Crébillon and marivaudage

Crébillon lived in Marivaux's society. Like him, he frequented the Théâtre des Italiens. With him, he participated in the agapes of the Société du Caveau. His oriental libertine tale, Tanzaï et Néadarné, histoire japonoise, also known as L'Écumoire, which he published two years after the Lettres de la Marquise, explicitly satirizes marivaudage through the fairy Moustache and her precious banter¹.

The literary language of the 1730s, the fictional sociability in which this language was embedded, the virtual world defined by this sociability, were so profoundly marked by the personality and work of Marivaux that a word emerged to define them: marivaudage. Crébillon was in a sense summoned to define himself in relation to marivaudage.

I. Marivaudage by Marivaux: social downgrading versus word technique

As Frédéric Deloffre reminds us in Marivaux et le marivaudage², "Marivaudage and marivauder appeared during Marivaux's own lifetime. We can conjecture that they were forged in one of the cafés frequented by the beaux esprits of the time." (P. 5.)

Diderot's testimony: the two sociabilities

One of the earliest written testimonies to the word is a letter from Diderot to Sophie Volland dating from 1760. In it, Diderot complains of his unfitness for worldly society. He distinguishes the commerce of friends, where he excels, from the constrained codes of politeness and decorum, which he says he is incapable of mastering:

"I've asked myself many times why, with a gentle, easygoing character, indulgence, cheerfulness and knowledge, I was so ill-suited for society. It's because it's impossible for me to be there as I am with my friends, and because I don't know that cold, meaningless language spoken to the indifferent. I'm silent or indiscreet. A great opportunity to marivauder! And why shouldn't I? The next best thing is to be long³."

The sense of sequence here is tricky. Diderot begins by contrasting two contexts for speaking, two systems of sociability. Marivaudage is not the result of friendly, natural, spontaneous commerce; it springs from the constrained framework of worldly sociability, in which the normal use of language is that of a "cold, meaningless language spoken to the indifferent". Diderot claims not to have mastered the use of this language: "I am silent or indiscreet in it"; he either keeps silent, or speaks without discretion, i.e., without discernment, without measure. The cold language of worldly sociability then slips, slips out of control, recovers, catches up with the lively force of friendly commerce, where Diderot excels. Diderot l'indiscret is once again "as with my friends". Here, in this slipping and catching up, is where "la belle occasion de marivauder" lies.

The narcissistic knot

Diderot here spots the two sides of marivaudage: on the one hand it's the gallant language, "cold and empty of meaning", which skids into unintelligibility. But on the other hand, in this slippage, Diderot recovers his verve, the warmth of language: at worst, he will have been too long ("le pis-aller, c'est d'être long avec les autres"). So there's a slide towards something that doesn't make sense, then a reversal, a knot-tying, which implies a distancing from oneself, the subject's awareness of being in the process of marivauding, and, by the same token, the establishment of a critical point of view. In a letter dated November 6, Diderot writes, again to Sophie Volland, after a somewhat specious discussion, whether it's better to be a liar than an imbecile:

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"Oh le beau marivaudage que voilà. If I wanted to follow my ideas, we would sooner have hopped around the world than I would have seen the end of it; however, the world is about nine thousand leagues around, and... And may nine thousand devils take Marivaux and all his insipid imitators such as myself." (Letter 52, p. 211.)

By defining his discourse as marivaudage, Diderot admittedly takes a critical distance from himself, but at the same time acknowledges his narcissistic indulgence in this delightful practice of verbal slippage: he loves his marivaudage, he is a Marivaux follower.

A declassified preciousness

At the end, of the century, in his Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne (1798-1804), François de La Harpe gives a more technical definition of marivaudage:

"Marivaux made himself a style so particular that he had the honor of giving it his name; it was called marivaudage: it is the most bizarre mixture of subtle metaphysics and trivial locutions, convoluted sentiments and popular dictions."

We're moving away from lively sociability here, from a certain practice of conversation in the manner of Marivaux, towards the characteristics of his written work, whose novel heroes and theater characters alike are defined by this blend of aristocratic gallantry and bourgeois and peasant spontaneity. On the one hand, there's this preciousness, this virtuosity of reasoning, of linking: a "subtle metaphysics", "convoluted sentiments" through which the discourse loses its footing, slips into insignificance; on the other, in the body of the discourse itself, the catching up, the knotting is done by the irruption of an unexpected lexicon, of a triviality that brings back the concrete, the real. This mixture is directly linked to the social status of the character who marivals: a peasant placed in an aristocratic context (Marivaux, Jacob); a valet or servant engaged in a verbal joust with his or her master or mistress; or mimicking this joust with his or her accomplice. Doesn't Diderot himself, describing his "indiscreet" use of speech in society, betray a certain shyness, an awkwardness on the part of the son of a Langrois cutler in the face of petty masters and Parisian aristocrats?

There would thus be, in marivaudage, a kind of declassified practice of preciousness, and the symptom of a bourgeois appropriation of the language, and more generally of reasoning, of the aristocratic world. The slippage and catching up of meaning, the knotting of the concrete in insignificance, the coldness and warmth of language, would all be symptoms, expressions of this social downgrading of aristocratic language, of a kind of democratization of worldliness.

