SOURCE: "Viewing Romance in La Fontaine's Psyché," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, Winter 1988, pp. 17-33.

In his epilogue to the first six books of the Fables, La Fontaine professes his need to restore his creative energies with a change of pace:

Il s'en va temps que je reprenne
Un peu de forces et d'haleine
Pour fournir à d'autres projets

Retournons à Psyche.1

Laying aside the instructive Fables, he again takes up his Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon,² which he describes in his preface as aiming only at the reader's pleasure. Yet despite this work's frivolity, its composition does not afford La Fontaine the desired respite, for its prose seems to cause him as many difficulties as his most polished verse. In adapting for modern readers a story from Apuleius' Golden Ass, La Fontaine finds himself hesitating between the three stylistic levels appropriate to history, romance and the heroic poem: "Mes personnages me demandaient quelque chose de galant; leurs aventures, étant pleines de merveilleux en beaucoup d'endroits, me demandaient quelque chose d'héroïque et de relevé." Since "l'uniformité de style est la règle la plus étroite que nous ayons," he seeks "un caractère nouveau, et qui fût mêlé de tous ceuxlà," a mixed style that he would reduce to a "juste tempérament."³

As Jean Lafond has shown, La Fontaine's search for a style at once mixed and regular is symptomatic of the broader concerns he shares with a generation of writers that found the increasingly dominant classical ideal of regular beauty insufficient, or even cold and boring, if not accompanied by the less easily definable qualities of grace and charm. Many of the thematic developments of Psyché allow La Fontaine to explore this esthetic problem. The fable of Myrtis and Mégano, for example, evokes the limitations of regularity.⁴ Despite the perfect proportions of the noble Megano, "son esprit, sa beauté, sa taille, sa personne ne touchaient point, faute de Vénus qui donnât le sel à ses choses." The less perfectly beautiful shepherdess Myrtis, on the other hand, possessed an undefinable charm. The unfortunate Megano died admired, but unwed, while Myrtis married a king, whom she managed to captivate ever after (222).

In his attempts to avoid the monotonous regularity of Megano, La Fontaine often draws on romance. Thus, though he speaks of romance in his preface as embodying a single style, it is in romances like L 'Astrée that he finds his stylistic compromise—the mixture of prose and verse.⁵ Moreover, he multiplies the subjects and episodes of his inherited plot through such romance conventions as a pastoral episode, architectural descriptions, and debates on love and literature. This use of romance stems naturally from La Fontaine's esihetic problem. For the character of modern romance had itself grown out of efforts to reconcile the multiplicity of chivalric romance with the unity of ancient epic.⁶

France's first theoretical contribution to the sixteenth-century debates on romance was Jacques Amyot's preface to his translation of the Histoire ethiopique (1547), in which he offered the third-century Greek romance of Heliodorus as an artful alternative to the chaotic adventures of the Amadis cycle.⁷ According to Amyot, romance, a genre which regrettably serves only to please, is justified by the "imbecility" of the human spirit which, "travaillé … de grave estude," must sometimes "user de quelque divertissement, pour le destourner de ses tristes pensees … puis après le remettre plus alaigre … a la consideration, ou action des choses d'importance." In fact, Amyot accounts for his own work on the Histoire &thiopique much as La Fontaine would later explain his return to Psyché: "j'ay moy mesme adoucy le travail d'autres meilleures et plus fructueuses traductions en le traduisant par intervalles aux heures extraordinaires." Like La Fontaine, Amyot links pleasure to multiplicity: the ability of romance to divert lies, as the word's etymology suggests, in its diversity: "[la] delectation d'un bon entendement est tousjours voir, ouyr, et aprendre quelque chose de nouveau." However, he heartily condemns the endless variety of the Amadis romances, which are so "mal cousuz" as to disgust a well-ordered mind. The Histoire &thiopique, on the other hand, might serve as the prototype for a well-constructed genre that satisfies the intellect as well as the escapist desire for variety. In this type of romance, the pleasure in diversity is at once enhanced and limited by a method of composition that piques the reader's desire to pursue the ever-new adventures of the heroes by creating suspense, but that eventually brings his pleasures to a skillfully contrived conclusion: "laquelle laisse le lecteur satisfait, de la sorte que le sont ceux. qui a la fin viennent a jouyr d'un bien ardemment desire et long-mement [sic] atendu."⁸

Thanks to Amyot's preface, and a host of scholarly treatises, including the influential discourses of Torquato Tasso,⁹ the multiplicity of chivalric romance was eventually accommodated to a liberally interpreted formal unity. Quite naturally, then, when La Fontaine experiences anew the tension between unity and variety, he turns to the romances of the past. His problem, however, is quite different from that of such reformers as Amyot and Tasso. For, faced with a rigidly defined classical imperative, his task is not to coax the chaotic romance, through careful composition, into a semblance of order. It is, rather, to introduce into a work whose regularity is an unquestioned prerequisite, something of the charm and variety of romance.

