first novel not a mere imitation of seventeenth century novels, but a parody. It is more likely that the young author was experimenting and searching for his own style through imitation. In the “Avis,” he expresses his ideas about the problems he sees in the writing of novels at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He opposes “reason,” which establishes rules, to “nature,” which is instinct, the base of spontaneous feeling of pleasures of the heart. He praises “feminine intuition” and castigates male pedantry. Another question raised by Marivaux is that of truth in writing when he remarks that fiction is capable of moving readers more agreeably than reality. A novelist should not worry about realism, so long as the effect is successful. The writer appeals to the emotions rather than to the intellect.

This first novel by Marivaux is interesting from a thematic point of view. Ronald Rosbottom points out that it includes elements that “presage some of Marivaux’s more serious preoccupations in his later works,” namely, the psychological complications of initial love, the specific subject of the young orphaned girl, and the role of mask, disguise, and subterfuge in social relations.

Pharsamond

During the time he was writing his first novel, Marivaux was also working on his second one, Pharsamond, definitely a parody, sometimes referred to as “The Modern Don Quixote.” The hero, Pierre Bagnol, is eighteen years old; he has read many heroic stories and wants to experience similar adventures. He and his servant, Cliton, meet Cidalise and her suivante, Fatime, who want to be treated like heroines in a novel. Pharsamond-Pierre fights for his lady, Cliton does the same in the kitchen, and Cidalise’s mother throws them out. They return home, where they are scolded by Pierre’s uncle, but leave again in search of new adventures, which they find in an old castle. A lady, Clorine, dressed in a man’s clothes, and her suivante tell their story and fall madly in love with the pseudo-Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who flee, pursued unsuccessfully by their high-spirited mistresses. The two men find their first loves, are chased away once more by the mother, and arrive at a house where a marriage is being celebrated; this gives Cliton another opportunity to create havoc in the kitchen and in the reception room. Both heroes are finally cured by a magician and settle down to a much more prosaic life.

In Pharsamond, Marivaux studies again the relationships between reality and imagination as the four main characters move among the down-to-earth country people. Clorine is another precursor of Marianne; she is an orphan loved by a young nobleman whom she refuses to marry because of his family’s opposition and her lack of wealth. Marivaux’s favorite theme, that of a young girl facing a moral and a psychological dilemma while analyzing the initial feelings of love, is more developed in Pharsamond than it is in his first novel.

La Voiture embourbée

Marivaux’s preoccupation with the theme of reality and illusion continues to show in La Voiture embourbée (the stagecoach stuck in the mud), a short novel that begins like Marguerite de Navarre’s L’Heptamerón (1559; The Queene of Navarres Tales, 1597; also known as The Heptameron, 1959). To pass the time while the coach is being repaired, a group of travelers agree to tell stories, but instead of different stories, as in The Heptameron, the characters—who include the author himself, a middle-aged lady, her daughter, a bel esprit (or witty person), and an aging but gallant financier—are each going to add an episode to the story proposed by the author about Amandor and Ariobarsane, revealing their personalities through their contributions to the narration.

The frame story shows the passengers making their way at night to an inn in a country village. The heroes of the story started by the narrator are again readers of novels who wish to become characters in a novel. When the middle-aged lady takes over, she fills the story with disguises, kidnappings, and separations of lovers that show her taste for the romances of the previous centuries. She tells her audience that she tried to give them what they requested, something tragic, something magical, and something astonishing. The bel esprit adds murder, prisons, and torture. The young girl ends the horror story of her predecessor by waking up the heroine, Ariobarsane, from her nightmare and adding everyday risqué situations that show that, at fifteen years of age, she knows the facts of life. The financier then shows his romantic dreams by reuniting Amandor and Ariobarsane, and the local curate’s nephew, who has been asked to join in, wraps up the story with a celebration in which all the characters drink too much and fall asleep. They find, then, that the coach has been repaired; the travelers go on their way, and when the author reaches his destination, he decides to write down what happened on his trip.

The interest of La Voiture embourbée rests in the formula used by Marivaux, combining his parodies of romantic fiction with a great share of realism. In this work, he developed the technique that he perfected in The Life of Marianne and The Fortunate Peasant, the use of a participant narrator. Marivaux thus shifted his authorial interventions to the narrative voice; the narrator is part of the story, yet, at the same time, he is above it; he can look inside himself and be looked at.

