SOURCE: Rinsler, Norma. “Fromentin's Dominique.” In Studies in French Fiction in Honour of Vivienne Mylne, edited by Robert Gibson, pp. 243-61. London: Grant & Cutler Ltd., 1988.

[In the following essay, Rinsler considers various interpretations of Dominique and concludes that Fromentin's richness of language and structure allows the work to be viewed from many different aspects.]

There are books which are so familiar that they become invisible. Dominique has been one of those books for the present writer, remembered, in Empson's phrase, as a ‘taste in the head’, and offering at a recent re-reading a profoundly surprising appearance of completely unremembered (or unobserved?) complexity. The ‘taste in the head’ had been chiefly elegiac; quite different from the taste of Romantic melancholy or Baudelairean spleen, it was measured, classical, harmonious and a trifle vague. I cannot have read it very well. Revisited, it seems not at all vague, but precise and incisive, and harmonious in quite a different way.

The critical consensus stresses that Dominique is a singular book: it is Fromentin's only novel, and there is no other novel quite like it.¹ But since nature abhors a category of one, the next step is generally to show that it is not in fact alone. At the simplest level, this can be done by pointing to other ‘single’ novels, such as Constant's Adolphe, or Sainte-Beuve's Volupté; and one can characterise this group still further by stressing that ‘single’ novels appear often to be the work of writers who are chiefly essayists or critics, as if every critic had one novel in his knapsack. At another level, Dominique can be related to recognised types of nineteenth-century novel: the confessional novel, the novel of psychological analysis, the novel of adulterous passion thwarted or otherwise, the ‘roman de l'individu’ and the ‘roman de la mémoire’.² Subjecting the text to this ‘nothing-but’ treatment reduces it to familiar and therefore manageable proportions; but it also leaves out of account or obscures precisely those uncomfortably individual qualities which challenge us in the first place to find a way of handling them. In taking up that challenge I recognise that it is doubtful that anything radically new can now be said about Dominique, but it may be possible at least to avoid saying inappropriate things, to clear away some of the accretions and see what remains.

The first notion to examine is the accepted view of Dominique as an ‘autobiographical novel’,³ a category which may subsume any or all of the types of novel with which this text has been compared. The composite term itself begs a number of questions which are generally ignored, beginning with the relationship between autobiography and fiction. Recent critical studies of texts that present themselves as autobiography or memoirs have radically changed our view of a once unproblematical genre (or no more problematical, at least, than human relations in general). We might however assume that when a writer's ‘real’ experience is presented as fiction, the problems disappear: we have only to take it as fiction. Unfortunately, the mere fact that we retain a sub-category labelled ‘autobiographical fiction’ suggests that we do not regard texts which appear to fall into this category in the same way as we regard other fictional works. However limited the measure of ‘real’ experience contained in a text, it colours the whole, so that we adopt a different receptive stance: instead of waiting to be amused, diverted, provoked or impressed by the skills of the creator of fictional artifice, we expect to be gratified by the author's confidence and to respond in our turn with trust, and preferably with sympathy. Whether we sympathise or not (and we may be antipathetic to what is revealed in the text), our response is primarily moral and emotional, and establishes a relationship between us and the author. I suspect that the confessional atmosphere often leads us to value the text that induces it more highly than we value the ‘merely’ fictional. In short, we receive autobiographical fiction very much as we receive autobiography, with the added pleasure of believing that we have penetrated a fictional disguise.

It ought to follow that if we are unaware that the experiences recounted in the text have some basis in the experiences of the author himself, we shall read the text differently. This does not seem always to be the case. Something in the text itself may persuade readers that what they are reading about belongs to reality, not fiction. In the case of the first-person narrative, this persuasion may then lead to the conclusion that the story is the story of the author himself: a logical deduction, but not necessarily a true or adequate one. I shall return to that ‘something’ in due course, but shall first consider what, in reading Dominique, we are reading about.

The story, if we attempt to abstract it from the web of language in which it is presented to us, appears remarkably thin. Dominique is brought up on his father's estate at Les Trembles, is tutored by Augustin, then sent away to school in a nearby town where he meets Olivier. He becomes a frequent guest at the house of Olivier's uncle and cousins, and falls in love with the elder girl, Madeleine, who is older than himself. Madeleine becomes engaged to a stranger whom the family had met on holiday. Dominique leaves school and goes to Paris, together with Olivier, for further study. He turns to a casual love affair for consolation when Madeleine is married, but later pursues Madeleine, who at first avoids him, then undertakes to cure him of his hopeless passion. Finally she admits her love for him, and after a single kiss she orders him to go away, and they never meet again. Dominique goes back to Les Trembles, marries some time later, and has two children. Augustin has married too, and has become successful after years of struggle. Olivier rejects the love which Madeleine's sister Julie feels for him; he refuses to marry, and finally attempts to kill himself. The suicide is bungled, and a disfigured Olivier leaves the neighbourhood of Les Trembles. The emotion aroused by this incident leads Dominique to relate the story of his life to an unnamed listener, thus generating the text.

