SOURCE: McCready, Susan. “Performing Stability: The Problem of Proof in Alfred de Musset's Un Caprice and La Quenouille de Barbérine.” Romance Notes 38, no. 1 (fall 1997): 87-95.

[In the following essay, McCready regards the theme of fidelity and its proof in two of Musset's comedies of the 1830s.]

A husband is unsure of his wife's fidelity and hatches a scheme to prove that she is unfaithful; a wife worries that her husband is about to stray and enlists the help of her maid to spy on him; a young man promised in marriage to a young woman wants to test her to prove that she will be faithful before he says “I do.” Disguises are worn; letters are intercepted; conversations overheard, but in the end, the lovers always recognize each other's true, essential value and are united. This is a standard comic plot: some sort of conflict (a doubt about fidelity) is introduced into a once-stable system (a happy marriage) and the conflict is resolved through “negotiations,” which, in the end, uphold the (slightly altered) status quo.¹ The traditional comic resolution eliminates a sometimes sinister indeterminacy, through a performance of stability—usually the promise of the marriage of the young protagonists to the “correct” partner or the reunion of husband and wife. The lovers in such traditional comedies are exemplary figures whose negotiations about fidelity or marriage can be read in general terms as meditations on the collectively imagined value of love, fidelity and marriage in society. The happy resolution of the conflict is a “making real” (to use Elaine Scarry's term) of these abstract values, which are now anchored for the audience in the theatrical performance and for the characters by some performance within the play.

Elaine Scarry shows in The Body in Pain how anxieties about indeterminacy (what she calls “unanchored claims”—such as the claim of the realness of God) lead to the complex, collective psychological project of analogical verification, which consists of anchoring those claims in a physical body and usually in physical pain. For example, according to Scarry, in the Old Testament, scenes of wounding are meant to substantiate, to “make real” the existence of God; the marks on the bodies of the Israelites are to be read as “proof” of the power of God, who has no body. This process is what “grounds” the claim of God's realness, a claim on which an entire social order is based. We can also see this process at work in the theater, in plays in which the conflict centers on the need to prove something (and in comedies it is often love or fidelity that is in question). The need for physical evidence (of love, of fidelity) drives the action of the play until the characters are satisfied, and in plays in the most traditional mode, satisfaction comes only with the happy marriage (performed or renewed) of the protagonists. At the same time, the play itself serves the function of analogical verification for its audience, whose unanchored claims about love and fidelity are embodied in the physical performance of the play.²

Many of Musset's plays conform to this basic structure as characters rehearse a variety of strategies to arrive at some sort of “proof.” The strategies are the traditional comic devices such as secret, disguise (and recognition), and dédoublement, which at first heighten the indeterminacy (and the comic effect). In the end, however, the negotiation of values played out in these strategies reaches a resolution, a collective agreement about value(s) which (re)stabilizes the system. Thus artificial indeterminacy (disguise, etc.) is a pretext to a performance of stability.³ In his Confession d'un enfant du siècle, Musset as social critic suffers precisely from his “contemporary indeterminacy,” a malaise, which according to Musset is endemic to his rudderless generation as it drifts between the past and the future. He describes the situation of the French youth in the 1830s thus:

… derrière eux un passé à jamais détruit, s'agitant encore sur ses ruines, avec tous les fossiles des siècles d'absolutisme; devant eux l'aurore d'un immense horizon, les premières clartés de l'avenir; et entre ces deux mondes … quelque chose de semblable à l'Océan qui sépare le vieux continent de la jeune Amérique … le siècle présent, en un mot, qui sépare le passé de l'avenir, qui n'est ni l'un ni l'autre et qui ressemble à tous deux à la fois, et où l'on ne sait à chaque pas qu'on fait, si l'on marche sur une semence ou sur un débris.

(Prose 85)

Un Caprice and La Quenouille de Barbérine, two comedies from the 1830s are both meditations on this indeterminacy and attempts to establish new exchange values through which the individual and the society might become “grounded” once more.

Both of these plays (and several others in Musset's œuvre) embody concerns about exchange, value, and power, but they do so within a system that presents the value of marriage and fidelity as a given. While the fidelity of specific characters may be put into question in some of these plays, the value of fidelity is always agreed upon in the happy ending which (re)unites husband and wife. Certainly the most well-known of these comedies is Un Caprice, a one-act play in eight scenes. First published in 1837, Un Caprice had a successful run at the Théâtre-Français beginning in 1847 and has been one of Musset's most performed plays ever since. Un Caprice is particularly illuminating as it opens with the proof of conjugal devotion (the purse Mathilde is making for her husband) and the proof of adultery (the other, “counterfeit” purse accepted by the husband from another woman). The rest of the play is a series of manipulations that will “set things right” again, negotiating an agreement about the essential value of fidelity.

