SOURCE: “Monuments of the Maternal: Reflections on the Desbordes-Valmore Correspondence,” in L'espirit createur, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 41-51.

[In the following essay, McCall describes the gender dynamics of female epistolary writing illustrated by Desbordes-Valmore's Correspondance intime.]

Collective remembrance promotes unity through the recognition of a common memory that the public is invited to claim as its own. For this reason, cultural historians have paid significant attention to the creation of a secular national identity in France through commemorative events.¹ If it is true that France's heroes were and perhaps still are its writers,² it is also clear that much remains to be said of the ways in which Third Republic France generated literary heroes and the grounds upon which these figures were shaped to define a cultural pre-eminence. The erection of statues constituted an important element in this process, for it allowed the nation to bring its many “gods” to life and consume them in a form of lay communion. Subscription campaigns, updates in the press on negotiations with artists, and the securing of high-ranking participants for inaugural ceremonies idealized honorees and fostered their appropriation by the public. Judging from the disagreement voiced over certain commemorations, the stakes of figurative public representation were particularly high since they entwined the society's past, present, and future with an idealized body and life-history.³

Indeed, the proliferation of busts risked wiping out the unity that they were meant to create if not reflect. François Coppée equates the multiplication of effigies with the nation's demagogic Republic, and, using a term dear to the period, Olivier de Gourcuff speaks of “statuomanie.”⁴ Their concern was far from gratuitous: the death of the last Romantics, the expansion of secondary education, the widening of the “programme” in 1895, and the resulting production of new literary history manuals led professors and journalists to meditate on the rights of artists to posthumous recognition and on the values associated with distinct forms of iconization, including statues, slots in literary manuals, questions on national exams and posthumous publications. Claiming that “l'usage d'élever des statues fera toujours une partie de l'éducation publique” and that Baudelaire incarnated “la débauche et l'immoralité,” Ferdinand Brunetière objects to the subscription campaign in the latter's honor,⁵ and Doumic laments the proposed statue of Verlaine, while Devernois and Coppée appear dismayed at the lack of professional qualifications of some other honorees: “Pourquoi Banville triomphe-t-il au Luxembourg, et point Baudelaire? Pourquoi Leconte de Lisle et Verlaine y auront-ils leurs monuments avant Théophile Gautier?” (Coppée). Unlike most columnists, however, who discuss the relationship between male models and male viewers, Coppée saves his most specific remarks for two women whose differing statuary fates leave him perplexed:

L'auteur d'Indiana et de Valentine, qui était une femme de génie, n'a pas obtenu les honneurs de la place publique, et l'on vient précisément de les discerner à Mme Desbordes-Valmore, à qui nous devons, certes, quelques poèmes d'une sensibilité délicieuse, mais chez qui nous rencontrons, dans bien des pages, pas mal de romance et de pleurnicherie.

(“Saint-Beuve”)

This comparison reflects the equally forced association of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore with submissive female suffering and maternal discourse and of George Sand with an assault on the family and a reputation for inflicting pain on men. The exaggerated dichotomy is also a side effect of the publicity for the 1896 inauguration in Douai of a statue honoring Desbordes-Valmore; more significantly, it confirms the symbolically charged presence of these women authors on a volatile epistolary scene. In the case of Desbordes-Valmore, a two-volume Correspondance intime appeared early in the year,⁶ perfectly timed to intersect profitably with the inauguration of her statue.⁷ As for Sand, a new series of biographies and articles was preparing the public for the publication of her exchanges with Musset.⁸ In this context, a study of the press coverage accorded to Desbordes-Valmore's statue and the Correspondance intime will reveal some of the mechanics of gendered commemoration at the turn of the century, clarify the role of epistolary monuments in that process and, in responding, albeit mostly by implication, to the temporary preference for Desbordes-Valmore over Sand as an object of iconization, question the effectiveness of the maternal as a valorizing concept.