Faced with this story, readers are generally moved to supply an interpretation of its events. This is by no means an invariable reaction to the reading of fiction, and it suggests that the text is felt to be problematical or ambiguous despite (or perhaps because of) the apparent simplicity of the plot. Some such awareness of ambiguity probably dictated the ‘improvements’ suggested to Fromentin by George Sand, which on the whole he politely ignored. She was particularly worried by the pistol shot which closes the introductory chapters, remarking that ‘le coup de pistolet surprend un peu’, and qualifying her unease by adding that she did not like the suicide ‘là où il est placé’.⁴ One may well be puzzled as to Fromentin's intentions in destroying Olivier, while he permits Augustin to climb ever higher and Dominique to achieve a state of equilibrium only momentarily disturbed by echoes from the past. The book was published in 1862, ergo, it is felt, it cannot be a straightforward account of Romantic passion. The most tempting conclusion would be to see it as anti-Romantic: Dominique is the man who has learned the futility of the Romantic dissatisfactions that lead Olivier to attempt suicide; putting passion behind him, he has chosen the path of work and will that Augustin had pointed out to him, and has settled for the ordered calm of a gentleman-farmer's life.⁵ The ambiguity of the text is not removed by this reading. Dominique's final state may be seen as a proof of moral strength; or it may be interpreted as emotional cowardice, which would allow for an implicitly Romantic view (the reader's, and, if the reader insists, the author's) of anti-Romanticism (Dominique's). All these readings suppose that some kind of moral lesson is being offered to the reader, but there are two possible versions of the moral: the first, that we should all strive for a sensible resolution like Dominique's; the second, that we should have the courage of our passions and seize what Dominique allowed himself to lose. Unless we believe that Fromentin had not made up his mind what he wanted to say, the apparently equal validity of these two readings suggests that neither has much to do with the text, and that they are the conclusions of readers who are reading their own novel.

A clue to Fromentin's intentions is often sought in the fact that Dominique is accompanied throughout the text by two familiars, Augustin and Olivier. It is easy to conclude that they are his good and his bad angel, the one offering an earnest example of will-power, determination, sacrifice and a serenely saint-like devotion to higher values, the other charmingly superficial, pleasure-loving, cynical, cruel and unhappy.⁶ The contrast thus established would certainly be important if Dominique appeared capable of becoming like either the one or the other angel, if they were indeed merely projections of Dominique's potentialities. I do not believe however that such is the case. The contrast is too neat, for Augustin is not a wholly sympathetic character (hence G. Sagnes's regret that ‘un pareil livre s'achève sur son nom’),⁷ and Olivier is not shown as wholly bad. Perhaps only twentieth-century teeth would be set on edge by Augustin's account of his marriage,⁸ but even if one considers this response to be anachronistic, there are sufficient indications in the text that Augustin is not a simple allegory of the good life, and indeed is not seen as such even by Dominique. Similarly, Fromentin presents a complex view of Dominique's friend and contemporary, Olivier, first attracting our interest in his difficult character by introducing him, at the end of Chapter II, as a visitor to Dominique's family whose mood is clearly at odds with domestic calm. Since it is Olivier's attempt to kill himself that precipitates Dominique's ‘confession’, we are aware of Olivier's lamentable fate, and of his own judgement on his life, before we meet him as the attractive adolescent companion of Dominique's schooldays. The same is not true of Augustin, whose acquaintance we make at the same time as Dominique does, when he comes to disturb the child's paradise; seeing him first through the eyes of a child, we remain aware of the distance created by the difference in their ages, and are made as uncomfortable by his exhortations as if they were directed at ourselves. Thus Fromentin deliberately counters a simple view of these two men. Olivier's brutal end prevents us from being excessively bewitched by his charm, but also from taking his unhappiness to be a mere pose; it is certainly not intended to make us condemn him. As for Augustin, we meet him as the tutor of an undisciplined, self-consciously sensitive boy, to whom he appears cold and correct and unfeeling; he is seen to be quite incapable of perceiving or understanding, still less of sharing, the life of the sensations that governs the child's existence. His methodical approach to literary creation contrasts sharply with Dominique's ardent effusions, which are foreshadowed in his Latin composition and later channelled into verse. However generously the older Dominique acknowledges Augustin's moral heroism, that first impression—Dominique's own impression—is never completely denied. There is thus good and bad on both sides, or rather, since the yardsticks of good and evil do not seem appropriate here, it would be nearer the truth to say that there is warmth and coldness on both sides; for the judgements that Dominique passes on his two mentors are not based on moral values but on more or less of sympathy and admiration, and these responses fluctuate according to his own development.

The function of Augustin and Olivier in the text appears more central to its meaning than that of Madeleine, who is by contrast a rather shadowy figure. It has been pointed out many times that Dominique falls in love not with Madeleine but with love itself. A diffuse adolescent excitement which initially seeks its release in a wild race through the springtime fields is accidentally crystallised, in Stendhalian fashion, about the image of Madeleine; it is intensified by her absence, and fully realised only at the moment of her betrothal to another man. Dominique's exclamation at that moment: ‘Madeleine est perdue, et je l'aime’ (p. 445), neatly establishes the prior importance of frustration. What has not been noticed is that Madeleine herself goes through an exactly similar evolution. Her slow awakening to sensuality and self-consciousness does not follow on her marriage, but is triggered by the desire that she perceives in Dominique's eyes. Her mad ride through the woods echoes his adolescent outburst, serving in like fashion to crystallise rather than to sublimate desire. Madeleine, indeed, though shadowy, is not without an active presence in the text. Though we see her almost entirely through the eyes of Dominique (almost, because her quasi-absent husband and her father suggest another view of her), she does react to Dominique's presence and her emotions do evolve. She owes a great deal no doubt, as critics have remarked, to other heroines of literature, offering her sister to Dominique as Madame de Mortsauf offers her daughter to Félix de Vandenesse, and destroying herself through pity like Eloa.⁹ I would add that her attempt to cure Dominique of his passion recalls Amélie's role as guérisseuse of René's melancholy.¹⁰ The comparison however also points to the greater complexity of Madeleine, who knows that she is the object of passion as well as its victim, and is consciously playing a very dangerous game. Madeleine's self-styled heroism, accepted by Dominique as heroic despite his temptation to use it to torture her, looks to the reader more like flirting with forbidden emotions, which is exactly the same game as Dominique is playing. It has more than a hint besides of the punishment of Tantalus, keeping Dominique at arm's length and thereby effectively keeping him, which is exactly the manœuvre to which Olivier accuses Dominique of subjecting Madeleine.

