L'Atelier de Robert Challe (1659-1721) (review)

Robert Challe is not the only French writer to have been neglected, indeed virtually forgotten, for a long period after his death, but he is surely one of the most fascinating in the literary history of the eighteenth century. By turns a trader, a shipboard travel diarist, a novelist, and a truculent religious polemicist, Challe's range of interests parallel those of his famous contemporary Daniel Defoe, and in its plain-spoken vigour, Challe's style rivals that of the English writer. Challe's fictional masterpiece, Les Illustres Françaises (1713), is today generally agreed to be the most formally inventive and thematically profound work of fiction to appear in the fifty years that separate the work of Mme de Lafayette from that of Prévost and Marivaux. (Anne de Sola published a critical edition of Penelope Aubin's eighteenth-century translation of The Illustrious French Lovers in 2000, while a contemporary version by A.W. Preston appeared in 2008, under the rather misleading title Life, Love, and Laughter in the Reign of Louis XIV: A New Translation of Robert Challe's Novel "Les Illustres Françaises.") Yet, when in 1959 Frédéric Deloffre brought out his edition of the novel, it was the first to be published since the eighteenth century. The author himself had been so thoroughly forgotten that a further twenty years of research, led by Jean Mesnard, were required to determine the barest outline of Challe's life. In the 1960s, Michèle Weil showed that Challe was also the author of a remarkable Continuation added to the translation of Cervantes's Don Quixote by Filleau de la Chaise, who had himself already provided a fictitious Suite of his own. Finally, it was only when a full, original manuscript was discovered in Vienna in the 1990s that confirmation was found, not only that Challe was the author of Le Militaire philosophe, one of the most influential deist tracts of the Enlightenment, first circulated anonymously and clandestinely, and then published in 1767 under the auspices of d'Holbach, but also that the work we knew was a truncated and distorted version of a more nuanced and complex exploration of theodicy and theology, one whose intensely personal character makes the Difficultés sur la religion proposées au Père Malebranche one of the most important testimonies of the religious doubts and anxieties of its time.

Bad luck played a part in this neglect. Challe's patron Seignelay, Colbert's son, died before he could be of much use; Challe's investment in a trading post established in Acadia was lost to English marauders from Boston; the official expedition to Siam of 1690-91, in which Challe served as an écrivain du roi, had to be aborted in India because a power shift at the Siamese court destroyed hopes of French influence there (the fascinating Journal d'un voyage fait aux Indes orientales that emerged was eventually published in 1721, but Challe had died just before it appeared). Challe's personality also played a significant part in drawing the curtain of neglect: he had a quick temper, a fierce sense of the justice he felt he was owed, and impatience with the social and intellectual compromises or dissimulations required to advance his career. This personality, along with a modest family background, made it difficult for him to cultivate useful relations and got him in trouble with the authorities. When encouraged by the sympathetic French booksellers working in Holland, with whom he corresponded about Les Illustres Françaises, to reveal his identity to them, Challe refused. The prudence of unhappy experience with the law combined with the passive-aggressiveness of a wounded pride conspired to deprive Challe of the best opportunity he had to ensure his name would be remembered in the republic of letters.

We have learned much about this elusive author, and yet much remains to be done in locating Challe within the discourses of his day, and even more in...