SOURCE: "La chute d'un ange: Heaven and Hell on Earth," in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. XIII, No. 4, Summer, 1985, pp. 191-99.

[In the following excerpt, the critic explicates La chute d'un ange, focusing on humankind's relationship to God, suffering, and evil as presented in the poem.]

La Chute d'un ange brings us into a world where men have forgotten Heaven. The nomadic tribesmen who figure in the first part of the narration are thus doubly fallen, for they have not only been excluded from Eden, they have no recollection of God and have lost the power to see the signs of His presence which are visible in the universe. The central narrator, who is a holy man, has told us that in the antediluvian natural universe, still in its original state of perfection, all things are "pleins de Dieu." But when the cedars of Lebanon sing their hymn of adoration to God, it is before an audience of angels; men do not hear them. Nature has not lost all sacred meaning, however, for, as Daïdha tells Cédar, pagan gods who have fallen to earth after being defeated in wars with other gods (pagans too have their myths of fallen gods) sometimes hide in natural objects such as a stone or a piece of wood, and there the nomads hold them by charms, threats, or tears. These are the gods they carry with them and often trade or break and which they worship or insult as their fortunes vary. The tribesmen also have a privileged place to which they return each year and which they consider their fatherland. Here are caves where they and their ancestors have lived, full of memories and mysteries; they place them under the care of their gods. Here too is the burial ground, where the nomads speak to their dead relatives' souls and leave gifts for them. The caves, which should be considered their holiest places, are hollowed out of the earth and rock and have no vertical opening to the sky to communicate with transcendent forces.

The nomads' religion does not occupy them for long after they settle into their daily pastoral life. The narrator views their practices with contempt because they are pagan; to the reader they appear minimal as religious observances, whether pagan or not. However, if these primitive tribes do not worship the fertility of Mother Earth as an agricultural society would, but live rather heedlessly off her abundance, this cult is replaced symbolically to some extent by the honor given to the family; and the mothers, with their nourishing milk, are a human expression of nature's great richness and generosity. The nomads live contentedly in a benevolent but weakly sacralized universe.

The one solid structure that the nomads build is the Tour de la Faim, made of stones and mud, where Daïdha and her children are placed to await death by starvation. It is open to the sky, so that the gods may accuse no one of her death. Stars look down and a swallow visits her, but no gods intervene. It is Cédar, now only a man, who appears at the top of the walls to save his wife and children; profane love is here the effective force. Such heroic rescues still belong to the repertory of motifs of the modern mythology we observe today in desacralized society.

Babel (or Balbeck: Lamartine uses both names), the other society depicted in La Chute d'un ange, is more than desacralized, it is the extreme of the wicked society, not just of the profane but of profanation itself. Kindly Mother Nature is replaced with an artificial world of towers, walls, and man-made trees. The giants who rule there have not just forgotten God; they have denied and banished Him and put themselves in His place. All values are reversed and symbols of the sacred are perverted: the city is not a holy city but Hell on earth; the holy mountains are replaced by the heights on which the city is built, not so that the giants may be nearer to God, but so that they may supplant Him. The polluted air forms a miasma above the city which cuts off contact with Heaven, and in this atmosphere airships fly about like desecrated angels. One does not descend into this Hell, since the demons who rule it are passing themselves off as gods, but within the city the giants maintain their power and enjoy their cruel pleasures on the heights, while relegating their dehumanized slaves to deep dungeons.