It is clear that Dominique does not understand Madeleine, indeed he has never really looked very carefully at her. He spends a good deal of time elaborating hypotheses about the feelings which he thinks may be revealed in her behaviour, for instance at the prize-giving ceremony (p. 458):

Eprouva-t-elle un peu de confusion elle-même en me voyant là dans l'attitude affreusement gauche que j'essaye de vous peindre? Eut-elle un contre-coup du saisissement qui m'envahit? Son amitié souffrit-elle en me trouvant risible, ou seulement en devinant que je pouvais souffrir? Quels furent au juste ses sentiments pendant cette rapide mais très cuisante épreuve qui sembla nous atteindre tous les deux à la fois et presque dans le même sens? Je l'ignore; mais elle devint très rouge, elle le devint encore davantage quand elle me vit descendre et m'approcher d'elle. […] Il y avait dans ses yeux tout à fait troublés comme une larme ou d'intérêt ou de compassion, ou seulement une larme involontaire de jeune femme timide … Qui sait? Je me le suis demandé souvent, et je ne l'ai jamais su.

This passage is typical of many in which Dominique constructs alternative scenarios, striving for the desired significance despite his admitted ignorance of Madeleine's feelings and his patent inability to read the signs. He imagines that he might declare his love to Madeleine, and composes the dialogue: ‘Je mettais en scène cette explication fort grave’ (p. 503). He constructs such hypotheses (which are never tested) for others too; for instance, during the ‘promenade en bateau’, he puts together Julie's silence and a view of a departing ship to create a drama: ‘Julie, perdue dans je ne sais quelle confuse aspiration, surveillait attentivement le départ du grand navire qui appareillait’ (p. 485). Julie is the perfect subject, ‘car, avec cette singulière fille clairvoyante et cachée, toutes les suppositions étaient permises, et cependant demeuraient douteuses’ (p. 555). The source of all his scenarios is, of course, to be found in other novels.

Fromentin wrote to Du Mesnil while working on Dominique: ‘L'écueil, c'est de n'être pas du Gessner, ni du Berquin, ni du René, ni mille choses’.¹¹ That he indeed had these and other models in mind is shown by textual reference to literary parallels. The intertextuality operates however on two levels. First, there are the parallels adduced by Dominique himself, as when he refers to Werther, to Lamartine's Le Lac, or to Mauprat.¹² The role of these references is twofold, in that on the one hand they indicate the extent to which Dominique has been moulded by literature, and on the other they allow Dominique himself to draw conclusions about the validity and strength of his emotions. He is fully aware of the power of literature, ‘un aliment d'esprit de toute importance’, and in a mood of moral uplift he gives up the reading of fiction: ‘Je ne me sentais plus aucun besoin d'être éclairé sur les choses du cœur. Me reconnaître dans des livres émouvants, ce n'était pas la peine au moment même où je me fuyais’ (p. 538). This moment of renunciation makes it plain that he has habitually turned to fiction for enlightenment about ‘les choses du cœur’. He is indeed so steeped in literary images that he suffers some inhibition as a writer in expressing his own feelings, having discovered that what he believed to be the stuff of poetry is only the common currency of prose (p. 485):

Ce que je vous raconte, jadis quand j'étais jeune, plus d'une fois il m'a passé par la tête de l'écrire, ou, comme on disait alors, de le chanter. A cette époque, il me semblait qu'il n'y avait qu'une langue pour fixer dignement ce que de pareils souvenirs avaient, selon moi, d'inexprimable. Aujourd'hui que j'ai retrouvé mon histoire dans les livres des autres, dont quelques-uns sont immortels, que vous dirais-je?

Spontaneous feelings become problematical as soon as he encounters the literary expression of those feelings: ‘je n'eus qu'un regret, ce fut de parodier peut-être en les rapetissant ce que de grands esprits avaient éprouvé avant moi’ (p. 420).

On another level, and confirming the impossibility of saying anything new about human experience, the text may suggest to the reader parallels which are not available to Dominique. The influence of literature on the hero may recall, for instance, the case of Emma Bovary, brought to grief five years earlier by being ‘plus sentimentale qu'artiste’. But Dominique is not Emma. Not only is he obscurely aware of the role played by literature in his confusions, but he fails both as man of sentiment and as artist. (One is tempted to imagine that he foreshadows Frédéric Moreau.) Similarly, Olivier's suicide, like Emma's, is stripped of Romantic literary convention and presented as physically horrible; but where Emma succeeds in killing herself and thus solves her problems, Olivier is not granted such an easy exit (nor his story such a neat denouement), and has to go on living with the visible mark of his failure. I would suggest that the literary parallels are here being used ironically, though the irony depends of course on the reader's being aware of the existence of the texts—or the sort of texts—at which Fromentin glances. The two kinds of parallel occur together and are thus made explicit in the ‘promenade en bateau’. Here Dominique thinks of Elvire and her lover on the waters of Lamartine's lake,¹³ while the reader observes a group of disparate individuals, dozing in the heat of the day, and engaged, when awake, in some private interior monologue from which Dominique is excluded. Madeleine, sound asleep, becomes the focus of Dominique's fantasies; awake, she utters banal observations quite unlike Elvire's profundities. In this passage, it is the inappropriateness of the literary allusion that gives it force.

We are warned at the very beginning of the text, by the unnamed listener, that ‘il y a tant de nuances dans la sincérité la plus loyale! il y a tant de manières de dire la vérité sans la dire tout entière!’ (p. 370). If sincerity is to be judged by spontaneity and candour (though that is debatable), there would be nobody sincere or even truly passionate in this text, were it not for Julie, who is the only character to avoid the keynote of its relationships: calculation. Her essential difference from the other young people is made clear in the extraordinarily powerful episode of the visit to the lighthouse. The vertige which overcomes Dominique, and which he senses in his companions, is more than physical (pp. 482-83):

Il fallait y regarder attentivement pour comprendre où se terminait la mer, où le ciel commençait, tant la limite était douteuse, tant l'un et l'autre avaient la même pâleur incertaine, la même palpitation orageuse et le même infini. […] … tous accoudés sur la légère balustrade qui seule nous séparait de l'abîme, sentant très distinctement l'énorme tour osciller sous nos pieds à chaque impulsion du vent, attirés par l'immense danger, et comme sollicités d'en bas par les clameurs de la marée montante, nous restâmes longtemps dans la plus grande stupeur, semblables à des gens qui, le pied posé sur la vie fragile, par miracle, auraient un jour l'aventure inouie de regarder et de voir au-delà.

