[In the following essay, Jensen discusses Vigny's thoughts on the close relationship of history and literature as represented in his historical novel Cinq-Mars and its apologetic preface.]

During the lifetime of Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863), Cinq-Mars, ou une conjuration sous Louis XIII¹ was without a doubt his most widely read work. Written in 1824-25 and published in January 1826, the novel went through 12 or 13 separate editions; its popular success was thus about twice that of Stello and Servitude et grandeur militaires. In the introduction to his translation of Cinq-Mars, William Hazlitt (the younger) remarked: “There is no person of any reading who has not present in his memory” the various characters of the novel.² Nor was the success of Cinq-Mars merely popular: both Louis-Philippe and Napoléon III discussed the book's thesis with the author.³

Vigny's attitude toward popular success was almost always an aristocrat's disdain, and there is no doubt that its very popularity led Vigny to scorn Cinq-Mars, stocked as it was with elements of romance and melodrama calculated to appeal to a broad public. He hoped, however, that success would bring him the renown needed to call attention to his other works, that celebrity would “faire lire les autres”—amounting, at the time he made this remark, to several poems (1028). He seems to have achieved this aim. Today Cinq-Mars is less well-known than the Poëmes philosophiques (Les Destinées) or than his play, Chatterton. The novel has nevertheless retained a modest popularity. In a recent “ideal library” which appeared in France under the auspices of Bernard Pivot, Cinq-Mars was given a place among the 25 best historical novels of all time.⁴

For the modern reader, however, appreciation of Vigny's novel is hampered by the very licence which facilitated its success. He plays fast and loose with the historical record, and in ways even more transparent than Scott's in Ivanhoe, whose success in translation inspired the vogue of the historical novel in France in the 1820s. Scott's practice had been to create a fictional protagonist and associates who find themselves in the thick of historical events, but in Cinq-Mars all principal characters, including the eponymous hero, are based on individuals who actually existed. Vigny simplifies them, however, so that they take their substance not from events as they occurred, but from a process of reducing motivations to clear and easily grasped moral notions. The actions of characters are thoroughly altered to conform to these moral notions, and Vigny does not hesitate to invent incidents which are historically impossible in order to heighten these effects. The means characters employ to gain their ends are exaggerated to accord with their moral significance in the plot. As a result, historical factors are neglected in favor of personal ones. Furthermore, Vigny allegorizes settings in Cinq-Mars to dramatize the significance of characters and their actions. All these processes constitute a logic of idealization similar to that of romance in which attributes of divinity accrue to heroes and demonic qualities characterize their enemies.⁵

Vigny, however, went to some pains to evade the charge of falsifying history. The second edition increased the number of endnotes from six to 14, taking up more than 30 pages. Vigny's notes, one of which ostentatiously refers to his use of manuscript sources in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal,⁶ seem intended to convince the reader that the novel rested on a study of primary sources. When the strategy of documentation failed to mollify critics, Vigny published a third edition of Cinq-Mars (1827) in which all historical notes were eliminated, only to be reinstated in a different form from 1829 on. Ultimately, however, Vigny felt that such indirect means of defense were inadequate. Instead, he confronted the issues involved directly by counterattacking with a manifesto-like preface which first appeared in 1829 and introduced all subsequent editions: “Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art.”⁷ Although critics have tended to see in these maneuvers little more than embarrassed attempts to save face, what is in fact involved is a conceptual struggle concerning the proper boundary between historical and fictional narrative. The long reign of positivist historiography has obscured until recently what is now increasingly clear: the boundary between history and fiction appeared almost as problematic in the early nineteenth century as it has begun, of late, to appear to us.⁸

What exactly were Vigny's thoughts about the relation of history to fiction in the period during which he wrote Cinq-Mars? Unfortunately, no texts predating the novel address this question. Vigny kept his project a secret from friends and acquaintances until the novel was all but finished. Henri Latouche refers to the work in a letter of October 1825, so the novel cannot have been completely unknown to Vigny's friends, but the first reference to the novel in his Correspondence is to be found in an undated letter to his publisher, Urbain Canel. In the letter, apparently written in December 1825, Vigny insists on his desire for secrecy: “Je vous ai écrit, Monsieur, pour recommander le secret exact de Cinq-Mars, je désire que personne ne jette les yeux sur lui avant son jour et qu'on ignore même que vous avez le premier volume.”⁹ Not even Victor Hugo, perhaps Vigny's closest friend at the time, knew of the large project which Vigny had undertaken in the summer of 1824.

Various factors led Vigny to keep silent about the most considerable enterprise he had undertaken as a writer: the severity of the critical response to his long mythopoeic poem, Eloa, which had been savaged by the Catholic press in 1824, a fear of political repercussions from what could be read as an attack upon ministerial despotism (there is evidence that Vigny's literary ambitions had already caused problems in his army career),¹⁰ and the wish to keep to himself what might turn out to be no more than another abortive project. In the absence of evidence that Vigny seriously considered the problem of the relation of history to fiction while writing Cinq-Mars, his determination to defend the novel from charges of inaccuracy has seemed to most commentators to be wrong-headed stubbornness. But is this so? From the perspective of the 1820s, the boundary between historical and fictional narrative was not as clear as it seemed to be during the long reign of what may be called positivist historiography. Restoration novelists were aware of the perennial tension between history and fiction. But they were also more aware than their positivistic successors of the essential role of the imagination in the constitution of narrative. Renewed interest during recent decades in the philosophical problems inherent in historical narrative render us somewhat more sympathetic to the choices Vigny made in Cinq-Mars and defended in “Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art.”

