Reading royalty in Dumas’ Le Collier de la reine
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Italiano
10.1080/0950236x.2012.658433
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance Literature and Culture
ResumoAbstract Capitalizing on the historical trend of Realist novels, Alexandre Dumas père published his Le Collier de la reine in 1849–1850. The novel dramatizes a factual case of fraud, forgery, and royal impersonation that shook the Ancien Régime in 1785. Dumas locates at the centre of his intrigue the figure of the queen (Marie-Antoinette), and shows how a series of public misinterpretations of the royal person actually contribute to the monarchy's downfall and the Revolution of 1789. I argue that Dumas uses the historical setting as a screen for his veiled comments on the contemporary political events of 1848–1850, a period fraught with yet another revolution, two failed regimes and the advent of Napoléon III's dictatorship (to which Dumas, like other republican authors of the time, was opposed). By casting his focus on the paradoxes of revelation and concealment around the person of the queen's impersonator in 1785, Dumas subtly and concurrently questions acts of cultural hierophany in the France of 1850, thereby calling attention to the fragility of both the republic and the whole idea of leadership itself. Keywords: Alexandre Dumas père Collier de la reine Marie-Antoinette1848Revolution Notes Eric Le Calvez, ‘From Text to Macrotext’ in Michal Peled Ginsburg (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Balzac s Old Goriot (New York: MLA, 2000).Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: U Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 23.Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, eds, Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Quoted in Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 196. Chiara Bongiovanni, ‘Rimozione e narrazione: tracce della Grande Rivoluzione in tre mélodrames’ (‘Repression and Narration: Traces of the French Revolution in Three Melodramas’). Studi francesi, 40.2 (1996), pp. 240–257. The earliest English translation is documented by Harris at 1849, which suggests that the translation must have been done directly from the serial publication, from a copy of Dumas's manuscript, or from a pirated Belgian edition taken from the pages of the newspaper in which the novel was published in feuilleton form. Additional English translations were published in London in 1855 (Simms and Macintyre), 1861 (Clarke), 1894 (Dent), and 1922 (Collins). Sales data is evidenced by the novel's repeated translations and re-publication. See http://www.cadytech.com/dumas/work.php?key=76 for further details. Other fictional representations of the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ include Thomas Carlyle's ‘Diamond Necklace’ (1837), Maurice Leblanc's ‘Le Collier de la reine’ (1905), Antal Szerb's The Queen’s Necklace (1941–42), Edgar P. Jacobs’ L'Affaire du collier (1967, an episode in the Blake and Mortimer graphic novel series), Riyoko Ikeda's manga series La Rose de Versailles (serialized in Japan beginning in 1973, published in ten volumes in 1982), and most recently, Charles Shyer's film The Affair of the Necklace (2001, starring Hilary Swank and Christopher Walken). Evelyne Lever, ‘L'affaire du Collier ébranle la monarchie’ Historia, 463 (1985), pp. 70–77. Eric de Haynin, Louis de Rohan : Le cardinal ‘collier’ (Paris: Perrin, 1997). Thomas Carlyle, ‘Count Cagliostro’ in Fraser’s Magazine (London: \stop July–August 1833), p. 28. Simon Burrows's, Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London’s French Libellistes, 1758–92 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) ‘contends that printed libelles directed primarily against the queen probably did not circulate before 1789, and certainly not in substantial numbers’, Burrows, Blackmail, p. 147. In fact, Burrows suggests that the circulation of pamphlets against the queen ‘began with the publication of the comtesse de La Motte's Mémoires, which was followed … by the liberation and republication of texts from the Bastille's secret dépôt’, Burrows, Blackmail, p. 152. According to this theory, the anti-Autrichienne sentiment happened thus as part of the immediate tumult of 1789, rather than the longer-term movement of dissatisfaction and popular unrest that Dumas implies throughout the 1780s. I would argue that Dumas's use, in 1848–50, of the idea of pamphlets (and Cagliostro's cunning in suggesting the ‘Etteniotna’ pamphlet be dated from London – Collier, p. 262) speak more to the importance of popular belief about historical events than to the facts of those events themselves. For Dumas's purposes, that is, pamphlets that are