EPISTOLARY INTERCOURSE IN LA COMTESSE DE TENDE

The Comtesse de Tende is the story of a passionate young woman and the price she must pay for giving expression to her passion. It is in many ways an “unspeakable” story, telling of a virginal bride who pursues her husband sexually, systematically betrays her best friend, has an extramarital affair resulting in pregnancy, has suicidal and infanticidal tendencies, and dies following the premature childbirth of the illegitimate child. No wonder the novella was not published until 31 years after the death of its author, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette.

The tale begins as a young woman is handed over from her father to her husband:

Mademoiselle de Strozzi, fille du maréchal et proche parente de Catherine de Médicis, épousa, la première année de la Régence de cette reine, le comte de Tende . . . (399)^[1]

and closes, just after the countess’s death, with a brief epilogue about her husband, who survives her. Thus the title of La Comtesse de Tende is quite appropriate, as the novella covers precisely the period of the woman’s marriage.

Within the tight economy of this thirteen-page novella, three letters are cited in full. Why are they included in the story? Is their nature as letters exploited in the narrative in ways similar to the techniques of epistolary novels? Can their use be related to what Janet G. Altman calls “epistolarity,” the creation of meaning through the exploitation of the potential power of the letter form?^[2] The purpose of this study is to explore to what extent “epistolarity” may be present in La Comtesse de Tende—the ways in which the three letters create meaning in this short fiction narrative. Strategies will vary from letter to letter. Further, I will show how these letters may be used to contrast Lafayette’s representation of women’s writing versus men’s writing.

The Exchange of Letters

The pattern of letter-exchange deserves close attention. Each of the three letters is written by a different sender and received and read only by its intended addressee. The first letter is written by M. de Navarre to the Mme de Tende at daybreak following the consummation of his marriage to her best friend. The other two letters constitute an exchange between Mme and M. de Tende—her confession of her (illegitimate) pregnancy and his response.

However, there are actually four letters exchanged in the story. The countess’s reply to Navarre is referred to, but not textually reproduced. The “suppressed” letter is therefore a deviation from the norm in this narrative, creating a structural enigma. I shall come back to it. Let us note meanwhile that, if we include the textually suppressed letter, the letters fall into two different channels of written intercourse: exchange between the lovers^[3] and exchange between the spouses. Let us examine them in the order of their appearance.

M. de Navarre to Mme de Tende

Je ne pense qu’à vous, madame, je ne suis occupé que de vous; et dans les premiers moments de la possession légitime du plus grand parti de France, à peine le jour commence à paraître que je quitte la chambre où j’ai passé la nuit, pour vous dire que je me suis déjà repenti mille fois de vous avoir obéi et de n’avoir pas tout abandonné pour ne vivre que pour vous. (403)

The most distinctive feature of this letter is the time at which it was written and sent. The significance of the time is stressed by Navarre himself, and noted by the countess as well as by Navarre’s new bride, the princess de Neufchâtel. The countess is quite alarmed to receive the letter the morning after the wedding:

La vue de cette lettre la troubla et, parce qu’elle la reconnut être du chevalier de Navarre, et parce qu’il était si peu vraisemblable que, pendant cette nuit qui devait avoir été celle de ses noces, il eût le loisir de lui écrire. . . . (403)

But after she reads it, she is charmed by its timing: “Cette lettre, et les moments où elle était écrite, touchèrent sensiblement la comtesse de Tende” (403).

The countess is then summoned to the princess’s home to “celebrate” her socially embarrassing marriage. The wealthy princess had married the fortuneless Navarre, against all reasonable expectations, because she believed—and the countess had fortified this belief—that the winsome Navarre was passionately in love with her. Now she confides to the countess her suspicions of her new husband’s inconstancy, as evidenced by his distracted mood, by his late arrival to his own wedding, and most significantly, by his leaving the bridal chamber at daybreak on a feeble pretext. Furthermore, when he returned, he had obviously just been writing—she could tell from his (stained) hands: “il venait d’écrire; je l’ai connu à ses mains” (404). And to whom else but a mistress would a man write at such a time? His ink-stained hands thus indelibly mark Navarre’s guilt; akin to Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands, they are signs of an epistolary transgression.

