Flirting with the young lady: Albéric Cahuet's Au jardin des vierges (In the Garden of Maidens)

In his 1904 novel Au jardin des vierges, Albéric Cahuet takes up where the celebrated and infamous Les demi- vierges (1894) by Marcel Prévost had not ventured to tread. The turn-of-the-century period was obsessed with the seemingly irreversible disappearance of the young lady, ever more emancipated and rebelling against the rules of a patriarchal society which allowed her to become a woman only once married. Cahuet seizes on the contradictory state of desires in modern young ladies and conventional society and imagines the provoking character of a writer who preaches the complete freedom for young unmarried women to experiment with flirting in the most audacious way. In his supposed novel, the heroine transcribes every day her most erotic sensations and desires in “the most suggestive of confessions.” Au jardin des vierges, in a clever turn of fiction, sets the stage for a complex game of seduction between the writer Norville and a delightful maiden who wants to apply his declared transgressive principles. The young lady has become the ultimate femme fatale. Cahuet manages to create a well-written story (mostly in vivid dialogic form) on the basis of the anxiety-ridden moral and social aporias typical of the period. His novel might be the very last testimony to a vanishing human type, ever so present in much of the fiction from the two previous centuries. Shortly after, Proust’s “jeunes filles en fleurs” (1919) will have escaped for good from the constraints that made their predecessors’ lives so dangerous and their charms so tantalizing.