FICTION IN FRANCE
Before 1914
If variant poetry burgeoned suddenly with the turn of the present
century, new developments in fiction were equally apparent. Between 1900
and 1950, novels with female variance as either a central or a major
theme averaged more than two per year. A rather larger additional group
used variance as a minor motif or in a telling incident or two. Of this
generous crop a good half was the work of English and American authors;
an equal proportion was written by women; and although active
championship of lesbianism or variance was comparatively rare, better
than half the fictional presentations were either sympathetic or
neutral. These counts are based upon a hundred-odd volumes available for
examination, plus an additional score or so of unequivocal reviews.
The new century’s characteristic changes were least evident in France,
where for a couple of decades variant fiction had appeared in quantity,
and where at least two or three women (Rachilde, Jane de LaVaudère,
Camille Pert) had contributed. We have seen that Pierre Louÿs between
1896 and 1901 even struck a new note of cheerful insouciance, but his
_Aphrodite_ and _Bilitis_ pictured courtesans of the classical era, and
the adventures of his three girls in _King Pausole_ were set in a zany
fantasy well removed from reality.
From reviews and publishers’ records we know that during the century’s
first decade fully as many inferior lesbian novels appeared as in the
one preceding, a few of which will be mentioned later. The outstanding
work, however, was that done by the couple signing themselves
Colette-Willy, who opened a new era by portraying their own times with
both frankness and sympathy. Willy was the established music critic and
light novelist Henry Gauthier-Villars. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette has
since been recognized as the foremost French woman writer of her time,
but in 1900 she was merely a piquant personality who, a decade earlier,
at seventeen, had come to Paris from the provinces and married
Gauthier-Villars. Consequently, when _Claudine à L’Ecole_ appeared
(1900), it was taken to be mainly a work of Willy based upon his wife’s
girlhood experiences. Critics have since established that it and its
three successors, _Claudine à Paris_ (1901), _Claudine en Ménage_ (1902)
and _Claudine s’en Va_ (1903) were less his than Colette’s own, and the
fifth volume, _La Retraite Sentimentale_ (1907) was recognized at the
time of its appearance as hers, since by then she had separated from her
husband. The first four of the series have been translated as _Claudine
at School_, _Young Lady of Paris_, _The Indulgent Husband_, and
_Innocent Wife_, and are fairly well-known.
This series presents the emotional history of the delightful Claudine
between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and incidentally incorporates
the authors’ opinions upon many sorts of sexual relation. Claudine
appears first as a day pupil in a provincial public school somewhere in
the mountainous _départements_ of southern France. Motherless, she is
brought up after a fashion by a father so absorbed in his studies as to
approach a caricature of the absent-minded professor, and by a
free-tongued servant comparable to Proust’s Françoise. She grows up a
tomboy, free to climb trees, to roam alone over the wooded hills about
her small town, and to read at will in her father’s uncensored library.
Her emotional development begins with an attraction appropriate to her
years (fifteen) but uncommonly intense, to a pretty assistant mistress,
Mademoiselle Aimée. With Claudine’s wily arrangement to be tutored in
English at home, this affair promises to develop richly, but it is
interrupted when the headmistress, a domineering redhead, also contracts
a passion for her assistant. Knowing on which side her bread is
buttered, Aimée abandons Claudine, to become the pampered darling of her
superior. Two or three of the “big girls” understand perfectly what is
going on, and Claudine even eavesdrops one day upon an intimate moment
enjoyed by the two women in their dormitory quarters while their classes
run wild in the schoolrooms below. Later, the headmistress implies to
Claudine that had she not from the outset shown antagonism, her
affection might have been bestowed on her rather than on the somewhat
insipid junior mistress.
In the course of the year, Claudine discovers that she is becoming
attractive to men, notably the school’s visiting physician, a “wolf” at
whom she laughs although he has an irritating power to move her. He uses
his political influence to the end of enjoying Aimée’s favors, an affair
to which the older mistress appears indifferent, her jealousy being
reserved for feminine rivals. A second diversion develops when Aimée’s
young sister, Luce, enters at mid-term as a charity pupil and is badly
neglected by the two mistresses. A year Claudine’s junior, this thin
green-eyed youngster becomes her adoring slave, constantly manoeuvering
for caresses, but receiving only blows, which she appears to find almost
as satisfying. To herself, Claudine admits that, were the girl anyone
but a sister to the fickle Aimée, the affair might go farther.
At the graduation dance—a neat bit of satire on provincial
entertainment—Claudine is much sought after by local and visiting
swains, and analyzes afterward why she found their attentions so
unsatisfactory. She contemplates what she wants of love:
I terribly needed Someone, and was humiliated by this lack, and
because I could not give anything to anyone I did not love and know
through and through—a dream which will never come true, eh?[1]
This précis of the feminine ideal marks the beginning of Colette’s
since-famous dissection of women’s emotional psychology.
The second volume carries Claudine through the year—her
seventeenth—which her father decides must be spent in Paris, ostensibly
in the interests of his scientific work, but actually with an eye to
widening her circle of acquaintance. Sick with nostalgia for her native
Montigny and loathing every aspect of her urban imprisonment, Claudine
succumbs to a long illness which has two important results. Her hair
must be cropped, and her contacts are confined to her father’s older
sister and the latter’s grandson, a pretty creature of her own age as
effeminate as she is boyish. Very nearly disliking Marcel, Claudine
still feels a physical attraction much like that which drew her to Luce.
But Marcel’s emotions are absorbed in an affair with a male
schoolmate—an affair which has made trouble for both boys at their Lycée
and evoked the wrath and contempt of Marcel’s father. Evasive about his
own experiences, Marcel is avidly curious about Claudine’s relations
with Luce (pride prevents her mentioning Aimée). It is Marcel who sees
the modish possibilities in Claudine’s cropped head, and takes her to an
English tailor to be outfitted _en garçonne_, a style eminently suited
to her both physically and psychologically.
During her illness Claudine has heard from Luce that her situation at
the school has become intolerable and she is ready for desperate
measures. Presently she meets Luce on a Paris street dressed more
smartly than she is herself, and learns that the girl, who had sought
help from an uncle (a gross sixty-year-old widower), is now being
lavishly kept by him. Nevertheless, Luce manages to have a boy-friend
from the Beaux-Arts on the side, and is also eager to resume relations
with Claudine. The latter, too, feels the earlier attraction, but
realizes she cannot tolerate intimacy with a little _grue_ who is living
with her own uncle. With humorous honesty she admits to herself that
despite having “read everything—and understood it” before she was
sixteen, when it comes to “real life” she is nothing but “an ordinary
good girl.”
