The Devil in Love E-Book

Jacques Cazotte

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 145

Beschreibung

Alvaro summons up the devil and gets more than he bargains for. World ex USA, Can

Das E-Book The Devil in Love wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

THE TRANSLATOR

THE EDITOR

INTRODUCTION

Copyright

THE TRANSLATOR

Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.

Her translations for Dedalus are: The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, Paris Noir: The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier.

She is currently translating New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani for Dedalus.

THE EDITOR

Brian Stableford is one of Britain’s leading writers of science fiction and fantasy.

He is the editor of The Dedalus Book of Decadence, The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy and Tales of the Wandering Jew.

He has translated for Dedalus under the pseudonym of Francis Amery Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain and The Angels of Perversity by Remy de Gourmont.

French Literature from Dedalus

French Language Literature in translation is an important part of the Dedalus list, with French being the language par excellence of literary fantasy.

Abbé Jules – Octave Mirbeau

Against Nature – J.-K. Huysmans

Alice, the Sausage – Sophie Jabès

An Afternoon with Rock Hudson – Mercedes Deambrosis

Angels of Perversity – Remy de Gourmont

Book of Nights – Sylvie Germain

Book of Tobias – Sylvie Germain

Bruges-la-Morte – Georges Rodenbach

The Bells of Bruges – Georges Rodenbach

Cathedral – J.-K. Huysmans

Days of Anger – Sylvie Germain

The Dedalus Book of French Horror – editor Terry Hale

The Devil in Love – Jacques Cazotte

The Diary of a Chambermaid – Octave Mirbeau

En Rade (Stranded) – J.-K. Huysmans

En Route – J.-K. Huysmans

Enigma – Rezvani

Episodes of Vathek – William Beckford

Experience of the Night – Marcel Bèalu

L’lnaperçu (Hidden Lives) – Sylvie Germain

Infinite Possibilities – Sylvie Germain

Invitation to a Journey – Sylvie Germain

Là-Bas – J.-K. Huysmans

Le Calvaire – Octave Mirbeau

Les Diaboliques – Barbey D’Aurevilly

Lobster – Guillaume Lecasble

Magnus – Sylvie Germain

Man in Flames – Serge Filippini

Manon Lescaut – Abbé Prevost

Marquise de Sade – Rachilde

Marthe– J.-K. Huysmans

Medusa Child – Sylvie Germain

Milagrosa – Mercedes Deambrosis

Monsieur de Phocas – Jean Lorrain

Mr Dick or the Tenth Book – Jean-Pierre Ohl

The Mystery of the Yellow Room – Gaston Leroux

Night of Amber – Sylvie Germain

Oblate of St Benedict – J.-K. Huysmans

Paris Noir (Rue des Maléfices) – Jacques Yonnet

Parisian Sketches – J.-K. Huysmans

Perfume of the Lady in Black – Gaston Leroux

Portrait of an Englishman in his Chateau – Pieyre de Mandiargues

Prague Noir: Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague – Sylvie Germain

Quest of the Absolute – Honoré de Balzac

Sebastien Roch – Octave Mirbeau

Séraphita – Honoré de Balzac

Smarra and Trilby – Charles Nodier

The Song of False Lovers – Sylvie Germain

Spirite and Coffee Pot – Théodore Gautier

Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript – Jan Potocki

Torture Garden – Octave Mirbeau

In preparation:

Hans Cadzand’s Vocation and Other Stories – Georges Rodenbach

Where the Tigers Are At Home – Jean-Marie Bias de Roblès

The Vatard Sisters – J.-K. Huysmans

INTRODUCTION

by

Brian Stableford

Jacques Cazotte was born in Dijon in 1719 and educated at the local Jesuit College. There he was extensively schooled in the ancient and modern languages, in order to prepare him for a career in foreign affairs. He subsequently studied law, qualifying in 1740, and shortly after went to Paris in order to enter the Marine Department of the civil service. He was then required by the Admiralty to spend a further two years studying marine law in Paris.

While he was pursuing these further studies Cazotte became a member of one of the capital’s many literary salons and produced his earliest literary works, La patte du chat (1741) and Les mille et une fadaises (1742; tr. as A Thousand and One Follies). Once he had taken up his official duties, however, he found himself fully occupied. He held various posts on shore and aboard ship, and was involved in various naval campaigns against the English during the war of the Austrian Succession.

After being promoted to écrivain principal in 1747 Cazotte was posted to the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, where he had an extremely uncomfortable time, dogged by poor health and financial difficulties. He seems to have been very badly treated by his superiors and never received the full remuneration due to him for his services, and in 1752 he was returned to France in order to recover his health and produce a report on the state of the colony. He was drawn once again into the literary life of Paris, producing two ballads and contributing two pamphlets to the controversy that was then raging regarding the alleged inferiority of French operatic music to Italian. Cazotte took up the cause of French music, most notably in a vituperative reply to a critical pamphlet issued by Rousseau.