Persiflage as perverse marivaudage

The flip side of marivaudage is persiflage⁴: in Trévoux's Dictionnaire (ed. 1771) we read:

"PERSIFLAGE, PERSIFLER, PERSIFLEUR. New terms that the depravity of taste and morals has made all too fashionable.
[...] It is this habit, this indecent way of joking, of mocking, of persiflage (for persiflage has become fashionable) a thousand kinds of sensible people, that we call species."

In contrast to marivaudage, persiflage points, aims at someone. In the one it targets, it spots the "species", which is not just a ridiculous singularity, but defines an "ingenuity":

"PERSIFLER, v. a. To joke, to mock someone indecently, to make him an instrument and victim of the joke by the things one makes him say ingenuously."

In this ingenuity, we find the class difference, which is no longer the downgrading of the marivaudant subject, but that of the persifuted object: an ingenue, i.e. someone who is not of the world of the petit-maîtres, who does not belong to the circle or who is excluded from it. Marivaudage seals the circle of sociability; persiflage, on the contrary, defines its outside, and organizes exclusion from this circle. A game of mundane outside and inside⁵ is then organized, a polarity of language that closes in on itself. Persifler is then used absolutely:

"PERSIFLATE. v. n. means to hold, of formed purpose, speeches without connected ideas. To try to reason with a petit-maître, or with a stunner, is a lost cause; they do nothing but persifler."

Persiflage is a perverse marivaudage: it uses insignificance, the incomprehensible meandering of its sequences, as a principle of closure, which blocks, forbids communication outside the mundane circle. We persiflage among ourselves, so that language establishes a barrier against those who are not. The delirium of language, its unreason, are signs of recognition, signs of class.

This is why we need to apprehend together marivaudage, which stirs up language, mixing its registers of sociability and levels of distinction, with persiflage, which on the contrary discriminates and excludes.

The sequence of lines

The interest of Frédéric Deloffre's thesis is to propose a stylistic model of Marivaudage, i.e., a translation of this mixing, this inclusion that functions as a social game, as an assimilation device, in the structure of dialogue that Marivaux practices.

Marivaudage is first and foremost a technique for linking lines⁶. This sequence is based on the repetition of words. Frédéric Deloffre notes Marivaux's use of the demonstrative "de ton familier", which "underlines the oral character of the reprise de mots" (p. 201). Thus, in La double inconstance (1723):

"FLAMINIA. - I have too much pleasure in seeing you.
ARLEQUIN. - I don't refuse you that pleasure myself, look at me at your ease, I'll return the favor." (II, 6⁷.)

It should be noted that the trivial demonstrative, supported by "là" and "moi", by introducing Harlequin's massive, peasant heaviness into the refined Petrarchan play of the amorous gaze (and this social mixture is decisive), prepares the reversal and catch-up of meaning: "je vous rendrai la pareille"; Harlequin enters the exchange, includes himself through marivaudage in the aristocratic system of sociability initiated by Flaminia. This system itself mimicked his peasant decline. Indeed, Flaminia had first said, in noble style: "Adieu, Arlequin, je vous verrai toujours, si on me le permet; je ne sais pas où je suis." She then translates, in a lower style: "I have too much pleasure in seeing you." It's the low style of noble discourse that allows Arlequin to engage and triggers the loop of marivaudage.

Social depth of linguistic play

Depreciation, or more precisely the lowering of the language level, therefore does not characterize the reprise, but on the contrary constitutes its initiation. In fact, we sometimes find the trivial demonstrative before the repetition, as in this beginning of the Serments indiscrets (1732):

"LUCILE. - I don't want to be married any time soon and may never be.
LISETTE. - You? With those eyes? I defy you, Madame.
LUCILE. - What reasoning! Do eyes decide anything?
LISETTE. - Without difficulty; yours condemn you to live in company, for example⁸."

The marivaudage consists in making the eyes an autonomous object, circulating between the interlocutors and comically endowed by the dialogue with a life of its own. "Ces yeux-là" is a vulgar accentuation, downgrading the noblest element in the apparatus of feminine seduction. Lucile is first with those eyes, then the eyes become subjects; we wonder if they decide anything. Finally, from questioning, we move on to assertion, and from abstract decision to trivial, joyous condemnation: "yours condemn you to live in company, for example."

The marivaudage reverses the situation of exclusion into one of inclusion: by refusing marriage, Lucile excluded herself from instituted sociability; by presenting her condemned to "live in company", Lisette includes Lucile in de facto sociability. But this inclusion implies a social downgrading: the symbolic stake of the Serments indiscrets is the alliance of the fathers, M. Orgon and M. Ergaste, precisely to preserve the children from a risk of downgrading through marriage.

The joyful camaraderie of "living in company", like the gaiety between friends that Diderot evokes in his letter to Sophie Volland of October 26, 1760, is the world threatened by the fathers' alliance at the play's beginning, which the "indiscreet oaths" of the young bourgeois try to preserve, and which finally, in the last act, the marivaudage catches up to make it coincide with the instituted sociability of marriage. Here we find the interplay of the two devices of alliance and sexuality described by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality⁹, that is, the interplay of two competing sociabilities, of two imperfectly superimposed worlds, whose linguistic expression and plasticity constitute the decisive symptom, but are, on the surface, only the symptom.

