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Stéphane Lojkine, "Entre scandale et leurre : la représentation du mariage dans Paméla de Richardson", Le Mariage et la loi dans la fiction narrative avant 1800, XXIe colloque SATOR, dir. Françoise Lavocat, Guiomar Hautcœur, Peeters, La république des Lettres, n°53, Louvain-Paris-Walpole MA, 2014, p. 431-449.

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Joseph Highmore, Pamela's Wedding, 1743-1744, oil on canvas, 62.8x76 cm, London, The Tate Gallery

Writing Pamela in 1740, Richardson made his fortune with the story of a marriage. Pamela's marriage to her seducer and master, Mr. B., is the novel's central episode, articulating, before it, the desire to achieve the noble and virtuous state of married womanhood, and, after it, that of being recognized in that state and enjoying all its prerogatives. But this desire always manifests itself in denial. Before marriage, Paméla's letters to her parents, and then her diary, bear nothing but the scandal of Mr. B's obscene brutality. After marriage, the effort for recognition is only expressed as a defense against a whole series of social aggressions. Paméla imagines the way she will be looked at, and strives to live up as closely as possible to the social representation that has now been devolved upon her: the economy of deception then succeeds the economy of scandal.

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Between scandal and decoy, neither the event nor, above all, the state of marriage can be represented. The novel thus confronts a challenge of representation, to which not only the novelist, but his illustrators seek to respond by skewing. It is this bias, or in other words, this device, that I propose to study here.

For this investigation, I will start from the 39-volume edition of Prévost's Œuvres choisies, published from 1783 to 1785¹ and reprinted in 1823. This edition played a major role in the assimilation by French culture of Richardsonian work, annexed as an integral part of Prévost's novelistic corpus.

I. Mr B.'s proposal, or the stage as scandal

Pamela and Mr B. in the small garden cabinet, engraving by Texier after Marillier, Œuvres de Prévost, 1784

In the editions I consulted, Paméla is entitled to three figures, among which the wedding, the novel's capital event, is not represented². In the first engraving, in a luxurious interior adorned with paintings, Paméla, tipped right on an armchair, weakly resists the advances of her master kneeling before her. She has just had time to place her embroidery work on the table. From her open work case on the floor, a ball of thread has escaped and rolled into the foreground. In the background, the painting depicts Daphne's metamorphosis, as she is caught in her flight by Apollo. Emerging from among the reeds, a river god observes Apollo and Daphne, just as we observe Pamela resisting Mr. B. The allegorical figure of the river god with the inverted urn observing Daphne's metamorphosis is traditional: Daphne invokes her father, the river Pénée, just as Apollo catches up with her. Pénée answers her prayer by metamorphosing her. In the scene with Paméla and Mr. B., it's the doorframe on the left that suggests a possible exit.

The engraving should be read from right to left, backwards from the textual reading: the path of the ball, the direction of Daphné's flight indicate this direction. With her left hand, Paméla removes Mr. B.'s hand from her neck; with her right arm, she restrains the advance of his arm against her waist; but her body leans inexorably towards the man from whom she is trying to escape. Her head melts into his: symbolically, the border of Apollo and Daphne comes in extremis to separate them: Pamela's head fits into the lower left-hand corner of the painting, in front of the river god's poured urn. Mr. B.'s head is pushed out of the painting, towards the urn placed on a pedestal in the corner of the room: in this urn grows a flowering shrub.

Like the two trees, the woman laurel of the painting and the potted shrub, the two urns, symbolically, respond to each other: one pours the pure water of nature, the refuge of persecuted innocence; the other contains nature and the domestic; one belongs to the grandiose but bare world of allegory, the other to the trivial but rich aristocracy of the novel. Mr. B. will have to contain his desire to wrest Paméla from her innocence, to bring her out of allegory and into the novel. The novel's process will consist of moving from one urn to another, from refused union to accepted union, from tragic metamorphosis to bourgeois marriage.

