[In the following essay, Bremner discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Fromentin's Dominique.]

Nearly all the critics who have concerned themselves with Fromentin's Dominique, from George Sand to Dr Barbara Wright in her recent edition¹ and D. G. Charlton in his review of it,² have discussed the motivation of Dominique's withdrawal. It seems that the central problem of the novel is the one which Fromentin has been least successful in treating. We know from Fromentin's correspondence with George Sand that he was trying to do two things in his novel; one might call them the moral, or didactic, and the emotional aspects. It seems from the letters that Fromentin was happier about the second than the first. In a letter to George Sand of 19th April 1862³ he says: “Je ne suis pas bien sûr d'avoir voulu prouver quelque chose, sinon que le repos est un des rares bonheurs possibles; et puis encore que tout irait mieux, les hommes et les œuvres, si l'on avait la chance de se bien connaître et l'esprit de se borner. Ce qu'il y a de plus clair pour moi, c'est que j'ai voulu me plaire, m'émouvoir encore avec des souvenirs, retrouver ma jeunesse à mesure que je m'en éloigne. …” and he says, later on in the same letter, that he will try to improve the moral aspect: “Je donnerai au Dominique retraité un rôle plus actif, plus large, plus efficace dans ses rapports importants avec un très petit monde. Il sera moins personnel et plus utile.” But in his letter of 9th November we find that he was unable to make the promised changes: “Après je ne sais combien de luttes, d'efforts inutiles et de gémissements, j'ai pris le parti de l'envoyer à l'imprimerie tel quel, ou à peu près.”⁴ The same awareness of a double purpose is evident in Dominique's own introduction to his story.⁵ The main developments of his career are one aspect: “C'est encore ce que cette histoire contiendra de meilleur comme moralité, et peut-être de plus romanesque comme aventure”; the other consists of his personal memories: “Le reste n'est instructif pour personne, et ne saurait émouvoir que mes souvenirs.” But for the reader, as for Dominique and for Fromentin, it is “le reste” which we find most interesting and moving, both by its volume and by its impact.

It is this dual intention which is responsible, I think, for most of the defects of the novel, and, as Fromentin's inability to correct his work implies, it represents an essential feature of his conception of his hero, and of himself as an artist. Before discussing this question it will be useful to try to isolate as far as possible the two aspects of his intention as they appear in the novel. On the moral level we have the story of a man who is destined by his nature and his upbringing not to be a social success, and who is brought into contact with a series of situations and characters which prove the point. This is the man who subjects his own works to a rigorous examination and rejects them, who regards Augustin's way of life as an ideal, and who cures himself of his last link with the past by telling his story. In this sense his attachment to a romantic past is like an umbilical cord which must be broken if he is to give himself fully to the chosen task of his maturity. By making a sacrifice of his story (“Je ne lui demandai point ses confidences; il me les offrit”),⁶ he can honestly say that he has left his past behind him, and is now, in the final chapter, able to avoid the fate of Olivier and to meet Augustin, “dont la vérité semblait avoir, pendant toute sa vie, rafraîchi les lèvres”, with a clear conscience. The moral lesson which emerges from this is expressed by Camille Reynaud: “Modérez vos désirs exorbitants, vos ambitions injustifiées; dominez la mélancolie, … aimez l'ordre.”⁷

As Dominique's introductory remarks suggest, the “moralité” is to be found on the level of the “romanesque”; the events illustrate the point, for us and for Dominique. Some of the statements in the first chapter imply an invitation to the reader to bring his practical and moral judgment to bear on the events of Dominique's life, when it comes to be related. This is particularly true of the opening pages, in which Dominique's judgment of his own life is followed by the narrator's comments on it. From this point of view the framework provided by the first two chapters introduces a story with a linear plot containing a series of events which enable us to assess Dominique's motives and reactions, a straightforward story with a moral, in fact. In it we expect to find enough evidence to assess Dominique's actions, evidence which is noticeably absent when we reach his decision to return to Les Trembles.