It is in these two milieus that Cédar, the fallen angel, will pass his first sojourn on earth, with a brief stay in an earthly paradise between the two. Cédar, like the nomads, is doubly fallen: not only has he become a man, but he has forgotten Heaven and no longer knows that he was ever an angel. Thus God has punished him for preferring the promise of profane love to sacred love. Since he is a newborn man, a clean slate, he will follow the example of the nomads among whom he has fallen and will become vaguely pagan. He suffers from his mental blank, but the narrator tells us that he has the instinct for God, though he lacks the idea. It is no doubt because of this instinct which he still retains, that Cédar is closer to nature than the tribesmen. Besides, he is excluded from human society and forced to live in isolation in the wild. His intellectual development takes place in contact with nature and with Daïdha. When he is sad or in danger, nature be-friends him. Fountains in the woods assuage his sorrow; the river Oronte, where he is thrown for dead, revives him, and the log to which he is shackled floats and saves him. He discovers a wonderful hiding place were he will take Daïdha to make her his bride. There they spend the night on a vast hammock made of vines, flowers, and bird feathers, a nuptial bed which by its height above the ground is brought a bit closer to Heaven. This paradise on earth, by the beauty and luxuriance of its vegetation, recalls the bower of Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost (Book IV), but Cédar and Daïdha do not, of course, stop to worship God, and the angels are not vigilant, as in Milton, but stop in envy as they listen to the earthly couple.

Some of the sacredness of nature begins to penetrate Cédar's consciousness. When during a happy moment of reunion with his family he wishes to share his joy with someone, he turns to nature: this is his instinctive way of thanking God. He marvels at the glories of the infinite sky and the elements of nature which he studies, and later, when he and Daïdha follow the coast, the sight of the sea fills them with rapture and they seem to discover the perfect original communion: "Avec leurs sens ravis tout semblait converser." The instinct is developing, but the idea is yet to be revealed.

Up to now, being cut off from God does not matter much to Cédar, for he is entirely preoccupied with what brought him to earth in the first place, his love for Daïdha. Conceived in Heaven, it is a perfect love and will be completely realized on earth. Cédar knew before his fall that earth was an "enfer des larmes" where true love is the one happiness. And so it turns out: love brings to Cédar an ecstasy unknown in Heaven. The true Heaven is where Daïdha is: "Et Cédar aspirant le ciel dans son [Daïdha's] sourire, / Crut que le ciel entier n'était que ce délire." As long as he has Daïdha and the children, he does not feel in exile on earth, though in many places it is impossible for him to live. But since his love is unsanctioned by Heaven, its happiness must be fleeting. At the moment of his fall, Heaven cries out threateningly: "Savoure jusqu'au sang le bonheur des humains." So from the very beginning of his human life, Cédar is under sentence, though unaware of it.

It is altogether fitting that in societies largely devoid of a sense of the sacred, divine or diabolical forces should be incarnated in men, Cédar and his family on one side, the barbaric tribes or individuals like Nemphed and Stagyr on the other. As a transcendent being, God is remote; in nature he is a source of good, but he has abandoned men to evil. However, these wicked men will serve as His agents, and it is through them that divine wrath will be visited on Cédar. His punishment throughout most of the poem will be meted out by men and their societies, by the barbarous nomads and the unspeakably cruel giants. From his very first moment on earth he has to fight to save Daïdha and himself; they are forced constantly to be on the run to escape man's malevolence. On several occasions, we see that Cedar's good deeds do not go unpunished. His reward for saving Daïdha at the beginning of his life on earth is to be shackled as a slave. Later when he leads the oppressed city-dwellers to revolt and freedom, they become as cruel as their former masters. And his last and fatal mistake is to be magnanimous to a surviving giant/ god whose betrayal will bring about the death of the family. In the first part, the only time when a non-human power seems to intervene to make Cédar suffer is in the incident when by mistake he kills his dog, his only friend.

In general, Cedar's life in this section of the poem alternates between the joy of love and the sufferings of persecution, danger, and threatened loss in a series of suspenseful episodes. The recurring image of being thrown over a cliff into water or into the abyss shows the precariousness of his existence and his love.

The visit to the earthly paradise in the mountains serves several functions besides giving Lamartine a place for his major philosophical poem. It is a Utopia in the midst of a world of disorder and danger, where the young family meets the only good man of the poem and where they find a well-ordered agricultural environment, with rich wheat fields, orchards, vegetable gardens, and domestic animals. In this peaceable kingdom all creatures exist in harmony, and the wild beasts are so friendly that they allow the children to pet them. If there are no other men there, at least the Livre primitif gives a theoretical base for the good society. But most of all, the existence of God is revealed to Cédar and Daïdha. The narrator tells us that under Adonaï's tutelage, Cedar's memory is awakened and he begins to find God again in his soul, and the thankfulness he and Daïdha once in a happy moment felt to "je ne sais quel dieu" is replaced by the first attempts at prayer. Adonaï"s realm is the one place where the sacred retains its power.