These signs are correctly “read” by his bride even though she has not seen the letter—he did indeed write it to a mistress whom he preferred to his new wife. But the nature of his guilt is intriguing. He has not yet committed a physical act of infidelity; in that sense, no crime has yet occurred. On the other hand, he has clearly defrauded his bride who had bargained on his passion. And he has certainly violated all decency, particularly in his timing. A certain social contract has been broken.

It may be discerned, furthermore, that Navarre is actually, by his letter, staking a claim to rights for physical intimacy with Mme de Tende. Previously, he had secured a promise to allow him to visit her in her private chambers—on the condition that he follow through with the financially advantageous marriage. Though the letter only alludes to Navarre’s repugnance for his wedding, it attests to his flattering preoccupation with the countess, notifying her that he has fulfilled his part of the bargain. In fact, while the timing of the letter would indicate an urgent need for communication, there is no practical urgency to reassure Mme de Tende that his desire for her has not abated. However, after fulfilling an arduous contract, Navarre could well be expected to send a hurried invoice for services due. But this contractual urgency is ambiguous. It also suggests the young man’s immediate need to evoke the countess, to address her, and to substitute her imaginary presence for the unwanted physical presence of his bride.

Against the third-person “omniscient” background narration, letters switch here very clearly to an “I-you” communication. This narrative shift underscores the mediating function of the letter between two characters. Altman has observed that in fiction a letter may also have the power to pull the time line out of phase, as a letter comprises the time of its composition, its transmission, its reading, and also admits a possible time of its rereading. In epistolary novels, the conditions under which each message is composed by the sender and read by the receiver often play important roles in the story, just as they do in La Comtesse de Tende.

Dialogue, like inserted letters, also shifts from a third-person to a first-person narrative act, but there are important differences. Whereas the act of writing a letter calls for making the addressee present in his/her actual absence, dialogue constantly affirms the presence of the other. The illusion of the addressee’s physical presence demonstrates one possible mediating function of the letter: bridging the distance between two characters. But the opposite is also possible. Choosing to write a letter rather than speak directly to someone who is present can create remoteness—make the addressee absent in his/her presence. The distance-bridging potential of a letter is at work in Navarre’s text. He leaves his bride’s chamber to address his beloved; the writing act starts the movement away from the wife and toward the mistress.

The traditional association of the act of writing with the sexual act thus doubles the contractual function of this letter. Navarre hastens from a real sex act—the consummation of his marriage—to a symbolic sex act. The spilled ink on his hands signifies more than mere emotion or haste. He creates as much of a mess by his writing as by his sex acts. His expressive fluids tend to leave traces, portending the countess’s unwanted pregnancy; they will leave a blot on her pristine reputation.

The circumstances of its delivery further underscore the letter’s function as a figurative sex act. Altman points out that in epistolary fiction letters can have a physical value as objects, they can have metonymic value (the letter standing for the writer), and they can have an exchange value. As a physical object that metonymically stands for its writer, it is delivered on to the countess’s bed, the contracted site of their future trysts. The messenger who drops the letter is La Lande, the equerry who serves as the intermediary for all private meetings and correspondence. Seeing the letter discreetly deposited on her bed, the countess immediately identifies its origin and regards it as an extension of its sender.

Since the “voice” of each letter’s writer is differentiated, it is only natural that, in the midst of a supposedly gallant love message, Navarre’s words express quite pointedly the same opportunism that inspires his notion of contracts. He tells his beloved that he writes “dans les premiers moments de la possession légitime du plus grand parti de France,” i.e., the possession not so much of a bride as of a great fortune. The princess de Neufchâtel, who has married Navarre out of passion, is reduced in the very act that should express his reciprocal passion to an object of exchange named by the monetary/social advantage she represents. The contrast between the social/ financial features of marriage and sexual inclination, an important thematic element throughout the works of Lafayette, is both confirmed and denied here as Navarre’s two contracts manage to combine both functions.