Cazotte returned to Martinique in 1754 but fared no better than before; his health deteriorated again and the hostility of his superiors was renewed. His awkward situation was further complicated by the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, during which the British tried unsuccessfully to capture Martinique. After being partially blinded by scurvy, Cazotte again returned to France in 1759, but was unfortunate enough to attempt to liquidate his assets by handing them over to a Jesuit Mission in exchange for notes of credit payable by the Society in France. These notes turned out to be virtually worthless, because the Mission’s credit was already over-extended (though the refusal of the Society to honour them added to the burden of disrepute which eventually led to the suppression of the French Jesuits in 1764).

Cazotte’s financial troubles were compounded by the fact that the Admiralty would not offer him an adequate pension following his premature retirement, and he would have been in a parlous state had he not inherited from his brother (who, being a clergyman, had no children) a large house in Pierry, near Epernay. Here Cazotte stayed for the remainder of his life; shortly after taking up residence there he married the daughter of an officer he had known in Martinique, and the couple had three children.

It was while living quietly at Pierry, at some distance from but not completely out of touch with the literary world of Paris, that Cazotte wrote his most considerable works, he developed the substance of one of his ballads into the longest of his works Ollivier (1763), a burlesque of the chivalric romances which had flattered and delighted the feudal barons of Medieval France, and which remained popular in spite of critical scorn. This was followed in 1767 by a comic novel, Le Lord impromptu (tr. as His most Unlooked for Lordship) and in 1772 (though it may have been written as many as eight years earlier) by much his most famous work, Le Diable amoreux (tr. as The Devil in Love and Biondetta; or, The Enamoured Spirit.)

In addition to these three long works Cazotte produced numerous minor pieces, of which several are of some note. La Nouvelle Raméide (1766) is a curious ‘sequel’ to a eulogistic poem issued in the same year by Jean François Rameau, the nephew of the famous composer whose eccentricities were later to be immortalised by Diderot in Le neveu de Rameau (written 1761; published 1823; tr. as Rameau’s Nephew). In the same period he dabbled in the production of fables, after the fashion of La Fontaine; these were later collected in 1788, along with various other items, including ‘La belle par accident’, a Quixotic fairy tale in the same vein as his earliest publications, and ‘Rachel’ (1788), a new version of a Spanish legend. Cazotte’s last major work was a series of oriental tales – some, but not all based in authentic Arabian folklore – issued as a Continuation des mille et une nuits (1788-89) tr. as Arabian Tales.)

Cazotte’s interest in the fantastic and the occult, exhibited in almost all his literary works, extended in the latter part of his life to a close involvement with the Martinists, an illuminist sect claiming affiliation to the Rosicrucian Order and Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati.

The founder of the sect, Martinez de Pasqualis, had established a series of quasi-masonic lodges in various French cities during the 1760s; after his death in 1768 he was succeeded by the self-styled Saint-Martin, whose close associate Madame la Croix became a member of Cazotte’s household, collaborating with him in séances and other occult experiments (somewhat to the discomfort of Mme. Cazotte). It is not clear exactly when Cazotte was initiated into the order, but the occult apparatus of Le Diable amoureux is certainly not taken seriously, and it is not until the oriental tales written in the late 1780s that the inspiration of the Martinist ideas becomes obvious in his work.

Cazotte did not remain within the Martinist fold for long; he broke with Saint-Martin in 1789 because the latter favoured the revolutionaries while Cazotte himself remained steadfastly loyal to the king. In fact, Cazotte’s loyalty went so far as to encourage him to draw up plans for a hypothetical counter-revolution, which he laid out in letters to an old friend who was an assistant to Laporte, the controller of the Civil List. When Laporte was arrested and his papers seized these letters fell into the hands of the revolutionaries and Cazotte was promptly arrested, along with his daughter Elisabeth. They were imprisoned in the Abbaye Saint-Germain-des Prés, and though they survived a massacre mounted by the Marseillais Cazotte was brought before a revolutionary tribunal, condemned and guillotined in September 1792.

Cazotte’s literary work exemplifies many of the popular literary fashions of his day. All of it was written to amuse, and the greater part of it is tongue-in-cheek. Although he was presumably grateful for the money earned by Le Diable amoureux and the Oriental tales there was never any sign of burgeoning professionalism in his career; he remained an amateur throughout. He did not lay claim to any considerable talent or artistry, and most of his critics have agreed with him. Even Le Diable amoureux, which is universally considered to be his masterpiece, is something of a curate’s egg, brilliant in some respects but distinctly ham-fisted in others. Appropriate assessment of the work is not helped by the fact that (according to Cazotte) the extant text is only half the work which he originally planned, and perhaps wrote, and that its ending had to be rewritten because the first version was deemed unsatisfactory by its readers.

