Les Onze by Pierre Michon (review)

eventually served as governor of Louisiana. In a less flattering light, LamotheCadillac was criticized for his dealings with indigenous peoples, imprisoned for illegal trafficking in 1704, and removed from his position in Louisiana because of personal conflicts. The forty prose poems comprising Lamothe-Cadillac delve into a period less fettered by historical record. Each text, presented in French and English on facing pages, depicts a scene from the protagonist’s youth. These episodes cover his birth and boyhood in the village of Saint-Nicolas, schooling, family activities, religious celebrations, coming-of-age passions, and the beginnings of his military career before his journey to Acadie. Matherne’s recreation of seventeenth-century French life recalls the sumptuous precision of Baroque realism. This verisimilitude reflects her research in France, be it through descriptions of food, clothing (as in Antoine’s admiration of a noble’s “feutre à larges bords garnis de plumes d’autruche et ses talons hauts à bouts carrés, ornés de nœuds,” 42), or architecture (at the Church of Les Jacobins in Toulouse, “Il s’étonne de la hauteur des doubles colonnes qui supportent des voûtes sur croisées d’ogives, des chapiteaux ornés de fleurs et de lianes,” 92). In addition to portrayals of activities and customs, Matherne breathes life into this décor partly by infusing it with Gascon oral tradition , including lexical borrowing (explained in a glossary) and entire folktales. An inevitable question when reading Lamothe-Cadillac is: why so much detail? Beyond effects of visual mimesis, the myriad enumerations and chiseled imagery stand as intrinsic to the book’s internal logic as biography. Antoine is a spirited, ambitious youth who chafes under the strictures of his society—especially as a bourgeois. Even further than the desire to “se libérer du régime du Roi Soleil” (80), Matherne’s descriptive intricacy makes clear that Antoine’s world is prefabricated : every stone has been set, every meal prepared, every story told, every gesture foreseen. The New World allows him to project his fantasies onto an open horizon. The consequences of colonial megalomania are undeniable. Here, the seed is still innocent, rooted in basic personal urges. This historical irony imbues Lamothe-Cadillac with added complexity and, in the classroom, could open a space for discussion about representations of individual subjectivity against the larger currents of hegemonic world-views. Brown University (RI) Clint Bruce MICHON, PIERRE. Les Onze. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2009. ISBN 978-2-86432-552-9. Pp. 137. 14 a. The novel opens with an evocation of the Kaisersaal in the Wurtzbourg Palace where Giambattista Tiepolo, seconded by his son, Giandomenico, painted images invoking universal harmony, and admiration for the prince-évêque of the region, who also happened to be the artists’ patron. The narrator points out that the face of one of the cherubs is often considered to be that of François-Elie Corentin, the eventual creator of the celebrated Les Onze, the portrait of the Comité du salut public which today occupies a place of honor in the Pavillon Flore of the Louvre. For his efforts on behalf of the Revolution, Corentin would become known as “le Tiepolo de la Terreur” (42). The narrator, however, is not convinced of this identification. He thinks the face is Marat’s. It would be a simple task to identify the points in common between the two works. Both celebrate figures 204 FRENCH REVIEW 84.1 who considered themselves enlightened, the prince-évêque and the committee members, all of whom, with the exception of Jean Bon Saint-André, also had artistic inclinations. Both works project an optimism about the present and the future, that human betterment was finally at hand. While the similarities between the two paintings are multiple, there remains one important difference, a difference which trumps everything else. Unlike Tiepolo’s fresco, neither Les Onze, nor its putative creator, François-Elie Corentin ever existed anywhere except in the imagination of Pierre Michon. The question then, is: what is Michon doing in this coy, somber novel? One can only speculate, and a good place to start is with the principal color in the non-existent, Les Onze. That would be yellow, the...