The princess of Clèves

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Title page of the first edition of the novel, Paris 1678

The Princess of Clèves (French La Princesse de Clèves ), also The Princess of Cleve , is a historical novel by Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette . It was published anonymously in Paris in 1678. The authors initially suspected both La Rochefoucauld , a close friend of the author, who vigorously denied authorship, and Jean de Segrais , a well-known writer and temporary secretary of the author.

Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, who came from a smaller nobility and had advanced to Countess de La Fayette by marriage, was the "lady of honor" and confidante of Henrietta Stuart , the wife of the younger brother of King Louis XIV , Duke Philip of Orléans , at the royal court. She was close friends with the also writer, Jansenist Duke of La Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sévigné, who is famous as a letter author . Through her father, who died young, she had already been given access to the precious literary salons of her time.

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The title heroine is not a "princess" in the German sense of the word, i. H. not a daughter or daughter-in-law of a ruling prince. Rather, she is the wife of a younger son of a duke ( duc ) who, since his brother inherits the title of duke, has to be satisfied with the non-specific title prince ("prince") in France . The book title cannot be seen historically.

The novel is set around 1560 at the French court towards the end of the reign of Henry II. It begins with a detailed presentation of the court and the ladies and gentlemen who inhabit it. This introduction, which is rather lengthy for today's readers, was certainly very interesting for the aristocratic and upper-class target audience of Madame de La Fayette, as they still knew many of the names listed and, moreover, had to feel encouraged to compare them with the court of Louis XIV. The long story, which is somewhat confusing for us today, of the difficulties that arise for the protagonist in the search for a spouse, also reflected a reality that is well known to the aforementioned audience.

The plot begins when the 16-year-old Mademoiselle de Chartres and her young widowed mother, the aristocratic and rich but morally strict Madame de Chartres, come from the provinces to Paris, where she is to be introduced to court in order to find a partner for them. The very first man she met in a jewelry store, the Prince of Clèves, fell in love with her without knowing who the beautiful young girl might be. After her introduction to the court, interested parties can be found very quickly, because she is not only pretty, but also "one of the best games in France". But the applicants are partly rejected by Mme de Chartres and partly rejected by their own families. The best possible game with a young relative of the king is blocked by the king personally at the behest of his mistress. Clèves, who, despite being in love, had already believed his cause was lost, since he is only a younger son and therefore not an optimal match, takes advantage of this situation and declares his love for the young girl. This informs the mother, who advises her daughter about the young man. Because of his social rank and his possessions, he is definitely an option and above all, despite his youth, he seems to her to be honorable and of solid character. She does not worry that her daughter only finds him likeable and no longer.

So the marriage is concluded. However, the young man soon realizes that his wife does not share his feelings, but only fulfills her marital duties. The fact that she gives him no cause for jealousy, rather acquires a reputation for absolute aloofness, gives him little consolation.

At a ball, while dancing, the princess runs into the Duke of Nemours , who has just returned from a trip and knows her as little as she does him. For both of them it is love at first sight, which over the next few days deepens in numerous encounters without being admitted or even explained. Nemours, until then a gallant and successful heartbreaker, is like a changed man. He is no longer looking for amorous adventures, appears melancholy and even an apparently promising application for the hand of the English queen, desired by the king, he lets run dry. The princess, in love for the first time in her life, is swept into a vortex of conflicting emotions. Although she values ​​her husband and is determined to remain loyal to him, in line with the morals that her mother taught her, her thoughts only revolve around Nemours. Although the two often meet in company, they hide their feelings, even if they can both read them on tiny signals that are barely visible to bystanders.

Torn between reason and passion, and in order to avoid all temptations, the princess retreats to one of the family's country châteaux and begs Clèves to leave her there, which Clèves does not want because of his social obligations. In an outburst of desperation, she confesses to him that she loves another man in a pavilion in the park, but does not reveal his name. The prince immediately suspects Nemours, especially since he has been told that he had been on a neighboring estate for two days.

Nemours, who has sneaked around the park in the dark, involuntarily overhears the conversation and now knows that he is loved. In the exuberance of his joy, he tells a friend about the unusual confession. He tells his lover, the story spreads lightning fast around the court.

The Prince of Clèves, who loves his wife excessively, may have been able to live with her “coldness”, but her love for another breaks his heart. He fell into melancholy, fell ill and died a little later.