In the course of her acquaintance with the pretty Marcel she meets
Renaud, the latter’s widowed father, and is drawn to him despite his
intolerance of his son’s homosexual affair. She thinks he is just the
man she would have chosen for a father—urbane and witty, but with sombre
emotional depths. Soon she is in love with him. The man, twenty years
her senior, struggles against a reciprocal attraction, but Claudine’s
headlong infatuation wins, and the book ends with their engagement.
The first section of _Claudine en Ménage_ analyzes with skill her as yet
incomplete marital adjustment. She resents the memory of her elaborate
wedding and her husband’s continuing mixture of fatherly indulgence and
experienced sensuality which shames her adoring naïveté. The couple have
spent a year in continental travel uncongenial to the Montigny tomboy,
and as she settles in Renaud’s Paris apartment she is homesick for her
native province and rebellious against the routine of sophisticated
entertaining her husband wishes to resume.
Accepting life on his terms with what grace she can, she presently meets
Rezi, a seductive Austrian, wife of a retired English officer, and soon
they are mutually infatuated. Their emotion can find no outlet because
the colonel’s jealous surveillance and the unremitting social activity
in her own household afford them no privacy. After a period of
increasingly painful frustration Claudine appeals to her husband for
aid. Renaud has all along shown the same excited interest in this affair
that his son exhibited in her relations with Luce, and he readily agrees
to find the pair a private haven. He insists, however, on retaining the
key to their “nest” himself and on escorting them to it whenever they
wish to go there. This complaisance bordering on voyeurism offends
Claudine, who is at heart wounded by his lack of jealousy. Gradually she
realizes that what she feels for Rezi is mere infatuation. She suspects
that her partner has been intimate with other women about whom she is
evasive, and she even finds reason to wonder whether before her marriage
Renaud and Rezi might not have had an affair. Her brooding discontent
increases during three weeks of illness when she can keep watch on
neither husband nor friend, and comes to a head on the day when she pays
a surprise visit to the “nest” and finds the two there together. In a
fury of jealousy and disillusionment she goes home to Montigny.
There, healed by springtime in the country, she owns that she is still
as much in love with Renaud as his letters show him to be with her. She
finally writes him that he has been too indulgent, too like a doting
father. ‘I wanted Rezi and you gave her to me like a bonbon. You should
have explained that there are sweets one cannot eat without becoming
ill.’[2] She tells him that if they are to be happy she must be more his
equal as he must be more her master. Life seems to her so much more sane
and wholesome in the country that she is determined to stay there, and
she hopes he will consent to make his permanent home there as well. When
business or even pleasure call him to Paris, she will let him go,
knowing that when he returns it will be from genuine inclination. The
volume closes with this ultimatum without disclosing Renaud’s response.
In _Claudine s’en Va_ the viewpoint shifts to that of a very different
young married woman, but Claudine, moving in and out of the picture, is
still a dominant influence in the story. Its central figure, Annie, is a
submissive creature who has been married four years to Alain, an
autocratic cousin whom she has adored slavishly since childhood. While
he is absent on a protracted business trip Annie discovers herself—her
uninfluenced personality is very different from her husband’s, and her
married life has been a one-sided affair never affording her real
satisfaction. The latter revelation is the fruit of long talks with
Claudine, whose own marriage, now radiantly successful, becomes for
Annie the embodiment of what mutual love should be. Her husband has
forbidden her to associate with Renaud and Claudine, whom he considers
too “fast” to be a good influence, but Annie learns that the sister to
whose care he has entrusted her is involved in a sordid affair with an
alcoholic journalist and that Alain himself has, since their marriage,
carried on a long liaison with a woman who has always disgusted her.
This painful enlightenment comes during a hectic season at an
international spa. She turns more and more to the bohemian but wholesome
Claudine, who convinces her that a middle course is possible between the
looseness into which she has been so quickly plunged and the rigid
conventionality of her former life. As their intimacy grows it becomes
apparent that Claudine is strongly drawn to her but is as strongly
self-disciplined. At one point when they have been exchanging
confidences and Annie rests her head on Claudine’s shoulder, hungry for
tenderness, Claudine springs up crying “Not too far! In another instant
I would—and I’ve promised Renaud——”[3]
Annie finally feels that further life with her husband is impossible,
and she prepares to leave on a secret quest for emotional orientation
before his return. In bidding her goodbye and godspeed, Claudine
confesses that she could easily have become emotionally involved, but
dared not risk a second experience like the one with Rezi. She must
abide by her promise to her husband, even though because of the
different circumstances, she, herself, can see no harm in giving what
comfort she might to the suffering Annie. Her final words are almost
mystical—a confession of faith in Love as something precious enough to
seek at all costs, and when found, to preserve at any price.
_La Retraite Sentimentale_, appearing in 1907 after Colette’s divorce
from Willy, carries Claudine’s story to its conclusion. At the outset
Renaud is in a Swiss sanitorium, exhausted by the hectic pace at which
he has lived, and Claudine is with the now-divorced Annie on the
latter’s Burgundian estate, in order to spare Renaud the jealous concern
her life alone in Paris might occasion. The potential attraction between
Annie and herself is dormant, and Claudine, wretchedly lonely without
her husband, amuses herself by drawing from her companion a full account
of her _Wanderjahr_. She learns that Annie has run the gamut of sexual
experiment with men in search of her romantic ideal, but has gained
nothing beyond momentary appeasement. More unwilling than ever to risk a
further barren experience with Annie, Claudine yields to a fantastic
impulse. Her woman-shy stepson, Marcel, arrives for a visit just as
Annie feels impelled to set out on another sexual quest, and Claudine
throws the two together in the hope that each may solve the other’s
problem. The tragi-farcical outcome suggests that this episode may have
been plotted during Colette’s collaboration with Willy, for it echoes
the most cynical note of the earlier volumes.
The concluding portion of _La Retraite Sentimentale_ shows Claudine, now
thirty and widowed, once more entrenched in her beloved country house in
Montigny. Her father and the old servant have died, and she is alone
with her cherished dogs and cats, still faithful in spirit to Renaud,
and filled with tolerant pity for the restless Parisians (Annie among
them) who often motor down to see her. This final volume has no place in
a study of female variance save for its picture of Claudine’s resolute
refusal in maturity to become involved with Annie.
As has been said, all of the volumes are now recognized as chiefly the
work of Colette, and also as more autobiographical than could be
admitted at the time of their composition. They may, therefore, be
trusted as giving a fairly accurate picture of a certain group of
Parisian literati at the turn of the century. There is something of
Willy in the idealized Renaud and also in the caricatured Maugis,
alcoholic music critic and paramour of Annie’s sister-in-law. Judging
Willy’s attitude from that found in his independent fiction, the
complaisance of Renaud toward his wife’s lesbian liaison was less
improbable than certain contemporary critics—Rachilde among them—felt it
to be. From passing references in Colette’s much later volume of
personal reminiscences, _Ces Plaisirs_,[4] it would appear that the
group in which she moved during her early married years—that is, the
middle and late Nineties—were tolerant of male as well as female
homosexuality, and Marcel’s affairs were probably drawn from life.