On the emotional level the picture is somewhat different and to a certain extent contradicts what has been said above. Instead of a forward-looking linear plot, we find a backward-looking attitude on the part of Dominique. On this level the experiences of the past are seen by him to have a validity which lies quite outside the attitudes of society and which cannot be squared with them. This “passé qui ne s'accordait pas très-bien avec sa vie présente”⁸ is not offered as an explanation of the present or as a guide to it, but as a completed period of life which exists, in a disquieting and undigested form, in the present. Here we are not concerned with assessing motives, or discovering the reasons for actions; we see Dominique as he sees himself, as someone who acted as he did because he could not do otherwise. He is seen as a man who does not shape his destiny but blunders into it. Thus Augustin, Madeleine and Olivier, who on the moral level might be regarded as indications of the various lines of conduct he could have followed, here serve merely to show that Dominique is Dominique, and the advice they constantly and vainly proffer only proves how different Dominique is from them.

This impression is strengthened by the fact that the older Dominique, who tells the story, is no more capable of an objective assessment of himself now than he was when the events took place. When Madeleine is attempting her “cure”, for example, he describes her thus: “Elle vivait ainsi dans la flamme, à l'abri de tout contact avec les sensations les plus brûlantes, pour ainsi dire enveloppée d'un vêtement d'innocence et de loyauté qui la rendait invulnérable aux ardeurs qui lui venait de moi, comme aux soupçons qui pouvaient lui venir du monde.”⁹ This is an attempt to preserve the past as it was, and the older Dominique seems no more aware than the younger one that it was he himself who clothed Madeleine with the “vêtement d'innocence et de loyauté”. It is not surprising that Madeleine is never properly allowed to take on an existence in her own right.

Like Fromentin, Dominique wants to relive his memories, and this presupposes a full complicity with them and with the person he was at the time. Camille Reynaud quotes a letter of 17th November 1844¹⁰ where Fromentin says that when “on est contemporain de toutes les époques de sa vie, on est, dans la plus haute acception du mot.” This, on the emotional level, can be regarded as Dominique's aim, and it is largely responsible for his fascination as a character, but it is not compatible with the moral intention of the novel. To achieve its emotional effect the story of Dominique's past cannot have the self-contained, cathartic quality that is essential on the moral level. In this connection I should disagree with Ronald Grimsley's interpretation: “Such is the final expression of a Romanticism which has overcome itself only to ensure its permanent survival in a more remote and hermetic form. Conquered and suppressed at the level of lived experience, this love is still worshipped in the secret recesses of Dominique's inner heart.”¹¹ Given the terms in which Fromentin sees the problem, such a solution is not possible. We can assume that Dominique will go on worshipping his love, but not that it is confined in a hermetic form.

This is the point at which the essential nature of Dominique, and Fromentin, becomes relevant. There are paradoxical features in Dominique's character and attitude to life which he shares with heroes of other novels of the period. Alienated by his upbringing from social, urban life, he has an obscure inner conviction that fulfilment and achievement are not attained on the level of public recognition. At his school prizegiving he has his first taste of public achievement and it is coupled with acute personal humiliation: he is not being seen as he wants to be seen. Conscious at the same time of a responsibility towards society, he eventually publishes his juvenilia, an action he refers to as a “balayage de conscience”,¹² but he nevertheless writes “une préface ingénieuse qui devait du moins les mettre à l'abri du ridicule”¹³ and publishes them anonymously. His political writings, again inspired by a need to feel useful and a desire to carve out a niche for himself in society, are also published anonymously and are followed by what we might now call an “agonising reappraisal”: “Je comparai ce qui était factice et ce qui était natif, je pesai ce qui appartenait à tout le monde et le peu que j'avais en propre.”¹⁴ This, and a further examination which convinces him that his works will not stand the test of time, lead him to condemn his work and himself. We are reminded of Fromentin's own comment on his novel in his letter to George Sand of 9th November 1862: “Ce méchant livre, sorti de moi depuis trop longtemps, ne m'inspire aujourd'hui qu'un grand dégoût.”¹⁵ This alienation from the products of one's mind is inspired by the fact that the uniqueness of the individual is destroyed by contact with society and public judgment. Self-expression, or indeed any kind of intellectual achievement, becomes valueless as soon as it takes on an objective existence and becomes common property. Dominique's unconscious desire to preserve his uniqueness is what characterises his actions in the story and his manner of telling it later.