Although the prince's death frees his wife for a marriage with the duke, she withdraws from court and breaks off all contact with the duke. In a final conversation between the two lovers, she justifies her decision by saying that there is no man whose love does not grow cold in marriage and who then does not turn to other women. She cannot rule out such behavior for herself either. A lover could be reproached in such a case, but what could be reproached for a husband whose only fault was that he no longer felt love? "Monsieur de Clèves was perhaps the only man on earth who kept his love in marriage."

reception

The novel was a huge public success in France from the start; the first edition was completely sold out shortly after its publication. It was lively discussed in all literary salons of the time, with the protagonist's confession to her husband, which was perceived as shocking, in the center of interest in addition to the question of the anonymous author . The Mercure Galant , the much-read society and culture magazine of the time, in which issues of art, literature and fashion were discussed and the latest social news was also reported, dedicated the novel, which was set in distant times, to the society of the contemporary reader reflected a reader poll. Problems and characters were typical of aristocracy and the literary salons of the time. The readers took offense at the unusual confession and the subsequent renunciation of the princess.

Around 1681/1682 the English author Nathaniel Lee wrote a version of the novel for the theater, which was published under the title The Princess of Cleve, as it was acted at the Queens Theater in Dorset-Garden in London. In Lee's adaptation, which is characterized by a satirical view of love, marriage and marriage and the hypocrisy of society when it comes to virtuous behavior, Nemours plays the main role.

The novel had a lasting effect on French literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. The book is considered an early example of a psychological novel that simultaneously unfolds a panorama of a concrete society and is no longer - like the predecessors of the genre - set in a fairytale, fantastic milieu with equally fairytale heroes and heroic and exaggerated affects , but instead focuses on judges the subtle movements of the heart.

The model of the Princess of Clèves , as Niklas Luhmann puts it, resulted in a "tail of renunciation novels", for example the novels of a Marquise de Tencin , which were written a little later, and were effective up to the Manon Lescaut des Abbé Prévost or the Dangerous Liaisons des Choderlos de Laclos . Stendhal , himself a master in the analysis of confusions and evasions of love and a keen observer of the society of his time, held the "divine princess of Clèves" in high regard.

The Princess of Clèves was one of the favorite novels of the late Raymond Radiguet . In his novel Der Ball des Comte d'Orgel he takes up the main motif again, the confession of a woman who confesses to her husband her passion for another man, with disastrous consequences for everyone involved.

The novel became a symbol of the French higher education movement . Nicolas Sarkozy earned ridicule and mockery when he said that this kind of reading was of no use to a receptionist and that only "sadists and fools" had put this book on the list of exam questions for recruitment tests for civil servants. In protest on February 16, 2009, teachers and students read the novel in one piece in front of the Panthéon for six hours.

Film adaptations

The novel was the basis for several films. In 1961, Jean Cocteau and Jean Delannoy , who also directed, wrote the screenplay for the film La Princesse de Clèves with Marina Vlady , Jean-François Poron and Jean Marais in the lead roles. This was followed in 1999 by the film La Lettre by Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira , with Chiara Mastroianni as princess, then in 2000 La Fidélité by Andrzej Żuławski with Sophie Marceau and Pascal Greggory as Clève and finally in 2008 La Belle Personne by Christophe Honoré with Louis Garrel , Léa Seydoux and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet .

In 2009/2011 the French director Régis Sauder shot a documentary at the Lycée Denis Diderot in a problematic district of Marseille , the majority of whose students are first and second generation French. Sauder filmed the pupils reading the novel, replaying dialogues and quietly listening in the classroom, when a voice recited passages of the text from off, and documented their comments on the film. The surprising result of the film project is that the young people from different countries of origin and a socially disadvantaged milieu "effortlessly [recognize] themselves in the characters of the novel". The "prevented love story" appeals to many of the girls and boys, girls who are not "allowed to follow the call of their hearts", boys who are forbidden to have love affairs with boys. They are familiar with the superior power of their parents, the feeling of being trapped in a cage from which there hardly seems to be any escape, unless a successfully passed Bac . “The discovery of the familiar in the foreign does not have to be, but it can have positive effects on the much-sought after« living together in a multicultural society »”, is also a - political - conclusion of the film.

Expenses (selection)

The novel has been reissued over and over again since it was first published. Some editions are luxuriously furnished with illustrations, such as B. by F. Masson (Paris 1978), Jules-Arsène Garnier (Paris 1889), JL Perrichon (Paris 1913), Serge de Solomko (Paris 1925), Étienne Drian (Paris 1929), Charles Guerin (Paris 1930), André Édouard Marty (Paris 1942), Marie Laurencin (Paris 1947), Jacques Pecnard (Paris 1961) or Christian Lacroix (Paris 2010).

