[In the following essay, DeJean argues that Artamène was a response to contemporary political events. As such, she suggests, Scudéry's work helps demonstrate how the novel as a genre was a response to the French political climate of the seventeenth century.]

Historians and literary historians have for some time asserted that the earliest types of prose fiction developed in 17th-century France played a central role “in the development and diffusion of feminist ideas.”¹ Without exception, the strains of prose fiction in which today's readers would recognize the emerging modern novel were the creation of women writers, a literary fact the theoretician Huet underscored as early as 1670 in a lengthy preface to Lafayette's Zayde. It is only by attempting to view the novelistic structures developed by these early women writers as a response to the contemporary political situation that we can come to an understanding of just what the adjective “feminist” can mean when applied to the context of 17th-century France. In a short article, I will be able to offer only a small illustration of the type of double reading I have in mind. However, every exploration of the politics of women's writing in classical France teaches the same basic lesson: at the intersection of gender and genre that produced the modern French novel is always located a meditation on the making of history in 17th-century France.

“Rien n'est si contraire au bel esprit que la guerre civile.” This maxim was formulated by a noted purveyor of bel esprit of the mid-17th century, Sarasin, when he found himself in circumstances that could hardly have failed to inspire meditation on the incompatibility of intellectual activity and that particular form of armed conflict in which aggressor and defender share the same nationality.² At the time when he coined the aphorism, the loyal retainer of the house of Condé had followed the duchesse de Longueville to Stenay, the last stronghold then resisting the royalist forces. On December 30, 1650, when Sarasin wrote, the situation in the rebel camp was grim: with her brothers, still prisoners in Le Havre, unable to come to her defense, the duchesse had just learned that Stenay was being marched upon by a royal army fresh from its victory at Réthel. Nevertheless, Sarasin testifies to the survival, even when the Fronde was at its least romantic, of at least one extravagant literary pleasure. He was writing to thank Madeleine de Scudéry for the fifth volume of her Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus, which had just reached the rebel outpost, where, as Madame de Longueville herself soon explained to the author in a personal note, “[ses ouvrages] adoucissent si agréablement l'ennui de ma vie présente” (Cousin 1: 48). Sarasin describes how, at the end of a long day preoccupied with military matters, “bedtime” (le petit coucher) at Stenay was devoted to “conversation” with Scudéry's heroes.

Today's critic does not find it easy to reconcile the heated impatience with which this initial public awaited each installment of Artamène's 13,000 page total with the reaction of terminal boredom that seems to have been the dominant response to the novel since the early 19th century.³ The enthusiasm inside Stenay should not be mistaken for merely the welcome relief from unpleasant reality provided by escapist fiction. At least in the Fronde's early years, Sarasin's dire pronouncement about the scarcity of wit seems exaggerated: according to Lever's bibliography of 17th-century narrative fiction, prior to 1652 novelistic production continued at a respectable pace. 1651 was even a very good year, with the appearance of both Le Roman comique and a prominent succès de scandale, the Histoire des amours du grand Alcandre. The political crisis finally takes its toll on literature in 1652 and 1653, the only two years in the entire century when a lone novel is being published, the successive volumes of Artamène. In 1650, therefore, readers in the Condé camp would not yet have been forced to turn to Scudéry's new volume solely out of desperation.

I would like to suggest that the excitement created each time a volume of Artamène reached the Condés in their peregrinations was a product of the political message these readers found in the novel. Ever since Boileau, Scudéry's fiction has been dismissed as literary frivolity, as the debasement of great heroes from antiquity to the status of fops who thought of nothing but their belles dames sans merci. Even Victor Cousin, the first post-17th-century critic to find the novel still worthy of attention, underestimates the seriousness of Scudéry's project in three ways. 1. He proclaims the novel a valuable history of its age in à clef guise. His rehabilitation is based, therefore, on a stripping away and a discarding of the entire presence of antiquity in Artamène, a presence he perceives as no more than an obstacle to appreciation of the fiction as the history of its time. 2. He concentrates above all on the petite histoire of the loves of 17th-century aristocrats, at the expense of grande histoire. 3. Even when Cousin painstakingly demonstrates the accuracy of the novel's war scenes as recreations of the grand Condé's most memorable military victories, he concludes rather vaguely that Scudéry's first public would have read these pages “avec passion” because they saw them as a glorification of “la tradition française […] de l'esprit militaire” (1: 184). Cousin never suggests that these elaborate forays into military history could have been motivated by any more concrete political purpose on the novelist's part.