When the story is told, Dominique and Fromentin are at the same time affected by another aspect of the paradox: the personal, private life seems to be what is unique and individual, but it is in fact what we share with everyone else. As Dr Barbara Wright says, in comparing the heroes of Dominique and Valdieu: “All these links of fraternity between Maurice and Dominique seem almost to be symbolised by the awareness, expressed by both heroes, of the fact that countless others before them have been through these same experiences which appear to them at the time to be so unique and individual.”¹⁶ Moreover, it is this common ground which enables us to communicate with others. In the social, public life, on the other hand, in which our communications are received, in which in fact our unique qualities might be recognized as such, they become distorted and alienated from us. It is the artist's task to overcome this paradox. Flaubert's solution, in the novel which is most nearly autobiographical, was to detach himself brutally from his creation, to alienate his hero, or himself, from himself, in fact to sacrifice himself to save his creation. Fromentin was perhaps temperamentally incapable of the ironic approach, a fact which accounts for his own attitude towards his hero and that of Dominique towards the narrator and towards his younger self.

As far as Fromentin's attitude to Dominique is concerned, the conviction that his hero's experiences are anything but unique provides an element for the moral aspect of the novel: Dominique is here considered by Fromentin, and by himself, as an ordinary person who learns that his social role should be played in an ordinary environment. This, if it had been developed at a more appropriate point in the novel, might have provided a more convincing reason for the return to Les Trembles. On the other hand, Fromentin intends to compensate for this ordinariness by using his descriptive powers to make him interesting. When the narrator visits Dominique at work in the wine-press,¹⁷ the description is designed to lead up to a climax dominated by the figure of the hero. As we watch the liquid being carried along the pipes, the picture gradually loses definition: the description of odours, heat, flowing wine and heady vapours takes over from the more down-to-earth description of the mechanism of the press with which the passage began. The last two sentences, in which Dominique is revealed, have an air of magic and mystery about them: “Des vapeurs capiteuses formaient un brouillard autour des lampes. M. Dominique était parmi ces vignerons, montés sur les étais du treuil, et les éclairant lui-même avec une lampe de main qui nous le fit découvrir dans ces demi-ténèbres.” But the dominant position of the hero is contradicted by the next sentence: “Il avait gardé sa tenue de chasse, et rien ne l'eût distingué des hommes de peine, si chacun d'eux ne l'eût appelé monsieur notre maître.” There is a discrepancy between the statement and the artistic effect. In the same way the emphasis placed by Dominique and the narrator on Dominique's ordinariness conflicts with the fascination of some of the scenes which he dominates in the story of his past. It is not merely, as the narrator observed, that Dominique's past does not square with his present: his subjective picture of himself does not square with his attempt at an objective assessment of his worth. Both views are valid if kept apart on the separate levels of experience which I have called emotional and moral. Fromentin is attempting to merge the two together.

There is a similar ambivalence in the treatment of the narrator. As I suggested earlier, he appears at first as a judge of Dominique's remarks, apparently in a position to give a detached view of Dominique's own judgment of himself. When the first meeting is recounted, the intention once again seems to be to emphasise that Dominique is an ordinary man like any other and that he himself is aware of it. The narrator begins his day's hunting with the doctor at some distance from Dominique, but we soon find that they are following the same path, a path they must follow since it is dictated by circumstances, the direction of the wind and the distribution of the game. When Dominique finally brings down the partridge, a fine prize, he claims that he is no more entitled to it than the others, since it was only chance that brought it into his line of fire: “J'ai bien été forcé, je crois, de me substituer à vous pour ne pas perdre une fort belle pièce. … Je ne me permettrais pas de vous l'offrir, je vous la rends”, he says, as though to avoid the charge of being a usurper.¹⁸ This “circonstance des plus vulgaires” does, I think pace Mr C. B. West,¹⁹ symbolise one aspect of Dominique's attitude towards objective achievement: there is no evidence that someone else might not have done it as well, so it cannot constitute a claim to uniqueness. At this point in the novel we are still on the moral level: the narrator is a man like Dominique and can therefore judge him for what he is. It is a role he later fulfils when he assesses Dominique's poems.²⁰ “Voilà le poète jugé,” says Dominique, “et bien jugé, ni plus ni moins que par lui-même.”

