Rachel, quand du Seigneur

James Jacques Joseph Tissot, Croquet, 1878, with kind permission of The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Rachel, quand du Seigneur Lawrence R. Schehr Rachel, quand du Seigneur la grâce tutélaire A mes tremblantes mains confia ton berceau, J'avais à ton bonheur voué ma vie entière Et c'est moi qui te livre au bourreau! Scribe and Halévy, La Juive' AT THE END OF Scribe and Halévy's 1835 opera La Juive, Rachel, the title character, is about to be burnt at the stake. To be saved she must renounce her faith and convert to Christianity, a solution she will not accept. In the previous act, however, Rachel's father, Eléazar, has revealed that years before, a Jew had saved a Cardinal 's daughter from death. Singing an aria still well-known in Proust's time, "Rachel quand du Seigneur," Eléazar intimates that he found the child and raised her: Rachel is thus not his biological daughter and is Catholic by birth, a fact of which she is unaware. The area reflects an ambiguity about blood and birth, about love and family piety, about the opposition between a father's love for his daughter, who has become Jewish through that love, and a father's hatred of all that is not Jewish, again, his daughter by her birth. Eléazar wavers throughout between his desire for vengeance on Christians and his paternal love. In Marcel Proust's description of a prostitute who eventually becomes the mistress of Robert de Saint-Loup, the narrator baptizes her "Rachel quand du Seigneur." We first meet her in one of many scenes engaging a sexuality marginal to (though an integral part of) the proper and presentable bourgeois vision of quiet propagation through heterosexual marriage. The narrator's Jewish friend Bloch takes him to a brothel.2 Although Bloch himself had long ceased going to this particular brothel, he considers it the right place for the narrator's initiation. But the girls Bloch requests are not there. Unfazed, the madam proposes an exotic choice: The madam of the house knew none of the women asked for and always proposed ones that one would not have wanted. With a smile full of promises (as if it were a rarity and a treat), she especially praised one of whom she said: "She's Jewish! Doesn't that appeal to you?" (It is undoubtedly because of that that she called her Rachel). (1:566) VOL. XXXVII, NO.4 83 L'Esprit Créateur At the end of the nineteenth century, the exoticism of the Jewish woman is a commonplace: her dark sultry looks are associated with a generalized orientalism and thus a generalized libidinal sexuality.3 For the narrator, Rachel's Oriental air is evoked by the madam's statement that Rachel is Jewish; for the madam, Rachel's Jewishness is recommendation enough to the prospective client.4 Overhearing the women's conversation, the narrator finds Rachel common. Ever polite, the narrator allows that one day he may return for Rachel: "Each time I promised the madam, who proposed her to me with a particular insistence praising her great intelligence and her knowledge, that I would come with the express purpose of meeting Rachel, whom I had nicknamed 'Rachel quand du Seigneur' " (1:567). This promised meeting never takes place, but much later, the two will meet again after Rachel has become SaintLoup 's mistress (2:456). At this point in A l'ombre, one might think that Rachel's Jewishness did not matter; it may simply be a way of singling her out from the crowd, so that when she becomes Robert's mistress, we will remember her. Yet that is not sufficient, for references to Judaism are not innocent in a novel that makes so much of the Dreyfus Affair. Her Jewishness will echo throughout the rest of the novel, as being Jewish becomes a stigmatized social quality. Being Jewish becomes part of a barometric system for social rise and fall. Specifically, being a Jewish woman means participating in an exchange system in which religion may be whitewashed by money, power, or influence: "During the...