uncirculated but known about through word of mouth hold as much power as pamphlets that are circulated, if not more. Strikingly, Dumas's pamphleteer Reteau see his entire ‘Etteniotna’ stash burned or shredded by the queen's dueling protectors. For the popular imagination of 1848–1850, like that of 1785–1889, \stop the idea of information repressed by governmental authorities, especially scandalous information, is as important as actual information that is made known. \stop Le Collier de la reine (Paris: Gallibard, 2002) indeed bears this out. For images from the pamphlets, see figures referred to later in this article. Jeanne de la Motte published her Mémoires justificatifs de la comtesse de Valois de la Motte: Ecrits par elle-même in 1789, then a second volume (the 1791 Second Mémoire justificatif). The timing of the two memoirs’ publication is crucial; as Frances Mossiker points out, Jeanne de la Motte's became the strongest anti-Antoinette voice in the outcry against the French queen in the early years of the Revolution, largely because she published her memoirs under her own truthful name, which was widely recognized and held up as an example of the injustice of monarchy and the popular disgust with royal profligacy. See Frances Mossiker, The Queen’s Necklace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961, 2004). Dumas creates a sort of comic relief ‘double’ to Jeanne's plot, when Beausire (Nicole-Oliva's lover) and his gambling partners pose as Portuguese ambassadors, feigning a diplomatic mission to purchase the necklace for the queen of Portugal. Carlyle, ‘Count Cagliostro’, pp. 27, 31. See Maza, ‘The Diamond Necklace Affair’ in Causes célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Dumas’ fictional Jeanne, on the other hand – though instrumental in deceiving the Cardinal and stealing the necklace – nonetheless remains a puppet, while Cagliostro pulls the strings; it is he who stages the doubling of the queen (Chapters 17 ‘Le Baquet’ and Chapters 23 ‘Le Bal de l'Opéra’); finances the printing of libelles, suggestive pamphlets that slander the royal character (Chapter 18, ‘Mlle Oliva’); bankrupts the Cardinal de Rohan (Chapter 58, ‘Le Débiteur et le créancier’); orchestrates the friendship between Jeanne and Nicole-Oliva (Chapter 63, ‘L'Observatoire’); and sets in motion the chain of events that leads ultimately to the encounter between Robespierre and Marat, who express the public perception of the queen as scandalous in both body and political function (Chapter 97, ‘L'Exécution’). I pause on Cagliostro because Dumas locates him at the center of two scenes that form the crux of the double-plot. Samuels, Spectacular Past, p. 204. ‘les cabriolets rapides devenaient la terreur des piétons’ Alexandre Dumas, Le Collier de la reine (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002), p. 69. Translations are my own unless otherwise specified; subsequent citations appear in the text. ‘rue de la Tixéranderie, rue populeuse, étroite et fort peu aristocratique’. ‘A bas le cabriolet!’. ‘Chez le commissaire!’. ‘plus beau des obélisques de neige’; ‘aiguille diminuée par les dégels’. ‘ce fut là que Bélus éprouva la première difficulté sérieuse’; ‘les curieux faisaient masse, et l'on ne pouvait traverser cette masse au trot’. ‘Avons-nous donc écrasé quelqu'un?’. ‘C'est qu'en ce temps-là, règne des aristocraties, il y avait aristocratie même dans la manière de conduire les chevaux : un prince du sang se menait à toute bride et sans crier gare ; un duc et pair, un gentilhomme et une fille d'Opéra, au grand trot ; un président et un financier au trot ; le petit-maître, dans son cabriolet, se conduisait lui-même comme à la chasse, et le jockey, debout derrière, criait gare quand le maître avait accroché ou renversé un malheureux’. Count Beugnot's Mémoires, cited in Mossiker, Queen’s Necklace, p. 158. ‘Reine dont la beauté surpasse les appas/Près d'un roi bienfaisant occupe ici ta place:/Si ce frêle édifice est de neige et de glace/Nos cœurs pour toi ne le sont pas’. Dumas deliberately leaves the écriteau’s tone ambiguous, so we are unsure if the textual ‘acclamation’ affixed to the dirtied snow-obelisk is meant ironically or sincerely. ‘[L]es têtes curieuses s'avançaient sous la capote du cabriolet. Les commentaires couraient dans la foule. – Tiens, ce sont des femmes, dit une voix. – Oui, des poupées aux Soubises, des maîtresses au d'Hénin. – Des filles d'Opéra, qui croient avoir le droit d’écraser le pauvre monde parce qu'elles ont dix mille livres par mois pour payer les frais d'hôpital’. Cagliostro will later clarify the appropriate reaction to seeing the queen: one must bend head and knee (p. 444). The Soubise family, especially the Rohan Guémenée branch (of which the