And yet such a denial of true seriousness to Scudéry's enterprise seems in blatant contradiction with what can only be termed the frenetic urgency of the novel's publication history, a pace that suggests that the author felt that the success of her efforts depended on getting her work into print as soon as possible. Granted, throughout her career Scudéry had her writing published with a rapidity that may be without equal in the French tradition. Even for her, however, the case of Artamène stands out, especially during the Fronde years when services were often disrupted and when priority for printing facilities must have been given to works more evidently on the cutting edge of the political situation, the various types of mazarinades that C. Jouhaud has recently analyzed as a call to action, writing as act, as arm in the struggle for public opinion. A few basic facts should be sufficient to demonstrate the frenzy with which Scudéry got the novel out. The permission to publish (known as the privilège) for its first two volumes was granted in July 1648: they appear on 7 January 1649 (date of their achevé d'imprimer), clearly, therefore, a creation of the first months of the uprising against the monarchy. An “avis au lecteur” to volume 3 explains that the author had intended to continue this practice of publishing the novel in paired volumes (a practice Scudéry was to follow for Clélie), but was yielding to “l'impatience publique” (iii) and releasing this volume alone. The tome bears an achevé d'imprimer of 7 December 1749, marking it as a product of what Jouhaud terms the first flowering of mazarinades.⁴ The next volume has an achevé d'imprimer of 15 March 1650, which means that, even though a good deal of it was surely completed when the preceding installment went to press (eleven months separate the achevé d'imprimer of vols. 1 and 2 and that of 3, as compared with only a little over three months the achevé d'imprimer of 3 and that of 4), Scudéry manages to bring out 1250 pages in just over 3 months.

And what a three-month period! Volume 3 appears at the height of the conflict between Mazarin and Condé; early in the next installment's production (18 January) the princes are arrested, and by the time it appears the duchesse de Longueville is fleeing into Holland. The accelerated pace once established, subsequent volumes are printed at intervals of 5-7 months: for example, the achevé d'imprimer of vol. 5 (1300 pp.) is 15 October 1650, that of vol. 6 (1425 pp.), 12 April 1651. To appreciate fully the speed of Artamène's production, it only has to be compared with the otherwise impressively rapid publication schedule of Clélie: even though the volumes of Scudéry's next novel are only roughly half as long as those of Artamène (in identical typeface), only the first four appear as rapidly as Artamène's. Subsequently, Scudéry averages nine months per volume. Artamène's rapid-fire history is played out in tandem with that of the Fronde, so that, for example, at the time of vol. 9's appearance (achevé d'imprimer February 1653), Madame de Longueville is still holding out in Bordeaux. Artamène's final volume (achevé d'imprimer September 1653) is the only part written entirely under the uncontested control of the monarchy.

Yet it never occurs to critics, satisfied with Boileau's canonical portrait of Scudéry as propagandist of “Tender geographies,” to consider a political motivation for such frenetic creation of fiction. On the rare occasions when Scudéry's political vision has been evoked, at least implicitly, it is always as if Artaméne had been created as an unambiguous vast tribute to the Golden Age of the Ancien Régime. Witness Cousin's justification for his promotion of Scudéry's novel as a treasure of the patrimony:

Si nous mettons sous les yeux de la France l'image d'un temps qui n'est plus, […] nous aimons à lui rappeler qu'elle a été grande pour […] lui rendre […] le sentiment de sa force, […] réveiller dans les générations nouvelles les passions généreuses qui ont fait battre le cœur à nos aïeux, […] remettre en honneur […] l'enthousiasme des grandes choses, la foi dans les destinées de la patrie.