The contradictions inherent in such a position are already implicit in La Fontaine's subject. In choosing to adapt a single interpolated story from an ancient romance, he betrays both his penchant for romance and his classical preference for a single, unified action. The very story he selects, however, is suggestive of the human need for diversity, since its inclusion in the Golden Ass is motivated by the need to divert a young girl's mind from the dangers that beset her.¹⁰ Having opted, nonetheless, for a single story, La Fontaine promptly sets about "varying" it with the additions from modern romances we have previously mentioned. However, in addition to these quantitative borrowings, La Fontaine incorporates numerous elements from the romance tradition of erotic suspense that do not serve primarily to vary his work. Rather, they allow him to dramatize, through the erotic tale of Psyché, the tensions inherent in his own conception of the reader's pleasure.

The plot of the Æthiopian Romance perfectly embodies romance's creation of erotic suspense through the withholding of information. The heroine Chariclea is cast off from birth by her mother, the queen of Ethiopia, who knows that the king will not believe her account of how their daughter happened to be born white.¹¹ Traversing the Mediterranean world with her beautiful Greek lover, whom she will not marry until she recovers her identity, Chariclea must confront ever-new threats of separation, dishonor and death. Her state of harrowing erotic suspense is maintained until the intricate plot is resolved in her recognition by her parents. The romance ends on this note of illumination, with the fulfillment of Chariclea's desire and the reader's intellectual satisfaction.

In the modern romantic epics of Ariosto and Tasso, the dynamics of suspense are much the same. These epics demonstrate, however, that erotic suspense may be generated by the multiplication of pleasure as well as pain. Moreover, since in the epic world, romance is regarded as an obstacle to the hero's mission, these works offer particularly pointed lessons about the temporary and illusory nature of romance diversions, which they situate on enchanted islands. There, the hero, captive of a beautiful enchantress, enjoys a life of infinite pleasures that might seem foreign to the principles of erotic suspense. But these pleasures too are based on mystery. Once the hero recovers his identity, or fully recognizes his captor, the enchantment dissipates and he returns to his mission.

In this type of romance, the state of erotic suspense as well as the return to normalcy are often expressed by conventional visual metaphors. For example, in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, Rinaldo's comrades arrive in Armida's garden to find the hero disporting himself with the enchantress. Rinaldo holds a mirror into which he and Armida both gaze, she at herself, and he at her reflected gaze. She sees only herself and he sees only her.¹² It is Armida's essential remoteness that maintains Rinaldo's enchantment. But when his comrades show the knight his own reflection, he is filled with shame and leaves the island. This, however, does not end the lovers' story. When Rinaldo and his companions have taken Jerusalem, despite Armida's bitter opposition, the sorceress attempts suicide. Awakening from a faint to find the knight bending over her, she tries to avoid his gaze, but her bitter hatred finally melts before her recognition of his love.¹³ The asymmetrical gaze of erotic suspense is resolved in a mutual recognition. As in the Histoire éthiopique, the return to unobstructed vision marks the end of the romance.

In Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, these romance conventions serve to emphasize the elements of erotic suspense inherent in La Fontaine's material. In Part I, Psyche and Cupid enjoy an erotic interlude in the latter's celestial pleasure palace, an interlude that depends for its continuance on the withholding of Cupid's identity. Cupid, a kind of philosopher of romance, instructs Psyche in the "secret" of erotic suspense, long known to Armida and her kin: "Du moment que vous n'aurez plus rien à souhaiter, vous vous ennuierez" (151). The pleasures of Cupid and Psyche are accordingly brought to an abrupt end when Psyche shines her lamp on her sleeping husband, though it is not her seeing of Cupid that ends the idyll, but Cupid's awakening. The sleeper, at once exposed and remote, his "voile de gaze" (171) a metaphor for his veiled eyes, seems to Psyche an inexhaustible source of pleasure. But when he awakens and returns her gaze, the spell is broken; he vanishes in anger, and with him the pleasure palace.

After detailing Psyche's multiple punishments for her curiosity, Part II culminates in a classic romance recognition, when Cupid surprises a sleeping Psyche. The much-admired symmetry of La Fontaine's twin episodes of the sleeper surprised may well have been inspired by Tasso. For the romance of Rinaldo and Armida begins when the sorceress is spell-bound by the vision of the sleeping knight,¹⁴ and is resolved when Rinaldo kneels over the unconscious Armida. Like Tasso's lovers, Cupid and Psyche achieve a love based on mutual recognition rather than erotic games. And, as always, their reciprocal gaze signals the end of the romance, as the happy couple retires to the "real world" of an Olympus in the image of the French court.

In so accentuating, in 1669, the romanesque aspects of his work, La Fontaine was resisting the trend towards more soberly classical forms like the nouvelle and the histoire. Still, romance had not entirely disappeared from view, but was furnishing the subjects for operas and comédies-ballets, intended for the entertainment of high society and the court. La Fontaine accordingly gives his work a courtly frame: four friends drive out to Versailles in order to hear the Psyché that one of them, Poliphile, has recently composed. La Fontaine thus creates a narrative equivalent of the court entertainment. And he further heightens the romanesque flavor of his work by incorporating the contemporary image of Versailles itself as the ultimate in romance divertissements.

