Engraven Desire Bday Aa ee 5. “OE EL ~ , ‘ij f Cre ML its ~, Te “Vy pp \ \ eX ; AN iy f Nh, WZ, te Gate wash Meet ltt Engraven DATING Eros, Image & ‘Text in the French Eighteenth Century BY oP betes Ewan eee DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS _ Durhamand London 1992 Parts of Chapter 8 first appeared in the Winter 1991 number of South Atlantic Quarterly (90: 1, I1I—52). Figure 8.45. Photo courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Figure 8.58 reprinted by permission from Sixty Erotic Engravings from “Juliette,” ©1969 by Grove Press. The following figures are courtesy of the Bibliotheque nationale, printed by permission: 1.3, 1.10, 3.2, 3.4, 3.10, 3.16, BULB, 3519s AatAe 5eOn5-Os 5h 25h eZ ON 529s F032, Gait, Oo Wh, O17), Gost, O30, Gi. B74 We Uk Fis lPs qa lisys olla ToS Wall, To287/> wexKoly vox Nil 8.12, 8.34, 8.37, 8.40, 8.54. © 1992 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper © Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. AJ.H.S. et Jean Vaché Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/engravendesire01 stew Contents Preface 1x 1 Text, Image, Allegory 1 2 The Dramatic Impulse 39 3 The Intervisual Paradigm 73 4 Visual Disclosures 103 5 Diana, orthe Voyeurs 133 6 The Passive Vessel 175 7 Exploitations 235 8 Decency and Indecency 271 Coda 335 Notes 339 Bibliography 363 Index 373 VWirwieg . Preface Engraving is everywhere in the eighteenth century. A finely perfected technique, it was the only means of reproducing works of art in quantity; many painters, including Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, and Jean- Baptiste Greuze, reached a wide public in this manner, and the Flemish and Italian painters would have been little known in France without it.! Engraving was so important in this role that even today almost any book dealing with eighteenth-century painting has to rely at least occasionally on copper plates copied from canvases that now cannot be found. This kind of imitative engraving, noble but derivative, was the only one exhibited at the Salon de |’Académie. As time went on, more plates came to be created from original designs, usually with anecdotal titles of some sort; this de- velopment parallels the emergence of the artist-designer as distinct from the engraver. Engraving was also the only means of illustrating a typeset text. Many of the volumes expensively illustrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were massive folios ranging from nature and travel books to Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s monumental tribute to La Fontaine (1755— 1759, $46). But it is principally the smaller scale illustrations that concern us here, specifically, those accompanying works of literature. A publisher’s decision to have a book illustrated was and is still a com- mercial as much as an esthetic one: illustration has always been expensive. Although there were certainly instances where an author or his Maecenas underwrote the costs so as to secure the prestige attached to an illustrated edition, the financial risk entailed normally supposed a predictable type of buyer who could afford, and would wish to possess, the particular product envisaged. The greater the reputation of the artists and the more skilled the workmen engaged, the higher, too, would be the investment, and in consequence the more carefully selected, to begin with, would be the text and the intended public. Not infrequently, therefore, a reissuance of a book, even a relatively new one, bore the title-page mention enrichi de figures, including sometimes the names of the artist(s), to help attract the buyer. Book illustration was already an accomplished art in the seventeenth century, most of it in large format (octavo to folio); then, as now, the size indicates the relative opulence of both volume and purchaser. Luxury editions continued to appear fairly regularly in the eighteenth century, but in the literary domain a much more noticeable illustrative corpus arose in the smaller formats, particularly duodecimo. This trend was owing in part to the growing number of engravers trained in the small number of expert workshops, and it encouraged the emergence of illustrative artists, many of whom made the designing of book plates their major occupation. (Some artists and engravers even specialized in work on the smallest scale: headpieces, tailpieces, and vignettes or culs de lampe.) This reduction no doubt served to contain the cost of illustration, though it hardly made it inexpensive when performed by the highly skilled. Cruder production and cheaper paper eventually made possible an almost popular level of illustration, exploited particularly in the pornographic trade. Inasmuch as my study inevitably fails to mention thousands of (subjec- tively) less interesting engravings, its focus is intrinsically skewed toward precisely that luxury category of books where one is most likely to en- counter the work of the most sought-after artists. In particular, that means the classics of the period: for example, Ovid, the Bible, Tasso, the Fables of La Fontaine. A publisher was much less likely to go to such expense for literature new and unproven. Classics have been prominently featured in the libraries of the well-to-do ever since a book-buying public came into existence, and engravings, prized in their own right, added to the volumes’ status. Several works in this category were illustrated many times over, in some cases, even century after century. Another important class of illustrated books, however, was less osten- sibly honorable and probably, like most novels, played a fundamentally different kind of role in the buyer’s library. These were the erotic texts, often classics themselves although in a different tradition—Boccaccio, La Fontaine’s Contes, Voltaire’s Pucelle d'Orléans, and the like. The fact that this kind of literature, too, found ready publishers for deluxe editions, added to the fact that the first category of dignified classics also contained powerfully sensual motifs, largely accounts for the relatively important role accorded in this study to images of erotic significance. Although first attracted to the copper engravings of the eighteenth cen- tury in essentially esthetic ways, I became increasingly intrigued by the x Preface complex relationships between them and the literature they usually accom- pany. There is no doubt that the combination of some gifted illustrators with skilled engravers and equally able printers gave us many of the most exquisite volumes in the history of publication, and several elegant studies and exhibit catalogues in recent years have celebrated their beauty. Cop- per engraving potentially is one of the most delicate of all artistic media. Although today recourse is usually had, even in the best bibliophilic pub- lications, to halftone reproductions, these reduce fine contrast to a range of grays and thus rob them of the remarkable intricacy that only originals in a good condition can convey. The engraver is much like a jeweler or miniaturist: by pure steadiness of hand he must carve dozens of discrete and sharp lines per inch, modulating their width, density, and contour over the surface of the plate; his finest works are as exquisite as those of any craft known. (Sometimes, the artist’s drawings themselves retain a simi- lar delicacy.) For their preservation we have the dedicated bibliophiles to thank. Their own studies, however, have dealt more with the artists and the states of the etchings and engravings than with such questions as how an illustrated text is read. It was to inquire into the question of the interrelation of text and image that this study was undertaken: it is not devoted to art form as such, but is an approach to images with a particular function and in their specifically literary context. A comprehensive treatment was out of the question, but even a selective survey seems to shed light on some insistent themes and to clarify the mechanics of the problem. The material under study is prin- cipally French and principally eighteenth century, for practical reasons. Besides corresponding to the period whose literature and art I know best, those limits serve to contain the vast corpus that otherwise would make the subject unmanageable. My purpose is to do justice to the power of the illustrative traditions as well as to the way they form, and are formed by, their relation to literature. Neither province is, in any case, autonomous. It is not enough to say that literary works play off (the “influence of”) others, and that images do as well, nor even that the image is literarily conditioned in ways that form a counterpoint to the visuality of literature, however true these premises be. The confrontation of an image with a text embodies, along with com- plementarity, a sort of defiance: a challenge to its mastery, an assertion of a coequal viewpoint. In certain ways it might even be helpful to think of illustration as being “against” rather than “to” the text, probing its tacit ambiguities if not its weaknesses. Even more interesting, at times, are the Preface xi tricks it can play with metaphor; for although both image and text can of course be metaphoric, they cannot always—and perhaps cannot usually— adopt each other’s metaphors and thus are tempted to substitute, literal- ize, or otherwise transmogrify the metaphors they feed upon in the other medium. When literature employs well-known visual themes, they function in terms of the traditions of both art and literature. I am specifically con- cerned with the interweavings and confrontation between the two, whereas most studies of illustration discuss the relation between text and image as if it were determined by just one. It is certainly true that the same literary texts tend to be illustrated over and over, and that each set of illustra- tions tends to resemble the last, at least in some fundamental ways. I will particularly contend, however, that linkages exist between illustrations irrespective of the specific identity of the texts being illustrated. Speaking schematically, every plate has three intertexts: the prevalent iconographic repertory; sometimes, the internal series of plates to which it belongs; and the literary work to which it is attached. For our purposes, it is essential to consider them as simultaneously operative, and the analysis must attempt to reflect this simultaneity. The movement of the book thus attempts to balance two types of argu- ment. The first stresses the common visual features of a disconnected range of illustrations, extending the ordinary notions of subject and motif to more complex shared patterns that, for want of a better label, I call “inter- visual paradigms.” These are of course closely related to textual thematics; they point to obsessions of the written not less than the visual, and thus they participate in broad intertextual paradigms and not just intervisual ones. The second type reverts to the level of discrete discriminations be- tween illustrations, recognizing both literary differences in the treatment of similar motifs and the interplay between particular illustrations and their particular texts. Such an approach entails skipping from item to item but helps avoid the risk of selecting out (and perhaps belaboring) too few examples. The demonstration is, instead, cumulative and as such depends on richness of repetitions and interference of the themes discussed. I am not concerned with tracing the origin of each motif, which is fre- quently ancient, but of describing its function within a given configuration of other motifs. A Greek myth might not fulfill the same role at all in its original historical context that it does in eighteenth-century France. Alain- Marie Bassy, whose reflections on approaches to the study of illustration have helped to situate and illuminate the whole field, couches the relevant signifying system in terms of the figural tradition that largely concerns me xii Preface here: “It is via the series that the image signifies. It is but a segment, a se- quence ina system of which the reader must, piece by piece, as in dominos, reconstruct the totality” (1984: 155-56). But my object is not confined to the pure interplay of illustrations; it is also to bring image and text into a sort of global dialogue, consciously trying to avert the cleavage that Bassy cautioned against, the risk that “a gap may be created between a system of literature which, in terms of intertextuality, refers only to itself, and a system of illustration which would also function within a closed circle, in a sort of ‘inter-iconicity’ ” (1984: 155-56). My aim is to avoid both extremes. Other things being more or less equal, preference has been given to ex- amples that have not been widely reproduced in other books on engraving. Most of them are from literary books, but autonomous prints come into play as well (as do, to a lesser degree, paintings), both because they share many of the same themes and because they must be read in juxtaposition with text in much the same ways as illustrations. Since this is not primarily a bibliophilic study, the complexity of ref- erences has been minimized. Copper plates were often reused, and when that happened, they were often at least partially reengraved to restore their sharpness, with the fine detail inevitably modified in the process. Identifying and presenting the original in its most pristine form is of great importance for the specialized study of engraving as an artistic technique, but less so for the study of content. I have garnered my examples where I could and try to respect their authenticity without encumbering the reader with details relating to their origin. In order to keep references brief, I have signaled all titles of primary sources and editions that figure in the bibliography at the end of the vol- ume by the sign § followed by the bibliography number and volume and/ or page references. The relationship of designer to engraver is abbrevi- ated in the form: artist/engraver (zmvenit/sculpsit when signed on the plate). For secondary sources, the standard date reference is used, again with full information given in the bibliography at the end. English translations frequently cited are listed separately at the end of the bibliography. Many of the works used in this study have never been translated, and in some instances even the preferred translation seemed inadequate for justifying the relationship of a specific passage to an illus- tration. All translations not specifically identified are my own. I am much indebted to Robert Dawson for his collection and knowledge of French books; to the scholars and staff in the libraries that have assisted me, in particular, the rare book room of the Perkins Library at Duke Uni- Preface xiii versity, the British Art Center and the Beineke and Sterling libraries at Yale University, the rare book collection of the Library of Congress, the Bibliotheque municipale de Montpellier, and, of course, the Bibliotheque nationale. I have also benefited from the assistance of grants from the Yale Center for British Art and the Duke University Research Council. Among those who have read the manuscript critically I have particularly to thank James Rolleston, Paul Hunter, Gita May, Jay Caplan, and Barbara Reitt. Great credit for the good qualities of this volume is due to Reynolds Smith, Mary Mendell, Jean Brady, and Tom Campbell of Duke University Press. xiv Preface I began by dropping the picture theory of language and ended by adopting the language theory of pictures. —Nelson Goodman, Problems and Projects Whereas we have traditionally been accus- tomed to reading literature by analogy with the plastic arts and with music, we now have to recognize the necessity of a non- perceptual, linguistic moment in painting and music, and learn to read pictures rather than to zmagine meaning. —Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory 2 8) Seay eee eee ith — atin dupagng is wy Torey a ; Lows ? - 4) Ae Pinel pa oo bd < Vaden ow ae i) 7 1 > 9 1 Text, Image, Allegory The proliferation in recent years of reflections on the relationship of lit- erature and art, or more generally word and image, has had surprisingly little place for the subject of literary illustration, which would seem to be the field of their most apparent interaction. Perhaps what this tells us is that a certain tenacious hierarchy in art appreciation still relegates small engravings to the station of minor art, and this both because they are diminutive and because, more importantly, they too evidently manifest an ontological dependence upon the thing imitated—which in its case is not nature, as in classical theory, but narrative. Some seem to have assumed, in consequence, that the subject was artistically minor and semiotically shallow. This book will treat, in combination rather than serially, three distin- guishable but decidedly overlapping subjects: the semiotics of engravings, or the ways in which they are coded and read;' the intertextual network relating similar kinds of engravings to each other, more or less indepen- dently of the texts to which they are ostensibly tied; and the interplay between particular illustrations and the texts they accompany. The second of these, demonstrating the relation to each other of images whose ap- parent denotations may be totally unrelated, is the least studied aspect of book illustration, although indeed each of these avenues is still in the early stages of exploration. Recent essays by Alain-Marie Bassy, Alain Guillerm, Gérard Gréverand, and Claude Labrosse have provided many of the needed clues for a comprehensive and varied field of study. . First we must look at the question of how illustrations can and cannot be said to represent text; that is, in what mode they actualize, in their medium, what is assumed to be “contained” in another. Inasmuch as the pertinent text is frequently a narrative, there follows a consideration of what the narrative functions, if any, of a synchronous picture might be. This leads to a discussion of intrinsic factors that set illustration as art and medium apart from the world of painting with which, nonetheless, it must always in some degree be compared. And finally, returning to the image-text analogy, there is the matter of how we go about “reading” illustrations, particularly when they are overlaid with allegorical referents. Reading and Illustrating It is well understood by now that one cannot be content to describe illustra- tions in terms of their “fidelity” to a text in the sense of being a potentially unmediated copy of something that takes place in narrative. The figure, in other words, cannot be thought of as a signifier whose signified is simply the literary text, but rather as some kind of intertext. What we usually mean by the notion of an illustration’s supposed fidelity to, or respect of, the text is more plausibly thought of as a state of compatibility or noncontra- diction (or, in Nelson Goodman’s terminology, of compliance)? between the information each contains and the texts to which it relates. But there is no literal sense in which an illustration can be a direct transcription from language to image. Obviously, however, the term /zteral is often used casually, in a relative sense, to describe illustrations that are rigidly un- imaginative, seeming to add as little as possible to the minimal verbal cues taken from the text.’ Our first principle of analysis must therefore be that a text never deter- mines how it is illustrated. It does not, in the first place, decide which scenes are to be represented, although there are ways in which it can flag the attention of a potential illustrator; in short tales or tragedies there is usually a fairly evident sort of crisis line or climactic scene that is by all odds the most likely to be selected. In longer, more complex works the range of the artist’s options is great.‘ Still, the manner of treating the subject would not be imposed, even if its essential content were. But the choice is powerfully influenced as well by extraneous factors, in particular, by previous illustrations of the same text or other texts. Illustrations may, up toa point, be thought of as actualizations or “read- ings” (or even in a certain sense “performances”) of the text, much as individual acts of reading are in reception theory. Pointing out that “the verb ‘illustrate’ itself seems to have been used to refer to verbal elucidation before it was transferred to the pictorial supplementation of verbal texts,” Wendy Steiner concludes: “These usages indicate the rootedness of illus- tration in interpretation and intertextuality” (1982: 141). Such “reading” 2 Text, Image, Allegory is constrained by definable boundaries yet by no means fully determined; an indefinite number of illustrations could be compatible with the text, not only because any number of distinct moments of action might be picked for illustration, but also because for any such moment any number of illustrations is imaginable. This is the essential perspective of Gerard Gréverand: “each illustrator contributes his own intelligibility of the text; thus there is always the possibility of a new intelligibility, an infinite field of the figuratively possible” (1983: 91). Such selection may color the story by what it omits as well as what it includes: thus, Jean Sgard notes, in terms of the eight plates by Jacques-Jean Pasquier and Hubert Francois Gravelot for the Manon Lescaut of 1753, the whole concentration is on the two lovers, to the exclusion of such important characters in the novel as Des Grieux’s father; religion, Manon’s betrayals are absent (1988: 283, 286). Yet two other theoretical situations must still be envisioned: that the notion of an eventual illustration might itself be a generating factor in the production of the text; and that illustration and text may be less than perfectly compatible, either because the former is obeying rules of its own, or because it embodies a particular angle that is being (visually) applied to the reading of the work. Illustrations, as Thomas Pavel remarks, can respond only to the infor- mational content of a text and not readily to its stylistic or narratological aspects (1986: 74). In keeping with this insight (and method), one could formulate the propositional equivalent of this notion of compatibility. If one imagines a set of statements that could more or less indisputably be made about the (visually semantic) contents of any picture, any one of these statements could then be said to be “contained by” or “belonging to” the picture itself, in the same manner that elements of meaning or “semes” are said to be possessed by particular words. The number of such statements, though possibly very large, ought to be finite; and the set is at least partly different from the sum of sentences that belong to the text itself. In fact, any statement pertaining to an illustration of a literary text that is not in fact to be found in the text, or could not at least be said to be valid in the text’s “world,” would constitute an instance of incompatibility; the subset of such statements might consist of none at all (total compatibility of text and illustration) or the entire parent set (a possibility, for instance, when the wrong plate is affixed to a work).’ One could account for the contents of this subset in various ways: inattention to the text, imaginative excess, artistic license, and the like. Generally, however, the relation between text and image is, even if not strictly derivative, not exactly reversible either. For if the image can act Text, Image, Allegory 3 upon the reader, it is nonetheless powerless, as Gréverand notes, to affect the text qua text: We have to recognize that a variation in an aspect of the image does not entail a change in the narrative it accompanies; hence we cannot consider the illustration as the signifier of a text which is more or less its caption and which, in this perspective, would constitute its signified. Image and text are not the front and back sides of the same meaning. (1983: 93) This applies at least to the pure model in which the text is assigned clear temporal priority. But there are also, both theoretically and practically, more complicated interrelations. The most obvious one is the case where the author has selected either the artist or the subjects of illustration; as in the collaboration between playwright and director, it is impossible then to say that the latter does not supply sometimes decisive feedback to the former. It is tempting to conjecture that Antoine Francois Prévost had a hand in determining the illustrations for the 1753 Manon,° and beyond any doubt that Jean-Jacques Rousseau specified the subjects for his Ju/ie in 1761. At that extremity of the scale, William Blake and Salomon Gessner being the only examples that readily suggest themselves within this time frame, authors are their own artists. But one must also consider the subtler anterior influence exerted during the writing process by the realization that a particular situation would lend itself well to illustration, or even the writer’s tendency to conceive episodes (and this constitutes the optimal model in Denis Diderot’s thought) so that they can. At this level, “illustra- tion” merges with the general category of dramatic imagination, and the potential engraving becomes one of the factors involved in the production of the literary text. There is thus an inherently interactive relationship between writer and draftsman, for an understanding of which one can seek some clues in the kind of textual cues to which the artist responds. Just as there are scénes a faire (obvious if not facile dramatic situations) in relation to the plot of a play or novel, so one can point in many texts to what one might call scénes a illustrer. Take this example from Louvet de Couvray’s Amours du chevalier de Faublas, where the baron discovers his son Faublas in a dark room with Mme de Lignolle and Justine (with whom he has just made love, believing her to be Mme de B***): Un cri d’effroi m’échappa. . . . Le baron, armé d’une bougie fatale, s'arréta dans l’embrasure de la porte; et quelle scéne il éclaira! D’abord lui- 4 Text, Image, Allegory méme, qui comptait ne trouver qu'une femme avec son fils, ne fut pas médiocrement étonné d’en voir deux qui se tenaient amicalement par la main. Madame de Lignolle ensuite, madame de Lignolle également zndig- née, honteuse et surprise, montrait assez, sur son visage ou se peignaient les combats de plusieurs passions contraires, qu'elle ne pouvait ni me par- donner l’infidélité que sans doute je venais de lui faire, ni se pardonner a elle-méme les sottes caresses dont il n’y a qu'un instant elle accablait sa rivale, sa rivale qui, toute droite plantée contre la muraille, ne donnait pas signe de vie. Mais vous jugez que des quatre acteurs de cette étrange scéne, je ne fus pas le moins stupéfait, lorsqu’un coup d’oeil, furtivement jeté sur l’infortunée statue, m’eut fait reconnaitre... je la regardai trois fois encore avant de me persuader que mes sens eussent pu m’égarer a ce point... Cette femme, dans les bras de laquelle j’avais cru posséder la plus belle des femmes, ce n’était qu'une brunette passablement gentille! celle en qui tout a l’heure j’idolatrais Madame de B***, ce n’était que Justine! ($49: 3:125; italics added) {I let out a cry of fright. . . . The baron, armed with a fateful candle, came to a stop in the doorway; and what a scene he illuminated! He, to begin with, expecting only to find a woman with his son, was not a little surprised to see two of them holding hands amicably. Then Mme de Lignolle, indignant, shamed and surprised all at once, whose face, crossed by different and opposite emotions, indicated sufficiently that she could neither forgive me the infidelity that I had doubtless just committed, nor forgive herself the foolish caresses she had just the minute before been showering on her rival who, frozen upright against the wall, gave no sign of life. But you can judge that of the four actors in this strange scene I was not the least stupified when a furtive glance at that unfortunate statue revealed to me... I had to look three times before I could accept that I could have been so carried away by my own senses... This woman, in whose arms I thought I was possessing the most beautiful of women, was no more than a fairly nice brunette: she in whose person I had just adored Mme de B*** was merely Justine! ] The narrative here imposes a stasis on the reader’s imagination, effec- tively freezing the diegetic action while the narrative catches up with its dynamic potential. The notion of scéve combines and bridges reference to theater (“quatre acteurs”) and painting. The narrative judgment “Quelle scene!” by being repeated in the caption, becomes at the same time a com- mentary on the illustration—and on illustration. In such spaces do the Text, Image, Allegory 5 writer looking for illustrations and the artist parsing a text for subjects sometimes meet. Illustration as Narrative A basic, qualitative difference between text and image, recognized in the age-old comparisons of poetry to painting, is that a text is diachronic and a picture synchronic. Although an image may have a narrative content— a subject that Diderot discusses, placing great emphasis upon the range of artistic choices and the importance of the specific narrative moment selected—that content must necessarily be communicated, via gestures suspended in progress or signs of acts either completed or about to be per- formed,’ through a medium whose mode of existence is synchronic. This had not always been so strictly the case. Saint Francis could be shown on a single panel accomplishing several saintly gestures side by side; sixteenth- century illustrations of Ludovico Ariosto represent many scenes from each canto laid out as along a road in receding perspective, in a symbolically spatial diachrony that perhaps constitutes the original “time-line.” ® (It might be said that the comic strip reestablished sequential pictorial nar- rative and, by imbedding words—principally dialogue—redefined the traditional relationship of text and illustration.) It is true, of course, that a picture is never read in an absolutely synchronic manner. To some de- gree the eye and mind assimilate its various aspects sequentially,’ but the ordering of that perceptive sequence is not a narrative order, and the quasi- narrative aspects of the image’s meaning must be reconstructed from the semiotic data that at first may seem randomly dispersed. Owen Holloway puts it this way: “It is a prerequisite of good illustra- tion to bring together elements which perhaps were never together or even present in so many words in the text of the book. Coupled with this, it is the function of montage to break down a scene into features which are then presented in an order, and with a particular emphasis, and on the par- ticular scale, that the narrative of the illustrator himself requires” (1969: 30). This artistic license with respect to the diachronic text (though hardly a “prerequisite” of “good” illustration) is unquestionably an aspect of the illustrator’s repertory. Nonetheless, the analytic principle being put to use here, even though positively intended, is inapplicably vague (“am order,” a “particular scale,” and so forth) as is the definition of montage; while one may concede that it commendably evokes the ephemeral experience of illus- trations, this terminology, partly judgmental and normative, cannot be applied objectively to their description. Wendy Steiner has drawn renewed 6 Text, Image, Allegory attention to the means whereby the artist, whether illustrator or history painter, “represents” action in a static medium by catching “the crucial moment when all the past and future of the act are implied” (1982: 148). On another level, an illustration can entail condensation of a purely sym- bolic type: for example, representation of Julie’s bed and room in the fifth illustration to Julie (L’inoculation de l'amour) recalls the earlier night Saint- Preux spent with her there (the only other time he ever entered this room, but not an element in the sequence of illustrations) and simultaneously foreshadows Julie’s deathbed, subject of the twelfth plate (Labrosse 1985: 229). Such coherent sequences of illustrations, which seem to become established only in the 1750s, may, in Jean Sgard’s view, owe much both to William Hogarth’s “Progress” series and to the copious illustrations in both English and French editions of Samuel Richardson (1986: 32-35). He is quite right to emphasize the particular interior dynamics of such a suite, which can in many instances serve as subject of rewarding study in its own right. A major distinction between a “narrative” painting such as Jean Honoré Fragonard’s Corésus et Callirhoé (one of Diderot’s principal examples in his Salons) and a literary illustration is that the latter is physically juxtaposed with its prescribed textual environment, and this proximity imposes the dominant role of text to which the figural must be related. Text dominates also in history painting, but it is not an immediate given; it must either be identified by the title, or by intuitable or reconstructible data coded in the image. Every representational piece of art has some kind of intertext, and this intertext, if not overtly narrative, at least takes on, in the process of deployment, a narrative form. Take, for instance, the following descrip- tion by Mary Sheriff of a “non-narrative” allegory of fall by Fragonard: “{a}] young woman gathers fruit in her apron and squeezes a bunch of grapes over a child lying in the grass below,” who moreover “is animated by the spray” (1990: 95, I11; my italics). The verbs here call attention to at least a minimal narrative, and they are surely essential to understanding of the painting. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made a simple but dramatic demon- stration of this relation in the first page of Le petit prince, where he presented a childish image in the form of a riddle, looking something like a hat. What the drawing represents, it is explained—its text, in other words— is a boa that has swallowed an elephant: '° a static image—seemingly a still life—that instead implies a narrative content. Still life defies this tendency by rejecting, as Norman Bryson puts it, the Narrative sentence as characterized in grammatical analogy by the verb: “still-life knows only nouns, adjectives, and conjunctions, and by insist- Text, Image, Allegory 7 ing on these and only these remains permanently below the threshold of meaning” (1981: 23). Such a characterization has for our purposes the advantage of rendering immediately evident why it is that things have so much less important a place (and still life, @ fortiori, none at all) in illus- tration than in painting. Illustration stays close to narrative; even though it must necessarily freeze motion, it wants dynamic content—in Bryson’s terms, implied “verbs.” And given its small format, once the active agents are accommodated, there is little space left for inanimate accessories. If the “subject” is immediately recognizable, on the other hand, that means that the image is capable of regenerating a text unaided in the mind of the viewer, a situation that Alain Bergala calls effet-fiction: “the recognition of a situation or a scene belonging to the fictional collective imagination” (1977: 16).'' The biblical, mythical, or historical scene is the paradigmatic instance of this operation, though there have been many paintings whose subjects remain open to dispute. Seventeenth-century treatises on painting stressed the painter’s need for a vast literary culture to serve as a repertory of unambiguous reference; according to Roger de Piles, “Invention . . . must not keep the viewer’s mind in suspense through any obscurity,” and traditionally coded attributes are the conventional means of assuring such identification.’ Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos asserted as early as 1719 that this was sometimes a source of significant misunder- standing, or at best limited pleasure, at the salons: “I have several times been surprised that painters who have such a stake in making the charac- ters they use to move us recognizable, and who must encounter so many difficulties in making them so with only a paintbrush to assist them, do not always accompany their historical paintings with a short inscription. Three-quarters of the viewers, who moreover are quite capable of giving the work its due, are not well enough read to guess the subject of the painting.” One can then say that the picture “speaks a language they don’t understand.” This constraint distinguishes painting from poetry, for the poet can always introduce an unfamiliar subject gradually; the painter therefore “must never undertake to treat a subject drawn from some little- known work; he must insert on his canvas only characters that everyone, at least those before whom his painting will be shown, has heard of.” It is for this reason that most European painting remains faithful to biblical subjects, and after that to Greek and Roman history and fable—“subjects generally known” (Du Bos 1770: 1:90—91, 108-10). In salon painting, the viewer most often has the support of at least a title—sometimes one that, in the absence of such a conventional historical referent, must compensate for that lack by providing a quick synopsis of 8 Text, Image, Allegory the sense of the action. There are examples of this among Greuze’s paint- ings, precisely because, although “for the tableau to work . . . it must be completely legible,” they are often not “historical” in the traditional way.’ Antoinette Ehrard (1986) has shown how ambiguous certain of his best-known paintings might easily become if the titles happened to be re- versed. A remark of Mark Twain’s is pertinent here: “A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expres- sion in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated ‘Beatrice Cenci the Day Before Her Execution.’ It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, “Young Girl with Hay Fever; Young Girl with Her Head in a Bag.’” “ In other words, in the absence of the correct text, the painting is misunderstood, which means that a different (erroneous) text is generated; for “Young Girl with Hay Fever” still implies a text, although not the one historically intended. Of course, in Twain’s ironic construction, it would be equally valid. Mitchell quotes this passage rather to show Twain’s skepticism about “the notion that painting is capable of expressing some invisible essence.” Insofar as any attempt to define the content of such pictorial essence would itself be a process of exploration with words, the search for a textual representation equivalent to the visual one, it could quite well be argued that that comes down to essentially the same point I am making here.” But it is also true, as Mitchell points out, that the label is worth little without the picture, which is “a confluence of pictorial and verbal traditions” (1986: 42). The title is in effect a proposition about the picture—often, perhaps, a truncated proposition. “There is no message in any medium that asserts without some help from the external context, nor does any message ever come to us free of the contamination of other media and contexts. It may be that pictures require more help from the outside than verbal messages, or at least that this is the case with painting produced in the iconographic tradition” (Steiner 1982: 162).'