novel is generally thought to have originated with the Greeks, from whom it passed over to the Moors and thence to the Spaniards, who subsequently transmitted it to our troubadours. And they in turn passed it on to our courtly storytellers.
Although I respect this theory of the novel’s line of descent, and although there are even parts of it I subscribe to, I none the less can in no wise adopt it literally. Is it not, in fact, difficult to accept without reservation in an era when travel was so infrequent and communication so sporadic? There are customs, habits, and tastes which cannot be transmitted; inherent in all men, they are a part of man’s make-up at birth. Wherever man exists, inevitable traces of these customs, habits, and tastes can be discovered.
Let there be no doubt about it: it was in the countries which first recognized gods that the novel originated; and, to be more specific, in Egypt, the cradle of all divine worship. No sooner did man begin to suspect the existence of immortal beings than he endowed them with both actions and words. Thereafter we find metamorphoses, fables, parables, and novels: in a word, we find works of fiction as soon as fiction seized hold of the minds of men. Thus we find fabulous works of imagination the moment it becomes a question of imaginary creatures: when whole nations, at first guided by priests, after having slaughtered each other in the name of their chimerical divinities, later take up arms for their king or their country, the homage offered to heroism counterbalances the tribute paid to superstition; not only do they then most rightly substitute these new heroes for their gods, but they also sing their warriors’ praises as once they had sung the praises of heaven; they embroider upon the great feats of their lives, or, weary of relating tales about them, they create new characters who resemble them . . . who surpass them, and soon new novels appear, doubtless more probable and far more suitable for man than were those tales that extolled naught but phantoms. Hercule,4 the mighty captain, having valiantly to do battle against his enemies: this is the historical hero; Hercules, destroying monsters, cleaving in twain giants: that is the god . . . the fable, and the origin of superstition; but of reasonable superstition, since its only basis is the reward for heroism, the gratitude due to the liberators of a nation, whereas the superstition that invents uncreated and never perceived beings has no other motive behind it than to provoke fear and hope, and to unsettle the mind.
Every people, therefore, has its gods, its demigods, its heroes, its true stories, and its fables; some part of it, as we have just seen, can have a solid basis in fact, as it pertains to the heroes; all the rest is pure fantasy, incredible; it is all a work of pure invention, a novel, because the gods spoke only through the medium of men who, more or less interested in this ridiculous artifice, did not fail to make up the language of phantoms, from whatever they imagined would be most likely to seduce or terrify, and, consequently, from whatever was most incredible. “’Tis common knowledge,” said the scholar Huet, “that the term ‘novel’ was once applied to history, and that it was later applied to fiction, all of which is proof positive that the one derived from the other.”
There were, therefore, novels written in every language and in every country of the world, the events and styles of which were modeled both after the customs of the country and opinions commonly held therein.
Man is prey to two weaknesses, which derive from his existence and characterize it. Wheresoever on earth he dwells, man feels the need to pray, and to love: and herein lies the basis for all novels. Man has written novels in order to portray beings whom he implored; he has written novels to sing the praises of those whom he loves. The former, dictated by terror or hope, must have been somber, full of exaggeration, untruths, and fictions, such as those that Esdras composed during the Babylonian captivity. The latter are full of niceties and sentiments, as typified by Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, a love story about Theagenes and Charicleia. But as man prayed, and as he loved, wheresoever he dwelled on the face of the earth, there were novels, that is, works of fiction, which at times depicted the fanciful objects of his worship, and at times those more concrete objects of his love.
One should therefore refrain from trying to trace the source of this kind of writing back to one nation in preference to another; one should be persuaded by what we have just said that all nations have more or less employed this form, depending upon the greater or lesser predilection they have had eit
her for love or for superstition.
Let us cast a cursory glance now at those nations which have been most receptive to works of fiction, and at the works themselves and those who have written them. Let us follow the line down to our own day, in order to allow our readers to be in a position to make their own comparisons.