Colette’s divorce after twelve years of marriage, however, is said to
have been due to heterosexual irregularities on her husband’s part. A
second marriage in 1914 to Henri de Jouvenel, by whom she had a
daughter, seems to have brought her a more settled happiness. But it
should be noted that Stella Browne, in a psychological study of some
women authors with homosexual tendencies,[5] mentions Colette as having
been involved herself before 1914 in two powerful variant attachments,
one with the film star, Marguérite Moréno, whom she met while she was
earning her living on the stage between her two marriages, and the other
with an unnamed foreign noblewoman. Character sketches of both these
women, naturally drawn with great discretion, appear in _Ces Plaisirs_.
From them one gathers that Colette’s relations with Moréno were
intimate, but “the Chevalier” (the nickname perhaps an echo from
Peladan’s chaste lady) is presented as a romantic idealist unwilling or
unable to cross the boundaries of physical intimacy with anyone.
To return to Claudine, she has some masculine secondary
characteristics—she is proud of her boyish height and acrobatic
abilities—and a personality in which unfeminine traits were emphasized
by her freedom and independence while young. But she never rebels
against the feminine role. She is also proud of her beautiful hair and
eyes, and she never abandons skirts even on her strenuous cross-country
rambles. She enjoys her power to attract men, though she scorns
flirtation and breaks an umbrella on a boulevardier who risks the
traditional continental pinch. Her reaction to the women who attract her
is definitely male—primarily physical, roused by beauty and passivity,
and manifesting itself in a desire to conquer and dominate. It contrasts
sharply with the clinging adoration of Luce, Aimée, and Annie. It is
most often stirred, after the initial “crush” on Aimée, by girls younger
than herself, those who recall her own youth or the masochistic devotion
of young Luce. This is particularly stressed in the early pages of
_Claudine en Ménage_, when, taking Renaud on a visit to her old school,
she finds there a handful of delicious adolescents spending their
holidays in the dormitory, and plays recklessly with them. It appears
again in _Claudine s’en Va_, when she encounters at the spa an impudent
comedienne so much like herself a few years earlier as to provoke
universal comment on the resemblance. This young woman, Polaire, was a
real not a fictional character who had acted in a dramatic version of
_Claudine à Paris_ in 1903, and who appears in the story under her own
name, as do various other contemporary personalities in the course of
the five volumes. (A particularly malicious sketch of Mme. Dieulafoy,
whose opera _Sémiramis_ had just been presented, figures in _Claudine
s’en Va_ in a letter from the music critic Maugis.)[6]
Taken together, the five _Claudine_ novels present a complete sexual
philosophy. It is Claudine’s progressive maturing under the influence of
Renaud which weans her away from her variant leanings, but the influence
is not one-sided. As their marital relationship deepens and mellows,
Renaud is led to “love Love,” to be, as Claudine puts it, more “chaste,”
less fond of sensual virtuosity “_qui s’aide d’une combinaison de
miroirs ... et de mots fait pour le chuchotement et qu’on se force à
crier à haute voix, tout crus_.”[7] In short, he has acquired a more
feminine outlook. Here, in brief, is the distilled wisdom of the woman
pronounced a genius in portraying the nuances of feminine psychology.
Lesbian attractions are legitimate but they belong to youth. Mature love
is neither uninhibited sophistication nor romantic idealism, but a
mutual devotion in whose interest each sex must sacrifice something and
must attempt to acquire some part of the other’s outlook. It has taken
four decades of Freud and his successors to produce the almost identical
wisdom which appears in all the better marriage manuals one reads today.
One might say that although France did not contribute so much as Germany
and England to the scientific study of sex, her long years of frank
attention to it from the personal and literary angles bore fruit before
the scientists’ harvest.
The _Claudine_ series spanned seven years, but they were not the only
works of their genre to appear in France. In the matter of public
acclaim, perhaps the most important item was an opera, _Astarte_,
presented by the Académie Nationale de Musique on February 15, 1901,
with a score by Xavier Leroux, which critics characterized as Wagnerian,
and a five-act libretto by Louis de Gramont. (It is cited in Martens’s
_Book of Operas_ as _Omphale_, and was apparently composed in 1891,
though there is no record of a dramatic performance before 1901.) The
libretto has not been available, and the following account is drawn from
the review by Breville in the _Mercure de France_ for April 1901, and
the summary in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_[8] of an article in _Le Temps_
for February 20, by Pierre Lalo. The drama combines two episodes from
the mythological cycle of Hercules: his bewitched assumption of woman’s
dress and his death caused by the shirt of Nessus. Hercules is
represented as going to Lydia to stamp out the infamous lesbian cult of
Astarte by slaying Omphale, its high priestess. Instead, he is reduced
by her seduction to abject slavery, forgetting all his previous triumphs
and the purpose of his quest. Shedding his warlike accoutrements and
‘using the skin of the Nemean lion for a bedside carpet,’ he watches
with fascination a lesbian ceremony which Breville pronounces one of the
most beautiful ballets ever presented on the stage, ‘consecrated not so
much to those _amours animales_ of which Verlaine speaks as to the
harmonious disposition of groups and colors,’ its erotic climax being
veiled in ‘suddenly imposed shadows.’
At the ballet’s end Hercules is willing to abjure Vesta, adopt the
religion of Astarte, and enter into the marriage with Omphale urged by
the high priest. But Omphale, at last enamoured of a man, demurs because
she knows that the sequel to the nuptials must be the sacrifice of
Hercules on Astarte’s altar. At this point, the maiden Iole appears
bringing the miraculous tunic of Nessus from Hercules’s wife, Dejanira.
This tunic supposedly will save him from the power of Astarte and
rekindle the flame of legitimate love. The charms of Iole so transcend
those of Hercules in the eyes of Omphale that she offers to release him
and his warriors if she may keep the girl. Hercules, “toujours naïf,”
accepts the bargain, dons the tunic, and bursts into flame, igniting
temple and palace as well. Omphale, undisturbed either by his dying
cries or the general conflagration, embarks for Lesbos with the
enraptured Iole amid the ritual chants and dancing of all the women.
Breville, who finds Leroux’s score worthy of serious attention, is
fairly scornful of Gramont’s book. Here, he says, Hercules is not a
mythical hero but a robust swashbuckler who stalks about like the
professional wrestler paid to let an amateur win the bout. Amorous
psychology, he feels, has given way to mere physiology; Omphale’s sudden
preference for Iole is unconvincing, and moralists have no real case
against a work which ends in barren triumph for the purely sensual.
Despite this negative judgment the opera must have survived at least
from February till April, which suggests that Breville’s opinion was
prejudiced.