° Mary Sheriff’s analysis of the Progress of Love sequence at the Frick Collection is appropriately posed in just such terms: “Reading The Progress of Love is problematic because the subject is artist-created, that is, not supported by a literary text. Viewers cannot know the narrative outside of the painting(s), and they are called upon to fabricate, rather than to remember, a story line” (1990: 65—66). In the event, she goes on to show that there may be no fixed story line at all, such that the ensemble of four paintings can be read creatively by the viewer." Diderot is in fact invoking this same principle in a different way when he says: “Every piece of sculpture or painting must be the expression of a great Text, Image, Allegory 9 maxim, a lesson for the viewer; otherwise it is mute.” '® The “maxim” in his formula is, precisely, a textual referent: the meaning of the tableau is rendered through the mediation of a text, and “mute” then basically means devoid of text—in other words, meaningless. Deprived of diachronic repetition (essential to verbal narrative) by im- position of the rigorously logical singleness of Renaissance perspective, painting had recourse to other devices that left it only “weakly narrative” (Steiner 1988: 23), whence perhaps a heightened dependency upon his- torical subjects that can implicitly restore the sense of linear sequence. (Films, I might point out, are in contrast strongly narrative: their techni- cal substratum itself consisting of repetitions, there is no static equivalent for many terms used to describe filmic treatments, for example, the way a camera is said to “dwell” on a face or object. Paintings and engravings can do nothing but dwell.) '? Nonetheless, she exaggerates this weakness by underestimating the narrative role of discourse about painting: for inter- pretation constantly regenerates the narrative implied in painting, a phe- nomenon that she in fact illustrates again and again. The viewer’s ability to tell the story represented in the picture constitutes the proof that there is one, even in classical history painting where the diachronic elements that underpin “strong” narrative are lacking. The animation attributed to certain ostensibly narrative works”? is itself, in truth, an effect of dynamic interpretive discourse, the endless verbal energizing of critical description. For as Steiner says elsewhere, “One would not object that the statements generated by a verbal text are not part of its meaning, so why should one do so of a painting?” (1982: 162). If illustrations are thought of as that form of representation that refers simultaneously to the world (for recognition of its visual signs) and to text, then all history paintings are in this sense #//ustrations of a virtual text.7! The difference with illustration stricto sensu is that the narrative text is already a specific given, along with the image. There is an important distinction to be made between textual environment in this general sense, intrinsic to the possibility of a discourse about images, and the presence of direct textual support, to which I shall return later. In the history of painting this differ- ence is sometimes problematic because of the questionable status of titles, which, even in cases where they have since become traditional, may, par- ticularly in the case of older paintings, have been originated by a collector, auctioneer, or curator rather than the artist. Such interventions, however, further testify to the institutional and cultural necessity of such a text. Even “Untitled” is, after all, a text and influences the way the viewer looks at the painting. 10 6Text, Image, Allegory In the case of literary illustrations, the relevant textual environment is almost always manifest, although when the physical metonymy is compro- mised, as when plates are detached from their original book or mislocated by a negligent binder, they can become quite enigmatic. (It must be re- membered that copper plates, requiring a different kind of press, were always printed separately from the text sheets—always hors texte—and had to be tipped into the books when bound. Often instructions were incorpo- rated into the typeset pages as to where these plates should be placed in binding, but errors were common.) Similarly, when a lengthy and much subdivided text contains numerous unlabeled frontispieces, identification of the subject of each can be, at best, delayed, and sometimes quite prob- lematic; a good example of this is L’Astrée of 1733 ($81), whose dozens of plates often correspond confusingly to passages buried deep in secondary narratives. In most instances encountered after midcentury, however, the neighboring presence of appropriate text makes the support readily avail- able even when the plate bears no caption; conversely, when present, the caption brings explicit and focused reinforcement amid the potentially vast range of the text as a whole. Specific Attributes of the Medium Artistic factors, to be sure, must ever be kept in mind; engraving as an art form does not exist independently of other plastic arts. There was no tradition yet established for painting literary subjects, aside from biblical, Greek, Latin, and a few other epic subjects that were subsumed under the rubric of “history” painting; the practice of painting fictional subjects does not flourish until the nineteenth century. On the other hand, in treating only book illustrations I am leaving aside not only original independent prints but a large mass of engravings dedicated to reproduction of paint- ings, which played a major role in the dissemination of works of art and are inevitably judged mostly in terms of the adequacy of that reproduction. No visual art has any direct equivalent for representation of the linguis- tic first person. A first-person narrator must be transposed, viewed from without, in order to be included at all. In this regard, there can be no more than a rudimentary “narratology” of illustrations, focalization being apparently limited to two gross categories according to the presence or absence of the protagonist. If he is not in the picture, then we can some- times imagine that it represents what he sees—provided, that is, that the text confirms that he is a viable witness. In every other case we can say little else than that it is the reader who “sees.” Pictures of all kinds thus derive Text, Image, Allegory 11 from plot rather than the narrative situation; or if the poet is portrayed, it is because of an extradiegetic transposition, where he becomes qua narra- tor part of the illustrator’s plot rather than producing his own. Even if in language the focalization is on the character, causing us to “see” through his eyes, in the illustration we must generally see him, not what he says and not just what he sees. The “double register” whereby a first-person homodiegetic”* narrator plays two roles (past and present) while seeming to speak with one voice cannot be projected visually by any conventional device.” Focalization operates in a rather different manner in the cinema, and for this reason the descriptive tools developed for analysis of the (paradigmati- cally male) gaze in film are imperfectly applicable here. The camera’s eye, for example, is not infrequently identified with the gaze of the protago- nist, which can thus encounter that of the woman looking back to signify her consciousness of being looked at. And whether the male is doimg the looking or seen in the act of looking, the situation, essentially dynamic, can be captured through various (often moving) angles. These techniques have no parallel in illustration, not only because it is static but because its “gaze” must complement in one way or another the narrative voice in the text. It is not an independent, integral, intensive medium as is film. There are other important features peculiar to this single art. Literary illustrations, being almost always much smaller (but with notable excep- tions, such as Oudry’s folio illustrations of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables), are also, of necessity, much more stylized. The fact that engravings therefore contain far less information than paintings offers advantages when it comes to the business of interpreting them, for they must depend upon less subtle effects, even formalized codes. For the same reason, they are never treated as “realistic” —a notion that, in Norman Bryson’s analysis, depends upon “an instituted difference between figure and discourse” (1981: 12). Bryson’s theory illuminates not only the bases of mimetic art conven- tions but indirectly the rather special, even anomalous, place of engraving and illustration in comparison with the painting tradition. For “realism is not something that is established by an identity between image and world (Essential Copy), but by an . . . excess of the image over discourse”: in other words, a surfeit of figural information over text, thanks in part to such data-rich tools as color and perspective. The density of image satu- rates the eye and mind, and “the textuality of the image recedes before the even spreading of a connotation which is not experienced as zntelligible, but sensory” (1981: 18). Thus, to a mimetic view of the history of art, “the painting of realism is seen as a progressive liberation from discourse 12 Text, Image, Allegory as the technology of painting permits ever closer approximation towards the Essential Copy” (27). It will be immediately evident that this could not describe engraving, which, by virtue of its limitations in medium and dimensions, cannot manage to supercharge the image so greatly that figure overwhelms the discourse. Engraving remains at all stages in its history intimately tied to and semantically determined by text; in the case of literary illustration this vital dependency is even more obviously inherent. Conversely, engravings are—and this is perhaps their most distinctive feature in esthetic considerations—relatively free from the imposed theo- retical constraints of imitation. Even in the neoclassical period it seems to have been conceded that engravings can represent without necessarily depending in order to do so upon the creation of z//usion; rarely was it ar- gued that they can aspire to illusion except in the very limited and formal sense that they conform to certain representational norms, for example, the rules of perspective. Painting is “an art which through lines and colors represents on a smooth and unified surface all visible objects. The painter imitates or counterfeits nature through the use of colors”; engraving, in contrast, does not imitate objects themselves, one of whose essential at- tributes is color, but only their highlights and shadows.”* Although it might not immediately be obvious, that is a highly privileged situation for any artistic medium in an era where illusion was arguably more crucial to the notion of zsthetic response than was reference. Or more exactly, engraving is not held to be apt for imitation of mature. When it imitates painting—and in many discussions, reproduction of art through engraving is the only aspect of the subject considered—a different ontology is as- sumed, which may justify positing a virtual equivalence, at least in terms of the artistic skill manifested, of plate and painting,” and even, at least in one apologist’s view, with respect to color; Louis Doissin says in La gravure, poeme: “the crowning merit of the engraver, his greatest glory is to render all the effects of the more varied coloration in an art that allows of only two colors, black and white, such that the illusion is perfect, and that objects are not more true in the painting than in the engraving” ($19: 23). Few appear to share Doissin’s judgment that such power might in exceptional cases extend even to representation of objects directly.*° It does not, in any event, characterize the illustration of books, which he refers to merely in passing as an “agrement” capable of rendering gesture and movement (78-79). Doubtless one can and does, as a matter of practice, make implicit quali- tative distinctions among artists and among particular engravings. Aside from the fine tooling that sets the best plates apart from the cruder ones, Text, Image, Allegory 13 there are varying strengths of design, and I think one can also say strengths of concept; the two may often coincide. Let me offer a simple contrast between two Shakespeare illustrations by Francis Hayman, engraved by Gravelot, who spent much of his early career in London. His plate of Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” scene (act 5, scene 1) is what I would call a weak illustration (figure 1.1). It is certainly neither crude nor awkward, it is striking in its perspective, and it is hard to see any way in which it disputes the text: Lady Macbeth enters, observed by a gentlewoman and doctor, carrying a taper, which in the illustration she has just put down; there is even a noticeable spot on the back (!) of her left hand. But it has little to “say”; it is thin on content; with its dominance of straight lines and stick characters, it is also visually prim and static. His Hamlet, on the other hand, is strong: by that I mean not principally that it is busier—although it is that, describing in some detail the well-populated “Mousetrap” scene (figure 1.2)—but that it more clearly tries to assume the challenge of the play’s complexity: the players, the king’s reaction, Hamlet’s odd stance, the different and echoing levels of staging, and so forth. This it does not through facial expression (engravings on this small scale usually cannot achieve much in the way of facial detail on full figures, and close-ups are unknown to this medium), nor by grandness of gesture, but by placement and interplay of characters. We not only know what is the precise point in the action, but we grasp as well something of its complicated interwork- ings and of the characters’ relations, which escape completely in the former example. But illustrations have distinct limitations, and not just ones of scale. Format is one constraint: paintings, and the engravings that reproduce them, are generally wider than they are high, and their content is orga- nized in function of that horizontal “stage”; literary illustrations, if they are full-page plates, are almost without exception vertical. And although it is true that in some ways “an illustration breaks the perceptual field of a page, disjoining itself from typography particularly when it uses the devices of perspective” (Steiner 1982: 154), it is also in certain ways inte- grated into the book format: illustrations are almost without exception framed, whether ornamentally or by a simple black line, as if to underscore their “pageness,” their forn.al congruency to the pages of text that they parallel and, by connotation, to assert the mutual adequacy of the visual and verbal. It would be difficult to infer humor or irony from an engraving in the absence of any sort of caption, except to the extent that it may represent a situation so incongruous that one could hardly imagine the originating 14 Text, Image, Allegory 1.1 Macbeth, act 5, scene 1. Hayman/Gravelot ($75: 5:1). 1.2 Hamlet, act 3, scene 7. Hayman/Gravelot ($75: 3:7). text’s not harboring an ironical intent—for example, the patently prepos- terous scene for canto 37 of Ariosto’s Roland furieux, which cries out for (verbal) explanation (figure 1.3). The text says: “The women were seated on the ground, and dared not rise; for this position was the only means their modesty had of veiling them from view’; the reason for their embarrassing posture is that a misogynistic tyrant has had their skirts cut off “so as to reveal what modesty and nature are careful to hide” ($2: 4:59—60). In the case of Hogarth, according to Bryson’s analysis, irony is possible because of starkly contrasting levels of reading, a process that is no less textual in essence.”’ Political cartoons, the commonest use of humor in line-drawing, always were and still are entirely dependent upon verbal support. Whiteness, one of the most universal signifiers of feminine beauty throughout the classical period, cannot effectively be rendered in engrav- ing except by scarcity of lines, which also, especially in small plates, simultaneously weakens the modeling of the flesh. Light and shadow, as Claude Labrosse remarks (1985: 216), are the essential medium both of the engraving’s spatialization and its elementary symbolic material. Paint- ing, in contrast, can make whiteness very striking with no loss of texture. On another front, neither painting nor engraving have ever been success- Text, Image, Allegory 15 1.3 Ariosto, Roland furieux, canto 37. Cochin/Ponce (§2). ful at representing tears, although they have recourse to other means of manifesting grief; most of the tearful scenes one can think of in painting are quite stylized versions of biblical passages that are well known to the viewer and, like the crucifix, easily identified (and identified with), regard- less of their proximity to realist norms. In illustration engraving, where the dimensions of the medium prevent encoding of much detail in a facial expression, emotions are not generally the focus, or if so, they must be coded primarily in gesture. Reading Engravings What, asked Roland Barthes in 1964, is the signifying structure of “illustration”? “Does the image duplicate some of the text’s information, through a phenomenon of redundance, or does the text add previously unknown information to the image?” (1982: 30). It is useful, as Ralph Cohen was pointing out about the same time, to conceive the illustration 16 Text, Image, Allegory as figuring in some ways a reading of the text, one that like all readings is neither limitative nor definitive; thus, illustrations are “significant for criti- cism because they supplement the remarks of critics” (1964: 288). This analogy has a further structural justification in that, as Claude Labrosse points out in his discussion of Julie, the plate visually objectivizes a scene for an unrepresented, untextual observer who might also be a reader (1985: 232). Alain-Marie Bassy has formulated incisively this critical function of engraving: “It deflects, and arrests if needed, the text’s possible signifieds. It gives an immediate account of one of its modes of reading” (1984: 159). Its ultimate effect may be a sophistication and enrichment of reading as well as of critical discourse.”* Although this capturing of a certain possible meaning appears at first a beneficial function, it exerts an independent and possibly insidious influence on the memory: “Far from rivaling the text, the image, by pretending to be subordinate, complements, amplifies, deforms, and sometimes corrupts it.” For the illustration has a condition- ing power that is not easily, if at all, overcome. People seem to recall easily which texts read in their youth were illustrated, and these images tend subsequently to prove indissociable from the text.”? Such endemic complementarity is widely accepted as proper where illustrations closely associated with the original creations, as were those of Alice in Wonder- land or Le petit prince, are concerned. But there are much more disturbing precedents to weigh in the balance as well: it is questionable whether any reader of Francois Rabelais or Charles Perrault since Gustave Doré has been able to escape the overwhelming influence—arguably quite foreign to the author and perhaps even fatal to the understanding of his spirit— of his canonical (the word is not too strong in this instance) illustrations. The pressure such images exert on subsequent illustrators, when these can come into being at all, is no less real. The praxis upon which my own discussion is based is as much the re- sult of a degree of disappointment with attempts to construct a theory of reading of illustrations as it is a positive affirmation of their value and importance. Let me illustrate the problem briefly by citing a couple of examples from Owen Holloway, who has made some valiant efforts to cut to the heart of the matter: The convention of black and white exists to simplify the terms of the composition by contrasts and simplifications in the medium, which are the equivalent of the way the mind itself selects in order to make sense of a scene. The elements laid down by the text are reduced to the common denominator of a visual and psychological impression: the movement of Text, Image, Allegory 17 light and shadow (to use a term of the period) constituted a series of fugi- tive impressions, subjectively true, corresponding to the actual diffused perception of things, and bringing into play a world of the imagination. (1969: 13) Anyone as enamored as I of the charms of line engravings will be inclined to applaud the intuition at work in this passage, but its formulation is finally quite inadequate. The material medium is posited as analogous to a semiotic process (white and black : simplified contrasts : the way the mind works), begging the question of how one is to imagine the mediation from one to the other. Nor is “movement,” whether derived from the period under study or not, a satisfactory tool of analysis, closely tied as it is to sub- jective impression. No one doubts that there can be a series of impressions, or that imagination plays a role; but to what “actual diffused perception” can these be said rigorously to correspond? While the eye, as he remarks further on, “can be made to pass fleetingly from one thing to another, to relate them as they can then be felt to exist” (14), the dependence upon feeling too easily induces the viewer to confuse metaphor and data. Holloway goes on to sketch a theory of how an engraving is read, by reference to a Jean Michel Moreau plate for a song from Jean Benjamin de Laborde,*” whose specific subject little matters for present purposes: “Pictorially the main feature is the unimportance of the charming figures themselves. There is no dualism between humanity and the setting, for it is not a solid scene at all, so much as a multitude of points of relative luminosity which lead the eye delightedly here, there and everywhere and at last into the far distance” (1969: 40). Subjective delight aside, this seems to mean essentially that the plate contains a variety of planes (the opposite of a “solid scene” ?), and that, the foreground being, as is customary, close to the center, it is assimilated first by the viewer and the background only subsequently. But when the center plane is occupied by a more distant subject, as is the case of Charles Eisen’s Le faucon (Holloway 1969: fig. 27), it can attract the eye before the “foreground,” now on the periphery of the picture.*’ Yet J am uncomfortable even with referring to what “the eye” does; strictly speaking, such language has its place only in scientific studies of perception—for example, the recording of eye movements scanning a given object—which can indeed be performed, but are not my subject any more than they are Holloway’s. Moreover, the illusion of correlating one’s own cognitive process with something like “movement” leads Hollo- way to refer to the “almost dizzy motion,” indeed to the motion of one particular statue that sets it “spinning,” in a plate that to another viewer 18 Text, Image, Allegory might appear somewhat static (42).*” In my mind, lacking such specific information on the process of understanding, one is on safer ground to speak of the signifying elements, for which the sequence of assimilation is not particularly crucial.*? Not all aspects of a picture need be seen at the same first glance, and certainly they are not all of the same size, but—to the extent that they can be identified at all—they are all equally present, and one can evoke them in some kind of rational (not perceptual) order without doing violence to any. In any case, the illustration itself must be decoded and assimilated by the reader; and whether it is read before or after, it cannot be read simultaneously with nor even independently of the passage to which it corresponds.*4 The conventional device for asserting that link is the legend (a component of engravings that is scarcely if ever acknowledged by Hollo- way), which may be a quotation from the text itself, thus galvanizing an ostensibly rigorous correspondence, or some sort of paraphrase of its plot or moral lesson: for example, “L’héroisme de la valeur,” caption of the sec- ond of twelve illustrations for Jw/ze, is not a direct borrowing from the text of the novel and thereby constitutes supplementary text.” In the case of Julie, both types exist and both are prescribed by the author. Strict appli- cation of an encapsulated quotation to an illustration becomes a common method in the 1770s.*° The twelfth and last of the Jw/ze series bears no legend (also by Rous- seau’s specification), yet there is still text: not only the episode in the novel to which the figure corresponds but also Rousseau’s written instructions to the artist. By looking just at the illustration (figure 1.4), one easily recognizes Claire’s gesture at the story’s end where she definitively confirms Julie’s death by placing a veil over her slightly decomposed face and ex- claiming: “Maudite soit l’indigne main qui jamais lévera ce voile!” [Cursed be the unworthy hand that ever lifts this veil!] (part 6, letter 11). And indeed this fulfills Rousseau’s specifications, which read in part: “Claire est debout aupreés du lit, le visage élevé vers le ciel, et les yeux en pleurs. Elle est dans l’attitude de quelqu’un qui parle avec véhémence. Elle tient des deux mains un riche voile en broderie, qu’elle vient de baiser et dont elle va couvrir la face de son amie” {Claire is standing beside the bed, her face lifted toward heaven and her eyes in tears. Her posture indicates that she is speaking forcefully. She holds in her two hands a richly embroidered veil, which she has just kissed and with which she is about to cover her friend’s face}.*’ A degree of discordance is nonetheless detectable here in that Rous- seau now says Claire is about to pose the veil: he has in fact misread his own novel, in which the veil is placed before Claire begins to speak. There is Text, Image, Allegory 19 1.4 Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloise, part 6, letter 11. Gravelot/Le Mire (§71). thus a sense in which, strictly speaking, the engraving does not “literally” illustrate any passage actually in the book. Now, of course, one could hold that Rousseau’s private instructions to the engraver have no particular bearing on the case; but that is not quite satisfactory either, because with typical ambivalence Rousseau decided to publish that text, too, along with the illustrations: On ne saurait donc entrer dans un trop grand détail quand on veut ex- poser des sujets d’estampes, et qu’on est absolument ignorant dans l'art. Au reste, il est aisé de comprendre que ceci n’avait pas été écrit pour le public; mais en donnant séparément les estampes, on a cru devoir y joindre l’explication. (Ixxx) 20 Text, Image, Allegory {One cannot go into too much detail when the objective is to describe the subjects of the plates in the complete ignorance of that art. It is, moreover, easily understood that this was not written for the public; but since the plates are being published separately, we felt the explanation should be included. } That is in part because, having once elaborated his imagined illustrations, Rousseau could not help but find the realization disappointing. He was in particular dissatisfied with the rendition of Claire, whom he characterized for the artist by “un désordre dans toute la personne qui peigne la profonde affliction sans malpropreté, et qui soit touchant, non risible” {a disorder about her whole person that represents deep affliction without dirtiness, and is moving rather than amusing]. That is expecting a lot of affective communication in the tiny face of a book plate:*® what Rousseau really wants, it would seem, is a painting, where the possibilities of expressive nuance would be considerably greater. In lieu of his mental image, he found, in the proof he was first sent, a Wolmar who “semble un vieux apothicaire et Claire une grosse joufflue de servante qui tient un torchon. Il faut absolument remédier a cela et si cela ne se peut j’aimerais mieux supprimer l’estampe’” {looks like an old apothecary and Claire like a heavy servant with round cheeks holding a dishtowel. That absolutely must be fixed, and if it can’t be I would rather do without the plate}.*” The point is not, of course, that Rousseau’s “mistake” is terribly impor- tant, but that it is telling; it “illustrates” both the mediation of another text between book and image, and the futility of ever looking for absolute coincidence of a visual image with a verbal one. In a sense, the discrep- ancy in question does not make any difference, and in another the whole issue is one of difference. As Edward Hodnett puts it, “no matter how plainly representational illustrations may try to be, they are always in some de- gree supplementary rather than reproductive images. The text frequently does not describe in full detail the scene chosen, may not really describe it at all, and literally cannot match a picture in concreteness.” “° Indeed, only admixtures of representation and symbolization can be encountered, for ultimately there is no possibility of unmitigated correspondence of the visual and verbal. Christian Michel’s distinction between “narrative” and “allegorical” illustration is thus potentially fallible.*! Even if “denotative” illustration has largely displaced allegory by about 1770 (Sgard 1988: 285), the frontispiece for Les /iaisons dangereuses in 1796 (figure 1.5) can in no way directly represent action in the novel, given its obvious allegorical ingredients, although it presumably alludes to the moral content of the Text, Image, Allegory 21 story by symbolizing the evil forces (Valmont and Merteuil) treading on virtue (Mme de Tourvel, or perhaps Cécile). The mask, serpent, and lamb do not resemble anything in the story except via the relay of metaphor, whose structure is purely verbal. The corresponding plate for volume two of the same edition (figure 1.6), which appears at first glance to be a typical allegory, at the same time alludes quite specifically to important elements of the plot: the undoing of Merteuil through Valmont’s revelation of her letters even as he lies dying by Danceny’s sword. The sword, moreover, occupies the same relative position over Valmont’s body as the snake in the first plate, both implying the phallic nature of his life and death. Moreau’s frontispiece for Julie is equally complex in a different way (figure 1.7). There is no identifiable action from the novel here, the art- ist considering himself no longer bound by Rousseau’s expressed wishes concerning either subject or caption. The neutral on designating the char- acter in this legend—“ Aide de la sagesse, on se sauve de |’amour dans les bras de la raison” {With wisdom’s help, one flees from love into the arms of reason]—is represented by an abstract male figure having no special 1.5 Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, frontispiece vol. 1. Monnet/Langlois ($41). 1.6 Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, frontispiece vol. 2. Monnet/Patas ($41). 22 ‘Text, Image, Allegory 1.7 “With wisdom’s help, one flees from love into the arms of reason.” Frontispiece for Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloise. Moreau/ Duclos ($72: 2:1). connection to Julie or Saint-Preux. Reason, receiving him in her arms, is not iconically distinctive, though she holds a bit (to bridle him with) in her right hand; Sagesse (Minerva), who fends off Cupid and his helpers, is more specific.*” The text of the legend itself, although it is not to be found in the novel, is not only aphoristic in a way that is typical of the characters’ style; it also makes use of terms and concepts closely approaching theirs. Compare, for example, the use of the same key words in a passage written by Milord Edouard: Une flamme ardente et malheureuse est capable d’absorber pour un temps, pour toujours peut-étre, une partie de ses facultés; mais elle est elle-méme une preuve de leur excellence, et du parti qu'il en pourrait tirer pour cultiver la sagesse: car la sublime raison ne se soutient que par la méme vigueur de l’4me qui fait les grandes passions, et l’on ne sert digne- ment la philosophie qu’avec le méme feu qu’on sent pour une maitresse. ( Julze ou la nouvelle Héloise, part 2, letter 2; emphasis added) {A burning and unfortunate passion might absorb for a time, perhaps Text, Image, Allegory 23 forever, a part of her faculties; but it is itself a proof of their excellence, and of the profit he could draw from them to cultivate wisdom: for the sublimity of reason is sustained only by the same vigor of soul that makes for great passions, and philosophy can be worthily served only with the same ardor one feels for his mistress. } The interplay between these terms is of great thematic importance—for instance, the question of whether sagesse and amour are compatible—and there are many passages (all in the novel’s first half) where combinations of sagesse, amour, and raison are to be found in close proximity. The legend, drawing on the rhetoric of the first half, nonetheless points strongly toward the message of the second, where sagesse and amour are more or less diamet- rically opposed. Discursively, therefore, if not figuratively, the illustration is closely linked to the story and even more so to the thesis of the novel. Claude Labrosse further evokes with reference to Julie the matter of thematic elements that cannot be represented in engravings, from the diaphanous veil, on a relatively simple technical level, to phantasms and obsessions. Since there are dramatic and emotive values expressed in lan- guage (in particular the passion of words) that thus cannot readily serve as the subjects of illustrations, he refers paradoxically but appropriately to corresponding images as “la parole décue de la fiction” (1985: 235-38). Reference and Allegory It must be conceded, too, that we have difficulty assimilating fully the meaning of such double allusions, to the extent that we no longer pos- sess as thoroughly as did their original viewers and readers an internalized repertory of traditional allegorical knowledge—and the classical languages on which they depended **—then sometimes referred to as iconologie. The series by Charles Nicolas Cochin and Gravelot called A/manach iconolo- gique** provides a reminder of the persistence and specificity of such asso- ciations. As Georges May has remarked, “Iconology has recourse to the profusion of symbols and the complication and unexpectedness of their combinations. The work of art can ultimately turn into a logogriph or a rebus.” © Especially to us it is likely so to appear. Alain Guillerm equally observes that the symbols “have been lost and forgotten along with the cul- tural world that produced them. . . . Now we can understand only those emblems of allegories that are based on metaphorical transcriptions whose key our ancestors have bequeathed us, or ones that are transparent.” “ There are many lessons to be gleaned from a work such as the Gravelot- 24 ‘Text, Image, Allegory Cochin Iconologie, especially since the text is so carefully glossed and the engravings so skillfully detailed. One, most interesting in the light of the Derridean elaboration of the notion of “trace,” is that Mémoire‘*’ is represented holding in her hand neither the pen nor the chisel one might expect,*® but rather a burin: “C’est dans le cerveau que se gravent les con- ceptions, et c'est pour exprimer cette pensée qu’on a fait tenir un burin a la Mémoire” {It is in the brain that conceptions are engraved, and to express this thought we have placed a burin in Memory’s hand}. Copper engrav- ing, not some other form of sculpture or even writing, thus seems (at least to an engraver) the most economical way to express emblematically the role of memory, perhaps because it can capture the zmaging function of mental “conception” as well as the relationship of memory to ext.” It may be well to recall in this context the passage in the Dzoptrique where René Descartes moves from engraving to memory through their common but paradoxical attribute of resemblance: Even if we think it best, in order to depart as little as possible from received opinions, to admit that the objects of sensation actually do transmit images of themselves to the interior of the brain, we must at least observe that no images have to resemble the objects they represent in all respects (otherwise there would be no distinction between the object and its image); resemblance in a few features is enough, and very often the perfection of an image depends on its not resembling the object as much as it might. For instance, engravings, which consist merely of a little ink spread over paper, represent to us forests, towns, men and even battles and tempests. And yet, out of an unlimited number of different qualities that they lead us to conceive {in} the objects, there is not one in respect of which they actually resemble them, except shape. Even this is a very imperfect resemblance; on a flat surface, they represent objects variously convex or concave; and again, according to the rules of perspective, they often represent circles by ovals rather than by other circles, and squares by diamonds rather than by other squares. Thus very often, in order to be more perfect gua images, and to represent the object better, it is necessary for the engravings not to resemble it.”° Representation is thus distinguished from resemblance, although it con- tinues to depend upon it; and the memory is inscribed in some way analogous to the copper plate, a selective resemblance. Figure, the ele- ment of resemblance, would seem to designate geometric outline; yet even this immediately runs into trouble because the reduction of nature to two dimensions (via the laws of perspective) makes even geometry a dissembler Text, Image, Allegory 25 as the oval comes to represent a circle better than would a circle. Descartes seems unable fully to resolve this conundrum, but the analogy hereby serves his purposes all the better since he does not want to be forced to explain just how the brain “represents” the memory traces it retains. Perspective, of course, does underlie our understanding of how what would be distortions from one angle become true perceptions from another (the picture viewer’s), but the question of how a painting or a fortiori a design can “resemble” nature has given rise to a long controversy. It has been argued that no rigorous parallel being identifiable between nature and image, resemblance is philosophically untenable and visual represen- tation must in consequence be considered, like language, an application of conventional signs. Sir Ernst Gombrich, who long defended this view, has rallied since to the viability of a certain naturalness in the visual sign, to be understood as perceptual equivalences. Thus, corresponding ranges in nature and a picture display similar “gradients in the distribution of light,” and even outlines, though doubtless stylized in a way that nature never actually is, nonetheless correspond to contours that are the limits of objects detected by movement and contrast (Gombrich 1981: 17). The resemblance of the image to nature, however problematic, is thus of a dif- ferent kind from its “resemblance” to text. Gombrich may not do justice, however, to their interplay. In commenting upon a Roman mosaic of a dog with the inscription “Cave canem,” Gombrich remarks: “To understand the notice you must know Latin, to understand the picture you must know about dogs” (18). But the meaning of the whole is not simply ‘dog,’ and the dog image has not been understood unless its relation to the text is part of the overall perception; the dog, however immediate its taxonomical identity, is an #/lustration. The Iconologie also provides, under the very rubric “Gravure en taille- douce” (literally, ‘soft’ or copper engraving) a most pertinent instruction on the difference between allegory and reference to reality (figure 1.8). If one compares the content of this plate with the numerous illustrations for the same subject in the Encyclopédie (“Planches,” vol. 5), one is struck with both the amount of detail and its accuracy, compressed into so little space; yet this is iconology, not documentation. The truth is that this plate would nonetheless have been totally out of place in the Encyclopédie, for a reason so evident it almost escapes notice: it is all but unimaginable that a woman should be working in an engraver’s shop.”