Image semiotic structure

Symbolically, then, Marillier places the figure of Paméla under the protection of the absent father, and contrasts Daphné's wild laurel with the polite shrub growing in the urn in Mr. B's study. This opposition is redoubled by that of the two urns: the one on the left designates the marriage to come; the one on the right, the rape just avoided. A scene within a scene, the Apollo and Daphne in the garden cabinet is therefore not just a mythological allegory of what is at stake in this scene of the novel: it represents the whole of the first volume, in which Paméla victoriously resists, while Paméla in her armchair, softened, already consenting, announces, as it were, the acceptance of the marriage and prefigures the following volume. This explains the difference between the fiercely resistant Paméla of the text and the insidiously abandoned Paméla in the picture. Marillier represents the play, the novelistic transformation of the Paméla figure: from Paméla laurier, rustic and inexorable, to Lady Paméla, polite and open to enjoyment. While the narrative necessarily arranges a succession of events and states (Paméla servant then Paméla lady), the image juxtaposes the figures and presents them simultaneously (Daphné fleeing and Paméla surrendering): visual juxtaposition here equals narrative succession.

A forbidden scene

This difference in semiological functioning is confirmed by comparison with the text of letter XI, which the engraving is supposed to illustrate: Paméla, in her narrative, makes no mention of either the painting of Apollo and Daphne , or the potted shrub, which bear on the engraving the symbolic significance of the scene. On the contrary, she insists on the unrepresentable character of what has been played out in this scene: textually, the scenic device rests on this unrepresentability, whose forbidden representation it implements all the same, albeit at the cost of a detour.

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First of all, Mr. B. has stolen the letter in which Pamela recounts the scene to her parents: "someone stole my letter, and I don't know what happened to it. It was quite long; I suspect he took it. What we read, then, is a second, summarized version of the missing letter: "I can't find my letter, so I'll tell you about it as briefly as I can. The text is there only as a supplement, and through this staging of its disappearance, liminally expresses the prohibition against it, the screen of stage representation.

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In the narrative itself, Paméla first insists on the absence of witnesses: "for there was not a soul near us". Then, when Mr. B. realizes that he won't overcome her resistance, he begs Paméla to keep it a secret: "If you can keep all this a secret, I'll have a better opinion of your prudence" and, further on, "I command you not to say a word about what happened, and all will be well, and I'll forgive you." Even after Pamela has gone out, Mr. B. calls her back with the same injunction: "He called me, saying, keep it secret, Pamela, I command you; and don't come home yet, as I told you." To obey him, Pamela then wipes the visible traces of the past scene from her face: "I blew into my hand to dry my eyes, because I didn't want to appear too disobedient."

Without witnesses, marked by the seal of secrecy, stricken with invisibility, the scene is finally virtually mute: nothing in the characters' speech carries its real content. Mr. B. does announce that he has a statement to make: "No, Paméla, don't go; I have something to tell you"; and further on: "I want you to stay, to hear what I have to tell you". But what he says is not really what he has to say:

"My sister Davers," he said (and it seemed to me that he looked as embarrassed as I did), "wanted you to stay with her; but she would not have done for you what I intend to do, if you continue to be faithful and obliging. Wouldn't you rather stay with me than go to my sister Davers?"

Mr. B.'s question is seemingly purely professional: it's a matter of Paméla choosing between two places and comparing their advantages. But precisely what those advantages are remains implicit.

The master's discourse

Mr. B.'s discourse is empty of content; or more exactly, the power of this discourse lies in the fact that it puts into circulation a hidden content, a signified without a signifier, obscene and terrifying precisely because it escapes mastery, the measure of a discursive formulation. The content is signified by all the non-verbal elements of the scene. First, it's Mr. B.'s air, "looking as embarrassed as I am", then his neantizing gaze, where Paméla's petrification can be read in hollow:

"He had a look that penetrated me with fright; I don't know how to express it; it was, I think, a stray look.

As soon as I could speak..."