Cinq-Mars was far from being Vigny's first work to exploit history. His first literary attempt was a historical narrative of the Fronde inspired by reading Retz's memoirs. But it was poetry which attracted most of Vigny's literary effort. In 1815-17, he worked on three tragedies in verse, all of which had historical subjects: Roland, Julien l'Apostat, and Antoine et Cléopâtre. These he destroyed in 1832, when the great cholera epidemic which visited most parts of the globe at some time between 1817 and 1837 reached Paris, threatening the lives both of the author of Cinq-Mars and his wife and making the exigent poet tremble “dans la crainte des éditeurs posthumes” (Vigny, Journal 950). Except for the article “Sur les œuvres complètes de Byron” published in the December 1820 number of the Hugo brothers' Conservateur Littéraire, almost all of Vigny's literary work was poetry. The fact that Vigny's reputation before Cinq-Mars rested exclusively upon his poetic production was doubtless one more reason he relished the idea of springing upon the unsuspecting world a substantial work in prose.

It should already have been apparent, however, to one considering Vigny's corpus before 1826, that history was the main source—indeed, the almost exclusive source—for the settings for Vigny's literary imagination. In addition to scenic elements, these poems are generally narrative works, often taking their action from historical situations. Thus the first and longest piece in his first volume, Poëmes, published by Pélicier in March 1822, was “Héléna,” a poem dramatizing the contemporary Greek struggle for liberation. “Héléna” was followed by nine poems in three groupings which are historical in nature: “Poëmes antiques,” “Poëmes judaïques,” and “Poëmes modernes.” Eloa, published by Auguste Boulland in April 1824, employs generalized themes of Christian epic myth which Vigny presents as a mythico-historical mélange.

The practice of his competitors in the burgeoning field of the historical novel in the 1820s was not calculated to augment the scruples of historical novelists. As a recent study of the period notes, “Every year the number of Scott imitators had increased; 1825 and 1826 were not exceptions. Most imitations were poorly composed as well as too improbable and melodramatic.”¹¹ Given the state of the genre in the 1820s, we should not exaggerate the fastidiousness with regard to accuracy which an author would have been likely to feel in planning and writing a historical novel.

Some idea of how Vigny fit the material to his loom can be grasped from miscellaneous papers pertaining to the novel's genesis. One entitled “Dates de C. Mars” takes notice of the awkward fact that the execution of Urbain Grandier preceded Cinq-Mars's arrival at court by several years.¹² But this should probably not be read as the expression of a twinge of conscience.¹³ The following page of notes, whose material resemblance to the preceding one seems to make it contemporary with it, shows no special scrupulousness for historical detail. The page is entitled “rapprochemens et faits.” Vigny notes that “le Bourreau s'était cassé la jambe on prit un homme de la lie du peuple pour 100 écus—qu'il soit lié à l'action qu'il accepte pour sauver C. Mars et ne le puisse pas” (Chantilly, Tome III, fol. 65). Though this idea was never incorporated into the novel, it shows how a historical detail was a point of departure for imagining dramatic connections which might heighten the interest of the narrative. In this case, the historical record offered the author a variety of possibilities. Different accounts assert that the man hired as executioner was a porter, a butcher, or a manual laborer, engaged to replace the incapacitated bourreau of Lyons.¹⁴ Though the historical fee of 100 écus (Vaissière 94) was retained, Vigny chose not to introduce “un homme de la lie du peuple.” Instead, he invented “Jean le Roux,” a butcher who, according to his wife, is “un honnête homme” (Vigny, Cinq-Mars, … 2: 354). The possibility of involving the executioner in the plot to save Cinq-Mars is neglected, perhaps so that some gallows humor on the part of le peuple may, in the Shakespearean tradition, leaven the pathos of the hero's end. The wife, who is unhappy that her husband is being paid to “couper la tête à deux chrétiens,” is told: “qu'est-ce que cela te fait que la viande qu'il coupe se mange ou ne se mange pas?” (Vigny, Cinq-Mars 354)

It was Vigny's peculiarly historical inspiration that led Emile Deschamps to consider him the master of the poème, then considered to be a particular genre of poem, distinct from an ode, ballad, elegy, etc.:

Le Lyrique, l'Elégiaque et l'Epique étant les parties faibles de notre ancienne poésie …, c'est de ce côté que devait se porter la vie de la poésie actuelle. Aussi M. Victor Hugo s'est-il révélé dans l'Ode, M. de Lamartine dans l'Elégie et M. Alfred de Vigny dans le Poème … à l'exemple de Byron, [M. de Vigny] a su renfermer la poésie épique dans des compositions d'une moyenne étendue et toutes inventées: il a su être grand sans être long.¹⁵

In the twentieth century psychological approaches to Vigny have certainly contributed much to our understanding of Vigny, but an emphasis upon subjectivity has sometimes obscured the extent to which Vigny's practice was based upon his way of understanding the historical process.¹⁶ Vigny, of course, was not alone in this interest. The historical inquisitiveness and historical-mindedness which marks the Romantic period so deeply fostered an interest in historical theories which attempted to explain the elaboration of myths.¹⁷ Historical accounts of the literature of Romanticism have tended to focus on the cultivation of individual subjectivity and its expression in lyrical and fictional genres. But from another perspective, what underlies the revival of all three literary genres cited by Deschamps in his 1828 preface to Etudes françaises et étrangères—lyric, elegy, and “poème”—is the new consciousness of the historical uniqueness of societies and individuals as well as the ephemeral circumstantiality of their intersection in historical moments. Vigny, in pondering his work, sometimes thought of Cinq-Mars as the first volume of a “histoire de la noblesse” which he never wrote (Vigny, Journal 1049), sometimes as the first “chant” of “une sorte de poème épique sur la désillusion” (Vigny, Journal 1037) comments which are further confirmation of his historical consciousness.