In the 1660's, the relatively modest Versailles was not regarded as the seat of government, but as a charming retreat where Louis XIV could escape his weighty responsibilities. Thus, a worried Colbert reminded the king that "Cette maison regarde bien davantage le plaisir et le divertissement de Votre Majesté que sa gloire," and urged that spending be directed to the Louvre, "plus digne de la grandeur de Votre Majesté."¹⁵ This estimation of Versailles was confirmed by such entertainments as the Plaisirs de l'île enchantée, a three-day extravaganza in which jousts, dance, and theater were loosely organized as the pleasures offered the captive knights on the island of Ariosto's sorceress, Alcina.¹⁶ Louis himself appeared as the hero, Ruggiero, and the festivities ended in "un Feu d'artifice, qui met fin … aux divertissements de l'Isle Enchantée."¹⁷

It is with this Versailles that La Fontaine frames the story of Cupid and Psyche. Thus, near the outset of the work, in a verse description of the grotto of Thetis, he declines to depict Louis XIV as an epic Mars (130), preferring the image of an Apollo who, after his daily labors enjoys a few hours' "relâche" in the arms of the sea goddess Thetis (129). La Fontaine's favorite literary equivalent for this sort of antiheroic "reliche" is the enchanted palace of Tasso's Armida, which is once compared directly to Versailles (183) and twice to its mirror image, the palace of Cupid (143, 147). Unlike the victims of Armida, Louis is not imprisoned in his retreat. Indeed, the fountain of Apollo offers an imposing reminder of his daily departure from the realm of Thetis to pursue his epic labors (184). But at the heart of the realm, he commands an enchanted island, where he may refresh himself at will.

By setting his romanesque story in an equally romanesque frame, La Fontaine highlights an implicit resemblance between the readers and the characters of romance. As Amyot recognized, in the diversity of romance, the reader seeks a respite from the tedious uniformity of everyday duties or of serious writing. By the same token, the multiple adventures of the heroes are but a temporary diversion from their undifferentiated lives before and (happily ever) after. In the multilayered Psyché, the reader's selection of La Fontaine's pleasing tale is enacted by the four friends' excursion to the enchanted island of Versailles, a diversion that is in turn mirrored by the transporting of Psyché to an ethereal pleasure palace. By organizing his work around this need for divertissement, La Fontaine creates the ideal backdrop for considering the problems posed by his own departures from classical regularity.

Not surprisingly, for a writer as solicitous of his public as La Fontaine, most of the problems involve the perceptions of the reader. In his preface, he in fact declines to judge whether he has achieved the desired "tempérament": "c'est ce que le public m'apprendra" (123). In thus deferring to the public, La Fontaine does not merely make a conventional gesture of modesty. For his delicate balance between romance and regularity requires highly subtle judgments and perceptions on the part of the reader, who consequently acquires a somewhat worrisome authority. Throughout Psyché, the esthetic and erotic experiences of romance gazers afford La Fontaine the opportunity to explore the relationship between his mixed text and its readers. La Fontaine does not appear entirely sure that readers will, or should, approve of the use he has made of romance.

In the opening pages of Psyché, Polyphile and his friends observe that, if every king needs some form of recreation, theirs has chosen a most noble one: "Notre monarque se divertit à faire batir des palais." Such a diversion possesses an "utilité générale," since, "par ce moyen, les sujets peuvent prendre part aux plaisirs du prince, et voir avec admiration ce qui n'est pas fait pour eux" (127-28). This curious statement first describes the subjects as taking part in princely pleasures, but then immediately retracts this participatory role to stress their respectful admiration and their exclusion from the king's diversions ("et voir avec admiration ce qui n 'est pas fait pour eux").

This ambiguous evocation of the subjects' attitude is immediately pursued in the verse description of the Grotto of Thetis. Here, as we have seen, La Fontaine declines the role of epic poet, recalling his rejection in the preface of a uniformly high style:

Si j'etais plus savant en l'art de bien écrire,
Je peindrais ce monarque étendant son empire:
11 lancerait la foudre.

In the awe-inspiring epic, the attitude of the viewer would presumably be conditioned by that of the hero's subjects, who are overpowered: "on verrait a ses pieds/Des peuples abattus, d'autres humilies" (129-30). La Fontaine chooses instead to portray the king as the lover shown in the group of marble statues that form the grotto's centerpiece. This Apollo, instead of towering over the vanquished, sits amidst a group of nereids, who are bathing him in preparation for his nightly encounter with Thetis.

This grouping presents a classic scene of erotic suspense, the marble figures frozen in the attitudes of unfulfilled desire. The nereids are captivated by Apollo's charms, but he remains aloof; unmoved by their beauty, he is preoccupied by his incipient reunion with the unseen Thetis. Yet this scene suggests that the indispensable corollary to the mystery of this chain of gazes is display. Even as Apollo dreams of that moment when he and Thetis will be, "libre et sans temoins," he surrenders his body to the ministrations of the blushing, sighing nereids. Similarly, Louis creates a palace to escape the cares of state, but that palace displays his most intimate divertissements before the curious gaze of every idle stroller—a disconcertingly literal enactment of the notion that "les sujets peuvent prendre part aux plaisirs du monarque."