The earliest novelist whereof antiquity speaks is Aristeides of Miletus, but none of his work remains extant. All we know is that his prose romance was called Milesian Tales. A reference in the preface of The Golden Ass seems to indicate that Aristeides’ works were licentious: “I am going to write in this same manner,” says Apuleius, in the beginning of The Golden Ass.
Antonius Diogenes, a contemporary of Alexander, wrote in a more polished style in The Loves of Dinias and Dercillis, a novel full of fabrications, charms, and spells, of voyages, and of most remarkable adventures—a work that le Seurre copied in 1745, in a short, even more extraordinary work; for, not content to take his heroes through familiar lands, as had Diogenes, le Seurre at times takes them to the moon, and at times down into the bowels of hell.
Next come the loves of Rhodanes and Sinonis, written by Iamblichus of Syria; the loves of Theagenes and Charicleia which we have already mentioned; Xenophon’s Cyropaedia; the loves of Daphnis and Chloë, by Longus; the loves of Ismene and Ismenia; and a whole host of others, some translated, others totally forgotten today.
The Romans, more critically minded and more given to spite and malice than to love and prayer, confined themselves to a few works of satire, such as those by Petronius and Varro, which should in no wise be classed as novels.
The Gauls, more inclined to these two weaknesses, had their bards, whom we can consider as the first novelists in that part of Europe wherein we dwell today. The occupation of these bards, says Lucan, was to render in verse the immortal acts of their nation’s heroes, and to sing them to the accompaniment of an instrument which resembled a lyre; very few of these works have come down to us today.
Then we have the words and deeds of Charlemagne, attributed to Archbishop Turpin of Reims, and all the tales of the Round Table—Tristram, Lancelot, Perceval—all written with a view toward immortalizing known heroes or inventing others modeled after them but who, embellished by the imagination, surpass them by the wonderment of their deeds. But what a great gulf separates these long, boring, and superstition-laden works from the Greek novels which had preceded them! What barbarity, what coarseness followed after those tasteful and pleasing works of fiction whereof the Greeks had given us the models; for though there were doubtless others before them, these are the earliest with which we are familiar today.
The troubadours were next to appear, and although we ought to class them as poets rather than as novelists, the multitude of agreeable tales in prose that they composed is none the less reason enough for us to grant them a rightful place amongst the writers of whom we are speaking. Let anyone who doubts this claim cast his eyes upon their fabliaux—written in the Romance language during the reign of Hugh Capet5—which Italy hastened to emulate.
This beautiful part of Europe, still groaning beneath the yoke of the Saracens and still far removed in time from that period when she was to become the birthplace of the Renaissance in the arts, boasted almost no novelists prior to the tenth century. They appeared more or less at the same time as did our troubadours in France, and indeed imitated them. But let us be quite candid concerning this glory: it was not the Italians who became our masters in this art, as Laharpe contends (page 242, vol. III), but, on the contrary, on our own soil in France that they received their training: ’twas at the school of our troubadours that Dante, Boccaccio, Tasso, and even to some degree Petrarch, sketched out their compositions; almost all of Boccaccio’s tales can be found as well in our own fabliaux.
The same cannot be said for the Spanish, versed in the art of fiction by the Moors, who themselves derived it from the Greeks, having the entire body of Greek fiction translated into Arabic; they wrote delightful novels, much imitated by our writers; of which more later.
As gallantry took on a new aspect in France, the novel improved, and ’twas then, that is to say at the beginning of the previous century, that Honoré d’Urfé wrote his novel Astrée, which led us to prefer—and most deservedly so—his charming shepherds of the Lignon to those foolish knights of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From that time forth, the rage to emulate seized all those whom Nature had endowed with a taste for this kind of writing. The astonishing success of Astrée, which was still being widely read midway through the present century, had completely captured people’s fancies, and the work was widely imitated, though never improved upon. Gomberville, La Calprenède, Desmarets, and Scudéry all thought to surpass the original by substituting princes and kings for the Lignon shepherds, and they slipped back into the error which their model had managed to avoid. Scudéry’s sister made the same mistake as her brother: like him, she wanted to ennoble d’Urfé’s manner and style and, like her brother, she substituted boring heroes for charming shepherds. Instead of portraying, in the person of Cinna, a prince such as Herodotus had painted him, she composes an Artamène more insane than all the characters in Astrée, a lover who can do naught but weep from morn till night, and whose languors, instead of becoming an object of interest to us, only tax our patience. The same drawbacks in her Clélie, wherein she endows the Romans, whom she badly distorts, with all the absurd qualities of the models she was following, which have never been better depicted.