Dominique waits for one of the group to break under the strain, and it is Julie who faints. He is however wrong in his assumption that of all the companions, Julie is the most ‘frêle’, but not the most ‘ému’ (a role which no doubt he reserves for himself). Her feeling for Olivier is not a Romantic preference for frustration, nor a calculated flirtation, but an inveterate passion, profound and lasting, that cohabits, because it must, with genuine despair. Even if Olivier is right in his judgement that ‘elle fait son malheur à plaisir’, she does so disinterestedly, for she has nothing either to gain or to lose. She is shown indeed as lost from the beginning. Dominique is repeatedly disturbed by her eyes, with their lustreless burning gaze that seems to reflect an inner sickness. She is not weak, compared to Dominique, Olivier and Madeleine, but has a perverse strength and fidelity which only Augustin, in his different way, can match.

It is by such comparison and contrast, rather than by individual analysis, that patterns emerge in the constellation of characters that Fromentin groups and regroups in his novel. None of the individuals is fully ‘rounded’ in the traditional sense, because none of them needs to be: it is what can be revealed through their dynamic interaction that matters. Thus we learn much of the nature of Olivier and Augustin through each man's assessment of the other, his view of the other's relationship to Dominique, and Dominique's reaction to their views of each other. The moral examples that they offer are, as I suggested above, of no practical use to Dominique, who is no more capable of accepting Augustin's advice than that of Olivier. Nor are they as different as they seem to Dominique. Both are distinguished by their appeal to reason, which Augustin backs up with moral high-mindedness and Olivier with a world-weary pragmatism. But rational principles in either guise do not appeal to Dominique; and perhaps he is right, for reason has led to destructive doubt in Olivier, and to excessive certainty in Augustin. In both men, spontaneous feeling has died, leaving an inner hollowness to which Olivier responds with languid posturing and Augustin with strenuous activity. It is not at all clear that the reader is being asked to approve of the one rather than the other. Olivier has some of the characteristics of Romanticism as Fromentin describes it: ‘ce 89 artistique […] qui prit des devises bizarres, affecta très innocemment des tendances farouches, discuta prodigieusement, créa presque autant, se couvrit de ridicule et d'éclat, commit quelques excès, produisit des œuvres admirables, mais au fond ne promulgua rien’.¹⁴ But Olivier is above all a Baudelairean dandy who observes only ‘l'horreur de la vie’, resolutely rejects the appeal of the transcendent, prefers Paris to the beauties of nature, chooses sterility, fears boredom and hates vulgarity. His refusal to ‘épouser la liberté et le bonheur d'une autre’ (p. 395) is thought by Dominique to be ‘une question de probité’ (p. 548); perhaps it is—but it is powerfully supported by his pessimism. Augustin on the other hand has perceived the way of the world, sees Paris as a challenge and sets out to conquer it. Dominique admires his resolution and reflects that he will prove to be no man's slave (p. 521). But though Augustin appears as fiercely independent as Olivier, it is the world that conquers, since he accepts its values; he will be no less subject as a master than he would have been as a slave.

I would suggest—and the book's non-ending seems to confirm this—that Fromentin is not offering a moral lesson or indeed a conclusion of any kind. Though he does have things to say about the business of living, about character, about ideals and ambitions, and about human relationships, conflicting views are constantly expressed on all these topics. Thus Dominique sees Olivier's fear of ennui and his hatred of vulgarity as ‘d'incurables erreurs’ (p. 530); character, in his view, is fate, and he describes Olivier's final act of despair as ‘une catastrophe trop facile à prévoir et malheureusement impossible à conjurer’ (p. 396). Olivier, on the other hand, having offered a devastatingly acute analysis of Dominique's faults and an accurate prediction of the denouement of his passion for Madeleine, remarks: ‘il dépend de toi de me donner tort’; character, in Olivier's view, is not fate. Nothing in the text allows us to choose between these two conceptions. As Olivier explains to Dominique, ‘la raison n'est d'aucun côté’ (p. 529); it is all a matter of differences.

The Dominique that we meet at the time of his ‘confession’ cannot be said to have learned very much from either of his mentors. Though he claims to have accepted Augustin's teachings, he is still drawn to Olivier by affection, by shared experience, and by Olivier's links with Madeleine. Their ideas, however, are only superficially alike. Olivier regards happiness as an illusion, and opts for an attainable degree of self-knowledge and for attainable goals: ‘Toute la question est là: trouver ce qui convient à sa nature et ne copier le bonheur de personne’. Since he insists that ‘l'avenir permet de tout admettre’, Olivier is not thinking, when he speaks of ‘sa nature’, in terms of a fixed personality, but of a malleable and shifting self which we learn to know precisely by finding ‘ce qui convient’, a discovery which in his view we can only make by rejecting the examples and the conventional wisdom offered us by others, and adopting a sort of Gidean disponibilité (pp. 528-29). Dominique's version of ‘ce qui convient à sa nature’ differs significantly from Olivier's in that Dominique does appear to believe in an essential individual self: ‘Je me suis mis d'accord avec moi-même’. He explains that his retreat to his estate is an act of wisdom based on ‘l'égalité des désirs et des forces’, implying that he has fully measured both (pp. 369-70). Olivier too, on being asked why he has chosen to live on his estate, replies: ‘Chacun fait selon ses forces’; but unlike Dominique, he does not claim that this choice is inevitable or definitive: future events for Olivier are only ‘possible’ or ‘probable’. Nor does he present his choice as a virtue: when it is suggested to him that ‘C'est de la sagesse’, he replies ‘Peut-être’, adding that ‘personne ne peut dire que ce soit une folie de vivre paisiblement sur ses terres et de s'en trouver bien’ (pp. 394-95). Dominique insistently reminds his listener that he has chosen the path of modesty because he was clearly not destined for the path of genius. Olivier's grief is not that he is not a great man, but that he is merely a man: ‘Je suis modeste, profondément humilié de n'être qu'un homme, mais je m'y résigne’ (p. 530). This ‘modesty’ mocks Dominique's pretensions, and Olivier's philosophical position is quite different from Dominique's.