This mix of reticence and exhibitionism requires a complex attitude on the part of the viewer, combining both the participation and the respectful "admiration" that we noted in the observation of the four friends. As they prepare Apollo to be agreeable to Thetis, the nereids participate vicariously in pleasures from which they are forever excluded. They bathe the god's hands and feet, and delight in his charms, but never lose their attitude of respectful deference. Though alive to the "grace" of his negligent abandon, they are also conscious of his "majeste." The nereids thus instruct the visitor as to the appropriate response to Versailles and its charming master. They do not represent, however, the only possible response. The Apollo group is framed by two niches that hold the figures of Acis¹⁸ and Galatea. While this Ovidian allusion may seem a fitting echo of the idyll of Apollo, it cannot but call to mind the menacing figure of Polyphemus. When that one-eyed viewer spotted Galatea in the arms of her lover, he refused to accept exclusion from their pleasures, but hurled a piece of the mountain down on his young rival (Metamorphoses Xill, 852-84). Polyphemus, conspicuous by his absence from the grotto, hints that the king or the author who rejects the epic privilege of overpowering the viewer in favor of the more delicate operations of charm, risks finding himself or his creation overpowered instead.

The first part of Psyché's adventures, which Poliphile reads to his friends in the Grotto of Thetis, brings the static attitudes represented by its statues to life. If Apollo's synthesis of grace and majesty recalls La Fontaine's esthetic aims, they are more transparently embodied by Psyché, who possesses not only perfect beauty, but each of the "graces necessaires pour se faire aimer." Due to the jealousy of Venus, however, she suddenly finds herself able to inspire only the "admiration" due perfection: "On avait encore de la veneration, du respect, de l'admiration pour elle … mais on n'avait plus de ce qu'on appelle amour." Psyché's difficult recovery of this elusive quality thus allegorizes La Fontaine's own quest for the gift of Venus, arbitrarily retracted by classical pronouncements. When Psyché is spirited away to Cupid's celestial Versailles, Venus's spell is temporarily counteracted by the powers of her son. In Cupid's formula for insuring both Psyché's and his own allure, La Fontaine tries out a first esthetic model in the image of the royal art de plaire.

During her sojourn in Cupid's pleasure palace, Psyché is inducted into the methods of pleasing and being pleased that prevail on pleasure islands. Cupid, as we have seen, links his powers of fascination to concealment.¹⁹ Nonetheless, he seasons his invisibility with a touch of exhibitionism—a point to which La Fontaine attaches great importance. Over a third of the preface concerns a single modification of Apuleius. Though the oracle that instructs Psyché's parents to marry her to a monster constitutes "le nceud de la fable," says La Fontaine, "j'en ai augmente l'inconvenient, faute d'avoir rendu cet oracle ambigu et court." While acknowledging that the oracle creates the suspense so essential to "ces sortes de narrations," La Fontaine perversely makes the oracle so clear that the reader not only cannot doubt Cupid's identity, but may find the characters' ignorance unconvincing as well. In defense of this narrative lapse, La Fontaine explains that "le plaisir que doit donner cette fable a ceux qui la lisent, ce n'est pas leur incertitude a l'egard de la qualite de ce mari, c'est l'incertitude de Psyché seule." And even Psyché's uncertainty, he maintains, should be greatly curtailed (124-25).

This conception of the reader's pleasure is consistent with the erotic precepts of Cupid. If we agree with La Fontaine as to the oracle's transparency, then it is clear that even before meeting Psyché, Cupid has contrived to display his identity as much as to veil it. The evidence of most of Psyché's senses and the marvels of Cupid's palace can only lessen her doubts. The palace, in fact, practically flaunts the identity of its owner. One of its tapestries, for example, depicts Love's conquests; in the final image, Love himself succumbs to a young woman who strongly resembles Psyché, but whose face is averted (145). Cupid's policy, like La Fontaine's, is to narrow the range of Psyché's doubt as much as possible: "vous ne doutez pas qu'il n'y ait quelque chose en moi de surnaturel. Necessairement je suis dieu, ou je suis demon … Si vous trouvez que je sois demon, vous me hairez; et si je suis dieu, vous […] ne m'aimerez plus avec tant d'ardeur, car il s'en faut bien qu'on aime les dieux aussi violemment que les hommes" (151-52). This policy assumes that Psyché will be able to supply a suitably nuanced response. She will, on the one hand, escape boredom by conjuring up ever-varied images of her spouse, yet these images will never seriously threaten her intuitive sense of his perfection. "Je prends un plaisir extreme a vous voir en peine," says Cupid, "d'autant plus que votre imagination ne se forge guere de monstres (j'entends d'images de ma personne) qui ne soient tres agréables."

As this statement suggests, Cupid's strategy serves to maintain himself, as much as Psyché, in a state of pleasurable suspense. For the gods, he explains, are so often bored that "ils sont contraints de se faire de temps en temps des sujets de desir et d'inquietude" (151). Cupid, of course, is certain of Psyché's identity and has unlimited access to her physical perfections. He therefore contrives a situation in which he cannot be entirely confident of her love. Moreover, he adds variety to her beauty by keeping her in a state of constant emotional flux, a state that also allows him to revel in the agreeable images of himself that her imagination supplies.