The opening scene of Un Caprice finds Mme Chavigny (Mathilde) placing the finishing touches on a red purse she has made in secret as a surprise for her husband. Urged on by affection for her husband and her fear of losing him to another, Mathilde plans to offer the purse to her husband as a mark of her own fidelity. She has worked in secret, she explains, to avoid the appearance of a reproach: “Cela aurait eu l'air de lui dire: ‘Voyez comme je pense à vous’ … tandis qu'en lui montrant mon petit travail fini, ce sera lui qui se dira que j'ai pensé à lui.” (Théâtre 422). She goes on to address an affectionate apostrophe to the purse in which it becomes clear that the real value of the purse is not in any intrinsic worth as an object, but in its offering. “Pauvre petite! tu ne vaux pas grand-chose, on ne te vendrait pas deux louis. Comment se fait-il qu'il me semble triste de me séparer de toi!” (Théâtre 422). In fact, Mathilde has great difficulty in separating herself from the purse. Not only is she already clearly projecting her identity onto the purse, confounding herself psychologically with it,⁴ but the act of offering the purse will be physically deferred and finally performed only through the mediation of Mme de Léry.

The first obstacle to offering the purse comes from Mathilde herself, who has not finished it when her husband enters. He proudly (one might say sadistically) displays another purse, a blue purse given to him as a gift. Mathilde's friend and confidante Mme de Léry then enters and immediately identifies the author of the blue purse as a Mme de Blainville, confirming Mathilde's suspicions. Mme de Léry's teasing remarks about the purse show a clear continuity with Mathilde's attitude toward her own purse. That is, here, a purse is not just a purse. “On a mis sept ans à la faire et vous jugez si pendant ce temps-là elle a changé de destination. Elle a appartenu en idée à trois personnes de ma connaissance. C'est un vrai trésor que vous avez là” (Théâtre 426). While the specific item exchanged is not necessarily meaningful, the exchange itself has meaning within the societal context.⁵ In this case, the exchange is inscribed in the courtly tradition of the love token, in which accepting a gift or wearing clothing in the lover's color is part of a “code” which signifies the lovers' constancy (or infidelity). Both Mme de Léry and Mathilde (and presumably Mme de Blainville) immediately understand this, but Chavigny refuses to accept the purse's “meaning.” He makes much of Mathilde's nonsensical question on first seeing the purse: “De quelle couleur est-elle?” (Théâtre 425). But, in fact, in the context of the courtly code, the color signifies the purse's author and so to ask “What color is it?” is really to ask “Who gave it to you?” Chavigny likewise sees (or claims to see) only nonsense in Mathilde's displeasure that he should display the purse in public, replying “La montrer! Ne dirait-on pas que c'est un trophée?” Of course, that is precisely what it is: the purse represents his (imminent) conquest of Mme de Blainville and his denial of this fact makes his intentions all the more clear. When Mathilde begs Chavigny to give up the blue purse, the subtext is just as clear, but he again refuses, preferring to take everything literally in order to deny its signification.

It is Mme de Léry who, once apprised of the situation between the spouses, is able to turn Chavigny's refusal against him. She has Mathilde's purse presented to him anonymously, then teases him to guess its author. This time, it is she who remains (at least in appearance) in the realm of the literal as Chavigny (convinced that the purse is a gift from Mme de Léry, herself) attempts to seduce her. In an inversion of his earlier scene with Mathilde, Chavigny begs to know who made the red purse, then gladly exchanges the blue one for it. The exchange made, Mme de Léry reveals that the red purse was made by Mathilde. With this moment of recognition everything falls back into place: Chavigny now understands the true value of Mathilde's love and plans to confess his faults to her and in so doing to restore conjugal felicity.

