L'Espace de la douleur chez Loaisel de Tréogate 1752-1812 (review)

98 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 44), does so in a stilted manner. Although the translators have created a happy balance between eighteenth and twentieth-century usage, it is inevitable that, at times, the English equivalent will fail to portray the subtlety of the author's language. This is evident in the translation of "tourmentée" as "tormented" (p. 1) since, in English, "tormented " has a much stronger connotation than its French counterpart. In rendering "ne faisant plus auprès de moi que baguenauder ennuyeusement" (p. 13), which requires a footnote in the source text, by "spent all her time with me in boring trifles" (p. 12), the translators lose some of the subtlety of the original. I would also question the use of "formally " (p. 15) to translate "par la forme" (p. 16) and suggest that "lively" would translate "vive" (p. 34) more aptly than "excitable" (p. 32). On the other hand, there are happy solutions such as the description of the suitor who was "usée et endetté" as "shopworn and in debt" (p. 7). Joan and Philip Stewart have made an excellent choice in the selection of the novel from a vast array of possibilities from this period. The brevity, concision, epistolary form, clarity, and classical simplicity of the French make this novella an eminently usable text for undergraduate courses in French literature, women's studies, literary theory, narratology, and comparative anthropology. Olga B. Cragg University of British Columbia Raphael Giménez. L'Espace de la douleur chez Loaisel de Tréogate 1752-1812. Paris: Minard, 1992. 275pp. FFr150. ISBN 2-85210-041-X. Loaisel de Tréogate is a minor writer whose works have interested scholars, to the small extent that they have interested scholars, because of the transitional link he provides between the "pre-romanticism" of Rousseau and the early romanticism of such figures as Chateaubriand. Now there are writers who are "minor" because they write about very marginal topics, and others who are minor because they do not write very engagingly. Since Loaisel de Tréogate must, alas, be placed in the second category, I suppose it is ungracious to hold it against Raphaël Giménez that in his diligent recapitulation of everything that has been written about Loaisel from the beginning until now, the fact of Loaisel's mediocrity appears so relentlessly. This is the case, however, and it makes reading L'Espace de la douleur a disheartening task. Giménez's intention in his study is to focus on an "écrivain méconnu" who stands out among his contemporaries for "une note nouvelle, l'indice d'une sensibilité particulière, le témoignage de la complexité de la quête au bonheur" (p. 9). Writing about Loaisel's best-known work, the novel Dolbreuse, he says: "Par la complexité et la profondeur de son analyse affective à la fin d'un siècle qui, en dépit de sa richesse intellectuelle, semble parfois oublier l'importance du cœur humain, Dolbreuse représente un jalon vital dans le développement pathétique du roman-confession" (p. 11). Giménez has composed his study also in order to correct errors that have crept into previous biographical and bibliographical studies of Loaisel. His project is thus a good one, but this reader regrets that he did not go about it differently. The first part of the book is a painstaking review of Loaisel's life and work, with some speculations concerning the probable origin of the pen name Tréogate. For the second part of his book, and in a way that could be described as valiant, Giménez has searched out (with a lot of help, carefully attributed, from Townsend Bowling's pioneering study and others) what appears to be everything ever stated in print about REVIEWS 99 Loaisel; he quotes copiously from it, under various categories: "Un romantique 'préromantique ,'" "L'Ossianisme tréogatien," "Débat sur les sources de René et Atala," and so on. It is here especially that, faced with evaluations like "un des plus féconds parmi les auteurs de troisième ordre du xvrae siècle finissant" (Baldensperger, quoted on p. 54), "Loaisel tout d'abord est...