In the same year a popular star of music hall and demi-monde, Liane de
Pougy, published a novel, _Idylle Saphique_. Rachilde in the _Mercure_
pronounced it well-written but omitted comment on its theme, evidently
thinking the title sufficiently obvious. She confined herself to
lamenting that the author seemed on her way to becoming a respectable
woman (_honnête_), ‘and what is worse, a bluestocking.’[9] The
_Jahrbuch_, which repeatedly deplored the French tendency to regard
homosexuality as an experience possible for anyone, rather than the
innate tendency which that journal’s sponsors championed, considered the
_Idylle_ psychologically sound, and gave an extensive résumé of the
plot,[10] which seems representative enough of the sensational variant
novels of the time to merit review here. Annhine de Lys, famous Parisian
_courtisane_, differs from most of her class in dreaming of a great
love. Her profitable life with a millionaire or two has sickened her of
both luxury and sex, so that when a twenty-year-old American falls in
love with her she is moved by the girl’s intense worship. She herself
has hitherto avoided ‘lesbian degeneracy,’ and continues to resist it in
its completeness, having been warned by a colleague that it wrecks the
nerves.
Florence, the American, is engaged to a fellow countryman, who, like
Claudine’s husband, has not objected to several variant experiments on
her part, but of her passion for Annhine he is jealous for the first
time. He purchases Annhine’s favors at a fabulous price, thinking thus
to disgust his fiancée with her adored, but instead she turns against
him. When a previous love of Florence’s, realizing that she too has lost
the girl, stabs herself in the presence of the current pair, Annhine
falls ill from shock and leaves Paris. But some months in Italy and
Spain and a romantic interlude with a young man do not serve to
eradicate her memories of Florence, and the two are finally reunited.
Annhine sells her Paris mansion because it has been the scene of
professional liaisons which now seem shameful to her, and she and
Florence plan a “marriage” and a future of constancy and happiness. But
the other courtesan’s prediction proves correct: Annhine suffers a
breakdown, and Florence plans to marry the ever-devoted American suitor
in order to support her love. Annhine, knowing herself doomed, begs the
girl to enter the marriage seriously and give up lesbian practices, but
after her death Florence merely cancels her engagement a second time and
goes her way alone. Interestingly enough, the reviewer in the _Jahrbuch_
finds the suitor a wholly incredible character, and believes only an
American could be so casually tolerant. Yet the review of _Claudine en
Ménage_ follows immediately in the same number of the journal, with no
editorial comment on the parallel situations in the two.
In the following year (1902) a novel of less artistry voiced strong
disapproval of lesbianism. Charles Montfont’s _Journal d’une Saphiste_
is an autobiography which follows Aline from her first boarding school
initiation at the age of ten into her middle twenties. Her second love,
beginning in adolescence, is for the delicate and feminine Mirette, an
orphan who spends vacations in her home. Since Aline is motherless and
her father without suspicion, the two girls enjoy a protracted affair
until the father arranges a marriage for Aline. Her husband, alerted by
her docile frigidity and by watching her with her friend, tells her she
must choose between them. She chooses Mirette. Her father dies
financially ruined, and as her ex-husband will understandably enough
contribute nothing to her support, she is obliged to keep herself and
her love by selling herself secretly to one of her husband’s friends.
Mirette senses the truth, and, already weakened by passionate excesses,
dies in raving delirium. Aline ends her diary with an exhortation:
‘Women, seek only the love that all mankind honors, the healthy and
honorable, because fertile, love of men,’ and leaves the document to a
friend as a warning to all girls and schoolmistresses against ‘the
extravagant madness of lesbian love.’ The implication is that she then
commits suicide. The entire book, while using moral tags at beginning
and end to placate the censor, is written with detail bordering on
pornography, and Mirette’s death is as much medical nonsense as was
Annhine’s mentioned above, or Mlle Giraud’s from meningitis.
* * * * *
As was said earlier, the dozen years before World War I produced as many
variant novels of diverse quality as appeared in the 1890s. These ranged
from Morel’s _Sapho de Lesbos_ and Fauré’s _La Derniere Journée de
Sapho_, both of which whitewashed their classical heroine; through
Willy’s _La Môme Picrate_, in which the lesbian motif is incidental, and
de Régnier’s _L’Amour et le Plaisir_, a clever imitation of eighteenth
century farce; to LePage’s _Les Fausse Vierges_ and Hoche’s _Le Vice
Mortel_, melodramas holding lesbianism responsible for murder and
suicide in improbable circumstances.[11] The only novel to rate serious
consideration in both the _Mercure_ and the _Jahrbuch_ was Daniel
Borys’s _Carlotta Noll, Amoureuse et Femme de Lettres_ (1905).[12] In
this book, the heroine’s passion for a famous male literary colleague is
supplanted by infatuation for the homosexual Myrtil, who lures her into
active lesbianism and introduces her to the fatal habit of inhaling
ether as well. (Annie in _Claudine s’en Va_ had a similar fondness for
chloroform. _Sic transeunt_ modes in drugs!) When Carlotta is finally
abandoned by Myrtil she suffers general paralysis and ends in an
institution. The book’s chief claim to critical attention seems to have
been its prose style, which notably resembled that of Louÿs.
Post-War Trends
War, as always, checked the flow of fiction on any exotic themes. But
Marcel Proust in his invalid’s ivory tower was steadily working on _À La
Recherche du Temps Perdu_, which emerged intermittently from 1918 to
1926. (_Swann’s Way_ had appeared in 1913, but it and _The Guermantes
Way_ are least pertinent to the present study, variance in the latter
being confined to the male liaisons of the Baron Charlus.) One of the
major factors in Proust’s long narrative is the lesbianism of its
narrator’s mistress, Albertine. This is strongly foreshadowed in _Within
a Budding Grove_; its development provides much of the narrative
suspense in _The Captive_, and it reaches a climax in _The Sweet Cheat
Gone_. Proust weaves the lesbian strand skillfully through his complex
but controlled pattern. A sadistic episode between Mlle Vintueil and a
friend figures briefly in the Combray-childhood section of Marcel’s
history (which in the completed cycle precedes _Swann’s Way_), but this
ties into the later pattern when Marcel learns that Albertine had,
during adolescence, been associated with this pair of women.[13] Then
comes Marcel’s obsession with the group of bold and athletic girls at
the seaside resort of Balbec and his final fixation upon Albertine who
was one of them;[14] his temporary separation from her while he is
absorbed with the Duchesse de Guermantes and his military cousin,
Robert; his later living with Albertine alone in the family town house
and attempting to cut her off from all her previous feminine associates
save the trusted Andrée,[15] whom he later ironically discovers to have
been her lover;[16] and his final awareness that even his first love,
Gilberte Swann, was associated with a nameless girl transvestist whom he
had imagined to be a boy; and that Gilberte had also known Albertine’s
circle.[17]
Critics are now agreed that the tapestry of female variance which Proust
wove with such art was in part a transposition of the male homosexuality
he did not dare to treat so openly. Perceptive readers detected this at
once. Colette in _Ces Plaisirs_ pronounced his lesbians unconvincing
little monsters, and Natalie Clifford Barney in _Aventures de L’Esprit_
writes of warning him when his early volumes appeared of the difficulty
of translating the experience of one sex into terms of the other.[18]
Even quite naïve readers of his work in English have been sceptical of
Albertine’s freedom to visit Marcel in his hotel room late at night
whenever he sent the servant Françoise to fetch her, and one could cite
many similar inconsistencies with any known code of etiquette for
“respectable” and marriageable girls in France or elsewhere. Thus
Proust’s whole lesbian canvas is in part invalidated as a social
document. But still the types he portrays, their various
interconnections, and most of their psychology, ring perfectly true for
any group of young female sophisticates. He was certainly well
acquainted with many variants of both sexes, and one need discount his
feminine data very little.