The word as a principle of dialogic pegging

The linguistic symptom of marivaudage can be spotted, in Marivaux's theater, in a certain type of dialogic sequence, on which Frédéric Deloffre focuses his analysis, drawing out a technique of pegging lines by the word:

"the sequence of words merely translates the unconscious progression of feelings [...]. The obligatory mode of progress of the action is the passage from word to word. Whereas, in other writers, words are only one of the visible signs of dramatic action, in Marivaux they are the material, the very fabric of the drama. If words play such a role in Marivaux's work, it's only natural that they should play a part in it.
If words play such a role in Marivaux's plays, it's because the notion of marivaudage implies an awareness of the existence of language." (P. 207.)

"only translates": here we touch on F. Deloffre's central thesis. Marivaudage would be a matter of words, a technique of structuring and linking through word repetition: a conscious, deliberate technique through which language reflects itself as the object of discourse. Marivaudage would be a self-reflexive practice of language.

How does this practice articulate with what overflows the field studied by F. Deloffre, this mixing of sociabilities, this social downgrading, this slippage of meaning that implies that we leave, at some point, the discursive logic, that we enter into something else that slips and is caught up, lower down, more trivially, in the order of discourse? The exit from discourse symptomizes social exclusion; speech is then relayed by the gaze: this verbal object that is the word, which becomes autonomous in dialogue, is an object of gaze when it is not the gaze itself: of Harlequin on Flaminia, of Lucile on men.

Indiscretion of marivaudage

In this respect, Les Serments indiscrets, performed the year Lettres de la Marquise was published, provides an interesting basis for analysis. Initially, Lucile and Damis have been promised to each other by their fathers, but have sworn to each other not to marry. They meet and swear "indiscreet" oaths to each other, as they fall in love at the very moment they swear not to marry. Oaths are the cold language of alliances; indiscretion introduces, into this instituted coldness, slippage, the knotting of intrigue, the warmth of exchange and event: the intrigue of the valets, Frontin and Lisette, and Lucile's sister, Phénice, just as "indiscreet" as the two pledges' oaths, will bring about the final reconciliation and the marriage initially planned.

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The term "indiscreet" is the one Diderot uses in 1760, as we've seen, to characterize the slippage of marivaudage in society: "I am silent or indiscreet there. A fine opportunity for marivauding!"

Lucile and Damis continue on with their discourse even though their feelings have changed: marivaudage occurs because of this gap that is established between the refusal of the project at the outset (avoiding marriage at all costs) and the situation that is established (the emergence of the feeling of love). The marivaudage mixes the discourse of refusal, of exclusion, and the attraction, the emergence of feeling: it is the sparing of this heterogeneity.

The position of refusal

As the curtain rises, Lucile writes Damis a letter that contains the refusal of the project, i.e. the harmonic basis not only of her own discourse, but of Damis's own discourse. From the outset, then, everything is said and written.

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"Lucile is sitting at a table, folding a letter; a lackey is in front of her, to whom she says. - Let someone go and tell Lisette that she's coming. (The lackey leaves. She gets up.) Damis would be a strange man, if this letter doesn't break the plan we're making to get married." (I, 1, p. 969.)

Or this situation is precisely that of the Marquise at the beginning of Crébillon's Lettres: she too begins by writing very quietly to the Count that she doesn't love him and couldn't love him:

"I don't know if you remember that we only bound together a trade of friendship; I promised you mine in good faith, and I would be angry if by asking me what I cannot give you, you obliged me to refuse you what depends on me." (P. 49.)

It all begins here, too, with the refusal of the love project. The Marquise opposes him to "a trade of friendship", "what depends on me". Morally and symbolically, the situation is significantly different: in Les Serments indiscrets, it's a marriage that's being refused; in Lettres de la Marquise, the object of the refusal is an adulterous affair. In Marivaux, Lucile's refusal is mediated, downgraded by Lisette's language; in Crébillon, epistolary monody, set in an exclusively aristocratic world, seems to forbid any dialogization.

II. Crébillonian adaptation: badinage without social play?

Yet it's on the word friendship that the first sentence unfolds its embroidery: the marquise first launches the theme, "we have only bound together a trade of friendship". Then the possessive pronoun takes up the theme word: "I promised you my in good faith." Finally, the periphrasis takes up the possessive "you refuse that which depends on me".

So it's not the word that's taken up, but its signified, through a succession of signifiers that precisely dematerialize, disseminate the word, from noun (friendship) to pronoun (mine), then from pronoun to periphrase (what depends on me). The dissemination of the word introduces discursive polarization: from the commerce of friendship, which implies a circulation, an exchange between the epistolary subject and his interlocutor, we have in effect passed to a structure of opposition, between "what I cannot give you", not only love, but sex, sexual consumption, and "what depends on me", not so much friendship, but epistolary commerce, the use of discourse. "Commerce d'amitié" has split into what, of commerce, depends on me, a linguistic commerce, a simple exchange of words, and what, of friendship, I cannot give you, a feeling that slides into love and inevitably leads to the exposure of bodies. The dissemination, the polarization of the theme into a structure of discursive opposition, thus introduces the real, the trivial, the erotic risk. As the discourse detaches itself from its referent, in the dazzling vertigo of its abstract structure¹⁰ ("that by asking me for what I cannot give you, you would oblige me to deny you what depends on me"), the referent trivializes as an empty, declassified center: on the one hand, the Marquise's verbal prowess, playing with the fire of sex through her speech; on the other, what her speech points towards, what she will eventually give away, what she will eventually fall into, consummating libertine abuse, then elegiac pain, finally death.