From this As soon as I could speak, we can deduce that previously Paméla couldn't. But Paméla's paralysis, like the desire implicit in the master's discourse, remains informable, and the girl's speech cannot reach its real destination:

"I'd rather go and serve milady Davers, if you'd allow me, because... I was going to continue; but he abruptly interrupted me."

Because must introduce Mr. B.'s real request, because you want to rape me , because your desire threatens me . Rape, the danger of bodily harm, is the stakes of the master's discourse, a stakes whose signified remains signifierless to the end. The master's discourse is defined by this maintained impossibility: it puts into circulation a signified without a signifier, and keeps it always surfacing, always unspoken.

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Mr. B. cuts Paméla off and finishes his sentence himself, superimposing on the expected ending (the evocation of the master's real demand), the threat and expression of the balance of power:

"I was going to continue; but he interrupted me abruptly, saying, because you're a silly little girl, and you don't know what suits you."

The rest of the dialogue is based on this same circulation of the signified without signifier: the master formulates his request in a veiled way, then forbids Paméla to formulate her response.

"I won't hurt you, Pamela, don't be afraid of me. I don't want to stay here," I replied. You don't want to stay, you impertinent little girl," he continued. Do you know who you're talking to?

The insult verbally extends the physical attack by displacing the brutality of the signified actually at stake (the rape, the aggression played out in the very moment of the dialogue) to the figure of Paméla, whom it disfigures and soils: the sublime and desirable Paméla, in the very moment when Mr. B.'s desire is close to being consummated. B. is about to be consummated, becomes a "petite sotte", a "petite impertinente", and even, in the 1743 edition, a "petite saloppe"³.

The constitutive circulation of the master's discourse ceases when the master-slave relationship, becoming objectified, reverses:

"You don't want to stay, you impertinent little thing," he resumed? Do you know who you're talking to? Then I lost all fear and respect: 'Yes, sir,' I told him, 'I know; I can well forget that I'm your servant, when you forget what befits a master."

Paméla's revolt reverses the discursive flow. It's Paméla who suddenly decides to delete a signifier ("I can well forget that I'm your servant"), and so finds herself in a strong position to negotiate. And negotiate what else but her marriage?

II. L'Accordée, or the stage as decoy

Pamela reunites with her father, engraving by Pauquet after Marillier, Œuvres de Prévost, 1784

Marillier's second engraving, which opens volume 18 of Œuvres de Prévost, refers to a scene in every way antithetical to the first: while Pamela is still wary of Mr. B.'s latest arrangements and fears that the marriage he now promises her is only a supposed one, he comes to fetch her from his upstairs room and begs her to join the company waiting for her in the parlour on the first floor. Mr. B. has summoned Pamela's father, Mr. Andrews. The private scene of the attack in the garden cabinet, a visually scandalous and morally forbidden scene, is contrasted with the public scene of the reunion of father and daughter, complacently offered to the gaze and approval of the spectators.

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The injunction to tell the scene

As much as the first scene was defined, in the text, as impossible to tell, an impossibility that the engraving signified through the detour of the Apollo and Daphne painting, this one is, on the contrary, prepared and carried by a very strong narrative injunction. It's no longer a question of prohibition and scandal, but of exemplarity and demonstration. Now that her father has joined her, Paméla turns to her mother:

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"It is now, my dear mother, that my letters must be addressed to you. [...] My master and [my father] have both enjoined me to write you how it all happened.

[...] I was ordered to do so" (pp. 80-81).

The narrative is thus placed under the patronage of the father and future husband. It does not transgress or subvert any code, but on the contrary celebrates its archetypes: the scene will be both one of Blessing (he "prepared to give me his blessing") and of Recognition ("this happy meeting"), where biblical ritual and Aristotelian structure will find an exemplary formulation.