If I may be permitted to go back for a moment, I should like to keep the promise I made to take a cursory look at Spain.
To be sure, if knighthood had served as a source of inspiration for our novelists, to what extent had it not also influenced writers on the other side of the Pyrenees? The contents of Don Quixote’s library, amusingly catalogued by Miguel Cervantes, clearly demonstrate it; but, however that may be, the renowned author of the memoirs of the greatest madman that any novelist has ever conceived most certainly has no rival worthy of the name. His immortal work, known throughout the world, translated into every language, and perforce considered the foremost novel ever written, doubtless possesses, more than any other novel, the art of storytelling, of blending agreeably the various adventures, and especially of being edifying and amusing. “This book,” said Saint-Evremond, “is the only one I reread without getting bored, and the only book I should like to have written.” The twelve stories by the same author, highly interesting and full of wit and refinement, definitely place this renowned Spanish novelist in the front rank; without him we might possibly not have had either Scarron’s charming work or the greatest part of Lesage’s.
After d’Urfé and his imitators, after the Ariadnes and the Cleopatras, the Pharamonds and the Polixandres—all those works, in short, wherein the hero, after languishing throughout nine volumes, was happy indeed to marry in the tenth—after, I say, all this hodgepodge unintelligible today, there appeared Madame de La Fayette who, albeit beguiled by the languorous tone she found in the works of her predecessors, none the less shortened them considerably. And in becoming more concise she became more interesting. It has been said that, because she was a woman (as though this sex, naturally more delicate, more given to writing novels, could not aspire in the realm of fiction to many more laurels than we), it has been claimed, I say, that Madame de La Fayette was aided a great deal, and was able to write her novels only with the help of La Rochefoucauld with what regards the reflections and of de Segrais with what regards the style; be that as it may, there is nothing more interesting than Zayde, nor any work more agreeably written than La Princesse de Clèves. Gracious and charming lady, though the graces may have held your brush, is love not sometimes allowed to guide it?
Fénelon appeared on the scene and thought to make his mark by poetically offering guidance to sovereigns who never paid him any heed. Voluptuous lover of Guyon, your soul had need to love, your mind felt the need to paint; if only you had forsaken pedantry or your pride in teaching
kings how one ought to rule, we would have had from your pen more than one masterpiece, rather than a single book which no one reads any longer. The same cannot be said for you, delightful Scarron: till the end of time, your immortal novel will provoke laughter, your scenes will never grow old or outdated. Telemachus, who had but one century to live, will perish beneath the ruins of this century which already is no more; and your actors from Le Mans, gracious and beloved child of madness, will amuse even the most serious readers, so long as men shall dwell upon the face of the earth.
Toward the end of the same century, the daughter of the celebrated Poisson (Madame de Gomez), penned works in a manner far different from the writers of her own sex who had preceded her, but they were no less pleasant; and her Journées amusantes, as well as her Cents nouvelles, will, despite their shortcomings, always form the nucleus of the library for those who enjoy this kind of writing. Gomez understood her art, ’twould be impossible to refuse her this rightful encomium. Mademoiselle de Lussan, Mesdames de Tencin and de Graffigny, Elie de Beaumont, and Riccoboni vied with her; their writings, full of refinement and taste, are most assuredly an honor to their sex. De Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne will always remain a model of tenderness and sentiment, and those of Mylady Catesby, by Riccoboni, could serve eternally as a model to those who aspire to naught but grace and lightness of touch.
But let us return to the century we left, urged on by the desire to render homage to the gracious women who held sway in this kind of writing, wherefrom the men could learn most excellent lessons.