Two French Libertine Novels: “The Story of Madame de Luz” and “The Confessions of the Comte de ***,” (review)

For his contemporaries, Charles Pinot-Duclos (1704–72) was a prominent figure in eighteenth-century French life and letters. A habitué of the aristocratic salons, where he was welcomed in spite of his plebeian origins (his father was a hat maker), he also frequented the literary and political cafés, mingling with the intellectuals and artists of his era. Witty, known for his blunt, even coarse, speech, and well connected, he held a number of official positions: Secretary of the Académie française and Royal Historiographer, in addition to, briefly, public office as mayor of Dinan, where he was born. A prolific writer, Duclos penned memoirs and histories on subjects as diverse as the reign of Louis xi and the origins of the French language. He also wrote plays and fiction. The Story of Madame de Luz was widely read, and The Confessions of the Comte de *** was one of the most published and read novels of the eighteenth century, with eight editions during the first year and translations into English and German. The nineteenth century recognized Duclos as a historian and moralist—and Stendhal considered him his favourite author—but his novels (like many written during his era) were less appreciated. The rediscovery of the eighteenth-century novel towards the middle of the twentieth century, canonized in a Pléiade edition, has lead to a reconsideration of Duclos as a novelist of manners who observes and analyses his own society in order to understand the pro found significance of human social experience. Most recently, the interest in libertine novels—the anthologies of Raymond Trousson and Patrick Wald Lasowski, the latter’s again in a Pléiade edition, and the critical studies of Claude Reichler, Colette Cazenobe, and others, as well as Nancy K. Miller, who compares the libertine and sentimental novel—has fixed critical attention on Duclos. So a new translation of his first two novels seems particularly timely.

While the term libertin was used in the seventeenth century to describe free thinkers who challenged religious and moral codes, the eighteenth-century libertine novel is associated with amorous and licentious behaviour. Responding to and defying the social constraints of the ancien régime, the libertine novel takes a variety of forms from the Regency to the Revolution, from Crébillon fils to Sade, and ranges from the philosophical to the pornographic. The common dominator is the search for pleasure, linked to the will for power and the satisfaction of the ego. Male-authored libertine novels insist on male privilege, and they record seduction and betrayal most often in an aristocratic and worldly milieu. Women, however, are not always victims: libertinage has been compared to a game among equals.

The Confessions of the Comte de *** (1741) is in many ways prototypical. Using the popular convention of the memoir novel, the mature hero, like those of Crébillon and Marivaux, looks back with irony on the “folly and errors” (84) of his youth. He presents his tale as a moral lesson and peppers his account with maxims recalling those of La Rochefoucauld, as he chronicles for a young relative his twenty-year career as un homme à la mode and lists the women who have participated in his sexual and social education. His brief portraits have been compared to the Caractères of La Bruyère, although his contemporaries identified some of the characters (for example, Mme de Tonins, who is described along with her salon, is generally considered to be modelled on Mme de Tencin). No real seduction occurs, since the hero picks women whose conquest is certain, nor does he linger on descriptions of pleasure, for all his liaisons are basically the same. The Count becomes more introspective and altruistic in the second part of the novel. He tries to convince...