! La gravure, however, could not be very well represented by any figure other than female, for rea- sons almost strictly determined by grammatical gender.” It follows that women play a role in iconology ” roughly proportional to the ratio of femi- 26 Text, Image, Allegory 1.8 Copper Engraving, in Iconologie par figures. Cochin/Gaucher ($37: PEOw): nine to masculine nouns in the allegorized lexicon; and this has nothing whatever to do with the actual economic role of women in contemporary society. Iconology does not rule out social fact but is not strictly bound by it either. The appearance of several different articles on allegory in the first vol- ume of the Encyclopédie supplement in 1776 suggests the urgency of the subject for contemporary esthetic thinking. An unsigned article argues that allegory is a visual equivalent of metaphor: “it is a natural sign or an image‘ that is substituted for the thing designated.” Such substitution is unavoidable for the representation of abstract ideas and prudent with regard to bold ones—“when one cannot present the thing baldly” [quand on n’ose pas présenter nGment la chose}.” But it does so through precise Text, Image, Allegory 27 application of metaphorical convention (“an exact relation between image and object”) so as to avoid enigma. Mythological characters are not inher- ently allegorical but become so in the visual arts,*° presumably because of the inevitable metonymic attributes that reduce them to clichés. Jean- Francois Marmontel refers to pictorial allegories as emblémes (ibid., 302), again suggesting a set of strict correspondences if we judge by Abbé Edme Mallet’s earlier definition—which would apply to the Iconologie par figures— of embléme: “image or painting which via the representation of some known story or symbol, accompanied by a word or legend, makes us aware of something else or of a moral.” It would seem that in his view, the meaning of the image is more than exhausted by the ample resonance of the verbal support: “the words of the emblem alone have a full and complete meaning, and even all the sense and all the meaning that they can have joined to the figure.”°’ The words themselves, indeed, are more than merely signs pointing to the figure. Today’s readers are largely unattuned to such codes, insofar as we are no longer imbued with the mythology upon which they largely depended. Looking at Eisen’s illustration of Héro et Léandre, we might be surprised at the choice of subject (figure 1.9). Given that in the story Leander drowns in the stormy strait he must cross to visit Hero, after which the heroine casts herself into the sea, it certainly appears that the artist has thrown away great dramatic possibilities in favor of an undynamic love allegory. The first factor to remember, however, is that the contemporary reader was probably aware in advance of the story’s content and that in conse- quence the tragic ending is already implied in this scene, which, like a Racinian plot, depends for its effect not on surprise but on the ominous- ness of fatality. Second, he would understand the ominous relevance of the epigraph on the title page: Quid juvenis, magnum cui versat in ossibus ignem Durus Amor? nempe abruptis turbata procellis Nocte natat coecta serus freta: quem super ingens Porta tonat coeli, & scopulis illisa reclamant Aequora: nec miseri possunt revocare, parentes, Nec moritura super crudeli funere virgo. (Virgil, Georg. Lib. 3.v.258) {Think of a young man, burning with cruel love to the bone: Think of him, late in the blindfold night swimming the narrows That are vexed by headlong gales, while above his head the huge Gates of heaven thunder and the seas collide with a crash 28 Text, Image, Allegory 1.9 Musaeus, Hero and Leandre, frontispiece. Eisen/ Duclos ($61). Against the capes: powerless to recall him his sorrowful parents And the girl who is soon to die of grief over his body. }*® In any case, Eisen’s viewer would spontaneously take note of many cues in this engraving: that this is the temple of Venus, whose statue at right is flanked by those of her chief sex symbols, her son Cupid and the billing doves; that the garlands everywhere connote the story’s sensual dynamics, as does of course Hero’s naked breast. But she is not herself here a lover sacrificing at the altar, but rather a priestess of Venus (as her sash prob- ably indicates) to whom love is strictly forbidden: in this scene Leander, who has come to attend the festival of Venus and Adonis, has just fallen passionately in love with her in defiance of her solemn consecration to virginity. At the outer limit, where allegory is virtually entire, there are cases that are very nearly intractable today.” A paradigm of both the distinction and the alliance between allegory and illustration is to be found in Romeyn Text, Image, Allegory 29 de Hooghe’s 1671 frontispiece for Zayde (figure 1.10).°° It does “illustrate” Mme de Lafayette’s novel, but only in the background: some undefinable edifice (one would be tempted to think it a tomb, were that not an unlikely symbol for the work) bears the story’s name engraved upon it, along with several symbols of the plot’s dominant love interest (Cupids with arrows and flames, billing doves) and a bas-relief that presumably refers’ in the- atrical fashion, as if on a stage, to some scene from the action (it would appear to be a death scene). The entrance to this monument is flanked by the bust of Diana and some other figure difficult to identify. But pride of place is given to an allegory, which, as the banner at the lower left makes clear, concerns not Zayde itself but rather Pierre Daniel Huet’s Lettre sur l’origine des romans, which was published along with it.°! Probably it is to be correlated quite directly with some assertion of Huet’s: but which one? One might expect it to embody Huet’s key formula, italicized in his text and explained at length, according to which novels are “feigned histories of amorous adventures, written with art in prose, for the pleasure and in- struction of readers” (46—47). It is hard to apply those notions directly to the frontispiece, however, although it may in some way symbolize fiction’s didactic function: “since man’s mind is the natural enemy of teaching, and love turns it against instruction, it has to be tricked by the lure of plea- sure, and his flaws corrected by condemning them in another” (47). Its one nearly unambiguous element is the altar of love at left, identified by the garlands and the two flaming hearts inscribed thereon; what may be doves are found to the left and right of the nude figure.° Could the allegory refer to Huet’s contrasting of poetry and novel? to the admixture of truth and fiction (“lies that resemble truth,” 49), or the need for verisimilitude? Or could it refer rather to his concluding remarks on the importance of choosing good novels over bad, or the double moral profit from the reading of novels: “always to find disorder and vice followed by shame and an unhappy outcome, after it has long vainly triumphed; uprightness and virtue on the contrary gloriously exalted after long per- secutions” (141)? I can venture only that the allegory has probably to do essentially with the relation of novel to truth and morality. The lyre at lower left alludes to poetry, since Huet’s argument derives the roman as genre from ancient narrative. It appears to be leaning against a shield, on which is a Roman type of helmet and perhaps some laurel. One would expect Truth to be naked: but which of the naked figures would she most probably be? The dark figure at right with a cudgel may represent Vice (or punishment?). Who is the character in a woman’s breastplate being silenced, and why is there a garment (?) draped from his/her right shoulder 30. ©6Text, Image, Allegory ‘ “wm 1.10 Madame de Lafayette, Zayde. Frontispiece by Romeyn de Hooghe, 1671. to the other seated figure? The iconic markers, with relation to standard devices, seem insufficient to resolve these ambiguities. Only the figure at left provides more positive clues, yet they do not coincide wholly with any single allegory. If it is a scepter she cradles in her right hand, she could be Virtue;® if it is a ring that the hand also holds (but I doubt it), it might symbolize marital fidelity, and in that case the altar, wedlock.” If her left hand, however, holds a mirror, then she might instead be Pru- dence (although Prudence’s mirror is supposed to be accompanied by a serpent);© the helmet would tend to reinforce this identification.°° None of these ambiguities is resolved, incidentally, by close inspection of the original engraving. Text, Image, Allegory 31 1.11 “Religion protecting Humanity from Fanaticism,” frontispiece for Marmon- tel, Les Incas. Moreau/de Ghendt and Leveau ($55). 1.12 “Pleasures in vain recall Old Age to life, while Time urges him on toward the tomb.” Lucretius, De /a nature des choses, book 3. Gravelot/Anon. ($50, book 3). But that is not to say that all such encoded allusions were evident even to the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century reader, and that is why tex- tual clues often accompanied the engraving. The most prevalent is the legend itself, which supports the image both by containing the profusion of possible visual meanings and, sometimes but not always, by focusing within the overall work the target area of textual correspondence.®’ Like a title, the legend is a sort of mode d'emploi or synoptic set of instructions on how to set about reading the picture; it purports to deliver the topi- cal or allegorical gist, leaving the assimilation of complementary details to the individual’s competence. For instance, the Moreau frontispiece for Marmontel’s Les Incas seems fairly adequately explained by the caption: “La Religion protégeant |’Humanité contre le Fanatisme” {Religion protect- ing Humanity from Fanaticism]}, although there is something of a mixed metaphor involved: the chains and weapons of Fanaticism do suggest im- prisonment and torture, but otherwise the disposition of the characters 32 Text, Image, Allegory make the symbolic offense more nearly resemble a rape (figure 1.11). Gra- velot’s illustration to book three of Lucretius (figure 1.12) similarly has its purely allegorical tenor overtly explicated: “Les plaisirs rappellent en vain la Vieillesse a la vie, le Temps la presse et la mene au tombeau” [Pleasures in vain recall Old Age to life, while Time urges him on toward the tomb}. In many instances, of course, the allegorical allusion is assumed to be patent enough to forgo even such minimal verbal assistance. The caption for the frontispiece of Baculard d’Arnaud’s Nouvelles historiques (figure 1.13) is merely the title of the collection itself, and the subject seems to relate fairly directly to d’Arnaud’s apology in the preface in favor of “historical” fiction: “embellissons la vérité, mais qu’elle ne disparaisse point sous les ornements” {let us embellish truth, but not let her disappear beneath the ornaments}; thus naked Truth, in the act of writing history, supported by father Time, is being garlanded (and thus both beautified and ever so slightly veiled) by Minerva. Understanding the sense of such allegories can nonetheless for us, at times, pose considerable quandaries. 1.13 d’Arnaud, Now- velles historiques, frontispiece. Eisen/de Longueil (§3). Text, Image, Allegory 33 As Gréverand sees it, the function of the legend is to merge with the image: “In the case of a linguistic contribution such as we encounter in captioned illustrations, the meanings carried overlap: verbal signs and pic- tural signs together bring to life a single signifying substance” (1983: 193). Such a unified vision must, however, be qualified, first by the highly prob- lematic compatibility of the linguistic and the visual (wne méme substance), and also by the matter of reference to literary context. A good example might be a simple pastoral scene illustrating a song entitled “Les plaintes mutuelles” [Mutual complaints} (figure 1.14).° Both that title and the caption, “Hélas, reprit Colin, / Mon coeur t’adore en vain,” reinforce the impression of a rather conventional pastoral couple, separated by some obstacle or unrequited love. This would not quite explain why the girl’s hat lies far from her on the ground, rather than by her basket where one might expect it, nor more particularly her partial state of undress; but such details could result from a banal lovers’ tussle. In the full textual con- text, however, the legend is a punch line: following two stanzas of Colin’s amorous complaints, the song reaches this conclusion: La belle écoute ses voeux. L’instant arrive, il devient heureux; Ses feux Sont d’abord vifs et pressants, Bientot languissants. Comment, cher amant, Ton ardeur chancelle, S’écria-t-elle. Helas, reprit Colin, Mon coeur t’adore en vain; (Refrain:) C'est le sort des amours De se plaindre toujours. {The fair one hears him out. The moment comes that makes him happy; his passion is first eager and intense, soon abated. How is this, dear lover? Your ardor is wavering, she cries. Alas, replies Colin, my heart adores you, but it is in vain. (Refrain:) It is lovers’ fate never to be satisfied. } Thus is a seemingly innocent caption stood semantically on its head, ina complete narrative- and role-reversal with respect to what it first seemed to imply. The physical act, which appeared perhaps to be in dispute, has in fact already taken place, yet the girl’s appetite is not sated; the de- 34 Text, Image, Allegory 1.14 Menilglaise, “Les plaintes mutuelles.” Le Barbier/Masquelier ($40: 3:44). ceptively romantic words refer instead to Colin’s temporary fatigue and consequent impotence. The reading of such illustrations can be radically altered by their isolation, not only from each other, but from the comple- mentary text.” A relevant gloss may occur somewhere outside the caption, for example in a preface or liminary poem, although it does not necessarily resolve all the ambiguities. Clement Pierre Marillier’s frontispiece for Dorat’s “La Fable et la Vérité” ° corresponds loosely to the allegory of Dorat’s poem, in which Vérité proclaims: “J’existe avant les temps” {I existed before time} and Fable declares of her: “Ton beau miroir est effrayant” [Your beautiful mirror is frightening] (figure 1.15). There is no mention there, however, of the prism, nor of the putto (unless it is by way of the phrase “La nudité ne sied bien qu’a l’Amour” {Nudity becomes only Love]; nor, more importantly, is there any pictorial equivalent of Vérité’s own verbal allegory: Mon front est couronné de rayons prophétiques Qui percent le sombre avenir, Text, Image, Allegory 35 1.15 Dorat, Fables, frontispiece. Marillier/de Launay (§22). 1.16 “The necessity of love, or advice to the young.” Maréchal, La journée de l'amour. Taunay/ Anon. (§51). Et le passe, par leurs reflets magiques, Dans un point lumineux au présent vient s’unir. (§22: Fable I) {My brow is crowned with prophetic rays that penetrate the dark future; and the past, through their magic reflections, comes to meet the present in a luminous point. } In order to fill in such semiotic gaps there comes into common usage a supplementary category of text frequently called “Explication des figures,” inserted at the beginning or end of the illustrated volume. A mediating text, it offers to reconcile such disparities in the reader’s understanding by manifesting the “missing” text; in this typical instance, it furnishes a clarification about the gesture of Time, which is dispersing the thick fogs that would shroud Truth, and specifies that Fable’s prism serves to soften the glare of Truth’s light; meanwhile, Cupid illumines the world in his own way. In the example of Pierre Sylvain Maréchal’s Journée de l'amour, even the poems, which are pretty clear—for example: 36 Text, Image, Allegory La beauté vous offre une rose Qu’ il faut laisser épanouir; Amants songez a la cueillir Le premier jour qu’elle est éclose.”! {The fair gives you a rose that you must let bloom; hasten, lovers, to pick it the day it blossoms. } —apparently did not in the eyes of author or publisher do justice to all the subtle erotic charge encoded in the engravings, which are therefore independently explicated (figure 1. 16): L’intérieur du temple de l’Amour. On voit deux amants a |’entrée du sanctuaire; le visage de |’Amant peint toute la vivacité de |’amour et du désir; |’Amante a fait un faux pas avant de monter le premier degré; l’Amant la retient et lui vole une rose qu’elle a dans son sein, en lui faisant signe d’en faire un sacrifice a |’Amour, dont il lui montre !’autel. ($51, “Explication des estampes”) {Inside the temple of Venus. Two lovers are seen at the entrance to the sanctuary; on his face is all the eagerness of love and desire; she has stumbled before climbing the first stair; he grasps her and steals a rose from her breast, gesturing to her to sacrifice it to Venus, to whose altar he points. } For although it is true that pictorial allegory is itself a discourse with its own continuous play of allusion, it is also true that it is always, at every point in history, dependent upon gloss, whether or not that gloss is a typo- graphical accompaniment. That is, although pictorial and verbal allegory can be described in much the same way, their function is not exactly sym- metric, for even the visual allegory must pass through—and is, in most instances, demonstrably derived from—the medium of the word.’? The collective memory has to be reminded of how allegory works, and this, too, is always done with words. The proverb “A picture is worth a thousand words” was meant to val- orize pictures at the expense of words and was certainly very good for the snapshot industry. But the truth is that the picture is “worth” those thousand (or however many) words only when you already know the words. A picture is never viewed without verbal context, and the more that con- text is complete, the more it “means.” There used to be frequent guessing games in popular magazines challenging the reader to identify the subject Text, Image, Allegory 37 of a bizarre photo. It was not, of course, possible; but in fact those pic- tures, too, had context (they were usually common objects viewed through a powerful microscope). That one learned to recognize, but only thanks to the prompting provided by earlier answers. Really, all this is not very surprising; everything the human race does is verbal, even the pictures it paints, even the pictures it “captures.” Art is afloat in a sea of words. 38 Text, Image, Allegory 2 The Dramatic Impulse Dramatic tension is a major component of many though certainly not all of the topoi invoked in this study. Although hardly a kind of subject matter in itself—rather a matter of tone and structure applicable to all sorts of material—it is all the more germane in that it corresponds to a marked transformation not just of illustration but of theatrical practice itself in the course of the eighteenth century—a change to which we owe the modern use of the word drama, forged from a fusion of classical comedy and tragedy into a domestic sort of tragicomedy that Diderot called /e genre sérieux. In many ways the prototype for the illustration of literary works always had been the theater,' and much of the early illustration for editions of the- atrical works consisted in fairly straightforward depiction of scenes as acted on the stage, depiction sometimes so accurate as to constitute an excel- lent source of documentation for the historian of theatrical performance.’ To this degree the most specific characteristic of theatrical illustration compared to other types is that, in addition to bemmg representational, it refers to (dramatic) representation. There appeared in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many elegantly illustrated editions of theatrical works, a tradition to which belong Francois Boucher’s series of plates for Jean Racine and Moliere and Moreau’s illustrations for the plays of Vol- taire. Typically such editions featured a single frontispiece per play, and just as typically the artist sought out for that privileged location the most visually eloquent moment in the text—more often than not a scene from the final act. Eisen’s illustration for Jean Mairet’s Sophonisbe is in this regard paradigmatic, corresponding to the very last lines in the play, accom- panying Massinisse’s suicide alongside the body of Sophonisbe—whom he himself has poisoned in order to spare her from the humiliation of being delivered up to the Romans (figure 2. 1): Meurs miserable prince, et d’une main hardie, Ferme l’acte sanglant de cette tragédie. Il tire le potgnard caché sous sa robe. Sophonisbe en ceci t’a voulu prévenir; Et puisque tes efforts n’ont pu la retenir, Donne-toi pour le moins le plaisir de la suivre, Et cesse de mourir en achevant de vivre. Montre que les rigueurs du Romain sans pitié Peuvent tout sur |’amant, et rien sur l’amitié. I] se tue. ($54: Act 5, scene 8) {Die, miserable prince, and with firm hand put an end to this tragedy’s bloody act. He takes the hidden dagger from under his robe. Sophonisbe wanted to go before you; and since thine efforts could not prevent her, give thyself at least the pleasure of following her, and by ceasing to live, end thy dying. Let the Romans see that their pitiless cruelty was all- powerful against a lover, but nothing worth against a friend. He kills himself.) This is high drama, and there is really nothing much new about such a form of textual representation, which is at once that of a scene, as fiction, and of its possible realization on stage; this despite the fact that the curtain is supposed to fall as Massinisse pronounces the last line, so that the suicide cannot actually be viewed.’ Eisen enhances the theatricality both through gesture (the grieving attendants, the dagger held poised at arm’s length) and by an abundance of regal textures (velvet, ermine, silk, and ostrich feathers); a detail as poignant as the dagger tucked into Sophonisbe’s belt is not neglected. His rendition is very close in essence to the artistic tradition to which a whole class of “historical” painting belongs, such as Fragonard’s Corésus et Callirhoé, around which Diderot constructs a dramatic narrative in his Salon de 1765. There is a difference, however, between high drama and domestic (or bourgeois) drama. As the theater itself throughout the century, but espe- cially from 1760 on, moved in the direction of middle- or lower-class domesticity, sentiment, and grandiloquent gesture, so did illustration: not just illustration of theater, but illustration in general, in part because it was an aspect of a global esthetic evolution but also because a special in- fluence continued to be exercised upon illustration by the theater. Thus, as the stage under the egis of Diderot in particular adopted the tableau model of scenic composition, its notion of the dramatic scene carried over 40 The Dramatic Impulse 2.1 Mairet, Sophonisbe. Eisen/de Launay (§54). into all kinds of other literary media. A good painting, said Diderot, should make a good theatrical scene, and a good scene should make a good painting. Nonetheless, book plates, by dint of formal constraints, lend them- selves awkwardly to imitation of authentic stage settings, for their vertical format, in contrast to the dominant horizontal dimension of the stage as of most historical painting, means that they cannot spread out a stage set- ting in a comparably panoramic manner. Their evolution is thus in some respects necessarily peculiar to their own medium and acts both upon and against what were heretofore, in Michel Melot’s description, the impor- tant traits of their “language,” which “consists in eyes turned aside, or the nonchalance of a hand. When, in the eighteenth century, intimate dramas were to be illustrated, the illustrator had to be convinced that the world of sentiment was as concrete as the world of natural sciences” (1984: 111). While perpetuating that confidence in the visually “concrete” nature of the language of sentiment, the new esthetic underscored it to the point of hy- The Dramatic Impulse 41 2.3 Opera. Dorat, La déclamation théatrale. Eisen/De Ghendt (§21). perbole, transforming such delicately noted gestures as “eyes turned aside, or the nonchalance of a hand” into grandiose and overstated postures. It is thus not possible to distinguish completely between the two media nor between the predilections of particular artists and communal taste. Eisen’s frontispiece for Dorat’s Lettres d'une chanoinesse de Lisbonne, a verse adaptation of the celebrated seventeenth-century Lettres portugazses (by Gabriel de Guilleragues, 1669), already testifies to the cultivation of pathetic gesture (although there is still a substantial degree of allegory mixed in), which theatrical drame as a whole tries to avoid (figure 2.2). It seems to correspond to the following passage written just after the heroine has read her lover’s letter of farewell: Cher et fatal objet de mes peines profondes, Mes soupirs jusqu’a vous égarés sur les ondes, Ne m’en rapportent rien qu'un solitaire effroi, Et des garants trop sirs que tout finit pour moi. Suis-je assez confondue? assez infortunée? I] ne me manquait plus que d’étre abandonnée. (§25: 67) 42 The Dramatic Impulse {Dear, fatal object of my deepest hurt, my sighs wandering over the waves unto you bring me back but a lonely fear, and the too certain evidence that all is finished for me. Am I enough confounded? unhappy enough? The only pain left for me was to be abandoned. } The departing ship visible through the window is a literal, though tempo- rally contrived, aspect of his departure; the bed from which she appears to have just arisen, like the tattered garlands strewn about the floor, allude back to the virtue she earlier willingly sacrificed to him; Cupid, finally, still hiding under the covers though his sorry flame has fallen to the ground, is wholly symbolic. The overall theatrical character of the illustration can be seen by comparing it to the personification of Opera in La déclamation théatrale, also by Dorat (figure 2.3), which evokes magnificent costum- ing and grand stage effects; but the pose, scattered flowers, and overall composition are much the same. In the theater this new sense of dynamic movement was consummately embodied in plays by Diderot and those by playwrights he in part inspired: Michel Jean Sedaine, Louis Sébastien Mercier, Baculard d’Arnaud, Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais—plays soon styled dames that would shortly lead to the notion of melodrama. In prose narrative, on the other hand, the same potential for an esthetics of tableaux could be realized by use of the historical anecdote‘ (gripping ones like the story of Inkle and Yariko were illustrated many times, as well as adapted into other genres) and other morally overcharged plots like those of Marmontel’s Contes moraux (although Gravelot’s celebrated illustrations for these are in fact rather subdued as dramatic gesture goes).> These genres, at least where Dide- rot’s own art is concerned, turned out to be in some ways more fertile avenues of dramatic exploration than theater, allowing elbow room both for intensity of visual composition and for simultaneous elaboration of a corresponding theory. Diderot’s Les deux amis de Bourbonne, one of the best examples, was adjoined by Gessner to a 1776 edition of his own work and also illustrated by Gessner himself with a plate (figure 2.4) alluding to the following passage, in which Felix brings home the body of the coal merchant (charbonnier) for whose death he feels responsible: Il s’arréte a la porte, il étend le cadavre a ses pieds, et s’assied le dos appuyé contre un arbre et le visage tourné vers l’entrée de la cabane. Voila le spectacle qui attendait la charbonnieére au sortir de sa baraque. Elle s’éveille, elle ne trouve point son mari 4 cété d’elle; elle cherche des yeux Félix, point de Félix. Elle se léve, elle sort, elle voit, elle crie, elle tombe a la renverse. Ses enfants accourent, ils voient, ils crient; ils The Dramatic Impulse 43 se roulent sur leur peére, ils se roulent sur leur mére. La charbonniere, rappelée a elle-méme par le tumulte et les cris de ses enfants, s'arrache les cheveux, se déchire les joues. Félix immobile au pied de son arbre, les yeux fermés, la téte renversée en arriére, leur disait d’une voix éteinte: “Tuez-moi.” ° {He stopped at the door, spread the cadaver at his feet, and sat down with his back propped against a tree and his face turned toward the entrance to the cabin. This is the sight that awaited the coal-man’s wife as she left her hovel. She awakened, failed to find her husband beside her; she looked about for Felix: no Felix. She got up, went outside, saw, cried and fell over backwards. Her children came running, they too saw and cried; they fell prostrate on their father, on their mother. The coal-man’s wife, brought to her senses by the tumult and her children’s cries, pulled her hair, tore her cheeks. Felix, motionless at the foot of the tree, his eyes closed, his head thrown back, said to them ina whispered voice: “Kill me.”} 2.4 Diderot, Les deux amis de Bourbonne. Gess- ner/Anon. (§33: 24). 44 The Dramatic Impulse Diderot has conceived and fixed the scene theatrically, and Gessner has done his best to respond in kind with carefully poised gestures and atti- tudes expressing grief and consternation; Felix seems to be looking heaven- ward instead of rehearsing death as in the text. If Moreau did not actually precede Gessner, he then imitated his basic structure in his own illustra- tion (figure 2.5), antedating by a scant few moments the precise moment of action represented in order to transfer the more dramatically powerful gesture to the widow; in this rendition, we have opposite a rather laconic Felix a pyramid of despair over the fallen father.’ He also added a com- pletely unrelated illustration, one more closely allied to traditional ones depicting duels.® This tendency to follow the lead of Diderot’s dramatic program can yield an apparent form of quintessentially tranquil domesticity, albeit one in- fused with an underlying tension, or lead rather to celebration of high domestic drama as in d’Arnaud’s Germeuil: here the hero, corrupted and 2.5 Diderot, Les deux amis de Bourbonne. Moreau/Simonet ($35: 4:215). The Dramatic Impulse 45 2.6d’ Arnaud, Germeuil. Marillier/Halbou (§3: 4:365). ruined by his false Parisian friends, arrives just in time to seize from the hand of his long-suffering wife Adélaide the poisoned cup with which she intends to end both her woes and his (figure 2.6). The presence of their children suggests the burdens she has had to bear alone, and Diderot would certainly have appreciated, along with such a domestic touch as the uncomprehending dog playing with a stick, the pathos of the baby in a walker reaching up toward her father. In this category the work of Prévost is forcefully revived by Marillier in the 1783 edition of his Oewvres choisies. Here the repertory of favored gestures and meanings is, as for the theatrical drame (and perhaps, though less schematically, for any affective theatrical gesture), quickly compiled: for example, grief, with head bowed and hands mopping tears from the eyes (figure 2.7), and extreme tension (often accompanied by fainting), where the visual impact is heightened by arms raised in various emphatic directions (figure 2.8). There is, to be sure, no question of separating the 46 The Dramatic Impulse subject into wholly discrete literary and artistic domains, but it must as always be recognized that the text alone does not and cannot determine either scene or treatment. Certainly there are, and the passages corresponding to these two illus- trations typify, intense dramas in Prévost. Indeed, the text is more replete with them than a couple of examples standing alone can begin to convey. Both of these are from the Mémozres d’un homme de qualité. In the first, Re- noncour’s valet Scoti, who believed his master dead, seems to be the center of attention at the moment of their tender reunion. It takes place in a thoroughly morbid context: Renoncour has lived ina sealed, crepe-draped mourning room (which he himself calls “cette espece de tombeau” {a sort of tomb}) for a year, with the heart of his wife Selima enshrined in the urn on the table before him, her portrait on the wall, and her clothing draped about the room (book 5). And while the legend in the second illustration (“Ma niéce était tombeée dans un profond évanouissement” {My niece had fallen into a deep faint}) puts the emphasis on Renoncour’s niece Nadine, 2.7 “The faithful valet upon entering threw himself at my feet; he drenched them with his tears.” Prévost, Mémozres d’un homme de qualité. Marillier/de Longueil (§66: 1:282). 2.8 “My niece had fallen into a deep faint.” Prévost, Mémoires d'un homme de qualité. Marillier/Delvaux ($66: 3, frontispiece). The Dramatic Impulse 47 it is equally important to its meaning that Milady R—— has been stabbed with a sword and M. de B had his brain splattered on the floor by the marquis’s pistol (book 13).? The gun is itself a harbinger of specifically domestic forms of tragedy, for it has no place at all in traditional tragedy, where armed aggression is reserved to the sword. Marillier slants the entire human component of the composition to the left, creating another pyra- mid of grief set off by the exclamatory gesture of the person entering. His images are in both cases compatible with the text and emphasize the spectacular—not by trying to duplicate all the lugubrious details piled up in Prévost’s text, but through stylized form and gesture. Darkness encom- passing each scene is signified by the bright whiteness of the chandelier’s aura. Marillier also respects a theatrical sense of decorum in ambiguously hiding from view the top of M. de B ’s shattered head, as if he were merely wounded and somehow still able to prop himself up. Eminently reminiscent of the style and tenor of Greuze, such a moralis- tic subject was in fact illustrated by him in one of his rare book illustrations for Francoise Albine Benoist’s Sophronie in 1769 (figure 2.9). Sophronie, a widow, wants to encourage Valzan to make advances to her, failing to realize that it is really her daughter Adele he desires; but just as he tries confusedly and desperately to comfort her, Adele enters, provoking a dra- matic misunderstanding to which he can put an end only by declaring his true sentiments to Sophronie. The convergent leanings of the three char- acters are again typical of this type of illustration, as is the long, straight sweep of Valzan’s arms which beckon to bring the two women together. Greuze was of course given to touching evocations of domestic authen- ticity, which brought cries of admiration from Diderot. Although this is far from his frequently rustic setting, he includes signs of daily activity in the balls of yarn and embroidery loom at the lower left. The curtain, em- phasizing the room’s height, counterbalances Sophronie’s long dress and adds grandeur to the scene. Marillier, along with others, designed quite a number of similar tableaux to illustrate the various works of Baculard d’Arnaud, an artistic collabo- ration or at least combination that undoubtedly contributed to the overall ascendency of the new style. As Robert Dawson remarks of d’Arnaud, “characters and events in his works, particularly from 1764 on, move in series of tableaux, a technique directly related to the stage of the time, dominated as it came to be by the overstated, pathetic acting of Le Kain and Mile Clairon” (1976: 1:425). Among these tableaux are numerous death scenes typical of a well-known late-century taste feeding in part ona renewal of elegiac literature, particularly English and German. Their char- 48 The Dramatic Impulse 2.9 “Ah! Madame, you are looking at her.” Mme Benoit, Sophronie. Greuze/ Moreau (§6). acters, unlike tragic heroes, typically die in bed at home, but the dramatic staging surrounding them is intense. In d’Arnaud’s Pauline et Suzette, the scene is, to begin with, theatrically composed: Cependant on approchait de I’humble grabat ou était couchée la pauvre Philippine. Suzette, a ses cOtés, fondait en larmes, ainsi que Jacques qui partageait sa douleur; le curé soutenait la téte de la mourante, et aux pieds du lit s’était établi un rabellion qui semblait n’attendre que le moment d’écrire; une foule de spectateurs les entourait. ($3: 4:194—95) {Meanwhile they approached the humble pallet where the poor Phil- ippine was lying. Suzette, at her side, had broken into tears, as had Jacques, who shared her grief; the priest held up the dying woman’s head, and at the foot of the bed was installed a notary, who seemed only to await the moment to begin writing. A crowd of spectators surrounded them. } This descriptive composition is then balanced in the text by a dramatic one, the exact moment represented by Marillier, when the dying woman has just revealed that she had substituted her baby daughter Suzette for the real Pauline de Monticourt (figure 2.10): The Dramatic Impulse 49 2.10 d’Arnaud, Pauline et Suzette. Marillier/de Launay ($3: 4:169). 2.11 Voltaire, L’ingénu, chap. 20. Monnet/ Vidal ($89: 2: 316). Jamais coup de tonnerre n’a été plus foudroyant. Mlle de Monticourt tombe comme anéantie pres du lit, en poussant un cri effroyable: —Je suis Suzette! ce sont les seuls mots qu'elle puisse proférer. Suzette, de son Coté, se précipite vers M. et Mme de Monticourt qui lui ouvraient leurs bras, et s’écrie: Quoi! voila mon pére et ma mere! Blinsey frappé de la méme surprise recule quelques pas en arriére. Toute l’assemblee, par divers signes, exprime son étonnement. (§3: 194-96) {Never was a thunderclap more stupefying. Mlle de Monticourt fell as if stricken beside the bed, letting out an awful cry: —I am Suzette! These were the only words she could utter. Suzette, for her part, rushed toward the Monticourts, who opened their arms to her and cried out: So this is my father and mother! Blinsey, taken equally by surprise, took several steps backward. The whole assembly by various signs expressed its astonishment. } Far from being an isolated dramatization, this scene is the pivotal one for the rest of the story, since it has compromised the love relationships cen- tering on the two girls. The reconnaissance, a classical comic device, has been 50 The Dramatic Impulse domesticated and thereby recuperated for melodrama. The pathos of Mlle de Monticourt’s position is heightened by turning her in all her pyrami- dal elegance toward the viewer of the plate, while all the other characters direct their attention elsewhere, either toward the old woman in bed or toward the reunited family group at the right. Death asserts an increasingly visible presence in literature and its images. Tombs, which real society puts out of its way on terrains circum- vented by daily life, now begin to crop up in all sorts of fictive contexts. There are, for instance, two plates for the scene in Ariosto’s canto 36 where, as Marfisa and Rogero duel, Atlas proclaims to them from out of his tomb that they are in fact brother and sister.'' But more often it is grief that is to be communicated. Charles Monnet underscores the moral lesson of the death of Mlle de St.