The pleasure that Cupid and Psyché take in each other is similar to the reaction that La Fontaine asks of the reader, who ought to be charmed by his work's surface variety, but respectful of its underlying uniformity. This parallel is reinforced by Cupid's palace, which mixes the art of classical Greece with an eclecticism linked to romance. Busts and paintings in the spirit of Phideas and Apelles mingle anachronistically with Arabian alcoves (144). Portraits juxtapose Helen and Phyme (reputedly the model for Praxiteles' Aphrodite), to Armida and Ariosto's Angelica:

Ces fameuses beautés dont la Grèce se vante,
Celles que le Parnasse en ses fables nous chante,
Ou de qui nos romans font de si beaux portraits
(143).²⁰

And Psyché herself is represented "en amazone. … en Nymphe, en bergere, en chasseresse, en grecque, en persane" (146). An analogous dichotomy characterizes Psyche's imagined representations of Cupid. "Je ne sais," she complains, "si vous êtes Ethiopien ou Grec" (149), a vacillation between the classical and the exotic that recalls the Aethiopian Romance, whose plot hinges on this very problem of identity. It is indeed the variety of romance that diverts the two Greek lovers from the potential tedium of their perfection.

Such is the complexity of La Fontaine's esthetic allegorizing that Psyche, as well as Cupid, at times recalls the master of Versailles. Thus, on arriving at the pleasure palace, she is bathed, much like Apollo, by a group of admiring nymphs in preparation for her encounter with an invisible lover. This scene may remind us that, though Apollo is in one sense an artist-charmer, he is primarily a lover, whose nights with Thetis are a mise en abyme of Versailles itself, the luxurious retreat of the Sun King. Like Louis, Psyche inhabits a palace designed for her pleasure—an analogy that would place Cupid in the position of Colbert, "l'intelligence qui est l'âme de ce palais, et qui fait agir tant de mains savantes pour la satisfaction du monarque" (185). Moreover, one of the principal pleasures the palace offers is the display of her own image, which the creators of the palace, "de peur que le même objet se presentant si souvent à elle ne lui devînt ennuyeux … avaient diversifiée." Though Psyche's beauty can gain nothing from these varied representations, she often views them "par divertissement," rather as Louis enjoys a twilight promenade past mythological depictions of himself (183). Psyche also enjoys dressing up in the costumes shown in her portraits, taking pleasure in displaying her thus renewed beauty to herself, and wishing she could display it as well to her husband, who is as often as not a hidden spectator of her self-contemplation (146). While this complex development of the Armida-Rinaldo situation eludes one-to-one analogies, its titillating blend of voyeurism, narcissism and exhibitionism encapsulates La Fontaine's interpretation of the erotic artistry of Versailles.

Unfortunately, the delicate balance required to maintain this pleasurable suspense is upset by the arrival of Psyche's sisters. Or perhaps the divertissement was inherently unstable. In her attempts to persuade Cupid to admit her sisters to his palace, Psyche evokes her need for admiring spectators, a need like that of kings, who "se plaisent à étaler leurs richesses, et à se montrer quelquefois avec l'éclat et la gloire dont ils jouissent." For with only herself to view it, the artful variety supplied by Cupid ceases to function, as all Psyche's pleasures are reduced to an indistinguishable monotony: "l'émail des parterres, celui des prés, et celui des pierreries, commencaient à lui être égaux; leur différence ne dépendait plus que des yeux d'autrui" (158). If he is perpetually to captivate Psyche, Cupid must offer her not only a variety of objects but a variety of viewers as well.

However, the eyes of Psyche's jealous sisters are not capable of the sort of subtle discernment that the maintenance of the pleasure isle requires. Though fully sensitive to the charm of Psyche's enjoyments. they cannot, or will not, supply the necessary "admiration" for the divine perfection that lies behind them. Refusing, like Polyphemus, to take part in pleasures that were not made for them, they convince Psyche that she has wed a frightful serpent with whose monstrous progeny she risks populating the universe: "Quoi! Psyché peuplera de monstres tout l'Univers!" (165). Insidiously injecting her with their "venin," these true serpents persuade Psyche to destroy her husband with the poisoned dagger they supply. When Psyche shines her lamplight on the god of love, she naturally loses her murderous resolve. But the sleeper's vulnerability is nonetheless indicated by the fact that he is wounded by the drop of burning oil that spills from the lamp. This breakdown in Cupid's system of perpetual erotic suspense suggests the fragility of a formula requiring viewers to participate, yet keep their distance, and objects to display themselves, but not too much. Even a god, it seems, who elects to charm rather than to overawe, may risk getting burned.