Poetics of the double constraint

This brings us to the fundamental poetic problem Richardson faced: how to reconcile the poetic efficacy of the stage, based consubstantially on transgression, with the moral requirement of a celebration of the norm; how to turn stage scandal into a bourgeois repetition of ordinary morality? For here, it's no longer a question of the moral exemplarity of heroic conduct (as still manifested in the first part of Paméla ), but of a kind of ordinary exemplarity, a pacified celebration of the non-event. To be effective, the novel must surprise, seize, scandalize; to be moral, of that bourgeois morality of united and virtuous conduct, without hysteria or sacrifice, the novel must neither surprise, nor seize, nor scandalize, but modestly unfold the natural gray of a life without accidents.

This double poetic constraint in which Richardson is caught (technically using the effectiveness of the scene, but symbolically eliminating its scandalous dimension) is thematized in the novel by the double constraint in which Paméla must always struggle: in the first part, she must resist her master to save her virtue, but at the same time obey him, because in another way, her virtue is also involved; in the second part, she must impose herself socially as a lady, wife and mother, thus overturning the figure of the servant-mistress: yet the revolt, the seizure of power that this symbolic reversal imposes, can never take the form of a confrontation, which would reduce Paméla precisely to that which it is a question of divesting herself of in order to occupy the position of master; it is the slaves, not the masters, who revolt.

An imaginary scandal: quiproquo stratagem

To satisfy this double constraint in the scene before us, Richardson organizes a quid pro quo: Pamela going down to the parlor imagines herself meeting Mr. Williams, the young clergyman who, taking up the cause of her persecuted innocence, has attracted, in the first part, the vindictive jealousy of Mr. B. The latter himself has engaged her in this false lead: "Pamela," he says to me, "wouldn't you be surprised, if you went to see Mr. Williams? Williams on your way down there" (P. 78.) Pamela's inner self then sketches out the terribly awkward scene of her confrontation with Williams, whom she thinks she'll have to face in a moment: "I do wish that Mr. Williams hadn't chosen to come here while they're all here, because of the evil looks they'll throw at him and me." (P. 79.)

The conventional, moral and flat scene of the paternal blessing and family reunion is thus going to be parasitized by the absent scene of the shameful face-to-face with the supposed lover: Williams in fact isn't there, and he was never Paméla's lover anyway. Yet it is he whom Paméla tries to avoid with her eyes: "I couldn't see my dear father [...]. The ladies had their eyes fixed on his side; but still believing that Mr. Williams was there, I was careful not to cast mine there." (P. 89.) Same avoidance a few lines further on: "but though I was opposite him, with the table before me, I avoided casting my eyes towards the door, lest I should catch a glimpse of Mr. Williams."

The purely virtual scandal of the confrontation with Williams perpetuates the subversive effectiveness of the scene, in a setting where the norm and good feelings nevertheless triumph. Paméla's task is to move from the decoy stage, which is truly scenic, to the real stage, which is not. The scene will thus be ordered neither around the blessing, nor even around the promised "happy meeting", but as a surprise for Paméla to discover her father in the place of her supposed lover.

A father without a figure

For the father in the scene is without a figure. The figure is Williams, the absent one. The father, motionless and stunned, is the scene's blind spot:

"I could not see my dear father; his heart was apparently too full to open his mouth; for he rose and sat down three or four times in succession, without being able to come to me, or utter a single word."

When he finally lets his emotion out, his tears paralyze both his speech and his movements. On the part of both Paméla and her father, the theatricality of the scene is denied, the characters refusing to fulfill the role of actors that the audience expects of them.

For this scene of surprise and reunion is obviously by no means fortuitous. It has been prepared, laid out by Mr. B., with a view to maximum theatrical effectiveness, as evidenced by the conversation that precedes it, in which Mr. B. titillates milady Darnford, Mr. and Mrs. Peters, and all the good society of the township that he has invited for the occasion.

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"Ah! monsieur," cried almost all of them at once, "shall we not see this good old man, whose simplicity, good sense and probity you have so extolled to us? If I believed," he said, "that Pamela was not too moved by the surprise, I would make you all witnesses to their first meeting" (p. 86).