We have noted that in Cinq-Mars a certain logic of idealization, similar to that which exaggerates character traits in romance, causes the heroes of the novel to approach the divine and its villains to approach the demonic. A similar tendency runs through Vigny's work from beginning to end. Whether it be the analytical Docteur Noir in Stello and Daphné, the suffering princess in “Wanda,” or the portrait Vigny paints of himself in the “Commentaires sur les mœurs de mon temps et document pour l'histoire” which Jean Sangnier entitled “L'Affaire de l'Académie,”¹⁸ virtually every principal character depicted by Vigny in a narrative undergoes an imaginative transformation projecting him or her into what we exaggerate only slightly by calling the realm of the merveilleux. But this is exactly what is, according to Vigny, incompatible with modernity. In 1838 he noted in his journal:

du poeme epique.—Les deux choses impossibles à présent sont: dans l'ensemble des poèmes humains, un merveilleux qui se puisse admettre.—Dans le détail de la forme, le vers héroïque.—Le lecteur ne peut pas vivre avec lui.

(Vigny, Journal 1095)

For these or for other reasons, the quasi-epic ambitions of Vigny and the other Romantics fell short of full attainment. But they were nonetheless a necessary part of the program of Romanticism, an inevitable accompaniment of the development of what Friedrich Meinecke dubbed Historismus—a term whose English equivalent, historism, has unfortunately not found general acceptance. As Meinecke put it: “The essence of historism is the substitution of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history.”¹⁹ This form of historical consciousness became much more widespread in the Romantic period. It was the French Revolution which, by its world-shattering cataclysmic power, extended beyond the intellectual élite the consciousness that old ways of thinking had been bound to particular historical periods. All the aspects of the literary movements we group under the name of Romanticism were affected by this consciousness.

In considering the role of history in Vigny's thought at this time, however, we must keep in mind the fact that history had not yet sought to become a science and thus to divorce itself from literature. This effort, inspired by Rankean ideals, would soon staff the cadre of professionalized historians called into existence by the needs of the modern university. Along with other forms of scientism, the idea of a “science of history” has of late become implausible. As a result, we are now better able to appreciate the perspective of the 1820s. Just as the last 25 years have witnessed the birth of a “new journalism” which infuses non-fictional accounts with narrative techniques which derive from the devices of fictional narrative, so in the field of history authors of historical narrative are coming to accept the literariness of their work.²⁰ The breach which the nineteenth century opened between history and literature seems to be healing. In Vigny's day, the breach was only on the verge of opening. Historical narrative, although distinguished from fiction, relied in narrating the past upon the same literary devices of plot, characterization, point of view, and so on, as fictional narrative, but without regarding such reliance as problematic. To borrow Schiller's terms, historians today are obliged to write historical narrative sentimentally, i.e., with full consciousness of its “artificial and contrived aspects,” whereas in the early nineteenth century they could do so naively, i.e., supposing that their narratives heeded only the “simple nature” of events.²¹

As confirmation of the fact that history and literature were more closely allied in the early nineteenth century than they would be in the latter part of the century, when the positivistic influences led historians to aspire either to know the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen,”²² or to formulate the laws which determined its events, on the model of the laws discovered by the natural sciences, we may cite the career of Leopold von Ranke, born two years before Vigny. Late in life he claimed that the novels of Walter Scott had encouraged his first historical researches, and that, after considering a career in literature, he decided to devote himself to history. In a letter to his brother in 1824, Ranke wrote: “It is certain that I was born for studies … less certain that I was born for the study of history; but I have for once taken it up … and will stick to it” (Ranke 5-6). Comparing the portraits of Louis XI and Charles the Bold in Scott's Quentin Durward and in Philippe de Comines, Ranke came to a conclusion diametrically opposed to Vigny's attitude: “I found by comparison that the truth was more interesting and beautiful than the romance. I turned away from it and resolved to avoid all invention and imagination in my works and to stick to facts.”²³ The idea that it is possible to “avoid all invention and imagination” is the essence of what we have referred to above as the “naive” approach to historical perspective.

In France, the aim of a scientific reform of the discipline of history came later, and historical studies throughout the first half of the nineteenth century openly avowed their affiliation with literature. No French historian called for imagination and invention to be expunged from works of history. In Chateaubriand, literary imagination had an ascendancy over the historical record and, indeed, over his own experience rarely equaled in any other writer.²⁴ Yet it was the inspiration of Chateaubriand, as much as that of Scott, which presided over the renewal of interest in history in France. Augustin Thierry's description of being inspired to become a historian by a reading of Les Martyrs at the age of 15 is (or was) well known.²⁵ And unlike Ranke, who impugned his handling of historical materials, Thierry praised Walter Scott: “il y a plus de véritable histoire dans ses romans sur l'Écosse et sur l'Angleterre que dans les compilations philosophiquement fausses qui sont encore en possession de ce grand nom. …”²⁶ Even Guizot, whose works were reproached by Sainte-Beuve for being mechanical chains of events which suppressed the contingency of life and who set as his object not to narrate but to explain events, affirmed the necessity of using the literary imagination to understand history:

But do you know also their external physiognomy? Have you before your eyes their individual features? The facts now dead once lived; unless they have become alive to you you know them not. The investigation of facts, the study of their relation, the reproduction of their form and motion, these constitute history, and every great historical work must be judged by these tests.²⁷

The cohesion of history to other literary genres was, then, virtually unchallenged in France in the 1820s. However, far from feeling threatened and perceiving in this relation a weakness, as historians tend to do today, history regarded this relationship as a strength, another weapon in its rhetorical arsenal. For with the extension and deepening of historical consciousness in the aftermath of the French Revolution, history had become an aggressive intellectual force and was on the march. Reizov describes this state of affairs well:

Jamais encore avant cette décennie, l'histoire n'avait eu une si grande importance pour la vie intellectuelle du pays. Les théories politiques et les utopies sociales étaient empreintes d'histoire, l'histoire se substituait presque aux recherches philosophiques et aux œuvres littéraires ou bien plutôt elle déterminait les méthodes des unes et des autres; la philosophie se transformait en histoire de la philosophie et en philosophie de l'histoire, le roman devenait “roman historique,” la poésie ressuscitait les ballades et les vieilles légendes, les peintres, abandonnant le “naturel,” peignaient des costumes anciens, et les hommes politiques s'en référait constamment à l'histoire.²⁸

Because there was at this time a widespread consensus that history was moving in a particular direction and that progress was less a theory than a fact to be explained,²⁹ there was not a widely felt need to subject the phenomenon of the apprehension of the historical past to critical scrutiny. Doubts about progress, of course, are a constant conservative presence in every milieu where groups with an interest in the status quo fear that change will lead to a decline in their importance, and they have a doctrinal basis in pessimistic religious doctrines that enjoyed a revival following the disappointments of the French Revolution. In esthetic circles widespread disenchantment with the results of the July Revolution of 1830 and subsequent movements for social and political change fostered growing skepticism toward the view that human society was providentially moving toward a happier future. In philosophy, the pessimism of Nietzsche (inspired in part by that of Schopenhauer) was perhaps the negation of progressivism which has had the most long-lasting influence. But as historical consciousness only became extensive in the aftermath of the French Revolution, so the crisis in progressivism has begun to become widespread only in the twentieth century. In the 1820s, such doubt was negligible. Its absence accounts for phenomena which contemporary cultural critics often find incomprehensible or else attribute to such factors as Eurocentrism or racism, like the virtual absence of any principled opposition at home to European colonialism. As Paul Bénichou has noted of the idea of progress dominating the Romantic period, “cette notion est désormais interprétée … non dans le sens d'une virtualité propre à l'homme et qu'il dépend de lui de réaliser—la perfectibilité selon le mot consacré—mais comme une assurance d'avenir humain inscrite dans le devenir du monde.”³⁰

These general observations are corroborated by the text of a review of Augustin Thierry's Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands published in Le Constitutionnel of August 26, 1826. According to a survey of the press published in 1826, Le Constitutionnel was an independent paper with the largest subscription in France: between 20,000 and 21,000 subscribers.³¹ The anonymous reviewer begins by observing the peculiar aptitude of the contemporary moment for historical writing, explaining this disposition itself historically:

S'il était vrai, comme beaucoup de personnes le pensent, que le génie de la poésie et des arts fut perdu chez nous; qu'au dégré de civilisation auquel nous sommes parvenus, la force et la naïveté d'imagination nous fussent refusées, que nous fussions condamnés à juger, à critiquer, jamais à produire, il nous resterait un genre auquel notre esprit critique ne serait pas aussi mortel, et pour lequel nous conserverions encore assez de jeunesse et de puissance créatrice; ce genre, c'est l'histoire.³²

The development of civilization has led to an advance because of which history, which was formerly written for rulers, is now written for all, and extends its interest to every place and time: “… tous les siècles, tous les régimes, tour-à-tour attaqués ou défendus par les partis, ont passé sous nos yeux et sont jugés” (3). This impartiality comes from the conviction that they are all stages in the progress of humanity:

… nous sommes sans colère contre telle ou telle époque; nous les regardons toutes commes les divers degrés de l'échelle ascendante que parcourt le genre humain en s'élevant vers le bien, vers le mieux. … Nous avons donc pour écrire l'histoire, d'abord une grande pensée philosophique, le perfectionnement croissant de l'espèce humaine, et ensuite l'impartialité dûe [sic] à cette pensée, qui nous fait considérer chaque état de l'espèce humaine comme une des variétés infinies de son développement progressif.

(3)

The writer could scarcely be clearer in expressing the view that the writing of history is a philosophical enterprise which involves the attainment of solid cognitive gains. But does this mean that the realm of the literary has been left behind? By no means:

Avec cette grande pensée philosophique et l'impartialité qui lui est inhérente, nous avons donc les conditions morales essentielles; réunirons-nous au même degré les conditions littéraires? saurons-nous, comme les grands narrateurs de l'antiquité, rendre dramatiques ou épiques les événements fournis par l'histoire?

(3)

The ancients had a literary advantage: they had not developed disciplines that dealt with “ces détails techniques sur l'organisation, les ressources industrielles et militaires des sociétés, que nous exigeons de l'historien” (3). Thus they were able to concentrate both their attention and their narratives upon the train of historical action they were describing. This is what history is: the narration of an interesting true story—and it is noteworthy that the reviewer writing in Le Constitutionnel exhibits what we have called the “naive” attitude toward narration, showing not the slightest suspicion that storytelling imports something which is not in the events themselves:

Les dissertations, quelque savantes, quelque profondes qu'elles soient, peuvent être d'une grande utilité, attester une grande sagacité de génie; mais elles ne sont pas de l'histoire. La véritable histoire est celle qui, au lieu de disséquer pièce à pièce une époque ou un peuple, fait naître les événements graduellement et avec ensemble, leur conserve la même succession, le même mouvement que dans la nature, reproduit en quelque sorte la vie même, et inspire cet intérêt, ces sympathies qu'on éprouve à l'aspect d'un événement réel et présent. Cette histoire, saurons-nous la faire, avec la condition imposée d'entrer dans tous les détails de l'organisation des sociétés?