Le Télémaque travesti

Marivaux wrote one more novel around 1714, Le Télémaque travesti, which shows a young peasant, Brideron, and his uncle, Phocion, trying to relive the adventures of Telemachus because the young man’s father went to war and never came back. François Fénelon’s Télémaque (1699; The Adventures of Telemachus, 1720) is their bible and their travel guide; they plan each step according to its outline, making each one of their many adventures fit those of Ulysses’ son. Part of the interest in this work comes from the transposition of the Greek heroes’ experiences to those of Brideron and Phocion, who do not venture very far from their own French province. The constant references to the wars of Louis XIV, the satires of petty provincial tyrants, and the fights between Catholics and Huguenots make of the long novel a social document. Of interest also is the growing ability shown by Marivaux in depicting the reality of the exterior world and its effect on heroes who “have considerable difficulty in distinguishing between appearance and reality, even on the most obvious level,” as Rosbottom points out. Most of the novel is made up of dialogues between Brideron and Phocion, as Marivaux honed his skills to write for the stage.

From 1714 to 1727, Marivaux devoted most of his time to the theater, writing sixteen plays during this period, including a fragment of “Mahomet Second” and “L’Amour et la vérité” (love and truth). During those years, he married, had a child, and lost his wife and his money. When he returned to the novel with The Life of Marianne, he was no longer an author in search of a personal style but a successful writer in the prime of life, ready to produce what some consider not only his masterpiece but also one of the best novels of the eighteenth century.

The Life of Marianne

Marivaux’s interest in the theme of the young orphaned girl was evident from the time he wrote his first novel. The Life of Marianne is the story of a poor young girl on a quest for identity. She knows nothing about her origins, but she is convinced that her parents belonged to the high nobility. The aim of the fifteen-year-old Marianne is to force people to recognize her value. Because birth gives and even dictates the moral qualities that define a human being, Marianne uses her virtue to prove her worth. (A more recent edition of Marivaux’s novel had for its title The Virtuous Orphan: Or, The Life of Marianne.) She in turn uses her moral qualities to reflect her high birth because, as the French proverb goes, good blood cannot lie.

Upon the death of the old people who brought her up, Marianne finds herself in the humiliating position of having to accept a job in a laundry. Though she refuses the offer of an old gentleman, Monsieur de Climal, to provide her with a small apartment and a pension, her virtue does not prevent her from accepting, temporarily, the beautiful clothes he has bought for her. Marianne wears them to church, where she catches the eye, and the heart, of a young, handsome, and rich count named Valville. Coincidences play a large part in Marivaux’s novel. Marianne tries to keep Valville from finding out that she lives with a common laundress, but he has her followed by one of his servants. When he comes to pay his respects, he finds his own uncle, Monsieur de Climal, at Marianne’s feet. In great danger of losing her reputation, Marianne has to convince the people around her that Monsieur de Climal is not the pure and generous philanthropist everyone thinks he is, but an old Tartuffe. She congratulates herself for having kept the dress as proof of his immoral designs.

Not wanting to return to the laundress, Marianne is totally distraught and is crying in a church where a kind lady notices her. Madame de Miran, touched by the orphan’s misfortunes and her obvious fine qualities, takes her in charge, pays her pension in a convent, and soon considers herself Marianne’s adoptive mother. Having followed the path of virtue, Marianne is rewarded by moving closer to the man she loves, as Valville is Madame de Miran’s son. For the love of her new mother, however, even more than for the love of Valville’s reputation, she declares herself ready to forget him and to force him to forget her, all the time expecting her great sacrifice to be well rewarded. Madame de Miran is so impressed that she soon gives her consent to her son’s and Marianne’s marriage. Relatives who learn, in spite of all precautions taken, of Marianne’s unknown origins are determined to save Valville from himself; they kidnap Marianne and try to force her to marry, on the spot, a lower-class citizen. Fortunately, Marianne has a gift for long speeches that prove her virtue, her disinterest, and her self-sacrificing nature. Once more, she makes such a favorable impression that she convinces everybody of her moral nobility, which can come only from a noble ancestry.

Obstacles having been removed, the novel could end happily, but it is now discovered that Valville is not a constant lover; he is susceptible to damsels in distress, and Marianne—no longer in distress—has lost that certain charm. When he sees in his fiancé’s convent an attractive girl, Mademoiselle Varthon, who has just fainted, the sight overwhelms him. This girl is most cooperative, and Marianne faces once more the danger of losing Valville and her identity, inasmuch as being allowed to marry him was a proof of her nobility: I might well be reduced to a smart lass, an adventurer, and a little creature beneath their notice, who was no longer worthy of their care and who had been very bold to presume to wound the heart of a gentleman.

She wonders whether she should become a nun, and her story is now interrupted by the long one of Tervire, a nun in the convent, a melodramatic and bitter tale aimed presumably at proving to Marianne that knowing one’s aristocratic parents does not ensure happiness, and that one should not become a nun without being sure of one’s vocation.