Navarre’s writing also expresses his impetuousness, his use of flattery, and his cunning in transferring to the countess all responsibility for the passionless marriage that he so industriously contrived for his own financial and social gain: “je me suis déjà repenti mille fois de vous avoir obéi et de n’avoir pas tout abandonné pour ne vivre que pour vous.” The entire letter portrays him as both an adept lover and a clever trader.

* * *

After discovering the princess’s suspicion that her new husband had written to a mistress, the countess hurries to write him a note warning him to restrain from such compromising acts.

Mme de Tende to M. de Navarre

Elle écrivit dès le soir au prince de Navarre pour lui donner avis des soupçons de sa femme et pour l’obliger à se contraindre. (404)

The text of this letter is not provided; only one sentence buried in the middle of a long paragraph makes any allusion to it. Yet, in terms of the structural dynamics of letter writing, this missing piece raises a question: Why is the letter’s text suppressed? There are many possible explanations for this “deviation”:

1) The message was perhaps “unimportant”—simply a warning not to write. However, the author could well have chosen to use the text of the letter for other purposes, such as illustrating the heroine’s love for Navarre or her general state of mind. Lack of importance does not seem a sufficient explanation.

2) Suppressing this letter leaves one quoted letter per main character, a reasonable structural choice for a short and concise story. But if this were the case, then why mention the letter at all? The author could have had the countess warn Navarre orally, or not at all. Visibly, there had to be a letter.

3) In written, just as in sexual intercourse in this work, there are two channels: legitimate (between the spouses) and illegitimate (between the lovers). Illegitimate “intercourse” is dangerous, particularly for a woman, and written evidence of it must be avoided. This explanation fits well with the corpus of Lafayette’s work, such as La Princesse de Clèves, which problematizes the dangers of public knowledge of a woman’s private passion.

4) The missing letter demands suppression of further correspondence (“Elle écrivit . . . pour l’obliger à se contraindre [a ne pas écrire]”), and it is itself textually suppressed. In that sense, it illustrates the traditional French ideal of “forme” equalling “fond”—form expressing content. However, the implications of such a strategy extend much farther.

Indeed, “suppression” has become a catchword in criticism of women’s writing. To discover meaning in a woman’s text, we are told to look at the blank spaces, to read “between the lines” or in the margins, to see how the story emerges. In that spirit, I shall take the structural enigma of the countess’s “blank” letter as a point of departure for a reading of the novella.

It goes without saying that to write a personal letter constitutes authorship, at least on a small scale. Personal correspondence consists of an exchange of literary acts, telling events in the lives of the correspondents, that is, their own stories. The suppression of Mme de Tende’s letter thus illuminates her general constraints in “telling her story,” and the censure of a public expression of passion within the confines of her society. One must remember that the countess’s relationship with Navarre does indeed express passion, a passion that, thwarted in its official expression (in her early days of marriage), could only exist in an “illegitimate” form (adultery).^[4]

In an article exploring the “privileges of anonymity,” Joan DeJean discusses the “thirst” of the seventeenth-century French public for stories of women’s passion, and the extent to which a woman’s “scriptive authority” is lost when her private story falls into the hands of publisher and public (885–87). Is it for this reason that the countess de Tende (and the countess de Lafayette behind her) is so concerned with suppressing public knowledge of her love story? The suppressed letter serves as a plea to her lover to suppress writing. This is the only kind of communication she is authorized to write in the passionate exchange.

But written letters are not the only damning public signs of a love story. Mme de Tende’s pregnancy by Navarre threatens to disclose their illicit passion, at least to M. de Tende, who has not had marital relations with his wife since early in their marriage. So the countess contemplates suicide, a total suppression not only of her life story but also of her unborn child. However, she is not quite willing to write “murder” into her script.

If writing is often associated with the male sex act, giving birth is a common metaphor for publishing. In a sense, any birth publishes (makes public) a love story, or at least the story of an act of procreation. Giving birth to an illegitimate child, then, would publish the story of the Mme de Tende’s dishonor rather than that of her passion; once in the public domain, the story would escape her authorial control.

