Afterword
This is what men are made of, even the best.[1]
"Mademoiselle Irnois"
"Mademoiselle Irnois,"[2] published in 1847 in seven installments of Le National , was Gobineau's fourth serious attempt at fiction. This time, perhaps energized by his recent marriage to Clémence, he succeeded. He responded to his familiar financial straits with buoyant productivity and a potboiler that will remain one of his masterpieces. He made the feuilleton technique work to his advantage. Each installment of "Mademoiselle Irnois" skillfully ends in a way that is not only suspenseful but creates the wrong expectations.
If one did not know the date of composition of "Mademoiselle Irnois," its relatively conventional technique would betray it as an earlier work. The largely straightforward third person narrative, the classical unfolding of the plot (exposition, building of tension, climax, denouement), the concern for antecedents and causal relationships point to Balzac. Yet, Balzacian as the story might seem, it is already Gobinian. A relationship has been suggested between Emmelina Irnois and various characters in Balzac: Eugenie Grandet, Modeste Mignon, and Mademoiselle Cormond (La Vieille Fille ), for their unhappy love affairs; Madame Claes (in La Recherche de l'absolu ), for her sublime passion. She may also have had counterparts in real life, such as Gobineau's mother, who claimed in her memoirs that she had married Louis de Gobineau to escape a political marriage forced on her by the
emperor,[3] or his sister Caroline, the frail "Patouille," who was the first to make fun of her own "prevertebrate" constitution. Tales of forced unions under Napoleon's dictates and of fortunes scandalously and dubiously made after the Revolution were current in the conservative circle around Gobineau. Although the story lends itself to the "key game," its strength lies in those elements that come from the inner Gobineau and are unmistakably his: the ambivalence of Emmelina's mute and stubborn passion, which, as Flaubert would have said, "has depths of expression like an imbecile's face."[4]
The author cultivated this ambivalence. Emmelina's character is described along two divergent lines. On the one hand, she is compared to a saint, an angel, a mystic. She is described as "tranfigured," illuminated by the flame of a "sublime" passion, as floating in the spiritual "sphere." On the other, her contorted, involuted body is still a body, a "nature," an "organism," a "constitution," whose secret vitality shows in a superb mass of hair and into which instinct—an aberrant form, perhaps, and closer to a biological "imprint" than to a true sexual drive but instinct nonetheless—finds its way. Emmelina's nature is to be soulful and, vice versa, her soul manifests itself through an instinct , a single-minded, unworded desire that, as P.-L. Rey has shown,[5] constructs its poetic space within the stuffy measurable space of a First Empire bourgeois apartment. Desire? Or is it perhaps a tropism that causes Emmelina to turn automatically toward that other being from whom her existence is suspended? Her death has been compared to La Mort du loup by Vigny (a favorite poet of Gobineau), seen as the triumph of individualism in a world crushed by the weight of autocracy and materialism. It has also been read as a first expression of the sort of love that Gobineau later called "a sacred illness" and that his critics call "crazed love" (amour fou ).[6] One would expect no less from an author Zola had accused of tumbling "into the
blue of the sky" and who crowed about it because, after all, it was better than "tumbling into the gutter," like the author of L'Assommoir .[7] But Emmelina would be no more than a female Quasimodo if, against all rules of romantic dualism, Gobineau had not made it so clear that soul and instinct, drive and spirit, desires and reflexes are synonymous.
Souvenirs de Voyage
"Akrivie Phrangopoulo"[8] and "Adélaïde,"[9] written twenty-two years later (1869), show a total independence from literary models. The stifling boredom of Rio made Gobineau turn to happy travel memories. Souvenirs de voyage , which originally was to consist of four stories, refers to various parts of the world he had visited: "The Crimson Handkerchief" to Cephalonia, "Akrivie Phrangopoulo" to Naxos, "Adélaïde" to the Germany of small kingdoms he had sampled in his early diplomatic career, and "The Caribou Hunt" to his mission to Newfoundland.
The collection was ready at the time of Gobineau's return from Brazil. In his elation at being free from a much-resented appointment, he anticipated that 1870 and 1871 would be especially momentous for his career. Little did he foresee the national disaster or the familial penury that were to fill these two years. Thus the publication of Souvenirs de voyage had to wait until 1872.[10] Gobineau was the more anxious to see the volume in print as he counted on it to help his candidacy at the Académie française by adding literary counterweight to the too technical and scientific Essai , although in his view, his pièces de résistance should have been Amadis and Le Paradis de Beowulf , which he considered to be more dignified literary productions. One hopes that neither of these pompous epic poems would have swayed its members. In any case, by 1872 these works could
not be blamed for the fiasco of Gobineau's candidacy since they were still in manuscript form.
