Les boudoirs dans l’œuvre de Balzac: surveiller, mentir, désirer, mourir par Jean-François Richer (review)

by riches (48). For his part, Raffaele Carbone reads Montaigne in dialogue with Giordano Bruno, both of whom “ont cultivé une forme de marginalité capable de remettre en cause l’ordre social et politique établi”(75).The growing number of students and scholars interested in Early Modern France and its Mediterranean context will enjoy Mahbouba Saï Tlili’s study of the anarchic society of corsaires barbaresques (Barbary pirates) in Marin Le Roy de Gomberville’s L’exil de Polexandre (1629), situated on an island “abritant le désordre et le chaos à la frontière d’un monde d’ordre et de droit” (121). The fact that Gomberville’s novel aims largely to “mettre en valeur la politique étrangère de la France en dénigrant sévèrement celle de l’Espagne” (129) reminds the reader that margins and marginality are largely a question of perspective. Mediterranean pirates are also the topic of Sandrine Blondet’s “Pirates et corsaires sur les théâtres parisiens en 1637.” There, the corsaire “ne revendique jamais sa marginalité, mais la subit, et la déplore” (154). The open definition of marginality throughout the volume, as well as the juxtaposition of authors from different places (England, France, Italy) and times (approximately 1530s–1680s), mean that the volume offers more a sample of possible topics related to a range of forms of marginality (often the case with conference proceedings) than a specifically focused treatment that results in carefully planned conceptual heavy lifting, which is not a problem—each of the chapters is informative, well written. A collection worth reading by anyone interested in the range of topics discussed. New York University Phillip John Usher Richer, Jean-François. Les boudoirs dans l’œuvre de Balzac: surveiller, mentir, désirer, mourir. Québec: Nota bene, 2012. ISBN 978-2-89518-370-9. Pp. 320. $30 Can. In the course of four chapters, Richer convincingly demonstrates the essential role played by the boudoir in the Balzacian universe.Richer takes us far from the eighteenthcentury erotic spaces of Crébillon fils and Sade into the darker terrain of the many boudoirs within the architecture of power constructed by Balzac across his oeuvre. “Le lieu des ébats est désormais un lieu de combats,”Richer notes of the divide between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries (42). Through close readings spanning Balzac’s fiction, and occasionally illuminated by references to other treatises of the period such as Chaumont’s 1841 Physiologie du boudoir et des femmes de Paris, Richer steers us through a series of boudoirs where private meets public, where, more often than not, suitors are infantilized, where rendezvous have lethal consequences, and where silence and eloquence reflect the destinies of individuals and the fates of politicians. Under the theoretical aegis of Foucault, chapter one,“Surveiller,” demonstrates the impossibility of intimacy within the boudoir. Narrators or other characters can be stationed just outside and husbands lurk. In short, the boudoir is anything but a private place. Appearances are deliberately deceptive here, as Richer shows in the 288 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 289 next chapter, “Mentir.” The boudoir at the beginning of Sarrasine uncovers, while at the same time covering up the origins of the Lanty fortune and the originary gender ambiguity that would prove fatal to Sarrasine. Rarely is desire consummated in this space of mendacity.As grown men enter the boudoir only to leave silenced and reduced to sons of a mother figure, the space is shown to be one haunted by the specter of incest. Not all males succumb to the dangers of the boudoir, however. Part of what distinguishes the triumvirate of (generally) successful Balzacian male protagonists— Eugène de Rastignac, Henri de Marsay, and le marquis de Ronquerolles—is their ability to wield their eloquence in this space so fraught with danger. As suitors of influential women, the boudoir, for them a space of conquest, serves to catapult them upward into brilliant public careers. The book’s final chapter, “Mourir,” exposes the boudoir to be, for many, a toxic space. There is, of course, the spectacular boudoir death scene of Paquita Valdes in La fille aux yeux d’or. More subtle, however, are other...