The word surprise is taken up a few lines later by Paméla: "they could well think that I would not support such a pleasant surprise ". After Pamela has recognized her father and fainted in his arms, the word returns again in Mr. B.'s mouth: "I always feared," he tells them, "that such a great surprise would be stronger than she." (P. 90.) Finally, the same word characterizes Mr. Andrews after the reunion: "I confirmed to him the excess of my master's kindnesses, which his mute surprise seemed to refuse to believe" (p. 91). The surprise is indeed the real device of the scene prepared by Mr. B., while the blessing and the reunion provide only the symbolic alibi in the narrative structure of the story. This is evidenced by the very brief scene itself, which gave rise to Marillier's engraving:

"Ah! my dear child!" he cried.
I recognized his voice, looked up, and had no sooner caught sight of him, than I rushed towards him, overturned the table without any regard for the company, and threw myself at his feet. Ah! my father! my father!" I cried, "is it possible? is it you? Yes, it's him. Give your blessing to your happy... I couldn't finish, and fainted⁴."

The dialogue contains, discursively, the two topical characterizations of the scene that is here rhetorically at stake: "I recognize her voice" designates it as a scene of recognition, while "Give your benediction" introduces the performance at the end of which marriage will become possible. Indeed, there can be no marriage if the young girl has not first been granted by her father to her future husband.

But on closer inspection, these topical elements are systematically blurred and defused in their theatrical effectiveness: Paméla doesn't visually recognize her father; she recognizes his voice. As soon as she sees him, the father figure is shattered: Paméla overturns the table, throws herself on top of him and faints. Mr. Andrews doesn't paint the picture: he crystallizes the scene, in other words, he consummates its rupture, right down to the interruption of the discursive flow: "Give your blessing to your happy...". Faced with this blind figure, Paméla loses her name.

As for the blessing, it's doubly misused: in Greuze's L'Accordée (1761), it's to his son-in-law that the father of the family grants his blessing, at the same time as offering him his daughter's dowry. Here, Mr. Andrews is summoned to bless his own daughter, as if to ward off the scandalous figure of mistress-servant he's already been given. Yet not only does the blessing not and cannot target the agreed addressee, but, performed in private, blurred by effusion, it loses all performative efficacy:

"I was permitted to retire with him [...]. We knelt down, amidst a thousand blessings we gave each other; we thanked God in concert, and remained long enough in a kind of ecstasy. My master entered shortly afterwards: Ah, sir," said my father, "what a change this is! May God bless you, and reward you in this world and the next!" (p. 89-91.)

The blessing takes place, as it were, off-stage, out of sight; so it can't do its job as a social ritual. Multiplied, it loses its solemnity; reciprocally, it blurs hierarchies and functions. We are no longer witnesses to a rite, but to "a kind of ecstasy", intimate, fusional, carried away, whose imaginary sensuality outweighs its symbolic efficacy.

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In this lyrical outburst, the final blessing goes almost unnoticed. The father finally blesses his son-in-law, blesses him in extremis , and accomplishes the performance through a misunderstanding: he doesn't bless him directly as his daughter's future husband, but for having found the path of virtue again ("what a change is this one"), i.e. for having converted the desire for rape into the promise of marriage. Everything rests on this change, just as the entire scene rests on the change of scene, first from the absent scene with Williams to the surprise of the recovered father, then from public surprise to intimate ecstasy.

The lure in the image: the father figure according to Marillier

By choosing to illustrate concurrently the seduction scene in the garden cabinet and the scene of Paméla's reunion with her father, at the head of the two volumes of Œuvres de Prévost devoted to Paméla, Marillier not only selects two emblematic moments from the novel, likely to synthetically give the physiognomy of each of the two parts constituting the first version of Paméla : he establishes a relationship between the two scenes and composes the two engravings as a diptych.

