This article, now somewhat amended, originally
appeared in Romanic Review,
Volume
86 (1995), pp. 36-43, © The Trustees of Columbia University.
Half-Title or Julie beheaded
by Philip Stewart
"Julie ou":
head and frail articulation, separated from their body by a certain kind of
critical terror. Imagine a book on Richardson that referred throughout to Virtue
Rewarded and The History of a Young Lady without ever mentioning Pamela
or Clarissa. This is exactly what has happened in the case of Rousseau's
novel. One could read all the way through any number of volumes devoted to it
without ever learning -- without encountering any suggestion -- that its
author gave it any other title than "La nouvelle Héloïse." The old
"Classiques Larousse" abridgment, through which generations of French
and other students first made contact with the work, nowhere so informs the
reader, even though editor J.-E. Morel occasionally refers familiarly to
"la Julie" (but also "l'Héloïse"). Even the
authoritative Pléiade edition(1)
mentions no Julie on its title page; the recent Folio edition does, but
not on its cover -- as if the publisher feared confusing a potential
reader (i.e., buyer) with an unrecognizable (i.e., real) title.(2)
There is thus some
pertinence to this question: how did a novel entitled Julie come to be
known exclusively by its subtitle? What is it about Julie ou that so
taxes the collective memory?
First point of call in this
inquiry is naturally the historical record, and in particular the author's own
references to his book. It is more than slightly significant that, as J. S.
Spink remarked, "the Abélard-Héloïse model . . . appeared in the title at
the very last moment" (165), for this tells us that, far from being the
informing concept that generated the text, it was, if not an afterthought, at
least a late comparison -- probably the result of reading Colardeau's 1758
translation of Pope's Eloïsa to Abelard. Rousseau's first working title,
Julie, ou lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des
Alpes indeed "corresponds more closely to the substance of the
book" (Spink 165). Rousseau recast that title's first part as Julie, ou
la moderne Héloïse, and only as the typesetting was under way in
early 1760 did he change this to Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.(3)
From this point until the
publication a year later there was never any doubt that the full title was to
be an amalgam of two parts, the first being Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse
and the second Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied
des Alpes. Rousseau was highly specific about the layout of the title page,(4) as
he was about the rather curious decision to separate these two titles and place
Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse separately on the half-title page
(probably to avoid too cluttered a title page)(5);
this detail was to have, as we shall see, long-range consequences. In fact, Julie
dominates, appearing in significantly larger type than ou la nouvelle
Héloïse. At the same time he specified that the running head "Lettres
de deux amants" be changed to "La nouvelle Héloïse", and this
was done.(6)
This fluctuation or
hesitation is further evident in discussion of the long "second"
preface often referred to as the "Préface dialoguée." When he informs
Rey about it, mainly in order to specify that he will not include it in the
first Amsterdam edition, he calls it Préface de Julie(7); and
while he published it under the name Préface de la Nouvelle Héloïse: ou
entretien sur les romans, its avertissement begins: "Ce
dialogue ou entretien supposé était d'abord destiné à servir de préface aux Lettres
de deux amants." It would seem that Rousseau was ambivalent about
which appelation to favor. The reason Lettres de deux amants holds equal
footing in this contest is that Rousseau generally avoided the term roman,
referring frequently in the "second" preface, for example, to ces
Lettres and ce Recueil, in order to favor the premise that the
letters could be real.
This apparent ambiguity of
title is, not surprisingly, reflected in references by his contemporaries. Le
Mercure's first notice, going by the title page alone, lists it as Lettres
de deux amants . . . but the extensive summary given in the following issue
instead uses the half-title Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.(8)
All three installments of summary and extracts in the Journal Encyclopédique
appear under the sole title Lettres de deux amants . . . (9)
This is not to say that
Rousseau did not frequently use "la nouvelle Héloïse" or just
"l'Héloïse." In Lettres de la montagne we find one mention of
"Nouvelle Héloïse" and two of "Héloïse"; in Rousseau
juge de Jean-Jacques it is always "Héloïse" (eight times) or
"Nouvelle Héloïse" (one time). But the preponderance in fact leans
towards Julie. In The Confessions, where Rousseau talks most at
length about it, he calls it "la nouvelle Héloïse" in five places,
simply "l'Héloïse" in five others, and just plain "Julie"
in fifteen. Elsewhere I have located about an equal number of
"Héloïse" and "Julie." We have no concordance for the correspondence;
my sampling, taken from 1760-1761 when the book is most often mentioned, though
highly imperfect, is nonetheless sufficient to indicate the general trend: what
we find is that while the publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, nearly always says Julie,
the many avid readers who write to Rousseau when the novel comes out use all
three designations, indeed often more than one in a single letter (I have
counted among them 13 Héloïse, 22 Nouvelle Héloïse and 25 Julie).