Experience and naïveté: the syncretism of novelistic elegy

Contrary to Marivaux's practice, Crebillonian trivialization, and the downgrading it implies, are implicit. It is the referent that is trivialized, not the signifier, which on the contrary acts as a screen through the play of dissemination and polarization of discourse. Trivial locutions are rare, found only at the beginning of the Lettres. In letter I, they are meant to betray the naivety and inexperience of the letter-writer:

"I know, then, by sight of country, how lovers are made, and I die of fear that you are one." (P. 49.)

This marquise who knows things "à vue de pays" and ingenuously confesses that she's "dying of fear" is a rococo shepherdess, whose falsely peasant speech introduces the learned candor proper to marivaudage into the discourse: on the one hand, the simplicity of the lexicon designates her as libertine prey; on the other, the refinement of the syntax provides her with the verbal apparatus to defend herself. The marivaude subject is an impossible contradictory type: the marquise is the one who doesn't know and the one who knows, the one who doesn't defy and defies herself, the one who gives herself away and the one who protects herself.

We find here the contradiction of elegy and novel: the elegy heroine comes after the event, when everything has already been consummated, to expose what remains of the amorous devastation, a situation, a state; the novel heroine, on the contrary, appears before the event, prepares it, builds it, accomplishes it. Marivaudage is the management of this contradiction, the syncretic implementation of a romantic elegy: from the perspective of the elegy, the Marquise already knows everything, and organizes, as best she can, the longest possible management of the Count's desire; from the perspective of the novel, to say that we know à vue de pays how lovers are made, is to signify to the last person to whom it should be confessed that we know neither from near nor from far what a lover looks like; it is also to announce the program of the novel: at the end of her sentimental education, when she dies, the marquise will really know this:

"I have at last reached all that an unhappy passion can give torment. The fear of your inconstancy used to occupy me entirely; but I don't know if I wouldn't rather see you inconstant, and see you always, than lose you faithful." (Letter LXV, p. 209.)

What experience teaches is that the love trade is not fundamentally based on the moral issue of inconstancy and fidelity, but much more concretely on the physical alternative of presence and absence. But in the first letters, the Marquise's knowledge is not yet supposed to be a tested knowledge, a knowledge of experience. The shepherdess's language signals this missing experience: the colloquial lightness of expression is symptomatic as a discourse of what is not yet knotted.

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Counting flowers: gallant haggling

There's still time, here, to "conter fleurettes" because the marquise discovers the amorous game in its novelty, its freshness, its surprise:

"You're a gallant man, polite, considerate, seductive even, if you weren't careful. You tell me flowery tales, which don't fail to entertain me, since the little habit I have of hearing them prevents them from putting me to sleep." (Letter II, p. 53.)

The Marquise herself acknowledges "the little habit I have of hearing them", her inexperience in the face of a discourse, of new events. At the same time, this discourse and these events stem from knowledge that has always been there, which she characterizes and identifies. By referring to it trivially as "conter fleurettes", the Marquise attempts to domesticate it, to make it her own. The present "vous me contez fleurettes" is less historical than gnomic: what you're doing there right now with me, I recognize, I identify; it's called conter fleurettes.

Love becomes trivialized in fleurettes; fleurettes become a word in the Crebillonian sentence, a word-object that becomes autonomous: "le peu d'habitude où je suis d'en entendre" takes up fleurettes by means of the pronoun "en"; "empêche qu'elles ne m'endorment" gives fleurettes the status of subject pronoun: "elles" are fleurettes. But as common as the locution "conter fleurettes" is, and its meaning established and marked out, outside of this locution, fleurettes become incongruous, as shown by the article Fleurettes in Trévoux's Dictionary:

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FLEURETTE, s. f.Diminutive. Small flower. Flosculus. It is scarcely said literally except in Pastoral Poetry. To pick the fleurettes of the meadows.
☞ Fleurettes, en matière de galanterie, se dit au figuré, de certains petits ornemens du langage, des pensées agréables & riantes, des termes doux & flatterteurs qu'un homme emploie avec une femme à laquelle il veut plaire. Blandimenta, verba suavia, blanda, amatoria. A woman is said to love fleurette, fleurettes. Don't be fooled by fleurettes spouted at you only to surprise you. S. Evr. Greek & Latin passages are pretty fleurettes to win a heart. Boil. On dit conter des fleurettes, en parlant des tendres discours des amans; expression qui vient apparemment de ce qu'ils emploient les ornemens du langage, les fleurs de la Rhétorique pour s'insinuer plus doucement ; or, according to le Noble's remark, from what there used to be in France (under Charles VI) a species of Monnoie on which one saw a quantity of small flowers, which Monstrelet calls florettes, flourettes or fleurettes. These pieces were worth 20 deniers tournois, or 16 deniers parisis. So to count fleurettes was to count Monnoie; which, in all times, has been the most persuasive means, the most eloquent language.

La clef du coffrefort & des cœurs , c'est la même ;
That if not of hearts,
C'est du moins celle desfaveurs¹¹.