(3)

What gifts are needed to write history? It is reassuring to the reviewer that exceptional literary gifts are not required—not because they falsify history, but because they participate in a genius to which few pretend:

Si, pour composer ce qu'on peut appeler une histoire narrative, il fallait du génie dramatique, s'il fallait l'art de tout mettre en action qu'ont eu Shakspeare [sic], Molière, nous douterions de nos succès en histoire; mais heureusement il ne faut que de l'universalité d'intelligence et un grand esprit d'ordre … comprendre les hommes et les choses, puis choisir, ordonner, tout cela suppose sans doute d'éminentes qualités, des qualités de premier ordre; néanmoins ce n'est pas encore le génie dramatique tel que l'ont eu Shakspeare et Molière, et c'est là ce qui nous rassure.

(3)

And what is the reason such gifts are not required? It is the writer's naive belief that the qualities which distinguish literary genius can already be found in the events the historian recounts: “Il faut qu'on se figure bien que tout est intéressant et dramatique dans la réalité; qu'il ne faut qu'être clair et savoir conserver la génération des choses, pour être éminemment intéressant, et souvent dramatique ou épique” (4). Before proceeding to his particular remarks on Thierry's work, the reviewer sums up in a manner which admirably demonstrates that he is unaware of any danger to truth resulting from the melding of history and literature. The only thing to beware of is an excess of enthusiasm:

Ainsi comprendre, choisir, ordonner, voilà le génie historique. Il ne faut pas sans doute que l'historien soit froid, il ne faut pas qu'il reste indifférent à ce qu'il raconte; mais saiton à quoi lui servira de se passionner lui-même? non pas à animer son récit de l'expression des sentiments qu'il éprouvera, Dieu l'en préserve, il déclamerait; mais à bien discerner les scènes dramatiques de son sujet, à les préparer, à y faire aboutir l'action. Ce qui le frappe fortement, il éprouve le besoin de le raconter; il s'y dirige, il se hâte d'y parvenir, et son besoin devient celui de lecteur, qui le suit et partage son impatience et son désir d'arriver. Encore une fois, ces qualités sont aussi éminentes qu'on le voudra, mais elles ne sont pas du génie dramatique, et, à notre gré, c'est là ce qui sauve l'histoire de nos jours, si elle est sauvée.

(4)

This interesting review is, in fact, an essay on the writing of history; the subsequent discussion of Thierry's work is shorter than the general remarks which precede it.

In the intellectual atmosphere which we have described, then, it is hardly surprising that when writing Cinq-Mars Alfred de Vigny did not experience a need to analyze more critically the distinction between history and fiction. Indeed, his initial tendency was to refuse to recognize any conflict between the two. Since his work participated in both, he was willing to take credit both for having written a satisfying novel, and for having authored a serious work of history.

Although the first edition of Cinq-Mars was published without a preface, there is good reason to suppose that Vigny at first contemplated composing a preface to precede the novel. In his survey of works of fiction in this period, Claude Duchet concludes that “la préface est à l'époque, pour le roman, un préambule nécessaire. Son absence est signifiante: indice de novation, de différence calculée ou d'un très bas niveau de lecture.”³³ Since it goes without saying that Vigny aimed not at a low but at an exalted “niveau de lecture,” the absence of a preface in the first edition of Cinq-Mars may be taken as a deliberate gesture: not so much of a “différence calculée” as of a différence effacée: by removing the preface Vigny positions himself to enjoy the dignities both of the novelist and the historian, to receive homages both as creative artist and as student of history. On the one hand, the lack of a preface seems to add to the novel's esthetic luster: “… l'absence de toute désignation paraît bien être pour le roman de cette époque la marque recherchée d'une certaine qualité, qui se dispense du langage mercantile de l'affiche” (Duchet 248). On the other hand, although Vigny endows his novel with a subtitle, he avoids including in it any term which suggests that the work is fictional in nature. Perhaps because his article is concerned with the affirmative signifying function of a preface (or its absence), or because he assumes that the category of “roman” is self-evidently constituted, Claude Duchet neglects to notice that the absence of a preface permits a generic equivalence, an amphibology which Vigny was willing to exploit.

In Cinq-Mars, Vigny's fidelity to history does not go much beyond using the names of historical figures for the principal characters of the novel. Vigny alters the most basic and objective facts of biography, the dates of birth and death. For example, Father Joseph, doubtless the character who has in the novel suffered the greatest transformation, died in 1638, a year before the real Cinq-Mars gained royal favor. Vigny could scarcely have hoped that readers would fail to notice such discrepancies. As Marie de Mantoue, Cinq-Mars's beloved, remarks in the novel: “Vous savez bien quelle est toute l'infortune d'une princesse: … toute la terre est avertie de son âge …” (Vigny, Cinq-Mars 45). Given Vigny's manipulation of the historical record, it may seem dubious that Cinq-Mars could have been classed as a work of history.

But this was indeed the case. If it was, in fact, among Vigny's aims to straddle the line between history and fiction, we have in the annual classification of new books for the Bibliographie de la France testimony to his success. Founded in 1811 at Napoleon's command, this annual publication collected in a single volume the periodicals which recorded at short intervals (in the 1830s and after, weekly) all books and pamphlets printed according to the law on the dépôt légal. The volume for 1826 classified the first two editions of Cinq-Mars as “histoire,” under the rubric “Histoire de France.”³⁴ In 1827, the third edition of the novel, despite the fact that Vigny stripped it of most of its trapping of notes, was again classified with works of history under the heading “Histoire de France” (Bibliographie de la France … Année 1827 277). Not until 1829, when the fourth edition was headed by the classificatorily helpful preface entitled “Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art,” was the book's classification transferred to “belles-lettres” under the rubric “Romans et contes” (Bibliographie … 1829 238). This classification was continued for the editions of 1833 and 1837 (Bibliographie … 1833 224, 1837 219). Then, in 1841, despite the notation in the main entry indicating that this was the “8^e édition, précédée de réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art” (Bibliographie … 1841 591), the novel mysteriously reverts in the Tables to the rubric “Histoire de France” (Bibliographie … 1841 248). The next edition, in 1846 (Bibliographie … 1846 210), appeared with “Romans et contes,” where it belonged, and where subsequent editions remained.

