Keeping on the Mask: Madame de Villedieu’s Annales galantes and the Pleasures of Not Revealing History

Abstract

Madame de Villedieu’s Annales galantes (1670)—a collection of eighteen short narratives—helped to inaugurate a genre of fiction known as the nouvelle historique, a concise story that discloses the sentimental conflicts lying behind a specific event or person from French history. This “unmasking” of history often shows the importance of women to historical action, while rejecting the idealism and love discourse of the earlier novelistic tradition. With the Annales galantes, however, Villedieu is less interested in removing masks than in celebrating their use, especially as instruments of hypocrisy and marital infidelity. Drawing upon the cultural meanings of masks in Louis XIV’s France, Villedieu creates tales that demonstrate the power of keeping on the mask—that is, maintaining one’s autonomy by assuming a new persona. She also uses her anonymity to fashion an authorial mask that justifies her characters’ disguises and invites readers to imitate their deceptions. Villedieu ultimately employs the nouvelle historique with great creativity while avoiding historical determinism.

Keywords:

• Villedieu
• Annales galantes
• masks
• disguise
• nouvelle historique
• disclosure

Notes

1 For a concise discussion of Villedieu’s trajectory as a professional writer, see Nathalie Grande, Stratégies de romancières, 265–8.

2 The terms nouvelle historique and nouvelle galante are both used in the second half of the seventeenth century to designate short narratives based on events and personages from recent French history. I agree with Nathalie Grande that there is little pertinence in trying to distinguish between the two terms (Le Rire galant 240), so I will use nouvelle historique consistently throughout this article.

3 Both Micheline Cuénin (280) and Gérard Letexier (Annales 28) use the term “véritable manifeste littéraire” to describe the “Avant-Propos.”

4 In her article on ruses in the Annales galantes, Kuizenga says that Villedieu’s text works to “démasquer l’Histoire” and that it discloses “le ‘vrai’ visage de quelques personnages du passé” (327).

5 See, for example, Dangeau’s entries for the following dates: 12 janvier 1685, 17 janvier 1685, 20 février 1686, 26 février 1686, 19 janvier 1699, 21 janvier 1699, 8 février 1699, 3 mars 1699, 22 janvier 1700, 27 janvier 1700.

6 Dangeau recounts such a Parisian mass entry as follows: “La fête fut fort galante et magnifique ; mais la foule des masques qui étoit venue de Paris troubla un peu les plaisirs de la fête” (Lundi 8 février 1699).

7 The Gallica database has an image of Louis XIV overcoming Huguenots represented as a man holding a mask: “Louis XIV terrassant l'hérésie personnifiée sous les traits d'un homme tenant un masque.”

8 The second chapter of Cuénin’s study of Villedieu provides an examination of the writer’s many friendships in the worldly society of her time.

9 According to Micheline Cuénin, the friendship between Villedieu and Hugues de Lionne, who patronized various writers, probably began around 1664. Lionne was the dedicatee of Villedieu’s play Le Favory and worked to secure her a royal pension, which she only received at the end of her writing career (Cuénin 78–80).

10 Indeed, as Lucien Bély has shown, the diplomats who worked for Louis XIV were expected to gain secret information about foreign dignitaries. See his “Louis XIV et le plaisir de l’information.”

11 The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française of 1694 defines “endroit” both as a geographic site (“Voici l’endroit où on veut bâtir”) and as a place on the body (“Voilà l’endroit où il est blessé”).

12 Furetière defines “déshabillé” as “Toilette, robe de chambre, ou autre besogne dont on se sert, quand on est dans son particulier, quand on s’habille, ou quand on se deshabille.” The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française states that when used with the preposition “en” or “dans,” the term means “Les besognes de nuit dont on se sert quand on est deshabillé.”

13 According to Gérard Letexier, this “Table” was printed after the “Avant-Propos” in the 1670 edition of the Annales (Annales 47, n. 2).

14 Erica Harth writes: “In Le Grand Cyrus, as in d’Urfé’s novels, the beau monde appeared in exotic disguise [. . .] If the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel could be read as a ‘Who’s Who of 1482,’ Le Grand Cyrus could be read as a ‘Who’s Who of the Fronde’” (97). See Harth, Ideology and Culture.

15 Similarly, Furetière’s definition of “Hypocrisie” is “déguisement en matière de dévotion ou de vertu.”

16 Both Letexier (Annales 32) and Cuénin (282) suggest that Villedieu’s decision to remain anonymous is because of the resemblance of her story “Les Fraticelles” to Tartuffe.

17 I owe this insight to James H. Johnson’s discussion of Tristano Martinelli’s letters to patrons using the mask of Arlecchino. As Johnson writes: “Even as it preserved distance, the mask could foster intimacy” (78).

18 Villedieu says: “l’air enjoué qui est répandu sur les matières les plus sérieuses doit paraître assez divertissant aux gens qui le remarqueront, pour les obliger à ne pas trahir l’intention d’un auteur qui les aura si bien divertis” (51).

19 Many literary critics have commented on the role of the nouvelle historique in “demolishing” the heroic ideals expressed in earlier fiction. See, for example, the ninth chapter in Christian Zonza’s study of the nouvelle historique,“Vers un nouvel héroïsme et une nouvelle histoire?” (479–571).

20 The 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines “pudicité” as “le principal ornement d’une femme.”

21 My interpretation of “Les Fraticelles” diverges from that of Nathalie Grande (Le Rire galant 177-181) and is closer to that of Sophie Houdard.

22 Paige compares Lafayette’s practice in La Princesse de Montpensier, published in 1662, to the Princesse de Clèves, published in 1678, to argue that the writer comes to a greater awareness of the hazards of writing “true stories.” See Before Fiction 35–61.

23 In her “Table des matières historiques,” Villedieu says that the story of Marianne in “Dulcin” is “une pure fiction,” but nonetheless plausible if one were to do “un examen de maris mécontents et de femmes mal satisfaites” (361).

24 “Le dégoût” is the subtitle given to Marianne’s autobiographical tale, referring to the loss of passion that comes with marriage.

25 This is not to say that Scudéry’s novels celebrate marriage uncritically. Indeed, the characters of Amilcar and Plotine in Clélie provide a well-reasoned critique of marriage, as do the characters of Hylas and Stelle in L’Astrée. But these are secondary characters in their novels, and one might say that what Villedieu does is to take the spirit of Plotine and Stelle and make it more central to her storytelling universe.

26 Marianne says, “Je ne ferai point aussi de généalogie inutile, il doit vous être indifférent de savoir qui étaient mes prédécesseurs” (293).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Harrison

David Harrison is Professor of French at Grinnell College. His work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature has appeared in Cahiers Saint-Simon, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, and The French Review. He is working with a team of scholars on producing a digital, bilingual edition of La Princesse de Clèves.