Forced to take action, the countess considers “rewriting” that chapter in order to regain control over pregnancy and story. Her husband is expected to visit her for one night; she plans to seduce him, and attribute to him the ostensible “authorship” of the child. However, shaken by the news that her lover had been killed at war, she lacks the sangfroid to erase the story of her passion. Instead of seducing her husband and thereby falsifying the story, she spends the night writing him a letter that is true to the original plot—“la plus difficile à écrire qui ait peut-être jamais été écrite” (410).^[5] At daybreak, as her husband is leaving the house, a servant hands him the letter.

Let us note that the sexual distance between the spouses is underscored by this choice to write rather than speak directly to each other. In the same spirit, the countess waits until the count is departing to have a third person deliver the message; and the count in turn waits until he has traveled some distance before he reads the missive. In effect, letters become the only intercourse between the spouses, and their texts the only “issue” of their marriage.

* * *

Mme de Tende to her husband

Cette lettre me va coûter la vie; mais je mérite la mort et je la désire. Je suis grosse. Celui qui est la cause de mon malheur n’est plus au monde, aussi bien que le seul homme qui savait notre commerce; le public ne l’a jamais soupçonné. J’avais résolu de finir ma vie par mes mains, mais je l’offre à Dieu et à vous pour l’expiation de mon crime. Je n’ai pas voulu me déshonorer aux yeux du monde, parce que ma réputation vous regarde; conservez-la pour l’amour de vous. Je vais faire paraître l’état où je suis; cachez-en la honte et faites-moi périr quand vous voudrez et comme vous le voudrez. (409–10)

The countess’s written submission translates into another textual contract: she transfers to her husband all the rights to her life story. In return, she expects to minimize publishing perils by limiting the public to one person: her husband. While she abandons further claims to determine the plot of her life, the countess nevertheless hopes that her confession will ensure her death by the hand of her husband. Fully in line with her “Italian” nature, death has now become the new object of her passion: “[J]e mérite la mort et je la désire.” But she must rely on the power of the letter to have it dealt to her by the new “author.”

It is then no wonder that she assures her husband that her story was never known by the public, and that all witnesses to her guilty passion are dead. The total “suppression” of everyone connected to the illegitimate intercourse thus parallels the suppression of the countess’s only known letter to Navarre. The count remains free to decide the ending. He attains a status equivalent to that of God (the Author of Life); it is up to him to determine the meaning of her story.

Or so it would seem. In fact, Mme de Tende further influences her husband with a sort of “writing act” strategy. She predicts that her letter will cost her her life (“Cette lettre me va coûter la vie”) and she inscribes her death in a continuous process from past to future (“J’avais résolu de finir ma vie par mes mains”). She justifies it by divine law, associating God and the count (“je l’offre à Dieu et à vous pour l’expiation de mon crime”). In that sense, her letter, written “by her own hands” constitutes an act designed to end her life. She even adds an ad hominem argument: it is primarily for her husband’s sake that she wants to avoid publication of her story “aux yeux du monde.” He must think of his own pride. This ardent appeal completes the countess’s sole textual publication.

* * *

Reading her text, M. de Tende is overcome with shock, jealousy, and rage, only tempered slightly by some remaining tenderness for his wife. It does not bring him closer to her. Rather than returning home, he stops at an inn for several days before sending his brief response. Her last argument has convinced him to keep his shame secret. While he does not quite endorse the contract to kill (and postpones the decision), he does embrace his role as the new author of the female plot.

M de Tende to his wife

Le désir d’empêcher l’éclat de ma honte l’emporte présentement sur ma vengeance; je verrai, dans la suite, ce que j’ordonnerai de votre indigne destinée. Conduisez-vous comme si vous aviez toujours été ce que vous deviez être. (411)

Suppressing the story of marital infidelity requires the subversion of the countess’s private love story. In his letter, the count twists the story of his wife’s passion into the story of his cuckoldry—a story that must be suppressed at all costs. Whether this fear of exposure underlies all men’s fear of women’s right to have their own stories is a matter for speculation. At any rate, the count, in his tentative contract, reserves the right to determine his wife’s fate at a later date, when he will decide how to end the plot of her story.

