Fictions of Love: Le mal d’amour and its Transmission in La Princesse de Clèves

In this essay I would like to bring together two topoi frequently discussed in relation to Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves – illness and the mis-directed letter – as figures of love and amorous experience in the novel. Though quite distinct in nature, both themes suggest the problems of circulation and vulnerability against which Lafayette’s protagonist must constantly fight. By tying together these seemingly unrelated plot elements, I hope to elucidate a new appreciation of the novel’s esthetic and ideological unity that so many readers have sensed and a number have sought to articulate.¹

Before examining these figural representations, I would like to consider direct descriptions of love in this novel and, especially, the terms used to represent it.² It would be unnecessary to demonstrate at great length the negative light in which love is depicted in the novel so my comments here will be brief and will focus on Lafayette’s preference for the term passion to describe her Princess’s experience.

Lafayette’s Lexicon of Love

First some statistical observations: the notion of “love” is referred to as a noun some 220 times in the novel (roughly once a page in most modern editions), divided unequally in the following way: amour (50 times), galanterie (22 times), inclination (32 times), passion (116 times).³ The listing of these terms in alphabetical order, usually employed to represent neutrality, corresponds roughly, in this case, with the connotative weight – the non-neutrality – associated with each word in classical discourse.

Lafayette seems to go to great lengths to avoid speaking of amour in a neutral way. Indeed, occurrences of the noun “amour” have relatively limited presence in La Princesse de Clèves, less than a quarter of the nouns in the semantic field. In the first chapter, for example, “amour” is used only six times, always in either a negative or a mixed, “impure” sense. The first occurrence refers to love’s absence in the diplomatic marriage the King seeks to arrange between Queen Elizabeth and Nemours:⁴ “une Reine qui ne m’a jamais vu[,] me veuille épouser par amour” (337). The narrator later generalizes this observation for the court of France: “Il y avait tant d’intérêts et tant de cabales différentes, et les dames y avaient tant de part, que l’amour était toujours mêlé aux affaires, et les affaires à l’amour” (341). Most importantly, though, the word amour appears in Madame de Chartres’s famous lessons on love addressed to her daughter: “elle faisait souvent à sa fille des peintures de l’amour; elle lui montrait ce qu’il a d’agréable, pour la persuader plus aisément sur ce qu’elle lui en apprenait de dangereux; elle lui contait le peu de sincérité des hommes, leurs tromperies et leur infidélité” (338). This is, of course, essentially the book’s thesis, presented in the most balanced terms possible. Lafayette’s depiction of the Princess’s experience will mostly exploit, however discreetly, a more charged lexicon.

The two most difficult and historically dated alternative terms are inclination and galanterie. The first of these, for the first readers of La Princesse de Clèves, could not fail to evoke Madeleine de Scudéry’s allegorical Carte de Tendre, in which Inclination was the name of the principal city and the river that rushed amorous travelers to the capital and, quite often, past their destination into “la Mer dangeureuse.” The literature of préciosité, like Madame de Chartres’s lesson, warned women against this danger. The Princess’s over-powering feelings for Nemours will, consequently, be described more than a dozen times as an inclination. As for galanterie, often either a synonym or masculine double for préciosité, its importance has been amply demonstrated in the last quarter century, especially in a series of publications by Alain Viala, who considers it to be an essential touchstone in French classical culture. La Princesse de Clèves opens with a reference to “la magnificence et...