Flurettes therefore basically imply coinage¹². The hesitation between conter and compter fleurettes indicates the trivial register of the expression, that of coarse, even self-serving gallantry, which arouses suspicion. Boileau's fleurettes are a denigration of the fleurs de rhétorique, while Saint Evremond's débiter des fleurettes is modelled on conter fleurettes. The word is never a subject, as in Crébillon, and has no semantic autonomy outside the expression. The expression "aimer la fleurette" is more interesting, as a shortcut close to entendre fleurettes ("le peu d'habitude où je suis d'en entendre"), which becomes very elliptical: quant à des fleurettes qui endorment...

The empowerment of the word as a verbal object that skids out of meaning is characteristic of marivaudage: the center of this sophisticated discourse is nonetheless a very simple word, fleurettes... The fleurettes reappear in letter XI:

"It's not that I fear the impressions your speeches might make on my heart. What is called fleurettes, and which seduces so many women, would be powerless over me; but after all, it's better not to expose yourself to it." (Letter XI, p. 71.)

Fleurettes are undoubtedly the rhetorical flowers that adorn the Count's speeches; but they are above all the fleurettes of conter fleurettes, a flippant expression, which means that it doesn't take, that the Marquise is not fooled¹³. Here again, she invokes the ever-present knowledge of the woman who knows in advance what these things are called: "ce que l'on appelle fleurettes" ironically characterizes the Count's speech, putting it at a distance like a known language effect, like a repertoried merry-go-round.

At the same time, the Marquise confesses that she's fallen for it, that she's learning all about it: "but after all, it's better not to expose yourself to it"; after all, it's almost saying after the fact that she shouldn't have exposed herself to it, that she should never have let the Count engage in this business with her, which she only gradually understands will not be without consequences.

There is marivaudage because of this ambiguity: the marquise says things as if she had always known them; and the marquise learns things as she says them. In Marivaux, ambiguity is always at the same time a social ambiguity, using language to represent a bourgeois downgrading of aristocratic sociability. Crébillon benefits from this democratization of precious gallantry, but, apparently, he doesn't pass it on fictionally: in Crébillonian fiction, libertine knowledge and the things of sex take the place of social mastery, for which there is neither stake nor struggle.

This is why there is so little lexical trivialization, even though it is an essential feature of Marivaux's dialogue. All that remains in Crébillon's work is the interplay between what is presented as already known, already there (what a lover is, what a seduction strategy is) and what at the same time is only gradually discovered, always too late.

This is why there is so little lexical trivialization in Marivaux's dialogue, even though it is an essential springboard for dialogue.

The prerequisite of banter

The reversion of knowledge into learning is the mainspring of banter. Before marivauding or persiflage, the marquise banters. Banter is a necessary prerequisite for discursive slippage and catch-up. The Marquise herself presents her epistolary practice as a conjuration of banter. The word first appears to refer to her husband's vain seductive discourse:

It's the same word used to refer to her husband's vain seductive discourse.

"The poor man! I'd pity him well if he had to be constantly occupied with pleasing me, with nothing but the sad banter of conjugal love as his only resource." (L. I, p. 52.)

The banter is what the marquis should provide his wife as compensation for cheating on her. But the marquise, who is neither fooled nor jealous, holds him to that. It's a smokescreen, a "sad banter" that comes under the heading of "that cold, meaningless language spoken to the indifferent", which Diderot evokes in the letter to Sophie Volland of October 26, 1760.

Badinage is that agreed-upon basis of gallant sociability, which must be left, or derailed, for the marivaudage to begin. The second appearance of the word refers to the "commerce des lettres" engaged in with the Count:

"You tell me you love me, you write to me, and I maintain a commerce of letters with you, which, innocent as it is on my side, as it seems to me to be, as I even wish it to be, is perhaps a crime for me. This idea saddens me: believe me, let's end this banter, it bores me." (Letter III, p. 54.)

The Marquise pretends to put an end to her dalliance with the Count precisely because this dalliance has already started to go off the rails. The slippage is mimed by the juxtaposition of verbal groups, increasingly complicated, increasingly wrapped in oratorical precautions: "tout innocent qu'il est de mon côté" ("on my side" inserts a second restriction into the first), "qu'il me paraît l'être" (adds a third restriction), "que je souhaite même qu'il soit" (fourth restriction). From restriction to restriction, the innocence of the Marquise's dalliance is no longer asserted, but timidly wished for, until its final, resounding reversal, into a crime: "is perhaps a crime for me".

Designating banter as banter means that we're already out of it, that from vain discourse we've moved on to a second-degree use of this verbal insignificance, that the marivaudage is beginning. In itself, banter is not reflexive: it's a primer, an instillation.

"I knew it well, that you would take for love what is only friendship. [...] I confess I am a fool to have believed that my dalliance with you was of no consequence. I am willing to admit that my natural vivacity, and the little thought I gave to what you were telling me, and to what I was writing to you, are the reason why I answered you in a way that kept you in your error." (Letter XI, p. 70.)

The Marquise reproaches the Count for over-interpreting her banter. But, reproaching him for it, she becomes aware of its implications, of the depth of feeling behind the surface of verbal play. She then reproaches herself for his "little reflection", which is Crébillon's way of designating what he is writing as being of the order of reflection.