Musset's 1849 verse play Louison follows a similar storyline, in which a would-be unfaithful husband is corrected through a series of substitutions, and when the dust settles, rediscovers the true value of his faithful wife. Neither comedy ever puts into serious question the “value” of fidelity; rather in both cases the husband simply needs to be reminded of it. In La Quenouille de Barbérine, first published in 1835, the value of a wife's fidelity is so evident that Ulric wagers “tout ce qu['il] possède sur terre” (Théâtre 313) on Barbérine's fidelity. In this case, her fidelity must be (and, of course, is) proven, but its worth is made explicit. In the 1851 play Bettine, the unfaithful fiancé Steinberg uses the appearance of Bettine's infidelity as a pretext to break their engagement, after she has sacrificed all of her belongings to pay his debts. He determines value only in economic terms, and since Bettine is no longer able to support him financially, she is no longer of value to him. Her abandonment leads Bettine in turn to recognize the true worth of the Marquis, her erstwhile suitor, and the play concludes with their happy marriage. Again, value is not put into question; it only needs to be recognized.⁶

In Un Caprice, the obstacle to Chavigny's recognition of Mathilde's value is his own desire to have it both ways. In refusing to admit that his having accepted a purse from Mme de Blainville “means” anything, he is able to keep both possibilities (fidelity or infidelity) in play. He is able to do this because he himself is not engaged in the exchanges taking place. We have spoken of the purse as an “arbitrary object” in the system of exchange, but in the realm of literature it is anything but arbitrary. As a metonymy for the woman who offers it, the purse has obvious sexual connotations and becomes the object of “analogical verification” of which Elaine Scarry speaks. Not only, as we have seen, do the two purses “make real” certain claims (Mathilde's stands for fidelity, while Mme de Blainville's stands for proof of infidelity), they illustrate the power imbalance inherent in the relationships of the characters. That is, they stand for the radical embodiment of the women as opposed to the un-embodied power of Chavigny who is able to refuse their signification as long as it is convenient because he is not himself embodied in the exchange. Scarry opposes the vulnerable, physical body to the powerful, un-embodied voice, and so it is no surprise if here the power exercised by the un-embodied Chavigny is discursive.

When in her scene iv confrontation with her husband, Mathilde falls on her knees to beg him to give up the blue purse (intending, unbeknownst to Chavigny, to replace it with the red one), the engagement of her body in this action exemplifies the degree to which she is already physically engaged in the exchange of the purses. Chavigny's reply and his immediate exit demonstrate his power; he is able to enforce his will discursively by naming Mathilde's action “un enfantillage” (Théâtre 430) and physically by cutting off all discussion in leaving. In a way, Chavigny is already absent before his exit as he is not really “in” the negotiation that Mathilde is attempting to operate. In scene viii, the analogous scene between Chavigny and Mme de Léry, the power imbalance is corrected. This time, Mathilde is physically absent from the stage (although metonymically figured in the presence of the red purse) and acting only as her proxy, Mme de Léry is not herself implicated in the exchange she successfully operates; that is, she is all voice. In contrast, Chavigny goes through a process of “embodiment” over the course of the scene, as Mme de Léry (by withholding the name of the author of the red purse) is able to reverse the power dynamic of the earlier scene. Chavigny, himself, begs on bended knee to know the name of his admirer, as Mathilde had done earlier.

When Mme de Léry destroys the blue purse, however, the exchange is not complete, since Chavigny believes that Mme de Léry is the author of the red purse. Another substitution must be made before Chavigny recognizes his error. Significantly, the correction is discursive. As Chavigny had done earlier with Mathilde, after a scene peppered with verbal sparring, Mme de Léry simply states the literal facts: “Si vous trouvez que Mathilde a les yeux rouges, essuyez-les avec cette petite bourse que ses larmes reconnaîtront, car c'est votre bonne, brave et fidèle femme qui a passé quinze jours à la faire” (Théâtre 448). Turning his own discursive strategy against him, Mme de Léry forces Chavigny to recognize the significance of the situation he himself created. The resolution, the return of Mathilde and Chavigny's pledge to tell her of his attempted seduction of her friend, underscores the importance of discourse in this play and in systems of exchange in general. Here word-play can be used to create a sort of indeterminacy (as in the failed seduction of Mme de Léry) or it can be used to diffuse indeterminacy by a cold statement of fact.