Though it does not make him happy, Olivier has achieved at least a measure of self-knowledge, whereas Dominique's problem is that he has great difficulty in choosing between possible selves. When he compares Augustin with Olivier, Augustin seems to him to show ‘des côtés presque vulgaires’ (and ‘le vulgaire’, of course, is one of Olivier's two great aversions). Dominique is at first embarrassed by the ‘médiocrités d'existence’ of Augustin's domestic life, reacting as Olivier would react; but then, when he begins to help Augustin to cut logs, he rapidly takes an idealised view of their honest labour. Consequently, when Olivier raises an eyebrow at the account of this edifying experience, Dominique feels that Olivier is unjust—yet until he adopted Augustin's persona, that was precisely his own reaction (pp. 516, 522). Olivier's resignation and Dominique's irresolution do have one thing in common: both suggest that since we cannot escape the human condition, a wholly original self is not possible. We have only the freedom to choose what we will resemble. Fromentin says something very similar about art: ‘Entre ne plus vouloir imiter et imaginer, il y a renier ses exemples: c'est bien, mais il faut en trouver d'autres, et, quoi qu'on fasse, même avec la souveraine indépendance du génie, s'émanciper n'est que changer de maître’.¹⁵

If Dominique is unable to make a whole-hearted choice, he will inevitably be unable to effect a whole-hearted renunciation. According to Claude Herzfeld, the retreat to nature is the central theme and justification of the novel. Barthes too claims that Dominique is not a ‘roman d'amour’ but a ‘roman de la Campagne’, though where Herzfeld sees a Freudian return to the womb, Barthes sees a critique of urban life (of which he approves) and a glorification of patriarchal rural traditions (of which, since they are riddled with the injustices and blindnesses of class-consciousness, he does not).¹⁶ Perhaps we do not need to choose between these extreme points of view, for I think that although Fromentin's own love of the countryside in which he grew up informs the text from beginning to end, it is not the subject of his novel. Nor is love, at least in the sense in which we generally speak of a ‘love story’. Dominique's feeling for Madeleine is certainly not a tender emotion. When he sees her ‘dans la tenue splendide et indiscrète d'une femme en toilette de bal’, he not only learns the meaning of jealousy, but discovers in her ‘des attraits extérieurs qui d'une créature presque angélique faisaient tout simplement une femme accomplie’ (p. 490). Poor Dominique has a very literal mind: meeting Augustin's wife for the first time, he is surprised to find her ‘beaucoup plus jolie que je ne l'avais supposé d'après les opinions systématiques d'Augustin sur les agréments extérieurs des choses’ (p. 519). Once he has recognised that his ideal love has become a sexual passion, he is obsessed first with forcing Madeleine to recognise his feelings, then with extorting from her a confession of her own desire, and at both stages he is consciously and ruthlessly cruel. As Olivier informs him, he wants excitement and drama, and does not really want to take possession of Madeleine. In his long account of his life, he has almost nothing to say about affection, and does not speak of love at all in relation to his wife and children, ‘trois êtres à qui je me dois et qui me lient par des devoirs précis’ (p. 369). The first paragraph of the novel describes nature as appropriate rather than central to his existence (‘Ma vie est faite et bien faite selon mes désirs et mes mérites. Elle est rustique, ce qui ne lui messied pas’), does not mention love, and introduces the key words of the text: ‘la certitude et le repos’; ‘un acte de modestie, de prudence et de raison’; ‘Ma vie est faite … selon mes désirs et mes mérites’; ‘l'égalité des désirs et des forces’; ‘la sagesse’; ‘un homme heureux’. Fromentin wrote to George Sand: ‘Je ne suis pas bien sûr d'avoir voulu prouver quelque chose, sinon que le repos est un des rares bonheurs possibles; et puis 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’ (19 April 1862).¹⁷ But the treatment of this theme is less simple than that statement might suggest, for where in the novel are we to find a manifestation of ‘le bonheur’, or even of ‘le repos’? Dominique's peace is easily disturbed, as even his admiring listener can perceive, by the slightest reference to the past. Olivier's claim to ‘vivre paisiblement sur ses terres’ is mocked by his attempted suicide. Augustin has no desire for the tranquillity that comes from solitude, being prevented by his sense of duty from isolating himself; the only peace he understands is the quiet of a clear conscience.

