Journal pour Mademoiselle de Menou by Madame de Murat (review)

Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat may be best known as an author of fairy tales, but is also (in)famous for her ‘impiétés domestiques’ and her ‘attachement monstrueux pour des personnes de son sexe’ (p. 11). Separated from her husband, she was imprisoned in the Château de Loches, from whence she tried to escape disguised as a man but was discovered. After periods at Saumur and Angers, she was returned to Loches under a more lenient regime that allowed her to socialize in the surrounding town. The Journal consists of a series of ‘letters’ recounting her everyday life, interspersed with poems and other short works that she wrote to her cousin Mlle de Menou between April 1708 and March 1709, when the latter had returned home following a visit. Mme Murat is desperate to lure her back, and the tone is one of determined gaiety in the face of tedium, with moments of despair. Mme Murat’s routine consisted of social engagements within the same small, essentially feminine, circle, and the volume provides a privileged window onto the activities of women in the upper levels of provincial society. We see how they entertained themselves with music, gambling, theatricals, and poetry. Mme Murat is proud of her abilities and lords it over her fellows, but we also see her bored, ill, and unhappy, and we pity her since we know that her cousin never came. For, unlike the other women of her acquaintance, Mme Murat is forbidden to travel, and although her friend is a mere thirty kilometres away, her letters and those infinitely more infrequent of Mlle de Menou are all that binds them. We consequently obtain a strong sense of the letter as physical object: they are written, sealed, taken, forgotten, lost, and destroyed, and much of their author’s frustration derives from the necessity of finding reliable agents to carry them. We also glimpse the more unpleasant side of life in the chateau with its cold, rats, and leaking roofs. Not surprisingly, the Comtesse suffers severely with her health and describes the torment she endures from her renal colic, the hated baths her doctor prescribes for it, and the agonizing passing of gallstones (‘parpaings’). All this is truly fascinating. On the other hand, I found the edition itself somewhat frustrating, since it concentrates on the Journal in terms of its history and genre, whereas I would have preferred to learn more about the author, her circle, and the circumstances of her captivity. There are copious footnotes, but it is irritating to have to disentangle the linguistic from the historical and biographical. The volume includes a linguistic glossary, but would have benefited from a biographical glossary detailing the many friends, acquaintances, and other personalities who flit across its pages. And finally, while there are indexes of names, places, works, and authors mentioned, the first is unhelpful given that men and women are not distinguished, and the lack of a general index means that many of the more interesting details are impossible to find again after a first reading.