Marivaux never finished The Life of Marianne, and critics have thought of several reasons for the author’s loss of interest. He may have been sensitive to contemporary criticism, which alleged that he would never catch up with his heroine’s story because it took him ten years, from 1731 to 1741, to account for less than fourteen weeks of her life. He had given one of his characters the honor of stating the moral of his tale: “I am not concerned about your family, for if you were of royal extraction, would it add anything to your personal merit?” Marivaux may have lost interest in Marianne as he was working at the same time on The Fortunate Peasant.

More significant is that Marianne had painted herself into a corner. If she allows Valville to marry someone else, the world will know he has found someone better than she, an unbearable thought for someone who considers that the quality of her virtue places her above all around her. There is no doubt in her mind that she can recapture Valville’s love, but she does not want anybody to think she lowered herself to compete with Mademoiselle Varthon, morally so inferior to her. She would also have to fight off all the ladies in distress that her flighty husband might find on his path. Marrying the old officer, who does not care about her unknown ancestors, or becoming a nun will show the world that Valville broke her heart. All that Marivaux lets the reader know about his heroine is that she eventually becomes a countess.

From traditional novels with their lost princesses in search of parents, The Life of Marianne draws its love story characterized by obstacles impossible to overcome. It is in the memoir form, as old Marianne, now a countess, reconstructs her life for the benefit of a close friend, by means of a long letter, which makes this novel one of the many eighteenth century epistolary novels. At the same time, The Life of Marianne is a new type of novel in its point of view. With a recall of some thirty-five years, the now worldly-wise and experienced Marianne explains and rationalizes her past actions, words, and intimate thoughts as she sets out to prove that she is the kind of person she thinks she is. “She consults the aristocratic principle within herself,” writes Peter Brooks, “and brings to light the kind of behavior it dictates to her.” Her story is a series of interior recognition scenes in which Marianne discovers in herself aristocratic origins. She feels at home when in high society, while she records her instinctive repugnance for the laundress and her shop.

Marivaux describes his novel as a “tissue of events which have given [Marianne] a certain knowledge of the human heart and character.” Jean Rousset uses the term “structure of the double register” to explain Marivaux’s innovation, Marianne being, at the same time, the one who lives her adventures and the one who tells them, inheriting the double roles of heroine and narrator, which until then were distributed between separate persons. The two registers remain distinct and disjointed; the older Marianne who narrates is not the young Marianne living her isolation and her love; she looks at her from afar; she has for young Marianne the feeling of an author who knows the fate of the character whose life he is writing and who is at the same time somewhat of a stranger. The structure of the double register, as Brooks explains it, “permits a complex play between the tone of experience and that of freshness, the worldly and the spontaneous, the lucid and the indefinite, what Marianne will become and what she is” at fifteen.

Beyond her introspection lies Marianne’s acute ability to perceive what others think of her and to act in a manner that always puts her at her best, imposing on all the image that she has of herself, but using different “masks” for the different kinds of persons she sets out to impress. The church episode in which she first sees Valville is one of many examples. She knows she is beautiful because of the way the other young ladies look at her; they show their feelings of spite and jealousy all the more when they try to conceal them. The way Marianne is looked at provides her with an identity. After having lost sight of Valville and walking home, Marianne does not feel the necessity of acting and puts down her mask: “My thoughts were no longer full of myself, and I did not even wish to be agreeable: indifferent to all but him, I neglected my charms, and took no care to display them to the best advantage.”

One of the worst things that can happen is being unmasked by the enemy. While visiting Madame de Fare and wearing her mask of the young lady from a good background, Marianne runs into the laundress. Marianne tries to avoid exposure to Madame de Fare by pretending to be sick, but “every impression of those emotions with which I had been agitated remained still on my countenance; there might be seen there an air of grief and consternation which I could not remove.” Everyone in Marivaux’s novels is so aware of the necessity of wearing a mask that Marianne is encouraged to do so by one of her benefactors. In order to discourage Valville’s assiduities at first, she must feign indifference and “persuade him, even with the appearance of regret, that he will love her in vain and that she is not in a condition to return his affection.” When Madame de Miran accepts Marianne as a daughter-in-law, she knows she will have to wear a mask. “If my son marries you and the world can be convinced it was against my consentI shall not fail to appear angry; but at last I shall be reconciled and forgive all.”

Mask-wearing may be considered an instinctive means of survival in a hostile society, but it does not exclude a certain dose of hypocrisy, and the title The Virtuous Orphan does not give a true picture of Marianne. Practically every move she makes is the result of calculation. When she has an extreme desire to see Valville, she says “I restrained myself; I refused to go to him, because if Mme de Miran should know it, it would add to her esteem. Thus my refusal was only a laudable piece of artifice.” The winner of this human comedy is the one who unmasks others without allowing himself to be unmasked.

