Choix de lettres (review)

'Il est très vrai', Graffigny observes in a letter to Devaux of 19 April 1745, 'que les lettres, tant mauvaises soient-elles, se font toujours lire et que, quand elles ne diraient que l'histoire d'une vie aussi commune que les nôtres, on lirait que l'on s'est levé, chaussé, vêtu, dîné, soupé, etc' (p. 112). Graffigny's life was not unremarkable, of course, and neither are her letters. Her surviving correspondence runs to some 2500 letters, the critical edition of which, published by the Voltaire Foundation, will eventually reach fifteen volumes (on the most recent of these to appear, volume 9, see FS, LX (2006), 516-17). This selection from her correspondence has been expertly assembled and annotated by a member of the editorial team working on the larger project, English Showalter, who, since the 1960s, has single-handedly done more than any other scholar to restore Graffigny to her rightful place, bringing about nothing less than a wholesale revision in the canon of eighteenth-century writers. Graffigny's letters prove beguiling because they offer the private counterbalance to the public image of her that we might form simply from reading her epistolary novel Lettres d'une Péruvienne. In this excellent anthology, we read about a woman with money worries (she is writing her play Cénie, she tells Devaux in August 1745, simply to make money (p. 117)); a woman who struggles to keep her household in order ('un laquais que j'ai depuis neuf mois', she complains to Devaux in February 1754, 'revint le matin de commission ivre' (p. 239)); a woman who is susceptible to all sorts of unpleasant ailments ('Un besoin me prend,' she notes in June 1746, 'je me traîne à ma garde-robe. Je rends un morceau gros comme un oeuf. Me voilà guérie, libre, dégagée, forte, et je sens mes entrailles reprendre leur doux mouvement' (p. 129)); a woman who is furious at being scorned by her lover of some fifteen years ('Voilà le nœud de tous les tourments que l'on m'a fait souffrir' (p. 83)); a woman who feels as if the menopause is going to kill her ('Je ne puis m'ôter de la tête une seule minute que voici mes derniers six mois qui commencent', she writes in 1743, fifteen years before her death (p. 79)); and a woman who discovers only in middle age what it is to have an orgasm: writing to the impotent Devaux in December 1743 about her new lover, Pierre Valleré, she observes: 'Il m'apprend des choses que mon âme et mes sens ont ignorées toute leur vie' (p. 85). However, at the same time, Graffigny's letters provide unique insights into the public sphere of the mid-eighteenth century too: she goes to the first performance of Voltaire's Mérope in February 1743 ('la pièce est admirable et jouée divinement'), where the audience reacts with such wild enthusiasm that 'Jupiter n'aurait pu se faire entendre' (p. 75); in 1746 she reads Diderot's Pensées philosophiques 'tout d'un trait, sans boire, manger, ni dormir' (p.126); she is gripped in 1758 by Helvétius's De l'esprit ('Il est vrai que son ouvrage contient beaucoup de belles et bonnes choses, mais il a trop hasardé à abien des égards' (pp. 262-63)); and fascinatingly, we witness the ups and downs of her writing the Lettres d'une Péruvienne: at one point in September 1745, for instance, she seems to suffer from writer's block ('Je suis à présent bien embarrassée pour continuer' (p. 118)), but by the following June, she is in more confident mood: 'Je ne me résoudrai jamais à faire de ma Zilie [sic] une petite sauvagesse méprisable telles qu'elles sont à présent' (p. 129). This anthology, then, is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike, as well as for those...