La Quenouille de Barbérine presents an even clearer example of the double use of discourse and the power imbalance of embodiedness vs. un-embodiedness. Here a young knight, Rosemberg, wagers that Ulric's wife Barbérine will be unfaithful during his absence. Infuriated by this slander and sure of his wife's fidelity, Ulric accepts the wager and Rosemberg journeys to Ulric's chateau to attempt to seduce Barbérine. From the outset, Rosemberg is “all voice”; his only proof of Barbérine's faithlessness is the commonplace “on dit” about the faithlessness of all women. “Je n'ai pas médit d'une femme,” he explains, “j'ai exprimé mon opinion sur toutes les femmes en général” (Théâtre 312). But like Chavigny, Rosemberg will undergo an embodying transformation, as the wise Barbérine pretends to be seduced in order to administer a particularly humiliating punishment to Rosemberg: imprisoned in her tower, he is forced to spin to earn his board. “Si vous voulez boire et manger, vous n'avez d'autre moyen que de faire comme les vieilles femmes qui gagnent leur vie en prison, c'est-à-dire de filer. Vous trouverez une quenouille et un rouet tout préparés dans cette chambre” (Théâtre 322). Barbérine, speaking from off-stage is now all voice and all powerful. At her mercy is Rosemberg who falls prey to his own bodily need for food and is forced to spin. Foregrounded in this play is, of course, the issue of gender: Rosemberg's punishment is humiliating because he is not only embodied (made vulnerable) but feminized.

While discourse seems to be a sort of double-edged sword, what Scarry refers to as something that is both a tool and a weapon, in this play there is always an external, verifiable truth to which discourse refers. In Un Caprice, under the watchful eye of Mme de Léry, husband and wife are reunited. The essential superiority of Mathilde is recognized, as is the essential value of fidelity. The same is true of the other plays we have mentioned: they are all about coming “to terms”⁷ in different relationships, but they all rely on artifice (play-acting, disguise) within the play to arrive successfully at their ends. As we have seen, the mises en scène manufactured by the characters within the plays correspond narrowly to an essentially unquestioned (though temporarily challenged) “real,” which is the value they are “proving” (“embodying,” “substantiating,” “demonstrating”) and whose proof makes its self-perpetuation possible.

Notes

1. This is basically the plot of Marivaux's L'Epreuve and Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, among others, but it is not limited to comedy. It is also the plot of A Winter's Tale and Chaucer's clerk's tale (which is Perrault's “Griselidis”) and with the minor variation of an unhappy ending (in which the value of the spouse is recognized too late) becomes the basic plot of Othello.

2. Anne Ubersfeld has shown convincingly that the spectator of a theatrical performance does not simply “believe in” the reality of what is enacted on stage, but undergoes a complex negotiation to discern the referential relationship of two real spaces, that of the concrete (“real”) space of the stage and that of quotidian reality, “celui où s'exerce son action, celui où il n'est pas spectateur” (Ubersfeld 11).

3. Albert Smith has nonetheless argued convincingly that at least in Les Caprices de Marianne, Musset subverts this traditional comic structure, and transforms it into something new and distinctly Romantic precisely by refusing to banish all instability. The same might also be said for other plays in Musset's œuvre, in which comedy and tragedy share the stage, either through comic structure turned tragic, or, as in La Nuit vénitienne, tragic conflict diffused into masked comedic gaiety.

4. For example, after failing to present the purse to him, Mathilde is about to throw it on the fire and then stops herself and addressing the purse says: “Mais qu'as-tu fait? … Il n'y a pas de ta faute; tu attendais, tu espérais aussi” (Théâtre 431). She is clearly projecting her own intentions onto the purse.

5. I follow Marcel Mauss's analysis in his “Essai sur le don,” in which the gift's importance lies not in the object itself but in its contextualized function as “total social fact.” Of course, in the case of Un Caprice, the choice of a purse is not arbitrary, but deeply significant, as well will see.

6. We might compare this to the typical fairy tale, in which virtue is hidden or not recognized (Perrault's “Peau d'âne” is an example) until some especially virtuous prince or king reveals the true identity of the mistreated heroine. As in the plays we are discussing, virtue or value is a “given” but appearance is deceiving (sometimes intentionally so) and it can be mistaken. Usually in fairy tales it is an authority figure who “sets things right.” We should remark that in the more “psychologized” theater of Musset, it is often up to the individual to recognize his/her mistake and to make amends.

7. This is perhaps clearest in Bettine, which opens with the arrival of the notaire with marriage contracts for Bettine and Steinberg ready. By the end of the play, after having been put off on several occasions, he will be invited to stay and preside over the signing of marriage contracts by Bettine and the Marquis.

Works Cited

Mauss, Marcel. “Essai sur le don,” in Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires Français, 1973.

Musset, Alfred de. Œuvres complètes en prose, Paris: Gallimard, 1951.

———. Théâtre complet, Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Smith, Albert. “Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne: A Romantic Adaptation of a Traditional Comic Structure,” Nineteenth Century French Studies, Vol. 20 No. 1-2 (1991-2 Fall-Winter): 53-64.

Ubersfeld, Anne. “Notes sur la dénégation théâtrale,” in Régis Durand (ed.) La Relation théâtrale, Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1980.