As an artificially produced monument made of “natural” materials,⁹ correspondences played a vital role in late nineteenth-century rituals of remembrance and canonization. The originals, prized objects of “fétichisme” in a period marked by what Albert Flament terms “le goût de la relique,” facilitated a cultural “culte des morts,” while the publications retrospectively created monuments for a memory-hungry post-revolutionary France.¹⁰ Epistolary texts received extensive press coverage, and, much like statues, the circulation of supposedly original documents coextensive with recently deceased authors' representations both honored them and exposed them to the judgment of the nation. It is hardly surprising, then, that these distinct forms of metonymic public inscription—statues and published letters—should appear frequently in tandem. In April 1896, Le Figaro reminded its readers that profits from the three-volume edition of Hugo's letters would help finance “la souscription pour le monument de Victor Hugo.”¹¹ Doumic recognized the mechanics of this relationship in the Desbordes-Valmore case:

On a voulu rendre hommage à l'aimable poétesse qui eut en vers d'assez heureuses intentions et en resta généralement à l'intention. De toutes les archives privées sont sorties des laisses de lettres intimes. On s'est penché avec une curiosité vivement excitée sur ce passé douleureux …¹²

And, at the end of the year, a writer for Gil Blas explained that the process typically started with a statue that gives renewed visibility to a name; this in turn led to the publication of letters that are commented upon “avec frénésie.”¹³

Correspondences could play this alternately iconoclastic and apotheosizing role because the textual bodies of these purportedly more honest forms of memoirs were endowed with several mutually reinforcing powers: they confirmed the popular “homme-œuvre” correlation and satisfied a positivistic search for documentary truth on the part of journalists, professors of literary history, and writers alike, for whom epistolary fame and shame facilitated the task of triage of authors whose letters were increasingly finding their way into archives and libraries, where they were forming France's “artificial or archival memory.”¹⁴ Van Bever is typical when he reminds his readers that copies of the Desbordes-Valmore letters published by Rivière are available for consultation.¹⁵ Correspondences could also stand as monuments themselves, since, according to influential critics and the writers of compilations such as La Littérature française par la dissertation,¹⁶ letters constituted a peculiarly French, and even more specifically, feminine genre. Even as literary critics from the political left joined their peers from the right in denouncing the unpatriotic, sexually ambiguous, and morally destructive autobiographical texts that self-obsessed Romantic authors had foisted upon an unsuspecting nation, epistolary writing escaped virtually unscathed, and criticism centered most frequently on the appropriate organization and timing of publications. Typical in this regard is Brunetière, who admits that France has never produced a Milton, a Shakespeare, a Kant, or a Goethe, but consoles himself with the fact that no other country can claim a correspondence comparable to that of Voltaire, “ou à celle de Mme de Sévigné, rien de comparable seulement à celle de Madame du Deffand ou de Mademoiselle de Lespinasse; et c'est bien déjà quelque chose.”¹⁷ Gustave Lanson, who admits writing “pour la patrie,” agrees when he places epistolarity, the epitome of written social exchange, at the center of the nation's unique artistic strengths: “Les qualités qui font le prix des lettres sont trop essentielles à notre race pour que je croie qu'on cesse jamais d'en écrire d'agréables chez nous.”¹⁸ In so doing, and unlike Brunetière, Doumic, and Roustan who see the genre's decline in the Romantic period,¹⁹ Lanson fails to detect any decadence (xxii) and claims that the nineteenth century has successfully carried on the tradition of its elders (xxiii).