Rousseau does likewise in his own letters, though the most frequent seems to be
Julie: my rough count yields two "Héloïse," four
"Nouvelle Héloïse," and eleven "Julie." In short, while
allusion to the book by means of its subtitle was common, nothing at all
suggests that "la nouvelle Héloïse" had become, in the eyes of either
Rousseau or his public, anything like its true, unique and definitive title.
Yet that is what it has been considered for most of the time since.
The first revision, which
was ultimately to exercise an extended influence, was the introduction in 1764,
in the editions bearing the Duchesne imprint (Neufchâtel and Paris), of the
words "La Nouvelle Héloïse" at the beginning of the title page, which
was then followed by an "ou" before "Lettres de deux
amants . . . ." These modified title pages are all still accompanied by
the half-title Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse(10);
even so, the change was surely not made with Rousseau's permission. Indeed he
was generally quite clear about matters he had decided upon; the same 1764
editions, for example, replaced Gravelot's twelfth engraving with a new one of
Julie falling into the water ("L'amour maternel"), which Rousseau
found grotesque.(11)
Subsequently, when the
half-title was dropped in a collected edition of Rousseau's works,(12)
imitations of this title page beginning "La nouvelle Héloïse ou" were
left, as it were, exposed; and so it is that erosion by erosion Julie's
main title more frequently (but still almost exclusively in collected editions)
appeared as simply "La nouvelle Héloïse."(13)
All of the other 113 editions or re-emissions between 1761 and 1800 bear Julie
before "La nouvelle Héloïse" on their half-title or title page.(14)
The most egregious act of
emendation was perpetrated in 1761 by the English translator William Kenrick,
who not only titled the book Eloisa pure and simple(15)
but substituted throughout the name of Eloisa for that of Julie -- this
being, as he assures in his preface, "a matter of no importance to the
reader." In this operation, Julie simply disappears and the simile (which
only comes into play one single time in the text of the novel) brazenly
replaces the character. Moreover, the heroine thereby ceases to be the nouvelle
Heloise: their conflation actually robs the comparison of some of its explicit
force. Needless to say, this was -- literally -- taking the "Héloïse"
moniker too literally. Restitution was made in 1773 in an otherwise only
slightly modified Kenrick translation titled Julia: or, The New Eloisa.(16)
The first Eloisa version was re-issued fifteen or so times in England
through 1810, and even blindly taken up again in a reprint by Woodstock Books
of Oxford in 1989.
The principal motivation
behind this gradual slippage was probably the fact that a title as slim as Julie
was disconcerting in terms of contemporary practice. It was one thing to call a
work Mémoires du comte de Comminge or La princesse de Clèves, and
something else again to give it a name unknown to readers, much less merely a
first name. La vie de Marianne (1731) sports an aggressive anonymity,
but it continued with the fuller justification: . . . ou les aventures de
Madame la comtesse de ***; in this context, the operative clause is
definitely "Madame la comtesse de ***" that is, someone. We
might recall that Nivelle de La Chaussée created a small sensation in 1741 when
he gave a play the unadorned title Mélanide: it was a woman's name, obviously
enough, but it didn't mean anything. As Lanson remarks:
Cela étonna. C'était bon pour la
tragédie: les héros de l'histoire et de la fable sont connus. Mais un nom
inconnu, un nom de l'invention de l'auteur, ni symbolique ni grotesque, insignifiant,
incolore, qui n'annonçait ni l'intention morale de l'auteur, ni les caractères,
ni le sujet, on n'avait jamais donné de titre pareil à une comédie.(17)
Médée could pass; it is full of meaning:
but Mélanide? Mélanide had no information value. It is not hard
to see that Julie was in this sense highly unconventional and would
appear very simply to lack the ballast necessary to stabilize such a massive
book. (It is likely for the same reason that, in similar semantic situations,
titles today are often reduplicated for implicit reinforcement: witness the
soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and the films Europa, Europe
and Olivier Olivier.)(18)
Julie: the name, unsung, is devoid of
inherent content. This is partly, to be sure, what Rousseau intended: if
anything, it merely suggests the Alpine simplicity echoed in the assertively
modest anonymity of that other title, Lettres de deux amants, habitants
d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes. But that would also explain why he
added a subtitle which on the contrary is heavily invested with meaning:
it brings with it the whole mass of a century-long fascination with Abelard and
Heloise, a mound of plays and poems and other adaptations of their sorrows and
letters.(19) "La nouvelle Héloïse" is
as powerful and substantial as "Julie" is slight; it stakes a claim
to grandeur which counterbalances the name of a simple girl; after the two
modest, acute syllables of "Julie"(20)
it trumpets with six (a classical hémistiche): this is an Heloise for
our times, a modern Heloise. Moreover, the fact that "la nouvelle
Héloïse" stands in apposition to Julie makes it convenient to use
the one in place of the other, which one cannot so easily do with a moral
paraphrase such as "Virtue Rewarded."