The symmetry of the devices invites us to superimpose Mr. B., in the first, and Mr. Andrews, in the second, so that the second scene appears as the transfiguration of the first or, if we prefer, its moralized repetition. In the second engraving, the benevolent, smiling, benign Mr. B., who on the left extends his hands forward as if he had just let go of Pamela, is exactly in the posture of the rapist Apollo in the first engraving, with the same forward movement, the same way of standing on tiptoe, the same hands feverishly reaching for a body that is slipping away.

The first engraving contains the sexual proposition; the second represents the father's grant, i.e., in a way, the symbolic response to the request borne by the first. This response is therefore out of synch. Paméla's wedding bears the mark of this fundamental hiatus between the real demand and the symbolic response: it is not the grand, consensual wedding that the young woman had dreamed of, and that the structure of the story would require; nor does this marriage purely and simply satisfy Mr. B.'s desire, whose brutal irruption it conjures up and pacifies. A veritable legal compromise, it also constitutes a compromise in the order of novelistic representation, manifesting itself both as the central issue of representation and as a perceptual hole, essentially unrepresentable.

III. Marriage, or the absent scene

Williams marries Pamela and Mr B, engraving by Gravelot, Pamela, 1742

Pamela's wedding scene comes a few days and a few dozen pages after the young girl's reunion with her father. Mr. Andrews has gone back to tell his wife the good news, so, despite Mr. B.'s urging, he won't be attending his daughter's wedding. On the other hand, Mr. B. is keen to keep this marriage a secret, at least initially, to avoid scandal.

The refusal of publicity, the concealment of witnesses, of speeches, of the very vision and representation of the scene, tend to conceal the scandalous and denied scene of the wedding, which symbolically nevertheless falls within the scope of publicity and show effect. To construct this paradoxical theatricality, Richardson once again resorts to the economy of deception, conjuring up a virtual scene concurrent with the impossible-to-represent real scene of the wedding.

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First, it will be a matter of getting to Mr. B.'s chapel without arousing the suspicions of the servants, and Abraham in particular: Mr. Péters, invited to act as Pamela's father and Mr. B.'s best man, Mr. Williams, who will act as priest for the secret ceremony, as well as the two future spouses, thus play out a whole ostensible comedy in front of the domesticity:

"When Abraham entered to serve, my Master, to prevent the servants from suspecting anything, said to these gentlemen: you have done well to come to breakfast; for my dear Child & I were going to take the air until dinnertime."

A whole virtual novel then unfolds, imagined and arranged by Mr. B., and improvised as he goes along by his guests, who adapt to the fiction unfolding before them: it's not Paméla's wedding, but a walk after breakfast, the purpose of which is to visit the estate chapel, where the Master has ordered embellishments. Paméla, referred to not as a mistress or a wife, but paternally as "my dear Child", is supposed to have sprained her ankle, to lend verisimilitude to her extraordinary disturbance, and to the harnessing of the ceremonial "grand carriage", closed to guarantee incognito, instead of the small "coupé carriage". Paméla even participates in this ostensible scene, asking Mrs. Jewkes, her chaperone, with the most hypocritical naiveté:

"Do you know," I added, "what such great changes are to be made in the chapel, that we must all state our opinion of them?"

In contrast to this high scene, played out for domesticity, is the low scene⁵, where a tetanized Paméla gradually slips into the stunned invisibility we've seen at work in the preceding scenes:

"I couldn't eat, though I tried to. My hand trembled so violently, that I spilled some of my chocolate, & was obliged to put my cup back on the table. They were all kind enough not to pretend to notice, & to look the other way."

Paméla becomes the passive, invisible figure her father occupied in the recognition scene. In this space of invisibility, she engages in a secret dialogue with the Jewkes, behind the screen of Abraham, supposedly seeing and understanding nothing:

"In the end, I took her by the arm, & passing in front of Abraham, really," I said to the Jewkes, "that nasty slip I made coming down the stairs, made me limp, & I must support myself on you. [...]
She told me that Nanon had been put on the secrete, & that she had ordered her to remain at the chapel door to take care that no one entered."