For this reason, correspondences offered writers, and especially the suspect Romantic and doubly suspect Romantic women writers, a means by which they could ensure their classification as truly French and truly women. When the first volume of George Sand's family-authorized version of her correspondence appeared in 1882, it was, therefore, perfectly logical for Barbey d'Aurevilly to use the mundane tone of her texts to question the letter-writer's sexual identity.²⁰ In the case of Desbordes-Valmore, the stakes of epistolary “correctness” did not appear as high: when Rivière published two volumes of her missives a year and a half into the realization of Montesquiou-Fresnac's 1894 plan to honor her with a statue, the poet's sobriquet as the Mater Dolorosa of France, bestowed upon her by Sainte-Beuve and Jules Michelet, remained unchallenged in the press.²¹ The expectation was that this devoted mother would adhere to the code of epistolary maternal discourse and prove herself to be “une nouvelle Mme de Sévigné, plus tendre et plus malheureuse que la première.”²² The two-volume body of letters did nothing to dispel this idea; readers could admire the letters sent by this “tendre Sévigné du malheur” to her children,²³ and critics insatiably retold the story of an adolescent Desbordes bouncing her future husband, then a child, on her knee, later hesitating before believing that he could be romantically mature enough to lay claim to her hand and, finally, treating her young husband like a spoiled child. In the five-part series that Jules Lemaître devoted to this story in his column, “La Semaine dramatique,” the critic goes further than most when he outright suggests gender inversion: “les rôles sont intervertis dans cette réunion puisque c'est lui qui est le plus jeune de sept ans, le plus faible et le plus beau.”²⁴ Most critics, nonetheless, did remark that the poet expressed her marital love in quasi-maternal expressions and showed an indulgent blindness that only a mother could display—“elle n'est que tendre pitié pour ce grand enfant prodigue,” writes Frédéric Loliée.²⁵ Desbordes-Valmore's “maternal” style might have been the simple effect of female rhetorical training, but it was prized as exemplary.²⁶ The revelation, however, made in a letter that was included in the introduction rather than in the official corpus, of a hitherto undisclosed child, born out of wedlock and dead at a young age, retrospectively turned the poet into what, in Christian dogma, Mary had narrowly escaped becoming, a “fille-mère,” temporarily endangering her status as it provoked much public discussion.

Given the irony with which mainstream journalists covered the demands of feminists who spoke both about the rights of unmarried mothers and the rights of women not to bear children, the reporting of the Parisian press made of the news a scandal “qui n'en était pas un.” Not that journalists turned away from the spectacle of women's endless suffering; on the contrary, the story of seduction and illegitimate procreation told through and mostly around Desbordes-Valmore's letters gave critics an opportunity to articulate their understanding of the maternal.

Instead of condemning the poet for immorality or using her as an example of modern social disintegration, journalists praised her courage and indulged themselves in the reassuring spectacle of feminine masochism. Gaston Deschamps, for example, placed Desbordes-Valmore in the prestigious Héroïdes tradition so as to establish her superiority over Sand, Staël, Mme de Maintenon, and even the great Sévigné herself:

nous devons [à l'amant inconnu] les plus beaux cris d'amour que les lettres aient entendus depuis Sappho et Mlle de Lespinasse. […] son cœur saigna d'une intime blessure. Elle se fit malheureuse. Elle aima son mal. […] De toutes nos femmes de lettres, c'est peut-être la seule qui soit vraiment une femme. A côté d'elle, Mme de Sévigné a l'air d'un bon garçon, et Mme de Maintenon fait l'effet d'un proviseur. Ni hommase comme Mme de Staël, ni gendelettre comme l'était un peu la géniale Sand, elle eut, en vers et en prose, l'écriture grêle, fine, allongée, qui convient à son sexe.²⁷

Others picked up on this article, among them a writer who recognized that the masochistic bonds defining feminine love—“Les femmes aiment à se soumettre … Il faut les servir en les dominant”—bind the public to them: “C'est la destinée des amoureuses d'être aimées après leur mort.”²⁸ Charles Eoley, in this spirit, justifies his absence from the inaugural festivities, for his loving respect for the poet's modesty and vaguely religious piety demand quiet reverence.²⁹ Séverine, in turn, claims Desbordes-Valmore as the patron saint of women writers: “Et, au nom de toutes les bas-bleus, sûre de n'être jamais démentie par aucune, j'attache ce souvenir comme un bouquet, Marceline, au socle de ta statue.”³⁰ Georges Rodenbach and many others affirm an explicitly filial relationship to the maternal poet: “On se prend à l'aimer comme une mère. C'est notre mère en double dirait-on” (110).³¹ Through love and poetic verve, for which Rodenbach is one of a few to give her credit, she achieved distinction, but like her biblical model, her greatest achievement remains an act of asexual procreation through which she gave birth to Verlaine, “né de sa divine maternité poétique.”³²

In light of his admiration for the poet's production of male greatness, it is not surprising that, like others, Rodenbach also deplores (or at least appears to deplore, since his objections are suspiciously colorful) the unauthorized, hence illegal, correspondence whose display of the material “underside” of maternal idealizations is nothing short of obscene:

Lettre nobles. […] Mais un tragique aveu s'y intercale, pli à l'œuvre, secret violé de cette vie, blessure vive sur laquelle elle avait tant pris soin de draper les chastes plis de ses poèmes. […] sous ces draps blancs se cachait le sang d'une maternité coupable.³³

This “original” guilt, told in Desbordes-Valmore's letters, which Rodenbach terms an unfortunate “retour à la terre originelle,” rules out recourse to certain images of the virgin mother, but it does render even more pertinent the earlier characterizations of the poet as Mater Dolorosa. Flowing blood, criminal and divine, links first-time intercourse and childbirth to this traditional representation of empathetic suffering. And references to “la mère en double” permeate articles on Desbordes-Valmore, from those of irreverent newspaper journalists, like Jules Lemaître (2), to that penned by her most fervent admirer, Montesquiou-Fezenac—“L'hostie blanche, la pure colombe a rougi, pleuré, saigné” (8), he writes, saddened that unsophisticated readers, fascinated by “une tare de la chaire faible,” will now reach for her through the thought of intimate physical contact rather than through her poems or, as he puts it, “par l'ouverture de ses plaies” (10).

“Pli à l'œuvre,” Desbordes-Valmore's correspondence functions as a monumental sullied sexual organ, a compelling and unsavory reminder of the sexualized maternal within every young girl. As such, the texts seem to fit well within the edifying purposes assigned in newspapers to parodies of female letter-writing. While the Marceline Desbordes-Valmore story was literally “unfolding,” readers could consider “Lettres de femmes,” a feature in Le Journal whose classificatory subtitles—including “Nos Aïeules,” “Les Pratiques,” “L'Infidèle,” “Styles d'amour” and “PAPA”—and common goal of unveiling forbidden feminine sexual desire through epistolary revelations implicitly defined the publication of women's letters, even Desbordes-Valmore's, as a cautionary lesson for men.³⁴ As Bernard-Kahler notes, the publication of real “lettres de femmes” unearths an obscene body of knowledge:

l'on descend dans l'existence des femmes. Et l'on ne s'aperçoit pas qu'à ouvrir un cercueil et à chercher sur des lèvres décolorées et sous des paupières closes une flamme du regard, un sourire de promesses, il y a autant de profanation que de relever, en pleine rue, les jupes d'une enfant.³⁵

Admiration can then quickly change to horror: Armand Silvestre affirms that the correspondences of writers such as Desbordes-Valmore and Mme Hugo had made of 1896 a year “[qui] aura marqué sa place et son estampille dans les annales du dégout” (“La Matriarche”). By publicizing the fact that France's relatively “immaculate” poetic mother (Lemaître 31) was nothing more than a common, if tragically unfortunate, woman whose desire had led her both to “fall” too early and to write inappropriately sensual letters to her husband late in life (Loliée 546), France's literary critics did more than rehumanize a woman whom Barbey d'Aurevilly had earlier characterized as ethereal, a “Corinne simplifiée, purifiée, attendrie, mais amincie jusqu'à ne plus être”³⁶; they claimed to penetrate the protected domain of maternal discourse, unveil the truth about women, and, in the secure field of metaphor, to imitate the poet's husband and perform incest.

Too pathetic to condemn, Desbordes-Valmore is wholly subsumed in the roles of abandoned woman, devoted mother and obedient wife, ready to move according to her husband's desires, prepared to give up writing if he should so wish and ever ready to forgive his infidelities (I 32, 64, 157; II 22). As Rivière states in his preface to the letters, they furnish indisputable proof of “l'obéissance infirme, l'abandon et comme la confusion de sa vie avec le maître de sa vie” (xxiv). Years later, Pierre Lasserre demonstrates the importance of this interpretation when he praises Desbordes-Valmore's correspondence for the example it provides of self-mutilation:

En voilà donc une au moins qui n'était pas férue des droits de sa personnalité—une personnalité de femme de lettres et de poète de génie, s'il vous plaît. Je mets volontiers au dessus de tous les poèmes de Marceline sa correspondance avec ce ridicule mari, non que lui-même, certes, m'intéresse beaucoup, mais parce que, pour lui, Marceline atteignit cet héroïsme de la bonté obscure qui est pour toute femme, poète ou non, le suprême génie.³⁷