Reflection, the opposite of banter

Reflection, which draws the consequences of dalliance and defuses them, is what opposes dalliance, which maintains in what the marquise calls "your error", which is the emergent reality of love. Banter produces verbal slippage, towards insignificance, but also towards the game of love, while reflection undertakes, aims at a catching-up of discourse, a return to mastery. Re-flection: a loop is formed, a circuit is closed. The Marquise's reflection is intended to turn back the clock to before the banter, to cancel out what the banter has let slip, what it has conceded in terms of amorous commerce. The banter slides into sex, while the reflection reintroduces distance from it. But this distance is achieved through the naming of things, the use of words: in the end, therefore, it does not cancel out the amorous commerce, but rather ties it together. Reflection goes back to take the real in reverse, naming it while appearing to evacuate it, circumscribing it under the guise of getting rid of it.

"A lover's care flatters us in spite of ourselves; and our reflections contribute more to losing us than they do to holding us back. What do I know in the end if virtue would prevail? It rarely compares with pleasure." (P. 71.)

The Marquise is perfectly aware of the perverse effect, the vicious circle of reflection, which prolongs the banter under the guise of interrupting it, and, engaging in a losing battle of virtue against pleasure, brings to consciousness and de facto regularizes the love trade. Reflection claims to "retain": Crébillon makes full use of the prefix "ré-" to go back in time. This discourse introduces comparison, the struggle between virtue and pleasure. But virtue is never really confronted with pleasure: "it only too rarely enters into comparison". Virtue is a discourse without experience; it is the knowledge that pre-exists banter, that knowledge that is always already there, imperious, abstract, on which the empty circumscription of the feminine subject is based.

Thinking is therefore always retrospective, too late, and not prospective: it cannot anticipate events. In contrast, the other, the seducer, the libertine, can anticipate his prey's reflections. Reflection is therefore the moral, predictable, vulnerable horizon of the lyrical female subject.

The circuit of a silent scene: the forsaken rival (letter XII)

Letter XII recounts how the Marquise witnessed the mute, tender reproaches of one of her rivals, seduced and then forsaken by the Count:

"I already knew you liked her, and your manner with her confirmed to me what I had been told. You were embarrassed; you dared not sustain her glances; it seemed as if they reproached you for some crime; her eyes fixed on you wet themselves from time to time with tears which she strove in vain to stop [...]. You felt the consequence of this, and you had no doubt that I was making reflections that were not very advantageous for you." (Letter XII, p. 73.)

The Count, who helplessly witnesses his former mistress's despair, has foreseen the reflections the Marquise would make on this silent scene, which does not show them to her advantage. The scene is pathetic, a scene of elegiac despair: but the letter treats this scene, this despair, at a distance, not directly as an event, as a feeling, but indirectly, as a repercussion, as an anticipation of the reflections it will trigger. The reflections are a meta-discourse of the elegy, letter XII constituting a mixture of one and the other.

There's always a circuitous path, a slippage-rattrapage that ties the Crebillonian discursive game to the empty center of its reference to reality. Here, where we're dealing with a scene, the circuit is concretely materialized in space, by the Count's trajectory. First, he goes towards "that woman", abandoning the marquise:

Then, he goes towards "that woman", abandoning the marquise.

"However unhonest it was for you to leave me, you liked better to do so than to put me within range of hearing her reproaches." (P. 73.)

This is the time of the slippage: the gallant game of decorum unravels, a gap opens, the Count leaves the "honest", i.e. he transgresses the rules of worldly sociability to parry the most urgent, avoid scandal, order the embarrassress to shut up.

Then, after the slip comes the catch-up, the return that induces reflection:

"You came back to me, but confused, and whatever gaiety you affected, it was easy to judge, by the embarrassment of your speeches, of the spite this adventure caused you. You felt the consequence, and did not doubt that I would make reflections..." (P. 73.)

The return of the scene is twofold: the geometrical return of the Count, who, in space, returns to the Marquise, and the symbolic return-effect of the event, a "consequence" which, in the Marquise's case, results in reflections of little advantage to the Count. As pathetic as the forlorn lover's scene of despair is, the Count's little maneuver to conceal the collateral damage of his libertinism is ridiculous, comic and even almost pleasant: the Marquise persiflage the Count, and it's a form of marivaudage. Her persiflage circumscribes the lyrical scene of amorous despair, but remains external and foreign to it. Not only has the Count lost control of the situation, but the Marquise, who enjoys his confusion as a lucid spectator, is at the same time well aware that she is metaphorically witnessing her own demise: she does not, however, control the use of pleasures, and cannot control it once her own desire, which she cannot renounce, is at stake.

The indiscretion: trembling of the device

So the key word in this persifluous scene is not mastery, or control, but indiscretion:

"All we have to reproach him with is his love for you, a reproach that perhaps we wouldn't have made, if your indiscretion hadn't made his weakness burst forth." (P. 73.)

The Marquise's discernment is opposed by the Count's indiscretion, the same indiscretion that betrays Lucile and Damis in Les Serments indiscrets, or Diderot in society: "I am silent or indiscreet there. La belle occasion de marivauder!" Indiscretion is the element of instability that marivaudage introduces into the structure of gallant sociability; it is what tips a technique, a practice of language into a device of social representation and literary fiction.

III. Return effect of the social game: the marquise's divided consciousness

Reason and spirit: symbolic splitting

With indiscretion, we're at the heart of marivaudage. Just listen to the definition given by the fairy Moustache, or the Mole, in Tanzaï et Néadarné. There, the brilliance of marivaudage is represented by the spirit of Prince Cormoran, the Mole's lover on Babiole Island; but this spirit is embodied first and foremost in the speech of the Mole, who represents it:

.

