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  • Music and the Feminine in Pascal Quignard
  • Katherine Kolb

Je ne suis pas de ceux qui disent: Ce n'est rien:
C'est une femme qui se noie.

La Fontaine, La Femme noyée

Tous les matins du monde, Alain Corneau's popular film based on the novel of the same title by Pascal Quignard, crossed the Atlantic under a title translated word for word from the French: All the Mornings of the World.1 Even in English the phrase sounds harmonious, resonant with overtones of cosmic origins, country air, springtime, and nostalgia for ages past. The specific age in question strikes a particular chord with French ears: it is that golden age of French cultural origins, the seventeenth century. The predominant setting, apart from a few contrasting scenes in Paris and Versailles, is the lovely valley of the Bièvre river, site of Port-Royal and cradle of Jansenism. The subject, of course, is music: the haunting Baroque music of the film score, which recovers little-known music contemporary with—and by implication equal to—Corneille, Racine, and Molière. In a brief passage of the novel omitted from the film the main characters, stopping by a tennis court (jeu de paume) in Paris, happen upon two actors declaiming a famous scene from Racine's Britannicus.2 The implied parallel with music is underscored by the use of the theatrical declamation for a teaching comparison with music.

Idyllic though it sounds, the title phrase within both novel and film marks their most tragic moment. Madeleine, the gifted elder daughter of the seventeenth-century viola da gambist known as Sainte Colombe, teacher of the renowned Marin Marais, has just committed suicide. Her tragic act is twice redundant: she is already on the verge of death, and the grief at the root of her illness—her abandonment by Marais after their romance some years earlier—has long since taken its toll. But her death is carefully composed. She summons Marais to play a piece he once wrote for her ("La Rêveuse"); then she hangs herself, using the ribbons from an elegant pair of shoes crafted for her by Marais's father, a shoemaker. In a clumsy gesture of reparation, Marais had ordered the gift after the birth of their stillborn child. His rejection of her is less clumsy than brutal. After telling her he no longer desires her he adds, with a poetic flourish, "La vie est belle à proportion qu'elle est féroce." His maxim looks ahead to the narrator's equally philosophical phrase after the hanging: "Tous les matins du monde sont sans retour." [End Page 101]

Under its idyllic surface, then, the title of both novel and film bears a shadow message of implacable ironic import. Nature is beautiful but cruel, the Jansenist God severe. But although Madeleine's death signifies in retrospect within the impersonal, fatalistic, pseudo-Darwinian framework of the title maxim, she herself intends a message of direct ethical and aesthetic import. As she unties the shoelaces to prepare the noose, she mutters: "Il ne voulait pas être cordonnier" (106). By using these ribbons as her rope (corde) she turns Marais, in effect, into a "cordonnier"—in the sense of hangman, puller of la corde. A less gruesome association points to musical strings or cordes, emblematic of the musical world in which she herself once figured. The ribbons put her back in touch—renouent—with a time in which she was among other things the dreamer or rêveuse of Marais's composition.

For all his court finery, the word play suggests Marais is no better than his father the shoemaker; he remains at bottom an ordinary tradesman or artisan—a manipulator of strings, cordes—by comparison with her father, a true artist. "Et dire que j'aurais aimé être votre épouse" (103), she says scornfully, implying that he has disappointed her in more ways than one. He disappoints her again with his death-bed rendition of "La Rêveuse." For a piece that presumably represents a kind of berceuse or lullaby suitable to its melancholy mission, he chooses too fast a tempo, and Madeleine must direct him to start over. He has of...

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