With the vanishing of Cupid's pleasure palace, La Fontaine eliminates his first esthetic model. During the interval between the first and second parts of Poliphile's reading, he begins to distinguish his own artistry from that of Cupid and Versailles. When Cupid's erotic strategy fails, he can simply fall back on his divine prerogative to compel admiration. (In fact, being Cupid, he can even compel love: in Part II, he will severely punish Psyche and her sisters, without losing the former's devotion.) This point is reiterated when the four friends stroll about the gardens of Versailles. Among the monuments they admire is the Fountain of Latona, which not only recapitulates the story of Cupid, but provides an interesting counterpoint to the Grotto of Thetis by depicting a potential response to the menace of Polyphemus. According to Ovid, while fleeing the wrath of Juno with her infants, Diana and Apollo, Latona stops to quench her thirst at a pool of water. When a group of abusive peasants impede her, Latona attempts persuasion, but her gentle words fail to move her enraged attackers (Metamorphoses VI, 360-65). La Fontaine's verse description stresses Latona's terrible riposte: when the disrespectful spectators throw water at her and her children, she changes them into frogs.²¹ Unlike the story of Cupid, this scene admits no suggestion that the three divinities might be monsters. It is, instead, the viewers who are caught in a state of monstrous ambiguity, half human, half amphibian: "Déjà les doigts de l'un en nageoires s'étendent"; "De l'insecte et de l'homme un autre est composé" (183). This group of unruly viewers is in turn surrounded by a second circle of ideal spectators, "Termes de qui le sort semblerait ennuyeux/S'ils n'étaient enchantés par l'aspect de ces lieux" (184). Thus, the Latona ensemble unveils the force that backs up the royal art de plaire, while reaffirming that only a monster could fail to respond to the graceful majesty of Apollo, Cupid or Latona.

Since superhuman expedients are not available to mere mortals like Psyché, on her expulsion from the pleasure palace she must seek some other means of recovering her lost charm. Her separation from Cupid in Part II allows La Fontaine to define more clearly the artistic assumptions of his Psyché. Whereas the pleasure palace involved a certain equality between viewer and object, and whereas the Latona ensemble makes the viewers powerless, Psyché must now confront an omnipotent audience. This situation is illuminated by the debate on tragedy and comedy that precedes the four friends' stroll in the gardens. At first, Ariste's defense of the superior powers of tragedy seems to imply an audience very like the captive one that encircles the fountain of Latona: "il n'y a divertissement égal à la tragédie, ni qui mene les esprits où il plaît au poète […] les maux d'autrui nous divertissent, c'est-à-dire qu'ils nous attachent l'esprit" (179). But, as he later makes clear, it is the viewer of tragedy, and not the author or the hero, who is all-powerful. For its principal pleasure "c'est que nous nous mettons audessus des rois par la pitié que nous avons d'eux, et devenons dieux a leur egard, contemplant d'un lieu tranquille leurs […] malheurs; ni plus ni moins que les dieux considerent de l'Olympe les miserables mortels" (182). Tragedy's power to touch and attacher requires an audience that is completely detached, and thus able to give in freely to those sudden movements of pity that it inspires. Accordingly, for Poliphile's reading of Part II, the friends leave the intimate, participatory environment of the grotto for an outdoor theater, scene of a very different sort of royal divertissement. Whereas the erotic climate of Part I often blurred the boundaries between viewer and object, in the theatrical climate of Part II, these roles are unequivocally distributed: Psyché must play out her tragic part before an audience of Olympians, as she strives to touch the hearts of Ceres, Juno, Proserpina, Cupid and Venus. In thus putting his reader in the place of the king, La Fontaine will paradoxically discover his own freedom from artistic absolutism.

During the course of her "longues peines" (187), Psyché makes a series of appeals for divine favor that display considerable moral and rhetorical progress. Thus her first plea to Ceres, a mannered exposition of her cause, ends in utter failure, due perhaps to the gods' desire "que nos prieres soient veritablement des prieres, et non des apologies" (217). As her speeches increase in artlessness and sincerity, they also increase in efficacity. As Psyché acquires the ability to touch her audience, some of the visual aspects of her trials serve to highlight the esthetic implications of her progress.

After several failed efforts to escape the wrath of Venus, Psyché journeys to her temple in order to surrender. This alabaster edifice, which possesses "autant de grace que de majeste" (226), seems very much in the spirit of Part 1. Its interior is ornamented with the multiple offerings of grateful artists and lovers, offerings that permit a rather vague allusion to Amyot's translation of Plutarch: "il s'en trouvait même de capitaines, dont les exploits, comme dit le bon Amyot, avaient cette grace de soudainete qui les rendait encore plus agreable" (227). Like Amyot himself, the heroic captains of history occasionally indulge in the pleasures of romance.²² Though profuse, the lovers' offerings are disposed in chapels in order to avoid confusion and to preserve the harmonious architecture of the whole.²³ This restrained ornamentation also insures that the viewer's gaze will focus on the central statue of Venus, said to have inspired Praxiteles. If the disposition of the temple summarizes La Fontaine's ideal fusion of classical regularity and romance diversity, the presentation of this statue interprets the function of diversity in a new manner: "On l'avait placée dans une niche de marbre noir, entre des colonnes de cette même couleur; ce qui la rendait plus blanche, et faisait un bel effet a la vue" (225). Here, variety is reduced to a principle of contrast, serving to display classical perfection with the greatest possible relief. La Fontaine seems to have found an almost formulaic expression of his concern that perfect regularity may prove sadly bland without an element of piquancy; of "sel." However, such sharp relief seems to violate the laws of regularity, contradicting La Fontaine's rejection, in his preface, of sharp stylistic contrasts. But it does address the problem Psyché encountered in Part 1, when she found that her pleasures had become indistinguishable. And it is entirely compatible with the principles of romance. The virginal beauty, and the ultimate satisfaction, of Heliodorus' Chariclea, can best be savored after she has escaped from the clutches of a multitude of swarthy bandits. And, upon her marriage, she and her beautiful Greek husband are strikingly ensconced against the agreeable background provided by an Ethiopian court. Needless to say, Psyché's own malheurs have a similarly contrastive function.

