As with his objections to Lafayette’s use of her sources, Valincour’s nitpicking here seems to me historically significant. When Donneau de Visé asks people to write in with their judgment on the Princess’s avowal, he is effectively using the Mercure galant to do something that the novel itself refuses to do. In Marguerite de Navarre, in d’Urfé, in Scudéry, and still, residually, in Lafayette’s own Zayde, the characters themselves perform acts of judgment: L’Astrée even includes mock trials where characters take turns ruling on the behavioral crimes of others. Another way of putting this would be to say that the editor of the Mercure galant is trying—to all appearances successfully—to fit reception of the novel into older patterns,35 but by the same token, as Valincour observes, the novel appears to resist this ethical use of character. Yet Valincour does not only critique. If he regrets the characters’ lack of poise, he also recognizes that purging the novel of conventional heroics and the grand passions that go with them has allowed the author to instantiate a more intimate relation between reader and character.
Indeed, given his frustration with the protagonists, it is striking how much Valincour likes and feels for them, heaping praise on the novel for its expression of “what happens in the depths of our hearts” (V 91). The vocabulary he uses to describe his reaction to the book is consistently one of sympathetic identification: readers are able to recognize themselves in the characters rather than feel the more familiar Aristotelian emotions of admiration, pity, and compassion. Lafayette’s achievement is immediately described as the expression of things that everyone has already felt. Hence, accounting for the peculiar “charm” of a passage such as the one in which the princesse de Clèves finally becomes aware of her love for Nemours, Valincour writes, “One cannot imagine anything more agreeable or natural; it expresses admirably well how certain movements arise in our hearts, movements that we hide from our closest friends and that we try to hide from ourselves out of fear of having to fight them” (V 38). “Charming,” “agreeable,” “natural”: these are recurrent terms in Valincour’s text, far removed both from the language of ethical judgment and from forms of aesthetic response that stressed a kind of contagion or fury that overwhelms the reader or spectator with the heroes’ extreme feelings. Lafayette’s art gives voice to things we have already felt, or describes the way we are. So of the Princess’s dumbfounded reaction to seeing Nemours pocket her portrait, Valincour comments, “Admit that Madame de Clèves’s embarrassment is perfectly expressed. As for myself, I’m sure that of all the women who have found themselves in the situation she was in, not one could help but recognize herself here, as if she herself had been depicted” (V 42). Of her husband’s ill-fated urge to have Nemours followed: “This whole passage seemed to me subtle indeed; it expresses perfectly the fact that people given over to love or jealousy don’t see things as others do” (V 80). Of the Princess’s frequent inner monologues in which she debates her course of action: “one must concede that the author excels at showing what happens in our heart. Its many movements have never been perceived so well, nor expressed with such force and subtlety. Madame de Clèves’s reflections on her own situation, her agitations, these different thoughts that destroy one another as they arise are all things that happen every day inside us, things that everyone feels but that few can depict as we see done here” (V 98). Characters do not provide models for our behavior; they act as readers act, enabling us to see ourselves as if in a mirror.
The irony, as Charnes himself remarks, is that this expression of common experience is made possible by the very trait that Valincour cannot get his mind around, to wit, the pedestrian quality of the novel’s heroes.36 It is a shame that the Princess cannot respond to Nemours’s outrageous theft of the portrait with more aplomb, and yet it is precisely in her embarrassed reaction that readers will see themselves; she cannot follow through on any of her resolutions, but her inability to act in her best interests is what makes her representative of the way we are. That the protagonists’ antiheroic bumbling actually endears them to us is made clearest in a famous passage in which Valincour juxtaposes the scene of avowal in La Princesse de Clèves with a remarkably similar one in the second story of Villedieu’s Les Désordres de l’amour. Critics often assume that Valincour is accusing Lafayette of having plagiarized the key scene of her novel,37 but he clearly brings up the Villedieu passage to demonstrate why Lafayette’s is so much better. And its superiority turns on just this question of heroic behavior. Villedieu’s Madame de Thermes names her lover boldly and unhesitantly, as Valincour notes: she “approaches the conversation with a much more superior tone than that of Madame de Clèves” and “does not show any of the timidity of the Princess.” Moreover, her husband responds with self-sacrifice, ceding to his rival.
Villedieu’s characters thus comport themselves with a forthrightness that seems to call out for the reader’s approval or censure; but as Valincour says to the interlocutor who proposes the parallel, “I much prefer the duc de Clèves even with all his chagrins.” The interlocutor agrees, waxing sarcastic on the behavior of Villedieu’s characters: “maybe people lived more heroically back in the time of the Marquis de Thermes.” For heroism is quite literally a turnoff: Madame de Thermes’s “great gift for explaining herself,” Valincour continues, “seems to me as likely to extinguish love in a husband’s heart as Madame de Clèves’s avowal was to foster and maybe even increase it” (V 104). Villedieu’s heroine is admirable; Lafayette’s is something more: “one loves Madame de Clèves” (V 122).
Lafayette’s characters, then, are not so much examples of amorous temperaments that one can laud or chastise as they are people defined by a fundamental inadequation between interior and exterior, feelings and actions. And Valincour signals that inadequation as the source of our identificatory pleasure: the author must have avoided giving the princesse de Clèves perfect presence of mind precisely because in the antitragic logic of the novel, weakness is what inspires the reader’s “inclination” for the character: “it is in this manner that the reader is touched by [s’intéresse pour] Madame de Clèves, and that he feels, as it were, compassion and pity with respect to all the embarrassing situations in which he sees her trapped, whereas he would have had only aversion or maybe even contempt for a woman whose quick wit and resoluteness couldn’t keep her from falling into such dire straits” (V 76). I mentioned a moment ago that on the whole Valincour’s lexicon of identification avoids emphasizing the emotions familiar to the Aristotelian tradition, and so this passage is an exception: pity and compassion are of course staples of the cathartic vocabulary of the period. But a quick look reveals the anti-Aristotelian thrust of Valincour’s use. Here, pity and compassion (and the critic hints that these terms may be inappropriate) stem not from seeing a strong if imperfect man brought low by circumstances, but from the contemplation of a weak character. Readerly contempt and pity switch sides: whereas according to traditional understanding the former is reserved for the weak and the latter for the strong, now the exact opposite is the case. Whence the indifference Valincour expresses with respect to the grand emotions of Villedieu’s Monsieur and Madame de Thermes. Who can identify with a hero?
The silences Valincour initially ascribed to a kind of misplaced comic frustration have become the very focus of the critic’s praise. “Don’t you agree, Madame, that by not saying anything Madame de Clèves nevertheless says everything she should say, and everything she could?”