M. de Tende concludes by telling his wife to conduct herself as if she had always been what she should have been (“Conduisez-vous comme si vous aviez toujours été ce que vous deviez être” 411). He intimates that she should allow her pregnancy to appear to be legitimate, and in return, he will assume paternity for the child—publish it under his name, so to speak. However, we can discern in that text an implied censure of her unfaithfulness. In the final lines of his own letter the count attempts to rewrite the beginning of the story, altering its moral perspective. Initially he was portrayed as the villain, rejecting all amorous advances by his young, passionate wife and preferring adulterous adventures elsewhere. And even when, once the marriage is thus destroyed, he seeks to regain his wife’s love, he pursues her in the spirit of an extra-marital affair: “[Il] devint aussi amoureux d’elle que si elle n’eût point été sa femme” (407). All this past is denied in the letter: the guilty philanderer becomes an incensed victim and judge, and the countess, a victim of neglect, is turned into a guilty betrayer of vows.

Thus, after having refused to be the love story of his wife and forced her to go off and “write” a different love story that excluded him, the count now takes over and in his letter evokes a past love story between the spouses sanctified by a marriage vow that his wife has broken (un-beknownst to the public). In other words, he reserves the exclusive right to author the plot of his wife’s passion.

* * *

Mme de Tende’s reading of her husband’s letter is quite strange. Words that might seem to us to have “more bark than bite,”^[6] become, in the countess’s eager interpretation, a clear death sentence (“l’arrêt de sa mort”). Impatient to achieve union with her newest “passion,” death, she thus willfully misreads her husband’s text, not so much in a spirit of rebellion, but rather to satisfy her last desire.

By the same token, though she had handed over to her husband the power to direct her life’s plot, the countess in fact proceeds to act out a plot that she determines for herself—a zealous ritualization/legitimization of suicide:

Elle ne songea plus qu’à se préparer à la mort; et, comme c’était une personne dont tous les sentiments étaient vifs, elle embrassa la vertu et la pénitence avec la même ardeur qu’elle avait suivi sa passion. (411)

In reality, it has been her own intended plan that her confession would precipitate her death (“Je mérite la mort et je la désire”). Her plea to her husband masks an explicit order: “faites-moi périr quand vous voudrez et comme vous le voudrez” (409). What is presented as the countess’s total submission to her husband’s authority (leaving him master of her story of “illegitimate” passion, and both her own and her unborn child’s fate), paradoxically restores to her the power to dispose of her own life, to write out the rest of her story from the plot she herself initiated.^[7]

* * *

Here, as elsewhere, suppression/submission serves to conceal an actual subversion of male authority. The countess’s letter to Navarre may be suppressed, her love story may be suppressed from the public domain, her life and her child’s may be suppressed, but her passion is never suppressed—it merely changes object.^[8] The countess is never dominated by her husband. When he avoids her passionate advances, she turns to Navarre. When the count later desires her, she rejects him. When she becomes pregnant, she forces her husband to accept paternity obligations or face public ridicule. When he threatens vengeance for her infidelity, she eludes him by choosing her own death; and she reduces him to living the rest of his long life alone, deprived of the satisfaction of dominating a wife.^[9]

Furthermore, she leaves him deprived of an heir. The countess’s greatest challenge to the patriarchy, a scandalous and barely publishable challenge, is her fulfilled wish to have her child die. She could not acknowledge this death/abortion wish in her own letter’s text. Even Lafayette seems to have felt it necessary to justify it by a spurious concern for patriarchal values:

Elle eut la consolation de voir son enfant en vie, d’être assurée qu’il ne pouvait vivre et qu’elle ne donnait pas un héritier illégitime à son mari. (411)

Actually, the countess’s illegitimate child would not have been an illegitimate heir since her husband was to legitimize it in his own public story. In effect, the countess’s virtual infanticide has but one concrete result: extinction of the count’s official bloodline—the “sang” that transmits title, status, possessions. Without an heir, he is stripped both of his authority as pater familias and of his (illegitimate) authorship of a future family. When the countess takes her child with her into death, she puts an end to her husband’s story: he can only await his own death. And Lafayette summarizes for him that uneventful wait with one perfunctory sentence at the end of her text.