Cardinal Louis de Rohan is a member), is known in the 1770s and 1780s for a particularly degenerate lifestyle. Caroline Weber, in her Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 2007), assigns to Prince Louis de Rohan the succinct label ‘arrogant and debauched scion’ (p. 91). Philippe de Taverney, brother of Andrée (who rides through Paris in the cabriolet with the queen) is a courtier in love with the queen and her staunchest defender, though later in the novel he will be convinced by various Cagliostro-propagated slanderous accusations of Marie-Antoinette's bad behavior. Dumas uses the Taverney family as an index of the nobility's inevitable decline through the entire Mémoires d'un médecin series. ‘– Comment, demanda Philippe, vous me plaignez, monsieur, de ce que je respecte la royauté, vous, un Taverney-Maison-Rouge ! vous, un des bons gentilshommes de France ! – Attends donc, je ne te parle pas de la royauté, moi, je te parle de la reine. – Et vous faites une différence– Pardieu ! qu'est-ce que la royauté, mon cherune couronne ; on n'y touche pas à cela, peste ! Qu'est-ce que la reineune femme ; oh ! une femme, c'est différent …’ William Fortescue, France and 1848: The End of Monarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3. Ibid., pp. 3–4 Bongiovanni, ‘Rimozione e narrazione’, p. 256. ‘una pesante responsabilità nella rivoluzione del 1848’. Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, originally planned as the fifth and final volume of Mémoires d'un médecin, was composed first of all the volumes of Mémoires and did not fit into the series as planned. It is generally considered a stand-alone romance about Marie-Antoinette. See http://www.cadytech.com/dumas for more information. ‘En Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge ce qui passionnera [la populace] ce ne seront ni les aventures de Lorin et de Maurice, ni la délivrance de Marie-Antoinette; ce sera le tableau du club. La pièce, plus monarchique que républicaine dans le fond, tournera, grâce aux détails, contre le but même qu'elle propose. Le peuple suivra avec ardeur le spectacle d'un passé dont ses pères l'ont entretenu ; … il regardera, il écoutera, il étudiera et, quelques mois plus tard, il donnera chaque jour aux quatre coins de Paris la représentation de cette scène dont le drame n'aura été pour lui qu'une sorte de répétition générale. On ne voulut voir que le côté amusant de ces œuvres. Le jour où le peuple entonna sur le débris fumants du trône le chœur patriotique, que le drame lui avait enseigné, il fallut bien ouvrir les yeux et comprendre quelle corrélation existe en France entre les spectacles du boulevard et l'esprit des masses’. See John G. Gallaher, ‘Alexandre Dumas, Republican General of the French Revolution’ in Proceedings of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850 (1991), Vol. 21. pp. 82–92. La Comtesse de Charny was published serially between 1853 and 1855 as the fourth and penultimate volume of Mémoires d'un médecin. Dumas explains the desire to correct his historical errors in the Avant-Propos to La Route de Varennes. The explanation is accompanied by his statement of realization that ‘la fuite à Varennes est le fait le plus considerable de la révolution française, et meme de l'histoire de France. C'est le point culminant de la royauté: elle a mis sept cent quatre ans à monter jusqu’à Varennes, elle ne met que dix-neuf mois à descendre de Varennes à la place de la Révolution; en mettant le pied sur la première marche de l'escalier de l’épicier Sauce, l'infortuné Louis XVI mettait le pied sur le premier degré de son échafaud’ (‘the flight to Varennes is the most significant event of the French Revolution, and even of the history of France. It is the peak of the royalty, which took seven hundred and four years to get as far as Varennes, but only nineteen months to slip from Varennes to the Place de la Révolution. Putting one foot on the first step of Sauce's grocery, the unfortunate Louis XVI put the other foot on the first step of the guillotine’). Alexandre Dumas, La Route de Varennes (Leipzig: Alphonse Dürr, Libraire-Editeur, 1858), p. 8. Most accounts of the Varennes re-capture hold that Louis XVI was recognized because of his likeness on a golden écu coin; Dumas writes the scene using an assignat, a form of paper money issued by the Assemblée nationale constituante beginning in 1790, after the confiscation of Church properties to stave off government bankruptcy. ‘Drouet prend l'assignat, compare le portrait à l'original, et demeure convaincu que l'intendant de Madame de Korff est bien le roi en personne. Un officier municipal, nommé Farcy, se trouvait là. Drouet le touche du coude. – Reconnais-tu? lui dit-il. – Oh! répond celui-ci, le roi!’ Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Ibid., p. 55. Joseph Balsamo, published serially between 1846 and 1848, is Dumas’ first installment in Les Mémoires d'un médecin, and introduces the characters of the Taverneys, Nicole-Oliva, the royal couple, and Balsamo himself (who changes his name to Cagliostro in Le Collier de la reine). Useful political and economic research on the Revolution of 1848 can be found in Brian J. Hayes's research, available at http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/1848/french_revolution_1848.html. The French of 1848 had to choose between the red of socialism and the tricolore of the 1789 Revolution, thus reviving symbolically much of the rhetoric of the earlier revolutionaries. The Provisional Government, under the direction of luminaries like Louis Auguste Blanqui and Lamartine, issued a decree on 25 February 1848: ‘Citoyens, La royauté, sous quelque forme que ce soit, est abolie. Plus de légitimité, plus de bonapartisme, pas de régence. Le Gouvernement provisoire a pris toutes les mesures nécessaires pour rendre impossible le retour de 1′ancienne dynastie, et 1′avènement d'une dynastie nouvelle. La République est proclamée’. (‘Citizens: royalty, under whatever form, is abolished; no more legitimism, no more Bonapartism, no regency. The provisional government has taken all the measures necessary to render impossible the return of the former dynasty or the advent of a new dynasty. The republic is proclaimed’.) J.H. Robinson, ed., Readings in European History (Boston: Ginn, 1906), Vol. 2. pp. 560–561. Available at the Hanover Historical Texts Project, http://history.hanover.edu/. Bongiovanni, ‘Rimozione e narrazione’, p. 251. ‘Si può … tentare una generalizzazione e considerare la visione della Rivoluzione offerta da Lamartine e Dumas come coincidente con quella del [suo] vasto pubblico. Il pubblico di questi due autori era mediamente colto … e politicamente progressista, anche se non radicale’. Jo Burr Margadant, ‘Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848’ The American Historical Review, 104.5 (1999), pp. 1461–1496. Ibid., p. 1468. Ibid., p. 1470. Ibid., p. 1482. Dumas ran three times in 1848, as a liberal candidate for the Assembly under the newly formed Second Republic (David Coward, ‘The king of romance’ London Review of Books, 16 April 2003). See also Fernande Bassan, ‘Une amitié littéraire : Chateaubriand et Dumas père = A literary friendship: Chateaubriand and Dumas the Elder’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 29.3–4 (2001), pp. 217–225; see also Göran Blix, ‘The Prison-House of Revolutionary Memory: The Politics of Oblivion in Michelet, Hugo, and Dumas’ French Forum, 32.3 (Fall 2007), pp. 39–64. Margadant, ‘Gender, Vice’, p. 1491. Chantal Thomas, ‘The Heroine of the Crime: Marie-Antoinette in Pamphlets’ in Dena Goodman (ed.), Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 99–116; p. 106. Tara L. Collington, applying Bakhtinian theory to filmic versions of Dumas’ La Reine Margot, develops the idea of Dumas’ chronotopic transpositions in her article ‘“History is Not Just a Thing of the Past”: The Chronotopic Transpositions of La Reine Margot’ in Literature Interpretation Theory (2002), Vol. 13. pp. 97–116. Napoléon III was elected in December 1848. See Fenton Bresler, Napoleon III: A Life (London: Harper Collins, 1999). Margadant, ‘Gender, Vice’, p. 1491. Chantal Thomas, La Reine scélérate: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 162. ‘l'idée de l'essence différente, supérieure, inconcevable, de cet être mystérieux : une reine'. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). ‘au lieu d'attaquer un homme, j'attaque un corps …, j'attaque une reine’. ‘Au fait, dit-il, qu'est-ce qu'une reine? Une femme’. Lynn Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution’ in Dena Goodman (ed.), Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 119. See also note 53. Hunt, ‘Many bodies’, p. 119. ‘Une reine de France ne ment pas!’. Hunt, 2003, p. 119. ‘Le Baquet’. ‘bleu et limpide’. ‘bal masqué à l'Opéra’. ‘le visage couvert d'un masque de satin’. ‘Il faut bien l'avouer qu’à cette époque il y avait assaut entre les dames de la cour et les demoiselles du théâtre’. ‘Maintenant quelques mots plus particuliers sur les acteurs’. ‘les malades’ and ‘les sceptiques’. ‘Parmi les premiers, … on distinguait une jeune femme d'une belle taille, d'une belle figure, d'une mise un peu extravagante, qui, soumise à l'action du fluide et s'appliquant à elle-même avec la tringle les plus fortes doses sur la tête et l’épigastre, commençait à rouler ses beaux yeux comme si tout languissait en elle, tandis que ses mains frissonnaient sous ces premières titillations nerveuses qui indiquent l'envahissement