Le Cœur et le cri

By Dominique Millet-Gérard. Paris, Champion, 2004. 285 pp. Hb €55.00. Millet-Gérard's study focuses on the debate and conflict between ‘le cœur’ and ‘le cri’ in selected extracts of epistolary literature from Ovid's Heroides to Rémy de Gourmont's Le Songe d'une femme (1899). She steers away from any theoretical framework as such, in order to concentrate on an often rewarding, comparative reading of the texts themselves; her study is a self-diagnosed ‘travail philologique’. Ovid's Heroides provide both the starting point and the main point of reference for an investigation of different aspects of ‘l'amour épistolaire’ through the ages. The canon is restricted, by choice, to collections of letters and ‘romans épistolaires’ in Latin and in French whose interweaving lines of influence are traced in the first chapter, while each extract is firmly replaced in its original context. In addition to Ovid's Heroides and Gourmont's ‘roman familier’, the extracts used are taken from the letters of Abélard and Héloïse (c. 1132); the Historia de duobus amantibus by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1444); the anonymous Lettres portugaises (1669); the Lettres de la Marquise of Crébillon fils (1732); and Balzac's Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841–42). This fascinating yet motley collection of works yields many general truths about epistolary narrative which are initially summed up in the conclusion in three lines: ‘là où l'on attendait, conformément à la fonction de la lettre dans la vie, immédiateté et spontanéité, on trouve au contraire, dans la fiction littéraire, une grande sophistication’. The — all too brief — conclusion sells this study somewhat short, though, and much more of interest can be gleaned from the encounter. The central dynamic relationship of ‘le cœur’ and ‘le cri’ unfolds over the course of nine themed chapters, as does our awareness of the literary games being played around ‘cri’, (the lettre amoureuse is revealed as a mere exercise of the intellect, a ‘cri rhétorique’), at the expense of ‘cœur’: ‘l'amour épistolaire est affaire de littérature et non de psychologie’, as Millet-Gérard confirms early on. More often than not this conflict in the roman épistolaire privileges the omniscient author and an increasingly complicit male addressee/readership over the épistolière who falls victim to cultural as well as literary context. The épistolière of the Heroides and, by association, of other epistolary literature seems trapped in her double identity as woman and letter; subject and object: their fates joined in the ambiguous Latin substantive herois, -idis, referring at once to a female of noble lineage and to the fictitious letter. Millet-Gérard's central four chapters chart the continuing influence of four classical topoi defining ‘l'amour épistolaire’: absence; ‘peregrinus amor’, or love of a foreigner; the presentation of the sorrowful writer; and the distress caused by broken vows. Further chapters focus on the notions of ‘la reddition féminine’; the death of the (female) author; ‘paysage’; and finally the influence of Virgil as linked to a writerly pleasure derived from quotation and imitation. Across these varied extracts, female presence is gradually eroded by literary technique, we are aware of the illusion of presence being played out in front of us, but remain at one remove, and unable to identify with it. This study furnishes the reader with a number of intriguing insights into epistolary literature, and will be of interest to the scholar of French with some knowledge of Latin

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