Who Killed Mlle de la Chaux?: Enlightenment Authorship and the Dangers of Historical Realism

Depictions of the author at work are not uncommon in the literature of the decades that led to the French copyright laws of 1793. By the mid-eighteenth century, the satirical portrait that Antoine Furetière had sketched in the 1660s of the mercenary author ready to trade dedications for patronage at any cost had given way to a more compassionate interest in the complex ways in which writers could afford to write (234-46). As the literary market quickly expanded and the debates about intellectual property unfolded, writers did not shy away from describing the material conditions of their writing in often vivid terms. Accounts of conflicted engagements with the literary market and its greedy publishers, of the tension between elite patronage and the need for intellectual autonomy, and of the personal costs exacted by the production of texts are standard themes evoked by the self-reflecting eighteenth-century author.¹ Yet, when it comes to fleshing out the hardship derived from the labor of writing, very few depictions of the modern author come close to Diderot's wrenching fiction of a talented young woman writer who fails to live from the pen and eventually dies alone and utterly destitute after years of sacrificing herself to the pursuit of a literary career.

The woman behind this grim sketch of a failed author is Mlle de la Chaux, the female protagonist of the second half of Diderot's moral tale, Ceci n'est pas un conte, which was first published in the Correspondance littéraire de Grimm in April 1773. We do not usually think of Mlle de la Chaux as a talented woman of letters driven by authorial aspirations. To Diderot scholars, this female protagonist is best known as, on the one hand, the fictional victim of the immorality and ruthlessness of love that the tale illustrates, and, on the other, the real-life friend of Diderot and commentator on his Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751), whose philosophical insights prompted him to publish a supplement to the initial work known as the Lettre à Mademoiselle . . . . Much has been written about this intriguing character, particularly on the question of her fictional or real status and her relationship to Diderot.² But, for all the critical attention directed at this femme savante, to my knowledge, no study has dealt in any serious way with the figure of the female author that Mlle de la Chaux embodies in Diderot's tale. More than a mere pretext for a philosophical parable on sexual morality, Mlle de la Chaux provides a fascinating portrait of the author at work, and we have yet to engage with her story as a rich and complex proposition of what constitutes authorship in the French Enlightenment.

This essay proposes to analyze such a proposition, first by focusing on Mlle de la Chaux's difficult relationship to print publication, the gendered nature of her intellectual work, and more generally her overall failure to become a recognized author. From these depictions of her struggles with the literary world, a representation of authorship emerges that radically departs from the conception of the genius-creator, proprietor of his intellectual production, that has defined the modern author since the late Enlightenment and copyright era. In contrast to the modern scenario of authorial originality and self-realization, Ceci n'est pas un conte offers a counter-story about authorial effacement and dispossession expressed in the exploitation of the writer's work by her lover, the selfless nature of her writing practices, her failure to publish or market her own literary text, and her tragic final demise.

In the second section of this study, however, I argue that the story of Mlle de la Chaux's authorial dispossession is as much a counternarrative to modern literary identity as it is a trope central to Diderot's realist aesthetics. As we shall see, authorial dispossession is part of the broader reflection initiated by Diderot in the 1770s on the aesthetics of historical realism or what he calls "historical storytelling." In Ceci n'est...