* * * * *
In 1922 Romain Rolland, already famous for his greatest novel, _Jean
Christophe_, published _Annette and Sylvie_, the first volume of his
second series, _A Soul Enchanted_. As _Jean Christophe_ was the life
story of a man, so the later novel presents the emotional history of a
passionate woman, with her ultimate fulfillment in motherhood and
devotion to a son. The first episode is an attachment between the
heroine, Annette, and her illegitimate half-sister, Sylvie. The former
is the daughter of a puritanic and intellectual wife, the latter of a
less cultivated but more charming mistress. The progress of the girls’
intimacy after both are orphaned in their twenties is unfolded with keen
insight into their contrasting natures, one serious and violent, the
other self-contained and gracefully wise.
Sylvie’s affection was perfectly unrestrained, laughing, gamin-like,
impudent, but at bottom extremely sensible.... In Annette there dwelt
a strange demon of love ... she suppressed it ... for she was afraid
of it; her instinct told her that others would not understand
it....[19]
The two are drawn to one another with an intensity which Annette does
not suspect as unusual. Just before its climax their love is endangered
by the passing infatuation of both girls for a summer-resort Adonis, for
Sylvie a mere flirtation, stimulated largely by rivalry, but for Annette
a dangerous flare of passion alight for the first time in her
twenty-five years. Up to this point the girls’ devotion has expressed
itself only in constant companionship, endless confidences, and free but
innocent caresses. In Annette’s town house they have occupied adjoining
rooms. Occasionally Sylvie, a light sleeper,
... would get up and go over to the bed where Annette lay prostrate,
with the sheets thrust up in a mountain by her crossed knees; and ...
would fascinatedly watch the dull, heavy but strangely passionate
face of the sleeper who was drowning in the ocean of her dreams....
She wanted to waken her abruptly and put her arms about her neck.
“Wolf, are you there?” But she was too sure the wolf was there to try
the experiment. Less pure and more normal than her elder sister, she
played with fire, but she was not burned by it.[20]
After Annette’s stormy introduction to heterosexual passion,
however—(“That is love?... I don’t want any more. I’m not made for
it!”)—they spend some weeks together, and now
they were ruminating on their fever, their transports ... all that
they had acquired and learned from each other during the preceding
days. For this time they had given themselves completely, eager to
take all and give all.[21]
Their passion fights its way successfully through the phase of their
desiring to dominate and possess one another:
Their intimacy became so necessary to them that they wondered how
they had ever done without it ... but the two little Rivières felt
another, stronger need, that went deeper, to the very sources of
their being: the need of independence.[22]
The episode ends with Sylvie set up as a modiste, and Annette returning
to social life in the intellectual circles her father had frequented,
the two seeing one another less and less often.
The second portion of the book records Annette’s experience with a
highly eligible and attractive man whom she loves deeply. He and his
family, however, hold the conventional view that a wife should be
completely absorbed into her husband’s life and milieu, and as this
threatens her independence she breaks the engagement, though she is so
moved by her lover’s desolation that she gives herself to him before
parting. Unable to yield completely either to man or woman, she would
today be branded as a narcissist by psychoanalysts, but in the 1920s a
major artist could still present with sympathy such a quest for
individual integrity.
Written in the same year and treating the same theme more obliquely was
Victor Margueritte’s _La Garçonne_ (issued in a considerably expurgated
English translation in 1923 as _The Bachelor Girl_).[23] Monique
Lerbier, a true child of her decade, gives herself to her fiancé a
fortnight before her wedding, not only in token of loving trust but in
an effort to be more his equal in experience and courage. Then almost on
the eve of the ceremony she learns that she is merely a pawn in a
business deal between her father and Lucien, and also that her fiancé
has not given up a mistress of long standing nor does he intend to do
so. Outraged, she breaks with both him and her family, launches herself
as a decorator, and after some years of struggle achieves conspicuous
success. Along with her business career she leads a complicated personal
life with three or four lovers, one of them a woman, and only after much
travail attains emotional stability and a happy marriage. Among the
omissions from the English translation are the most explicit
heterosexual scenes and all homosexual passages.
In the original French version the latter are of considerable
importance. The first involves Monique and her chum Elizabeth, both
sixteen. “Zabeth” has adored Monique for three years without daring to
reveal her desires, which Monique for her part has never suspected. Then
on a sweltering afternoon the girls slip off their blouses—one is
reminded of Mlle Tantale—and fall to comparing breasts. Now Monique
senses her friend’s excitement and responds, and only a chance
interruption prevents her immediate initiation into the life of the
senses. Nearly a decade later, when Monique has plunged feverishly into
the bohemian life of Paris in the effort to forget Lucien, she and
Zabeth (now married) participate in a fashionable opium party and at
last consummate their long-deferred caresses.[24] Monique’s important
lesbian affair, however, involves a music-hall star who is still
bewitching at fifty, with whom she enjoys some months’ intimacy. It is
this woman’s tactful and knowing advances which release her emotions
from the ice in which the wreck of her engagement has frozen them. The
two often dance together in public, are recognized at once as intimate
by the male and female homosexuals who throng the dancing clubs, and
suffer neither personally nor professionally from the association. It
fades to a predictable end when Monique discovers that men no longer
repel her. Both women then return to heterosexual associations.[25]
* * * * *
As in pre-war years, during this third decade variant novels of all
qualities swarmed from the presses: Proust’s _Sodome et Gomorrhe_
(1921-22), _La Prisonnière_ (1924), and _Albertine Disparue_ (1925); in
1925 also, Jacques Lacretelle’s _La Bonifas_ and Edward Bourdet’s _La
Prisonnière_; and scattered over the same and later years, a shower from
the pen of one Charles-Etienne (an inferior disciple of Willy), and a
blast from Max DesVignons as hypocritical as Montfort’s and La Vaudère’s
prototypes of twenty years earlier.