We should not make too much of these shifts, which doubtless have more to do with gross errors committed by overworked, harried employees than with taxonomic glissements pregnant with signification to be delivered into the world by an intellectual sleuth operating à la Foucault.³⁵ Nevertheless, the fact that what seem to us obvious errors happened to a novel which did, after all, enjoy a certain celebrity, and not merely once but upon three separate occasions, confirms that a certain tenuousness existed on the frontier of history and fiction.

In conclusion, let us examine two early notes which may be attributed with some certainty to the period from 1824 and 1825 in which Cinq-Mars was conceived and written. Here we find Vigny affirming both the symbolic nature of a narrative work of fiction and the necessary truth-value of historical fiction.

The first text is an assertion of the philosophical utility of the inventions of the creative imagination:

La tragédie ou le roman, en général toute œuvre d'imagination qui crée des caractères, est à la philosophie ce que l'exception est à la règle: l'imagination donne du corps aux idées et leur crée des types et des symboles vivants qui sont comme la forme palpable et la preuve d'une théorie abstraite. La philosophie peut donc puiser des armes dans cet arsenal créé par les grands hommes et des expressions, des noms qui donnent plus de netteté aux idées. Ainsi lorsqu'elle traitera du vague des passions en prenant pour terme René, elle sera comprise; de la séduction Lovelace, Clarisse, etc.

(Vigny, Journal 880)

This passage does not specifically mention the historical novel, but Vigny reverts to the same ideas in the “Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art.” Although in the draft the “grands hommes” to whom he refers seem to be authors, Vigny's preface not only refers “à Lovelace et à Clarisse” (Vigny, Cinq-Mars 25) but it also develops the same idea of characters as symbols in the context of the historical novel:

… la muse vient raconter, dans ses formes passionnées, les aventures d'un personnage que je sais avoir vécu … elle recompose ses événements, selon la plus grande idée de vice ou de vertu que l'on puisse concevoir de lui, réparant les vides, voilant les disparates de sa vie et lui rendant cette unité parfaite de conduite que nous aimons à voir représentée même dans le mal …

(Vigny, Cinq-Mars 24)

According to Vigny, ancient historians believed that this was the manner of characterization which historians properly used: “… ils jetaient quelques figures colossales, symboles d'un grand caractère ou d'une haute pensée.”³⁶ Consider Vigny's terms: symbols of character, and symbols of thought. Again Vigny deliberately straddles the border between history and fiction. Indeed, the preface to Cinq-Mars is above all the theoretical grounding of this position.

The second passage that seems to be a note toward a preface to his historical novel is to be found in the Vigny papers at Chantilly:

                                                                                                                        à mes yeux

La première des Muses est la Vérité. Si vous rencontrez la Beauté dans les arts, c'est elle. [Previous state: La Beauté dans tous les arts n'est autre chose qu'elle-même.] Il faut lui rendre un culte entier. [c'est une] [elle] [Ce Dieu] elle n'admet point de partage. je pense qu'il faut la dire même à contre-cœur. Lorsqu'il s'agit de tenter le tableau d'un siècle; [que serait-il sans ombres?] [L'historien] doit vivre dans le tems passé sans se souvenir du présent quoique [il fau] cet ouvrage historique ne soit pas l'histoire, il en procede et doit tenir d'elle la vérité des couleurs.

La pensée est [doit être] sans amour et sans haine; elle passe parmi [doit planer sur] les lieux et les âges [et] comme un voyageur étranger et dit ce qu'elle a vu; avec une indépendante impartialité—

[l'auteur n'a] [l'appro]

toutes les [grandes] masses historiques sont³⁷

(Along with his idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization, Vigny's corrections have all been reproduced so as to make apparent the tentativeness of the text.)³⁸

Although the development of thought in this passage is rather rudimentary, its fundamental ideas are clear—truth, beauty, and historical fiction—as is its drift: that beauty and truth are compatible in the historical novel. Vigny's problem seems to be to generalize the notion of “vérité de couleur” so that it extends to the historical novel as a whole.³⁹ The prevailing theory of truth at this time being a correspondence theory, resemblance in details or in the portrayal of character deserved to be called “vérité.” But Vigny's abortive attempt to elaborate an account of the truth of historical fiction foundered, perhaps, on the inadequacy of the naive perceptionism which, suggested by the notion of color, takes possession of the thought of the passage near the point at which it breaks off.

All the evidence, then, points to the conclusion that Vigny was willing to allow and to exploit opportunities afforded by the intermingling of historical and fictional narratives which was characteristic of the period. In a letter addressed to a poet who has not been identified, thanking him warmly for his encouraging praise of Cinq-Mars, we find phrasing which reflects Vigny's wish to believe that his work has both esthetic and historical merit. On the one hand, he underscores the historical value of the work by emphasizing the usefulness of Cinq-Mars: “j'ai tenté d'être utile à notre France, elle m'a récompensé déjà par d'honorables suffrages. …”⁴⁰ On the other hand, the work's merit ultimately depends upon its imaginative inspiration: “Si cet ouvrage vous a plu, c'est sans doute que vous y avez reconnu quelque chose. … Je l'adore comme vous et même involontairement; on ne saura jamais combien de fois la simple prose que vous louez a été la traduction d'une première pensée poétique que j'éteignais à regret …” (Vigny, Correspondence 225).