du fluide magnétique. Lorsque sa tête se renversait en arrière sur le dossier du fauteuil, les assistants pouvaient regarder tout à leur aise ce front pâle, ces lèvres convulsives, et ce beau cou marbré peu à peu par le flux et le reflux plus rapide du sang’. The reader of Joseph Balsamo will recognize Oliva as Nicole, Andrée de Taverney's former servant. La reine scélérate, p. 146. I use ‘abjectifying’ here in the Kristevan sense of something situated outside the symbolic order whose presence causes a traumatized reaction precisely because it has been violently cast out from subjectivity in the familiar cultural world. The backwards spelling of ‘Antoinette’ makes the queen's familiar name into an unfamiliar object which is yet impossible not to recognize; Rétaud's pornographic pamphlet about the queen's libidinous behaviors performs the same kind of inescapable, un-unrecognizable reversal that both fascinates and horrifies the reading public. ‘pamphlets contre Marie-Antoinette qui lient fantasmes sexuels et haines politiques’ Refer to Note 57. La reine scélérate, p. 162. ‘La reine de France est un monstre. Le discours pamphlétaire se relance, à l'infini, de son extrémisme dans le vice. Cette mélopée est infatigable car elle se fonde, pour la nier, sur une croyance persistante dans le caractère sacré de la reine. … On ne se lasse pas d'insulter Marie-Antoinette parce que chaque insulte proférée produit un frémissement de blasphème. Couvrir son nom d'ordures est chose délicieuse, c'est l'envers d'une adoration’. Strikingly, Thomas herself vacillates between ‘la’ and ‘une’ when speaking of the queen: ‘la’ when referring to Marie-Antoinette specifically; ‘une’ when discussing the generic function, reine. I take these alterations to mean that the place of the queen in French society – history, myth, fiction, and cultural memory – remains indeterminate and perturbing, down to the level of the grammar itself. ‘Mais, messieurs, regardez donc, c'est la reine’. ‘effrayées et surprises’. ‘La reine ! – La reine chez Mesmer ! – La reine dans une crise !’ ‘ressemblance frappante’. The gap we might read in the case of Nicole/Oliva involves precisely the fact that in the previous volume of Les Mémoires d'un médecin, she participates in a scene in which her mistress, Andrée de Taverney, is accused of behavior that does not suit her station – that is, consorting with the gardener Gilbert. In Andrée's case, the accusation is true, but only because she is under the influence of deep hypnosis (performed on her by none other than Joseph Balsamo/Cagliostro). See Dumas, Joseph Balsamo (Paris: Brodard et Taupin, 1967); also ‘From Text to Macrotext’, in Michal Peled Ginsburg (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Balzac’s Old Goriot (New York: MLA, 2000), p. 28. She arrived in France at age fifteen, one of 13 children of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. La reine scélérate, p. 19. ‘Les perversités inouïes d'une étrangère provoquent une condamnation unanime’. ‘Connaissez-vous la reine, oui ou non?’. La reine scélérate, p. 23. ‘le mythe a sa vie propre, qui repose sur une logique interne, une imagerie traditionnelle profondément onirique’. ‘rentr[er] dans l'apparence’. The first scene unmasks both Oliva and Cagliostro: Oliva when Cagliostro, masked, tells her he knows everything about her past and therefore associates her with her abandoned name and identity Nicole; and Cagliostro when Oliva, also masked, mistakes him for her dead lover Gilbert and pleads with him, ‘Take off your mask’ (‘Ôtez votre masque’, p. 314). The de-masking of Oliva calls up a history from the novel Joseph Balsamo, a back-story of rape, hypnotism, unrequited love, and domestic service; the de-masking of Cagliostro leaves both Oliva and the reader blank as to the significance of this visible face. Cagliostro has not yet been identified by name in this scene, and Dumas refers to him merely as ‘the blue domino’ (‘le domino bleu’, p. 314), conflating disguise with identity and the power of the unknown. Still, even if this scene of de-masking raises more questions than it answers, it establishes the pact between the two characters that allows a more important, and seemingly revelatory, unmasking to take place in the next chapter, ‘Le bal de l'Opéra (suite)’. After Oliva asks le domino bleu to remove his mask, he agrees, on one condition: at a later time, without questioning, ‘I will ask in my turn that you remove your mask’ (‘J'exigerai à mon tour que vous ôtiez votre masque’, p. 314). Oliva, as the ‘medium’ for Cagliostro's machinations, remains mute while the Cardinal is slowly but surely led to believe she is the queen. Her silence is key, for the Cardinal has already asked her to speak and promised