It is this recipe for ‘sagesse’ that Dominique adopts when he undertakes to devote himself to his family and his estate (showing again his need for a model). But I have already suggested that Augustin is not proposed by the author himself as a model. If Fromentin were really offering a clear moral lesson in ‘sagesse’, it is unlikely that he would allow Dominique the melancholy pleasure of telling his story in such vividly present detail, or the luxury of his private shrine to the past (from which, it appears, his wife is excluded). Dominique's own reservations about choosing Augustin as a model are revealed in his comment on Augustin's eventual success: ‘il est au bout de sa tâche. […] Ce n'est point un grand homme, c'est une grande volonté. Il est aujourd'hui le point de mire de beaucoup de nos contemporains, chose rare qu'une pareille honnêteté parvenant assez haut pour donner aux braves gens l'envie de l'imiter’ (p. 562). This remark subtly devalues Augustin's talents, while praising his moral qualities; but since it also suggests that the fame which Augustin has fought so hard to achieve is worthless, it casts an ambiguous light on those moral qualities. Dominique's claim that he has taken Augustin as his example would imply that he has forgotten Olivier's advice to ‘n'imiter le bonheur de personne’; for though Augustin does not speak in terms of happiness, Dominique believes him to be happy in his choice of ‘des affections sans trouble’: ‘il disait “ma femme” avec un air de possession tranquille et assurée qui me faisait oublier toutes les duretés de sa carrière, et me représentait la plus parfaite expression du bonheur’ (p. 521). For himself, Dominique seems less sure: ‘si le bonheur consiste dans l'égalité des désirs et des forces, […] vous pourrez témoigner que vous avec vu un homme heureux’ (pp. 369-70). Once again it is Olivier who is the most pragmatic (pp. 529-30):

Le bonheur, le vrai bonheur, est un mot de légende. Le paradis de ce monde s'est refermé sur les pas de nos premiers parents; voilà quarantecinq mille ans qu'on se contente ici-bas de demi-perfections, de demibonheurs et de demi-moyens. […] Je suis modeste, profondément humilié de n'être qu'un homme, mais je m'y résigne.

The modulations that Fromentin effects in the meaning of key terms suggest that for human beings there is no such thing as absolute truth. It is not only that, in Olivier's words, ‘la raison n'est d'aucun côté’ but that ‘truth’ too is a term whose meaning fluctuates, or more precisely, that there are many kinds of truth. Writing his last Latin exercise for Augustin before leaving Les Trembles to go to school, Dominique composes an account of Hannibal's departure from Italy in which, he says, ‘j'essayai d'exprimer ce qui me paraissait être la vérité, sinon historique, au moins lyrique’ (p. 408). When he offers his listener an account of his own life, what kind of truth is he telling? The listener is somewhat surprised by the rapid growth of confidence and candour between himself and Dominique. It seems possible that the self-portrait that Dominique offers to his listener is, once more, a version of himself elaborated in response to the character of another: the cadre is not merely a narrative device. I suggested at the beginning of this essay that something in the text inclines us nonetheless to read it as truth. If we turn our attention to the structure of the text, it may be possible to see what that ‘something’ is, remembering that we are not looking for a demonstration of absolute truth, but for the signs of a kind of truth that carries conviction.

The structure of his novel was clear in Fromentin's mind from the earliest stages of its composition: ‘Je me suis mis à mon livre depuis cinq ou six jours. J'ai commencé d'écrire une vingtaine de pages à peu près. […] Ce sera une introduction un peu longue, suivie d'un récit’.¹⁸ The introduction occupies in fact two chapters out of eighteen, or almost exactly one-seventh of the total number of pages. Together with the final chapter, it forms the cadre of the récit, and gives the unnamed listener a substantial presence. The listener acts as a first-person narrator in the first two chapters and the last; he tells us of his friendship with the doctor which led him, one autumn, to visit the village near Dominique's estate, of his encounter with a solitary hunter while out shooting with the doctor, of a brief exchange of courtesies with the hunter, now named as Monsieur Dominique, and of a glimpse of the stranger's house and then of his family as they come to meet him. However, even within the cadre, his is not the only narrative voice. The text begins with the voice of Dominique, speaking in the first person to the listener: ‘Certainement je n'ai pas à me plaindre,—me disait celui dont je rapporterai les confidences dans le récit très simple et trop peu romanesque qu'on lira tout à l'heure,—car, Dieu merci, je ne suis plus rien, à supposer que j'aie jamais été quelque chose …’ Only the brief parenthesis (‘me disait’) establishes the presence of a listener/narrator, and the remainder of the long first paragraph consists of words spoken by Dominique, though transcribed by the listener. The effect of this direct speech is to offer us a first-hand impression of Dominique, but of Dominique as he wishes to present himself. Further comments on Dominique's life, made by himself, are reported in indirect speech in the second paragraph of the text. Two further paragraphs explain the listener's reactions to Dominique's presentation of himself, and at this point the notion of relative truth is introduced: ‘Etait-il sincère? Je me le suis demandé souvent, […] Mais il y a tant de nuances dans la sincérité la plus loyale! il y a tant de manières de dire la vérité sans la dire tout entière!’ It is only after this careful preparation that the listener begins to act as a first-person narrator proper: ‘La première fois que je le rencontrai, c'était en automne. Le hasard me le faisait connaître à cette époque de l'année qu'il aime le plus …’ (p. 371). The present tense here (‘il aime’, ‘il parle’, ‘toute cette existence modérée qui s'accomplit ou qui s'achève’) extends the time scale of the text beyond the narrative of past events, indicating that at the time of writing, the listener is still acquainted with Dominique. The effect of this, together with the immediate sound of Dominique's voice and the reported comments of the doctor, is to persuade us of the reality of Dominique, who is not a figure from a remote past but a man still living in the present, and therefore a man with a future: at the end of the text, Dominique remarks to his listener: ‘pour en finir avec le principal personnage de ce récit, je vous dirai que ma vie commence’ (p. 563).