(1: vi-vii)

To read this—and I hasten to add that Cousin is not alone; I could also cite the historian Roger Picard, writing in New York in 1943 in self-imposed exile from occupied France, on the possibility that a revival of salon literature could revitalize French nationalism—one would take Artamène for a celebration of a time when the “fatherland” fulfilled its destiny of grandeur most completely, an implicit eulogy of the monarchy as the sole agent capable of channeling France's potential. However, rather than a sort of classical Chanson de Roland, Artamène is a unique example of bel esprit not only produced during civil war but as a commentary on the actions and the effects of such conflict. As such, the vision of heroism that it presents, in particular, is a far cry from the unproblematic tale of military prowess at the service of the monarchy that is Cousin's vision. Rather, Scudéry formulates an intricate questioning of the right to kingship in which controversial issues—Who deserves to be king? Should merit play a role in the designation of a monarch?—are discreetly woven in filigree throughout her tales of love unrequited and deferred.

I would suggest that we can only begin to evaluate Artamène's importance for its age if we try to recapture the experience of its initial public, the readers who discovered the novel as they lived through the unfolding civil war. To do so, it is necessary to foreground the elements that most evidently anchor the novel's first edition in actuality, in particular, the author's prefaces and the engravings by Chauveau that were generally not reproduced in subsequent editions and that can be seen as testimony to Scudéry's desire to encourage her initial audience to view her novel as more than escapist fiction. In addition, it is necessary to foreground the significant number of key plot developments that bear a striking resemblance to events of the Fronde. I realize that the genesis of such parallelisms may not always be clear. Witness a recent account of Charles Stuart's adventures while he wandered the English countryside after his defeat by Cromwell in the English Civil War that was so often on the minds of the participants in its French sequel: “Imitation of the romance model appears to direct the activity not only of the several historical narratives of this period but even of the historical actors themselves.”⁵

Historical writing and romance fiction, chiefly Scudéry's contributions to that genre, were at the time often so intricately intertwined that, if placed side by side without identification, pages of Montpensier's or Motteville's memoirs might be mistaken for scenes from Artamène. Scudéry deliberately plays on such proximity in order to steer her novel as close as possible to some of the key political events of the day: if the adventures of the Fronde's aristocratic leaders, like those of Charles Stuart, often “read” like a roman héroïque, Artamène, conversely, at times unmistakably evokes very recent events in a manner dangerously close to political statement.

The examples that most convincingly justify this conclusion occur in those volumes of Scudéry's novel (4-6) that were produced during that part of the Fronde for which we also possess her personal account of the events she considered crucial: between February 1650 and March 1651, Scudéry addressed a series of seven letters to Godeau, bishop of Vence, designed to keep him abreast of the unfolding political scene. These letters contain the only explicit political commentary in the surviving correspondence of Scudéry and provide in addition some of the most trenchant observations anywhere on the events and the protagonists of the day. I can do no more than suggest here the strategies on which such a politicizing reading of Scudéry's fiction would be founded. I will present in some detail one example: rather than steering a safe course by focusing on an uncontrovertibly intentional recreation of recent history, I will foreground a plot development that occurs in print so soon after the historical events it seems to mimic that I cannot prove that the resemblance is not simply fortuitous. Artamène can be seen as an immense, progressively unfolding mazarinade: like those texts of political immediacy, it is positioned on the cutting edge, defining itself as a fiction built on barely fictionalized current events.