The date and place written under the last line of "Akrivie Phrangopoulo" are retrospective—deceptive, it appears—and were perhaps a secret code between its author and the woman who inspired it, Gobineau's Athenian friend, Zoé Dragoumis. In their correspondence, she urged him to write a story about Brazil. But Gobineau spurned the idea: the Brazilians, he said, were all of mixed blood and, therefore, "the scum of mankind."[11] Instead, he would write a Greek story, forgetting that at the time he was in Athens, he had depicted Greece as "an ocean of lies and knaveries."[12] But he was referring then to complicated chains of diplomatic intrigue and to Greece's inner instability. And that was history . The Greece for which he now feels a "violent passion" (though "from a distance, perhaps," he concedes) and which seems to him a flawless land, is mythical, ahistorical.
In a more immediate context, "Akrivie Phrangopoulo" refers to a second excursion to Naxos and Santorin made by Gobineau in September 1867 while, probably not to his regret, the rest of the family waited for him in Salamis. The personal sources of the story are numerous and specific. Norton was modeled partly after Captain Lindsay Brine, the skipper of the English corvette that transported the Gobineaus to the islands, partly after Lord Edward Robert Lytton, at that time secretary of the British Embassy in Athens, who, as the son of the renowned author of The Last Days of Pompeii , as an aristocrat, a poet himself (under the alias of Owen Meredith), a great traveler, and an admirer of Gobineau, had made the conquest of the French plenipotentiary. Akrivie is, of course, Zoé, although the model seems to have been more prudish and conventional than the "Daughter of Priam." Moncade, Phrangopoulo, and probably Mella are all based on real persons. In a wider context, the story evokes the Greece of the Crusaders and of the sixteenth century,
not surprisingly more to Gobineau's taste than the democratic Greece of the classical period which he had already castigated in the Essai . Gobineau appreciated the looseness of the medieval order, whether in Western Europe or in the Levant, a looseness that had preserved the relative autonomy of small islands like Naxos and made it possible for them to bypass history.
But the most compelling context is the Greece of mythology. It serves as a stage for a fairy tale, the love between the Sleeping Beauty (as Gobineau calls Akrivie) and a Prince Charming. It could just as well be Ariadne and Theseus, Cybele and Attis, Persephone and Hades, or a hundred other Western or non-Western myths in which the hero conducts a quest, he or the princess disappears into a cave or forest, returns, and is reborn. The wind from the Aegean Sea or from the volcano's mouth whistles very ancient tunes over the graceful somnolence of Akrivie. Zoé meant "life." Akrivie's name means "accuracy" (
Gobineau admired Stendhal and was one of the first critics to hail him as a giant. According to Rey, "Akrivie Phrangopoulo" would be the most Stendhalian of Gobineau's stories, provided that one considers the systematic De l'Amour as the real Stendhal (which, fortunately for the author of La Chartreuse de Parme , is not the case). Rey draws a parallel between the various phases of De l'Amour and Norton's progressive awareness of his love for Akrivie but rightly points out that (contrary to Stendhal's thesis) this love brings him closer to his true nature and to nature as a whole.[13] What is most remarkable about "Akrivie," however, is neither its psychology nor its artfulness, for it is very loosely constructed, moving in fits and starts along the predictable but uneven path of Norton's responses to the Greek girl. Note, for instance, the ridiculously short space devoted to their lives in England. What is remarkable about it is that it revolves around an absence and a silence : hers. As powerful a catalyst as she is, she hardly speaks directly. We perceive her largely through Norton's baffled reports. So, in the long run, the impression that lingers from the story is that of the ineffable quality of her charm and, more important, of reality. In this context, is it possible to say that the Antiparos cave alludes to man's ridiculous need to rape his environment and to defile it with words ? Could the graffiti represent the superimposition of cultural clichés over Nature's primeval silence?
This tale, it is true, is not one of Gobineau's most concise. It is occasionally guilty of the loquacious bonhomie of good-natured people, kind to themselves and to one another. But it is indeed silence and reverence that the erupting Santorin elicits in the two young people who let the volcano stage for them a titanic and unforgettable spectacle. Here we have the same Gobineau who wrote that the gift of speech seemed to him the least of all possible gifts and urged writers and artists to make themselves as transparent as possible. As in the case of Proust, whose Recherche started as a Contre
Sainte-Beuve (an attack on the literary dicta in favor among his predecessors), Gobineau's small masterpiece might be a symbolic indictment of literature—or, at least, of belles lettres.