to guess her identity through her voice (‘un mot de vous, je vous en prie, et je promets de vous deviner avec ce seul mot’, ‘one word from you, I beg of you, and I promise to guess who you are with that word alone’, p. 322). The tension in the scene mounts as Cagliostro – pretending he speaks for the masked woman by his side – alludes to details of a poem inscribed on a table in Schoenbrunn, the imperial residence in Vienna. He quotes the poem in German, still passing this quotation as an act on behalf of his companion. The Cardinal, already halfway duped by Oliva's physical shape beneath her disguise, falls completely into Cagliostro's trap with the poetry, and ultimately responds with the following verse. ‘éclat[e] en fanfares bruyantes’. ‘Aussitôt le capuchon d'Oliva fut froissé, tiré en arrière par une main invisible, son masque dénoué tomba ; ses traits apparurent une seconde dans la pénombre … Le domino bleu poussa un cri d'inquiétude affectée ; Oliva, un cri d’épouvante. Trois ou quatre cris de surprise répondirent à cette double exclamation. Le cardinal faillit s’évanouir. S'il fût tombé à ce moment, il fût tombé à genoux’. The diegetic structure of Dumas's novel, too, contains a faultline. The first half of the novel consists of a double-plot developed with no intervention from the character ultimately blamed and punished for it. (Jeanne, significantly, only begins to consider purloining the queen's necklace on page 638, nearly 200 pages after the halfway point of the novel.) The halfway point itself is a complicated subject, as we can actually locate two different dividing lines, one based on page-count, the other on number of chapters. The first halfway point leaves us in the chapter called ‘Un alibi’, in which the queen is confronted with the actions of her double and seeks to prove her own innocence. The other halfway point consists of a chapter called ‘La maison déserte’, which departs from the ongoing intrigue and the necklace affair altogether. This chapter focuses on Cagliostro, who returns to a burned-out house closed up since the end of the previous novel Joseph Balsamo, and who walks through its devastated space for the first time in ten years (according to the schema Dumas has set up for this series), conjuring up memories of the time he lived there as Balsamo and of the woman he loved, the beautiful Lorenza, whom he used as a medium and ultimately killed. Lorenza appears in Le Collier de la reine as an irruption, a break in the narrative logic that complicates even further the already convoluted plotlines and troubles the focus on the double-plot by adding yet another facet, even another double – Lorenza functions on the narrative level as a double for Nicole-Oliva, just as Nicole-Oliva functions on the plot level as a double for Marie-Antoinette. This chapter forces the reader to focus on a death, but a death that leads into another episode of suffering, a death that is not completely final. Furthermore, Lorenza's death opens a space of suspension in Dumas's narrative. Within the space of suspension, more and more connections can be forged between the various unmatched halves of the various plotlines. Structurally speaking, Lorenza prefigures Oliva, who will serve Cagliostro as a sort of medium in her turn – physically instead of psychically. Jeffrey Ravel's, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) provides ample evidence of the ‘genre-confusion’ between court and theatre. ‘la reine est cette femme, parce que cette femme est la reine’ April Alliston, ‘Female Sexuality and Enlightenment Realisms’ in Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast (eds), Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 15. Ibid., pp. 15–16. When Marie-Antoinette tells her accuser Charny that he must have made an error in thinking he saw her at the Opera Ball, Charny replies, ‘Madame, Your Majesty's features are imprinted on the hearts of all her subjects. To see Your Majesty once is to recognize her forever’ (p. 456) (‘Madame, les traits de Votre Majesté sont graves dans les coeurs de tous ses sujets. Avoir vu Votre Majesté une fois, c'est la voir toujours.’) ‘Eh bien ! Qu'ai-je fait samedi? Qu'on me le dise, car en vérité je deviens folle, et si cela continue je croirai moi-même que je suis allée à cet infâme bal de l'Opéra’. Samuels, Spectacular Past, p. 186. Bongiovanni, ‘Rimozione e narrazione’, p. 251. ‘arrivò al momento giusto per scandalizzare i benpensanti e attirare le folle’. Bongiovanni, ‘Rimozione e narrazione’, p. 251. ‘[l]a decisione … di ambientare un romanzo nei momenti più cupi della Rivoluzione non fu certo casuale, ma probabilmente dettata dall'evoluzione della storiografia del tempo’.
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