The Fortunate Peasant

Written at the same time as the second and third parts of The Life of Marianne, Marivaux’s The Fortunate Peasant has much in common with that novel in themes as well as in techniques. The memoir form again allows a fifty-year-old narrator to establish a distance between himself and Jacob the protagonist. Even as Marianne refuses Monsieur de Climal’s offer to set her up in a room and is rewarded by meeting Madame de Miran, so Jacob refuses to marry his master’s girlfriend and is rewarded by meeting Mademoiselle Habert. Both Marianne and Jacob succeed in their endeavors with the help of their physical attractiveness. Their reasons for choosing the moral path do not stem so much from rigid codes of ethics as from pride; they feel that they deserve something better. Jacob has no need to settle with his master’s servant when he is sure of being able to seduce his master’s wife.

After working on the novel for two years, Marivaux left it unfinished, with the implication that Jacob would be successful in his quest for money and respectability. Unlike Marianne, Jacob knows that his father is a simple farmer, but he is handsome, intelligent, and adaptable. After some three months of apprenticeship in Paris, he has the good fortune of coming to the rescue of Mademoiselle Habert, a well-preserved “spinster” of about fifty years of age who gives up for him a life devoted to her sister as well as to piety and obedience to a confessor. As well-intentioned relatives had tried to prevent Marianne from marrying Valville, so Jacob has to plead his case to show he is worthy of Mademoiselle Habert. Where Marianne wins by proving the nobility of her soul, Jacob claims he is the social equal of the Habert sisters by bringing them down to his level, because their grandparents were also farmers; from this point of view, Jacob can well be considered the male counterpart of Marianne.

Reflections and examples of mask-wearing abound. Jacob uses two different modes of expression, switching at will the mask of the somewhat sophisticated Parisian for that of the naïve peasant. He says that he always guards his language when he is in the company of men, while he purposely uses provincial expressions with the women, who think of them as cute. Sometimes the mask sticks, and Jacob not only dupes others but also dupes himself: “I acted my part so well,” he says when Mademoiselle Habert asks him if he does not exaggerate his attachment for her, “that I deceived myself.” The narrator, in this instance, tries to excuse the young protagonist, who uses his masks with such expertise that, flirting at dinner simultaneously with three women, he gives each one the impression that he sees only her. This apparently innocent game, with his soon-to-be wife, the landlady, and her daughter, prepares Jacob for bigger catches. His affairs with Madame de Ferval and Madame de Fecour flatter his ego and give him confidence in his abilities; he admits to not loving them but to loving their rank, so much above his.

Jacob the peasant acquires from his devoted wife the title of Monsieur de la Vallée, with the clothes and sword to complete the picture of a gentleman: Clothes make the man in Marivaux’s novels. Without her pretty dress and hat, Marianne would not have been noticed by Valville. Wearing nice clothes is another form of mask-wearing. Jacob, who describes himself as a handsome lad, adds: “What’s a handsome lad in an ordinary dress? Why, he is buried alive, such dupes are our eyes in that respect.”

Jacob loses all countenance when his mask is torn off by one of those coincidences that is reminiscent of Marianne being recognized by the laundress. Having joined Madame de Ferval for an intimate rendezvous in a house in Versailles, Jacob is interrupted by the intrusion of a chevalier who thinks his own mistress is entertaining another man. The chevalier knew Jacob when he was a servant, and suddenly the hero feels no longer like Monsieur de la Vallée, a gentleman worthy of having a liaison with an important lady; he returns instantly to the status of the bowing and scraping servant, unable to utter a sound. The novel ends with another unmasking experience: Invited by a count to go to the Comédie-Française, the elegance he finds there overwhelms the poor Jacob, who again bows each time he is addressed by one of the count’s friends.

Marivaux is now recognized as a pioneer of the novel, even though never completely freed of the romanesque of the preceding century. He made use of the well-worn schemes of the memoir and of the epistolary novel and even of the device of the manuscript-found-in-the-attic, as in The Life of Marianne. His originality is evidenced in an imaginative though convoluted style that is appropriate to the motifs of nearness and distance developed in his fiction, permitting the author to enter into the action as both observer and participant. Marivaux does not reduce the novel to purely psychological analysis, although he is an adept analyst of the heart with all its caprices of feeling and motive. The sensitivities of his protagonists, the subtle retrospective expositions of thoughts and actions experienced long ago but still acutely felt and delineated, give Marivaux the right to insist on his singularity. The subtlety, tonality, and coloring that he gives to his writing allow the reader to understand the total complex of the characters in his novels and plays. His adroit and light style diffuses the fictive picture into charming vignettes and vistas. The smile of pleasure evoked in the reader is as well a smile of rueful understanding.

Marivaux was aware of the newness of his enterprise and made a personal cult of its originality. His most appreciated novels, those placed among the best examples of French fiction, are his unfinished ones. They stand apart and defy the definition of their genre.