We can therefore believe it
was the association with Heloise, so much more imposing for a reader of 1761
than today, that made the label seem so appealing, even overdetermined. It
carried a pungent redolence of scandal; Rousseau in his preface is quite
explicit about saying that his title stands forth specifically as a warning to
virgins: "Jamais fille chaste n'a lu de Romans; et j'ai mis à celui-ci un
titre assez décidé pour qu'en l'ouvrant on sût à quoi s'en tenir. Celle
qui, malgré ce titre, en osera lire une seule page, est une fille
perdue" (emphasis added).(21)
But at the same time, the appealing if not alluring titre assez décidé
was a lure, promising a story of lust and redemption: in relative terms, it was
something like a blaring "Lust! Crime! Passion!" on a
twentieth-century pulp cover.
For some, doubtless, to
refer to the book as "Héloïse" or "La nouvelle Héloïse"
functioned as a sign of approval, of assent to the author's implied invitation
to find in Julie the true modern embodiment of tragic medieval passion and/or
austere spiritual glory. It is understandable that, given all these active
connotations, "la nouvelle Héloïse" was catchy in a way that Julie
obviously could not be. That does not, however, make it the true title.
There were sometimes,
moreover, less admiring motivations at work. Voltaire insists on "Nouvelle
Héloïse" precisely because he, on the contrary, thinks the book so trivial
as to render its pretentious connection with the Heloise legend inherently
burlesque.(22) His use of the subtitle thus goes
hand in hand with his sarcasm about Helvetic values in general and especially
Julie's Swiss nobility (the baron d'Étange seems to be an embodiment of the
very kind of petty-noble pomposity Voltaire had just satirized in the person of
the Baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh).(23)
Thus it encapsulates much of the satirical tenor of his résumé of a plot that
features an "espèce de valet suisse" whom he repeatedly calls
Jean-Jacques. But there is more: Voltaire refers more exactly to "La
nouvelle Héloïse (ou Aloïsia)" because he wants to imply a scurrilous
consanguinity between Rousseau's title and Nicolas Chorier's infamous "Meursius
français" which went by various names of which one was Aloïsia.(24)
Such a conflation, which hinted at the indecencies or even obscenities Julie
contained,(25) would have appeared particularly
hilarious to a Voltaire greatly exasperated with what he considered to be
Rousseau's self-righteous antics.
Similar sentiments lay
behind La nouvelle Héloïse dévoilée by one Milon.(26)
Like Voltaire, Milon disparages both protagonists; he scoffs at St. Preux's
"ingénuité helvétique" and calls him things like "petit
scélérat," "tartufe," "amant extravagant," and
"pauvre diable de précepteur"; even Claire is "perfide," a
"vile complaisante." He derides the moralism of "la
friponne" Julie, and underscores his satire by referring to her
(rather than just the book) as "la nouvelle Héloïse." Moreover, like
Voltaire, Milon identifies the author himself -- for whom he also has such
unambiguous epithets as "misanthrope atrabilaire" and "rusé
charlatan" -- with "l'aimable héros de la nouvelle Héloïse."
