Le Roman dans l'histoire, l'histoire dans le roman. Hommage à Jean Sgard [2] (review)

228 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 Le Roman dans l'histoire, l'histoire dans le roman. Hommage à Jean Sgard [2]. Recherches et travaux, no. 49. Grenoble: Université Stendhal, 1995. 259pp. FFr 60. ISSN 0151-1874. Published by the Université de Grenoble in an ongoing series entitled Recherches et travaux, this forty-ninth volume, the second of two in honour of Jean Sgard, brings together disparate methods, materials, analyses, and positions, within a thematic or subject framework. The tabula gratulatoria that precedes the brief biographical introduction and bibliography by the volume editors, Catherine Volpilhac-Auger and Françoise Létoublon, gives some idea of the reach and respect in which Jean Sgard and his publications are held by the international community of scholars. The twenty essays that compose the collection, grouped together here under the theme—le roman dans l'histoire, l'histoire dans le roman—constitute a general survey of current studies in eighteenth-century fiction that is at the same time remarkably faithful in its diversity to this broad rubric. Like all such Festschriften, the interest and acuity of the chapters vary greatly. Through Montesquieu, Marivaux, Prévost, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos and other lesser figures, traditional and unexpected approaches to the "relations ambiguës entre histoire et roman" (p. 5) weave a point counterpoint of description , interpretation, and analysis. Thus Michel Gilot's opening salvo, "Une tout autre histoire?", which serves as preface to the content, describes the longstanding and wide-ranging discussion of the novel and history in relation one to the other, but also the writing of fiction and the problems of historiography as they confront the representation of events and human life. To what extent—the question is as open today as it was in the eighteenth century—are history and fiction two sides of the same coin? These essays for the most part serve as examples of the many ways in which fiction and history are the inseparable components of all narrative texts. On one side of the equation stand the effects of the Nouvelle Héloïse on the lives of many of Rousseau's contemporaries, or in terms of history and the modern reader, Rétifs Vie de mon père used for its documentary value by Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie in La Vie rurale en France (vol. 2). On the other side Jean Oudart in "Femmes à Histoire" analyses Prévost's Histoire de Marguerite d'Anjou where historical sources and pure invention in the person of Milady Nevill play upon the same stage. Other essays range from source studies anchored in erudition and traditional scholarship (Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, "Comment peut-on être troglodyte?"; Françoise Létoublon, "Cyrus le Grand et le Grand Cyrus. L'Histoire comme Orient romanesque"; Robert Granderoute, "Byzance, Justinien et son Général dans le Bélisaire de Marmontel") through the combinary techniques of mixing fact and fiction (Gunnar von Proschwitz, "Le Charles xn de Voltaire. Histoire ou roman?"; Henri Coulet, "L'Émigré: sens de L'Histoire et sens du roman") to close readings, interdisciplinary and transtextual analyses (Jean Marie Goulemot, "De quelques aventures romanesques d'une robe de chambre"; Bernadette Fort, "Le roman dans la critique de la peinture d'histoire: Diderot et Fragonard"; Aurelio Principato, "Les Liaisons dangereuses ou Clarisse remodelé"). REVIEWS 229 In thematic terms of course the thread of time joins most of these essays, however refracted the historical components may be. Catherine Langle's "En marge de l'Histoire: l'idéal monastique" sets side by side the decline of the monastic ideal in real terms and the rise of the monastic motif through the eighteenth century, particularly in libertine novels. The Utopian and literary space of the latter in texts such as Vénus dans le Cloître, in which "l'auteur pense son histoire en deux temps" (p. 222), expresses a "réclusion subvertie par le plaisir, une possibilité d'échapper à l'histoire et à ses avanies ... en se soustrayant au temps historique par le retrait dans un temps intime" (p. 223). Thus does the libertine novel respond to the failure of the monastic ideal as an escape from historical time. Robert Favre places internalized time differently within the context of...