Thus framed, the correspondence ensured the imprisonment of the poet's lyric voice in simplistic paradigms of feminine self-referentiality, proving all the while that little distinguished her—except her devotion to expiation—from the sex-craving women whose figures fill the period's newspaper caricatures. It is in fact difficult to find anyone who would discuss the letters themselves other than as perfect representations of feminine fallibility and punishment. Séverine, like most, prefers the woman as revealed through her letters to the poet; moreover, she too shuns literary analysis of the Correspondance intime (“MARCELINE”). Indeed, the dearth of any serious critical study is such that Georges D'Heylli's banal suggestion, that a comparison of her correspondence with that of others would show their “intéressante originalité,” appears radical.³⁸ As for Frédéric Loliée, he is the only one, after the pseudonymic Louis Vérité,³⁹ who discusses “la monotonie de la douleur” and admits, “A vrai dire, cette plainte revient avec une fréquence dont le lecteur éprouve quelque lassitude à la longue” (551).

Desbordes-Valmore represents a case in which universal approval or, at worst, benign indifference, governed a woman's inscription in statue form, and this as much because of rather than in spite of its accompanying and quasi-obligatory epistolary, commemorative scandal. When France's literary authorities traveled by train, therefore, to honor her in a town whose geographic marginality reflected the place of women writers in the French literary canon,⁴⁰ they were recognizing much less Kristeva's privileged maternal than the murdered wife and mother who, according to Luce Irigaray, is the foundation for Western civilization.⁴¹ Henry Fouquier recognizes both the meaning and its implications well when he links Desbordes-Valmore's fate to that of all women writers—“Cette statue érigée en honneur de la poétesse a remis sur le tapis la question des femmes-écrivains, des Bas-Bleus”—and concludes that the statue honors pain: “N'est-ce pas la douleur qui a fait cette Desbordes-Valmore à qui on dresse une statue? Et serait-elle autre chose qu'une rimeuse comme il y en a tant si, restée femme, elle n'avait souffert d'être femme?”⁴² As an allegory the statue successfully concretized the separation of the mother from speech, the poet from her own verbal productions, and the “bas-bleu” from the canon.

This possibility (the statue as allegory) suggests both the historical accuracy and present ideological danger of reading Kristeva's representation of the maternal as a figure of feminine empowerment; Barbey d'Aurevilly's notoriously misogynic description of Desbordes-Valmore's verses as “la poésie du Cri” (148) and Larnac's facile praise of her rhythmic and consequently ignorant female artistry (199)⁴³ fit Kristeva's description of pre-verbal communication in the maternal chora so closely that the construction appears less as a past refuge and more as a modern torture chamber. Rodenbach's description of the letter-writer, adapted from Sainte-Beuve's exaltation of her “cris d'amour ou de douleur,”⁴⁴ is eloquent:

Elle, surtout, a fait de la poésie vraiment féminine. Elle a un sexe littéraire. Elle a le cri des entrailles, la couvée silencieuse, les larmes promptes, les soubresauts de la passion, les déchirements, les trouées lumineuses, les jets de sang comme a dit Barbier, les jets de sang de ses paumes, de ses pieds, de son front couronné d'épines, de son flanc percé, de toute les blessures divines de cette Crucifiée de l'art.

(110)

Indeed, the correlation lends credence to Lynne Huffer's critique of the maternal as a nostalgic, conservative construction.⁴⁵ Just as the weight of Christian iconography may well have influenced the poet's expression of her pain, it underpinned the construction of Rivière's publication, a volume whose “preface” or foundation of female weakness and punishment reinforced an image of the woman poet that, while honoring her, signaled her petrifaction and exclusion from other, arguably more important, forms of recognition, notably a significant place in literary history manuals.