However, La Fontaine almost immediately applies the esthetic principle embodied in the temple in a highly disturbing manner. Upon Psyché's surrender, Venus orders the furies to destroy her beauty by whipping: "Commen, ons par ce corps d'albatre … [que mon fils] appelle le temple de la blancheur. Prenez vos scions, filles de la Nuit, et me l'empourprez si bien que cette blancheur ne trouve pas même un asile en son propre temple." Unable to suppress a "mouvement de pitié," Venus leaves the room, and even the furies don blindfolds. Poliphile, however, feels no such scruples, seizing, in twenty-eight lines of verse, on the empurpling of Psyché's body as the perfect occasion to throw its whiteness into sharpest relief. Branding Cupid a "tigre," he indignantly evokes his pleasure in Psyche's torment:

Tu devais venir voir empourprer cet albâtre;
Il fallait amener une troupe de Ris:
Des souffrances d'un corps dont tu fus idolâtre
Vous vous seriez tous divertis.
(229-31)

But Poliphile immediately contradicts himself, acknowledging that Cupid had in fact known nothing of Psyche's ordeal, and that, on learning of it, he promptly sent her a healing balm. In carrying his principle of contrast to its logical extreme, La Fontaine has offered the reader a pleasure so scandalous that he does not dare to imagine its viewers. In his search for relief, must he punish his Psyche, and turn her viewers into monsters? Must he desecrate the temple of classicism?

With the rapid arrival of Cupid's balm, La Fontaine retreats from this brief exploration of the dangerous frontiers of romance. But in Psyche's last ordeal, he tries out a final model for his esthetics of variety, a model that, though less scandalous, is perhaps more daring. When Psyche returns from the underworld bearing the cosmetic preparation Venus had sent her to request of Proserpina, she succumbs to the temptation to open its box. If she is to regain Cupid's love, she feels, she must remedy the recent ravages to her beauty. But on opening the box, she is engulfed in a penetrating smoke that blackens her face and part of her torso (245-46). Rather like the attackers of Latona, who attempt to wash away their amphibian extremities, she fails to remove the blackening at a nearby pool. Psyche too has become the very essence of monstrosity—a mixture. For all La Fontaine's protestations about a "juste tempérament," it is difficult to imagine a clearer admission of failure. Despite Cupid's and Psyche's play with romance exoticism as a mere surface variation on perfection, despite the temple of Venus, where delicately varied ornamentation complements perfect architectural regularity, La Fontaine's Psyché is not a new synthesis, but a bizarre graft of a romance face onto a regular body: a "visage d'Ethiopienne enté sur un corps de Grecque" (253).²⁴

Yet this strange and anti-classical creature is far from displeasing. It is when, surrendering all claims to beauty, Psyche cheerfully shows her irregular person to Cupid and begs the favor of serving him as a slave, that she succeeds in most thoroughly "attaching" the god. Cupid takes Psyché back to the court of Venus, where the goddess's retinue contemplates the unprecedented visitor with astonishment and pleasure: "Toute cette Cour la considérait comme un très beau monstre, et très digne d'être aimé" (253). When Psyche kneels at Venus's feet and, with the briefest of speeches, again throws herself on her mercy. even the spiteful goddess is moved to tears. Psyche, it seems. must lose her perfect beauty if she is to recover her long-lost grace. And so. La Fontaine at last accepts responsibility for his penchant for romance. which he ceases to treat as a mere background for the clever exhibition of his classical masterpiece. In allowing his Psyche to appear as a "beau monstre," in admitting that she partakes of the Ethiopian as well as the Greek. La Fontaine makes a rather bold statement of his literary priorities.

At the end of Poliphile's reading, the four friends linger at Versailles so that Acante may enjoy the sunset. The grandeur ("ses habits … magnifiques") and variety ("cent couleurs") of the solar display offer a final allusion to Apollo's coucher: "Il semblait qu'il se fût paré/Pour plaire aux filles de Nérée." Pleasure and perfection may perhaps endlessly coexist in the cycles of nature, in royal enclaves and on enchanted isles. Poliphile and his friends, however, having paid their hotnage to Apollo, head homeward under the conduct of a lesser star: "la lune étant en son plein. nos voyageurs … Ia voulurent bien pour leur guide" (257). In a sense, this return to Paris, the "real world" of classical authors and readers, merely retraces the journey that La Fontaine had made through Psyche's adventures. The traditional romance dénouement, with its mutual recognitions and return to unobscured vision, usually represents a rejection of the illusory diversions of romance in favor of a deeper reality. Thus, when Cupid first recognizes Psyche, he discovers—in an apt allusion both to romance convention and to the traditional spiritual interpretations of the Psyche legend—that "ce n'était pas seulement son corps qui le rendait amoureux, c'était son esprit et son âme par-dessus tout." But in preferring Psyche's soul to her body, Cupid does not seem to be rejecting the diversions of romance so much as the illusion of formal perfection. In allowing Cupid to love a disfigured Psyche, La Fontaine makes a plea for the soul of his art. Of course Psyche will eventually regain her Greek regularity. She does so, however, through no trick or contrivance of her own, but through the magnanimous gesture of her most rigorous spectator—the gift of Venus. Having sacrificed perfection in his efforts to please, La Fontaine must trust in the generosity of his readers.

