Unfortunate Couples: Adultery in Four Eighteenth-Century French Novels

Unfortunate Couples: Adultery in Four Eighteenth-Century French NovelsNadine Bérenguier In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont affirms that "to judge by literature, adultery would seem to be one of the most remarkable of occupations in both Europe and America. Few are the novels that fail to allude to it."1 In Adultery in the Novel Tony Tanner reaches similar conclusions: "Adultery as a phenomenon is in evidence in literature from the earliest times, as in Homer (and indeed we might suggest that it is the unstable triangularity of adultery, rather than the static symmetry of marriage, that is the generative form of Western literature as we know it)."2 An investigation of adultery can ignore neither the light de Rougemont has thrown upon the relations between adultery, courtly love, and death, nor the insights Tanner allows into the "great bourgeois novel." De Rougemont traces the degradation of the myth of courtly love through Petrarch, L'Astrée, and Racinian tragedy, noting its eclipse in the eighteenth century and suggesting that it reappears in a secular form in the nineteenth-century novel. Tanner's analysis builds on de Rougemont 's thesis, and, taking Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse as a precursor to the novels of the next century, he locates the ideological shift in attitudes to marriage and adultery in the middle of the 1 Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Harcourt, Brace, 1940; reprinted, New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), p. 16. 2 Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 12. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 4, July 1992 332 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION eighteenth century. He also contrasts adultery with other forms of sexual transgression: "Earlier fiction, particularly in the eighteenth century, abounds in seduction, fornication, and rape, and it would be possible to show how these particular modes of sexual 'exchange' were related to differing modes of economic exploitation or simply different transactional rules between classes or within any one class. Adultery is a very different matter."3 The implication that adultery has not always been a threat to the institution of marriage seems worth examining more closely. I undertake this analysis, however, not solely to study the various conceptions of marriage in the eighteenth century; I consider a rather more elusive concept: the married couple. In the twentieth century, marriage is automatically associated with the formation of a couple (although formal marriage may not be necessary to such an association). Constituting the private side of marriage, a "couple" is not only the functional association of two persons (in order to procreate, to continue the lineage, to increase wealth, and so forth) but also the locus of strong affective bonds, with its own dynamics that suppose each individual dedicated to the benefit of the relationship. At present, a couple is considered an entity with a life of its own, as evidenced by a book such as Le Couple: sa vie, sa mort* and its crises have become a privileged subject of fiction. I am not concerned here with tracing the notion of the married couple in literature, but with outlining the way in which differing conceptions of marriage and married life determine the literary representation of adultery . Four novels will assist me in this endeavour: Claude Crébillon's Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R*** (1732), Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), Jean-Jacque Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and his Emile et Sophie, ou les solitaires (1762).5 While the first two novels emphasize a similar conception of marriage, in which an extra-marital affair does not alter a conjugal relationship , Rousseau's attempt to enhance the status of the married couple 3 Tanner, p. 13. 4 Jean-G. Lemaire, Le Couple: sa vie, sa mort. La structuration du couple humain (Paris: Payot, 1979). 5 References are to the following editions: Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, known as Crébillon fils, Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R*** (Paris: Nizet, 1970); Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses, in Œuvres complètes, éd. Laurent Versini...