The frontispiece by Chauveau to Artamène's fourth volume depicts a nocturnal scene in which two women are speaking through the bars of a window to a man held prisoner in a stone tower of a vast citadel. We do not know when the volume reached the woman to whom it is dedicated, the then itinerant duchesse de Longueville. We do know that it reached Condé, characterized in the dedication to the first volume as “le preneur des villes et le gagneur des batailles” while he was still captive in Vincennes, a château that could have served as Chauveau's model whereas no ancient monument could. Resemblances between many twists of Scudéry's plot and contemporary events may be merely lucky coincidences—for example, as the novel opens, Cyrus is searching for Mandane, whose whereabouts are unknown since her abduction by armed men who had cut off her access to the boat waiting to carry her to safety; he soon learns that she has made it to safety in Ephèse.⁶ The story line is uncannily close to the still unfolding real-life adventures of the duchesse de Longueville, the woman her contemporaries saw in Mandane, her near abduction at sea, followed by her flight over land, that had not yet brought her to safety in Holland at the time of the volume's achevé d'imprimer (15 March). However, the two months that elapse between Condé's capture and the achevé d'imprimer seem sufficient, in a publication schedule as tight as Artamène's, to indicate Scudéry's desire to make the plight of the princes and the duchesse uppermost in her readers' minds, as it was in hers, according to her correspondence with Godeau. Her letter of February 1650 is dominated by an account of the duchesse's flight and the noble conduct of the imprisoned princes, especially that of Condé, “[qui] n'a pas dit une parole indigne de ce même cœur qui lui a fait gagner quatre batailles et acquérir tant de gloire.”⁷ This is the first hint of the dominant political message of this correspondence: the ingratitude of those whose rule had been safeguarded more than once by the military accomplishments of the hero they are now treating like a criminal.

My conjecture that the novel's mood is intentionally in tune with that of the correspondence is supported by the volume's initial major plot development, the story of Princesse Palmis and Cléandre, which Cousin's key identifies as that of Princesse Marie and Monsieur Le Grand, better known to modern readers as Cinq-Mars. Well into the volume, the reader learns that Cléandre is the character depicted in prison in the frontispiece: he is being held captive because he has been falsely accused of plotting against his sovereign, King Crésus of Lydie. Any discussion of the story's potentially subversive message could begin by noting that an evocation of Louis XIII's notorious favorite was surely not a particularly delicate gesture. (His execution for crimes of lèse majesté in 1642 was still a recent memory.) Moreover, even though the end of Cléandre, allegedly a.k.a. Cinq-Mars, does not figure in Artamène, the thoughts of any readers in 1650 who decoded the text in à clef fashion would certainly have turned to the accusation of conspiracy against an all-powerful Cardinal-chief royal adviser; those readers would just as certainly also have compared this to the reason for the loss of royal favor by the prince then in the tower of Vincennes. Finally, they could not have failed to conclude that the message of this “fiction” of unjust imprisonment applied principally to the more recent military hero than to his predecessor under Louis XIII: the innocence of Cinq-Mars vis-à-vis Richelieu was hardly as debatable as that of Condé vis-à-vis Mazarin.

Furthermore, politicization of the novel is not dependent on Cousin's theory. When it is read without reference to a key, the story is perhaps even more unsettling for the reader who stops to position the questions it raises in the political context of its creation. For Cléandre, unlike Cinq-Mars, is really a prince (prince Artamas), a legitimate ruler, hiding under an assumed name. He is defined above all by his military genius: Cléandre has saved the State when he led the royal army to victory in several recent battles. Nonetheless, Crésus now describes him as “un criminel d'Etat” (4: 332). The parallel with Condé seems more inevitable later in the volume, when the Lydian monarchy finds itself menaced with a war with Cyrus, at a time when Cléandre, “qui seul pouvait soutenir une semblable guerre,” is still a prisoner of state (4: 1108). Scudéry thereby completes Cléandre's translation into Condé-figure. He thus becomes a member of the class of characters whom she portrays, often more explicitly than the obvious Condé-figure Cyrus, in dangerous proximity to the individual whose heroism her letters prove she admired above all else.