The spectacle of prolonged agony, conveyed through texts published in a ceremonial and literary rape, formed, like her statue, a “body” that literally blocked the study of Desbordes-Valmore until Christine Planté undertook her seminal studies; in 1896, that spectacle also provided a timely term of comparison against which George Sand could be “read.” Little wonder that Sand's letters to Musset provoked such an explosive reaction in the press when they appeared in Fall 1896. The novelist's age difference with Musset, who was not her husband, promoted an image of maternal perversion, while her subsequent treason in preferring a brawny Italian doctor to France's sublime poet both defied the sexual logic of literary nationalism and reversed the canonical paradigm of abandonment. Most importantly, Sand could not be possessed through the appropriation of her texts since she had planned for their publication herself (McCall Saint-Saëns 271-73). For fin de siècle France, Desbordes-Valmore represented, therefore, a far better candidate for public figurative iconization than the “inépuisable” Sand.⁴⁶ As Georges Rodenbach summarized:

Marceline Valmore est la plus grande des femmes françaises. A ceux qui insistent, aujourd'hui, sur l'infériorité des femmes, sur leur incapacité foncière et pour ainsi dire organique, il suffit de répondre par ce nom-là, une femme tout uniquement de génie, mieux que George Sand, trop consacrée, et qui, vraiment, ne fut, elle, qu'un homme de lettres.

(109)

In interviews staged as a debate by La nouvelle revue internationale two days after the inauguration of the statue in Douai, François Coppée and Emile Zola were asked to comment on posthumous epistolary publications. Coppée declared that he was “absolument contre,” and he cited Desbordes-Valmore's Correspondance intime as an example of a destructive publication. Zola, in contrast, placed himself squarely in the camp of proponents: “les lettres sont l'expression exacte d'une vérité.”⁴⁷ In light of the uses to which epistolary and statuary monuments have been put, it remains urgent that we not fall dupe to the “truth” that women are molded into expressing.

Notes

1. See Pierre Nora, “L'ère de commémoration,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Lieux de Mémoire III, vol. 3: De l'archive à l'emblème (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 975-1012.

2. Priscilla Parkhurst Clark, Literary France: The Making of a Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987).

3. June Hargrove, “Les Statues de Paris,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Lieux de Mémoire II, vol. 3: La Nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 243-82. This excellent study concentrates on political control of the process and on more overtly political male figures.

4. François Coppée, “Bustes et statues,” Le Journal, 11 juin 1896; Olivier de Gourcuff, “Causerie,” Nouvelle revue européenne, 15 juillet 1896: 402-03.

5. Ferdinand Brunetière, “La Statue de Baudelaire,” Nouveaux essais sur la littérature contemporaine, 3^e éd. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1897), 154-55, 156; René Doumic, “Les Statues de Paris,” Etudes sur la littérature française 2^e série (Paris: Didier Perrin, 1900), 295-319; Henri Duvernois, “Verlaine,” La Presse, 13 janvier 1896; François Coppée, “Sainte-Beuve,” Le Journal, 6 août 1896.

6. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Correspondance intime, ed. Benjamin Rivière (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1896).

7. For a summary of the ceremony that included Anatole France and Sarah Bernhardt and that was to include Verlaine, who died before it took place, see Georges Malet, “Mme Desbordes-Valmore,” Gazette de France, 14 juillet 1896.

8. Anne McCall Saint-Saëns, “Fins de séries: La Correspondance Sand-Musset et la critique ‘fin de siècle,’” in L'Épistolaire, un genre féminin?, ed Christine Planté (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 265-78.

9. Armand Silvestre plays on sexual overtones in referring to these volumes as the result of “artificial generation.” “La Matriarche,” Le Journal, 18 décembre 1896.

10. Albert Flament, “Une urne remplie de larmes. Un poète féminin au XIX^e siècle,” Le Gaulois, 17 août 1909.

11. “La Correspondance de Victor Hugo,” Le Figaro, 7 avril 1896.

12. René Doumic, “Ce qui sort des tombes,” Le Gaulois, 31 août 1896.

13. Lamoignon, “Les alcoves littéraires. Le livre d'amour,” Gil Blas, 3 décembre 1896.

14. Richard Terdiman, Present Past. Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 30.

15. A. Van Bever, Méditation sentimentale sur Desbordes-Valmore (Paris: Bibliothèque de l'association, 1896), 13. For other examples, see René Doumic, “Ce qui sort des tombes,” and Henry Lapauze, “On ne publiera pas la Correspondance d'Alfred de Musset,” Le Gaulois, 5 septembre 1896.