  • Amourettes du duc de Nemours et Princesse de Cleves . Dernière edition. Amsterdam: Jean Wolters 1695.
  • La Princesse de Cleves . Paris: Compagnie des Libraires 1719. Avec privilège du Roy.
  • La Princesse de Clèves . Préface by Anatole France . Compositions de Jules Garnier . Paris: Conquet 1889.
  • La Princesse de Cleves. Préface et commentaires de Marie-Madeleine Fragonard. Paris: Livre Poche 2006. ISBN 978-2-266-19932-2

The text has been translated into German several times:

  • Love story of the Hertzog von Nemours and the Printzesin von Cleve. anonymous. 1711.
  • The Princess of Cleves. From Friedrich Schulz. 1790. New edition. Mannheim 1801. [1]
  • The Princess of Cleves. Adapted freely from the French. by Sophie Mereau . In: Romanes-Kalender for the year 1799.
  • The Princess of Cleve. Transferred into German u. ed. by Paul Hansmann. Munich 1913. [2]
  • The princess of Clèves. Translated by Eva Hess u. Gerhard Hess . [1946]. Stuttgart, Reclam, 1999, ISBN 3-15-007986-1 .
  • The Princess of Cleve. Transfer u. a. by Emil Lerch. Basel 1947.
  • The Princess of Cleve. Transfer u. Nachw. By Hans Broemser. Mainz 1948.
  • The princess of Clèves. Novel. Translated by Ferdinand Hardekopf . Manesse, Zurich 1954. New edition, with afterwards by Alexander Kluge . Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-7175-2224-9 .
  • The Princess of Cleves. Translated by Julia Marianne Kirchner . Follow-up by Émile Magne . Frankfurt, Insel-Verl. 1967.
  • The Princess of Cleve. Novel. Translated from the French by Hans Broemser. With an afterword by Henriette Beese . Frankfurt 1980.

literature

further literature on the "Princesse" in the name article of the Madame

  • Ernst Merian-Genast: Madame de La Fayette. Life and work. In: Madame de La Fayette: The Princess of Clèves and the Princess of Montpensier . Manesse, Zurich 1957.
  • Erich Köhler : Madame de Lafayette's 'La princesse de Clèves'. Studies on the Form of the Classical Novel. (Series: Hamburger Romance Studies, A, Bd. 43.) de Gruyter, Hamburg undated [1959].
  • Alain Cantillon: La Princesse de Clèves. Mme de La Fayette. (Series: Balises, Série Oeuvres # 6). 9 Nathan, Paris 1989, ISBN 2091886017 & Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3125310334
  • Jean Garapon: Profile d'une oeuvre: Madame de La Fayette, La princesse de Clèves. (Profil Littérature series. 112.) Hatier, Paris 2001, ISBN 2218036274 ; previously 1989 to 1997 ISBN 221804787X .
  • Jean Firges : Madame de La Fayette: 'The Princess of Clèves'. The discovery of the individual in the 17th century French novel. (Exemplary series literature and philosophy. 9.) Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2001, ISBN 978-3-93326416-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ on the dynastic connections between France and the eponymous region on the Lower Rhine, which lasted 140 years, see list of the rulers of Nevers
  2. ↑ Madame de La Fayette: The Princess of Cleves . Zurich 1957. pp. 281–282.
  3. ↑ Princess of cleves, the Nathaniel Lee - Сustom Literature essay Literature essays, May 27, 2014, accessed October 13, 2019
  4. ↑ Niklas Luhmann: Love as Passion . Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 12.
  5. ^ Letter from Stendhal to Balzac, 1840, quoted from Arthur Schurig: epilogue to Stendhal's "Karthaus von Parma" . 1920
  6. ↑ “Un sadique ou un imbécile”, speech in Lyon on February 23, 2007. For the reactions, see Sandra Kegel: Parlez-vous français? In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 7, 2017, p. 1.
  7. ↑ Lecture marathon de “La Princesse de Clèves” devant le Panthéon , accessed on October 25, 2017.
  8. ↑ a b Marc Zitzmann: Discovering the familiar in the foreign . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 5, 2011.
  9. ^ Year after German National Library . 90 pages; this is the only issue of the text.
  10. ↑ Chapter-wise interpretation with quotations from important paragraphs; Timeline with a synopsis of La F.'s life and French history; List of all acting persons. In French.
  11. ↑ Enclosed are quotations from Honoré de Balzac (La duchesse de Langeais), Paul Claudel (Partage de midi) and Raymond Radiguet ( Le bal du comte d'Orgel ) relating to this novel . An interview with Marcel Bozonnet, who made a scenic adaptation. In French.
  12. ↑ An interpretation. The first “modern” novel, a triangular story at the court of Henry II and Catherine de Medici. The heroine of the title discovers the contradictions of her own ego in the opposition of duty and inclination.