We will never know for certain how much of Artamène's plot was intentional, how much the result of the kind of premonitory intuition Scudéry reveals throughout her correspondence with Godeau, most remarkably in the letter of 2 March 1651, when she describes the barricades newly installed around the Palais Royal and compares the King to “ces petits oiseaux qui chantent si bien et qui se réjouïssent, quoiqu'ils soient prisonniers dans leurs cages,” to conclude ominously that “il se souviendra longtemps de tout ce qu'on lui fait aujourd'hui” (244, 245). But in the end the degree of intentionality behind Scudéry's political fictions seems less important than their striking actuality for the French public for whom she rushed each volume into print.

If there is any validity to a reading that seeks to translate Artamène's plot into the political reality of the time of its creation, nowhere is this more evident than in the four battles so prominently displayed in volumes 3-7. Cousin's research conclusively demonstrated that the most detailed military exploits of Scudéry's title character are such exact recreations of Condé's best known victories that they could only have been composed by someone relying on both the first printed accounts of his battles and Condé family documents not made public before the 18th century. However, Cousin never speculates on the audacity of Scudéry's decision to define heroism, in this most heroic of her so-called heroic novels, solely through reference to the individual about whom she writes Godeau a month after the achevé d'imprimer of the volume containing the fictionalization of Condé's exploits at Lens: “C'est une chose honteuse à la Reine et à notre nation de voir les injustices que l'on voit” (236). Neither Cousin nor subsequent critics have taken Scudéry's erudition seriously enough to consider reading her fiction alongside her classical sources, especially the most important ones, Herodotus and Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a reading that further confirms the boldness of the novelist's political stance. Witness the example of her fictionalization of the siege of Dunkerque in vol. 7: from Herodotus's account of the siege of Cumes, the moral is that a city should at any cost avoid conflict with Cyrus, even to the extent of banishing that warrior's enemy to whom its inhabitants have given shelter—surely an inflammatory lesson for the first of her volumes composed after Condé's release from prison, a volume still in production when Mazarin was exiled and Condé began raising an army.

The first eyewitness accounts of the Fronde years were made public only long after the events. Since literary figures are generally so timid in dealing with the political crises of their day, it is hardly surprising that references in purely literary works to what Molière terms “nos troubles” were not quick to appear. Artamène seems to have been the most immediate response in literature to the Fronde. Like Germaine de Staël, whose novels are so marked by Scudéry's influence and who, in Delphine, provided the earliest important literary use of the Revolution, Scudéry could be a major, unrecognized political novelist. In addition, the lesson of Artamène could indicate that, at the time of its initial formulation, the modern French novel was a generic response to the contemporary climate of political unrest. The continuing formal evolution of Scudéry's fiction in the final volumes of Artamène and in Clélie, as well as the novelistic structures explored by her inheritors, notably Lafayette, if read in tandem with the French monarchy's rise to absolutism, suggest that the continuing involvement of 17th-century French women writers with the novel was in essence a political affair.

Notes

1. Ian Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610-1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 201.

2. Sarasin, letter to Scudéry, 30 December 1650. In Victor Cousin, La Société française au XVII^e siècle d'après ‘Le Grand Cyrus’ de Mlle. de Scudéry (2 vols.; Paris: Didier, 1873), 1: 44.

3. The last description of a passionately involved reading of Artamène I have encountered is found at the beginning of Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre tombe, when he stresses that his mother knew Artamène by heart (2 vols.; Paris, Garnier, 1964), 1: 26-27.

4. Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades: La Fronde des mots (Paris: Aubier, 1985), p. 28.

5. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 213.

6. I cite Artamène's first edition. (Paris: Courbé, 1649-1653), 4: 53.

7. Mademoiselle de Scudéry: sa vie et sa correspondance, ed. Rathery and Boutron (Paris: Techener, 1873), p. 212.