-Yves in Voltaire’s L’ingénu by depicting its cause, St- Pouange (accompanied by “l’amie de Versailles”), in contrition before her bier (figure 2.11): Le bon Gordon était la, les yeux remplis de larmes. II interrompt ses tristes prieres pour apprendre a |’homme de cour toute cette horrible catastrophe. II lui parle avec cet empire que donnent la douleur et la vertu. St. Pouange n’était point né méchant; . . . il écoutait Gordon, les yeux baissés, et il en essuyait quelques pleurs qu’il était étonné de repandre: il connut le repentir. (chapter 20) {The good Gordon was there, his eyes filled with tears. He interrupted his sad prayers to inform the courtier of this horrible catastrophe. He spoke with the serenity of grief and virtue. St. Pouange was not born wicked; . . . he listened to Gordon with head bowed, and he wiped some tears that he was surprised to shed: he knew repentence. } The stiff and parallel gestures of the characters hardly dominate over the imposing, austere presence of the bier crowned with powerful, lugubrious candles; at least an attempt is made here to represent violent emotion (or consternation) in the female companion’s face. For Gessner’s widely pub- lished biblical tale La mort d’Abel, Moreau depicts Thirza, Abel’s wife, prostrate on his earthen grave, her body rising slightly toward the right echoing the lie of the land, as Cain, who “gémissait et levait les bras au ciel” {wailed and lifted his arms toward heaven}, looks on (figure 2.12). Such a motif is often extended into morbid contemplation, as was already evident from Prévost’s Mémoires d’un homme de qualité. That is part of the implication of the Giovanni Battista Cipriani plate in which Fleur-de-Lys mourns Brandimart in canto 43 of Ariosto’s Roland furieux (figure 2.13). After having overseen the construction of his tomb, “She resolved in her The Dramatic Impulse 51 2.12 Gessner, La mort d' Abel. Moreau/De Ghendt (§35: 3: 224). 2.13 Ariosto, Roland furieux, Canto 43. Cipriani/Bartholozzi (§2: 4:286). 2.14 d’ Arnaud, Lieb- man. Anon. (83: heart never to part thence until her soul was breathed from her body, and she had a cell made in the sepulchre, and there she shut herself up and passed her life. . . . She remained in the sepulchre, and there, worn out by penance, praying day and night, she did not last a long time before the threads of her life were broken by Fate” (Ariosto, trans. Gilbert, 2: 771). Thus the presence of the tomb implies also the desire to die, particularly in a love context (signaled here by the Cupid-like statue in the alcove be- hind the tomb) such as this and L’Ingénu. Dramatic lighting in the dark room is once more featured, although there is no grandiosity of gesture here. Fleur-de-Lys resembles a Da Vinci or Raphael Madonna, martyr of love and devotion; the book she holds is doubtless a devotional one or a missal, an allusion to the “offices et messes” she continually had said for Brandimart. The subject of death can be simply contemplative, as is signified by the legend borne by an illustration for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: “O mort, souveraine propriétaire de tous les étres, il t'appartient d’effacer les empires sous tes pas et d’éteindre les astres” [Death! great proprietor of all! ‘tis thine / To tread out empire, and to quench the stars!}.” In pictures, bones are the conventional reminder of this venerable memento mori tra- dition. In this period they are, however, the exception; though there are 52 The Dramatic Impulse significant instances of morbid fascination, they are usually coupled with romantic despair, and often, too, with a predisposition to melancholy. This is notably the case in the transparently named Liebman by Baculard d’Arnaud, whose hero is first encountered by the narrator in a cemetery weeping on Amélie’s tomb. In the anonymous engraving the tomb is deco- rated with Amours and, though emblematic shovels and bones lie about, they are certainly not hers (figure 2.14). Suicide also becomes a literary theme, beginning with Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni’s Histotre du marquis de Cressy (1758) and accelerating rapidly in the wake of Goethe’s Werther (1774). Eisen’s depiction of Tragédie shows her holding up a dagger that is pointed at herself."* At the end of Louvet de Couvray’s Les amours du chevalier de Faublas Mme de Lignolle flies across town in the rain exclaiming, “j'ai besoin d’eau, je brale!” {I am burning; I need water!}, only to plunge into the Seine and die. What is interesting about the illustration (figure 2.15) is that it represents this precipitous demise not with the breathless pace of the narrative but as if it constituted a premeditated or at least willful suicide, poising her on the edge of the river above the words that were uttered not then, in the narrative, but as she left the house. Lightning, water, and the quai of the Seine were never more stylized. The dominant tone is that of a deliberate reverie, interpo- The DramaticImpulse 53 lated in, though not clearly justified by, the text; it can be realized only by substituting, for affective reasons, a romantic stasis and introspection for the accelerating rhythm of Faublas’s rendition. Baculard d’Arnaud’s work is in this context a lode of poetic inspira- tion to the artist. The heroine of Exphémie begins the play by lying in a coffin, and ends it (while pursuing the beloved Sinval, who has just left her forever) by falling into the arms of Mélanie and Cécile exclaiming, “Je n’ai plus qu’a mourir” {Death is all that remains] (figure 2.16); in between these two scenes are to be found even more lugubrious visions. The religious trappings coincide with the idea that one of the functions of a monastery, sometimes the principal one, is to encourage one to con- template death. Gothic vaults seem to reduce the dramatic pyramid of characters to their earthly relative position and the tomb to open spon- taneously beneath them. Memento mori figure even more heavily in Le comte de Comminge ou les amants malheureux. The first of two illustrations by Marillier (figure 2.17) represents the Chevalier d’Orsigni with the monk Euthime and brother Arsene (really Comminge) in a setting that tries to do rigorous justice to d’Arnaud’s rather remarkable stage specifications: 2.15 “I am burning; I need water!” Louvet de Couvray, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas. Dutertre/Delvaux ($49: 4:301). 2.16 d’Arnaud, Euphémie. Restout/ Augustin de Saint-Aubin (§4b). 54 The Dramatic Impulse 2.17 d’ Arnaud, Le comte de Comminge. Marillier/ Massard (§ 4a: 3). La toile se leve, et laisse voir un souterrain vaste et profond, consacré aux sepultures des religieux de la Trappe; deux ailes du cloitre, fort longues et a perte de vue, y viennent aboutir; on y descend par deux escaliers de pierres grossiérement taillées et d’une vingtaine de degrés. II n’est éclairé que d’une lampe. Au fond s’éleve une grande croix, telle qu’on en voit dans nos cimetiéres, au bas de laquelle est adossé un sépulcre peu élevé, et formé de pierres brutes; plusieurs tétes de morts amon- celées lient ce monument avec la croix; c’est le tombeau du célébre abbé de Rancé, fondateur de la Trappe. Plus avant, du cOté gauche, est une fosse qui parait nouvellement creusée, sur les bords de laquelle sont une pioche, une pelle, etc. ($4a: 3) {The curtain rises, and reveals a vast and deep catacomb devoted to the sepulchres of the Trappists. Two wings of the cloister, stretching as far The Dramatic Impulse 55 as one can see, come together in the middle; this place is reached via two stairways of roughly cut stone and twenty or so steps. It is lit only by a lamp. At the back is a large cross, like those in our cemeteries, at the foot of which is a low sepulchre made of crude stones; several skulls in a pile connect this monument with the cross: this is the tomb of the celebrated abbot de Rancé, founder of the Trappist order. Further to the front, on the left, is a pit that appears newly dug, on the edge of which are a pick, a shovel, etc. ] The grave described is the one Comminge has dug for himself, as each brother is required to do; Euthime says, as he is dying: “Soutenons ce spectacle, il apprend a mourir” {Let us bear this sight: it teaches us how to die} ($4a: 39). That exhortation furnishes the legend for the second illustration, which is quite similar. But by the time Euthime actually dies (which ts what the plate represents, rather than the moment he pronounces these words), the love interest has been fully revealed: Euthime is recog- nized as Adelaide in disguise—that is, the very woman for love of whom Comminge himself is wasting away. That illustrations of Baculard d’Arnaud are not altogether exceptional is evident, however, from many other works exploiting the lugubrious. In Arnaud Berquin’s “Le pressentiment” [The Foreboding}, Lise has a night- mare in which her berger Julien appears trailing a long veil; he leads her through fields, forests, and valleys, then through a cemetery to an old temple, where she mistakes the altar for the romantic goal of their mission: Mais vers la nef Julien marche a pas lents. Dans le milieu de l’enceinte déserte, Elle le voit, pres d’un tas d’ossements, L’oeil attaché sur une tombe ouverte. Il y descend, s’y couche, et sur le bord Il se souleve, et dévoilant sa téte: Lise, tu vois, 6 Lise, je suis mort. ($10: 53) { Julien walked slowly toward the nave. In the midst of the empty court, she saw him near a pile of bones looking at an open tomb. He climbed down into it, lay down; then lifting himself back up on the edge, and uncovering his head, he said: Lise, you see, oh Lise, I am dead. } This is the moment of the illustration (figure 2.18). The setting includes a hanging on the right wall decorated with death’s heads—hardly an explicit 56 The Dramatic Impulse 2.18 Berquin, “Le pres- sentiment.” Marillier/ de Launay (§ 10: 53). part of the dream as described in the text; but on the other hand, the visual representation of a dream is something that has no literal model in the real world. Julien, here already (or still) beshrouded, tells Lise how he has been killed and begs her to remain faithful to him; the poem concludes on this note of macabre premonition: La tombe alors se referme a grand bruit. Lise en sursaut se réveille, s écrie. Le jour naissait. Ce jour méme elle apprit Que son amant avait perdu la vie.” ($10: 53) {Then the tomb closed again with a clang. Lise awoke with a start and cried out. Day was breaking. That very day she learned that her lover had lost his life. } The Dramatic Impulse 57 Anne Claude Philippe de Tubiéres, comte de Caylus, writing in “Les épreuves de l’amour dans les quatre éléments” [Tests of love in the four elements}, contrives to have /iving lovers meet unexpectedly in a grave— a kind of successful revenge of the foredoomed subplot in Romeo and Juliet. After she feigns pregnancy in order to get out of a convent, Eulalie is then sent to the gallows for apparent infanticide but from there is cut down just in time by Alexis. When he absents himself for a fortnight, she falls into a fatal lethargy, and he returns only in time to attend her burial. That night, he goes to her grave determined to rejoin her in death, lies down beside her, covers himself with dirt, then falls asleep (figure 2.19). It has to be said that this illustration will work only if the grave is shallow indeed; Eulalie almost appears to have been merely laid on top of the ground, like the bones surrounding her. The next day, in any case, the two slowly awaken together (“O ciel! ressuscitons-nous? Est-ce aujourd'hui le grand 2.19 “Oh heaven! are we resurrecting? Is this the great day?” Caylus, “Les étrennes de la Saint-Jean.” Marillier/ Fessard (§15: 10:454). 58 The Dramatic Impulse 2.20 “A young monk dies in Abelard’s arms from the effects of a poison prepared for the other.” Abailard, Lettres d’Héloise et d’Abailard. Moreau/Simonet (§1: 1:67). 2.21 Ariosto, Roland furieux, canto 37. Moreau/ Moreau (§2: 4:57). jour?” [Oh heaven! are we resurrecting? Is this the great day?]}), and only little by little come to realize, as Alexis’s clutching at her burial garments seems to suggest, that they have in fact not yet passed into the other world. When it comes to death, however, the whole dramatic movement (paralleled in fiction by the roman noir) showed a predilection for its more violent forms. What is relatively new about the dramatic grandiloquence of this type of death scene is that it does not illustrate stage tragedies but works instead from a romance tradition, particularly but not exclu- sively late medieval or “gothic.” Two examples by Moreau create entirely different kinds of tragic ambiance, the one solitary and spare, with the familiar contrast of artificial lighting: “Un jeune religieux expire entre les bras d’Abailard par l’effet d’un poison préparé pour ce dernier” [A young monk dies in Abelard’s arms from the effects of a poison prepared for the other} (figure 2.20); and the other collective and monumental: it is the death of Ariosto’s Drusilla, who poisons herself during the celebration of her marriage with Tanacre (at left) in order thereby to avenge her husband Olindre over his very tomb (figure 2.21). Here we have some elements we have already seen: the tomb draped in black; the arresting profile of the heroine flanked by characters echoing the calamity, all accented with magnificently eloquent hands; but also, at far left and right, expressions The Dramatic Impulse 59 of the passions that seem to be right out of Peter Paul Rubens or Charles Le Brun. Other forms of violence also abound. However popular the sen- timental exploitation of the Abelard story, its pivotal scene was of course a particularly gruesome act of mutilation, which Eisen illustrates about as graphically as possible (figure 2.22) in a frontal view showing the razor about to do its work. Moreau partly imitated him later, achieving a differ- ent sort of dramatic intensity by a focal light source near the center of the operation, with the dreadful blade being brandished before the victim’s eyes (figure 2.23).'° Again, there is a reminiscence of Le Brun’s archetypes of the passions in the faces of Abelard and the man next to him; the force- fully rectilinear bed post lends additional relief to the carefully varied poses of the numerous participants. Given this literary and artistic climate, it is not surprising to find a great number of illustrations prominently featuring a sword or dagger, some- times one that is merely threatening but more often one that has just been used or is about to be. One might say, of course, that a stabbing even more than a duel inherently makes a good tableau, though there is not much place for stabbings on the tragic stage at the time. Even a crude, anony- mous illustration of Prévost’s scene where Cleveland is stabbed by Gelin 2.22 Colardeau, Lettre amoureuse d’Héloise a Abailard. Eisen/ Anon. (§16: 11, head- piece). 60 The Dramatic Impulse 2.23 “Abelard’s castra- tion.” Abailard, Lettres d'Héloise et d'Abailard. Moreau/Langlois (§1: 1233): is, dramatically speaking, pretty striking (figure 2.24), especially with the victim pictured as if expiring head down on the left: Jeus assez de bonheur pour écarter le premier coup: mais comme je me levais de ma chaise en m’efforcant de le saisir, il me fit tomber sur le lit de repos qui était a coté de moi, et me plongea deux fois son épée au travers du corps. Je demeurai étendu et sans force, en versant deux ruisseaux de sang. Le chanoine, qui n’avait pu étre assez prompt pour arréter mon assassin, se jeta sur lui au moment qu il me portait un troisieme coup, et lui saisit heureusement le poignet. ($67: 4:342—43) {I was fortunate enough to turn aside the first blow; but as I was rising from my chair to try to grab him, he threw me back on the couch that was beside me and twice thrust his sword through me. I lay prostrate and helpless, spilling two rivers of blood. The canon, who had been unable to stop my assassin, leapt upon him as he gave me a third blow and fortunately got hold of his wrist. } The Dramatic Impulse 61 A significant formal interaction to note here: the narrator’s je itself consti- tutes in the narration the assurance that he (the character lying on the bed) is not in fact dead; but since the narrator cannot visually be represented as a “je”, the illustration in itself carries no such implicit guarantee. By 1783 we find a much more systematic development of the dramatic and artistic potential, as, for example, in another stabbing scene from Prévost’s Mémoires d’un homme de qualité (igure 2.25). Renoncour himself calls the event a “spectacle,” but he is referring to the aftermath: Trois corps étendus dans des ruisseaux de sang, mon cher marquis entre mes bras, sans mouvement et sans connaissance, dom Diego qui s'arrachait les cheveux pres de sa fille, et qui percait l’air de ses cris, ses trois fils qui tachaient d’arréter le sang de leur trop malheureuse soeur, et tous les autres spectateurs dans un trouble qui ne leur permettait pas méme de penser a nous secourir. ($66: 2:61—62) {Three bodies lying in rivers of blood; my dear marquis in my arms, motionless and unconscious; Don Diego, who was tearing his hair be- side his daughter and rending the air with his cries; his three sons, who were trying to stanch their unhappy sister’s blood; and all the other wit- nesses in a consternation such that they did not even think of trying to help us. } Perhaps Marillier felt that “rivers of blood” could not be rendered effec- tively, or that this was too much holocaust to portray all at once; he chose for his illustration, in any event, the minute just preceding this passage, but one more rapid and decisive for his purposes: Dans le méme instant, donna de Pastrino, qui se douta bien que c était le marquis de Rosemont, et qui vit entrer apres lui son frére, les mains liées de plusieurs cordes, s’écria avec une fureur inexprimable: Quoi! je vois le meurtrier de mon fils, et qui veut |’étre encore de mon frere! Tiens, ajouta cette barbare en enfoncant le poignard au milieu du sein de donna Diana, voila pour toi, qui es son amante; et elle se leva ensuite pour se jeter sur le marquis."” {At the same instant, Dona Pastrino, who was pretty sure it was the Marquis de Rosemont and saw her brother coming in after him with his hands tied with several cords, cried out with inexpressible fury: What! I see the murderer of my son, who now is trying to kill my brother! There! the barbarous woman added, burying the dagger in Dona Diana’s breast, that’s for you, his mistress; and she then got up and threw herself on the marquis. } 62 The Dramatic Impulse 2.24 Prévost, Le philosophe anglais. Anon. ($67: 4:334). 2.25 “What! I see the murderer of my son, who now is trying to kill my brother!” Prévost, Mémozres d’un homme de qualité. Marillier/Halbou (§66: 2, frontispiece). That is, the artist poises the dagger just before it falls on Diana, set off by the angle of all the swords and pikes in her direction, and in so doing charges with pathos Diana’s futile entreaty of forgiveness or mercy. In contrast, the executioner in Louis d’Ussieux’s Jeanne Gray, anecdote anglaise holds aloft the severed head of Guilford as his wife prepares to submit to the same fate ($83, unsigned), doubtless because, just as d’Ussieux’s text is meant to evoke an historical drama (despite its inclusion in a volume entitled Le Décameron francais), the artist imitates historical painting to a degree untypical of book illustrations. Prisoners in chains also are not uncommon. For Marmontel’s Les Incas, Moreau depicts Ataliba, a Peruvian “monarch,” with his family who have fallen asleep “les yeux épuisés de larmes, et le coeur lassé de sanglots” {his tears exhausted, and his heart weary with sobs}, as his executioners arrive (figure 2.26).'® The chains themselves are not imposing, though the pillar that secures him, standing for the massive and incontrovertible au- The Dramatic Impulse 63 2.26 “Ataliba’s family . was asleep round about him.” Marmon- tel, Les Incas, chap. 53. Moreau/Neée (855: 2:360). thority of his captors, certainly is; the emphasis is on it, on the contrast of wakefulness and sleep, and on the various positions by which the family betray their insuperable weariness. The chains are a major focus, however, in Baculard d’Arnaud’s Varbeck, where the Comtesse de Huntley is about to stab herself in despair at her husband’s fate when Astley rushes in to save him (figure 2.27);'? at the same time, the symmetry of posture and gesture of the two men lends relief to the pivotal role of the heroine. One is reminded of the pathos commonly emphasized in renditions of the caritas romana theme, in which an aged prisoner is sustained by his daughter’s milk; an Indian parallel of this legend was likewise included in Les Incas and illustrated by Moreau.” Dorat provides us an intriguing—if too willfully “classical” and self- serving—description of these fashions in the prefatory remarks to his verse adaptation of the Lettres portugaises mentioned earlier in this chapter: 64 The Dramatic Impulse Aujourd’hui si l’on veut procurer quelque plaisir, soit au lecteur, soit au spectateur, il faut leur donner des convulsions. Des effets, a quelque prix que ce soit des effets et point de nature. C était bon autrefois, pour me servir des expressions de Molzére, dans /e Médecin malgré lui; mais les Littérateurs modernes ont changé tout cela. Le charbon de terre de Londres s’est joint aux brouillards de Paris. I] nous faut, comme chez nos voisins, des massacres, des viols, des tétes de morts, des ombres encapuchonnées de leurs linceuls, toute la charge enfin de Drury Lane, pour ranimer des ames €teintes, et remuer des tétes qui sont plus vides encore, qu’elles ne sont mélancoliques; car nous avons la prétention d’étre tristes, et nous ne sommes qu ennuyés.”! {To bring any pleasure to either reader or viewer today, you have to give them convulsions. Effects, at any price, and no Nature. That used to be all right, to use Moliére’s phrase in Le médecin malgré lui; but modern 2.27d’ Arnaud, Varbeck. Eisen/Neée ($3: 1:130). Saas PeeePaan. ae - 5 4 ‘ The Dramatic Impulse 65 writers have changed all that. London’s coal has combined with Paris fogs. We, like our neighbors, need massacres, rapes, skulls, shades hooded in shrouds, in short, the whole paraphernalia of Drury Lane, to put new life into extinct souls and stir brains even more empty than they are melancholy; for our pretense is that we are sad, and we are only bored. } Dorat’s own work, which he is implicitly justifying, is, of course, an at- tempt to purify and elevate what was to start with a notably spare text. Besides rejecting faddishness in the name of more austere values—a sig- nificant enough commentary relative to this period, which is still too often lumped together with classicism—he suggests that a nefarious English influence is fundamentally to blame. At the extreme limit, domestic drama shades off into brutality, of which Nicolas-Edmeé Restif de la Bretonne is, at least in relatively “high” lit- erature, a notable champion. With the abjection of Ursule in La paysanne pervertie, for example, it is clear that prison means not necessarily chains (though they, too, play a role) but abuse in many forms; one typical illustration (figure 2.28) corresponds to this passage: Ce n’était pas tout: le quatrieme jour le porteur d’eau m’a fait signer, a force de coups, et presque mourante, la vente de mon bien, déja hypo- théqué pour la moitié de sa valeur. En voyant le notaire, quoiqu’apres avoir consenti, j’ai voulu réclamer; l’infame s’en est apercu, et m’a foulée aux pieds. On est accouru 4 mes hurlements, car ma voix etouffee n’était plus autre chose. “Tu signeras!” criait le misérable porteur d’eau. J’etais couverte de sang et méconnaissable. On m’a lavée, et mise au lit. J’ai signé. Depuis ce moment, je n’ai plus été battue. Mais d’autres abominations m’attendaient. (§70: part 6, letter 127) {That was not all: on the fourth day the water carrier made me sign, beaten and almost dead, for the sale of my property, already mortgaged for half its value. When I saw the notary, but only after agreeing to this, I wanted to renege; the scoundrel realized this and threw me down at his feet. My screams—for my suffocated voice was no more than this— brought others running. “You will sign!” cried the miserable water car- rier. I was covered with blood and unrecognizable. They washed me and put me to bed. I signed. From this time on I was never beaten. But other abominations awaited me. } Besides the act of aggression, contrasted to the passive composure of the notary and other observers, what is most striking here is the variety of cos- 66 The Dramatic Impulse 2.28 Restif de la Bre- tonne, La paysanne pervertie. Binet/ Anon. ($70: 3: 318). tume, signifying, as it does, the social gamut represented, from exotic to banal, sword to scum. The relationship to Sade of such a literary and illus- trative tendency needs hardly be stressed. Unlike most other practitioners of similar topoi, Restif argues that they really constitute a significant part of everyday life; they are scarcely more subdued in a work with an archi- typal but domestic name like Un ménage parisien {A Parisian household]. Despite the fact that such scenes are supposed to be made of quotidian materials, I think it can be safely said that in most cases they are barely imaginable. Maurice Lévy has amply documented this kind of illustration in the roman noir, and IJ can only refer to the many illustrations he gives in his anthology (Lévy 1973), as well as to his overall characterization of the situations they depict: Thus all the elements join together to drive the heroine to despair: skies strewn with storms and migrating birds, inaccessible mountains and dizzying precipices, water everywhere threatening, an enemy to beat back and reclaim victims from; fire too makes human love fragile The Dramatic Impulse 67 and so ephemeral. . . . Above all, in becoming “gothic” the novel is un-urbanized and places its characters within a nature that is bristling with medieval structures, gothic buildings which symbolize the car- ceral universe phantasmagorized by this late-eighteenth century. (Lévy 1980: 159) The many plates he reproduces are eloquent demonstrations of the con- stant reproduction of a continual if varied literary and visual model. Few of them are the work of skilled artists, and few are signed, but such imitation by artists at all levels is often good evidence of the power of a stereotype. One particular type of symbol that seems notable (though not predomi- nant) in these contexts because of its mythic, sempiternal quality is the evil power suggested by creatures associated with witchcraft, bats and serpents in particular. Over and over again in his metaphorical frontispieces to La paysanne pervertie Louis Binet uses devilish, serpentine, and other slimy and 2.29 Ariosto, Roland furieux, canto 42. Anon./Ponce (§2). 68 The Dramatic Impulse 2.30 Berquin, “The deadly revenge of jeal- ousy.” Marillier/de Launay (§ 10: 33). ghoulish creatures to suggest that the reader should cringe at the spectacle of Parisian perversion.”” When Renaud is saved from Jealousy by Disdain in canto 42 of Ariosto’s Roland furieux (figure 2.29), we are in the realm of pure allegory (even if it is in part mock allegory), as the Medusa-like figure and the flaming club of the protector emphasize.”> But something interesting happens when what seems a similar type of serpent appears in the illustration for Arnaud Berquin’s “La funeste vengeance de la jalousie” {The deadly revenge of jealousy] (figure 2.30). The orphan Isabelle has been thrown by her jealous stepmother into a dark prison tower marked by “une vapeur infecte et ténébreuse” [a dark and infectious vapor} whence issue “d’horribles sifflements” {horrible hissings}: the snake is literal this time, a fact that exceeds in horror even the ugly woman’s intentions. And yet it is not quite literal either when juxtaposed with the verse: The Dramatic Impulse 69 Epouvantee alors elle accourt; on s’empresse, Le cachot funeste est ouvert; On y plonge un flambeau: Vois, feroce tigresse, Vois quel spectacle t’est ouvert. Cest ta niéce; elle expire. Une couleuvre énorme, Les yeux d'un noir venin gonflés, Autour de ce beau corps roule son corps difforme, L’étouffe en ses noeuds redoubles. Dans I’accés des fureurs, dont la soif la tourmente, Elle lui déchire le flanc, Et dans son coeur ouvert plongeant sa gueule ardente, S'abreuve a longs traits de son sang. (§10: 40) {Appalled, she hurried forth; they crowded about, and the deadly dun- geon was opened; a torch was lowered inside: Look now, fierce tigress, what a spectacle is yours. That is your niece, and she is dying. An enor- mous adder, its eyes swollen by a black venim, entwined its misshapen body around hers and suffocated her in its many knots. Tortured by thirst, in a burst of fury it tore her apart, and plunging its burning mouth into her open heart, it drank her blood in long draughts. } The multiplication of serpents in the illustration, and their transforma- tion into vampires in the text, makes of them visual metaphors; moreover, Isabelle’s persecutor, in panic, believing she, too, is being bitten by ser- pents, serves now as a parable of remorse. There is of course a relationship between exploitative horror and the sublime, even if the sublime is in ways a distinct esthetic category quite removed from both stage setting and gothic novel. Many historical and religious paintings can be assimilated to the sublime, and poetry like painting often tried to extrapolate from heroic commonplaces new and yet grander images. Thus Gessner’s Tableau du déluge, illustrated by Moreau, which manages to transport the pastoral topos to the top of the peak where the last remaining humans seek refuge as the floodwaters rise (figure 2.31). Semin and Sémire, in each other's arms, sing a hymn to God’s justice, con- cluding with the “Ensevelissez-nous” of the legend, which continues in the text: “voila qu'elle vient, la mort; elle s’'avance sur cette vague noire. . . . Ils parlaient ainsi; et, se tenant embrassés, ils furent entrainés par les flots” {Bury me; death is upon me; it is coming with this black wave. Thus they spoke; and embracing each other, they were carried off by the 7o The Dramatic Impulse 2.31 “Bury us, ye waves! ... there! ah, kiss me, my beloved.” Gessner, Tableau du dé- luge. Moreau/Girardet ($36: 2:14). waters}.*4 As many superlatives as possible cascade together to elevate both poetic and visual expression to an apocalyptic consummation. Yet visually this representation is austerely stylized: the rectilinear rain and lightning above, the swirling sea, garments, and rock below, and the overstated but statuesque frozenness of the heroes’ gestures. The floating bodies do not respond to this tempestuousness, and the female torso in the middle foreground even injects a disconcerting eroticism amidst all this sublimity. Overtly, the grandiloquence we have been talking about here has little erotic content except to the extent that such images as daggers or moun- tains are read in terms of their rather obvious Freudian stereotypes. There are, however, both historical and thematic reasons for bringing them into dialogue with even some of the erotic themes to appear later in this book. Dramatic illustration is, like dramatic fiction, a controlled, domesticated means of procuring for the reader/viewer the pleasures of violence. It is not much interested in gore, but it at once expresses and contains the explo- sive forces of human emotion and their destructive potential; and these, of course, are not lacking in sexual energies. That discovery we owe in large The Dramatic Impulse 71 measure to Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, in whose work the latent violence of drama is most extravagantly and willfully unleashed. In Sade the sublime is stripped of its sentimental niceties and exposed for the raw and terrible passion that exults in torture of a particularly and specifically sexual nature. His work— itself abundantly illustrated during the censure- free 1790s—represents in other words a complete conflation of “domestic” passion and erotic aggression. Yet the argument for this assimilation of themes does not depend entirely upon the historical fact of Sade’s own work, for it is quite evident in the writings and illustrations of earlier or less famous figures such as Baculard d’Arnaud or Restif de la Bretonne. Essentially these currents are inseparable. Any form of sexual expression that is ostensibly sublimated may be nonetheless, as Michel Foucault has shown (1976), a discourse of obsession. It should be understood, then, that the schematic distinction between the drama just discussed and the erotic themes in my final chapters is merely heuristic: these discrete thematic strains are in psychological reality, as in the narrative contexts under study, closely intertwined. On its most fundamental level this is a psychological assumption, but it is also a practical reality to the degree that every dra- matic illustration could lend itself in some measure to decipherment as representation or projection of diegetic desire. 72 The Dramatic Impulse 3 The Intervisual Paradigm Engravings can be approached and read in a number of lights, each with potentially valid heuristic claims. The most traditional corpus for com- parative study consists of the diverse works of one artist; less frequently, though more recently, we have seen studies of the sequence of illustra- tions for a given text or of succeeding sets of illustrations for the same text. This book offers instead the partial codification of a less standard kind of paradigm, at the figural and intertextual level,’ defined by the- matic resemblances between illustrations irrespective of how similar or dissimilar their related literary texts may purport to be. It is an empirical identification of a few recognizable instances, not an exhaustive taxonomy. Underdetermined from the standpoint of textually generated specificity, the illustration is nonetheless constrained by the representational language available to an artist at a given time, or even overdetermined by the au- thority of certain obsessional traditions. The overall cultural inventory is such that a large number of engravings of the period have many things in common, and this phenomenon can be demonstrated by even a limited range of specific images. By juxtaposing images that ostensibly relate to a variety of apparently discrete literary contexts, one is able to perceive also their own level of continuity, and this in turn renews awareness of certain literary fixations. Three clusters serve in this chapter as examples of the ways in which illustrations of quite separate works share the same patterns of iconic connotations. The ones invoked here are largely sexual, if only for the reason noted by Alain Guillerm: that, within the range of symbolic languages, sexual difference stands out as one that between the eighteenth century and ours has lost relatively little of its currency: Nous ne comprenons plus guére que ceux qui reposent sur une logique dont nous pouvons encore suivre le cheminement. C’est le cas des dif- férentes colorations des deux sexes: cette opposition et toutes les con- notations qu'elle enferme proviennent d’une convention idéologique toujours active. (1980: 178) {About the only ones we can still understand are those based on a logic we can still follow. Such is the case for the different sexual colorations: the opposition of the sexes and all the connotations it carries arise from an ideological convention which is still active. } This observation about characteristic oppositions by gender is equally true or nearly so of eroticism in general. It is of course a commonplace that sexu- ality was one of the master myths of the eighteenth century, and this may be, although in scrupulous comparison with other periods the assumption might be difficult to prove. Certainly sexual imagery plays a large role in its artistic life, but again the Enlightenment may be more similar than is usually recognized to any other period in that regard. What tends to be considered a sort of obsession on its part—or on the part of the critic, or both—is also, perhaps, something that imposes its ongoing presence simply by virtue of being perdurably clear and decipherable. One useful approach, described by Alain-Marie Bassy, is to track down sexual connotation in particular through what he calls “trans-iconicité” or “imter-iconicite”: A travers les innombrables planches gravées d’aprés Baudoin, Borel, Debucourt ou Fragonard, le jeu des citations réciproques, |’itération des themes signalent la présence et la permanence d’un code élaboré de représentation. La confrontation de ces planches “galantes” avec les planches “libres,” non signées, moins allusives et plus audacieuses pro- duites dans le méme temps, permet d’apprécier l’etendue et la diversite de ce lexique symbolique. Certains objets, certains étres reapparaissent constamment a titre de métonymies: animal domestique, jeune servi- teur, carafe a col étroit, verre d’eau débordant, éponge, ou chandelle. Le jeu érotique de l'image commence par la résolution de la metonymie. Ce lexique n’est toutefois, a la difference de l’emblématique médiévale, ni établi dans un dictionnaire, ni définitivement fixé. Il ne se révele qu’au travers du systeme des images. Le plaisir ne s’acquiert que par la frequentation assidue de l'ensemble d’une production. La jouissance qu éprouve le “voyeur” a la lecture de l'image galante nait d’abord de la maitrise du code, qui lui permet d’enfreindre, en le tournant, |’interdit moral.” (1984: 161) 74 The Intervisual Paradigm {Throughout the innumerable plates engraved after Baudoin, Borel, Debucourt, or Fragonard, the play of reciprocal quotations and the iteration of themes signals the presence and the permanence of an elabo- rate code of representation. Comparison of these “gallant” plates with “risqué” plates, unsigned, less allusive and more daring, produced at the same time, gives an idea of the extent and diversity of this symbolic lexicon. Certain objects, certain beings reappear constantly in a met- onymic role: domestic animals, young servants, a narrow-necked carafe, an overflowing glass of water, a sponge or candle. The erotic play of the image begins with resolution of the metonymy. This lexicon is none- theless, unlike medieval emblematics, neither set down in a dictionary, nor definitively fixed. It can be perceived only through the system of images. The pleasure can be acquired only through patient observation of an entire production. The delight experienced by the “voyeur” of a gallant image derives first from mastery of the code, which enables him to violate the moral injunction via a bypass. } The suggested comparison of “planches libres” or indecent plates with decent ones is explored in Chapter 8; here, my concern is with aspects of the code—including some of the “metonyms” Bassy mentions—that permeate all kinds of subjects, even those that are not ostensibly sexual. That lexicon is indeed so vast that no exhaustive repertory can yet be envisioned. The pragmatic ease of identifying this particular category of preoccupations and redundancies makes it a suitable domain in which to begin developing tools of recognition that can later be extended to more elusive sorts of content. Spilt Milk There are innumerable ways in which representation can shade off into allegory. Even if it seems that a natural image can be symbolically neu- tral—a tree is just a tree, and water, water—in art that simple equivalence is problematical, particularly when it comes to water. A spring has many mythological, and consequently allegorical, connotations, as do rivers and lakes. All are frequently associated with ablutions—a theme to which I return below—and, via that connection, with the sensual attraction of nudity; if the anonymous work called Vénus a la coquille in the Louvre? is really Venus, then the fact that an overturned vase accompanies her distinguishes its particular meaning from that of overflowing vases that elsewhere merely symbolize springs or rivers. But the association of flow- ing or falling water with sensuous motifs is too widespread for any doubt to The Intervisual Paradigm 75 persist about its extended connotations: see, for example, the tailpiece to Dorat’s fourth Basser (figure 3.1), which accompanies a fanciful description of a Roman cult to /e baiser (with the fundamental lexical ambiguity which that word itself implies), although it does not otherwise specifically echo any representation in the poem. In principle, the moral of La Fontaine’s “La laitiere et le pot au lait” alludes to disappointed expectations more than it does to lost innocence; such a meaning is consistent with the author’s own adaptation of it in the maxim “Proprement, toute notre vie / Est . . . la fable du Pot au lait” {In truth, our entire life is . . . the fable of the broken pitcher}.