"Indeed, reason is vulgar. It always appears what it is, it fears to drown in playfulness, and does not fail to leap back when a singularly turned idea presents itself, or a luminous imagination conveniently places itself in the heart." (Book II, chapter 24, p. 362.)

There is a fundamental heterogeneity to the marivaudage: the fearful advance of reason on the one hand, which jumps back at the slightest incongruity of thought; singular idea and luminous imagination on the other, which spring forth, which present themselves unexpectedly, which place themselves in a temporality of the instant and of emergence. Here we recognize the progression of discourse and its slippage, the cold propriety of instituted thought and the warmth, the light of its transgression.

This distinction of two temporalities of thought (reason and imagination, reflection and spirit, the time of reflection and the flash of the stroke) is also a social distinction: "reason is vulgar", it is of low extraction. Conversely,

"The mind is of a more sociable character; the dignity of its manners makes it felt that its education has been removed from prejudice. What he thinks is his own, holds to nothing, isolates himself from himself." (P. 352.)

The mind is fundamentally aristocratic: contradictorily, it is sociable and isolates itself from itself, it has a sense of social dignity and displays total independence, in defiance of prejudice. La Maupe is initially about education, but ultimately evokes birth:

"always noble, his august air, even bantering, speaks in favor of his birth, and reason, always bourgeois near him, silent through dryness, succumbs in spite of itself, increasing by its bad humor the triumph of its rival." (P. 353.)

Crébillon is thus explicitly aware of the social dynamics that implement, in depth, the marivaudage. Even when, thematically, the marivaudage unfolds in a socially homogeneous world that doesn't represent its exteriority (the princely protagonists have neither servants nor peasants, meet neither merchants nor artisans), even when it presents itself as a simple affair of language and words, the discourse it produces, worked by reason and spirit, by spirit against reason, introduces a dialectic of slippage and catch-up that is a dialectic of class: aristocracy of the mind versus bourgeoisie of reason, noble distinction of the stroke versus return, slowness, laborious catch-up of reflection.

A pure linguistic vertigo?

Reflection is first and foremost a bourgeois catch-up. A scorned, ridiculed subject (always boring, too long, off-putting in its principles, an enemy of aristocratic pleasures and consumption), reflection nevertheless constitutes at the same time the aristocratic form of marivaudage, the medium of its expression:

"Les belles réflexions!" said Neadarné again. If it were true," continued Tanzaï, "that they were as beautiful as you say, I wouldn't like them any better [...]. Moustache has been keeping us in suspense for at least three hours over a story I could have done in a quarter of an hour. [...] Go on," says Néadarné to Moustache; "and above all, give me an exact account of what you've done, and not only of what you thought, but also of what you would have liked to have thought; in a word, don't forget the slightest circumstance. You're such a good storyteller!" (Chap. 25, p. 361.)

The reflection is always too long, always constitutes an unbearable digression from the event it comments on, or from which, purely and simply, it deviates. But at the same time, this deviation produces a delicious vertigo, the vertigo described by Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte, this rupture of the signifying chain in relation to the signified, which distances the real and deploys its volute, autonomizes it, abstracts it, ramifies it for the sole formal pleasure of its architectural deployment: not what the narrator did, but what he thought; not what he thought, but, after the fact, what, on the spot, he would have liked to think. This is what the fairy Moustache calls, describing Cormoran's language, "the unbearable elegance of his speeches"

.

"there was no one who was not delighted to hear him, and though this fierce being entitled common sense, did not always act civilly with what he said, the unbearable elegance of his speeches meant that he lost nothing, or that common sense, hidden behind a miraculous multitude of best-placed words, would have seemed insipidly dull to his most absurd Sectators." (P. 352.)

The discourse, detached as it were not only from its referent but from its very meaning ("common sense"), unfolds as a dazzling arrangement of words, an abstract verbal mechanic. The word is the focal point of the discourse insofar as, becoming the object of the verbal craft of marivaudage, it frees itself from meaning. Crébillon, through the fairy Moustache, is not simply satirizing an external object, Marivaux's jargon. His pastiche is a pastiche of the self, and the mockery is a self-reflexive mockery.

Crebillonian marivaudage as deconstruction of the elegiac scene

Self-mockery targets the very scenes that Crebillonian fiction elicits, and in a way nips in the bud. Witness letter IX of the Lettres de la marquise, on the Count's illness:

"Hey what! My poor Count, you are ill, and ill of love, the case is singular! My rigors will cost you your life¹⁴! I didn't think I was so formidable." (P. 65.)

The marquise will never go into the details of the illness: it's the fact of being ill, the "case", that interests her and fuels her persiflage of the "poor count". As with the silent scene of the forsaken lover in letter XII, letter IX circumscribes an elegiac theatricality she never enters, distancing it on the contrary, turning the tragic lamento into worldly banter: surely the Count shouldn't make us a heroid...!"

The deconstruction of the heroid is obvious and methodical: the marquise first ruins the appeal to posterity; the elegy, which is fictitiously addressed to an absent, unreachable interlocutor, is in fact aimed at posterity:

"Don't advise yourself to die, it would give me in posterity a reputation of insensitivity that I perhaps don't deserve."