There are however not two but three narrative voices in the text. At the beginning of Chapter III, Dominique takes over the role of narrator, speaking in the first person, and only very occasionally reminding us of the presence of his listener. As his narrative proceeds, the voice ceases to be the voice of the forty-year-old man who appears in the first paragraphs, and who reappears at the end of the text; it becomes the voice of his younger self, as if he were recounting recent events and fresh emotions. For the greater part of his récit, Dominique does not comment knowingly on the aspirations and errors of his younger self, in the manner of so many fictional self-narrators; he recreates the experiences of the past with an intensity that makes the reader feel that they are happening in the present. If there is irony in this text, it is not perceived by Dominique. The trick is the one that Gide plays with equal skill in L'Immoraliste: sympathy for the narrator is the reader's first response, and the irony emerges only slowly and on reflection. The cadre is however more highly elaborated in Dominique than in L'Immoraliste, and the listener's sympathetic view of the protagonist is supported by the doctor's admiration, by our glimpses of a calm and contented wife and of two lively, affectionate children, by the devotion of Dominique's servants and by his popularity on his estate and in the village. The listener however proves to be a less than reliable witness. He too has a tendency to invent scenarios (and borrows Dominique's phrase: ‘Je me le suis demandé souvent …’). Intrigued by hints of a mystery when he observes that Dominique reacts adversely to reminders of the past, he creates in the reader a sense of expectation and the promise of psychological complexities. These complexities, on the whole, fail to emerge from Dominique's own account. What emerges most clearly is the aspect of his character that he stresses at the beginning of Chapter III, his tendency to be dominated by ‘sensations’: ‘il se formait en moi je ne sais quelle mémoire spéciale assez peu sensible aux faits, mais d'une aptitude singulière à se pénétrer des impressions’ (p. 400). That is, Dominique's memory preserves not ‘la vérité historique’ but ‘la vérité lyrique’. The listener resembles him in this also: his careful delineation of the lone hunter in an autumn landscape strikes the note of ‘lyrical’ truth and of ‘impressions’ from the beginning. The ‘something’ that most strongly inclines us to believe Dominique's account of his life is Fromentin's ability to make the reader feel those ‘sensations’ and receive those ‘impressions’ as sharply and as clearly as Dominique himself does. We do not learn many facts about Dominique; there is a hiatus of about twenty years in his story, at the point where a Bildungsroman would begin to be interesting, and almost everything outside the life of the sensations seems unreal. The stilted rhetoric of Dominique's comments on society, on ambition, even on his friends and family, contrasts strongly with the freshness of perception and phrase when he is describing a landscape or a room, and conveying his response to what he sees.

‘L'art’, wrote Fromentin, ‘n'est pas un récit’.¹⁹ The qualities of his novel are the qualities that he most admired in art, and that he analyses in Les Maîtres d'autrefois: sobriety, control, economy of means, subtlety of colouring and gradation; all of these are required by the imagination in its transfiguration of the real, but they are not at the service of a récit. Fromentin noted with approval that the Dutch masters, unlike those of the French school, did not look for grandiose or impressive subjects. Anything may become the subject of art, for it is not the thing seen that matters, but the quality of the seeing.²⁰ Thus the truth that Fromentin himself values most is not ‘la vérité historique’, the accuracy of the récit, but ‘la vérité lyrique’, the truthfulness of the impression.

But there is a danger in lyricism, and it is a danger that Dominique fails to avoid. The dramatist always generalises, says Fromentin; not so the poet:²¹

Le propre du poète lyrique, au contraire, c'est de n'admettre les sentiments généraux qu'à leur point de contact et d'union avec ses sentiments particuliers. Il arrive à l'extrémité de ce genre que le poète, n'ayant en vue d'autre objet que lui-même, imprime identiquement à ses créations ce caractère distinctif et particulier qui constitue sa propre individualité.

This passage casts an interesting light on the admiring listener's view of Dominique's qualities: ‘Une grande concentration d'esprit, une active et intense observation de lui-même, l'instinct de s'élever plus haut, toujours plus haut, et de se dominer en ne se perdant jamais de vue …’ (p. 389). The truthful impression can only be achieved by subordinating the self and its busy intellect, its vanities and its desires, and concentrating on the specific nature of the thing seen, felt or heard. Fromentin particularly praises in Rubens ‘l'inconscience de lui-même’, in Dutch painting as a whole a blend of ‘sympathie’, ‘curiosité attentive’ and ‘patience’: ‘Désormais le génie consistera à ne rien préjuger, à ne pas savoir qu'on sait, à se laisser surprendre par son modèle, à ne demander qu'à lui comment il veut qu'on le représente’.²² Dominique has the sensitivity of an artist, but he can never be a great artist, because he is primarily concerned with himself. Moreover he not only has the literary talents of a second-rate poet, as he readily admits (more ‘modestie’): he has also acquired the insights of a third-rate novelist. He is furthest from convincing us when he attempts to construct his historical or psychological scenarios (and psychology as he understands it is structured on the model of a narrative account); but we can fully accept the truth of his sensations and impressions, which must, of course, be those of Fromentin himself. It is usual to praise the quality of the ‘description’ in Dominique, and to see it as an expression of Dominique's nature. Certainly Dominique regards nature as an extension of himself, and certainly description here is not a matter of combining superficial pictorial elements. But nor is the paysage merely an état d'âme: that would be in complete contradiction of Fromentin's aesthetic of self-subordination. The harmony that one may feel in this novel is the harmony of the physical world, and in that harmony Dominique is at once a sensitive observer and a sadly discordant note. What makes the ‘taste in the head’ of Dominique so lingeringly powerful is its unresolved tension between the implied understanding of human beings as small, undignified and weak, and the presence of a world of mysterious beauty and continuing power. Dominique cannot find a way of expressing that tension, because he believes that the beauty of the world exists only for and in and through his own awareness. But in the story of Dominique's failure, Fromentin has given it definitive expression.

Notes

1. A. Thibaudet, Intérieurs: Baudelaire-Fromentin-Amiel, Plon, 1924, p. 149. Dominique, Gallimard (‘Génie de la France’), 1933, p. 7. R. Barthes, ‘Fromentin: “Dominique”’, in Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques, Seuil (‘Points’), 1972, p. 156: ‘une œuvre deux fois solitaire’; ‘Dominique est consacré institutionnellement […] comme un chef-d'œuvre singulier’.