The moral anthologist
Formey had something quite opposite in mind in publishing L'esprit de Julie.(27)
He wanted to serve the didactic purposes that informed the novel, minus the
seductive and problematizing matrix with which Rousseau had surrounded them: L'esprit
de Julie is thus an expurgated Julie, or rather an extracted and
partially amended one, a quintessence of right thinking ("un miel pur et
exquis"). He expresses this intention, pertinently for our
analysis, precisely in terms of a contrast between the two titles:
"Il fallait faire une Julie imitable et digne d'être imitée: la Nouvelle
Héloïse, au contraire, est inimitable, et indigne d'être imitée"
(vi-vii). Formey's
associations with these names are quite unlike those suggested earlier: to him,
what is prominent about the Heloise association is evidently not its prestige
and tragic grandeur but its seductive contagion. What Formey is offering,
indeed urging upon, the reader is precisely Julie without Heloise: for
in this perspective, the name of Julie alongside Heloise seems to ring clear as
a bell, like that of an angel who must be divorced from her sinful sponsor.(28)
We can probably credit the
continuing cult of Abelard and Heloise with ultimately driving Julie out
of circulation (their remains were not removed from the Paraclet abbey to the
gothic tomb in the Père Lachaise until 1817). Madame de Merteuil may be
referring to Rousseau when she mentions reading "une lettre
d'Héloïse"(29) and in any case elsewhere clearly
identifies "Héloïse" as a novel(30);
in Restif, at about the same time, we also find it called
"l'Héloïse."(31) La Harpe refers only to "La
nouvelle Héloïse", but Sénac de Meilhan instead says Julie.(32)
Irregularly, the reference thus comes to be fixed as "La nouvelle
Héloïse", which is what we find in Villemain and Sainte-Beuve.
Chateaubriand and Lamartine differ only in adding an occasional, informal
"l'Héloïse," the version Staël and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre use most
of the time without even the article. Stendhal for his part writes "la Nouvelle-Héloïse,"
usually with a hyphen.(33)
The efficiency of the
phrase must be recognized. "La nouvelle Héloïse" canonizes Heloise,
making her the quintessential model for feminine passion and abdication, while
beatifying Julie by making of her a reincarnation -- or reinvention -- of that
paradigm. (It also reveals by contrast how clumsy was Kenrick's wholesale
substitution of one name for the other, which completely short-circuited this
rather elegant semiotic process.) This double movement of course only
reinforces and elevates the gesture Rousseau had already accomplished in
coining the expression. "La nouvelle Héloïse" is the romantic
apotheosis of Julie.
By the time modern academic
histories of literature, and along with them books and articles devoted
specifically to Julie, began appearing about 1890, "La nouvelle
Héloïse" was long since definitively ensconced as the novel's official
title. One cannot learn from Brunetière (Études critiques sur
l'histoire de la littérature française), Doumic (Histoire de la
littérature française) or Lanson (Histoire de la littérature française)
that Rousseau ever authored a work named Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. In the late nineteenth century, when
the teaching of "notre littérature" was to scholars of all
political persuasions an inherently patriotic endeavor, referring to books
familiarly, without the bother of bibliographical details, was one of the ways
in which the urbane man of letters manifested his intimacy with the great
writers of the past.(34) But this propensity is not the
principal explanation for the universality of "la nouvelle Héloïse",
for it figures not as a subtitle at all but as the book's real title; it
is Julie on the contrary that sometimes serves as familiar nickname. In
Le Breton's eighty-page chapter devoted to Julie in Le roman au
dix-huitième siècle, he mentions Julie only once: "Saint-Preux
s'est épris de son écolière, Julie d'Étange, comme autrefois Abélard avait aimé
Héloïse; de là le sous-titre, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse" (248). In truth, however, the token word sous-titre
in this sentence doesn't faze him a bit; it is not thought to be a subtitle at
all and never functions as such.
Daniel Mornet, in his
countless pages devoted to Julie, never calls it anything other than
"La nouvelle Héloïse." The whole of his La nouvelle Héloïse de
J.-J. Rousseau: étude et analyse contains but one single mention of Julie
(64). Even more astonishingly, Julie does not even figure on the title
page of his landmark, four-volume "Grands Écrivains de la France"
edition of 1925; were it not for his inclusion of facsimiles of the original
title pages, this information would be lacking entirely. One is tempted to
conclude that Mornet in some sense did not know what the book's true title was.
In the case of Lanson, we needn't even conjecture; he clearly did not
know: for in an article on Rousseau for La Grande Encyclopédie in which
he alludes twice to "l'Héloïse" and even once to "Julie",
he once explicitly gives the full title of the work, and here is the way
it comes out: "La Nouvelle Héloïse, ou Lettres de deux amants
habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes" (1064)!(35)
This corrupted version of the title corresponds, as was shown above, to an
unauthorized transfer of the subtitle in some editions from the half-title page
to the regular title page(36);
in this form, no place in the title at all; time, ideology and slipshod habits
have simply obliterated her. It goes to show that the scholarly bad habit is
the worst kind, since it never occurs to some scholars that they could be in
the business of perpetuating misinformation.
