'Les Revies' suivi de 'Les Converseuses' (review)

Cats have nine lives. Rétif de la Bretonne had nine times nine and he wrote about them all. He was his own hero, the inexhaustible source of material for stories, plays and novels. Under thinly disguised names, he enacted scenes from a past which he embellished in ways that reunited him with forgotten times and compensated for personal and public failure. He moved from fiction (Le Paysan perverti) to confessional autobiography (Monsieur Nicolas) to a form of theatre which is almost cinematographic (Le Drame de la Vie). After 1789, when age, illness and poverty made the real world increasingly hostile even in retrospect, his long-standing vitalist materialism, extended by reflections on metempsychosis and reincarnation, opened up magical new perspectives. For many years he had massaged his sensibilities by celebrating anniversaries of old events and flagged up new ones for future remembrance. But a chance remark which he attributed to Linguet replaced memory as a stimulant to his imagination with a more exciting possibility: 'que feriez-vous si vous recommenciez votre vie?' It was an invitation to relive his life 'sous une autre hypothèse', that hypothesis being to suppose that all that had once gone wrong would, on paper, go right. The result was Les Revies, written between April and August 1798. Rejuvenated and immensely rich, he proceeds, with evident relish, to relive his life not as it was but as he would have liked it to be. Thirty-six chronologically arranged 'vies voluptueuses' bring back the familiar cast of the good, the bad and the indifferent. The tone is libertine (and not, Rétif rightly insists, pornographic), the pace brisk and, despite the danger of self-indulgence inherent in the ploy, the tales confirm Rétif's reputation both as a social reformer (anticlericalism and utopianism serve as narrative strategies) and a literary realist: if he writes freely of sex, he claims to reflects human nature better than Sade (too perverse, too cruel) or the conforming, conventional novelists who failed to engage with real life. Despite the extravagance of the conceit, Les Revies proves to be a surprisingly forward-looking book, though it left no legacy. Never published, the manuscript was dispersed after Rétif's death. Pierre Bourguet, after a heroic pursuit through libraries and sale catalogues, has succeeded in piecing together about forty per cent of the original. To what he has salvaged he adds an informative, shrewd commentary which fully vindicates his high claims for this lost text. In comparison, the nine 'Converseuses' (intended as part of a new edition of Rétif' collection of tales. Le Palais Royal, 1790) offer fewer surprises. Even so, Bourguet's patient reconstructions offer a tantalizing glimpse of Restif's last stand. The sheer energy and inventiveness of Les Revies disturbs the received picture of Rétif the burnt-out author, and this meticulous, exemplary edition is the best reason for regretting the loss of other late, unpublished works, L'Enclos et les oiseaux, in particular. Rétif ultimately inserted himself into a vein of voyance fantastique in which, neither fraud nor lunatic, he sought, like Blake, to defend innocence against experience.