In spite of these reservations, however, it must be asserted that Cazotte is a key figure in the development of modern fantastic fiction, and one of the most important of its founding fathers. He was active in an age when the fantastic materials of oral tradition were first being exploited by littérateurs, not in a purely imitative fashion but in an exploratory spirit. He was one of the pioneers who demonstrated that ideas of the supernatural which were incapable of sustaining real belief (his conversion to Martinism cannot be seen as a redemption of the notions deployed in his fiction) became in consequence more useful to the writer of amusing, satirical and moralistic fictions. Le Diable amoureux is by far his most important work because it proved, in a particularly audacious fashion, that literary dealings with a metaphorical devil can offer a commentary on the tribulations of temptation far more pointed than any pious sermon.

Cazotte’s earliest stories reflect the fashionability in early eighteenth century France of the remade folktale. Though Charles Perrault had cautiously issued his collection of Contes de ma mère Loye (1697 tr. as Tales of Mother Goose and many other titles) under his son’s name in order to protect his own reputation for serious work the book took the salons of Paris by storm, and inspired dozens of further collections of contes de fées, many of them written by aristocratic ladies or clergymen.

Perrault’s stories had all been based on traditional tales, reshaped to sustain the moral lessons which were scrupulously appended to them, but those who followed in his footsteps made little or no distinction between original and borrowed materials. Within a few years the fairies were popping up in heavily ironic tales of the contemporary French court, adding an element of burlesque which excused but did not blunt the cutting edge of the satire.

The licence which the deployment of fairies gave to writers was by no means confined to satire. The presence of such elements with a story also defused charges of indecency. Galland’s translation of the classic anthology of Arabian folktales, the Mille et une Nuits (1704 - 1717) introduced Oriental elements into the genre, and also gave a healthy boost to its eroticism. The satirical irony of the newly-composed tales lent itself very readily to fusion with flirtatiously licentious material, and the importation of such material did no harm at all to the popularity of such tales in the Parisian salons. Everyone agreed – was it not entirely obvious? – that such tales were mere literary confections, and that they should in consequence be allowed a latitude which was not yet to be extended to more seriously-inclined work. (But ‘everyone’, of course, does not include the English, whose own extrapolations of the fairy tale were much more modest in every respect).

Inevitably, the Orientalized fairy tale was itself satirized, most notably by Antoine Hamilton (though Hamilton’s most famous work, and the only one to be translated into English – Les Quatre Facardins (1710 – 15) – remained incomplete), and it is not suprising that Cazotte, writing in the early 1740s, should have moved rapidly from the light-hearted but relatively straight La Patte du Chat to the chaotic absurdity of Les mille et une fadaises.

The former tale, openly imitative of Thomas Gueullette’s pastiches of Galland, describes the amazing adventures of the long-nosed Amadil, exiled from the country of Zimzim for treading on the paw of the queen’s favourite cat (which turns out, in the end, to be an evil magician in disguise). The latter establishes its credentials by posing as a tale concocted by an abbé as a cure for the insomnia of two bored ladies of leisure. Its opening parodies the tale of the sleeping beauty, though the multiply hunchbacked evil fairy is somewhat inconvenienced in delivering her curse by virtue of getting stuck in the chimney; and its penultimate sequence parodies the most celebrated of the licentious fairy tales, Le Sopha (1740) by Crébillon fils, in featuring a room entirely furnished by people magically transformed into appropriate pieces of furniture. The middle of the story is interrupted by an entirely irrelevant account of the adventures of a knight from the moon who has descended to earth by filling his head with ideas, thus rendering himself vulnerable to the force of gravity which is impotent to affect his light-minded fellow lunarians.

It is interesting to contrast these early tales, which are intentionally slapdash, with ‘La belle par accident’, a story of the same type first published nearly half a century afterwards. Here the hero Kallibad is an avatar of Don Quixote, deluded by overindulgence in the delights of the fantastic fiction into an inability to separate fact from fancy, but Cazotte is far more forgiving than Cervantes was and is careful to excuse and endorse a moderate level of affection for fantasy.

Ollivier attempts to do for the chivalric romance what La patte du chat does for the fairy tale, but in pursuit of propriety it extends to a much greater length. Cazotte seems not to have been entirely comfortable with a project of this magnitude, probably because he was used to making up his plots as he went along, and the confused nature of the story is more a lack of organization than calculated satire. The four subplots are untidily entwined, and the eventual dénouement is both anti-climatic and incomplete. If, as is sometimes alleged, the model of the story is Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the imitation is very pale indeed.

Just as he returned to the conte de fées in the latter part of of his career, so Cazotte returned to the chivalric romance, with the much shorter ‘L’Honneur perdu et recouvré’ (published 1788). The irony in this later tale is so muted as to be almost imperceptible, and it passed for a genuine example of the species with the ironic result that it became popular with a wider readership than most of the author’s other works.

Le Lord impromptu is a more interesting experiment than Ollivier, although it stands almost alone in Cazotte’s oeuvre in having no supernatural elements. It masquerades as a translation from the English and its models are to be found among the less earnest of early English novels – it is closest in spirit to Fielding’s parodies of Richardson, especially Joseph Andrews