* Jean Baptiste Oudry’s rendition of the fable in the 1755 edition (engraved by Riland) maintains this straightforwardness. But the eighteenth century is full of milkmaids—many perhaps inspired by La Fontaine’>—who sug- gest a Greuze-like tension between sweet innocence and sexual availability. Fragonard’s painting Perrette et le pot au lait® brings in three elements sug- gesting this: two male onlookers, the way Perrette’s skirts and slips fly up to bare her thighs, and the vapor emanating from the milk can, which alludes emblematically to her evanescent fantasies but also, possibly, to the wistful distractions of desire. The milk at least is a fairly authentic holdover from the implied narrative. This is much less true of La conviction, a print by Jean Frédéric Schall (figure 3.2), where the sexual nature of the subject becomes unambiguous. It is a typical rustic tryst motif where, as an added ironic turn, the lover has fled, inopportunely leaving behind his telltale hat: 3.1 Dorat, Les baisers. Eisen/Lingée ($20: 75). i by i : - i Wi Ki Hi ; kt ye 4 A a i" 3 \\ sical fen Tic ’ Nas \ 76 The Intervisual Paradigm 3,.2 The conviction, print. Schall/Marchand. Ah! tu m’en imposais! J’étais de bonne foi... Regarde ce chapeau! Pleure, et corrige-toi. {Ah, you were deceiving me! And I was in good faith... Look at this hat! Weep, and mend your ways. | There is nothing particularly logical, diegetically, about the overturned can of milk in the girl’s room; its only rationale is now symbolic.’ The many cruches cassées to be found in eighteenth-century art usually are based on this slight metonymic connection between symbol and sub- ject; that is, although there may be some minimal anecdotal reason for the vessel’s presence, it at the same time takes on sexual connotations. This is the case of a Greuze print entitled La fille confuse (engr. Pierre Charles and Francois Robert Ingouf)* in which, as the kitchen maid apparently listens to a proposition being relayed to her through the window, a neglected pot is boiling over. One of the most famous examples of this motif is Greuze’s La cruche cassée at the Louvre (engraved by Jean Massard in 1773),? where the girl’s dishevelment, the cloak on the ground, and the fountain all The Intervisual Paradigm 77 further attest to these sexual and moral implications. Indeed, the 1762 edition of the Contes of La Fontaine includes a poem attributed to Autereau that begins much like “La laitiére et le pot au lait” only to end in a more explicit, although humorously transposed, encounter: Un de ces jours dame Germaine, Pour certain besoin qu’elle avait, Envoya Jeanne 4 la fontaine: Elle y courut; cela pressait. Mais en courant, la pauvre creature Eut une facheuse aventure. Un malheureux caillou, qu'elle n’apercut pas, Vint se rencontrer sous ses pas. A ce caillou Jeanne trébuche, Tombe enfin, et casse sa cruche; Mieux eat valu cent fois s’étre cassé le cou. Casser une cruche si belle? Que faire? Que deviendra-t-elle? Pour en avoir une autre, elle n’a pas un sou. Quel bruit va faire sa maitresse De sa nature tres diablesse? Comment éviter son courroux? Quel emportement? Que de coups! Oserai-je jamais me r’offrir a sa vue? Non, non, dit-elle: enfin il faut que je me tue. Tuons-nous. Par bonheur, un voisin pres de la, Accourut, entendant cela; Et pour consoler l’affligee, Lui chercha les raisons les meilleures qu'il put; Mais pour bon orateur qu’il fat, Elle n’en fut point soulagée; Et la belle toujours s’arrachant les cheveux, Faisait couler deux ruisseaux de ses yeux, Enfin voulait mourir; la chose était conclue. He bien, veux-tu que je te tue, Lui dit-il. Volontiers. Lui sans autre facon Vous la jette sur le gazon, Obeit a ce qu’elle ordonne; A la tuer des mieux apprete ses efforts, Leve sa cotte, et puis lui donne 78 The Intervisual Paradigm D’un poignard a travers le corps. On a grande raison de dire Que pour les malheureux la mort a ses plaisirs, Jeanne roule les yeux, et pleure, enfin expire, Mais apres les derniers soupirs Elle remercia le sire. Oh! le brave homme que voila! Grand’merci Jésus, je suis la plus humble des votres: Les tuez-vous comme cela? Vraiment, j’en casserai bien d’autres.'° {One fine day Lady Germaine, having some need of water, sent Jeanne to the fountain; she ran, since her mistress was in a hurry. But while she was running, a sorry accident befell the poor creature. Her foot chanced upon a miserable stone she did not see; Jeanne stumbled over it, then fell and broke her pitcher. It were better a hundred times over to have broken her neck instead. Such a fine pitcher broken: what to do, and what would come of her? She hadn’t a penny to buy another. What a scene her mistress would make, devilish as she was anyway! How could she avoid her wrath? What rage, and what a beating! Dare I ever appear again before her? No, no quoth she: I must rather kill myself. Let us kill ourselves. Happily, a neighbor close by, hearing this, came running; to console the afflicted girl he gave the best reasons he could, but however eloquent he was, she was not relieved. And the fair maid, still pulling her hair, streams flowing from her eyes, still wanted to die: that much was settled. Well, then, shall I kill you? he said. Please do. He without further ado tumbled her on the grass, obeying her desire; he put his best efforts into killing her, lifting her petticoats and stabbing her through with his dagger. For the miserable, it is said with good cause, death has its pleasures: Jeanne rolled her eyes, wept, and expired. But after her last sighs she thanked the gentleman. O what a fine man he was! Jesus! thank you: I am all yours. Do you kill them all like that? I think I could break some more. } The illustration (figure 3.3), which like the other ones in the edition is doubtless by Eisen, remains a trifle ambiguous in that it is difficult to tell whether Jeanne’s lover is beginning to lift her skirt or they are, rather, de- picted after the fact (“Elle remercia le sire”). But the connection between the broken vessel and the loss of virginity—with more emphasis here, evi- dently, upon pleasure than loss—could not be more direct. The pitcher is left out, but there is a phallic end of a pipe protruding at the lower The Intervisual Paradigm 79 right, and the couple are so positioned that, although he is standing above her, his hand is directly over her sex. The physical union of the couple is reinforced by their encapsulation in a compact circle at the center of the engraving; the only other round lines are those of the suggestive neck of the shattered jug and the semicircular opening of the connotative spring. Tokens of moral fragility extend as well to nonliquid media, and they too run the gamut from the literal to the symbolic. But nothing, as we have said, can be completely literal in pictorial representation. For ex- ample, Nicolas Lavreince’s Le repentir tardif (figure 3.4)’ alludes strongly to the physical excitement of the sexual encounter by means of the lamp table that has been upset; this detail has to be read objectively as signifying some kind of violence, but it is also accompanied by a broken vase, which 3.3 Autereau, “La cruche.” Eisen/Anon. (§44: 2:291). 80 The Intervisual Paradigm 3.4 The belated regret, print. Lavreince/Le Villain. more firmly links the image to the allegorical cruche cassée category. Such signs, as this example makes rather clear, signify sexual activity without necessarily suggesting that anything nearly as precious as virginity is at stake—though that does seem to be the issue in such well-known Greuze examples as Les oeufs cassés (Metropolitan Museum, also engraved by Pierre Etienne Moitte). Schall, not known for his moralizing, uses the basket of fruit, itself a traditional symbol of innocence, in a similar way overturned, in combination with an encounter more frolicking than ominous, in Le panier renversé (engr. Boisson). In the case of Greuze’s Le malheur imprévu (engraved by Nicolas de Launay), it is a mirror that lies shattered on the ground amidst the general disorder. All of these spilt, upset, and shattered objects, however real and motivated their connection with other compo- nents of the illustration, impel our reading in the direction of the symbolic by virtue of all the other such objects that at any given instance can come to mind. This paradigm of meaning, in other words, does not emerge from within the picture itself but from the picture’s association with other pictures. Such a semantic configuration is found in any number of other readily identifiable motifs. The Intervisual Paradigm 81 Reflections The mirror is a traditional iconic symbol of truth ” but also of vanity (espe- cially feminine vanity), and it continued to be used emblematically as such. Even the sultan’s favorite mare is pictured in Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets admiring herself in a mirror, for no specific textual reason other than the fact that her whole description is an allegory of human conduct, stressing vanity and sexuality.’? Given its satirical overtones, the mirror turns up quite frequently in the hands of putti or monkeys or other displacements of human satire. Edward Moore’s Fables for the Female Sex includes a parable of “Love and Vanity,” each claiming dominion over the world of women. To resolve their dispute they attack, each by appropriate means, a naive passer-by: Cupid shoots her with an arrow, but Vanity has a better weapon: But here the Dame, whose guardian care Had to a moment watch’d the fair, At once her pocket mirror drew, And held the wonder full in view; As quickly, rang’d in order bright, A thousand beauties rush to sight, A world of charms, till now unknown, A world reveal’d to her alone; Enraptur’d stands the love-sick maid, Suspended o’er the darling shade, Here only fixes to admire, And centers ev'ry fond desire. ($60, fable 16) Francis Hayman’s illustration captures just the final lines, which seal the moral lesson about the inherent dominance of vanity in woman. Prudence, who earlier refused to decide the quarrel, looks on at left (figure 3.5). That an illustration may perfectly well engage such repertorial themes, to the point of seeming almost entirely comprehensible without reference to any particular text, and yet all the while relate quite specifically to de- tails of some such text, is owing in large part to the thematic nature of literature itself. A good example of this is “Renaud contemplant Armide,” from canto 16 of Tasso’s Jérusalem délivrée (figure 3.6). The fact that it de- picts the hero in the thrall of a sorceress would not by itself explain such details as the mirror, but like many of them—including the onlookers (Danois and Ubalde, sent out to find Renaud) and her bared breast—it is indeed explicit in the text: 82 The Intervisual Paradigm 3.5 “Love and Vanity.” Moore, Fables for the Female Sex, no. 16. Hayman/Ravenet ($60). 3.6 Tasso, Jérusalem délivrée, canto 16. Gravelot/Née ($78: 2:143). Elle est couché sur le gazon; Renaud est couché dans ses bras. Son voile ne couvre plus l’albatre de son sein; ses cheveux épars sont le jouet des zéphyrs. ($78: canto 16) {They beheld the Queen, set with their knight Beside the lake, shaded with boughs from sight: Her breasts were naked, for the day was hot, Her locks unbound waved in the wanton wind. } And even in this langorous atmosphere, the moment chosen for illustration is quite localizable: Les deux Guerriers, de l’asile qui les cache, contemplent leurs jeux et leur ivresse. Au cOté de Renaud pendait un miroir, confident discret des amoureux mysteres: Armide se leve, elle met le cristal entre les mains de son amant; ses yeux tout brillants de plaisir, y cherche son image; Renaud fait son miroir des beaux yeux de sa maitresse. ($78: canto 16) {The arméd pair These follies all beheld and this hot fare. Down by the lovers’ side there pendent was The Intervisual Paradigm 83 A crystal mirror, bright, pure, smooth, and neat, He rose, and to his mistress held the glass, A noble page, graced with that service great; She, with glad looks, he with inflamed, alas, Beauty and love beheld, both in one seat; Yet them in sundry objects each espies, She, in the glass, he saw them in her eyes. (Tasso, trans. Fairfax, stanzas 19—20)} The passage following alludes both to the flowers she places in her tresses and to the rose (here on the ground) she will place for sensuous contrast on her lily-white breast. Thus are sexuality and feminine vanity at once heightened: “elle ne voit qu’elle-méme. . . . Le paon superbe étala avec moins de complaisance l’orgueil de son plumage” “ [The jolly peacock spreads not half so fair / The eyéd feathers of his pompous train (Tasso, trans. Fairfax, stanza 24)}. The point is not that the mirror as such is either a positive or negative attribute, but that it figures so strongly in allegorically erotic situations. Julien Eymard makes it clear that the mirror theme is not featured in a major way in the eighteenth century,” but it nevertheless crops up with some regularity in contexts such as these. For instance, the extensive glosses for the plates in Abbé de Favre’s Quatre heures de la toilette des dames includes the following for the illustration of canto 3, “Le petit pot de rouge de Junon” (figure 3.7): Un boudoir éclairé d’un jour tendre: Europe y est assise a sa toilette; les trois Graces, Aglaé, Euphrosine, Thalie, l’environnent sans la cacher: Aglaé est derriére elle, tenant ses cheveux d’une main, et de l’autre les développant dans toute leur longueur comme si elle se disposait a les ployer ou 4 les tresser, mais en effet pour en faire paraitre toute la beaute: l’ensemble des traits d'Europe, doux et sensible, respire la gaieteé, la dig- nité et le sentiment affable: l’Amour plus pres de la toilette en examine l’effet avec attention, présentant lui-méme le miroir: au cote oppose, des Nymphes admirent avec attention et une curiosité extreme un pot de rouge que tient une d’elles un peu détachée du groupe; Comus dans l’enfoncement, préside a la toilette dont il est le dieu. Au milieu de la planche, deux amours soutiennent une couronne de fleurs. A vos cotés j’ai peint les Graces, Et l’Univers a vos genoux. ($31, “Sujets des estampes”) 84 The Intervisual Paradigm {A boudoir lit by soft morning light. Europa is seated at her toilet; the three Graces, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, Thalia, surround but do not hide her: Aglaia is behind her, holding her hair in one hand and with the other drawing it fully out as if preparing to fold or braid it, but in fact to display it in all its beauty. Europa’s mild and delicate features all be- speak gaiety, dignity and kindly sentiment. Cupid, closer to her toilet, examines closely its effect, himself presenting the mirror; on the oppo- site side, Nymphs admire with close and rapt curiosity a jar of rouge held by one who stands somewhat aside from the others; Comus, at the rear, presides over this toilet of which he is the god. In the middle of the plate, two Cupids hold a crown of flowers. Painting the Graces by your side And all creation at your feet.} !° 3.7 Favre, Quatre heures de la toilette des dames, chant 3. Leclerc/ Halbou (§31). The Intervisual Paradigm 85 Indeed, the whole canto, a sort of extensive elaboration of the engraving (or vice versa), is based upon the remarkably banal idea that the lady’s toilet, with its rouge and powder, is a good and lovely thing. Its central passage explains anecdotally why Europa’s breast is exposed in the picture: Un simple voile en un instant Abandonne le sein qu’il cache: Dieux! que d’attraits! mais promptement Un voile plus ample s’attache; Léger transparent de linon Sur ses épaules se déploie: Linon charmant! que l|’art emploie Pour le coup d’oeil de la raison! Dans ses replis flotte, s’égare Sa chevelure au clair chatain C'est Aglaé qui s’en empare Et la faconne de sa main... ($31, canto 3) { . . . Europa to her task has flown; Removed her kerchief, given to the eye Her maiden bosom’s budding blooms; Ye gods! how fair; but instantly An ampler veil the place assumes: Transparent folds of filmy lawn Upon her shoulders lie displayed, The filmy lawn that Art has made For Wit’s conclusions to be drawn. The chestnut meshes of her hair Float free from every formal band; Aglae lifts the mass with care And holds it up on loving hand. (Favre, trans. Keene, 36)]} The subject is of interest, to both artist and public, only for its amor- ous connotations; an elaborate tailpiece for the same canto shows Cupid pouring a quiverful of arrows onto a dressing table where a mirror figures prominently. La toilette was a very common subject for independent prints as well as book plates, along with /e lever, le coucher, and le bain—all conventional pretexts for portraying the nude; but in the so#/ette motif in particular 86 The Intervisual Paradigm 3.8 Favre, Quatre heures de la toilette des dames, chant 1. Leclerc/LeRoy (§31). a large mirror is usually a central feature.'’ Canto 1 of the same work, “L’Amour et Psyché’” (figure 3.8), begins as a /ever scene featuring a some- what dreamy and scantily clad character, and quickly develops into a sensual toilette scene: Psyché s’éveillant en sursaut a la fin d’un réve, les cheveux epars, mais point échevelée; elle est agitée, mais son air est tendre et d’une douceur inquieéte. Elle est debout, tenant de chaque main ses rideaux, qui restent unis par le faite: elle se trouve dans cette situation en face de sa toilette, et se regarde au miroir qui y est dresse: vers le ciel de la planche, entre le dais du lit et la corniche, l’Amour suivi d’un groupe de Songes s’envole en riant. Les vrais atours de la beauté Sont l’ouvrage de la Nature; The Intervisual Paradigm 87 Et sa plus brillante parure, Les roses de la Volupté. ($31, canto 1) {Psyche, awakening with a start at the end of a dream, her hair undone, but not dishevelled. She is disturbed, but her mein is tender and gently uneasy. She is standing, holding in each hand her bedcurtains drawn together at the top: in this position she is opposite her table, and beholds herself in the mirror which is thereupon. Towards the top of the plate, between the dais of the bed and the cornice, Cupid followed by a group of Dreams flies laughing away. For Nature’s grace is Beauty’s brightest gem, And Pleasure’s roses make her anadem. (Favre, trans. Keene, 19)}!® It is usually the face that is mirrored, but the exceptions are interesting, since the extension of vain preoccupation with facial beauty to the whole of the body implies greater attention to sexuality as such. The woman view- ing all of herself seems to be trying to play reflexively the same voyeuristic role that the viewer of the engraving is playing with her. Oudry pictures La Fontaine’s “Jeune veuve” still in mourning, casting a backward glance (her pose echoed by a woman in the mural) into a mirror—a pointed inter- pretation of a possibility that is no more than hinted at in the poem (figure 3.9): L’autre mois, on l’emploie a changer tous les jours Quelque chose a I’habit, au linge, a la coiffure: Le deuil enfin sert de parure, En attendant d’autres atours... . (Book 6, fable 21) {The next (month), some little change appears each morrow In gown, or hair, or linen, till at last Her weeds are almost as becoming As what she'll wear when they are cast. (Marsh, 182)} Schall’s Les appas multipliés shows a full-length nude standing before both a tall mirror and an oval one on a dresser, while she seems to be reaching for nothing more than a string of pearls to put in her hair; “multiplied” by different angles for the viewer, her charms are displayed to her own self- satisfied gaze as well (Perrot 1984: 66). Lest there be any doubt that the 88 The Intervisual Paradigm 3.9 La Fontaine, “The young widow.” Oudry/ Marvie and Beauvais (§46: 2:134). implications of the mirror extend beyond mere vanity to sensual preoccu- pations, it should be noted that in the Gravelot-Cochin Iconologie, Lascivité is depicted admiring herself in a mirror ($37: 1.57). Such figures suggest a particular complaisance with the subject’s specifi- cally sexual attributes. Although apparently much more modest, Sa taille est ravissante also lends a sensual overtone to the business of the dressing table, since the woman seems to be holding her dress open the better to calculate her own charms, an implication that the legend corroborates by alluding to a budding breast pressing out against her bodice (figure 3. 10): Sa taille est ravissante Et l’on peut deja voir ‘Une gorge naissante Repousser le mouchoir.”° {Her shape is a delight, and already one can see the rising breast pressing out against her kerchief. } The Intervisual Paradigm 89 3.10 Her shape is a de- light, print. Baudouin/ Le Beau. At the same time, her eyes are fixed down and to her left, as if to suggest that another character just out of the picture is also benefiting from the view. As in the previous example, the dove atop the vanity also alludes to the mirror’s sexual function, and for this reason doves thus perched were indeed a common decorative motif; the rose crowning the chair belongs to the same generally erotic iconic isotopy. Although the rose can sometimes stand for virginity, as in the Roman de la rose, or for sex in general, it specifically alludes in this context to the attractions of the nipple or bouton de rose; this is quite patent in Comparat- son du bouton de rose, where a rosebud is being held up to the breast and the two compared in the mirror (figure 3.11).7' It strikes one as a purely visual figuration of “comparison,” but this effect only conceals the essen- tial mediation of the whole notion by language: for it is only because the expression bouton de rose exists that the subject seeks to reassure herself of the viability of such poetic license. Moreover, the evidently sensual gist of her curiosity is more than slightly underscored by the bold aperture of her thighs. Such positioning cannot be dismissed as a merely coincidental aspect of the design: consider the fact that Boudard’s Iconologie designates similarly spread legs as the very symbol of effronterie ‘brazenness’; indeed, the entire subject as he describes it is remarkably parallel to this print: “elle 90 ©The Intervisual Paradigm a la gorge découverte et se découvre aussi les cuisses. Son attribut selon P. Val. est une guenon qui regarde ses parties honteuses dans un miroir” {her breast is bared and she also bares her thighs. Her attribute according to P. Val. (?) est a chimpanzee looking at her pudendum ina mirror] (figure 3.12). The animality as well as the ludicrousness attributed to her attitude is transposed to the monkey, who is actually doing what for her is only implied. This notion of “comparison” is used humorously by Lavreince in La comparaison, in which two women vie for the lovelier bosom before the dressing table mirror (figure 3.13); and by Schall, in a quite different way, in a painting bearing the same title but based instead on a comparison of two womens’ buttocks to those of a statue. This is, by the way, a dramatic instance in which the shift of medium lends a rather different cast to the understanding of a derivative engraving:”* the flesh tones of the figures flanking the statue cannot, as in the painting, contrast with the gray stone of the statue, and without that cue the whole humor of the comparison is more difficult to decipher. Such a narcissistic-voyeuristic motif is quite fully developed in the com- bination of text and illustration in Pierre Ulrich Dubuisson’s Tableau de la volupté. For the section entitled “Le Matin,” we see Belzors peeking in on the fifteen-year-old Deélie as she first puts on, then throws aside her corset, 3.11 Comparison of the rosebud, print. Gabriel de Saint-Aubin/Dennel. 3.12 Effron- tery, from Boudard’s Iconologie ($14: 1:175). The Intervisual Paradigm 91 and after the struggle sits panting intoxicated before her mirror (figure 3.14): 92 Il apercoit... Ciel! quel spectacle! Délie était voluptueusement Devant son miroir inclinée Sa taille n’était pas génée Dans les entraves d’un corset: Et plus noble elle en paraissait: Deux parfaites pommes d’albatre Présentaient a l’oeil enchanté, Le tendre et délicat théatre Des soupirs de la volupté: Belzors voit tout, Belzors s’enflamme En deétaillant mille beautés. . . . Mais d’un corset couleur de rose Il la voit soudain se saisir Un tel dessein le fait frémir, Il voudrait se plaindre et ne l’ose Indiscret amant, taisez-vous, De ce corset ne soyez plus jaloux; Déja je l’en vois affranchie, Ne vous plaignez plus de Délie, Elle le jette avec courroux. A peine sa main nonchalante Sur son sein |’avait attaché, Que |’autre main impatiente L’en a dans | instant arraché. De la géne son sein s’irrite, Avec plus de force il palpite, Ses soupirs en sont plus fréquents: De ses deux mains elle le presse, Et bientot une douce ivresse Occupe et trouble tous ses sens. ($30, 37-39) {He spies... Heaven, what a sight! Délie is leaning voluptuously toward her mirror, her waist unconstrained in the shackles of her corset; and the more noble she appeared for it: two perfect alabaster apples offered to the enchanted eye the tender and delicate theater of delight’s sighs. Bel- zors sees all, Belzors is inflamed in gazing upon a thousand charms. . . . The Intervisual Paradigm 3.13 The comparison, print. Lavreince/Janinet. 3.14 Dubuisson, Le tableau de la volupté. Eisen/de Longueil ($30). But suddenly he sees her take up a rose-colored corset; such a design makes him tremble; he would object but dares not. Silence, indiscrete lover, be not jealous of the corset; already I see her free of it; do not complain of Délie: she casts it off angrily; hardly had her careless hand fixed it to her breast than the other tears it away. Her breast rebels at the strain; it throbs with greater force; her sighs become more rapid. She presses it in her two hands, and soon a sweet intoxication invades and troubles all her senses. } Hearing her utter his name, Belzors throws himself at her feet to reap the fruits of Délie’s already sealed capitulation. Only this complete context makes it clear that Délie is pictured in the illustration at the last pos- sible moment of the sequence of actions Belzors passively witnesses; there is a kind of strip-tease hesitation playing between the illustration (which comes ten pages earlier than this passage) and the poem, which itself takes some time to account for all the picture suggests, especially the corset on the floor?’ and the significance of Délie’s hand. The intimacy of the lever convention works here in conjunction with several identifiable con- notations of the mirror and of the glass door that provides a view. Again, as with flowing or shattered vessels, one always has to look beyond the purely accessory value of the mirror; not just “present” like chairs or doors, reflections always mean something. The Intervisual Paradigm 93 The Book Why should a woman reading be represented with her breast naked, as is the case for a small plaster statue (Femme lisant, figure 3.15) at the Musée Cognacq-Jay? The key to the connection between the nudity and the book is the quiver of arrows and the pair of doves (symbols of Cupid and Venus) at the statue’s base. We are doubtless to assume it is a novel she is reading, but whatever it is, it has sexual connotations: these she does not express, although the sculptor, by allusion, does. Novels and letters play a large role in drawings of the period, and although they both relate to the theme of reading, their implications are rather different. Letters are of course a central part of the commerce of everyday life in eighteenth-century society, yet correspondence of a routine sort is hard to make much use of artistically. (Etienne Jeaurat’s Le joli dormir, cited below in Chapter 4, is one marginally effective way.) There are very few illustrations showing people writing, an act that seems to lack visual force; in portrait paintings, by contrast, the pen serves not infrequently an at- tribute of character. One means of giving some focus to the significance of reading was to lend a suggestion of erotic content to the reading matter. Thus, the fairly common representation of a woman holding a letter, such as Fragonard’s Love /etter at the Metropolitan Museum, usually implies that the missive entails a romantic—or simply sexual—proposition: in this case, aside from the title, such a meaning is suggested by the bouquet of flowers and, more subtly, by the Pekingese on the chair (as was suggested earlier, small, high-strung dogs usually carry overtones of sexual excite- ment). A print bearing another quite conventional title, Le billet doux,™ appears at first glance fairly bland, until one notices that the woman is ina suspiciously awkward position, with one shoeless foot up on the sofa, and moreover that the pictures on the wall represent, one Leda and the swan, and the other a naked woman ona bed beside which a man is kneeling.” This reader is almost invariably female, a conceit that doubtless at- taches to the more or less traditional assumption that serious reading and writing belonged to men, and that teaching a young woman to read was inviting trouble. Illiteracy is the most important form of ignorance consti- tuting Arnolphe’s method for bringing up a dutiful and dependent wife in Moliére’s L’école des femmes (1762): Heroines du temps, Mesdames les savantes, Pousseuses de tendresse et de beaux sentiments, Je défie a la fois tous vos vers, vos romans, 94 The Intervisual Paradigm 3.15 A Woman Reading. Anonymous (Musée Cognacq-Jay). Vos lettres, billets doux, toute votre science, De valoir cette honnéte et pudique ignorance. (Act I, scene 3) {Heroines of our time, scholarly dames, you who utter tender and fine feelings, I defy your verse, your novels, your letters and love letters, all your knowledge to match this honest and modest ignorance. } It is indeed her unintended ability to read and write which makes possible Agnes’s initiation to the “science” of sentiment and dissimulation. The book is a much richer signifier in this context. One has only to compare the two small paintings by Lavreince labeled La Jettre and Le roman, both quite restrained and representing the same model in the two activities (Burollet 1980: no. 150-51). The letter seems in this instance to be one she has just written, and though it could have amorous over- tones, there is no obvious clue. Her very peculiar posture and expression in the second case, however, not as she reads (her eyes, lifted from the book, look quizzically or perhaps mischievously toward the viewer), but The Intervisual Paradigm 95 as she turns over in her mind something just read, certainly suggests that some frivolous and perhaps naughty thoughts have been culled from the book. This particular ambiguity is consistent in the pictorial uses of the novel. Being conventionally associated with a romantic evocation of love, novels inspire tenderness; but being sometimes gallant or risqué as well, they can inspire sensual fantasies. Usually this distinction, though, is not spelled out in the representation, and it is infrequent that any specific book title is designated.*° In Simon René Baudouin’s gouache La J/ecture at the Musée des arts décoratifs,”’ the subject seems to be losing herself in dreamy thoughts, having apparently unlaced her corsage, with the book dropping softly from her hand onto a combination table/doghouse.”* Some ambiguity is maintained about the nature of her reading, however, by the fact that there are other, large tomes, along with other papers and a globe, on the table in front of her. A print entitled Le boudoir combines the same articles with a voyeuristic element and an ironic legend (figure 3. 16): N’entrez pas... De vos avantages Ne pouvez-vous de loin, a votre aise jouir: Du moins laissez a vos ouvrages Le talent heureux d’endormir. {Do not enter. . . Can you not enjoy your privileges at leisure and at a distance? Leave to your writings the gift of putting people to sleep. } Once more, it is impossible to say whether the verse was designed for the figure or vice versa; possibly both even refer to an anecdote that went the rounds, or to a popular play or ditty. It would seem that the man standing at the French doors is supposed to be the author of the book in question, and that there is, along with the obvious sarcasm about its soporific effect, an erotic suggestion whereby the “avantage” of exciting the woman may be exercised first by writ and subsequently in the flesh. On the other hand, why does he have his hands on the other woman; and is she resisting him or teasing him, and with respect to whom? Dorat’s “Hymne au baiser” further demonstrates the prevalence of such associations. It is evident, in the first place, that Dorat’s whole little book on the baisers is predicated upon the already well-established bivalence of that word: if baiser suggested nothing more than a tender and innocent kiss, there would be no justification for beginning in this way the hymn addressed to it: Don céleste, volupte pure De l’univers moteur secret, 96 The Intervisual Paradigm 3.16 The boudoir, print. Freudeberg/Maleuvre. Doux aiguillon de la Nature, Et son plus invincible attrait. . . . ($20: 55) {Pure joy by pitying heaven bestowed, Lethargic matter’s oft alarm, Ah! Nature’s most delightful goad, And most unconquerable charm! (Dorat, trans. Keene, 45)} The headpiece of this introductory poem seems itself to relate only to the conclusion that, after evoking the power of the bazser specifically to the poet and invoking its constant aid— Et puisses-tu, pour recompense, Rencontrer souvent |’innocence, Et la soumettre a tes plaisirs! ($20: 59) {So may you for your recompense Ofttimes encounter innocence The Intervisual Paradigm 97 Subdued to your prerogative. (Dorat, trans. Keene, 49)} —continues: Puisse a ce prix, trompant sa mere, La jeune fille de quinze ans, Dans son alcove solitaire Méditer ton art dans mes chants, Interroger son ame oisive, Dévorer |’ image expressive De l’'amoureuse volupte, Ne voir que baiser dans ses songes, Et soupconner dans ces mensonges Les douceurs de la vérité. ($20: 60) {Led by your law may sweet Fifteen, Safe hidden from her mother’s eyes, Learn in my songs what kisses mean As in her bed alone she lies! Interrogate her pensive soul And to her mind reveal the whole Of pleasure’s tempting ecstasy; May she behold you in her dreams, And learn to guess, from that which seems, The sweetness of reality. (Dorat, trans. Keene, 49—50)} The book is, in this vision, precisely the seductive element that insinu- ates sensual thoughts into the young virgin, of whom, as the illustration suggests, one hand might continue to hold the book while the other investigates erotic sensations more directly. The garlands, the distant celestial! voyeur, and the spread of her legs emphasize these connotations (figure 3.17). In an oblique way this would seem to tie in with La Fontaine’s argument, in “Les oies de frere Philippe,” that the book is innocent in comparison with the real thing: Chassez les soupirants, belles, souffrez mon livre; Je réponds de vous corps pour corps.... [Ye beauteous belles, beware each sighing swain, 98 The Intervisual Paradigm 3.17 “Anthem to the kiss,” headpiece. Dorat, Les baisers. Eisen/Née ($20: 55). Discard his vows: —my book with care retain; Your safety then Ill guarantee at ease. (La Fontaine, trans. Anon., 2:2)} He knows, though, that the distinction between the book and what it represents cannot be so literal as he here conveniently pretends; that, as Roland Barthes put it, “la passion vient des livres.” *? The Boucher catalog lists an engraving entitled Femme Jisant Eloyse et Abailar,*® which suggests something reminiscent of the reading about Lancelot and Guenevere that precipitated the sins of Francesca and Paolo in Dante’s Inferno. There are two gouache versions of Lavreince’s Le repentir tardif at the Musée Cognacq- Jay (Burollet 1980: nos. 156-57) of which one includes an overturned bedside table, complete with broken vase and candlestick, indicative of the excitement that preceded the moral (or ironic) afterthought in the title; but the second has instead an opened book on the floor beneath the edge of the bed, and this little item might be understood as the cause rather than the result of their activity.*! Such a suggestion is taken much further in two prints bearing only their titles. In Le roman dangereux we see once again a novel fallen to the floor, a loosened bodice, and the connotative garlands draped all over the room (figure 3.18); the woman is lying with her thighs apart, ready to be taken by the approaching male, in an elegant alcove complemented by The Intervisual Paradigm 99 3.18 The dangerous novel, print. Lavreince/ Helman. an enormous mirror and Cupid’s quiver and bow surrounded by a wreath. Apparently, the novel here is doubly “dangerous”: it invites the mists of sensuous fantasy, and it causes one to drop her physical guard against encroachers. The title is incisive in that it supplies the critical adjective dangereux;, but the word roman is important also. One can equally well doze off, after all, by reading philosophy or mathematics; only the novel would fulfill the particular role that reading serves in this semantic context. Le midi is more flagrant, and less decent (figure 3.19). It seems to recall the seventeenth-century pleasantry about “les romans qu’on ne peut lire que d’une main”: the novel, which is barely visible in the print, has fallen from the woman’s right hand to the ground, while her left is being put to frankly masturbatory use. All this is heightened by her odd position (she appears to be seated upon some sort of rattan garden sofa) which spreads her legs, one shoe dangling from the foot in the air. Here, the only voyeur, besides the statue, is the viewer of the plate. Although far from subtle here, there are enough stylized paintings in the eighteenth century of a woman hold- 100 ©The Intervisual Paradigm ing a book in one hand with the other in her lap for Mary Sheriff to call the pose a “conventional depiction of masturbation” (1990: 108). A higher preponderance of evidence has been drawn from outside of book illustration here than in other chapters, because these mechanisms of topical allusion operate equally well, whatever the visual medium. It is essential to recognize the broader world of art with which literary illustra- tions always maintain some degree of dialogue. Their distinguishing aspect with relation to those other contexts, though, is a tension or interference between this independent paradigm and the text that is ostensibly being illustrated. That text may of course contain its own level of symbolic allu- sion, which would not necessarily itself be visually encoded: these two levels of signification may function with some degree of autonomy. Either a mirror or a book provides a focus within the frame on which the characters’ attention is fixed, and thus could be understood in function of an interior motivation that Michael Fried has called “absorption” (1980: passim). I do not feel, nonetheless, that illustrations can be as usefully 3.19 Noontime, print. Baudouin/De Ghendt. The Intervisual Paradigm 101 divided as can paintings with respect to their “theatricality” and “absorp- tion,” principally because there is such a great difference in their range. In painting, where a sizable portion of the repertory is occupied by his- tory and portraiture, the statistical preponderance of theatricality is bound to be higher; in illustrations, absorption would seem almost always to apply. There are occasional portraits, but mostly of authors, and serving as frontispieces to collected editions, but otherwise it is almost unheard of for a character in a book plate to appear conscious of anything not represented within the frame. Any number of other symbols (among them animals, which are men- tioned in Chapter 8) could similarly be shown to correlate with others zm context in such a way as to reinforce specific connotations. Their function is usually not mechanically emblematic, but they retain nonetheless a mea- sure of allegorical quality that will be more or less evident according to the way they interact with the surrounding signs. Of the examples sur- veyed here, the broken vessel or spilled liquid is the motif that is closest to filling that direct allegorical function; flowing water and mirrors be- come more problematic and varied in their connotations; and books, which can be highly coded emblems (all emblem books contain many images with books in them, sacred books among others) at one end of the scale, can be almost indifferent objects in the domestic landscape at the other. The relevant text for assessing each one, itself understood as polysemic, is an essential ingredient of this context, but it does not suffice to relate the isolated visual token separately to the text: a// the elements interact, potentially all the words and all the images, at varying degrees of intensity and reinforcement. It is a semic network that has to be explored, whether or not it is conceptualized in those terms: one seeks to grasp what semes emitted by the text are echoed by the same or isotopic semes in the image. At one level this is, of course, like understanding language, a totally auto- matic process. But the more one looks at it, the more one realizes how complex are its workings and how subtle some of its repercussions. 