La conversation by Jean d’Ormesson (review)

her menses is the occasion for confusing advice from her mother and other adult women, her more mature girlfriends are experimenting sexually with boys thus triggering her own fantasies about sex with either her father or a male neighbor. Solange proceeds into adolescence and her first sexual experience with a male. Unlike the Duc de Nemours who lures the adolescent bride into sexual awareness, the males in Solange’s story range in a complicated series from her exhibitionist father, to her neighbor and tutor M. Bihotz, to her peers. Of course, the Princesse was a noble who could retire to a convent and refuse the advances of Nemours. By contrast, Solange is a middle-class young woman seeking the recognition of her peers with all the contemporary realism that grounds the idealism of Proust’s famous jeunes filles en fleur. Instead of the convent, she desires her first heterosexual experience and projects many fantasies about what it could be like. This narrative by a woman writer about a girl’s sexual awareness as a rite of passage in contemporary society is a welcome story. Some reviewers in France (e.g., Lire, Sept. 2011) have objected to the narrative’s salacious vocabulary, but such words are part of an adolescent’s survival skills in a sexually liberated society, in contrast to the verbal codes of Lafayette’s day. Darrieussecq shows a remarkable ability to mock us parents who have accompanied adolescents into this world of AIDS, condoms, venereal diseases, and peer pressure unheard of in the seventeenth century. The author’s sense of humor involves not only the adolescent Solange being tortured by adults who give her advice, but also by her peers who submit myths about sexuality and reinforce them with imaginative stories about their own sexual encounters. The title of this coming-of-age novel shifts the focus from a person (La Princesse) to a place (Clèves). The place crucially situates the action in a small village that becomes a crucible for Solange’s character being formed through her confrontation with the stress of deciding where, when, and with whom her first encounter occurs. Social class is everywhere determining her situation. At the very least the reader learns words and encounters characters that challenge the status quo with their culot and give us insights into the gulf separating adolescence in 1670 from what it has become. In its largest sense, this story stages the existential predicament that is pertinent to all men and women who wonder whether the Princesse de Clèves made the right decision, or not. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne D’ORMESSON, JEAN. La conversation. Paris: Héloïse d’Ormesson, 2011. ISBN 978-235087 -174-5. Pp. 121. 15 a. Ce livre d’une brièveté singulière pour un écrivain généralement prolixe entend dévoiler les arcanes d’un grand événement politique perpétré par un personnage historique des plus controversés. Le contexte est celui de la fin de la période révolutionnaire dans une France au bord de l’abîme. Par un coup d’État exécuté de façon magistrale le 18 brumaire de l’an VIII, le gouvernement du Directoire est remplacé par une ‘commission consulaire’ de trois membres. Bonaparte, nommé Premier Consul, se fait donner tous les pouvoirs alors que Cambacérès et Lebrun n’ont qu’un rôle consultatif. De la fin de 1799 à 1804, Bonaparte liquide le passé révolutionnaire et réorganise la France que des années de terreur, de 600 FRENCH REVIEW 86.3 brigandage, de guerre et de corruption ont dévastée et ensanglantée. Son œuvre fulgurante ne finit pas d’éblouir et sa gloire légendaire d’étonner. Ceci est d’autant plus exceptionnel qu’il “n’est le fils que de ses propres œuvres”, qu’il s’est engendré lui-même, remarque d’Ormesson (20). Le parcours prodigieux de ce génie fascine tant l’écrivain qu’il cherche à déceler les mécanismes de son raisonnement. Comment l’idée étrange de devenir empereur a-t-elle germé dans l’esprit de ce jeune général r...