Le Roman au XVIIIe siècle en Europe (review)

L'Esprit Créateur tions" of Louis XIVs marriage demonstrate how "the fictions of absolutism" attempted, in vain, to obscure the king's mortal body and the spectre of female sovereignty. Zanger studies central—visual and verbal—images of the marriage (Ch. 1 and 2), "technologies " that produced these images (Ch. 3 and 4), a fictional conversation by Madeleine de Scudéry (Ch. 5), and the queen's retum to visibility upon her death (Afterword). Chapter One examines engravings that appeared in the wake of Louis XlVs convalescence from his nearly fatal illness of 1658 and argues that the potential disorder of this liminal moment is resolved through strategic highlighting of Louis XIVs sexual and political prowess and the framing of male and female threats to his authority. Chapter Two treats descriptions of Maria Teresa in several occasional pamphlets about the marriage treaty and rituals. Focussing on descriptions of the new queen's vertugadin and her sweating during the ceremonies, Zanger gives a fascinating account of how Maria Teresa's bodily materiality challenges the king's abstract authority and how the pamphlets work to soothe the resulting anxiety. The next two chapters explore two mechanisms by which images of the marriage were purveyed . Chapter Three highlights the seriality of occasional pamphlets, which Zanger likens to the opacity that François Colletet attributes to Maria Teresa's first glimpse of her spouse. Like the queen's seemingly inaccessible gaze, the occasional pamphlet is intentionally open-ended, thus enticing readers into the market for absolutist fictions. Chapter Four presents an unusual but highly stimulating juxtaposition—analyses of both the firework displays organized for the royal couple and Comeille's La Toison d'or, produced shortly after the wedding. In both instances, Zanger argues, staging the frightening (war, the foreign woman as queen) is supposed to reestablish order. Chapter Five turns to the Prologue of Scudéry's Célinte, which features a debate opposing proponents of "universal" (i.e., legitimate, public) curiosity and those of "excessive" (scurrilous, private) curiosity about the royal couple's entry into Paris. According to Zanger, Scudéry suggests that the female cabinet mediates between these two sorts of curiosity and, thus, contributes to the "great vistas of universal curiosity" (153). Finally, the Afterword shifts from the marriage to the death of Maria Teresa. In Bossuet's famous funeral oration, the figure of the queen reemerges from relative obscurity, reasserting once again that Louis XIVs authority rests upon a combinatory logic at odds with the substitutional logic of the king's theoretical two bodies. "Interdisciplinary" is a much touted term these days, but Zanger's study is an exemplary model of such work. Not only literary scholars, but historians and anthropologists (among others) will find much to ponder in this book. Considering as she does the role of the queen in representations of Louis XIVs marriage, Zanger makes a forceful argument not only for revamping the "two-body" theory of kingship elaborated by Kantorowicz and Giesey, but also for opening new perspectives on queenship in early modern France. Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV complements the important recent work on Marie-Antoinette and opens new perspectives on the role of queenship in state building (as opposed to its role in state unbuilding during the Revolutionary era). But this book's contributions do not end here. It also offers new horizons for studying the representations of absolutism, the liminal moments of royal sovereignty, the interconnections between text and image, and the place of the history of the book in seventeenth-century France. This is a rich study that should be read by a broad spectrum of scholars. Lewis C. Seifert Brown University Alain Montandon. Le Roman au XVIIIe siècle en Europe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Pp. viii + 534. 158 francs. At its most exciting, this study tells us about works like Holbert's Le Voyage souterrain de Nicolas Klimius. In the grand tradition of Utopian literature, this novel takes us to an underground 164 Winter 1999 Book Reviews world inhabited by 27 distinct peoples. Each of them either illustrates a major point of Enlightenment idealism or satirizes a national shortcoming. Martinia, for instance, is populated...