Notes

1. All editions published while Vigny was alive bear the subtitle on the title page, and it is regrettable that twentieth-century editions have not always followed this practice. Twentieth-century editorial offhandedness in regard to Vigny, of which this is a minor example, can often be linked to the editorial practices of Fernand Baldensperger, whose two editions of the complete works have, until recently, been the scholarly standard. Baldensperger's 1948-50 two-volume Pléiade edition provides the subtitle of Cinq-Mars only in the novel's listing in the Table des matières of the second volume (1395), but not on the volume's other title pages (5, 13, 27). Curiously, however, the subtitle is given on the front of the dust jacket, where the titles included in the second volume are listed. Such haphazard quirkiness characterizes Baldensperger's editorial work.

2. Vigny, Cinq-Mars, or A Conspiracy under Louis XIII, trans. William Hazlitt (Boston: Little, Brown, 1907) xviii.

3. Alfred de Vigny, Journal d'un poète, in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1948-50) 2: 921, 1342.

4. Pierre Boncenne, ed., La Bibliothèque idéale, rev. ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989) 192, 197.

5. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957) 187.

6. Vigny, Cinq-Mars, ou une conjuration sous Louis XIII, 2nd ed. (Paris: Le Normant Père, 1826) 4: 468.

7. The precise dating of the preface presents certain difficulties. It appears in a version of the third edition by Urbain Canel dated 1827. In different editions the writing of the preface is dated “janvier 1826,” “janvier 1829,” and “1827.” For an extended discussion of these difficulties, see Mark K. Jensen, “The Use, Abuse, and Perfection of History: Vigny's Cinq-Mars and the ‘Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art’” (diss. U of California at Berkeley, 1989) 338-53.

8. The term “positivist” is used here to refer to the attempt to commit the quest for knowledge of human affairs to a natural-scientific model. “The basic fault of every form of positivism in the social sciences is the belief that the act of interpretation can be circumvented.” Peter L. Berger and Hansfried Kellner, Sociology Reinterpreted: An Essay on Method and Vocation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1981) 129.

9. Vigny, Correspondence d'Alfred de Vigny, ed. M. Ambrière, Thierry Bodin, Loïc Chotard, François Escoube, André Jarry, Roger Pierrot, and Jean Sangnier, vol. 1: 1816-juillet 1830 (Paris: PUF, 1989) 213.

10. André Jarry, “Contribution à une histoire de la carrière militaire de Vigny,” Bulletin de l'Association des Amis d'Alfred de Vigny 5 (1972-73) 41-42.

11. Paul T. Comeau, Diehards and Innovators: The French Romantic Struggle: 1800-1830 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988) 201.

12. Bibliothèque du Musée Condé, Chantilly, 91 G 13, fol. 64. Following a convention in the Vigny literature, I shall refer to this bound collection of miscellaneous notes as “Chantilly, Tome III.”

13. In an essay entitled “From History to Hysteria: Nineteenth-Century Discourse on Loudun,” Frank Paul Bowman reminds us that Vigny's novel is one of many nineteenth-century exploitations of the lurid history of Loudun that do violence to history “knowingly and unhesitatingly.” French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990) 111.

14. P. de Vaissière, Conjuration de Cinq-Mars (Paris: Hachette, 1928) 109.

15. Cited in Vigny, Morceaux choisis, ed. René Canat, 5th ed. (Paris: Didier & Privat, 1933) 98.

16. For example, in Part I, ch. 2-3 of François Germain, L'Imagination d'Alfred de Vigny (Paris: José Corti, 1962) 41-88, a psychological approach makes Vigny's symbols a means of discovery not of the nature of the universe, but of himself: “si Vigny s'intéresse à l'énigme de l'univers, c'est qu'il consacre son attention à se découvrir lui-même” (87). The complexity of these symbols is due, according to Germain, not to the complexity of the world but to the complexity of his inner life.

17. Herbert J. Hunt, The Epic in Nineteenth-Century France: A Study in Heroic and Humanitarian Poetry from “Les Martyrs” to “Les Siècles Morts” (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941).

18. Vigny, Mémoires inédits, ed. Jean Sangnier (Paris: Gallimard, 1958) 179-289.

19. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972) iv.

20. Simon Schama's recent work seems to me exemplary in this regard. See his Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), and Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). The critical response to Schama's latest work is ably summarized by Louis P. Masur, William and Mary Quarterly 49 (1992) 120-32, who notes that “for those who in recent years have given thought to the canons that govern historical writing, the question of the place of fiction in history has arrived” (123). The literature on this question is immense and can hardly be summarized here. The valuable discussions in History and Theory, Beiheft 25: Knowing and Telling History: The Anglo-Saxon Debate, ed. F. R. Ankersmit (1986) provide a useful survey of the literature. For more attention to Continental figures, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987).

21. “We ascribe a naive temperament to a person if he, in his judgment of things, overlooks their artificial nature and contrived aspects and heeds only their simple nature.” Schiller, “Naive and Sentimental Poetry” and “On the Sublime”: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966) 92.

22. Ranke's famous expression (“as it really was”) occurs in his preface to his History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494-1535. (The work actually covers only the years 1494-1514, since a planned second volume was never finished.) Leopold von Ranke, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Sciences of History, ed. and trans. Roger Wines (New York: Fordham UP, 1981) 58.

23. Quoted in G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959) 74.

24. See Pierre Martino, “Le Voyage de Chateaubriand en Amérique: essai de mise au point, 1952,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France 52 (1952) 149-64, pursuing the line of inquiry opened by Joseph Bédier's 1899 article.

25. In the preface to Récits des temps mérovingiens (Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1866) 8-10. “Ce moment d'enthousiasme fut peut-être décisif pour ma vocation à venir … Voilà une dette envers l'écrivain de génie qui a ouvert et qui domine le nouveau siècle littéraire” (10).

26. Augustin Thierry, Dix Ans d'études historiques (Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1866) 397. This was a review of Ivanhoe which appeared in the Censeur Européen on May 27, 1820.