2. M. Cressot, ‘Le Sens de Dominique’, RHLF [Revue d'histoire littérature de la France], XXXV (avril-juin 1928), pp. 211-18. J. Hytier, Les Romans de l'individu: Constant, Sainte-Beuve, Stendhal, Mérimée, Fromentin, Les Arts et le Livre, 1928. S. A. Rhodes, ‘Sources of Fromentin's Dominique’, PMLA (1930), 3, pp. 939-49. J. Vier, Pour l'étude du Dominique de Fromentin, Archives des Lettres Modernes, 16-17 (octobre-novembre 1958). Vier states that no precise influence of any 19th-century precursor is visible, but then notes a large number of ‘similarities’.

3. Hytier, Les Romans de l'individu, p. 140: ‘une autobiographie détournée’. C. Reynaud, La Genèse de “Dominique”, Grenoble, Arthaud, 1937, p. 18: ‘roman partiellement autobiographique’. M. A. Eckstein, Le Rôle du souvenir dans l'œuvre d'Eugène Fromentin, Zurich, Juris, 1970, p. 3: ‘puisque nous savons que Dominique est une espèce d'autre lui-même, nous nous rendons compte dès notre premier contact avec l'œuvre de Fromentin de l'extrême importance du souvenir’. Barthes, Degré zero, p. 156: ‘cette autobiographie discrète’. A. Fraigneau is almost alone in denying that Dominique is a ‘remplaçant’ for the author (Dominique, Livre de Poche, 1966, Préface, p. 10).

4. Fromentin, Correspondance et fragments inédits, ed. P. Blanchon, Plon, 1912, pp. 137-142 (letters from George Sand of 18 April and 24 May 1862).

5. See for example M. Cressot, loc. cit.: ‘un livre de claire raison et de critique morale’, and C. Herzfeld, ‘Dominique’ de Fromentin: thèmes et structure, Nizet, 1977, p. 65: ‘le conteur se juge et condamne le romantisme de sa jeunesse’.

6. Thibaudet, Intérieurs, p. 179: ‘Dominique est placé entre Olivier et Augustin comme entre deux influences, entre deux choix possibles’. A. R. Evans, Jnr, The Literary Art of Eugène Fromentin: a Study in Style and Motif, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1964, pp. 24-25: ‘Alternative solutions to the conflict are presented […] first by the blasé and irresolute Olivier, then by Augustin, the young hero's persevering tutor’. M. Lehtonen, Essai sur Dominique de Fromentin, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae), Helsinki, 1972, p. 11: Fromentin presents Olivier and Augustin schematically as ‘projections des différentes tendances psychologiques propres au personnage principal’.

7. G. Sagnes, ‘Les formes du regard dans Dominique’, in Colloque Eugène Fromentin, Travaux et mémoires de la maison Descartes, Amsterdam, no. 1 (Publications de l'Université de Lille III), 1979, p. 93.

8. Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Sagnes, Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1984, p. 517. All references to Dominique are to this edition (hereinafter ‘O.C.’), and are given in the text by page number.

9. Fromentin refers to ‘cette pauvre Mme de Mortsauf’ in a letter to Beltrémieux and his wife (3 September 1847), Lettres de jeunesse, ed. P. Blanchon, Plon, 1909, p. 228.

10. ‘Je m'aperçus qu'Amélie perdait le repos et la santé qu'elle commençait à me rendre’ (René).

11. Letter to Armand du Mesnil, n.d. (1859; ‘antérieure au 15 octobre’: see O.C., pp. 1415-16).

12. Fromentin's decision to acknowledge the echo of George Sand's novel when she pointed it out to him did not disadvantage him: the reference is made to play the same role as those that he had already made explicit in the text. He might have pointed out in his turn that she had not invented the episode either.

13. Fromentin is not mocking Lamartine. He deplores the selective and therefore uncomprehending admiration lavished on Lamartine's work: ‘Il n'est personne qui ne connaisse […] quelques vers du Lac, de Napoléon ou du Poète mourant. Cherchez combien il y en a […] qui parlent de Byron, du Crucifix, des Novissima verba'. He describes the Méditations poétiques as ‘un meuble indispensable dans une bibliothèque, surtout chez une femme’. See A quoi servent les petits poètes, O.C., p. 914.

14. Un programme de critique, III, O.C., p. 1045.

15. ibid., pp. 1047-48.

16. Herzfeld, ‘Dominique’ de Fromentin, p. 13 (‘ce roman qui dit un retour, un enracinement’), and p. 15 (‘Le retour à la terre natale est un retour à la mère’); Barthes, Degré zéro, pp. 158-60.

17. Correspondance, p. 139.

18. Letter to Du Mesnil, O.C., p. 1416 (see note 11).

19. Correspondance, p. 195. Blanchon links these unpublished notes with Un programme de critique, but they bear a close relation to discussion of ‘le sujet’ in Les Maîtres d'autrefois.

20. Les Maîtres d'autrefois, ‘Hollande’, IV, O.C., p. 669: ‘Une chose vous frappe quand on étudie le fond moral de l'art hollandais, c'est l'absence totale de ce que nous appelons aujourd'hui un sujet’; and pp. 674-75.

21. A quoi servent les petits poètes, O.C., pp. 910-11.

22. Les Maîtres d'autrefois, ‘Hollande’, II, O.C., pp. 642, 660. In an essay on Drouineau (1842), Fromentin criticises his tendency to ‘ramener la nature à l'homme’ (see Sur un “romantique libre”—Eugène Fromentin et Emile Beltrémieux, “Gustave Drouineau”, texte inédit avec une introduction et des notes par Barbara Wright, Archives des Lettres Modernes, no. 97, pp. 315-321, 1969 (1), pp. 42-43). Fromentin had had to combat the same tendency in himself: ‘Vous voyez, comme moi, comme nous tous, gens écervelés, les choses en vous plutôt qu'en elles-mêmes’ (letter to Du Mesnil (10 August 1843), Lettres de jeunesse, p. 94).