Mrs Jewkes doesn't respond to the ostensible speech, which legitimizes Pamela's weakness and their being kept away from prying ears, but to Pamela's real, unspeakable request, and she responds by describing the screen device of the upcoming wedding scene (Nanon at the door).

The walk to the chapel and the discussion of its beautification are moreover not only decoys here: they point to the device they mask by transposing what is at stake, the scandalous content of the scene, into the space, into the spatial arrangement that will carry this content.

The wedding ceremony itself takes place as Paméla gradually loses consciousness. When the real scene follows the acted one (the visit to the chapel, whose metaleptic status is that of the Apollo and Daphne in our first engraving), Paméla slips into invisibility and absents herself, as it were, from reality and scandal. Her marriage thus represents the irreducibility of the scene, yet a central means of novelistic representation, to representation itself, and especially when this scene plays, as it were, through marriage, its own normalization.

As a result, the representation of Paméla's wedding is not just a semiological compromise between the aristocratic economy of scandal and the bourgeois economy of deception. The wedding scene makes full use of the contradictions inherent in classical stagecraft: it is at once the focal point of the performance and the demonstration of its infigurability; the scandalous transgression of social ritual and the very establishment of that ritual. This is the paradox of the Enlightenment stage, evading the scandal it promotes, in the lure of a revolt it dodges.

Notes

1

Œuvres choisies de l'abbé Prévost , Amsterdam et Paris, Hôtel Serpente, 1783-1785, 39 vol. in-8°. Cote Bnf Res Y2 1799 to 1837 and 8044 to 8082. Paméla occupies volumes 17 and 18.

2

The English edition of 1742, illustrated with 29 engravings by Gravelot, features an illustration of the wedding (engraving no. 10).

3

a little fool, foolish hussy, then foolish Slut, toned down to "petite sotte", again, in the 1823 edition.

4

O, my dear Child!
I knew the Voice, and lifting up my Eyes, and seeing my Father, gave a Spring, overturn'd the Table, without regard to the Company, and threw myself at his Feet, O my Father ! my Father ! said I, can it be ! - Is it you? Yes, it is ! It is ! O bless your happy - Daughter ! I would have said, and down I sunk . (P. 294.) While Richardson completes Paméla's unfinished sentence (Daughter! I would have said ), the French translation maintains the incompleteness ("à votre heureuse... Je ne pus acheus"). In French, the failure of the discourse highlights the scenic device. Similarly can it be is not translated "est-ce possible", but "est-ce vous", which highlights the visual surprise, in the great tradition of tragic recognition. Compare with the duet of Hippolyte and Aricie in Rameau's opera (1733): "Aricie (/Hippolyte), is it you that I see / That my fate is worthy of envy! / The moment that makes you mine, / Is the happiest of my life." (V,4.) Similarly, in Voltaire's Œdipe (1718), "Hell opens... ô Laïus, ô mon père! Is it you?" (V, 4). In Irène (1777), "Is it you that in these places my despair contemplates? / Supporter of the unfortunate, my father! My example!" (III, 2). In Mahomet second (1733), Marivaux's unfinished tragedy, Irène seeing Theodore in chains: "Ah ciel! ah mon père! est-ce vous que j'embrasse?" (I, 4); the topos was parodied by Angélique facing the resurrected Argan in Molière's Le Malade imaginaire (1673): "Ah! what a pleasant surprise! Mon père, puisque, par un bonheur extrême, le ciel vous redonne à mes vœux, souffrez qu'ici je me jette à vos pieds" (III, 14).

5

Diderot gives, in the Paradoxe sur le comédien , several examples of what he calls "this double scene", or "ces deux scènes simultanées", or "la scène haute" and "la scène basse", which he uses as arguments to demonstrate the comedian's necessary composure and distancing. (Diderot, Œuvres , Lafont, Bouquins, IV, pp. 1391-3.)