Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric

Chapter One. Nineteenth-Century Eccentric Prototypes

11 Chapter One Nineteenth-Century Eccentric Prototypes At the fin de siècle, in 1885, Jules Andrieu, a self-proclaimed “amateur d’excentriques,” announced: “Une histoire document ée de la littérature excentrique est encore à faire. Elle mériterait de tenter une bonne plume de chercheur et d’humoriste et serait accueillie sans doute par une foule de curieux” (6). Has twentieth-century criticism responded to Andrieu’s suggestion? Surprisingly there is a dearth of serious criticism on the subject of eccentricity and no major work at all on representations of the eccentric as a fictional character in twentiethcentury French literature. Most books on eccentricity have been collections of nonfictional portraits of eccentric individuals. It is in fact a tradition that became very popular in the nineteenth century with such books as Gérard de Nerval’s Les illuminés (1850); Charles Monselet’s Les oubliés et les dédaignés (1857); Jules Champfleury’s Les excentriques (1850); and Lorédan Larchey’s Gens singuliers (1853), which grew into the monthly review La Revue Anecdotique des Excentricités Contemporaines (1856–63).1 Why has there been so little critical inquiry on the subject of the eccentric? On a purely semantic level, the term eccentric is a slippery and especially subjective one. What is eccentric for one person may not be for another. Moreover, notions of eccentricity vary, certainly, from culture to culture. It is not surprising , then, that dictionary definitions cannot immediately clear up the murkiness inherent in any study of eccentrics. We know only that in France, the terms excentrique and excentricit é were first adapted from English in their figurative meaning of “odd” or “original” around 1830, according to most dictionaries of this time. Before that, the words were purely geometrical or scientific terms.2 12 Chapter One The Anglomane Although the term excentrique was not used figuratively before the nineteenth century, its English sense was very prominent in the eighteenth century in the form of the Anglomane, who exemplified many of the characteristics the word excentrique was to be endowed with in relation to modern fictional characters. The most unifying characteristic of the Anglomane that would define the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French eccentric is his sense of freedom: freedom with dress, freedom with time, freedom with space. In the late eighteenth century, for example, Fougeret de Montbron published a pamphlet to counter what he considered a threat to French order in his Préservatif contre l’anglomanie because he thought that too much of this kind of freedom would harm French society. The Anglomane, as a true precursor to the modern eccentric, was either ridiculed for standing out from the French mold or criticized for being un-French or bizarre. Sabatier de Castres, for example, warns: “L’anglomanie a passé dans nos livres, dans nos mœurs et y a causé les mêmes ravages […]. En effet, [elle] n’a guère servi qu’à introduire parmi nous des bizarreries et des maximes qui n’étaient analogues ni au caractère, ni au gouvernement de la nation.”3 The Comte de Ségur, in his memoirs, denounces the fact that the Anglomane sees “les germes d’une grande révolution dans les esprits” instead of criticizing the English mores as “frivole, folle et peu française” (qtd. in Gury 149). This English import troubled and threatened the critics of anglomania, who feared that it menaced the French cultural status quo. As Jacques Gury has written, anglomania provoked laughter because it was excessive and ostentatious, and fear because France saw itself as a conformist and united society: L’excentricité scandalise souvent, inquiète parfois, et fait rire toujours. L’Anglomane, refusant tout ce qui est reçu dans la société française se retranche de la communauté, se veut différent; adoptant d’autres critères et un autre système de références, il se singularise dans une France uniforme et conformiste, il est donc excentrique par définition. (71) It is this very mixture of comedy and isolation that makes this eccentric a model for a “free spirit,” bold for its originality 13 Nineteenth-Century Eccentric Prototypes in breaking with the norms. Taking Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase “ce n’est pas un geste, c’est une vie,” the Anglomane’s ability to break away from France, while still living within the confines of French...