102 The Intervisual Paradigm 4 Visual Disclosures Just as the divorce from allegory is never absolute, other renditions of subjects analogous to the one at hand are never wholly absent. Although we encounter many illustrations that in all appearance refer specifically and exclusively to their “own” text, there is always a potentially wider network of meaning to which they relate once we can identify substantive resemblances between them and apparently unconnected illustrations to other works. Once this process is set in motion, these reminiscences of the already seen seem to resonate for the reader and viewer just as they supposedly did in the minds of the artists. Each of the remaining chapters in this book deals with a cluster of re- lated visual themes, ones that, following this method, thrust themselves upon our attention by their very recurrence. That many of them possess either in themselves or in context a degree of erotic content reflects one of the dominant trends in book illustration in general. A double process of selection, first by publishers of the kinds of texts they will have illustrated, second by the publishers or artists of the scenes they will represent, assures these particular motifs of a proportionately large role in the overall spec- trum of illustration, even if there are no statistics available to demonstrate this. Since it is inevitable, too, that the present author has performed a further and drastic selection among all engravings extant, that sometimes subjective process may have contributed to their relative weight. Although it could have exaggerated their preponderance, however, this factor could not call into question their existence, either individually or paradigmati- cally. It would in any case be true that my list is only partial, and that it is put forward as proof not of everything but of something, not in the guise of a complete repertory but as limited evidence of a demonstrable trend. It quickly becomes obvious to what degree these motifs privilege a point of view and with it an erotic sensitivity commanded by thoroughly mas- culine preoccupations. The three aspects of the male gaze described by E. Ann Kaplan (after Laura Mulvey) in terms of cinema are essentially applicable here. They are the camera eye (“while technically neutral, this look . . . is inherently voyeuristic and usually ‘male’ in the sense that a man is generally doing the filming”); the representation within the nar- rative of male watching female; and the look of male spectator, which imitates the first two (Kaplan 1983: 30). For our subject, too, one can assume, transposing the terms just slightly, that the artist’s eye is a male one, as is—typically though certainly not always—the reader or viewer's, looking through a page-frame as voyeuristic as any projector-screen. Only rarely can we test the impact of these paradigms against analogous work by a female artist or a record of the female-as-reader’s reaction. The male gazing at the female within the frame is also common, and unidirectional. The same suppositions hold as for the male authors, narrators, and readers whose perspectives dominate but do not altogether suffocate those of women. The reason why this is so is, of course, not specifically literary, but derives from a social and historical situation. But it justifies the apparent gender imbalance in the materials treated here; otherwise, I could be fairly accused of telling only half the story. There is no question that another, complementary story can validly be sought, and in that sense the survey presented here has no pretentions to completeness. It instead attempts to remain cognizant of its inherent limitations, which are those imposed by any direct use of the available evidence. Christian Soldiers (noun, feminine) Although the genteel amorous mythology of the eighteenth century had little room for any form of sexuality that was not conventionally hetero- sexual, there was a persistent fascination with femininity in male disguise, and vice versa. The starkest form of the transvestite woman is the figure of the female warrior. Mysterious knights bearing enigmatic ciphers show up at jousts in all sorts of medieval tales, but the only variants of that motif that seem to retain much interest for illustrators of the eighteenth century are those that concern knights who turn out to be women. However it is to be interpreted historically—Rousseau protested that in French society both men and women had forgotten how to belong to their own sex— female usurpation of masculine potency underlies these metamorphoses. Two literary legends, closely allied to religious ones, feature women warriors. It bears mentioning that they are not in fact the only ones pos- sible: the most classic form of the myth—although a confused and variable 104 Visual Disclosures one—is the amazon, yet in this period one encounters few allusions to her. No hermaphrodite, the amazon was truly woman, but the traditional image stressed her virile attributes and as such made of her an inappropri- ate embodiment, according to the prevailing sexual models, of masculine desire.' The subjects I refer to are Tasso’s Christian epic, on the one hand, and the legend of Joan of Arc, on the other—essentially in its degraded or parodic form, namely, Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orleans. Their common and distinguishing feature is that, while the warrior-heroine is valiant, she is also sexually attractive; and that this fact is first dissimulated in the narrative, awaiting an appropriate and dramatic revelation in due course. These are the points that the illustrators regularly stress, while retain- ing at the same time an intriguing degree of ambiguity. Gravelot depicts Clorinda’s battle with Tancred in canto 3 of Tasso’s Jérusalem délivrée at the point where her he/met is cast off, thus loosening her wavy locks and revealing to Tancred her identity as the woman he loves: “ses cheveux d’or flottent au gré des vents, et un guerrier redoutable devient une céleste beauté” {her golden hair blew in the wind, and a formidable warrior be- came a celestial beauty] (figure 4.1). In fact, the scene seems to be a conflation of two separate, specific textual moments. In the first, their ini- tial charge, “each delivers a blow to the other’s visor: their lances splinter, but the chords attaching Clorinda’s helmet are snapped by the blow: she is left bare-headed and disarmed”; it is at this point that Tancred suddenly recognizes her. But his gesture in the engraving relates rather to a slightly later moment in their combat where Clorinda, “forgetting that she had lost her helmet” (canto 3), is arrested by Tancred, who wants before battle to confess his love for her. This may explain why his shield has symboli- cally fallen to the ground, though this is not in the text and they should no longer be on the same spot where she was first uncovered. What is most important, though, is that in the uncertain interplay between text and image, it is as 7f Tancred, on the left, had previously failed to notice that her molded, evidently feminine breastplate identified her already as a woman, although literally that of course makes no sense in the narrative. That visual cue seems, in consequence, to constitute a sort of subliminal wink of complicity to the reader. In the story Clorinda always passes as a conventional (male) hero until she does something that brings her true sexual identity to light. What sets her apart from conventional amazons is precisely her comeliness; she can, and is willing to, inspire passion.* Such “martial maids” who emerge during the Renaissance are, while “always fit opponents for the mightiest men,” at the same time fully feminine in their erotic attraction; when unhelmeted or unarmored, “the Visual Disclosures 105 4.1 Tasso, Jérusalem délivrée, canto 3. Gravelot/Simonet ($78: 1:71). 4.2 “The angel that once guarded the gates of Paradise—there is your image. . . .” Gess- ner, “Chanson d’un suisse 4 sa maitresse sous les armes.” Le Barbier/Halbou ($34: 123). unusual beauty of the maid strikes every beholder.” * Militarily, Clorinda appears like the amazon as a usurpation of male potency, but the threat implied in this image is contained and countered by the assurance of her equally assertive womanliness. A fascination both literary and pictorial with this tantalizing ambivalence is further echoed in Jean-Jacques Le Bar- bier’s two plates for Gessner’s “Chanson d’un Suisse a sa maitresse sous les armes” (figures 4.2 and 4.3). The woman’s military posture (not to mention virility) is underscored by placing her on a cannon. The historical anecdote invoked (the siege of Zurich) leads one to suppose that the women who defended the bastions were simply substituting for their men in their armor; Gessner’s text indeed distinguishes between the violence the armor does to the female breast and the fully feminine exposure of the leg, even better than in civil garb: Quoi! le dur acier ose presser cette taille si souple, ce sein d’albatre et de rose: hélas! je ne le vois plus palpiter sous |’envieuse armure! Heureux encore, je vois ce genou mollement arrondi; je le vois ce pied mignon qu'une robe trainante dérobait a mes regards. 106 Visual Disclosures L’ange qui jadis veillait aux portes du Paradis, voila son image, jeune Ericie, sous ce vétement belliqueux. [$34: 123] {How dare hard steel to squeeze her supple waist, her breast of alabaster and rose! Alas, I can no longer see it throbbing beneath the envious armor! Yet happily I see the gently rounded knee; I see her lovely foot that the train of her dress used to hide from my view. The angel that once guarded the gates of Paradise—there is the image of young Ericie under her warlike garment. ] Le Barbier’s breastplates (the two are curiously not identical) instead stress sexuality, combining the military and feminine into one single—but sexu- ally identified—trait.4 Other attributes contribute to this conflation: ban- ners are balanced, in the tailpiece, by the torch of desire, while the bow and quiver of arrows can at once allude to the woman’s valor and to Cupid’s intervention. Two other tailpieces constituting ironic reductions of this idea occur at the end of canto 6 of Tasso’s Jérusalem délivrée, both representing a jealous Hermione assuming Clorinda’s proper role by donning her armor, echo the suggestive notion of conspicuously feminine form (figure 4.4), making it quite clear from its solid, one-piece construction that this is a rigid and thus indelibly female breastplate, and not just mail, which might take on the curvature of whatever bust it protects. A later and more statuesque de- 4.3 Gessner, “Chanson d’un Suisse a sa mai- tresse sous les armes,” tailpiece. Le Barbier/ Anon. ($34: 124). Visual Disclosures 107 piction of the same scene (figure 4.5) even reinforces visually the hardness of the medium (which is also stressed in the verse): observed closely, the solid concentric circles which form the convexities of the breastplate (figure 4.6) contrast with the dotted curves used conventionally in engraving to represent more supple rondeurs, that of legs, necks, torsos, or breasts in particular (figure 4.7). The necklace on the table fulfills the poetic cele- bration of her beauty as manifested in her state between costumes: “sans parure elle n’en est que plus belle: chaque ornement qu'elle 6te, découvre un trésor de plus” [without ornament she is all the lovelier; each one she doffs uncovers a new treasure} (canto 6).’ Similarly, in a pastiche on this kind of scene, Marillier in Le Caloandre fidéle, a longish story translated by Caylus,° has Léonide facing the viewer to display her well-contoured bosom: this despite the fact that she is explicitly fighting Caloandre under the arms and colors of Léandre, whose death she is seeking to avenge, and in such masculine disguise remains, like Clorinda, quite unknown to her adversary until her helmet falls off (figure 4.8). Most remarkably, in this instance even nipples are visible on the breastplate, as if rather than clad in military steel she were a bronze nude from the waist up. These examples reveal something fundamental about the usual rules of illustration. Text and figure in this regard do not work in the same way, for what is specifically disguised in the one is specifically revealed in the other. In language, which is infinitely more subtle than the stylized rep- resentation of engravings, sexual ambiguity is more easily accommodated, and a semic balance more delicately maintained, between the known and the unknown. It is as if illustrations, in contrast, cannot be properly read 4.4 Tasso, Jérusalem délivrée, canto 6, tailpiece. Gravelot/LeRoy ($78: 1:208). 108 Visual Disclosures 4.5 She arms herself alone with the help of she who is to accom- pany her flight.” Tasso, Jérusalem délivrée, canto 6. Le Barbier/Delvaux (§80: 1:178). unless the woman is marked as such, even if she is diegetically supposed to have been outwardly indistinguishable from a man until the disclosure that takes place at the precise narrative moment represented. In other words, the picture must encode sexual identity (just as, more generally, it must always make character identity clear), even if to do so is logically inconsis- tent with the text’s narrative perspective. In such a situation illustration’s Own imperatives supersede the normally assumed rule of congruence be- tween the two media. An inescapable factor in this process is precisely the different ontological status of text and image. In a diachronic text, a fact like a certain character’s gender can be signaled once and then left in the background, already assimilated even if not featured for much of the subsequent reading. But the engraving is constrained, lest a misreading occur, to represent synchronically the warrior and her sex at the same time: were her femininity not signified, the reader would mistake the action represented for some other scene involving only men. Visual Disclosures 109 4.6 Tasso, Jérusalem délivrée, canto 6 (detail). Le Barbier/Delvaux ($80: 1:178). There is further evidence for this particular semic function in the illus- trations of Ariosto. In canto 3, Bradamant in armor is shown in Merlin’s gothic cave as Melissa (“ungirdled, barefoot, and with loosened hair”)’ conjures spirits representing her future progeny by Rogero (figure 4.9). Merlin’s tomb is in the background and the surrounding vapor suggests the supernatural or visionary nature of the scene. It would seem that the artist had seen the late sixteenth-century Italian plate representing this scene along with others from the same canto. There is an interesting differ- ence, however, in that the earlier one shows the women distinctly standing within a magic circle for protection; Sir John Harington’s classic translation renders it thus: This done, she takes the damsel by the hand, Exhorting her she should not be afraid, And 1na circle causeth her to stand, And for her more security and aid And, as it were, for more assured band Upon her head some characters she laid; Then having done her due and solemn rites, She doth begin to call upon the sprites.* In this case, however, there are no “characters” on the head; the artist has instead understood the pentacle to be something suspended overhead and 110 ~=—s- Visual Disclosures oa 4.7 Dorat, “La comédie” (detail). Eisen/De Ghendt (§21). the circle on the floor is no longer prominent. But curiously, Bradamant’s breast seems here to be covered only by a pliable material conforming less metallically than would a breastplate, and this seems to relate to the fact that in this scene her sexual identity is not in question: for Melissa, like the reader, knows perfectly well who Bradamant is, and that she is destined to beget the generations parading before her ina vision.’ In the very next canto, however, we find Bradamant once more in a stylized, convex breastplate—of quite a different design from the previous examples, and lacking the concentric circles (figure 4.10); and this change coincides paradoxically with a narrative shift, since she has once more dis- guised her sex so that she can fool Brunello and take from him the magic ring, thereby defeating the necromancer Atlas who has been carrying off all the beautiful women on his flying hippogriff. (It is Brunello who is tied to a beech tree in the background, although he is supposed to have been left up on the mountain.) The enchanter has with him a magic book, which he has been decoyed into putting down, as well as a magic shield, which has been encased: That wretch had left on the ground the book that was doing all his fight- ing, and was running up with a chain that he was wont to carry girded on for use like that. . . . The lady soon had him lying on the ground... . Visual Disclosures 111 She, intending to cut off his head, hastily raises her victorious hand, but when she sees his face she suspends her stroke, as though despising such base vengeance. (Ariosto, trans. Gilbert 1:48) Atlas is himself enchained and, although he manages to make himself disappear along with his mysterious castle, Rogero is freed and thus ac- quires the hippogriff and magic shield. Therefore, the representation of hard metal armor of designedly female configuration can be understood to signify specifically that although this character is a woman, the other characters in the illustration are unaware of it.'? Bradamant is not the only person disguised in the story; indeed, near the end (canto 45) she will battle all day with the supposed Leon, the prize being her own hand in marriage. Her own sexual identity being no longer at issue, it is not stressed in the Cochin illustration, although there is a very considerable erotic investment in the encounter, which is underscored in the text by a comparison of her to an overcharged race horse.'' Accordingly, the illus- 4.8 “Cruel woman, cease your scorn; your hardness of heart alone will end my days.” Marini, Le Caloandre fidéle. Marillier/Borgnet ($15: 4:23). 112 Visual Disclosures 4.9 Ariosto, Roland furieux, canto 3. Anon. [Cochin] ($2: 1:49). 4.10 Ariosto, Roland furieux, canto 4. Anon. [Cochin] (§2: 1:73). tration lacks sexual identification: the characters are distinguished only by Leon’s double-headed eagle insignium, borne by Rogero, and the fact that Bradamant alone attacks while Rogero is content to defend himself. Rejecting such a visual conundrum, Cochin takes a completely different approach in his illustrations to Tasso, choosing instead to seek a visual equivalent of the ambiguity that confronts the other characters. For ex- ample, in his equivalent to figure 4.1 above, Clorinda’s hair is prominent but the sexual marking of her breastplate is studiously uncertain; although it is slightly rounded in form, it is also partially obscured by a sort of scarf trailing across it (§77: 1:76). In the illustration paralleling figures 4.4 and 4.5, the armor awaiting Erminia is, like the elegant clothing she has just taken off, scattered in numerous, fairly unspecific pieces on the floor ($77: 1:192): the artist thus avoids the need for determining the form of the breastplate.’ When in the next canto she approaches some peasants to ask for help, her breast suggests only the faintest hint of convexity and in any case is veiled by a cloth identifiable as such both by its softness and by a design woven into it (canto 7). Again, in Clorinda’s death scene, when Tancred, who has driven his sword between the breasts of this “un- Visual Disclosures 113, known warrior,” removes her helmet and recognizes her, Cochin has a sort of t-shirt covering her torso (canto 12). He thus achieves much the same result in a different way, encoding the feminine identity of the armored figure by the presence of a veil that covers what is, from the standpoint of representation, the most problematic part of her body. Although the remedy is pure artifice, in the sense that it is presumably not justified by anything Cochin knew about the vestimentary practices of knights, it en- ables him to escape the visual absurdity that seemed in earlier illustrations to blind the other characters to the obvious. It is precisely such erotic ambiguity that Voltaire and his illustrators exploit in his parodic reworking of the pucelle legend—“a wickedly funny, racy, bawdy, clever and skilful piece of mischief,” in the words of Marina Warner, virtually the only comic rendition of the legend ever—and for reasons intimately related to Voltaire’s philosophical mission (1981: 239). Warner shows how many myths the image of Jeanne conflates: tradition- ally assimilated to the biblical Judith, she also, thanks to her name, which evokes a bow (though d’Arc is probably spurious), is a figure of Diana the huntress, on the one hand, and the amazon, on the other. Playing frequently on the ambiguity of Jeanne, who dressed as a man but more spe- cifically as a soldier, Voltaire creates what is essentially the epic of Jeanne d’Arc’s virginity; it turns on endless narrow escapes for her maidenhead and in the process constantly emphasizes the eminently sexual body she protects under her austerely military regalia. Voltaire thus calls into ques- tion the very “martial maid” compromise alluded to above: his Jeanne wants to deny her sexuality, which everyone around her is out to uncover. Indeed, the motif is hardly limited to Jeanne herself. The illustration of canto 3 by Nicolas André Monsiau (figure 4.11) concerns Agnés, who, sporting Jeanne’s armor, has fallen into English hands and been turned over to Chandos. The legend, taken from the couplet: Chandos, pressé d’un aiguillon bien vif, La dévorait de son regard lascif. (Voltaire 1970: 314) {Chandos awake—how flowed thy boiling blood, When at thy side thou sawest the fair one sad . . . (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 40: 114)} does not, in fact, designate the moment chosen for illustration; it is a tex- tual quotation, neighboring the scene represented, but—a frequent prac- tice—is adopted less for its total accuracy as link from text to image than 114 Visual Disclosures 4.11 “Chandos awake— how flowed thy boiling blood. . . .” Voltaire, La pucelle d'Orléans, canto 3. Monsiau/ Ponce ($88: 1:58). ee ws. for its suitability (lapidarity, grammatical isolability) to serve as legend. The actual textual counterpart of the engraving in fact lends itself less well to this purpose but, on the other hand, explains better what is going on: Monsieur Chandos, hélas que faites-vous? Disait Agnés d’un ton timide et doux. Pardieu, dit-il, tout héros anglais jure, Quelqu’un m’a fait une sanglante injure. Cette culotte est mienne, et je prendrai Ce qui fut mien ou je le trouverai. Parler ainsi, mettre Agnés toute nue, C’est méme chose; et la belle éperdue Tout en pleurant était entre ses bras, Et lui disait: non je n’y consens pas. (Voltaire 1970: 315) Visual Disclosures 115 {“Oh! Mister Chandos, leave me now alone; What are you doing? Prithee, Sir, forbear.” “Ods zounds,” quoth he—(all English heroes swear), “Some one was guilty of a crying sin, Those are my breeches which your limbs are in, And when I find that which by right is mine, I'll have it, I protest, by powers divine.” To argue thus and Agnes to unclothe, Was the same thing; the fair one, something loth, Wept struggling in his arms against the intent, Then screamed full loud—‘“No, I do not consent.” (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 40: 114—15)} It is, of course, in part the seriousness of such formal refusals that Vol- taire is mocking, and the artist has no more exaggerated Agnes’s defensive ferocity than did Voltaire. The huge spread of the tent’s open flap, paral- leled by the angle of Agnés’s lower legs, seems to suggest a receptive vulva. Agnes is disguised again in canto 6, not for combat this time but for flight; she has taken “chemise, mules, robe . . . jusqu’au bonnet de nuit” [gown, slippers, robe . . . even his night cap} from Chandos’s wardrobe, only to be pursued into the forest by Monrose precisely because he mis- takes her for Chandos—until she falls down (figure 4.12). The engraving’s legend, La jument bronche et la belle éperdue, Jetant un cri dont retentit la nue, Tombe a coté, sur la terre étendue. again is only partially adequate, for the text once more emphasizes the particularly sexual nature of the resulting revelation: Le page arrive aussi prompt que les vents, Mais il perdit l’usage de ses sens, Quand cette robe ouverte et voltigeante Lui découvrit une beauté touchante, Un sein d’albatre et les charmants trésors Dont la nature enrichissait son corps. (Voltaire 1970: 364—65) {Swift as the wind, Monrose arriving stared, For at the sight his wondering wits were scared; As ’neath Lord Chandos’ robe, then floating wide, Fair Agnes’ lovely charms his eyes descried; 116 Visual Disclosures 4.12 “The palfrey stumbled, when the fainting fair, / Wafting a shriek that echoed through the air. . . Voltaire, La pucelle d Orléans, canto 6. Mon- siau/Le Mire (§88: 1:99). ” A breast of lilies, symmetry that scorned All earthly frames, by Venus’ self adorned. (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 40: 201—2)} Another, anonymous illustrator chose to neglect completely the attire de- scribed in the text and render her much more essentially feminine, in flowing dress and fancy bonnet, even highlighting her stockinged leg— apparently snagged in the saddle straps for better exposure—more than her chest (figure 4.13). Still, it is presumably this same artist who for canto 13 does represent the breast-centeredness of Jeanne’s physical allurement, again based entirely upon the surprise of its untimely revelation (figure 4.14). Chandos indeed has not known the identity of his adversary until this instant: Son quadrupeéde un haut le corps lui fit, Qui dans le pré Jeanne d’Arc étendit Visual Disclosures 117 4.13 Voltaire, La pucelle d’Orléans, canto 6. Anon. ($86). 4.14 Voltaire, La pucelle d'Orléans, canto 13. Anon. (§86). Sur son beau dos, sur sa cuisse gentille, Et comme il faut que tombe toute fille. Chandos pensait qu’en ce grand désarroi I] avait mis ou Dunois ou le roi. Il veut soudain contempler sa conquéte: Le casque 6té, Chandos voit une téte Ou languissaient deux grands yeux noirs et longs. De la cuirasse il défait les cordons. I] voit, 6 ciel! 6 plaisir! 6 merveille! Deux gros tétons de figure pareille, Unis, polis, separés, demi-ronds, Et surmontés de deux petits boutons Qu’en sa naissance a la rose vermeille. (Voltaire 1970: 473-74) {Her quadruped, those parts to heaven displayed, Which Joan unveiled upon the verdant glade; 118 Visual Disclosures Her well-turned back, plump limbs, in one word all, She fell, in short, as maidens ought to fall. Chandos conceiving that to this dread plight, He had reduced the King of Dunois’ knight; To view the vanquished on a sudden led, Withdrew the helm, when he beheld a head, Where languishing two large black eyes were placed. Quickly the thongs of breastplate he unlaced: Oh Heaven! Oh wonder! lo! his optics strike Two swelling breasts in contour both alike; Half-globes, soft polished, where two central studs Arising, view in glow with coral buds, Which in its birth the fragrant tree discloses, That ope’s to blushing spring its vermil roses. (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 41: 87—88)] Another point in Voltaire’s satire is the euphemism quadrupéde, since Jeanne by way of classical parody mounts a winged (and supernatural) ass who also, by a special sarcastic turn, represents sexual desire: Il nourrissait dés longtemps dans son ame Pour la pucelle une discrete flamme, Des sentiments nobles et délicats. Tres peu connus des anes d’ici-bas. (Voltaire 1970: 475) {Long had his bosom been love’s hidden seat, He nourished for the maid a flame discreet; A chastely noble sentimental glow, But little known to asses here below. (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 41: 89)} The implication of bestiality is the ultimate sacrilege that could be im- puted to the memory of Jeanne d’Arc, and this, too, will be repeated subsequently both by Voltaire and by certain of his illustrators. Another approach to the mockery of the national heroine is to divest her so completely of her armor that she is found in the ludicrous posi- tion of combatting utterly naked. In the eleventh canto she attacks in just this woeful state the English band who have invaded a convent. Logically, this is a simple reversal of the transvestite heroism of Jeanne highlighted earlier; now her sex is advertised in the most flamboyant fashion, so that Visual Disclosures 119 to at least one Englishman the paragon of chastity is merely a party to the general orgy going on around her: Jeanne était nue; un Anglais impudent Vers cet objet tourne soudain la téte, Il la convoite, il pense fermement Qu’elle venait pour étre de la fete. Vers elle il court et sur sa nudité Il va cherchant la sale volupte. (Voltaire 1970: 436) { Joan was en cuerpo, when a Briton’s eyes, With look unblushing, greet the wished-for prize; He covets her, and thinks some maiden gay Has sought the sisters to enjoy the fray; Then flies the fair to meet, and forthwith seeks To taint her modesty with loathsome freaks . . . (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 41: 44)]} He is the first one killed. All the rest are too busy raping the nuns to think of defending themselves: Ces mécréants au grand oeuvre attachés, N’écoutaient rien, sur leurs nonnains juchés, Tels des anons broutent des fleurs naissantes, Malgre les cris du maitre et des servantes. Jeanne qui voit leurs impudents travaux, De grande horreur saintement transportée, Invoquant Dieu, de Denis assistée, Le fer en main vole de dos en dos, De nuque en nuque et d’échine en échine, Frappant, percant de sa pique divine, Pourfendant I’un alors qu il commencait, Dépéchant Il’autre alors qu’il finissait, Et moissonnant la cohorte félonne; Si que chacun fut percé sur sa nonne, Et perdant l’ame au fort de son désir, Allait au diable en mourant de plaisir. (Voltaire 1970: 437) {Each miscreant bent on sin and void of shame, Heard nought, attentive only to his dame; 120. Visual Disclosures “ee 4.15 ‘He wears my helm and under vest- ments too.’ / Joan reasoned justly, she had truth to quote.” Voltaire, La pucelle d'Orléans, canto 11. Moreau/Simonet ($85: 11:198). Thus asses will ’mid flowers their course pursue, Spite of the cries of man and master too. Joan, who their deeds audacious thus descries, Transported feels a saintly horror rise; Invoking Heaven, and backed by Denis’ power, With glave in hand, of blows she deals a shower, From nape to nape, and thence from spine to spine, Cutting and slashing with her blade divine: Transpiercing, for intended crime the one, Another striking for offences done; Miscreants bedewing with a sanguine flow, Each for profaning gentle nun—laid low, Whose soul thus speeding by foul transport fed, Dying in sinful joy, to Satan sped. (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 41: 44—45)} Only one, Wharton, manages to shift his attention and confront the dan- ger, and he turns out to be the very one who is wearing her own armor: Visual Disclosures 121 La voyant nue il sentit des remords, Sa main tremblait de blesser ce beau corps. Il se défend et combat en arriere, De |’ennemie admirant les trésors, Et se moquant de sa vertu guerriere. (Voltaire 1970: 439) {To view her naked filled him with remorse, To wound that body robbed his arm of force, He but defends himself and backward moves, Admiring of his foe the charms he loves; Those treasures which impel his heart to scorn The martial virtues which her soul adorn. (Voltaire, trans. Fleming, 41: 46)]} Moreau’s plate is dense and angular, contrasting the gothic hardness of stone, wood, and steel with the sweeping vulnerability of limbs and robes, Wharton’s armor with Jeanne’s flesh (figure 4.15).'4 Jeanne d’Arc naked is the exact, paradoxical reversal of Jeanne the transvestite warrior—the myth exposed to open daylight, stripped of both its spiritual and physical pretentions. The sacrilege in both poem and image is flagrant.” Revelations Although the figure of a woman in armor may be a favorite (because ex- treme) form of provocative sexual dissimulation, it is hardly the only one. The novels and comedies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are replete with masqueraded characters, often involving a change of sex, although sexual attraction is only occasionally a dominant aspect of that situation. Louvet de Couvray’s Les amours du chevalier de Faublas is largely based on extended scenes where the chevalier plays female personae. The first of these sets the pattern by describing the advances he entertains from a husband and wife, simultaneously vying for his/her attentions while dressed as a girl, and two of the illustrations by Marguerite Géerard—ex- ceptional in that they were the work of a woman—are based on passages exploiting its ambiguities. Symmetry of composition (figure 4.16) here corresponds to the quandary of a disguised Faublas framed between two spouses, each of whom desires him/her; the woman wears a conventional ball gown, but Faublas is, according to the text, costumed in “un habit d’amazone complet, tel que le portent des dames anglaises quand elles montent a cheval” {a complete Amazon outfit, such as is worn by English 122 Visual Disclosures 4.16 “She held my right hand in hers, pressing it lightly; my left was less gently imprisoned.” Louvet de Couvray, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas. Marg. Gérard/ Tillard et Saint-Aubin ($49: 1, frontispiece). ladies when they ride horseback}.'° The reverberation of such a theme in illustration confirms both the fixation of a visual image and the constant reprise of literary themes that support it. Particular plays of Shakespeare also come to mind; and indeed one of Gravelot’s English illustrations renders so manifest the femininity of the disguised Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona (figure 4.17) that one must pause to remember that in the text she passes for Proteus’s page Sebastian."” Still there is quite a difference between this visual paradox, which we have already seen regarding depictions of women soldiers, and the explicit, die- getic exposure of the breast as the means of revelation: such a plot device, although totally out of place in a play, is not necessarily so in a narrative. Nevertheless, when it occurs, it seems a bit contrived, as in Arnaud Ber- quin’s L’ermite, where the hermit discovers in the following way something essential about the suffering “stranger” he has taken charitably into his abode (figure 4. 18): De tous ses sens bientot |’étranger perd l’usage; L’ermite secourable entr’ouvre ses habits; Visual Disclosures 123 Par un sein palpitant qui se fraye un passage, D’un sexe déguisé les secrets sont trahis. ($10: 27) {The stranger soon loses his senses; the good hermit loosens his garment to help: a pounding breast that surges into the open betrays the secrets of sex disguised. ] Secourable hardly does justice to his excessive zeal, but both characters re- gain their poetic innocence when the young man for whom she (Zélie) is desperately searching turns out to be none other than—the hermit him- self.'8 By this turn the story’s sexuality becomes ultimately conjugal in essence, thanks only to a redefinition cast back over the plot in function of its ending. There is a neat, formal parallel here between the means by which Zélie is exposed to the hermit and the delicate way Marillier ex- poses her to us. The only specific reason why the identities should come to light through this particular process is to underscore that sexuality: sexual identity is fused with identity itself. As the function of the hermit here suggests, given especially the priestly quality of his robes, such episodes lend themselves well to convent set- 124 Visual Disclosures 4.17 Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona. Gravelot/Van der Gucht (874: 1). 4.18 Berquin, L’ermite. Marillier/De Ghendt ($10: 21). 4.19 Dorat, Lettre du comte de Comminge. Eisen/de Longueil ($26: 40). tings, where they can complement in varying admixtures the sexual ac- tivities often featured in novels both decent and indecent, such as Pierre Sylvain Maréchal’s La femme abbé.” Dorat exploits a famous story attributed to Mme de Tencin in his Lettre du comte de Comminge, whose hero, contem- plating his own future grave in the Trappist monastery to which he has re- tired, is in turn being watched by a brother who as it happens will prove to be Adelaide herself, the very object of the desperate and tragic love which has brought him there (figure 4.19). In this instance where the male is subject to the female’s gaze, desire, though implicit, is decidedly muted, the emphasis being rather on their paradoxical similarity of appearance and harmony with nature. Other notable examples, active and passive, of this theme are Zinebra’s story in Boccaccio’s Decameron and “La Fille garcon” in Les contemporaines (thirteenth tale) by Restif de la Bretonne. In the first of these, the heroine, long disguised as Sicurano, bares her breast in order to prove both to the sultan (the husband who had given orders for her to be killed) and to the man who falsely claimed to have seduced her that she really is his long- lost (and innocent) wife (figure 4.20). In the second, Armide des Troches, having fled her family, is serving under the name Champagne as the Mar- Visual Disclosures 125 4.20 Boccaccio, Le Décaméron (second day, ninth story). Gravelot/Le Mire ($13: 1:279). 