Notes

¹Fables, contes et nouvelles, ed. René Groos, Jacques Schiffrin, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 150.

² For a discussion of La Fontaine's fusion of the fable and the conte in Psyché, see Jean-Pierre Collinet, Le Monde littéraire de La Fontaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 242-43.

³Œuvres diverses, ed. Pierre Clarac, 11, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 123. Future references to Psyché will be to this edition. For a discussion of La Fontaine's composite style, see Collinet, Ibid., pp. 244-52.

⁴ "La Beaute et la grace: 1'esthetique platonicienne des 'Amours de Psychd,'" Revue d'Histoire de France (maiaout 1969), pp. 475-77.

⁵ Henri Le Maître, Essai sur le mythe de Psyché dans la littérature française des origines a 1890 (Paris: Boivin, 1940), pp. 103-04.

⁶ See Bernard Weinberg's account of "The Quarrel over Ariosto and Tasso" in A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 954-1073.

⁷ For a discussion relating Amyot's preface to the Catholic Reformation project to "reform" romance, see Marc Fumaroli's "Jacques Amyot and the Clerical Polemic Against the Chivalric Novel," Renaissance Quarterly (Spring 1985), pp. 22-40.

⁸L 'Histoire wethiopique de Heliodorus, traduite de Grec en Francoys (Paris: Etienne Groulleau, 1549). This edition provides no pagination.

⁹ Fumaroli, "Jacques Amyot," pp. 24-26. Tasso's Discorsi dell'arte poetica (1587) and the Discorsi del poema heroico (1594) are discussed in Weinberg, Literary Criticism, pp. 1035-37; 1054-58.

¹⁰The Golden Ass: Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, trans. W. Adlington, revised S. Gaselee, The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1915), IV, 27.

¹¹ When Chariclea was conceived, her mother was looking at a picture of Andromeda, "and so by mishap engendered presently a thing like to her," An Aethiopian Romance, trans. Thomas Underdowne, revised F. A. Wright (London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.), IV, 119.

¹² Ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1971), XVI, 20-21.

¹³ "Mira ne gli occhi miei, s'al dir non vuoi/fedi prestar, de la mia fede il zelo," says Rinaldo, Ibid., XX, 135.

¹⁴ Ibid., XIV, 66-67.

¹⁵ Cited in Pierre de Nolhac, La Creation de Versailles (Paris: Louis Conard, 1925), p. 49.

¹⁶ See Nolhac's account of the festivities, Ibid., pp. 64-73.

¹⁷Théâtre: 1664-65, ed. René Bray (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1951), p. 301.

¹⁸ The Pléïade edition repeats the spelling "Atis" from the 1669 and 1729 editions, though the reference is indeed to a statue of Acis by Baptiste Tubi (Psyché, "notes et variantes," p. 838).

¹⁹ Joan de Jean's interesting analysis ("La Fontaine's Psyché: The Reflecting Pool of Classicism," L 'Esprit Créateur 21 [Winter 1981], pp. 99-109, and in some-what revised form in Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], pp. 65-72) makes Cupid's self-concealment the crux of a tale exemplifying absolutist strategies of domination, whereas I will suggest that to the degree that Cupid wishes to please, he must surrender some of his power to the reader-viewer.

²⁰ Collinet interprets this passage as indicating a mixture of "réalité historique avec la fiction romanesque et poétique" characteristic of Cupid's palace, Le Monde littéraire, p. 248.

²¹ The actual fountain of Latona may have contained a veiled allusion to the Fronde, meant to discourage future rebels. (Nathan Whitman, "Myth and Politics: Versailles and the Fountain of Latona," Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship, ed. John C. Rule [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969], pp. 286-301.)

²² But see Collinet, who links this passage to La Fontaine's conception of the sublime (Le Monde littéraire, p. 258).

²³ "Le style de l'ecrivain," says Collinet, "se projette dans celui de ses palais" (ibid., p. 247).

²⁴ 1 do not intend by this conclusion to contradict such critics as Michel Jeanneret ("Psyché de La Fontaine: La recherche d'un equilibre romanesque," The Equilibrium of Wit: Essays for Odette de Mourgues, ed. Peter Bayley and Dorothy Coleman [Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum Publishing, 1982], pp. 238-47), who shows how La Fontaine does indeed "temper" his work's multiplicity. But La Fontaine's self-commentary suggests that he falls short of his ideal.