Before this incident, however, the narrator has also been established in another role. During his absence from Les Trembles a strange bond is set up between the two men: “Pendant ce temps l'amitié a fait en nous de tels progrès que toutes les barrières sont tombées, toutes les précautions ont disparu.”²¹ Beside the relationship of critical detachment there is now another, one of sympathetic complicity; the men are not only portrayed in terms of their basic human similarity, but as sharing the same kind of sensibility, a fact which is emphasised by the fading out of the doctor, whose reactions to life seem to be more of the Homais type. Dominique must have a sympathetic hearer if he is to tell his story at all, with the result that the narrator's presence is no longer a means of providing the framework necessary for detachment, but a protective layer designed to preserve Dominique's story from ridicule. Emotionally, Dominique is not prepared to sacrifice his past, to become alienated from it, he is still completely involved, and here Fromentin's intention seems to be to involve his readers through the narrator. While Olivier's attempted suicide provides the moral incentive to tell the story, one feels that the presence of the narrator is even more important to provide the emotional climate so necessary to Dominique, and to Fromentin.

It is because of this that Dominique's past does not acquire a hermetic form: the conditions for this are that he should expose his story to alienation and rejection, that he should outgrow it emotionally; this he never does. His attitude to his younger self, as was seen in his account of Madeleine's attempted cure, is no different now from what it was. Now, as then, he has “le don cruel d'assister à sa vie comme à un spectacle donné par un autre”,²² which gives him, not the kind of detachment he needs now, but an acute need to protect himself from ridicule and a corresponding inability to assess his own or other people's motives. Thus, although Fromentin has tried to ensure a completely sympathetic hearing for his story, his character, by appearing not to understand himself, often attracts the very ridicule he fears. One could say the same of Flaubert's Frédéric, but we accept the comedy of his failure to assess himself and others because it is part of the ironic intention of the author. In Dominique, however, there is no clear line of demarcation between Fromentin and the elder Dominique, between the elder Dominique and his younger self, and between any of them and the narrator; all are equally capable of judging Dominique's moral worth and equally incapable of detaching themselves from his emotions. The tellers of the story are as much the dupes of the situation as the hero.

The part of the novel which suffers most from this is the relationship with Madeleine, which becomes unconvincing whenever we become aware of her as an independent person whose real nature contradicts the picture painted, in all good faith apparently, by Dominique. Two striking examples are the scene at the end of Chapter 12, where Dominique comes to see her with the intention of revealing his love and only succeeds in falling to his knees and asking forgiveness, and the whole incident of Madeleine's supposed attempt to cure him of his love in Chapter 13. Dominique's failure to understand what she is really like, though an essential feature of the novel, is exasperating, and he almost becomes a comic figure, a sleepwalker who is still asleep when he tells the story so many years later. A similar impression is made by Dominique's constant failure to take the advice given him by Olivier and Augustin. The fact is that he is temperamentally unfitted to take such advice, but his inability to formulate any reason for not taking it again produces an effect of comedy, the comedy of a man who refuses to see reason. Here, too, the older Dominique is as comic as the younger, because he is equally lacking in perspicacity.

The incidents mentioned so far are clearly not intended to be comic, they are a necessary consequence of Dominique's desire to preserve his past as it was; but at other times the uncertainty of Dominique's relationship to the story leaves us in doubt as to whether certain incidents are meant to be funny or not. Does he allow himself a wry smile when he recalls his impression that Augustin's wife was actually his mistress, or when he relates the dialogue which occurs when he sees Olivier after his visit to Augustin and his wife?

“Je reviens de chez Augustin,” lui dis-je.