Lacretelle’s novel, translated into English as _Marie Bonifas_ in 1927,
is worth special note. Its central figure is a motherless child of four
or five, stocky and ugly, when her father settles in the decaying Picard
hamlet of Vermont. Once thriving, the town has declined into a dreary
aggregate of men like the retired Major Bonifas, unmarriageable girls,
and acid gossips who spy upon each other behind half-closed shutters.
This country backwater, so different from the urban setting of most
variant fiction, is Marie’s lifelong home. The story covers the half
century preceding World War I.
Brought up roughly by her hard drinking parent and an ill-tempered
servant, Marie’s life is uneventful until a gentle country girl replaces
the old shrew and becomes at once mother, playmate, and tutor. Marie
blossoms as her adoring satellite, experiencing (as early as her tenth
year) a sensation she thinks of as “melting” when Reine caresses her.
She develops an antipathy to her father’s drunken coarseness, and
resents both his attentions to Reine and the bold admiration of soldiers
and country louts whom the girl attracts. This childhood idyll has a
shocking end when Reine, pregnant by the Major, throws herself from a
window and dies within a few hours. The curses of her peasant mother
convey the essence of the tragedy, though no understanding of its
details, to the terrified and prostrated child. A stronger conditioning
against men could hardly be devised.
In the boarding school to which her father consigns her for the next
half dozen years Marie develops her second passion for the older girl
appointed as her “shepherdess.” She remains at school during vacations
in order to wander the halls and garden paths she has walked with
Geneviève; she violently hates the latter’s fiancé; and for another of
Geneviève’s young charges she conceives such jealousy that she attacks
and beats her rival and is consequently expelled. The following years
from sixteen to nineteen she spends in a progressive school near the
Swiss frontier. Its principal, a Parisian, has studied at Lausanne and
taught abroad, and her advanced practice is to allow her girls complete
freedom outside the classroom. Marie’s delight is carpentry in a shop
where she spends all the hours not given to outdoor sports with her
English, American and Scandinavian mates. Conscious now of her masculine
build and lack of charm, she cultivates cynical indifference to romance,
but her instinct rejects the feminism preached by the headmistress and
her friends. Marie’s brief visits to her father are boresome, and it is
only at his death that she realizes the loss of her one tie on earth.
Nostalgia recalls her to Vermont, where she establishes herself as
mistress of the house, refuses the attentions of the physician who
attended her father, and attempts to become a part of the town’s life.
But although the soft femininity of a local aesthete makes a certain
appeal, she is impatient of the woman’s affectations, and she has too
many traits in common with a dowager philanthropist to make that old
aristocrat congenial. Because of her financial contributions to a
charity school, however, Marie is at least tolerated, and she puts her
carpentry to good use in renovating the school’s quarters unassisted.
Claire, the sewing mistress of the new school, a penniless, timorous and
fragile young woman of twenty, appeals instantly to Marie’s emotions.
Within a matter of weeks they are inseparable. Marie frightens off a
tentative suitor of Claire’s in a fashion which sows the seeds of town
gossip. When Claire succumbs to pneumonia Marie nurses her through the
illness and later takes the girl into her house as companion. As Marie
herself has by now refused a second proposal, slander runs rife. The
isolation in which the two live is delightful to Marie, but it palls
upon Claire so much that when a previous swain returns from his regiment
she welcomes him. Marie is seized with a jealousy she cannot conceal.
The man taunts her with her reputation, but since she is innocent, even
ignorant of its implications, her reaction is merely one of defiance.
When Claire contracts tuberculosis, Marie takes her to the Mediterranean
coast and acts as housekeeper and nurse to her socially-inferior
beloved. Far from being grateful, the girl puts her benefactrice through
some bitter hours, although she does soften before dying. Returning
alone to Vermont, Marie discovers that her eccentric benevolence has
only fed the ugly legends about her until the girl’s death is credited
to their intimacy, and she is completely ostracized. She responds with
contempt, buying strong tobacco at the village shop, riding astride as
no other Vermont woman has ever done, and laughing in the faces of those
who cut her. This blatant defiance ultimately provokes retaliation from
the town’s riff-raff, friends of Claire’s soldier-suitor, so that her
property and person are no longer safe and she is forced into complete
seclusion with only books for company.
Now, for the first time, she learns the nature of her own difference.
She recognizes that from earliest childhood she has found men ridiculous
and revolting; that women have provided the only interest in her life;
moreover, that
there was a certain resemblance between all the faces that had
attracted her; it was the same shade of melancholy, the same emotion
of a disappointed soul.... Whenever she saw on a woman’s face ... a
certain regret, a yearning look ... she felt a tug at her heart; she
wanted to rise up and offer herself as if she had been created to be
the guardian of a plant too fragile....[26]
Made conscious also of possible physical intimacy between women, and
knowing herself already branded in the town’s eyes as guilty of it, she
goes through a period of acute temptation, and is restrained from making
advances to a shopgirl only by the latter’s murmuring at a critical
moment a phrase that Claire had often used.
It is only when World War I breaks out and Vermont is invaded by German
troops that La Bonifas comes into her own. Then the disorganized
community, abandoned by its craven officials, turns to the emerging
recluse whose administrative ability, dauntless courage, and
considerable cunning save it from complete ruin. Thereafter, Marie
enjoys a position of honor. Her older enemies have died or fled, her
younger persecutors have been drawn off into the army. Indeed, old
enough by then to be the mother of the younger troops, and having won
their respect, she feels only warm admiration for their strength. “Marie
Bonifas had made her peace with men.” She is not, however, essentially
altered even by this change in one of her basic attitudes. Her interest
still centers about young girls and women. A daughter of her one-time
“shepherdess” is now her own goddaughter, and Marie frequently visits
her old school at the edge of town. The final scene in her drama occurs
at a prize-giving fête at that institution when Marie, occupying a seat
of honor, watches a dance-pageant presented by the students. At the
sight of all this young beauty costumed with the freedom of the
Twenties, and at the sound of a girl soloist rendering with fervor the
lament from Gluck’s _Orpheus_, the famous woman dissolves in a passion
of tears. It is the final irony of her life that one sympathetic
observer should whisper to another that she must be thinking of a dead
lover.
Exclusively variant women are rare in French fiction, and this long and
careful study of one is easily the best of its sort the country has
produced. Lacretelle has neither romanticized his heroine nor taken
sides in the heredity-environment dispute. Both innate masculine traits
and early conditioning start Marie on her variant way, and her later
social persecution is due equally to her own temperament and to the
town’s spiteful prejudice. This same temperament saves her from
succumbing intellectually to feminism or to the specious medical lore on
variance which she reads. She finds outlet for its strength only as the
war provides her with a man’s job to do. As far as simple realism and
dispassionate tolerance are concerned, _La Bonifas_ has scarcely been
bettered in any language.