27. Gooch 181-82. For an interesting discussion of Guizot's philosophy of history and its debt to literature, see Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989) 79-101.

28. B. Reizov, L'Historiographie romantique française: 1815-1830 (Moscow: Editions en Langues Etrangères, n.d.) 7-8.

29. See J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Growth and Origin (New York: Macmillan, 1932) 260-77.

30. Paul Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes: doctrines de l'âge romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977) 381.

31. This “tableau de la presse” in Le Constitutionnel of August 26, 1826 is given in full in Eugène Hatin, Bibliographie historique et critique de la presse périodique française (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1866) 355-56.

32. Le Constitutionnel (26 August 1826) 3. The editor, in a note, complains about the negativity of these remarks: “Ces assertions et ces suppositions sont purement gratuites. Peu de personnes pensent que le génie de la poésie et des arts soit perdu parmi nous. Béranger, Casimir Delavigne, Lamartine et quelques autres, prouvent que le génie de la poésie n'est pas éteint en France. Les arts d'imitation sont aussi cultivés avec succès; et pour ne parler que de la peinture, Gros, Gérard, Hersent, Guérin, ne soutiennent-ils pas l'honneur de l'école française? Nous n'aimons ni le faux ni le maniéré; l'immense popularité de Voltaire, le plus naturel des écrivains, en est une preuve décisive. Laissons les hommes médiocres crier à la décadence; ils ont leurs raisons pour dénigrer le siècle. Un homme d'esprit, tel que celui qui a composé l'article sur l'ouvrage de M. Thierry, devrait être moins injuste et moins tranchant.”

33. Claude Duchet, “L'Illusion historique: l'enseignement des préfaces (1815-1832),” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France 75 (1975) 249.

34. Bibliographie de la France, ou Journal de l'imprimerie et la librairie, et des cartes géographiques, gravures, lithographes et œuvres de musique: Année 1826 (Paris: Pillet Aîné, 1826) 242.

35. A thorough study of the systems employed by the Bibliographie de la France would certainly be fruitful. It is interesting, for example, that in 1855 the title of the pigeonhole into which Vigny's novel falls has been renamed “Contes, nouvelles et romans français; Auteurs vivants” (Bibliographie … 1855 403).

36. Vigny, Cinq-Mars 24. The 1859, 1861, and 1863 editions of Cinq-Mars have “et d'une haute pensée”; all previous editions read “ou d'une haute pensée.” There is reason to believe that this reading crept in unnoticed by Vigny along with other errors. See Appendix 1: “A Critical Edition of Vigny's ‘Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art,’” in Jensen 529-47.

37. Chantilly, Tome III, fol. 13v. Words crossed out in the manuscript have been bracketed. (A first state of the second sentence is given in brackets; Vigny has rewritten all the words except “dans les arts.”)

38. The version of the text soon to be published in Alphonse Bouvet's new Pléiade edition of Vigny's prose writings, graciously communicated to me by M. Bouvet, with his notes, makes the fragment seem clearer than in fact it is. Bouvet restores the word “l'historien,” which Vigny has barred in the ms. The sentence as it stands has no subject; it demands a substantive that refers to the author of a historical novel, not to a historian. Bouvet proposes 1826 as the date of this passage, but the same page recto bears a plan of the last chapter of Cinq-Mars with some text. Since the novel was at the printers by the end of 1825, it may be supposed this was written around the same time. There is no reason to think that it was inspired by Sainte-Beuve's article in Le Globe of 8 July 1826, as Bouvet suggests may have been the case.

39. As the term is used in the reviews of Cinq-Mars in 1826, “vérité” meant accuracy in historical details providing local color as well as an ambiance which gave to the fictional scene the feel of authenticity, and to the reader the sense of “being there.” Thus, in the first comment on the novel in the press, the Catholic paper Le Drapeau Blanc praised the novel for its “vérité”: “M. de Vigny a donné dans ce livre une scène du règne de Louis XIII; elle est rendu avec beaucoup de vérité et d'une manière fort pittoresque. Autour du célèbre cardinal se groupent les plus illustres personnages du siècle; les détails les plus minutieux de l'époque, les costumes, les conversations, les faits les plus curieux, tout est en relief, et le siècle de Louis XIII est là presque tout entier.” Le Drapeau Blanc (9 May 1826) 2-3. Le Courrier Français said in its review: “La conversation se prolonge, elle est pleine de vérité, et donne la juste mesure de l'esprit de Louis XIII. C'est cette vérité qui fait vivre les ouvrages et qui doit assurer le succès de Cinq-Mars.” Le Courrier Français (19 June 1826) 4. This is evidently the quality for which Vigny was praised in a review in La Quotidienne—a review which was, on other counts, rather severe: “[Son] talent est plein de vie; il se trouve particulièrement dans la peinture des caractères. En ceci l'auteur est historien, et toutes les actions qu'il prête à ses personnages, tous les discours qu'il leur fait tenir, sont autant d'attitudes réelles qu'ils ont prises ou qu'ils ont dû prendre. Sans doute ils n'ont rien dit de tout cela, mais d'après leur nature, on sent que lorsqu'ils parlaient, ils devaient avoir ce langage. Il résulte de cet heureux artifice que, s'il y a quelque fiction dans le drame, elle tourne tout entière à la plus grande ressemblance, à la plus vivante physionomie des acteurs.” La Quotidienne (31 May 1826) 2.

40. Vigny, Correspondence 1: 225. Because this letter cites a line of poetry associated with “votre Elvire,” it was formerly thought to have been addressed to Lamartine. As the editors of the Correspondence note, however, since the verse quoted by Vigny in his letter cannot be attributed to Lamartine, this is probably not the case.