As if the apotheosis of
"la nouvelle Héloïse" were not complete enough, it remained for
Bernard Guyon, annotator of the Pléiade edition, to fetishize it ultimately as
"ces trois mots destinés à devenir illustres" (Introduction, p.
lxviii). So riveted is he on them that he cannot fathom what could have come
over Rousseau the day he sent his protectrice, the Maréchale de Luxembourg, a
copy -- the last of those he wrote by hand -- the title page of which failed to
include these three magic words: in Guyon's terms, it "ne porte pas encore
le titre fameux, mais seulement le sous-titre: Julie | ou lettres
de deux amans | habitans etc."(37)
In other words, this manuscript in essence had no title: a priori, Julie,
ou lettres de deux amants cannot be understood as in any sense the book's
rightful name, of which it is but a distant glimmer; it conceals a hiatus
behind which imminent if not yet manifest, must lie le fameux titre.
That Rousseau should omit what to Guyon is "le titre" must
then amount to something of a mystification. In this rather extreme
construction of the matter, everything but "la nouvelle Héloïse" is
by definition a subtitle. Julie then is only a sort of pre- or proto-title,
a prête-nom awaiting its full revelation. A less prepossessed
investigator might, if he thought about it, draw rather different conclusions. Here,
"la nouvelle Héloïse" constitutes a predestined apotheosis that
shapes the whole inspired process: "S'il a finalement inscrit à la suite
de Julie, et avant Lettres de deux amans, ce sous-titre promis à
un glorieux destin, c'est sans doute à cause de la diffusion croissante du
'mythe' dans la littérature au cours de la première moitié du siècle"
(1338).(39) But the sublimity of Guyon's glorieux
destin is purely tautological: its only referent is precisely the romantic
mythification of "la nouvelle Héloïse", of which Guyon's phrases are
themselves an instance. Curiously, Peggy Kamuf accuses the Pléiade edition of
trivializing the Héloïse connection(40);
actually, the reverse is true: it has done everything possible to depreciate Julie.
The Pléiade editors
compound this process by making Julie invisible in their edition of the Confessions:
for, acting on the assumption that "Julie" is not a title but a
nickname of sorts, do not put it in italics, whereas they do of course for any
expression containing "Héloïse." Thus a simple
"editorial" detail ("nous avons souligné les titres d'ouvrages
cités par Rousseau, estimant qu'il ne s'agit là que d'une question de
présentation")(41)
-- particularly since it applies to the standard reference edition --
perpetuates the same old prejudice. The genuinely mythic power of "la nouvelle Héloïse" prevents
even good scholars from seeing the evidence, so that they naïvely
collaborate in actively suppressing it.
It is clear from a recent
overview of Rousseau scholarship by Raymond Trousson(42)
that it is still de bon ton to refer sometimes to "la Julie"
and "l'Héloïse"(43)
to indicate how familiar it is -- the way critics often condescendingly say
"Jean-Jacques" rather than Rousseau -- while mostly sticking with
"La nouvelle Héloïse" so people will know what you are talking about.
Julie is rarely if ever used in any scholarly title until quite
recently, and you can be sure that if you want to locate any references to it
in any index on earth written before 1980 or even sometimes later -- including
the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale -- you had better look under N
and not J. A rare exception to that rule is the recent A Rousseau
Dictionary by N. J. H. Dent, in which the listing for "Nouvelle
Héloïse" refers the reader to "Julie"; yet even this author
usually replaces Julie with "La nouvelle Héloïse" within the
text of the articles. I can cite another book where, even though
bibliographical scrupulousness leads the author to give all page references in
the footnotes under the form "Julie, etc.," he never refers to
it in the main body of the text as anything but "la Nouvelle Héloïse."(44)
Yet another recent book on Rousseau lists "(Julie ou) La Nouvelle
Héloïse" in the index, but does so under the letter N for good
measure.(45) Such schizophrenia is a gauge of
the depths of the problem. Is there any other literary work that is formally,
not casually, designated exclusively by its subtitle?
None of the explanations
suggested here can fully rationalize the way scholars and critics inexcusably
continue such a practice in our day. The shock to literary conventions has long
since worn off; if a book can be called Histoire d'O then one can hardly
be made uneasy by the likes of Julie. To continue in these circumstances
to call Rousseau's novel "La nouvelle Héloïse" is, just as in
Kenrick's wholesale substitution, to hypostatize a metaphor to no good purpose.