The double challenge of simultaneously creating and suppressing an heir has a parallel in the novella’s own story. Why, if not by a similar challenge to authority, would Lafayette “give birth to” a somewhat “illegitimate” tale (one arguably indecent for a woman of her milieu), but not publish it, even under a man’s borrowed name (like a false heir) or under the “privilege of anonymity,”^[10] as she did her other works of fiction? La Comtesse de Tende was truly “suppressed” until long after Lafayette’s death. She may well have felt the satisfaction of creating a story of a scandalous passion while wishing that it would not come to light, would never be “subject to erasure of [her] authority once her text passe[d] into the public domain” (DeJean 887).

However, in the end, her story was resurrected, and, within it, all the public and private texts that it contained. Even the absent letter of the countess to Navarre, the suppressed text within a suppressed text, can be recovered from the recovered tale. Moreover, by virtue of its en abyme function, it empowers the entire “illegitimate” creation to reveal its true story. The “epistolarity” of this “non-epistolary” novella thus reveals a crucial point: acceptance but also subversion of a social order that suppresses “illegitimate” channels of power and intercourse.

Works Cited

Altman, Janet G. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1982.

De Jean, Joan. “Lafayette’s Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity.” PMLA 99 (1984): 884–982.

Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, Comtesse de. Histoire de la Princesse de Montpensier et Histoire de la Comtesse de Tende. Ed. M. Cuénin. Geneva: Droz, 1979.

___. La Princesse de Clèves. Ed. É. Magne. Paris: Garnier, 1970.

^[1]Except where otherwise noted, all citations to the Comtesse de Tende are from Mme de Lafayette, Romans et Nouvelles, eds. Emile Magne and Alain Niderst (Paris: Garnier, 1970). All italic emphasis is my own.

^[2]In general, letters included in a narrative stand out from their background by more than a distinctive typeface. As Altman points out, a letter is a “mise en abyme” of the basic author-reader process. Each letter represents a writing act of a fictional character within the larger writing act; and our reading of each letter has a double character—it includes both our reading of the letter and our reading of the receiver’s reading of the letter.

^[3]Their letter exchange precedes and prefigures the consummation of the love affair between the countess de Tende and Navarre. The term “lovers” here is meant to refer to their passionate inclination for one another.

^[4]True, Lafayette undermines, like most of her contemporaries, the legitimacy of marital passion by showing the singularity—if not the indecency—of taking marital relations passionately: “le comte de Tende devint aussi amoureux d’elle que si elle n’eût point été sa femme” (407). Nonetheless, marital fidelity, if not passion, is surely established in the text as the moral ideal for a woman.

^[5]These are the same superlatives that surround the Princesse de Clèves’s aveu.

^[6]After all, M. de Tende’s letter shows that his desire for vengeance is held in check by his pride, and while he claims the authority (which his wife offered him in her letter) to determine her “unworthy” fate, he postpones action (acting out his vengeance) indefinitely.

^[7]This is a mark of Lafayette’s modernity as far as the future of French women’s fiction is concerned. The countess de Tende prefigures Staël’s heroines, Delphine and Corinne, who wrest control of their lives from the patriarchy in the end by means of suicide.

^[8]In the novella’s first sentence, the countess de Tende is identified by her close relation to Catherine de Médicis, an Italian-born queen of France known far more for her passion than her virtue.

^[9]The first printed version of the novella ends: “il ne voulut jamais se remarier, les femmes lui faisaient horreur, et il a vécu jusqu’à un âge fort avancé.” The underlined text was omitted from later versions, although it is restored in Cuénin’s 1979 edition.