The family's sudden capture and transfer to Balbeck is for Cédar a second fall from Heaven, cruel as the first one was not, for now he finds himself in a real Hell where he risks losing all that he loves. Balbeck is horrible at any time, but Hell seems worse when you have just come from Heaven. This time Cédar will not forget God, but the revelation of His existence brings him no comfort, it only makes him more conscious of the profanation of all that is good. He leads the oppressed people of Balbeck to revolt in the name of Adonaï and of God, but the revolt becomes carnage.

In this section and up to the end the demonic imagery is intensified. Evil is the dominant power on earth, and it is manifested in men and their works, which have a nightmarish quality that they would not have if they did not indicate some fiendish power at work. Of the examples of demonic imagery given by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, most appear in La Chute d'un ange. Those found in the first part are magnified in Balbeck: Cédar, enslaved and bound with lianas by the nomads but still living relatively free in the open air, is now in irons in a dungeon; aimless flight through the forests and across the mountains will be followed at the end by lost wandering in the desert; the Tour de la Faim will be multiplied a hundredfold by the sinister towers of Balbeck. And now some other elements are added: the tyrant, the mob, the harlot, cannibalism, the burning city. At the end the verdant nature friendly to Cédar has become a demonic waste-land.

When nature turns against Cédar, we know that the time of reckoning has come. Maddened by grief, he looks upward but it is to throw a handful of sand against cruel Heaven, then he curses stepmother earth for having brought forth man only to let him suffer and die. Horrified by the ultimate cruelty of the giants' sadistic pleasure, he revolts against God Himself and prepares the funeral-suicide pyre.

Cédar, who remains a simple man and to some extent a naïf up to the end, is in many ways an unlikely epic hero. By his isolation from the social group, by his pursual of his own survival and that of his immediate family rather than representing the moral values and aspirations of the tribe or nation, he fails to live up to the traditional role of the hero of epic. Being a former angel, he does not, like Adam, represent the human race. He does not advance toward the accomplishment of a mission but flees from the danger of death. His athletic feats and hairbreadth escapes have reminded some critics (H. J. Hunt, Léon Cellier) of Tarzan, and his exploits, such as the rescue from the Tour de la Faim alluded to earlier, belong to the corpus of modern popular myth. According to Cellier, "Cédar comme Tarzan matérialise le rêve d'un surhomme, situé dans le passé, et se présentant sous les traits d'un homme jeune, beau, athlétique et nu" [L'epopée romantique, 1954]. He climbs perilous heights and swings across a river on vines, but this "superman" is very vulnerable. In this respect, as in some others, Cédar resembles a hero of melodrama, a genre which often encompasses these modern myths: he is constantly beset by external obstacles; he passes from the extreme of one emotion to its opposite and back again; he is the strongest, bravest, and most handsome of men but not the most astute. Like the hero of melodrama, he engages our sympathy and arouses our pity.

Indeed, La Chute d'un ange shares many characteristics of melodrama, not just the polarization of emotions but also the polarization of good and evil, the persecution and humiliation of the innocent by sinister dark villains, a rapid succession of sensational peripeties, and fascination with lurid scenes of crime, sadism, and horror. The topos of the abyss is a suitable one for melodrama, with its frantic movement indicative of a universal instability and unease. It yawns beneath the evil as well as the good. In Balbeck we see Nemphed, who represents the extreme point of the loss of the human soul, looking down with dread from the "faîte escarpée" where he has arrived, feeling himself morally suspended over the abyss.

However, Lamartine violates one of the most important conditions of melodrama, the happy ending. Cédar must be punished: God has so decreed, the narrator knows it and has told us to expect the punishment. Cédar, himself being ignorant of it, keeps hoping and striving up to the end, and when the terrible loss comes, does not know what he is being punished for. Thus the use of the omniscient narrator gives a strong tragic irony to Cédar's story. In this poem we have not only the outlook of the good man struggling for happiness on earth; we also have the point of view of Heaven represented by the narrator and, within the central story, Adonaï and the Livre primitif, which is the revealed word of God.