One can easily enough understand the advantages of referring to Manon
Lescaut instead of Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut,
or Cleveland in the place of Le philosophe anglais ou histoire de M.
Cleveland, fils naturel de Cromwell: in these typical cases the nickname is
shorter (indeed it is not necessarily a subtitle at all), and it does refer to
the principal character. But in saying "La nouvelle Héloïse" one
incongruously opts for a nickname that is longer and abandons the heroine in
favor of her idealization. Would one refer to La destinée and L'optimisme
in lieu of Zadig or Candide?
It is, in my view, a
deplorable practice ever to publish works without their complete titles, even Les
égarements du cœur et de l'esprit stripped of its "ou mémoires de
M. de Meilcour" (Folio, 1977) or Le paysan parvenu without
"ou les mémoires de M***" (Garnier-Flammarion, 1965). The
latter, to be sure, is less crucial: the subtitle really provides little new
information except that of the autobiographical form; but it makes no sense in
the former case to deprive a reader of the fact that Meilcour's name is given
as part of the title.
Actually publishing such a
work shorn of its authentic title is even more serious, and by the same token
referring to it critically in this manner. If one can say Pamela and Clarissa,
then one can say Julie. It is more accurate; that's all there is to it.
P.S. Who invented the
hyphen in Saint-Preux? Not Rousseau, whose always wrote "St.
Preux." Yet the form Saint-Preux seems even more universal than
"La nouvelle Héloïse"; the rare scholars who use the book's true
title still write its hero's name as "Saint-Preux." Henri Coulet,
whose own text (twice issued, in Pléiade and Folio) consistently -- and
faithfully -- records "St. Preux," somehow cannot resist, when he
himself mentions the character, invariably changing this name to
"Saint-Preux"! In fact the hyphen (like most hyphens in proper names)
was an innovation of the early nineteenth century.(46)
Does it matter? In a more subtle
way than the title, yes. Saint-Preux is a name and St. Preux is a saint. Here
is an illustration of the difference it makes, in a simple but typical critical
remark: "the 'contrived name' of Saint-Preux contains two important
elements of the general concept of virtue: saint, implying saintliness;
and preux, which suggests prowess."(47)
This would make sense if the name were Saint-Preux; but it isn't; the critic is
himself misled by a tradition that has arbitrarily imposed
"Saint-Preux." For "saint" (as opposed to "Saint-")
does not imply saintliness; it means saint.
Perhaps this does not
change in a major way the word-play, in the central trio's playful diction,
whereby the roturier hero becomes loyal chevalier and by the same
process has his mock-saintly halo conferred upon him. But it matters
connotatively that he is not Monsieur Saint-Preux -- in the first half
of the novel he can't be a monsieur by any measure -- but St. Preux,
interpret that as one may. But even if it made no discernable
difference, why should anyone write "Saint-Preux" when Rousseau
himself did not?(48)
Philip Stewart
Duke University
Works Cited
Attridge, Anna. "The
reception of la Nouvelle Héloïse," Studies on Voltaire and the
Eighteenth Century 120 (1974): 227-67.
Brunetière, Ferdinand. Études critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française. Paris, 1880-1903.
Chateaubriand, François-René de. Mémoires d'outre-tombe. Paris, 1849.
Dent, N. J. H. A Rou sseau Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Doumic, René. Histoire
de la littérature française. Paris, many editions beginning in 1887.
Formey, Jean Henri Samuel. L'esprit de Julie ou extrait de la nouvelle
Héloïse, ouvrage utile à la société et particulièrement à la jeunesse. Berlin: Jean Jasperd, 1763.
Hall, H. Gaston. "The
Concept of Virtue in La nouvelle Héloïse," Yale French Studies
28 (1962), 20-33.
Kamuf, Peggy. Fictions
of feminine desire: disclosures of Heloise. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1982.
La Harpe, Jean-François de. Lycée ou cours de littérature. Paris, 1799-1805.
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Lamartine, Alphonse de. Cours familier de littérature. Paris, 1856-1869.
Lanson, Gustave. Histoire de la littérature française. Paris, 1895.
----. Manuel bibliographique de la littérature française moderne. Paris: Hachette, 1921.
----. Nivelle de la Chaussée et la comédie larmoyante. Paris: Hachette, 1903.
----. "Rousseau," in La grande Encyclopédie. Paris: Larousse, 1886-1902, 28: 1060-70.
