Madame De Graffigny: Correspondance. Tome XI. 2 juillet 1750–19 juin 1751. Lettres 1570–1722 (review)

Volume 10 of Graffigny’s remarkable letters ended with the triumph of her sentimental drama Cénie. (For reviews of preceding volumes, see FS 60 (2006), 516, and 62 (2008), 80–81.) The huge impact of this play is reflected in the first half of the present volume. The Comédie Française is packed despite the extreme summer heat, the parterre applaud almost continually, while the loges are filled with the privileged who readily shed tears. Graffigny receives dozens of complimentary letters and verses, of which she will send to her correspondent Panpan three packets. Pompadour initiates a performance for the French Court, which is appreciated even by the devout Queen and Dauphin. In Graffigny’s native Lorraine Cénie is put on for Stanislas, by his courtiers and then by professionals. The play text is sold for an exceptionally high sum to the printer-publisher Duchesne, who also furnishes 150 free copies which Graffigny dispatches to a range of recipients including the ruling elites of France, Lorraine, Vienna, Prussia and elsewhere. She is recognized in public, and felicitated for her moral sensibility. La Tour wants to paint her, and Adam to sculpt her. Visitors to her tiny house are incessant, with a new nucleus of youthful male admirers who spend much time there. Bret is disturbingly attractive, but she resists her feelings (fearing the thrall of love, but also what she repeatedly calls the ‘ridicule’ and the ‘indessence’ of a liaison at 55 with a man of 33). Palissot is not, but she aids him assiduously with his mediocre tragedy. The young Turgot, just quitting the Church for the Law, she finds increasingly sympathetic. Dromgold performs comic opera songs and poissard verses. All offer diversion during her bouts of nervous illness or depression (‘ce vilain noir’); and all profit from her free entry to the Théâtre français. Graffigny’s public fame means that her letters contain an even wider range of reference than in previous volumes. But the editorial challenge is admirably met, both in cogent annotation (Letter 1639 requires eighty footnotes!) and in the rest of the usual excellent scholarly apparatus in this series.

Cénie is, to our taste, melodramatic and insufferably sententious; so how does one explain its great impact at the time? It seems to reflect, neatly at the mid-century, a general shift in ethos away from the ironic permissiveness of the rococo and towards moral absolutes. Graffigny’s Péruvienne was the harbinger; but that was an obscurely-published short novel. Cénie is a five-act play performed at the premier theatre of France. At the same moment appear two works of more lasting cultural significance: the translation by Prévost of Richardson’s Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts. Both provoke strong reactions from Graffigny and from Panpan, recorded in the present volume. Prévost indeed dedicates his translation of Richardson to ‘l’illustre auteur de Cénie et des Lettres péruviennes’. He imagines her uniting under her motherly wing ‘Zilia, Cénie et Clarisse’, an ‘aimable famille’ constituting ‘le temple de la vertu et du sentiment’ (pp. 355–56). A new age is beginning.