Nothing could offer a sharper contrast than Bourdet’s drama, _La
Prisonnière_ (1925), which borrowed its title straight from Proust’s
novel of the preceding year. Within eight months of its presentation at
the Théâtre Fémina in Paris it was playing also in Berlin, Vienna,
Budapest, and New York. The germ of the play is said to have been its
author’s encounter during the war with a fellow officer who was
deliberately seeking death as escape from domestic tragedy,[27] and the
key character is this man’s wife, a lesbian who never appears on the
stage. The heroine is a girl of twenty whom the older woman has
captivated. As the play opens young Irene is struggling to remain in
Paris against her father’s efforts to take her with him to Rome, where
he is assigned to a diplomatic post. A widower, he has been accompanied
on other missions by his mistress, as both his daughters know, but
discretion dictates a more conventional ménage in Rome. When in
desperation Irene pleads an impending betrothal as reason for her
wishing not to leave Paris, her dictatorial parent takes matters in hand
and in short order has made the pretended excuse a reality. So Irene
must cope also with Jacques, the hitherto unsuccessful suitor (at that
time happy with a mistress who hoped one day to be his wife). Jacques
suspects that an old school friend, d’Aiguines, is Irene’s lover and the
real reason for her staying in Paris, but when he approaches the latter,
now married, he learns that it is Mme. d’Aiguines who is the object of
Irene’s absorbing passion. His first reaction is one of relief, but the
unhappy husband assures him that the case is much more serious than if
it were a matter of another man.
Understand this: they are not for us.... Under cover of friendship a
woman can enter any household ... she can poison and pillage
everything before the man whose home she destroys is even aware of
what’s happening to him. When he finally realizes ... it’s too
late—he is alone! Alone in the face of a secret alliance of two
beings who understand one another because they’re alike ... because
they’re of a different planet than he, the stranger, the enemy!...
_Get out_ while you still have strength to do it![28]
At this point Irene begs Jacques to marry her or even to take her as
mistress. She has been invited on a long cruise with Mme. d’Aiguines and
knows that to go will mean her complete ruin. Whether her adored is
cruel, or whether Irene fears social ostracism, is never clear—she
merely implores her fiancé to “save” her. “It’s like a prison to which I
must return captive, despite myself.” As a result Jacques makes her his
wife, in spite of his friend’s warning and his own recognition of the
other man’s wretchedness and premature aging. The couple spend a year
away from Paris, but with their return the struggle begins anew. Irene
has been a devoted wife and has severed all connections with her former
love, but she has been able to feel no passion for her husband, and when
an appeal comes from Mme. d’Aiguines, who is ill, Irene returns
helplessly to the old bondage. As for Jacques, he is fortunate enough to
discover his former mistress still unattached, and as she responds to
his kisses he says merely, “How beautiful!! A _woman_!”
Despite the hints above that Irene’s captivity is purely physical and
that she would like to escape it, all her symptoms throughout the play
are those of romantic and imaginative love. Every moment apart from her
friend is misery, and the violets she constantly receives become a
romantic fetish. Bourdet has been skillful in portraying the effect on a
number of persons of the conflict engendered in Irene by a love she
feels to be guilty. But her own actual feeling for and relation with
Mme. d’Aiguines are never made clear. It is, of course, easy to see why
this play, even with such evasion of a major psychological issue, swept
the western world while the superior efforts of Rolland and Lacretelle
raised only slight critical ripples. Chiefly, it condemned lesbianism.
But also Bourdet exhibited sheer inspiration in avoiding the direct
presentation of a lesbian on the stage. For it is difficult to find an
artistic middle ground between the unconvincing monster of hack writers
and a character perhaps too sympathetic to please the strait-laced.
Later his results will be compared with other plays appearing on the
American stage.
* * * * *
A very few words will do justice to the inferior novels referred to
above. Charles-Etienne’s _Les Désexuées_ is concerned chiefly with male
homosexuality, but a subsidiary plot is woven about Josette, childhood
companion of one of the men, who, through acting in a lesbian drama, is
drawn into an affair with the much younger ingenue. This ‘pitiful child’
adores her brilliant colleague until Josette gives way to passion,
whereupon the girl feels she is being merely used as emotional outlet,
and leaves the cast. Subsequent volumes, _Notre Dame de Lesbos_ and
_Léon dit Léonie_,[29] include liaisons between Josette and women
attracted to her by her success in the dramatic role of Sappho, as well
as a variety of other lesbians’ affairs. _La Bouche Fardée_ centers
about Gisèle, who enjoys a brief affair with her uncle and is pursued by
both his son and his daughter, but her secret love is the nephew Claude,
like herself an orphan, whom her uncle has brought home from Jamaica and
to whom he is closely bound. In the end it appears that Claude is
actually a girl, and she and Gisèle have one ecstatic night together,
(though both are under suspicion of having murdered the uncle), before
Claude is forced to flee back to the West Indies alone. Gisèle drifts
through subsequent volumes picturesquely inconsolable. The situation
here constitutes a triumph for lesbianism—a girl with satisfactory
heterosexual experience still prefers to all other men the one who
proves a woman in disguise. Of _Inassouvie_ the main figure is a
dominating woman ruthlessly bent upon an operatic career. Idol of the
day school where she teaches singing, she holds “orgies” in her
luxurious apartment with favorite pupils. The one girl who genuinely
loves her is a fifteen-year-old with a tragic family background. The
violence of this child’s affair with Adriane wrecks her fragile health,
whereupon her brother and a friend use stolen snapshots of an orgy to
break up Adriane’s engagement and injure her musical career. In the end,
however, Adriane triumphs by trapping the two boys in a situation which
compromises them as homosexuals, and she also takes violent revenge upon
the elderly fiancé and his son who have repudiated her. In temperament
she is related to Rachilde’s masculine heroines, and even more closely
to the central figure of James Gibbons Huneker’s _Painted Veils_, first
privately printed in English seven years earlier. The variety of
Charles-Etienne’s lesbians and their experiences are reminiscent of
Peladan, but he pretends to no high purpose, and indeed, the echoes in
his work from known predecessors (Rachilde, Willy etc.) are sufficient
to make one suspect synthetic inspiration from still others less
familiar.
The nadir of quality was touched in Des Vignon’s _Plaisirs Troublants_,
which like _Le Journal d’une Saphiste_ pretended to attack lesbianism
while including more scandalous detail than novels which tolerated it.
This tale pictures the encounter in their middle-twenties of two friends
who have known each other in public school, without dormitory
intimacies. The more masculine is happily married, save that her husband
is too absorbed in business to satisfy her. The other is a typist and
the mistress of one of her employers whom she hopes to marry. The chance
meeting ignites an infatuation which circumstances allow to flame for a
week unchecked, and the consequences are disastrous. Erotic reveries
leave Marceline unable to work and estrange her from her lover. Germaine
is roused to make such excessive sexual demands on her husband and her
maid that both fall ill. Marceline dies of tuberculosis; Germaine is
saved by a cliterectomy and then childbearing. The ostensible theme of
the book is the criminal waste in any sexual exercise save for the
purpose of procreation, but the author’s real interest, quite as
obviously as Montfort’s, is in sales, not reform.