Le Breton, André. Le roman au dix-huitième siècle. Paris: Société Française d'Imprimerie et de Librairie, 1898.
McEachern, Jo-Ann E. Bibliography
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Milon. La nouvelle Héloïse dévoilée. Bruxelles and Paris: Antoine Boudet, 1775.
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1. Volume 2
in Œuvres complètes, edited by Bernard Guyon and Henri Coulet, Paris:
Gallimard, 1961.
2. This is also true of the
Bordas school edition (1979).
3. "Au titre au lieu de moderne Héloïse, mettez nouvelle
Héloïse," he wrote to his publisher Marc-Michel Rey on 18 January 1760
(RAL 928). All references to Rousseau's
letters are to sequential numbers in the R. A. Leigh edition (abbreviated RAL)
of the Correspondance complète.
4. See illustration p. 41
below, accompanying letter of circa 12 April 1759 (RAL 796).
5. "Je suis d'avis que le titre se partage et qu'il y en ait deux au
lieu d'un. Le premier n'aura que ces mots. Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse.
Première partie. Le second titre comprendra le reste. En un mot, il faut
absolument trouver quelque expédient pour que le titre Simple ou double
contienne tout ce que j'y ai mis, et pourtant qu'il ne soit pas confus"
(Rousseau to Rey, 29 June 1760, RAL 1037). Rousseau refers explicitly to the first of these pages as a faux-titre
(half-title): cf. his letter to Rey on 17 July 1760, RAL 1056.
6. "Le titre courant des pages ne doit point être Lettres de deux Amans &c. mais, La nouvelle Héloïse" (Rousseau to Rey, 6 March 1760, RAL 952).
7. Rousseau to Rey, 14
March 1759, RAL 788.
8. March 1761, p. 101;
April 1761, I: 66-85 and II: 108-24.
9. 15 February 1761, 61-72;
1 March 1761, 38-54; 15 March 1761, 45-66.
10. The editions in
question, following the Jo-Ann McEachern's denominations, are 17A-C, 18A-B, 19
and 20, all dated 1764.
11. "Cette froide et ridicule estampe . . . a été ajoutée à mon insu je ne sais par qui ni pourquoi" (quoted by Guyon in the Pléiade edition, 1824).
12. The first of these
appears to be in 1775, McEachern 34B.
13. These editions, ranging
in date from 1782 to 1792, are McEachern numbers 45A-D, 45G, 45I, 45K, 48, 52B,
53A-B, 54. The only discrete editions wanting a mention of Julie are 55A
(1789) and 55B (1792).
14. In the nineteenth
century there also appeared occasional editions with the "Héloïse"
this title alone (1843, 1850, 1872, 1889). For an overview of the novel's
publication history see Jean Sgard, "Deux siècles d'éditions de La
nouvelle Héloïse."
15. Eloisa: Or, a Series
of Original Letters Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau. Translated from
the French (London: R. Griffiths, T. Becket, P. A. De Hondt, 1761), 4 vols.
16. Edinburgh: J. Bell, J. Dickson, C. Elliot, 1773, 3 vols.
17. Gustave Lanson, Nivelle de la Chaussée et la comédie larmoyante (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 158.
18. It may of course be
arguable that the redundance of such a title, particularly in this last example,
has a thematic rationale. Not infrequently, such duplications are an attempt to
simulate the voice crying out a name repeatedly, as in Absalom, Absalom!
(certainly Faulkner's title would never be thought void of semantic content)
and the video play Tora! Tora! Tora!
19. For a list of these see
the Mornet edition of Julie, 2: vii-viii.
20. Richardson's unknown
one-name eponyms were more rhythmically trisyllabic: Pamela, Clarissa,
Grandisson.
21. On cannot say
categorically that he means specifically the name Héloïse, for Lettres de
deux amants might alone be enough to qualify for the distinction of
"titre assez décidé."
22. Lettres à M. de Voltaire sur La nouvelle Héloïse (ou Aloïsia). He particularly mocks, at the
beginning of the second letter, the comparison of St. Preux's modest
accomplishments with those of the great Abelard (399). The attribution to
Voltaire is more than probable but not demonstrable: cf. Labrosse, 186.
23. This is clear from the
parallel language of the second letter, which is a rewrite of Julie's
plot in the style of Candide: of d'Étange's Vaudois nobility
Voltaire quips: "Vous savez qu'il n'y a rien de plus grand que ces
barons" (399); and later, when the protagonist goes to Paris, he writes
that it is "de peur que M. le baron ne le fît jeter, en Suisse, par les
fenêtres de sa chaumière, qu'il appelait château" (402).