4.21 “It’s a girl!” Restif de la Bretonne, “La fille garcon.” Binet/Berthet ($68: 3:3). quis’s valet when (s)he is accused of familiarities with the Marquise (figure 4.21). This author, always loathe to leave a picture unexplained, provides an exhaustive gloss: Dans la figure, on voit le marquis de M***, prévenu par deux domes- tiques jaloux contre le faux Champagne, venir au milieu de la nuit, suivi de deux hommes, pour le faire enlever, et l’envoyer aux iles. A l’instant ou le marquis arrive, une lanterne-sourde a la main, dont il dirige le rayon de lumiere, le faux Champagne est étendu sur son lit tout habille, la gorge absolument découverte: le marquis étonné, empéche ses gens d’avancer: “C’est une fille!” ($68: “Sujet de l’estampe de la treiziéme nouvelle”) {In the figure one can see the Marquis de M***, informed about the false Champagne by two jealous servants, arriving in the middle of the night, followed by two men, to seize him and send him off to the islands. At the moment the Marquis arrives, directing the light from the lantern 126 Visual Disclosures in his hand, the false Champagne is stretched out on the bed clothed, his breast fully exposed. The astonished Marquis halts his men: “It’s a girl!” } The chiaroscuro heightening the suspense and revelation of the plot makes a curious dramatic contrast here with Armide, whose pose suggests that of a traditional Venus. Armide’s name will surely alert Restif’s reader to one intertext for the sort of scene depicted, that of Tasso, which helps to clarify what are almost invariably, in the fiction of this period, the strictly hetero- sexual implications of the transvestitism. Restif underscores this avoidance of any homosexual connotations at the narrative’s outset, specifying in the process another intertext: Je ne pretends pas donner ici l’histoire de quelqu’une de ces Tribades, qui se sont rendues fameuses, en s’habillant et se comportant a la facon des hommes. Quoiqu’elles ne soient pas toutes méprisables, je suis a leur égard du sentiment de Voltaire, qui préfére la douce Agnes Sorel, a la belliqueuse Jeanne d’ Arc. ($68: 3:3) {It is not my intention here to relate the story of one of those Lesbians who became notorious for dressing and acting like men. Although not all of them are despicable, I am of Voltaire’s sentiment in this regard, preferring the tender Agnes Sorel to the warlike Joan of Arc.]} Restif, it appears, finds distasteful the lesbian overtones of woman warriors and favors a gentler (dowce) icon of feminine vulnerability. Although there was, as we have seen, at least on Voltaire’s part, a heavy dose of irony in Agnes’s douceur, it is not surprising to find the literary motifs associated in the same kind of relationship as the images: in both instances the fun- damental drives—or erotic curiosity, or however one defines them—are the same. In a similar manner Marillier illustrates a scene from Le Caloandre fidele at a point where sexuality is about to be—in fact has been—revealed: Caloandre is not supposed to know yet that his opposite number is in truth the Duchess of Chrysante, but—typically—he has already taken advantage of her faint to unbutton her vest, so all the same he knows. Accordingly, the engraving makes specifically evident the fact that she is a woman (figure 4.22). This can give Caloandre little pleasure under the cir- cumstances, as his contorted expression conveys, for she is literally dying of love for him and will indeed do so once she has confessed her identity and passion. I alluded earlier to titillation, which obviously is the name of the game. Visual Disclosures 127 4.22 “My dear friend, what has become of the courage you were just urging on me?” Marini, Le Caloandre fidele. Marillier/De Ghendt (§15: 3:336). The discovery of sex, the protrusion of a bouton de rose, where least expected entails more or less the same psychological mechanisms as any romance except that the sensual drive is suddenly unmasked: a fleur de peau, one might say. In another, more literal sense, of course, it zs disguised; or, rather, it is a play on the whole nature of (and need for) the disguise of desire. Despite the fact that the armored woman brings in other, partially virile and partially provocative, connotations, the function of this struc- ture remains essentially similar, whatever the kind of dress involved. It is a highly graphic version of the permanent sexual challenge of dis-covering, and enjoying the spectacle or consumption of what is under wraps. The world of illustration in the eighteenth century seems only rarely to offer from the female perspective an equivalent for this visual fascina- tion with the desired other; this probably holds true as well for fiction in general, even though an occasional male character in female guise can be found. Although there is every reason to believe that a not inconsiderable female readership existed, and that it influenced literary production, all kinds of indirect evidence indicate just as clearly that the choices about 128 Visual Disclosures what would be published and what would be purchased were made pre- dominantly by men—who in other ways as well, of course, controlled the artistic norms. This, to be sure, is hardly the only area where phallocen- trism dictates reference and meaning; it is doubtless among those where the process is in fact the least devious. The material we have to work with, even including the small number of illustrations attributable to women artists, simply does not found any conjecture about the content of the specifically female imagination. Marguerite Geérard’s five illustrations (out of twenty-seven) for Louvet de Couvray’s Les amours du chevalier de Faublas are a useful but inconclu- sive test case. The most interesting thing about them is that three, one of which was mentioned earlier (see figure 4.16), depict the chevalier wear- ing a dress, and a fourth having just removed one and lying in bed (§49: 1:25). The second bears as its caption the encouraging words of M. de Lignolle to Mlle de Brumont (“Bon! bon! ne vous lassez pas...” [That’s good, keep it up}) as the latter tries to cheer up his wife by frolicking with her (figure 4.23); it calls attention to his cuckoldry because “Mlle de Brumont” is really the Chevalier de Faublas. In a quite different mood, one that would be potentially quite dramatic were it not for the persistence of this travestissement, the same “Mlle de Brumont” displays unfeminine strength in hurling back the insolent captain and is about to betray her- self irretrievably by drawing a sword on him (figure 4.24).7° The fifth of Gérard’s illustrations (mentioned in Chapter 1), however, underscores his sexual exploits more conventionally, picturing him caught by his father in the dark between two women, with one of whom he indeed has just made love. Moreover, the one that most explicitly draws attention to the hero’s bizarre insistence on this means of practicing his promiscuity is by a dif- ferent artist (figure 4.25). In this outlandish adventure, Faublas is caught in a convent courtyard (where he penetrated in disguise to see his Sophie) in only partial and torn female dress, and here he witnesses from a tree, exactly like the peasant in La Fontaine’s Le villageois qui cherche son veau, the sport of another couple. Desperate to get out, he nonetheless reveals himself to them in this highly dubious state: Derneval me regardait de pres. D’abord il fut trompé par ma coiffure féminine, par le petit caraco blanc; mais le calecon déchiré attira aussi son attention, et une toile trés fine, modelant certaines formes délatrices, lui donna de terribles soupcons. “Est-ce une femme?” s’écria-t-il. D’un coup de main rapide il éclaircit ses doutes; et dés qu'il fut sar de mon sexe: “Créature amphibie! vous me direz qui vous étes!” ($49: 2:91) Visual Disclosures 129 4.23 “That’s good, keep it up; she'll give in.” Louvet de Couvray, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas. Mile Gérard/Patas (§49: 3:157). 4.24 “All right, kill him if we must, the scoundrel!” Louvet de Couvray, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas. Mlle Gérard/Patas (§49: 4:207). {Derneval examined me closely. At first he was deceived by my feminine hairdo, by the little white vest; but the torn drawers also attracted his at- tention, and a very fine cloth, modeling certain revealing shapes, made him terribly suspicious. “Is this a woman?” he cried. With one quick movement of the hand he resolved his doubts; and as soon as he was sure of my sex: “Amphibious creature! you will tell me who you are!”} Derneval’s language seems to point beyond Faublas’s immediate embar- rassment and raise the question of his sexual ambivalence, perhaps the only such instance in the whole book. Thus Gérard’s plates (usually signed “Mlle Gérard,” as if to call atten- tion to her feminine identity), embodying a thematics typical of the overall series of illustrations and one that is consistent with the novel’s own obses- sions, do not appear to constitute a discrete internal series or even a highly distinctive subset of the whole. There does not seem to be any basis on which we can deduce from them what she thought of or “saw” in the text, 130 ~=Visual Disclosures probably because she either was not at leisure to select her own subjects or because it would not have occurred to her to use them for any sort of personal (or generic) statement.”! In all visual media the female object exposed to male desire is privileged; there are few concessions to female perspective in the form of indulgent symmetry. The ways one sees and who, formally speaking, can look are matters on which the ambient culture sets restrictions, and this is well evi- denced in our subject matter. As John Berger says in his discussion of nudes in painting, “the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the specta- tor in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him” (1972: 54). Despite the fact that the narratives illus- trated often allowed fairly generous latitude to a recognition of woman’s desire, the modes of sexual attack (male overtures, female resistance or compliance) remain formulaic, and the illustrations themselves seem to retain the constraints prevalent in traditional painting. If a woman were 4.25 “Who are you anyway, you amphibi- ous creature?” Louvet de Couvray, Les amours du chevalier de Faublas. Dutertre/Lemire ($49: 2:91). Visual Disclosures 131 to be pictured in reverse relation to the male as seen in these examples, approaching, for example, a sleeping or bathing male, the meaning would be quite different, yet without informing us further about the female spec- tator whether real or imaginary. It would simply reflect (or constitute) what a conventionally construed woman would be signifying in such a situa- tion. Would a woman coming upon a “vulnerable” male constitute part of the female erotic imagination? Or does “vulnerability” carry too over- determined a sexual preponderance—too specifically feminized—to be of any use in such an interpretive context? Within this phallocratic system, women undoubtedly staked out their own esthetic-erotic existence and were themselves consumers of books; but the female conscience would have had to relate to erotic imagery essentially by espousal or reversal of a male perspective: in other words, in some way other than through direct identification with the represented point of view.” 132 Visual Disclosures 5 Diana, or the Voyeurs The body, and more particularly the female body, has always been (at least in the Western world) one of art’s most constant subjects. However vener- able the tradition, though, nudity is generally rationalized by some kind of at least minimal narrative pretext, such that, rather than just being there in order to be looked at, the nude is ostensibly perceived in the act of doing or being something; and that something can almost always be located within a finite range of stock myths or situations. In the eighteenth century boudoir scenes are among the most common motifs allowing for exposure of the body in various stages of undress. In terms of the fiction they themselves spin, such scenes do not force the issue of nakedness so much as pretend merely to represent it as it is found in its natural habitat: that is, the artist appears not to have willfully undressed the model so much as merely drawn her in the scanty déshabillé or peignoir she was “actually” wearing. Of the many paintings and engravings entitled “Le lever,” there seem to be none that include a male except as fully dressed spectator. Dressing-table scenes, conventionally entitled “La toilette,” are also frequent (see figure 3.14 from Dubuisson’s Tableau de la volupté {$30]) and, unlike /evers, can include male visitors without ostensibly offending modesty. All of these subjects cam of course include men if they are meant to be quite suggestive, and this is often what one encounters in the works of salty painters like Louis Léopold Boilly. And so, too, of course, “Le coucher”: a subject that has the added advantage of figuring the very act of undressing with which the picture fires the imagination; a cowcher is inher- ently analogous to a moment in a strip-tease. Diderot’s annoyance at the indecency of Pierre Antoine Baudouin’s “Le coucher de la mariée” (Salon de 1767) was based strictly on the nature of the subject, since in fact the model was in that instance well covered up. A print by Sigmund Freude- berg is typical (figure 5.1), and its legend underscores the “langorous” content: Les yeux chargés d’une douce langueur, Zeélie va dans le sein d’un sommeil enchanteur Reprendre une beauté nouvelle: Songes flatteurs on vous appelle, On a livré pour vous aux flammes De tendres billets... de la discrétion! A-t-elle tort ou bien raison? Respectons le secret des dames. {Her eyes filled with a sweet langour, Zélie from the bosom of an en- chanting sleep will draw new radiance: Come, pleasant dreams; for you tender letters have been delivered to the flames. . . Discretion! Is she right or wrong? Ladies’ secrets must be kept. } It is impossible to tell whether this mediocre bit of societal verse was writ- ten before or after the image was drawn, but the text is in some sense built into it by the particular attention focused on the crumpled paper before the fire, constituting the explicit hint that the woman expects, or just dreams about, a visitor to her bed. Bedtime is a deliciously ambiguous proposition that is as extensively exploited in the minor artistic genres as 5.1 Bedtime, print. Freudeberg/Romanet. 134 Diana, or the Voyeurs in such celebrated fictions as Claude-Prosper Jolyot Crébillon’s La nuit et le moment (§17). Because the Freudeberg coucher is a print, and doubtless one based on a painting, the subject stares unabashedly at the viewer outside the frame, rendering the enticement to him explicit in a way that literary illustrations never do. Similarly, there are bathing motifs everywhere in eighteenth-century art; two elegant examples are Johann Anton de Peters’s painting La baz- gneuse (Burollet 1980: figure 82) and Etienne Falconet’s marble Baigneuse assise sur un rocher, the former lightly draped and the latter nude, both at the Musee Cognacq-Jay. The usual predilection is for a background of nature, as if to rationalize the figure’s erotic presence by a less tendentious and more avowable causality. The artistic pretext thus plays an important sociological role; for there is a great difference between a woman bathing, a subject that intrinsically is sensual only in a very limited way, and the artis- tic depiction of a woman bathing, which is inherently suggestive (there are, after all, many natural acts that are mever represented in art). Moreover, representation of the bath metonymically links it with other physical and indoor activities, as is suggested by the legend to Le bain by Freudeberg (figure 5.2): De la lettre ou du chocolat Que préfere Madame? Ah ma chere Justine, Jai le coeur bien plus délicat Plus faible infiniment, hélas! que la poitrine. {Which, of the letter or the chocolate, does Madame prefer? Ah, dear Justine, my heart is much more sensitive, alas, than my chest. }! The tub so resembles a boudoir chair or causeuse that, were it not for the title and the clothing and shoes just taken off (thus signifying undressing without representing it), it would hardly be evident at all that a bath is in- volved. The poem alludes not to the bath as such but to two other related, implicit referents: lifestyle (the cup of chocolate) and gallantry (the letter).’ A small, frisky dog serves to connote eroticism, as it so often does in prints in this style. The representation of woman as engaged in some everyday act such as disrobing or bathing is ostensibly uncontrived—that is, purely denotative—which is a way of disguising her connotative sexuality, desir- ability, nakedness. Such motifs in painting and prints are stereotyped and thus relatively obvious. In literary illustration, on the other hand, this naturalizing or recuperation of such a subject comes about in large measure by way of the narrative function: a story has far more varied resources at Diana, or the Voyeurs 135 5.2 The Bath, print. Freudeberg/Roma- net, 1774. its disposal than a short title or ditty; it can create endless (even if still, perforce, repetitive to some degree) permutations of situations, bringing together the right kinds of components. One of the functions of the story line, then, is to bring the reader into a position analogous to that of a voy- eur. This is done in many ways that do not specifically lead to voyeurism, at least in the specifically erotic sense: Nemours’s spying on the heroine of La Fayette’s La princesse de Cléves is an indiscretion, an intrusion of a type not uncommon in novels. It is a device for communicating to the character information that he could otherwise not have. But by that same token, it not only lends itself to willfully erotic exploitation, inasmuch as any “pri- vate” scene it thereby opened up to inspection from outside; it also typifies the role of the viewer in any scene, literary or pictorial, whose devices of representation allow him to see unseen, to appropriate for his own pleasure a situation that purportedly does not take him into account. The occasions where a bath serves as a kind of fictive pretext for representa- tion of a nude couple are characteristically situated outdoors, the better to modulate the eroticism of the subject by the conventional innocence of its 136 Diana, or the Voyeurs natural surroundings. Nature is, to a degree, a thematic counterweight to eroticism and in some sense can be construed as its opposite. Moreover, the outdoor setting obviates the need to “frame” the illustration as architec- ture does, so as to further the fictive pretense that Nature alone is at work without human contrivance. Often the grotto mitigates the dichotomy, maintaining some or most of the attributes of the indoors. There is an affected modesty in the grotto bathing scene from the Regent’s (Philippe d’Orléans’s) celebrated series for Daphnis et Chloé (figure 5.3);? it is as clear from the narrative as from the illustration that the bath is quite unneces- sary except as pretext for exposing the sexual body to view: “Following Dorcon’s funeral, Chloe led Daphnis into the grotto of the nymphs. There she washed her shepherd, and for the first time in Daphnis’s presence she herself bathed, although her body needed no bath to heighten the glory of its whiteness and beauty” (italics added). This highly civilized grotto, with its own inscribed corridors and doors, is itself a hedge on the nature theme, affording closed-in intimacy and privacy together with the suggestion of natural grandeur, mystery, and wholesomeness. The viewer of honor is himself represented, clothed and only partially hidden from Chloe; and the nymphs of the statue seem to share with us the privilege of benefiting as well. 5-3 “Daphnis and Chloé bathing in the grotto.” Longus, Les amours pastorales de Daphnis et de Chloé. Philippe d’Orléans/ Audran (§48: 52). Diana, or the Voyeurs 137 “Un lieu secret, une grotte écartée” [a secret place, a solitary grotto} figures likewise in Masson de Pezay’s Zé/is au bain. The third canto begins with a series of word plays on the opposition of nudity and clothing, pass- ing via the familiar eighteenth-century mediation of the veil (a metaphor for pudeur, and which as drapery is an ambiguous compromise of mystery and revelation), then develops an imaginary strip-tease reminiscent of the wardrobe scene in Rousseau’s Ju/ze: Hilas approche, il voit sur la verdure, De sa Zeélis les simples vetements: (Hilas voit tout, rien n’échappe aux amants) “Eh bien, dit-il, voila donc sa parure? “Le lin jaloux, ornement de son sein, “Voila l’echarpe, et surtout la ceinture “Qu’elle quitta pour entrer dans son bain.” 4 {Hilas approaches; on the grass he spies his Zeélis’s simple garments (Hilas sees all: nothing escapes lovers): “So this,” he says, “is her adorn- ment? Jealous linen that decks her breast, and there her scarf, and above all the belt she took off to enter the bath.”}> He fondles and kisses her garments before himself entering the water in search of her. In this case the heroine has gone bathing alone; the pseudo- pastoral convention for a one-on-one meeting in the bosom of nature is further electrified by the fantasy of nakedness and the liquid eroticism, whose tactile excitement is stressed by Hilas: Quand ils auront humecté tes cheveux, Au moins, Zeélis, ces flots voluptueux Se méleront a mes jalouses larmes. Crois-moi, Zélis, crois-moi, les flots heureux, Qui de plus prés aurant touche tes charmes, Seront connus de mes sens amoureux. (ibid. ) {These venturous waters, Delia! that dare To clasp you round and dally with your hair, Will come to me and mingle with my tears; Believe me, maiden that this favoured stream, When once your shining loveliness it nears, Familiar to my amorous eyes will seem. (Masson de Pezay, trans. Keene, p. 32)} 138 Diana, or the Voyeurs Along with Zélis’s pigeon, the water is intercourse itself, mediating the distance separating them and uniting their senses. Carried away with its own rhetorical movement, the poem literalizes, with the result that the sexual desire passing from her to him (even though she somewhat para- doxically is downcurrent) heats the very water, exactly like an electric current: Comme les flots autour d’elle s’empressent! Ces flots si purs, ces flots qui la caressent; En la quittant, ils doivent te braler? (ibid.) {Behold the waves, as if in passions’ stress, Surrounding her with many a close caress, See how they come and go And round her ebb and flow, And cling around her rosy nakedness. (Masson de Pezay, trans. Keene, p. 34)}° A storm will make it poetically possible to bring their bodies together; this is the moment the illustrator chooses for his turbulent gesture of passion (figure 5.4): L’Onde et le Feu se disputent les airs; Les noirs torrents vomis par les montagnes, Changent en mer les plaintives campagnes. . . . Mais, Ciel! les flots la portent dans ses bras! Dans ses bras nus, il presse Zélis nue. Tout ce que peut la jeunesse et l’amour, Hilas le peut, il combat, ils’élance;.. . Chaque succes pour elle est un hommage. Une caresse est le prix d’un effort. Nouveaux baisers et nouvel avantage. Amour, Amour, nos amants sont au port. (ibid.) {Water and Fire vie in the air; black torrents belched forth by the moun- tains transform the moaning countryside into sea. . . . But Heaven! the waves bear her into his arms! In his naked arms he presses naked Zeélis to himself. All the force of youth and love is in Hilas, who struggles and presses forth; . . . every advance is an hommage to her. A caress is his Diana, or the Voyeurs 139 reward for each effort. More kisses and more ground gained. Love, oh Love, our lovers have reached port.} (My translation) The full flavor of the illustration can be savored only by following a verbal play that, beginning with the overt ecstasy of the flesh (ras nus, Zélis nue) introduces the suggestion of sexual pulsion (“Tout ce que pewt la jeunesse et l'amour”: pouvoir implies puzssance ‘potency’ and thus erection and ejacu- lation: 7/ s’élance), to culminate in a series of standard euphemisms from the language of gallantry (hommage to the woman who can inspire repeated arousal, arrival au port for consummation). A similar illustration (Eisen) for Dubuisson’s Tableau de la volupté pictures Belzors towing to shore the unconscious Délie, whom he had deliberately pursued into the water when he saw that she was naked and alone; the cur- rent took over from there. Again, the scene is of a piece with the narrative’s explicitly erotic continuation: Elle entr’ouvre un oeil languissant, Et voit dans ses bras son amant Dont l'amour va tout entreprendre: “Ingrat... arréte... que fais-tu?” Dernier soupir de sa vertu! Elle se tait et va se rendre. ($30: 51) {She opens a languid eye and sees in her arms her lover, whose desire will stop at nothing: “Ingrate... stop... what are you doing?” Virtue’s last sigh! She falls silent and is about to surrender. } There is a different anecdotal twist to this story in that her mother happens along at just this point and forces postponement of that particular piece of the action; those few lines are nonetheless essential in the narrative because this moment has established in the minds of both Delie and Belzors the un- deniability of her desire, which, they both realize, must be consummated at the earliest opportunity.’ Diane au bain is such a common theme in art that titles on works ex- ploiting it were almost superfluous, though some Dianas can barely if at all be distinguished from the almost equally common Vénus au bain or even allegories such as “L’été” in Eisen’s illustrations of Ovid.* But by far the episode most commemorated, one that is of particular interest to us in that it represents (and punishes) the viewer within the picture frame, is her unplanned encounter with Acteon. The hunter, poor fellow, means her no harm; but her modesty is so alarmed that she turns him into a stag, 140 Diana, or the Voyeurs 5.4 Masson de Pezay, ; ss Zélis au bain, canto 3. ORS, See ee Eisen/ Anon. ($56). ‘ “ POW, Ks whereupon he is brought down by his own hounds. The precise moment in most depictions corresponds to the first detail of his metamorphosis as described by Ovid, namely the appearance of the antlers Diana fixes upon his head (figures 5.5 and 5.6).? Boucher’s rendition, lush in both robes and vegetation, emphasizes Acteon’s stealth and the huntresses’ consternation as they crouch to hide their shame. The whole point is that Diana in her proud but vulnerable chastity was intruded upon and spied fully exposed, and the antlers doubtless symbolize the phallic threat (now neutralized) that Acteon represents; dramatically speaking, this is the critical point in her vengeance, for it is clear that her intention is to kill him and that he will indeed die as a result of the transformation. As Wendy Steiner has pointed out, such a choice operates within constraints of artistic necessity: If painting at its best should capture a significant action, it must catch it at its crucial moment, the moment that contains the past and future Diana, or the Voyeurs 141 5.5 Diana, from Ovid's Métamorphoses. Boucher/Saint-Aubin ($63: 1:20). 5.6 Diana and Acteon, from Ovid's Métamorphoses. Zocchi/Gregori ($64: 1:89). within it. But in this case {metamorphosis} the moment is a transforma- tion, a becoming which in itself is never visible. Thus, either the picture plane must be split into two moments so that its physical unity contra- dicts its representational disunity . . . ; or the figure must be presented halfway through his change. (Steiner 1982: 159) In Giuseppe Zocchi’s version, Acteon is featured more prominently, being framed in the cavernous mouth of the grotto. Still, if the essential sub- ject were Acteon rather than Diana, he could just as well be depicted as the hounds attack him" or as his friends in the hunting party gather for the kill. To these artists, the point was obviously Diana and not Acteon, a Diana at once passive, as object of view and desire, and unapproachable, even threateningly emasculating. As huntress, she shares these traits in part with the female warrior. Boucher’s rendition places her in a pose which could easily have lent itself to an indecent or “uncovered” variant of the plate (a practice mentioned in Chapter 8); one such was indeed executed for La baigneuse surprise.'' Thus, in several ways she epitomizes the provocation of the bathing subject, both because she boldly advertises her virginity 142 Dhiana, or the Voyeurs (the figure of Diana constitutes an allegory of chastity) and, on an ostensibly quite different but complementary level, because she is a man-hater under attack from the (also virile) image of the male hunter: Acteon’s intrusion is tantamount to the rape of Diana. “She stood above all for fierce autonomy,” notes Marina Warner, “for which her unassailable virginity was the sign” (1981: 202). Thus is also revealed a paradox of artistic representation: to look on the naked Diana is fatal, yet that is exactly the purpose for which the picture exists. The viewer is privileged to enjoy the luxury of sharing Acteon’s crime while sheltered from its dreadful consequences. A curious variant to this image of a ferociously pudique Diana is the lan- gorous one who displays herself for Endymion (a shepherd and not a hunter) in Jacques Sébastien Leclerc’s illustration to canto 2 of Favre’s Quatre heures de la toilette des dames (figure 5.7):'” Diane sortant des eaux, couchée sous un berceau de myrtes, dans ce voluptueux abandon que donne la fraicheur du bain. Elle fixe languis- samment et avec reproche le berger Endymion qui s’avance et reste en extase a l’aspect de tant de charmes: elle tient déja dans sa main le myrte qu'elle destine a sa couronne; derriére le berceau, les nymphes de la déesse tournent la téte et sourient en s’enfuyant. Va, mon courroux s évanouit, Et dans mes main est ta couronne. (§31, “Sujet des estampes”) {Diana leaving the water, lying under a bower of myrtle in a sensual relaxation acquired from a cool bath. She stares languidly, reproachfully at the shepherd Endymion who approaches and halts in ecstasy at the view of such charms; already she holds in her hand the myrtle she has picked for his crown. Beyond the bower, the goddess’s nymphs turn aside their heads and smile as they depart. My angry mood is pacified, Receive the crown I for thy brow have tied.} The canto is a sort of hymn to the bath, topped off with love-making: Heureux cent fois Endymion! Heureux |’amant fidele et tendre Qui voit l’objet de ses liens Ne quitter les bras du Scamandre Que pour s’oublier dans les siens! ($31: 39-40) Diana, or the Voyeurs 143 5.7 Endymion and Diana. Favre, Quatre heures de la toilette des dames, chant 2. Leclerc/Legrand (§31: 21). 5.8 Berquin, “Les bergéres au bain.” Marillier/De Ghendt (§8: 30). {Endymion shall be blest a hundred-fold, The tender and true swain, who can behold His lady leave Scamander’s arms, to bless His own embrace in self-forgetfulness. (Favre, trans. Keene, 30—31)} But as the rest of the myth would have it, she also put him to sleep perpetually so she could enjoy him just when she wanted, without the inconvenience that his own independent desire might impose on her, or even of his power to enjoy her enjoyment. This Diana thus illustrates, in context, only half (the sexually receptive one) of the traditional distinction between a standing Diana, clothed, and a reclining Diana nude. Three different artistic versions of a tale by Berquin yield interesting variations on the theme. The first, accompanying the publication of “Les bergeres au bain: Iris et Egle” in 1775, by Marillier (figure 5.8), is most reminiscent of the Acteon legend both by the presence of the deer and the shepherdesses’ obsession with being observed. It corresponds to the 144 Diana, or the Voyeurs following passage, where Iris and Eglé, while sharing intimate secrets, are alerted to a noise: Iris. O Nymphes, sauvez-nous! Egle. Prenons nos vétements, Enfuyons-nous sous cette roche. L’une et l'autre soudain fuit comme un passereau, Qu’un vorace épervier poursuit a tire-d’ailes. Et ce n’était qu'un faon, aussi timide qu’elles, Qui venait se baigner dans le méme ruisseau. (§8, Idylle 18) {Iris. Oh save us, Nymphs! Egle. Let us get our clothes and hide under this rock. Each flees like a sparrow pursued by a voracious, diving hawk. But it was only a fawn, as timid as they, coming to bathe in the same stream. ] The striking, elongated poses, the tension (erect, one could almost say) of the deer leaning, counterbalanced by them leaning right, make for muted sexual tension naturalized in lush surroundings.’ Adapted from Gessner, the same subject was twice illustrated in editions of his works, which sug- gests that both he and Berquin wrote such tales with illustration in mind. Le Barbier chose to play down the women’s fright and above all invite the unseen reader to fantasize on their naked beauty: “Les flots embrassent d’abord leurs genoux arrondis, et bient6t leur sein d’albatre et de rose” {The water first embraces their rounded knees, and soon thereafter their alabaster and rose breast] (figure 5.9). The women’s prominent posture in the foreground belongs to a tradition running from Rubens to Boucher and Fragonard (Les baigneuses); here they are counterpoised both in terms of body angle and orientation toward the viewer, as if in parallel with the legend’s equal emphasis on the roundness of the leg and the white- red blush of the breast. The third example takes even greater advantage of nakedness, with more emphasis on their fear of being seen, although the subject of that fear is only implicit: they look toward the source of noise that startled them in this dense, jungle-like setting (figure 5.10). Another of Berquin’s Idylles, “L’agneau,” reveals just how thin after all the bathing pretext can be: Pour un simple ruban, qui parait sa houlette, Lyse, un jour, de Tyrcis recut un bel agneau; C’éetait un jour d’été. L’agile bergerette Diana, or the Voyeurs 145 5-9 “The water first kisses their rounded knees, and soon there- after their alabaster and rose breast.” Gessner, “Iris et Egle,” Idylles. Le Barbier/de Longueil (§34: 2:63). Prend |’agneau dans ses bras, vole vers un ruisseau, Se dépouille, s’y plonge, et soudain sur la rive, Parmi joncs touffus, croit entendre du bruit. Son oeil s’y fixe. Elle palit: Et de ses bras, qu’un froid mortel saisit, L’agneau glisse, entrainé par l’onde fugitive. (§8: 30-32) {In return for a simple ribbon to adorn his staff, Lyse one day received from Tyrcis a fine lamb; it was a summer day. The agile shepherdess took the lamb in her arms and ran to a stream, disrobed and plunged in, when suddenly on the bank among the thick rushes she thought she heard a sound. Her eye fixed to the spot, she paled; and from her arms, gripped in a deathly chill, slipped the lamb, carried off by the fleeting current. } Only old-style “soft” pornographic movies have weaker pretexts for get- ting a woman undressed. Actually, the verse itself does not put Tyrcis 146 Diana, or the Voyeurs literally in the picture at this point other than by the sound he makes; he is “seen” only at the end of the poem, which fully expands, in retrospect, the sexual potential of this initial scene. For he has in the meantime hurried downstream to save the lamb and mark it with his ribbon: A peine, en le voyant, en croit-elle ses yeux. Le ruban le fait reconnaitre. Mais, 6 dieux! si Tyrcis... il était la peut-étre; Elle s’ajuste de son mieux. Tyrcis parait. Tyrcis avait un air si tendre! L’agneau donné deux fois était d’un si grand prix! On lui donne un baiser, puis deux, il en eut six: On ne les compta plus. Et comment s’en défendre? Ceux qu’on eit refuses, il les aurait ravis. La belle, prudemment, paya si bien Tyrcis, Que le berger n’eut plus rien a prétendre. (ibid.) 5.10 Gessner, “Iris et Egle.” Moreau/Le Mire @35 13233): Diana, or the Voyeurs 147 {Seeing it, she could scarcely believe her eyes. She recognized it by the ribbon. But, oh God, if Tyrcis... perhaps he was there! She fixed her- self up as best she could. Tyrcis appeared. Tyrcis seemed so tender! The lamb twice given was so dear! He got a kiss, then two; then six, they lost count. What could she do? Had she refused kisses, he would have stolen them. The girl, advisedly, rewarded Tyrcis so well that he could ask for nothing more. } The illustration, however, conflates this diachronic development entirely into the voyeur scene at the beginning (figure 5.11), thereby heightening the importance of his indiscreet presence and rendering the scene’s pre- cise position in the text somewhat ambiguous. To be sure, with a change of emphasis the same motif can take on a coloration more seductive than voyeuristic. Like a Siren, a nymph puts Renaldo to sleep (that is, in effect emasculates him) while Armida looks on, in canto 14 of Tasso’s Jérusalem délivrée (figure 5.12): il s’arréte, détache son casque et respire un air délicieux: au milieu s’eleve une vague qui tourne et se replie sur elle-méme; bientot il voit flotter une blonde chevelure, puis il apercoit la téte d'une nymphe, puis enfin un corps, qui semble formé par l’Amour et les Graces. ($79, canto 14) 5.11 Berquin, “L’agneau.” Marillier/Ponce ($8: 1:30). 5.12 Tasso, Jérusalem déli- vrée, canto 14. Moreau/Triére ($79). 148 Diana, or the Voyeurs 5.13 Fair Arethusa, whither do you fly? cries Alpheus; whither do you fly?” Ovid, Meétamorphoses. Moreau/ Basan (§63: 2:43). {He stopped, took off his helmet and breathed in the delightful air; in the middle a wave rose, crested and fell; soon he saw golden hair floating on the surface, then the head of a nymph, and finally a body such as Cupid and the Graces might have fashioned. } Armida’s spectatorship here is genuinely passive, since in this instance it is not the male who is stalking the female but she who is (deceptively) offering herself to his gaze. Moreau’s “Alpheus et Arethusa” for book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ($63) much resembles a variant on the Diana conceit, but with the bal- ance of metaphorical power, usually somewhat in doubt in motifs closely associated with Diana herself, shifted toward the masculine menace (figure 5.13). Arethusa is a misanthropic huntress like Diana, but she gets caught when bathing alone (Diana in contrast is protected by her band of fellow huntresses) and is ultimately absorbed into the water kingdom, metamorphosed into a sacred stream. La Fontaine’s “Le fleuve Scamandre” and Eisen’s illustration resemble a parody of that hoary old myth, since Diana, or the Voyeurs 149 5.14 “The stilled waters offered him the naive image of the sweetest charms.” Gessner, “Le bouquet.” Moreau/De Ghendt (§36: 1:258). onde devenue qranquille lui offrit Vimawe naive des plus doux attraits . Cimon is only pretending to be the river god in order to seduce the young innocent who is taking a “demi-bain” before his eyes.'