(Sick) Love and the Older Woman in Marcel Prévost's L’Automne d’une femme

Abstract

Marcel Prévost, a prolific novelist, journalist, and academician, is best known for works such as Les Demi-Vierges (1894), which demonstrates how Parisian society and education corrupt young women, and Les Vierges fortes (1900), which, according to Louise Lyle, “develop[s] the concept of the secular, self-perpetuating community of female educators only to explode it as an empty ideal” (60). In his 1893 novel, L’Automne d’une femme, Prévost focuses not on virgins but on the older woman, telling the story of forty-year-old Julie, who has languished for over twenty years in an arranged marriage to Antoine Surgère. Despite having the natural ability to ease the suffering of others, Julie shows no interest in nursing her husband when he falls ill, though she eagerly cares for the daughter of one of his colleagues, Claire Esquier, and the son of another associate, Maurice Artoy, who is all too eager to reciprocate when Julie's feelings for him become something more than maternal. Unbeknownst to Julie, however, Maurice and Claire once dabbled in a youthful romance that neither forgot. The glue that holds this tangled web of relationships together is illness, a theme so pervasive that the verb souffrir and its derivatives are employed no fewer than 137 times, along with myriad other terms related to pain. Prévost's creation of a veritable culture of illness in which love cannot possibly flourish for the woman in her “autumn” might be said, in fact, to feed into the Decadent vision of woman as dangerous and corrupting.

Keywords:

• aging
• decadence
• illness
• Prévost
• women

Notes

¹Diana Holmes expresses a similar idea, affirming that Prévost's work “served up titillating accounts of contemporary sexual mores whilst purporting to criticise them” (53).

²This is made easier because Claire and her father and, at least initially, Maurice, all live in close proximity on the Surgère property after the deaths of Mme Esquier and the Artoys.

³Huguet's i on the physical brings to mind Flaubert's abbé Bournisien, who instead of spiritual guidance offers Emma Bovary a beverage and wishes her “bonne santé” (147).

⁴Holmes continues: “Resistance to female education outside the home was often couched in these terms: learning, for the opponents of female schooling, was a figurative form of defloration. Sex education for girls was thus out of the question for most middle class parents, and the norm was a rather hasty maternal word in the ear of the bride shortly before her wedding night” (53). Melanie Hawthorne, commenting on Andrea Mansker's Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France (2011), reveals the downside to overemphasizing purity: “Because the country perceived a need to boost the birth rate […] while female purity remained important, too much i on [it] threatened to discourage the necessary business of reproduction. Society needed a way to promote purity (for women) without encouraging virginity or singleness” (179).

⁵Identified by Augustin Marie Morvan in 1890, this rare disease, now known as Morvan's syndrome (or Morvan's fibrillary chorea), involves peripheral nerve hyperexcitability and neuromyotonia. It is striking that the disease's presentation in the novel differs so markedly from modern descriptions, which list severe insomnia (as opposed to Antoine's constant sleepiness) and abnormal nerve and muscle activity (not abnormal bone marrow) as hallmark symptoms (Liquori et al). Whether or not Prévost simply had the facts wrong or if he deliberately took liberties in portraying the disease is unclear.

⁶Inexplicably, as Antoine's illness worsens, she wonders why she is not sad and muses that her husband “n’a jamais été méchant pour moi. Depuis très longtemps, je n’ai pas été malheureuse à cause de lui” (251)—comments at odds with what she expresses elsewhere. But then she realizes, thanks to “la mémoire tenace des sens [qui] se rebellait” that “‘[i]l m’a épousée, voilà le mal qu’il m’a fait” (251).

⁷Maurice evidently had plenty of practice with his own mother: even as a grown man, he was “épris de la beauté de sa mère, préférant à tous les rendez-vous une heure auprès d’elle, le front réfugié, comme un petit enfant, dans la tiédeur de son sein” (75). A later scene finds Maurice nestled in Julie's bosom “dans la posture où, jadis, enfant et jeune homme, il aimait à se blottir contre le sein de sa jolie mère” (134–35).

⁸The “presque” makes one wonder how well Bertaut read the novel, since there is no doubt about the nature of Julie's caresses.

