Instead of being someone from whom La Princesse de Clèves needed to be saved, Valincour may have been just the kind of reader Lafayette wanted—someone who would tug the obvious historical threads until they pulled out in his hand. If you follow the yellow and black, you will find a courtesan in place of the virtuous Princess; look up the junior de Clèves brother: he is married to someone else. Accidental or inconsequential contradictions these are not: each time we look for the precise point of suture between history and invention, we find that the place the Princess occupies in the novel is already occupied in history by someone else. Which is also to say that Lafayette makes that suture point problematic and brings the contradiction into being by inventing a heroine who cannot exist. Invention alone, I’ve said, can be accommodated to Aristotelian poetics; characters who might have existed may be less interesting than real ones, but they still bathe in the soft glow of reality. The Princess is invented in a different manner. She alone can be proved not to exist, since her space, as Valincour helps us see, is already occupied. This is not a mistake, as Valincour seems to think it is; nor is it of no concern, as Charnes suggests with a shrug. Rather, Lafayette has constructed what may be literature’s first deliberately counterfactual heroine. And if the Princess’s counterfactuality is no accident, it is also not a meaningless detail: Lafayette’s twisting of the Aristotelian party line is registered in the innovative strategies contemporaries developed to deal with her most unusual protagonist.20
True Stories
We might start to look for the reasons behind Lafayette’s play with the historical record by returning briefly to the work of hers usually regarded as the first historical novella. Despite its cast of largely real characters, including the heroine of the title, La Princesse de Montpensier was advertised as a work of pure imagination: its short “note from the bookseller” prominently proclaims the adventures therein to be “imaginary” and “invented at whim” (L 4). The tone of the note is deferential, as it should be: the novella does, after all, attribute an adulterous if unconsummated affair to Renée d’Anjou, the great-grandmother of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, Louis XIV’s cousin and the richest woman in Europe. No insult intended to persons living or dead, the “bookseller” gingerly states. The modern reader of course barely registers the note, so much does it state the obvious, rehearsing the legal disclaimers of our time.21 Since only a pedant would read with the goal of baring the truth underneath the fiction, why would we expect that this be a story that really happened? But for the public of 1662, adept at using keys to decipher oblique references to real people, these lines would surely have raised suspicions and implied the direct opposite of what they said.22 And anyone who consults the relevant genealogies is rewarded with a delicious “coincidence”: the duchesse de Montpensier’s grandfather, Henri de Bourbon, was born to Renée d’Anjou on May 12, 1573, nine months after an “imaginary” nocturnal episode described in the book in which the princesse de Montpensier lowers the drawbridge of her castle and admits her lover, the duc de Guise, into her chambers. (The adulterous meeting is easily datable since it takes place in the run-up to the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre, August 24 of the previous year.)
It is impossible to know why Lafayette might have wanted to hint at the bastard birth of the Grande Mademoiselle’s not-so-remote ancestor; the available record permits only speculation.23 Not speculative, however—unless one chooses to accept the bookseller’s note at face value and dismiss the suspicious nine-month interval as true coincidence—is the light this scandalous allusion sheds on the flagrantly unreal princess of Lafayette’s last novel. For the princesse de Clèves emerges as the diametric opposite of the earlier heroine, who was real to the point of indiscretion. In itself, their antithetical relationship might mean only that Lafayette has dropped one mode of writing and adopted another mode, no doubt more cautious or prudent. Yet the entire plot of La Princesse de Clèves seems to revolve around the circulation of true stories—the instructive lessons told to the young heroine, for example, but also a misplaced love letter and, most important of all, the story of the Princess’s own adulterous desire, which in one gripping scene is told back to her, minus the name that would identify her as its protagonist. So it is not only that the two heroines are antithetical in the type of extratextual referentiality they presuppose, but also that the novels that bear their names are antithetical, or more precisely that the later book is somehow about the earlier one, an implicit critique of its mode of being.24 La Princesse de Montpensier was a work of gossip—this is a statement not about its literary quality but about its referential status—while La Princesse de Clèves is a novel about gossip. A novel about gossip, moreover, that has been proofed against turning into gossip itself by dint of Lafayette’s careful husbanding of its heroine’s counterfactuality.
Although the prevalence of loose tongues and wayward speech in La Princesse de Clèves has long been recognized by Lafayette scholars, the compulsion to repeat true stories merits revisiting in the context of the “visible falsity” that Lafayette has installed at the heart of her novel.25 The crucial scenes are familiar to students of the book, and they invariably delineate a two-stage process: faced with what are billed as true stories, listeners—figurative readers, I propose—strive to complete the referential circle by supplying the real names of the provisionally anonymous protagonists. Such is the case with the unsigned love letter misplaced by the Vidame de Chartres, which may thereby “apply”—the word was in routine use in both England and France—to multiple parties, including the Princess’s lover Nemours. More relevant still is the complicated trajectory of the Princess’s avowal, made in private but quickly transformed into narrative and put in promiscuous circulation. Here, the problem of names is present on several levels: on the one hand, the Princess decides to admit to her husband her love for a man she refuses to name, leaving therefore a blank that ends up exciting the listener’s thirst for more information; on the other, the story of this story is then circulated in such a way that the wife becomes herself a blank that listeners must strive to fill in. The Princess’s extraordinary avowal fails not only because of male indiscretion (that of Nemours and Clèves), but also because she had the mistaken hope that a narrative might be made some sort of sign of good faith—an avowal in the feudal sense of pledge of fidelity—whereas narratives in this world are oppressively and relentlessly tied to real people.26
Indeed, from the outset the novel’s protagonists appear under the sign of the compulsion to name. Madame de Clèves’s first acquaintance with the duc de Nemours illustrates the process by which a known name is hesitantly fitted to a face:
the ball commenced, and as she was dancing with Monsieur de Guise, a rather loud noise was heard coming from around the door to the room, the sound of space being made for someone entering. Madame de Clèves finished her dance, and while she was looking around for a new partner, the King cried out for her to take the one who was arriving. She turned and saw a man she at first felt could be no one but Monsieur de Nemours. (L 274)
The passage marvelously sets up Nemours first as a blank, an unidentified “someone” emerging from the inchoate background noise or bruit, which in Lafayette’s day possessed the added and perhaps significant meaning of “gossip”; this person, again designated periphrastically as “the one who was arriving,” is then assigned to the Princess, who finally names him for us. The scene culminates with the Princess denying, as the official introductions are made, her prior knowledge of the identity of the “someone” with whom she has just danced. With disturbing symmetry, she now occupies the place that