° In comparison with the raw power of “Alpheus et Arethusa,” Gessner’s “Le bouquet” seems exceedingly gentle, although the link between the bathing motif and the implicit expression of desire is much the same; it is again Moreau who was called upon to illustrate (figure 5.14). The voice in the text is this time the male’s (in Ovid it was Arethusa’s), relating his vision of Daphne: C’est ici qu’avec une grace charmante elle releva sa robe azurée, et décou- vrant ses jolis pieds, elle entra dans |’eau limpide. Le corps mollement incliné, elle lavait de la main droite son beau visage, et de l'autre, elle soutenait les pans de sa robe. . . . Tandis qu’elle révait ainsi, penchée sur le ruisseau, elle laissa tomber le bouquet qui parait son sein, et le courant de l’onde le porta jusqu’au bord ou j’étais assis. Daphne se retira, je saisis le bouquet. ($36, Idylle 43, 213-14) 150 Dhiana, or the Voyeurs {At this point, she lifted her azure dress with charming grace, and un- covering her pretty feet, she entered the clear water. With her body leaning gently foreward, she washed her lovely face with her right hand, while with the other she held the folds of her dress. . . . As she was dreaming, bent over the stream, she dropped the bouquet which adorned her breast, and the current bore it to the shore where I was seated. Daphne withdrew; I seized the bouquet. } In some way Moreau obviously still had in mind his Alpheus, whose func- tion this hero nearly fills. Just as the figure is now veiled, however, the evidence of desire is more muted; and while the virgin is still captured, that fact is symbolically transposed. The illustrator opts, though, for the early part of the passage quoted—before she is “deflowered,” since she still has the bouquet in her bodice. There are of course biblical versions of this subject (often represented in art by famous masters)—namely Suzanna and the Elders and the bath of Bathsheba. The Péché de David et Bethsabée in a 1789 Bible shows a David looking down as Bathsheba disrobes beside a Roman-like (but outdoor) bath.'” One can compare with this an illustration of a distinctly Bathsheba type by Eisen for La Fontaine’s “Le roi Candaule,” a story taken from Herodotus in which the king who cannot resist taking advantage of his wife’s bath to show off her corporal charms nonetheless expects them to be appreciated zsthetically only (figure 5. 15): Proposez-vous de voir tout ce corps si charmant, Comme un beau marbre seulement. Je veux que vous disiez que l’art, que la pensée, Que méme le souhait ne peut aller plus loin. (844: 2:173) {You must propose, this charming form to view, As if mere marble, though to nature true; And I’m convinced you'll readily declare, Beyond nor art can reach, nor thought prepare... . (La Fontaine, trans. Anon., 2: 182)} In both cases, the desire thus provoked proves murderous; but here the husband who must be dispensed with for access to her bed is the king himself. Literarily, the most striking aspect of this passage is perhaps the verbal transposition of represented flesh into the stone of sculpture; art, which furnishes the model of the beautiful, is invoked in a turnabout as its refuge: marble both idealizes the wife’s seductiveness and (supposedly) Diana, or the Voyeurs 151 5.15 La Fontaine, “Le roi Candaule.” Eisen/ Anon. (§44: 2:173). puts it back into the realm of art and therefore beyond attainment. The main composition of this illustration is indeed reminiscent of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, but the stark positioning of her leg across the whole front plane is much more arresting, and the explicit representation of the voyeurs, whose angle of view is indeed less privileged than ours, aligns it with the tradition of illustrations which we have been discussing. This is indeed such a common theme in illustration that only a few more examples can be commented upon here. Inasmuch as such a scene constitutes in essence a temptation to illus- trator and viewer alike, the act of representing and viewing replicates the temptation represented within the figure by the male eye drawn to the female body; the situation is built upon an inherent structural reinforce- ment that is only in part evident. It conveys its own impetus toward imaginary extrapolation; thus, the illustration for the second canto of Mas- son De Pezay’s Zélis au bain exposes an image of nudity as if projected by the reader’s desire to see, since in the text it is imagined only (figure 5. 16): 152 Diana, or the Voyeurs 5-16 Masson de Pezay, Zélis au bain, canto 2. Eisen/de Longueil (§56). Pres d’un ruisseau la bergere est placée. La voyez-vous comme elle est abaissé¢e Négligemment, pour arréter cette eau: Et par degre, quand la Nymphe charmante Veut incliner son front vers le ruisseau; Comme les plis de sa robe mouvante, Modelant sur sa taille élégante, Aux yeux d’Hilas, qui soupire tout bas, En marquent bien les contours délicats! Mais au plaisir d’approcher la Bergere, Hilas, cache quelques moments, prefere De voir Zélis dans ce trouble amoureux, Cet abandon tendre et voluptueux, Ou la Beauté, qui se croit solitaire, Laisse son coeur se trahir dans ses yeux. (§56, canto 2) Diana, or the Voyeurs 153 5-17 “Where are you now, Tiran? Why are you not where you can see and touch what you love most in the world?” Caylus, Tiran le blanc. Marillier/Le Villain ($15: 2:52). {The shepherdess is seated near a stream. See how negligently she is stooped down to catch the water, and how little by little, as the charm- ing nymph tries to lower her face toward the stream, the folds in the undulating dress that model her elegant form put her delicate curves into relief for the eyes of Hilas, who sighs silently. But to the pleasure of approaching Zélis, Hilas who remains a few moments hidden, prefers that of watching her in such amorous excitement, such tender and sen- sual abandon, when the beauty, thinking she is alone, cannot keep her eyes from giving her heart away. } Thus Hilas resists—whereas the artist cannot—the temptation to lift the veil by force; correspondingly, it is once more as if the viewing angle had been deliberately shifted in order to privilege our access to the body while maintaining the letter of the poem in which Hilas cannot see it.'* Not that the structure of the situation is thereby really significantly different; what 154 Diana, or the Voyeurs basically distinguishes one member from another in this family of illustra- tions is not in fact whether the figure is clothed or not. Here, there is also a play upon the usual ambiguity about sentiment and desire: /aisse{r} son coeur se trahir sounds as though it should instead read “laisser son corps se trahir,” since that is what is really happening; but the lines following also continue to rationalize the role of the heart, as Zélis falls asleep and in her dream confirms her love for Hilas. It is also as an explicit realization of the voyeur’s desire that, in Caylus’s Tzran le blanc, a character called Plaisir de la Vie, while preparing princess Carmésine for her bath, extols and displays her charms for the benefit of Tiran, who has been smuggled into her room in a trunk (figure 5.17). The legend is a provocation to Carmésine: “Ou es- tu a présent, Tiran! Pourquoi n’es-tu pas dans un lieu ou tu puisses voir et toucher ce que tu aimes le plus au monde?” [Where are you now, Tiran? Why are you not where you can see and touch what you most love in the world?}, and a complicit cue to Tiran and the reader, who as usual is the primary target of the visual revelation. In fact, Tiran is there for something more than a front-row seat: the idea is for him to be slipped surreptitiously into her bed; but she, alarmed, makes too much of a fuss, and as a result the consummation ts long deferred. An illustration both drawn and engraved by Moreau accompanies Laborde’s song “Le berger fidele” on a subject similar to Berquin’s (figure 5.18). What makes the overall semantic context different is only the reverse twist of the song’s final line: Dans un bois écarté Aupres d’une onde pure, Pendant un soir d’été De son amour tout occupé Colin errait a l’aventure; Egle, Lisette, Iris Trésors de la nature De mieux nager se disputaient le prix, De mieux nager se disputaient le prix. Se croyant a l’ombre du mystere Et loin des regards curieux Elles présentaient a ses yeux ‘Mille beautés dignes des cieux Ainsi la reine de Cythere Jadis charmait les dieux, Jadis charmait les dieux. Diana, or the Voyeurs 155 5.18 “Egle, Lisette, Iris, you have a thousand charms, but one look from Cloris means more to me.” Laborde, “Le berger fidéele.” Moreau/ Moreau (§40: 1:120). Egle, Lifette, Iris , vous aves mille charmes Mais j'aime mieux un regard de Cloms E Le fidele Colin Rempli de ses alarmes, Et d'un regard chagrin, Ne les voyant qu’avec dédain, Leur dit les yeux mouillés de larmes, Egle, Lisette, Iris, Vous avez mille charmes, Mais j'aime mieux un regard de Cloris, Mais j'aime mieux un regard de Cloris. ($40: 1:120) {In an isolated wood near a sparkling stream, during a summer eve, Colin wandered absently, preoccupied by love. Eglé, Lisette, and Iris, treasures of nature, were vying for who was the best swimmer. Thinking they were well protected and far from curious eyes, they allowed his to behold a thousand beauties worthy of heaven. Thus did the queen of 156 Diana, or the Voyeurs Cythera once charm the gods. The faithful Colin, full of his own cares, and in his sadness viewing them only with disdain, said with tears in his eyes: Egle, Lisette, Iris, you have a thousand charms, but one look from Cloris means more to me. } For the genre this poem is a worthy representative: “The song in general, but particularly the erotic song, demands refinement of thought, delicacy of sentiment, pleasantness and grace of images, lightness of style, and great simplicity in its verse.” ” By a clever play of the sort that such poetry accordingly often lives by, Laborde has turned the story around so that the women seem to be offering Colin attractions he does not deign to accept; it is a sentimental, but highly conventional, use of the fidelity motif, which is practically indissociable from the pastoral. Moreau lends the women all the commotion of others who are genuinely threatened; although he places Colin in the shadows like the typically avid voyeur, he captures the ironic contrast of the poem’s end via Colin’s immobile indifference to the entice- ments he views. A prankish gloss on such scenes is a painting by Schall called Les espzégles in which two boys use a fishline and hook to lift away the clothes that two bathing women have left unattended on the bank.?° Espiéglerie, one might say, but ferocious and vengeful, is also at the heart of Boccaccio’s tale in which a scholar, duped by Elena into exposing him- self to the cold, dupes her in turn, through a fictitious magic rite she is supposedly to execute, into scalding herself naked in the sun atop a tower. Gravelot might have depicted her burning and suffering there, inasmuch as that is really the climax of the story; but instead, in his illustration she has just stripped and dipped herself seven times in the Arno and is heading toward the tower, while the scholar and his servant look on (figure 5.19). Among the possible reasons for preferring this moment are the difficulty of suggesting such a color-dependent notion as sun-scorched skin in a mono- chrome engraving, the desirability of representing Elena’s attractiveness rather than its demise, and the alluring provocation of a scene incorpo- rating its voyeurs: for even the vengeful scholar, according to the text, cannot help being much aroused by what he beholds: when she walked right past, so close to him, naked as she was, he gazed at the whiteness of her body penetrating the shadows of the night, and at that moment, as he stared at her breasts and the other parts of her body, thinking how beautiful they were and realizing to himself what was about to happen to them, he felt a twinge of pity for her. Moreover, suddenly attacked by the desires of the flesh which caused a certain part of him which had been resting to stand up straight, he was tempted Diana, or the Voyeurs 157 5-19 Boccaccio, Le Décaméron (eighth day, seventh tale). Gravelot/Le Mire ($13: 4:175). 158 Diana, or the Voyeurs to leave his hiding place, seize her, and fulfill his desires—and caught between pity and lust, he was almost overcome.”! Characters and reader are placed by the illustration in coinciding spectator situations not readily paralleled by any other moment in the story. Only rarely, and then sometimes only in parody, does one encounter a reversal of the usual distribution of sexual roles. In a Moreau plate for Antoine Hamilton’s “Le bélier,” a tale first published in 1730 in the style of a roman 4 clef, the surpassingly beautiful Alie sets in her grotto an amor- ous death trap for all whose fate it is to see her (figure 5.20). But on this occasion she is instead herself spellbound by the sight of the one man she will love and stares at him, framed both by the grotto itself and by the almost symmetric gestures of the companion and hunter facing her, riveted in unavenged and apparently unabashed nudity. Only the text, however, signifies this diegetic ascendency of the female gaze, which is accompanied by no fundamental restructuring of the traditional pattern of the image. In the case of Ovid’s Salmacis, who eschews the huntress image even though it is urged upon her, it is the irresistible nakedness of Hermaphrodite that inspires her to invite him to her bed and, when ignored, to pursue and ulti- mately envelop him (figure 5.21): “La nymphe Salmacis veut embrasser le jeune Hermaphrodite, qu'elle voit dans le bain” [The nymph Salmacis tries to embrace Hermaphrodite, whom she spies bathing}. Of course this situa- tion is inherently aberrant with respect to usual expectations, as proved by the fact that the mythical episode results in the very name for ambiguous sexual monstrosity.**? Monnet’s illustration reflects this hesitation by the masking of any prominent features of sexual identification, so that there is still no original or authentic form of representation of female over male perspective. As if to show that the canons of representation afford no serious place to the possibility of such inversion, Voltaire twice evoked satirically the notion of female excitement at the sight of the nude male. The first is in L’ingénu where, as the Huron standing in the river reasons with his con- verters over the biblical form of baptism (beginning of chapter 4), Mlles de Kerkabon and St. Yves indulge their sexual curiosity: “Mademoiselle de St. Yves . . . disait tout bas a sa compagne: ‘Mademoiselle, croyez-vous qu il reprenne sit6t ses habits?’” [Mademoiselle de St. Yves . . . said ina low voice to her companion, “Mademoiselle, do you think he will soon put his clothes back on?”}” (figure 5.22). Here there are two levels of seeing, the first in the foreground, masculine and serious, devoid of sexual con- notation; the second in the background, feminine, prurient, and comic. Diana, orthe Voyeurs 159 5.20 “The Goat.” Hamilton. Moreau/ Triére (§38: 2:115). 5.21 “The nymph Sal- macis tries to embrace Hermaphrodite, whom she spies bathing.” Ovid, Métamorphoses. Monnet/ Massard (863: Ages), 5.22 Voltaire, L’ingénu, chap. 4. Monnet/Deny ($89: 2). In the other instance, much more sensually forceful, the heretic “English animal” Jenni (Hzstozre de Jenni) attracts Dona Las Nalgas to come spy on him in the bath. The text lavishes attention on his vibrant flesh: Nous y entrames sur la pointe du pied, sans faire aucun bruit, sans par- ler, sans oser respirer, précisément dans le temps que l’English sortait de l’eau. Son visage n’était pas tourné vers nous; il 6ta un petit bonnet sous lequel étaient renoueés ses cheveux blonds, qui descendirent en grosses boucles sur la plus belle chute de reins que j’aie vue de ma vie; ses bras, ses Cuisses, ses jambes, me parurent d’un charnu, d’un fini, d’une élé- gance qui approche, a mon gré, |’Apollon du Belvedere de Rome, dont la copie est chez mon oncle le sculpteur. Dona Boca Vermeja était extasiée de surprise et d’enchantement. J€tais saisie comme elle; je ne pus m’empécher de dire: Ob que her- moso muchacho! Ces paroles, qui m’échapperent, firent tourner le jeune homme. Ce fut bien pis alors; nous vimes le visage d’ Adonis sur le corps d’un jeune Hercule. (ibid., 495) {We entered on tiptoe, without a sound, without speaking, without daring to breathe, precisely at the time that the Englishman was coming out of the water. His face was turned toward us; he took off a small cap under which his blond hair was tied, and it fell in large curls over the 160 Diana, or the Voyeurs most lovely torso I had ever seen; his arms, his thighs, his legs, appeared to me so fleshy and fine, nearly as elegant in my mind as the Apollo of the Belvedere of Rome of which my uncle the sculptor has a copy. Dona Boca Vermeja was in ecstasy with surprise and enchantment. I too was quite arrested; I could not help saying: Oh que hermoso muchacho! These words which escaped me caused him to turn his head. Then it was even worse; we saw the face of an Adonis on the body of a young Hercules. } The illustration captures the very second when his head turns (figure 5.23),°4 and attempts to pack as much physical punch as possible into the virile body, lavishly accented with curtains, sheets, and his Sampson-like hair. This sight so overwhelms Boca Vermeja that, when reminded she is after all the inquisitor’s mistress, she exclaims, “je trahirais Melchisédech pour ce beau jeune homme” {I would betry Melchizedek for this young man}. And, as Voltaire wryly adds, “Elle n’y manqua pas” [And she did}. Between this bath scene and one for La Morliére’s Angola, itself a parody of erotic fiction, the family resemblance (along with obvious differences) is notable (figure 5.24). It corresponds to this passage: Il se glissa le long des charmilles; et s'approchant jusqu’au vitrage, il vit que c’était une femme qui prenait le bain dans ce lieu délicieux. Elle Diana, or the Voyeurs 161 5.23 Voltaire, Jenni, chap. 1. Monnet/Deny (§89: 3:7). 5.24 La Morliére, Angola. Eisen/Tardieu (§47). avait la téte tournée, il ne put distinguer son visage, mais les beautés qui s offrirent a sa vue servirent a l’en dedommager. ... Cette personne se leva pour sortir du bain, et acheva de l’embraser, en laissant a découvert des beautés les plus cachées, et que l’eau lui avait dérobé {szc} jusques la. En sortant du bain, elle se retourna; et ayant apercu la téte du prince au travers des vitres, elle fit un grand cri, et gagna précipitamment une alcove ou était un petit lit en niche. ($47: 104) {He glided along the hedge-row; and coming up to the windows, he saw that it was a woman bathing in this delightful spot. She had her head turned aside, so he could not make out her face, but the beauties offered to his sight made up for that. . . . This person arose to leave the bath, and enflamed him even more by exposing to full view the most hidden beauties, which the water had until then covered. While leaving the bath, she turned around; and perceiving the prince’s head through the window, she let out a loud cry, and quickly hid in an alcove where there was a small bed. } 162 Diana, or the Voyeurs She is shown as she leaps to hide behind the bed curtain. In this instance, in a reversal of the usual practice, the artist by hiding from us her distinctively feminine traits positions her in such as way as to guarantee that Angola himself has an unimpeded frontal view. As in the previous example, the text establishes a direct link between the illicit sight and immediate desire, so that the picture connotes as well a direct sexual consequence: Il tourna précipitamment ses pas du coté de la porte du pavillon, et entra en lui demandant pardon de son indiscrétion, et se proposant d’en commettre de plus grands. . . . Le prince, emporté par sa passion, parvint par gradation aux plaisirs les plus vifs.2 ($47: 104, 107) {Immediately he directed his steps toward the cottage door and entered, begging pardon for his indiscretion while planning worse ones yet. . . . The prince, carried away by his passion, by stages reached the most acute pleasures. } An erotic commonplace so unexpectedly recast becomes humorous—not, as Voltaire certainly realizes, because it is any less representative of human nature, but simply because it uses the reader’s conventional expectations as a foil for its ironic commentary. From time to time artistic representation includes a meta-representation of its own process, as in Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s L’académie particuliére*® and other paintings and engravings in which the artist becomes part of the subject. In Le paysan perverti this is precisely what happens, in both text and image—it is impossible to distinguish neatly between them in the case of Restif, because he often so obviously had figures in mind, and detailed their subjects—in the unsigned illustration of the scene where Edmond is privy to the marquise’s bath in order to make her nude portrait for the marquis (figure 5.25). The purpose of this project, although exe- cuted with the marquise’s connivance, is precisely comparative: to see which of she or Ursule can claim the superior body.’’ Interestingly, however, the illustrator has resorted to both a textual and a visual contrivance in order to capture as much of this meaning as possible. For the scene seems to be, at least in terms of the novel itself, a conflation of two passages in part 4: letter 109 mentioning Edmond’s portrait of Ursule, and letter 112, where he draws the Marquise who has already seen the former. Moreover, in order to represent both the voyeur and his subjects, he has invoked the theatri- cal convention—not at all ordinary in illustration—of the cutaway wall whereby two rooms can be viewed at once by an audience. Restif’s image of himself as the unseen observer is obsessively pursued in such works as Les nuits de Paris and Les contemporaines. Indeed, in one illustration for Le Diana, or the Voyeurs 163 5-25 Restif de la Bretonne, Le paysan perverti. Binet/Le Roy ($69: 2:274). paysan perverti, which appears to represent Parangon’s assault on Tiennette in an inn (figure 5.26),*° it even interferes with the fiction. Parangon has entered her room, unbeknownst to her, through a secret door; but in terms of the illustration Restif himself appears to have entered as well (or to have already been waiting), even though that would make no literal sense in the story. In this instance the meta-theme of Restif as seer (and vicariously as substitute for the eyes of his reader) takes priority over the ground- or diegetic-level truth of the narrative in its own right. Voyeurism is in any case structurally inherent in pictures in a way that is unparalleled in narrative. (Fredric Jameson has remarked that “The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mind- less fascination.”)?? While a text has to be addressed to someone, even if that recipient is unknown or unidentified, the picture most often (with notable exceptions, portraiture in particular) pretends to ignore the viewer who, much like the spectator in the theater, is from the point of view 164 Diana, or the Voyeurs of its own characters supposed not to exist. In other words, the viewer is typically a voyeur, peeking in from his invulnerable perch outside the book whose characters are always, unbeknownst to them, being indiscreetly watched. There are of course numerous instances in art where the act of spying is itself thematized. In many an illustration the whole interest lies in what is overseen; baths are only one of the possible pretexts. But the pos- sibilities are simply not limitless, or the conventions in any event confine them to a few rather predictable categories. Pastoral traditions are replete with such scenes, which an illustration to La Fontaine’s “Contre ceux qui ont le godt difficile” [Against those who are hard to please} typifies (figure S227) La jalouse Amarylle Songeait a son Alcippe, et croyait de ses soins N’avoir que ses moutons et son chien pour témoins. Tircis, qui l’apercut, se glisse entre des saules; Il entend la bergere adressant ces paroles 5-26 Restif de la Bretonne, Le paysan perverti. Binet/Le Roy ($69: 1:139). Diana, or the Voyeurs 165 Au doux Zephir, et le priant De les porter 4 son amant. ($46: 1:460) {Amaryllis, while She longed for her Alcippus, howsoever deep In love, thought no one knew except her dog and sheep. But Thyrsis spied her, as he lurked midst willow trees, And heard his shepherdess address a gentle breeze Whose name was Zephyr—heard her pray That he might blow her lover’s way— . . . (La Fontaine, trans. Duke, p. 25)} An almost inevitable transferral takes place here, for in a visual medium Tircis can only be depicted as overseezmg, although he is in fact, more im- portantly in the fable, overhearing. It should be noted that in context this passage is really a parody of pastoral, based precisely upon exaggeration of the genre’s most patent conventions.” Another type is the voyeuristic tale so central to Boccaccio and his emu- lators, of which we have already seen some examples. Such tales of La Fontaine as “Les Rémois” and “La servante justifiée” (figure 5.28)*' have a structural spying component, sometimes diegetically accidental and some- times contrived, which his illustrators frequently emphasize. Indeed, they sometimes push implications of the situation further than the text makes strictly necessary. “Le villageois qui cherche son veau” {The villager look- ing for his calf } (derived from Les cent nouvelles nouvelles) does not explicitly require the key scene to be witnessed visually: Un villageois ayant perdu son veau, L’alla chercher dans la forét prochaine. Il se placa sur l’arbre le plus beau, Pour mieux entendre, et pour voir dans la plaine. Vient une dame avec un jouvenceau. Le lieu leur plait, l’eau leur vient a la bouche: Et le galant, qui sur l’herbe la couche, Crie en voyant je ne sais quels appas: O dieux, que vois-je, et que ne vois-je pas! Sans dire quoi; car c’étaient lettres closes. Lors le manant les arrétant tout coi: Homme de bien, qui voyez tant de choses, Voyez-vous point mon veau? dites-le moti. (844: 2:53) 166 Diana, or the Voyeurs {A countryman, one day, his calf had lost, And, seeking it, a neighboring forest crossed; The tallest tree that in the district grew, He climbed to get a more extensive view. Just then a lady with her lover came; The place was pleasing, both to spark and dame; Their mutual wishes, looks and eyes expressed, And on the grass the lady was caressed. What sights of charms, enchanting to the eyes, The gay gallant exclaimed, with fond surprise: — Ye gods, what striking beauties now I see! No objects names; but spoke with anxious glee. The clod, who, on the tree had mounted high, And heard at ease the conversation nigh, Now cried: —Good man! who see with such delight, Pray tell me if my calf be in your sight? (La Fontaine, trans. Anon., 2: 53—54)} The seezmg, though certainly important, is that of /e galant, not of the villageois who only hears. Yet Eisen, Cochin, and Fragonard all represent the latter stationed only slightly overhead with respect to the couple and 5.27 La Fontaine, “Against those who are hard to please.” Oudry/Cochin ($46: 1:460). 5.28 La Fontaine, “La servante justifiée.” Eisen/Le Mire ($44: 1:47). Diana, or the Voyeurs 167 thus enjoying quite a good view.*? This would hardly be the case were the Contes illustrated with the same literalism that characterizes editions of the Fables, and the whole difference lies in the nature of the subjects.» We observe here the powerful influence that a work of art exerts on successive treatments of the same subject; nonetheless, we find distinct variances in treatment: whereas Cochin assumes that it suffices to show the woman’s corsage unlaced, and Fragonard leaves her quite decently clothed, Eisen goes so far as to position the swain in a position to look up under her dress—and thus truly see, as the text implies (“[vous}] qui voyez tant de choses”), some significant wonders that the vi//ageois does not (figure 5.29).°4 Also in the Contes, a comparable view from a tree is the subject of the first tale in “La gageure des trois commeres.” The illustrator of 1795 is content to portray a fairly passionate version of the embrace designated in the text— Le maitre est a peine sur l’arbre monte, Que le valet embrasse la maitresse. L’époux qui voit comme I’on se caresse Crie, et descend en grand’hate aussitot. (La Fontaine 1980: 137) {Soon as the master they above descried, And that below our pair he sharply eyed, The butler took the lady in his arms, And grew at once familiar with her charms; At sight of this the husband gave a yell: Made haste to reach the ground, and nearly fell. . . (La Fontaine, trans. Anon., I.65)]} —whereas Eisen does not hesitate to show Guillot with his pants half-way down (Holloway 1969: no. 38). A word here, too, about the use of putti to mirror, often by parody but always with some sort of attenuating effect, representations of specifically adult activities. Tailpieces and less frequently headpieces often echo in a lighter vein the slight indecencies committed in other illustrations, thanks to their incongruous (and therefore humorous) combination of presexual bodies with imitations of adult sexual behavior. This convention, which tends to deny the seriousness (that is, the sinfulness) of sex, is pursued sys- tematically in the lavish illustrations of some of Dorat’s works such as Les baisers.° In “Les jaloux trompés, imitation de Catulle,” putti are present only as voyeurs, while adult lovers furnish the spectacle (figure 5. 30): 168 Diana, or the Voyeurs son veau.” Eisen/Le Mire (§44: 2:53). Viens,... au désir laissons-nous emporter. Baisons-nous mille fois et mille fois encore, Puis... encore mille fois avant de nous quitter; Fétons le jour, l’instant, le lien qui nous rassemble; Et confondons si bien tous nos baisers ensemble, Que les yeux des jaloux ne puissent les compter. (§20: 104) {Come to my arms! I love you, I adore, Let us be borne on passion’s tide for ever! Kiss me a thousand times; a thousand more, And still another thousand, sundering never; Diana, or the Voyeurs 5.29 La Fontaine, “Le villageois qui cherche And let us be so proud of Love’s sweet bond And blend our kisses in a guise so fond That Jealousy shall fail to count them ever. (Dorat, trans. Keene, 98)} In fact the putti, rather than characters in the narrative, here symbolize “les yeux des jaloux,” which im the poem are only an abstraction. With their wings and torch, they are also Amours, but that, too, is an abstraction. Thanks to Dorat’s own largesse, no poet of equivalently unassuming tal- ent was illustrated with anything like the lavishness that the best artists and engravers of the period bestowed upon his works; however vapid the verse, he cannot be faulted for his taste in graphic art. An amusing plate accompanying his Alphonse, ou l’Alcide espagnol, conte trés moral features the same mischievous figures, one of whom is supremely curious to know what is going on behind the bedcurtains (figure 5.31). The story in fact turns on that very mystery, whether anything is happening at all, and if so, who is responsible.*° Not infrequently a humorous use is made in prints of blatantly voyeur- istic situations with an implied narrative context, simple though it may be. Le clystére ou l’indiscret (figure 5.32)*’ has to my knowledge no specific legend or tale associated with it, although it fits into both a comic tradi- tion of apothecary syringes on the stage and a more limited narrative one 5.30 Dorat, Les baisers. Eisen/de Launay (§20: 103). 170 ~=Diana, or the Voyeurs 5.31 Dorat, Alphonse. Eisen/de Longueil (§27: 41). (see La Fontaine’s “Le reméde” and Eisen’s 1762 illustration, $44). Such a “remedy” has nothing, of course, to do with illness: the servant has been bribed to place the woman supposedly being treated in such a position that her well-exposed and well-contoured behind can be enjoyed through the window in the door. Her acquiescence, and the ambiguous turn of her head, suggest that she is perfectly aware of this operation; the dog adds an ironic commentary with his even better view. In this instance there is, in effect, a “text” that the title alone suffices to elicit. The same could almost be said with respect to Baudouin’s “L’épouse indiscréte,” where it is clear that one woman, hidden, watches a couple cavorting on what is now very disordered bedding; but the title is needed both to specify who she is and to deliver the ironic moral according to which it is Her curiosity that is ironically cast as indiscreet (Hervez 1924: 4:176). Diana, or the Voyeurs 171 5.32 Le clystere ou l’indiscret, print. Baudouin/Maleuvre. Insofar as the female body is being featured in all the examples dis- cussed in this chapter, their essence is nothing more (and nothing less) than the continuation of a long artistic tradition. The delicate medium we are concerned with, however, can in no way approach for richness of 172 Diana, or the Voyeurs texture and fullness of form the nudes offered by painting and sculpture. What distinguishes them is rather the interplay with narrative. Paintings and statues, too, have intertexts; but they, summoned from the viewer’s memory or summarily noted ina title, are limited in their complexity, and the allusion must in consequence be writ boldly. A narrative, on the other hand, can weave a web of connotation, misunderstanding, and permuta- tion against the background of which the engraving can more confidently isolate narrowly chosen incidents. Up to a point, it will still in most cases display the iconographic qualities that will allow certain of its components to stand out symbolically, overdetermined as it were. Thus the process of revelation, the surprise of discovery, in short, the quasi-diachronic, narra- tive element, functions as a coefficient of the exposed but stylized physical body. That seems to be possible in other media (Diana bathing in painting, for example) only with respect to a small repertory of fables firmly fixed in the viewer’s cultural baggage. The vulnerability—or more blatantly, the availability—of the object of desire, provoked by the apparent provocation of armored defense or the evasion of flight but frequently only implied in these examples, itself be- comes the theme of other illustrative paradigms that will be explored in the next two chapters, first in peaceful and then in progressively violent modes. They have in common the powerful appeal, even when expressed humoristically, of transgression combined with indemnity—indemnity in the first instance for the viewer-reader himself, but also sometimes the- matized within the story and illustration. The private space of a covetable body is dissolved or penetrated, offering it up for some form of delectation, sublimated or actualized, to an intruder.*® The element of aggression in pleasure, of sadism in desire, always stylized to the point of being more latent than apparent until late in the century, will nonetheless become much more tangible as the motifs we examine move from the tough and virile woman at the beginning of the previous chapter to the receptive or victimized ones in the next. Diana, or the Voyeurs 173 aie 64) 44 ¥ | 1 i { a ( nal 1 | a. ~ ( 6 The Passive Vessel Dormeuses The violation of private space in the form of visual intrusion is a narrative strategy for reconciling decency (or innocence) with gratification; the eyes possess and penetrate, allowing a sublimation of the rape in the heart. In this respect all the voyeurs in the discussion of Diana are like Saint- Preux when he consoles himself for separation from Julie by watching her through a telescope: “ton malheureux amant acheve de jouir des derniers plaisirs qu'il gottera peut-étre en ce monde. . . . A travers les airs et les murs il ose en secret pénétrer jusque dans ta chambre” [your unhappy lover has just enjoyed perhaps the last pleasures he will ever know in this world. . . . Through the air and walls he dares in secret to penetrate even your room}.' He is only looking, but his terminology is highly erotic: jouzr des derniers plaisirs, however rhetorically morose his use of the expression, is sexually just as tendentious as pénétrer jusque dans ta chambre. These im- plications underlie virtually all uses in both verbal and visual imagery of one person spying on another of the opposite sex. The pane of glass is the metaphorical space between the expression of desire and its fulfillment. When in addition the person being watched is slumbering, the physi- cal distance between watcher and watched can be ecstatically collapsed, both by the faculty of sight uninhibited by the polite constraints imposed by conscious behavior, and by the observer’s relative freedom to violate the “bubble” of protective space normally reserved around the waking individual. There are remarkable numbers of art works in the eighteenth century, from canvases to the decorations on porcelain and snuffboxes, that portray women sleeping; in painting the paradigm of the motif was Venus with a satyr approaching, realized by Antonio Correggio, Antoine Wat- teau, Fragonard, and others.” They often merge this subject with a kind of sentimental motif, associated with dreams,’ as in the print Le jolt dormir (figure 6.1), accompanied by the following poem: Puisque d’un cher époux vous regrettez l’absence, Ce sommeil ne saurait venir d’indifférence, Sans doute qu’en dormant pour calmer vos soupirs, Un réve officieux le rend a vos désirs. Ah! direz-vous bientot, je n’ai vu qu’un mensonge, Mais le plaisir est-il autre chose qu'un songe? {Since you miss your dear husband, this sleep cannot be born of indif- ference; in sleeping to quiet your sighs, a legitimate dream doubtless brings him to your desires. Ah, you will soon say, what I saw was but a lie: but is pleasure other than a dream?] Without this saccharine moralization on the absence of the cherished spouse, whose letter has induced this nostalgic reverie, several other in- terpretations might be possible. There is nonetheless an implication that it is largely a sensual need that is going unfulfilled: the dream is brought on by the woman’s désirs and consists of some ambiguous sort of plazszr. Woman’s sleep consistently suggests sexuality; compare this legend to that of a similar print: Ne réveillez point cette belle Marchez doucement, parlez bas; Epouse encor toute nouvelle Le repos nourrit ses appas. Fidele au dieu de l’hyménée Elle veut en avoir un fruit Et ne dort pendant la journée Qu’afin de mieux veiller la nuit.‘ {Awaken not the fair lady; walk softly and speak low: sleep nourishes the charms of the yet tender bride. Faithful to the god of marriage, she desires to bear its fruit, and sleeps by day the better to spend the night awake. } Sleep either provides the occasion for fantasizing about sex, or it signi- fies, as here, the nocturnal sexual activity from which the body must be restored during the day. Sleep was a favorite theme of Boucher, with its capacity to signify innocence and arousal at the same time. Le sommeil interrompu, at the Metropolitan Museum, is typical: an elegant shepherdess dozes as a young 176 The Passive Vessel 6.1 Le joli dormir {Sweet sleep}, print. Jeaurat/ Tournay. man tickles her cheek with a straw. Boucher of course uses many pastoral motifs, and among them this particular convention fit his style perfectly. Many prints were made of his variations on the subject, bearing such titles as La bergére endormie, La dormeuse, L’agréable surprise, Le repos de la volupté, Le sommeil de Vénus.’ There was, as this last title indicates, a latent mythic association with Venus, as well as with the traditional subject of Antiope sleeping while Jupiter looks on lustfully; it is indeed hard to distinguish the two themes.® A similar sort of configuration is called upon to illustrate a tale from Boccaccio about a young oaf who by beholding a sleeping beauty not only falls in love with her but by doing so becomes suddenly more refined (figure 6.2), an outcome that makes it more or less equivalent, by transposal of roles, to La Fontaine’s “Comment l’esprit vient aux filles” {How maidens acquire wit}. The text stresses just the right elements for Boucher: there was a very beautiful young lady sleeping upon the green grass, dressed in clothing so transparent that it concealed almost nothing of her fair flesh and covered from her waist down by a pure white and transparent quilt; at her feet were sleeping two women and a man, all servants of this young lady. . . . He began to examine her features, The Passive Vessel 177 t ings tema