Il examina mes vêtements tachés de boue, et comme il avait l'air de ne pas comprendre de quel lieu je pouvais sortir en pareil état:

“Augustin est marié,” lui dis-je.²³

The intention is clear enough. Both incidents establish the different assumptions about social life which link Olivier and Dominique and alienate them from Augustin, but one feels that the contradiction between moral approval and aesthetic disapproval, while it invites amusement, is intended to provoke sympathy. At one point in the story Olivier, exasperated by Dominique's reaction to his confidences, says: “J'ai l'air de te donner le spectacle d'une farce tragique.”²⁴ Dominique, had he had more perspicacity, might have said the same to his listener. It is the salvation of Dominique as a man, and the failing of Fromentin as a novelist, that he does not.

Dominique's is an impossible task. He has realised, but unconsciously, that for a man of sensibility to achieve his ambition in public or private life is to be a usurper, to win something to which he has no more right than the next man, and that this knowledge will sour the achievement. His solution, as a young man, is to adopt the precarious position of a potential usurper, of a man who is constantly on the point of achieving success in his career and his love-life. This position is indicated in his attitude to his writing and more fully worked out in his relationship with Madeleine, whose married status allows him to square his refusal to take over the role of M. de Nièvres with the demands of conventional morality. But such a position takes no account of objective reality: the relationship with Madeleine can last only as long as he can preserve an ideal picture of her. When she begins to exist in her own right, at first with emotional, then physical demands, he can only preserve the picture by withdrawing: “Je compris à peu près que je la tuais.”²⁵ Dominique's realisation that this kind of life cannot be maintained indefinitely leads to his departure for Les Trembles and a life which corresponds more nearly to the “hygiène” proposed by Augustin; but he knows that this step, necessary as it is to his survival, is only a second-best, that the only real beauty of his life now lies in the past.

Now, as then, the beauty can only be preserved if the balance of the elements remains unchanged, if Madeleine remains as he imagined her and if he himself retains his blindness to her nature and his own motives. Told in this way, the story has at times an immense beauty, perhaps most of all when the precarious emotional states are, so to speak, anchored in a landscape, as during the idyll at Les Trembles in Chapter 11. But if the beauty is salvaged by the power of memory, so is the intensity of the suffering: when, at the end of Chapter 6, Dominique cries “Madeleine est perdue, et je l'aime”, the contrast with the calmer past tense of the opening of Chapter 7: “Madeleine était perdue pour moi et je l'aimais” suggests that Dominique still suffers the torments of a lost love. His attempt to enable the past to co-exist with the present brings about as precarious a situation as he enjoyed in the past. Fromentin is Dominique's wholehearted accomplice in this attempt to have the best of both worlds, and this complicity produces the equally precarious balance between moral and emotional attitudes which is responsible for the beauties and failings of the novel.

Notes

1. Basil Blackwell, 1965.

2. Forum for Modern Language Studies, January 1967.

3. In Émile Henriot's edition, Garnier, 1961, p. 286.

4. Ibid., p. 289.

5. Dominique, edited by Barbara Wright, p. 30.

6. Ibid., p. 30.

7. La Genèse de Dominique, Arthaud, 1937, p. 188.

8. Wright, p. 2.

9. Ibid., p. 145.

10. Lettres de Jeunesse, A. Bataillard, p. 126.

11. “Romanticism in Dominique”, French Studies, January 1958.

12. Wright, p. 179.

13. Ibid., p. 178.

14. Ibid., p. 181.

15. Henriot, p. 289.

16. “Valdieu: a forgotten precursor of Fromentin's Dominique”, Modern Language Review, LX, 520.

17. Wright, pp. 9-10.

18. Ibid., p. 5.

19. “Notes on Dominique”, French Studies, April 1955. “To see a symbol in the magnificent ‘coq de perdrix rouge’ … would perhaps be fanciful.”

20. Wright, p. 23.

21. Ibid., p. 13.

22. Ibid., p. 55.

23. Ibid., p. 161.

24. Ibid., p. 168.

25. Ibid., p. 195.