16. M. Roustan, La Littérature française par la dissertation IV (Paris: Paul Delaplane, n.d.).

17. Ferdinand Brunetière, Questions de critique, 4^e éd. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988), 50.

18. Gustave Lanson, Lettres choisies du XVII^e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1898), xiv.

19. Ferdinand Brunetière, “Avertissement,” Prosper Mérimée, Une correspondance inédite (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1897), ii; “Les Lettres de Mérimée,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 octobre 1897: 913-14; M. Roustan, La Lettre (évolution d'un genre) (Paris: Librairie Paul Delaplane, 1904), 6-10, 112-15, 120.

20. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Œuvres et les hommes, vol. XIII, Littérature épistolaire (Genève: Slatkine, 1968), 363-74 (367).

21. André Maurel, “Un hommage à Marceline,” Le Figaro, 4 juillet 1896.

22. Eliane Jasenas, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore devant la critique (Genève: Droz/Paris: Minard, 1962), 124.

23. Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, Autels privilégiés (Paris: Fasquelle, 1899), 388.

24. Jules Lemaître, Les Contemporains, 7^e série (Paris: Société française, 1899), 1-46.

25. Frédéric Loliée, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” Revue encyclopédique, 18 juin 1896: 546.

26. Love letters were practically banished from epistolary manuals in the nineteenth-century, leaving Mme de Sévigné and maternal discourse as the only permissible vehicles for the epistolary expression of passion. See Volker Kapp, “L'art épistolaire dans les manuels scolaires du XIX^e siècle,” in L'Épistolarité à travers les siècles, ed. Mireille Bossis (Stuttgart: Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 1990), 125-26.

27. Gaston Deschamps, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” Le Temps, 12 juillet 1896.

28. “Journaux et revues. A propos de la statue de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” Nouvelle revue européenne, 15 juillet 1896: 602-07.

29. Charles Eoly, “(Bas-Bleuettes) Les Vraies Timides,” L'Echo de Paris, 1 juillet 1896.

30. Séverine, “MARCELINE,” L'Echo de Paris, 10 juillet 1896.

31. This characterization remains typical. See Jean Larnac, Histoire de la littérature féminine en France (Paris: Editions Kra, 1929), 199-200.

32. Georges Rodenbach, L'Élite (Paris: Fasquelle, 1899), 117.

33. Georges Rodenbach, “La Correspondance des écrivains,” Le Figaro, 29 mars 1896.

34. Marcel Prévost, “Lettres de Femmes. Nos Aïeules,” Le Journal, 27 janvier 1896; “Lettres de femmes. L'Infidèle,” 10 février 1896; “Lettres de femmes. Les Pratiques,” 24 février 1896; “Lettres de femmes. Styles d'amour,” 9 mars 1896; “Lettres de femmes. PAPA,” 23 mars 1896.

35. G. Bernard-Kahler, “Les lettres de femmes,” Le Voltaire, 14 septembre 1896.

36. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Œuvres et les hommes, III. Les Poètes, 1862 (Genève: Slatkine, 1968), 145-58.

37. Pierre Lasserre, Portraits et discussions (Paris: Mercure de France, 1914).

38. Georges D'Heylli, “La Quinzaine,” La Gazette anecdotique, 30 juin 1896: 365.

39. Louis Vérité, Un Épisode peu connu de la vie de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (Douai: Imprimerie Delattre et Gaulois, 1896), 2.

40. Séverine writes, “Car il ne faut point s'y tromper: on les tolère (parfois avec enthousiasme), on les tolère en tant qu'anomalie; infime minorité que, volontiers, comme atteinte d'une maladie contagieuse, on parquerait loins des gynécées.” “La littérature féminine,” Le Journal, 15 août 1896.

41. Julia Kristeva, Histoires d'amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), 294-327; Luce Irigaray, Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (Montréal: Editions de la pleine lune, 1981), 32-33.

42. Henri Fouquier, “Les Bas-bleus,” Le Figaro, 5 juillet 1896.

43. See Christine Planté, “L'Art sans art de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” Europe 697 (May 1987): 164-75.

44. Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1870).

45. Lynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures. Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 73-95.

46. Deberdt, “Lettres d'amour,” Le Voltaire, 2 février 1897.

47. “Nos interviews: Correspondances posthumes,” Nouvelle revue internationale, 15 juillet 1896.