It is true that the narrator is so moved by the poignancy of the story he is telling that he interrupts his recital to ask the stars if God enjoys seeing men suffer: "Pour l'incompréhensible et sainte volonté, / La ruine de l'homme est-elle volupté?" If so, God would be the ultimate sadist, not so different from the giants or from some barbarous pagan Moloch. But the old man immediately imposes silence upon himself, for "envers Dieu la plainte est une offense," and his last words are "Gloire à Dieu!" The listener who, as the narrator of the first and last sections is the poet's persona, seems to concur in this point of view, for he kneels contritely and accepts the old man's summation. The Livre primitif had set forth the guiding principle, which Cédar might have accepted if he had been given time to absorb it rather than being snatched away from Eden….

It is the long view that we must take, with its hope for an often distant future, and not on earth but in Heaven. When the constellations wonder why God permits such evil as the orgies of the giants to exist on earth, the angels reply: "Patient! car il est éternel." Moreover, in two passages the narrator assures us that some good will eventually rise again out of the destruction wrought by evil: the ashes of the Livre primitif will bear fruit later, and the ashes of the final funeral pyre are scattered by the wind, like seed. Thus it is indicated at intervals in La Chute d'un ange that in the long run God is just. At the end of the narration He is about to punish wicked men by engulfing them in the Flood. But He has already punished the innocent, Daïdha and the children, along with Cédar. The vague promises of eventual justice are not communicated to Cédar; even if they were, they would not alleviate his pain.

God has certainly made life on earth impossible for Cédar after the loss of love, for there is no salvation to be sought in human society. The constant tenor of the poem is that men in organized society are wicked and intractable. The just man must always be an outsider, living in isolation and often fearing for his life. Jocelyn, forced to sacrifice his love for Laurence, can find a reason for existence in serving his fellow-men. For Cédar, pariah that he is, no such alternative exists.

La Chute d'un ange is a strange and disconcerting work, as much melodrama as epic, with its combination of the primitive and the technologically advanced, with its hero who is both a man and not a man, and especially with its double point of view: revolt or acceptance, the pursuit of happiness or submission to incomprehensible suffering. Lamartine has left the possibility open for readers to respond according to their own lights. They may find that what the old seer narrates is more persuasive than his comments on his own story; while deferring to his mature wisdom, they may give preference to Cédar's "tête insensée." Unlike other fallen angels of myth and literature, the man Cédar remains angelic. The very impulse which leads to his fall, forgetting onself to go to the aid of another, is deemed admirable among men. He is as nearly perfect as a man can be (his desire for vengeance cannot be held against him), and his love is as tender and exalted as one could desire. He might have lived happily on earth even without the returning memory of God's existence; he is not a better man for it, and certainly not a happier one. Presumably, if the nomads and the giants had not turned away from God, they would not be so wicked and Cédar would fare better among them. But in that case God would have found some other way to punish him. At the end, virtue does not triumph, God does, in all His implacability.

The conclusion, "Gloire à Dieu!" sounds hollow, just as the last two lines of "Gethsémani," "Mais c'est Dieu qui t'écrase, ô mon âme, sois forte: / Baise sa main sous la douleur!" seem forced at the end of the long despairing poem on the death of Lamartine's daughter Julia. Where is the comforting faith of "L'Homme"? Jocelyn achieves a heroic resignation; it is presented as the culmination of the long process of reintegration with God which begins with Cedar's unrelieved despair. But La Chute d'un ange coming after Jocelyn bears witness to the anguish of the poet as he moves away from Christian faith toward deism.

The poem exalts above all the love of woman, who is not compared to angels, as in "Novissima verba," but who, as represented by Daïdha, is purely human. What does Cédar's eventual return to the "heureux néant" of Heaven mean if earthly love is the greatest joy of all, "la volupté suprême," and it is forever lost, forbidden and destroyed by a jealous God? When God receives Cédar back into Heaven, He would be cruel indeed if He did not again erase his memory and wipe out all recollection of his earthly loves.