The Devil's Pool and Other Stories

Open Letter to Monsieur Nisard (1836)

c 67 Open Letter to Monsieur Nisard (1836) DEAR SIR, Very few critics deserve to have either their praise acknowledged or their errors answered. If I receive your generous commendations with gratitude, and if I try to refute your strictures, it’s because I find that your work displays not only talent and insight, but also a great deal of broadmindedness and honesty. If I wanted merely to satisfy my vanity, I’d simply express my thanks—because you praise the imaginative side of my fiction far beyond its merits. But the more moved I am by your approval, the less I can accept some of your adverse criticisms; and so, in order to defend myself, I’m committing (with great reluctance, and contrary to my usual practice) the impertinence of speaking about myself to someone I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting. You say, sir, that an aversion to marriage is the basis of all my books. Well, allow me to point out four or five exceptions.1 Lélia, for one—which you list among my attacks on that social institution , and which doesn’t, to the best of my knowledge, say a single word about it. Lélia, of all my attempts at fiction, might also serve to answer your accusation that I want to bring back “sensual egoism ” and construct “a materialistic philosophy.” Nor, when I wrote it, did Indiana strike me as a defense of adultery. In that novel (where, if I remember rightly, no adultery ever takes place), I think the so-called lover (“that king of my books,” as you wittily call him) comes off worse than the husband. If I’m not absolutely mistaken about my own intentions, Le Secrétaire intime deals with the joys of conjugal fidelity. André is neither “against” marriage 68 The Devil’s Pool and Other Stories nor “for” adulterous relationships. Simon ends with a wedding, for all the world like a fairy tale by Perrault or Madame d’Aulnoy.2 Then there’s Valentine. Its ending isn’t, I must confess, either original or ingenious; an oldfashioned catastrophe steps in to prevent an adulteress from enjoying, in a second marriage, the happiness that she hadn’t been willing to wait for. The issue of marriage is no more under consideration in Leoni than in the Abbé Prévost’s inimitable novel Manon Lescaut,3 which I tried, for purely artistic reasons, to provide with a kind of pendant. The consequences of passionate love for an unworthy object—the slavery imposed by a corrupt creature’s power on a blind creature’s weakness—surely don’t appear in a better light in the former work than in the latter. There remains, then, Jacques. Jacques is, I think, the only one of my books that has had the good fortune to attract any attention from you—and that’s certainly more than any work of mine, to date, deserves to receive from a serious man. Maybe Jacques really does display all the hostility to domestic harmony that you detect in it. Admittedly, other people have detected just the opposite—and they could be equally right. When a book, however slight it may be, fails to demonstrate, clearly, unambigously, indisputably, and unanswerably, what it set out to demonstrate, that’s the fault of the book—but it isn’t always the fault of the author. As an artist, he has sinned gravely; his hand, lacking experience and control, has failed to communicate his intention; but as a man, he didn’t mean to puzzle his readers or distort the fundamentals of everlasting truth. Many stories, true or false, are told in Florence and Milan about the immortal Benvenuto Cellini.4 I’ve heard it said that when he started to make a vase, he would often plan its shape and proportions carefully; but when he came to carry out the design, he would become so fascinated by some figure or festoon that he’d get carried away, enlarging one detail to poeticize it, and displacing another so that he could give it a more graceful curve. Thus, roused by his love of detail, he’d neglect the work for the ornament, and he’d come to his senses too late, when he couldn’t return to his original design. Instead of the cup he had set out to make, he’d produce a tripod; instead of a ewer, a lamp; instead of a crucifix, the hilt of...