This wave of homosexual fiction during the Twenties was heavy enough
that a new periodical, _Marges_, circulated a questionnaire on the
subject in 1926, soliciting ‘a certain number’ of current authors’
opinions on the social significance and moral effects of the abundant
crop. If such established writers as Proust, Rolland and Colette were
approached, they failed to reply. The thirty-odd answers varied from a
Catholic’s terse quotation of St. Paul: “Let not the word be spoken
among you,” to essays of several pages defending homosexuality as a
recognized segment of human experience and a legitimate subject for
literature. Everything from war, Freud, and athletics to decadence,
avarice, and original sin, was blamed for the fictional epidemic.
Suggested methods of combating it ranged from ignoring variant fiction
in all review sheets to imprisoning and whipping its authors or
committing them to asylums. The summarizing editor, throwing up his
hands, suggested that some other magazine might like to attack the
prevalence of heterosexual activity in current literature and devise
some means of combating that![30]
While chance and not the _Marges’_ effort was probably responsible,
review sheets actually did soon feature less variant fiction than
before. For reasons quite unrelated to the dispute, Rachilde retired
from the staff of the _Mercure de France_ and Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_
died, both before the end of the decade, and no equally serviceable
records of variant titles replaced them. Therefore, most of the dozen
French novels of the 1930s cited here or there as significant must pass
without comment, since neither the volumes themselves nor adequate notes
upon them have been accessible. Since the end of World War I much French
fiction has appeared in English translation almost simultaneously with
its home publication, and such titles will be left for consideration
along with our own contemporary products. Two titles, however, must be
mentioned here, for one, Suzanne Roland-Manuel’s _Le Trille du Diable_,
has not been translated, and the other, André Gide’s _Geneviève_, though
published in France in 1936, did not come out in English until 1950.
In 1929 Gide’s _School for Wives_ showed the effect upon a submissive
but intelligent girl of a love match with a man incapable of the least
selflessness or intellectual honesty. A first sequel, _Robert_ (1930),
presented the husband’s view of the marriage and of his own undeserved
suffering. The second, _Geneviève_, gave the daughter’s autobiography
through adolescence. Geneviève begins her story at about fifteen with
her infatuation for a schoolmate. Sara is the daughter of an artist and
aspires to a stage career for which she appears well fitted. Geneviève’s
father sharply opposes the friendship because of Sara’s bohemian
background. Her mother, as always, stands between her daughter and her
husband’s dictatorial harshness, although her own approval of Sara’s
influence is not unqualified. Sara herself is emotionally unmoved,
enjoying chiefly her domination of Geneviève and another girl whom she
includes in a “secret society,” bound by distinctly feministic vows. The
affair reaches its climax when Sara’s father exhibits a nude study, the
face concealed by a hand mirror, for which the journals announce that
his daughter was the model. Geneviève’s already half-wakened senses
catch fire from this revelation of her beloved’s beauty, and she becomes
ill with excitement and fury when her younger brother steals from her a
magazine reproduction of the canvas.
Both mother and father are for once agreed that the association with
Sara must be terminated, and Geneviève is withdrawn from her school and
tutored by friends of the family. In the woman tutor she takes an
intellectual interest only, for she is too closely bound to her mother
to feel emotion for another woman of the same age. Her reaction to the
man, a married physician, is more complex. She is not conscious of
sexual attraction, is in fact repelled by the idea of sex and marriage,
largely from observing her parents’ experience. She has also absorbed
from Sara (an illegitimate child) a contempt for the conventions. As a
feministic declaration of independence—on the conscious level—she asks
her mentor to give her a child by him which will then be wholly hers to
bring up. The good doctor, recognizing the immaturity and relative
impersonality of her feeling for him, contrives to remain detached,
fatherly, and helpful. Geneviève’s mother confesses to her later that
she herself at a particularly trying stage of her unhappy marriage, was
for a time in love with the doctor, and one infers the profundity of the
daughter’s identification with her from the fact that the girl
subconsciously turned to the same man.
Roland-Manuel’s _Le Trille du Diable_ (1946) is reminiscent of
Lacretelle’s _La Bonifas_ in that its setting is a declining village and
its heroine’s history is traced from about 1870 until after the first
World War. But Florence Benoit, unlike Marie Bonifas, is a ruthless
egotist who never serves anyone’s interest but her own. Spoiled daughter
of a pretentious speculator, she anticipates wealth and a brilliant
marriage as her due, and when M. Benoit dies impoverished she makes life
a veritable hell for her mother and younger brother. She then steals a
mediocre but kindly man from his fiancée and leads him much the same
sort of life, later attempting also to dominate and possess her only
child, a son sufficiently like her to defy her in the end.
Her earliest conquest is Augustine Virot, daughter of her father’s
bookkeeper, a tall not too attractive girl with whom her association is
innocent until after their hearing a charity concert in the neighboring
city of Santerre. On this occasion Florence, then about fourteen,
conceives a romantic infatuation for the violinist Soline, largely under
the spell of his spectacularly brilliant encore, _Le Trille du Diable_.
Although Florence does not see Soline again until she is past middle
age, she nurses an undying passion for him which leads her into all
manner of absurdities and against which all subsequent emotion seems
pallid. As the title of the novel indicates, the author intends the
meretricious musical number and its aftermath to epitomize an
unwholesome flight from reality.
For several years after this fateful concert the two girls divert
themselves by enacting love scenes between Florence and Soline, the
latter impersonated by Augustine. Their caresses, progressively more
intimate, finally become so necessary to both that, when Augustine
enters normal school in Santerre, Florence fabricates excuses for
visiting her there every week. To achieve privacy for their clandestine
meetings she also invents elaborate lies which enable them to engage a
succession of cheap hotel rooms for the afternoon, and so to play out
their erotic ‘Soline’ improvisations without hindrance. The game loses
interest for Florence as soon as she begins her conscienceless gamble
for a husband, but she cannot let Augustine escape her, and she spoils
the unhappy girl’s first engagement to a rather passive man by writing
him slanderous anonymous letters, the same device as she has already
employed to capture her own husband.
As for Augustine, the early playing of a male role plus the humiliation
of her engagement’s unexplained ending turn her from any thought of
marriage until middle age, when after a dreary stretch of elementary
teaching, she finally accepts, _faute de mieux_, one of the town’s
eccentrics at whom she had laughed as a girl.
As has been stated, the three or four subsequent variant French titles,
all of which appeared in English within a year after their original
publication, will be discussed with fiction in English.