Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas (review)

REVIEWS 513 Louvet de Couvray. Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas. Édition de Michel Delon. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. 1172pp. ISBN 2-07-038803-4. Let us thank Michel Delon for bringing us a pocket edition of this novel, available previously only in the Pléiade collection. Louvet's novel is not the greatest of the century—except perhaps when measured by length—but it is one that represents best the rise and fall of eighteenth-century "libertinage." Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas consists of three novels published around the time of the Revolution: Une Année de la vie de Faublas (1787), which Louvet published when he was twenty-seven years old and which made him instantly famous; Six Semaines de la vie de Faublas (1788), and La Fin des amours du Faublas (1790). Louvet's stated purpose can be found in a 1789 preface: he intended to write a consistently "gay" novel because so many novels had made him yawn (p. 49); and he wanted to depict a really French, that is "frivole et galant," character (p. 51). He succeeded. No other eighteenth-century novel is as gay as Une Année de la vie de Faublas, which is the best of the three volumes. One cannot resist bursting into laughter sometimes, as one does when reading a Molière play. The plot is traditional, with allusions to Marivaux, Prévost, Crébillon fils, Laclos, and even Rousseau. We find the three main clichés of libertine novels: a hero torn between "true" love and sensual desire, his initiation by an experienced lady of the world, and his social education by an older male friend who teaches him that "true love is only an illusion of adolescence." In the first pages of the novel, Faublas, who is only fifteen and a half years old, falls in love with a pensioner in a convent, fourteen-year-old Sophie de Pontis. Soon after, he is seduced by the twenty-five-year-old marquise de B***. Although Faublas knows he loves Sophie and not Mme de B***, he is unable to resist the charms of the latter and he often "forgets" Sophie—not only when he is with Mme de B***, but with her chambermaid, or with several other women. He asks for the reader's indulgence: we need to remember that the "distracted" Faublas is barely sixteen years old. This is the usual story. But two elements characterize Faublas. One is the role played by cross-dressing, which reminds us of seventeenth-century baroque theatre. Faublas, dressed as a woman, seduces married women whose husbands mistake him for a young woman and try, in their turn, to seduce Faublas, leading to a number of incidents of gender confusion and some extremely funny quid pro quos. Louvet has a real talent for staging ridiculous cuckolds, and he introduces many funny theatrical dialogues into the narrative. The other element is the role played by Poland in the middle of this very French libertine novel. A friend of Faublas's father, M. du Portail, alias Lovzinski , recounts his story to the young man: Lovzinski is a Polish nobleman who sacrificed everything for his country; he lost his beloved wife Lodoiska in the war against the Russians, and his little daughter was abducted. He counts on Faublas to go to Poland, find his daughter, and then marry her. This expectation inspires the young Faublas to a comment that shows little respect for such a tragic fate: "Oui! et là, comme les chevaliers errants, j'irai de porte en 514 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:4 porte chercher une fille pour l'épouser!" (p. 324). In spite of himself, history catches up with Faublas, who discovers that his beloved Sophie is Lovzinski's lost daughter. One can really wonder, as Delon does in his erudite introduction, about the role in the novel played by the Polish episode, which became the most popular with the reading public. In the first volume, this tragic story is riddled with comic scenes: the stupid marquis de B*** arrives suddenly and interrupts Lovzinski's dramatic account of how Lodoïska was locked up in a tower and threatened by fire. It...