⁹Further evidence of this: when Bertaut asks “[n]’est-ce point encore elle, la femme de vice, qui surgit au plus profond de la conscience de Mme Surgère […] et accomplit inconsciemment les actes que réprouve l’épouse honnête assistant impuissante à sa propre défaite?” (18).

¹⁰This startlingly sensual passage is particularly interesting in light of Jules Bertaut's contention, in his very short (37-page) 1904 biography, that because of Prévost's religious education and keen interest in moral questions, the female characters in his early novels (including L’Automne d’une femme) are “des âmes religieuses […] qui ne tardent pas à connaître les remords en même temps que l’atroce et délicieuse sensation du péché. Cette sensation-là, nul ne l’a rendue avec plus d’intensité que M. Marcel Prévost” (20). Bertaut overstates Julie's remorse, however.

¹¹René Girard's désir médiatisé/mimétique (Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 1961) comes to mind here, especially given the following sentence: “[Maurice] s’avouait que cette admiration brutale des autres lui faisait désirer Julie plus ardemment” (102).

¹²Daumier blames the “fièvre continue de Paris” (175) for what ails Maurice: “Dire que la plupart des malades mondains qui viennent solliciter [à la Salpêtrière] une consultation du maître, —dire que presque tous n’ont d’autre maladie, comme vous, que leur vie désorientée ou dévergondée” (176). Another doctor whom Maurice consults during his travels comes to the same conclusion: “c’est la vie de Paris qui fait mal aux nerfs […] Je vois votre maladie à vous, monsieur. Vous avez abusé des plaisirs de Paris—ceux de votre âge” (191–92). His prescription: the water, walking, and avoiding excessive drink, salad, and green vegetables. The notion that distance from Paris leads to an improvement of health is reminiscent of Coupeau's situation in Zola's L’Assommoir: he quits drinking and is able to work once he departs, “guéri un moment par l’air de la campagne” (325).

¹³Claude Benoît's comment about Colette's Chéri seems relevant here: “c’est à travers le regard masculin que la vieillesse féminine est perçue dans ses moindres détails, avec une froideur et une nudité quasi médicale” (154).

¹⁴The only occasion on which there seems to be some ambiguity on this front is in the initial description of Claire, which has that “[e]lle semblait à la fois délicate et musclée, volontaire et timide” (40).

¹⁵Julie employs almost identical terms to describe her feelings for Maurice, telling Esquier “[i]l est en moi […] comme mon sang même… et si on me le retire, je mourrai” (292). This notion of being in someone else's blood hearkens back to Thérèse and Laurent's relationship in Zola's Thérèse Raquin: “L’amant donnait de son sang, l’amante de ses nerfs, et ils vivaient l’un dans l’autre” (203–04).

¹⁶The fact that Maurice is, in an earlier scene, critical of Claire's bosom may not bode well for the future of the relationship; he observes that Claire is too thin for a gown as low-cut as Julie's, and that “[e]lle a l’air d’une morte qui marche” (109).

¹⁷Adultery naturally figures into Julie's conversations with her priest and is linked to her suffering when the narrator states that “[p]eu d’hommes soupçonnent ce que souffre une femme longtemps fidèle dans le mariage, lorsque, station par station, elle monte le calvaire de l’adultère” (138), and then, when we are given insight into her own thoughts: “[Maurice] comprit-il qu’elle souffrait mille fois plus qu’une épousée […] que tout lui fut martyre” (139). But it is otherwise scarcely implicated in the “sickness” of the Julie–Maurice relationship. Again, Jules Bertaut exaggerates Julie's level of guilt when he says that in L’Automne, “c’est un [ … ] sentiment de responsabilité morale qui s’empare soudain du coeur torturé de Mme Surgère cherchant partout un remède au trouble de son être et ne le trouvant que dans la paix divine” (10).

¹⁸And yet, Daumier stops to marvel, upon removing Julie's corset after she faints from the trauma of Daumier's intervention, at Julie's youthfulness: “Comme elle est jeune encore! Les années n’ont pas détruit cet admirable instrument d’amour” (322).