Suggesting discreetly in passing that she is not insensible, that love wins her, that feeling in her operates what passion, with its theatrical ridicules, does not, the marquise evokes the tomb with its poetic epitaph: the tomb is the very form of the heroid, and the epitaph with the name of the murderous lover concludes Dido's to Aeneas:

"Some poet would load your tomb with a ridiculous epitaph, in which I would be reviled."

Finally, the marquise parodically represents herself as Ariane-Astrée¹⁵ lamenting on her rock:

"and what satisfaction would you have, when, despairing of your death, I would go to deserted rocks to tire the echoes of my regrets"

Habilely, the sequence of elegiac topoi turns the situation, or rather the focus, around: it's no longer the Count's lamentations, his pain, but the Marquise's tears, her bravura piece, her scene.

Schize of meaning: the turning of the word against itself ("you I don't like")

The whole point of the letter is there: to turn a "you" into an "I", to mobilize the object of persiflage for the representation, the exacerbation of the persiflage subject.

"Thus, judge, you whom I do not love, how little I would grieve at your death. You whom I dislike¹⁶! How hard that word seems to me!" (P. 66.)

Here begins the second phase of distanciation: no longer from the elegiac scene of the Count's illness to the Marquise's mocking view of this scene, a view that itself makes a scene; but from this second, cynical and sarcastic scene to the self-reflexive view it elicits. The Marquise watches herself taunt the Count, distancing herself from herself. Just as her illness became a case at the beginning of the letter, here her indifference becomes a word: it's not a question of not liking the Count, but of the effect of that word, "you I don't like".

This second-degree derealization sets the stage for a reversal that only comes in letter 13, with the Marquise's declaration of love:

"What's the risk of telling a poor dying man, you, that you love a little? Is it necessary to mean it? Why does that word cost so much? You've said it to me so many times, so gracefully, so tenderly." (P. 66.)

The word becomes a verbal object, becomes autonomous. It's no longer "you I don't love", it's a love word, whose subject, the I of "I love you", is carefully elided: "to tell a dying man, you, that one loves a little". The word is there, between the marquise and the count, drowned in the count's you persifuted to conceal what is being knotted, the point of the knot, which is not the love-sick count, gesticulating on his ridiculous heroid stage, but, right next to it, the I of the lyrical female subject, folded, entangled in the discourse of marivaudage, exhibiting and concealing her declaration.

We're thinking here of that common sense evoked by the fairy Moustache, "hidden behind a miraculous multitude of words placed at their best": the meaning is nevertheless in the word; it's the factitious arrangement in which the word is caught that de-realizes it, and allows it to be placed as anodyne in the foreground of discourse:

"what's the harm in repeating it, especially in the state you're in? What use can you make of this word? It even seems to me that there is more malice than kindness in assuring you that I love you." (P. 66.)

Playing with the word, the Marquise marivaude and, through the very game of marivaudage, catches herself at her own game.

"The mind that has become a stranger to itself"

The objectification of the word turned against itself so that it takes on the dangerous meaning (no longer "you whom I do not love", but "I love you") triggers the retour effect, the catching up of meaning, the return to serious matters, and this time, not those involving the count (his lovesickness, his case), but those involving the marquise herself, divided from herself by her own banter.

"You're more dangerous than I thought: falling ill to tenderize me! Truly, the idea is rare!" (P. 66.)

From case to word, from word to idea, marivaudage accomplishes its work of reversion and division. The idea is what the Moustache fairy opposes to reason: a rare, preposterous, ridiculous idea, but a brilliant, singular idea, a projection of the aristocratic mind against the besotted, bourgeois path of reason. The Marquise's conscience is torn apart, following the Hegelian pattern of divided consciousness:

"But true spirit is precisely this unity of absolutely separate extremes; and this spirit as their middle term comes into existence precisely by means of the free effectivity of these extremes deprived of the Self." (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Jean Hyppolite, Aubier, 1941, t. 2, "L'esprit devenu étranger à lui-même: la culture", p. 79.)

Marivaudage produces, above the language game in which it engages, this distanced awareness of the "true mind", capable of holding together, of simultaneously considering the "absolutely separate extremes" of the sentimental, affective game, these extremes mingled and objectified by the technique of pegging discourse by word. By experimenting with epistolary commerce, the Marquise undertakes a quest for truth that divides her from herself: On the one hand, she knows in advance that this exercise in speech can only lead to her falling into the "free effectivity" of an absolutely self-conscious passion; on the other hand, the reflexivity of marivaudage gives her the experience, the distance from this passion, and places her on the side of another, radically antagonistic "free effectivity", of an absolutely lucid and unanswerable critical position. The Marquise is true because she simultaneously experiences passion and the critique of passion, in other words, a double vertigo: the vertigo of losing control of the heart, and the vertigo of Marivaudage, which turns the circuit of her speech around this loss. This vertigo is a dispossession of the self, it is the experience of this division, this transport of the "true spirit" into the two "extremes deprived of the Self" of passion and marivaudage.

Spirit: the word is ambiguous in French. In Hegel, it's the spirit that inhabits consciousness (Geist), not the spirit that is exercised in language (Witz). But the Marquise's true spirit is both abstract consciousness and the living body of language, and precisely divided in its truth because it participates in Geist and Witz, reflection and banter, and from one to the other operates its knot, which is also a tear.

Notes