24. Aloisiæ Sigeæ
Toletanæ satyra sotadica was presented as a translation by Jean Meursius
into Latin of the work of a Spanish poetess. A French translation bore the
title Aloysia ou entretiens académiques des dames (1680) and another L'Académie
des dames (1730). Voltaire refers to Rousseau's novel as La Nouvelle
Aloisia in a letter to d'Alembert (20 April 1761, Correspondence no.
6585).
25. The hero, he writes, "s'avisa, étant ivre, de dire beaucoup d'ordures à sa respectable maîtresse" (397). Similarly, Grimm remarks on the passage where Julie cautions St. Preux against autoeroticism, "Ce dernier morceau serait plus à sa place dans l'Arétin, ainsi que quelques autres endroits du premier volume" (Correspondance Littéraire, 1 February 1761, in RAL A236, VIII:349): "l'Arétin" is an allusion to the Italian writer Aretino, or more exactly to pornographic works in circulation that were thought to be by him.
26. Brusselles and Paris: Antoine Boudet, 1775.
27. L'esprit de Julie ou extrait de la nouvelle Héloïse, ouvrage utile à
la société et particulièrement à la jeunesse (Berlin). Cf. Anna Attridge, "The reception of la
Nouvelle Héloïse," 246. Formey (1711-1797) also published an Anti-Émile
in 1763.
28. Actually, though, one
could say that his excerpts tend to depersonalize Julie by reducing personal
characterizations to abstract truths: cf. Labrosse, 178-80.
29. Sabatier de Castres will use the odd permutation "Lettres de la nouvelle Héloïse" in Les trois siècles de la littérature française (3: 427).
30. Les liaisons dangereuses (1782), letters 10 and 33.
31. La paysane pervertie, 142.
32. L'émigré (1797),
2: 1566. Étiemble cites another use of Julie in a letter of 1789 by Mme
Roland (1992).
33. Cf. Vie de Henri Brulard, 162, 163, 178.
34. Lanson for example
frequently alludes to Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, even in his
famous critical edition, as "Lettres anglaises," which was never an
authentic title -- although thanks to him many readers probably think it is.
35. He still lists the
title in exactly the same way in his revised new edition of the Manuel
bibliographique de la littérature française moderne in 1921 (785), and as la
Nouvelle Héloïse ou Lettres de deux amants in Histoire illustrée de la
littérature française (Hachette, 1923, II.138).
36. This rendition of the
title is not explained by Lanson's personal copy in the Duke University Library
(t. 2 of Œuvres complètes, Paris: Lefèvre, 1839), which bears "Julie"
in letters larger than the subtitle; a copy of the first edition also at Duke
apparently did not come from the Lanson collection.
37. Pp. 1335-36, emphasis
added. Noting that by this point (late 1759) an allusion can be found in one
letter (a letter to, not by, Rousseau) to "la Nouvelle
Aloyse,"(38)
38. From Orlando de
Lorenzy, 6 November 1759, RAL 878. The same Lorenzy, however, later refers in
two different letters to Julie (22 December 1760, RAL 1202; 28 January
1761, RAL 1241); Guyon did not know these letters, which were not in the
earlier Correspondance Générale, but there is no reason to think they
would have had any effect on his conclusions, since the correspondence
furnishes many examples of the usage of Julie by other pens. "
' "
39. Of course on another,
less lyrical level Guyon knows that it was only very late that Rousseau had
"l'idée de compléter le titre de son roman" (p. 466, n. 2).
40. Fictions of feminine
desire: disclosures of Heloise (98).
41. O.C.,
III.xcviii.
42. «Quinze années d'études rousseauistes», Dix-Huitième Siècle 24 (1992), 421-89.
43. Use of the article is a
key sign: "la" Julie signifies that it is a nickname and not a
title.
44. William Mead, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ou le romancier enchaîné.
45. Judith Still, Justice
and Difference in the Works of Rousseau (259).
46. I have never seen an
eighteenth-century edition that carried the name in hyphenated form (one finds
other variants -- "St. Preux," "S. Preux" and even
"Saint Preux"); the first in which I have seen it written this way is
the Pierre et Firmin Didot (Paris) edition of 1814.
47. H. Gaston Hall,
"The Concept of Virtue in La nouvelle Héloïse" (20).
48. For that matter,
Rousseau never ever wrote his name Jean-Jacques but rather Jean Jacques.