One month after the largo of "Akrivie," the scherzo of "Adëlaide" was written in a single day (December 16, 1869). Gobineau used his recollections of the four months he spent as attaché in the Court of Hanover and Brunswick in 1851. His correspondence from the time sounds straight out of "Adélaïde." "Hanover is charming," he wrote his sister. "A court, a favorite, a Palace Marshal, Courtiers, intrigues, a regiment of guards, a squadron of House guards, curial officials, a diplomatic corps. Reread Hoffmann."[14] Judging by the anecdotes, galas and costumes Gobineau describes in other letters, Offenbach would have been equally suitable. Delighted with this first mission and hopeful that it would refill his coffers, Gobineau indulged in the life and mores of these small principalities. He was entirely wrong about the money. Obligated by his rank to six servants and a coupé drawn by two handsome horses, he would be in financial difficulties in no time at all. But he assuredly got a decor and an atmosphere out of it for his future "Adélaïde."
As to its cast, he did not lack models in real life in a period when at least two such triangles existed among his acquaintances: that of Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers with his wife and his mother-in-law (and ex-mistress); that of George Sand, her daughter and Frédéric (note the first name) Chopin. In fiction, they were even more numerous, starting with (noblesse oblige) Sand's Dernière des Aldini . The most striking resemblance seems to be with Les Mémoires du Diable , a popular feuilleton by Frédéric (here we are again) Soulié which "Adélaïde" echoes almost word for word in the first spirited exchange between Elisabeth and her daughter. The possibility that one might identify the powerful Thiers as the antihero of this tarty tale was plausibly a sufficient
deterrent for Gobineau (always vulnerable, as he was always seeking better appointments) that he decided to exclude "Adélaïde" from Souvenirs de voyage at some point between 1869 and 1872.
Another reason might be that he saw "Adélaïde" as less exotic, therefore less poetic, than the three other stories in the collection. One may disagree with him. To the contrary, its crystalline economy seems to us an excellent example of his own definition of the short story:
All the finesse of observation, all the philosophy, all the logic in the world could not possibly suffice in producing a good short story. . . .Rather . . . let the form catch the reader's attention at every step, amuse and seduce him; let no expression, no word leave the writer's pen without being immediately disciplined, and set, so to speak, like a precious stone, in the place that is best for it; in a short story, handle prose as you would verse; for nothing is too good nor too carefully chosen for this small frame where everything must pass so close an examination.[15]
This craftsmanship makes it stand out among works built around the same motive: the sort of love in which only the rich and idle of a selected group can indulge. Stendhal called it love of the game for itself, also amour à querelles .[16] It involves the head (the ego, we would say today) more than the heart and is not meant for cowards. Laclos gave us a prototype, the Liaisons dangereuses which, like "Adélaïde," often speaks of love in the imagery of war and hunting. But the short story's concentration works in Gobineau's favor: instead of lengthy and wordy schemes, "Adélaïde"'s brisk ballet seems less cerebral, more instinctive and dynamic than the Liaisons . It is also less poignant. Although Gobineau refers to his heroines as two "Olympians," they look to us more like two elegant panthers working out their sexual hierarchy and territorial imperatives without lethal consequences for either, the sort of ritualized activity one observes in nature among well matched conspecifics. Thus, "Adélaïde" is the more
enjoyable for not involving our ethical values. That leaves Frederic out of the accounting; but from the start Gobineau makes him so naive, so vain, and, worse, so self-serving that one does not waste much pity on his deficient masculinity. So, in the end, if the species will not procreate, at least it will survive in the sort of balance that here takes the form of a seesaw. Let us not say that this perpetual motion is hell: it might be, given a Christian context; but, in this case, each character has more or less what he or she wants.
As in "Akrivie," the story's form espouses its content, here as a series of coups de théâtre , which, again, cannot be pointed out without spoiling the reader's pleasure. Just one example is the totally unexpected introduction at the end of the fifth paragraph (and third page) of Elisabeth's husband, a trick that sixteen years later made Henri Becque's La Parisienne[17] (1885) famous overnight. Although more durable than Becque's play, Gobineau's story was less fortunate and was published only posthumously in the Nouvelle Française in December 1913. If Gobineau tried to live up to his manifesto on the short story, his labor is hidden: his narrator, the baron, tells the tale in the relaxed manner of an aristocrat talking to good friends—an excellent excuse for occasionally loose syntax and negligent usage. Nonetheless, the story's brilliance lies in its minute details and in its understated humor, which keeps the translator on his toes. For instance, the transis évincés of the first paragraph are a splendid and oxymoronic rephrasing of amoureux transis . Or the use of the definite article, du , in les chevaux du mari , "the gentleman's horses" (p. 167 in our translation), which gives the husband the aspect of a traditional vaudeville character, one destined to be cuckolded, though here afflicted with too many wives.
Finally, the story within the story is handled with maximum economy (three lines at the beginning and three short paragraphs at the end to enclose the baron's narration) but
with maximum effect. What are we to think of Mme de Hautcastel's scandalized expressions in view of her "deep sigh" and her silence at the end, while we are told her husband slept through most of the evening? A whole conjugal drama in very few words, the kind of thing that absolutely precludes us from letting down our guard during this lovely piece.
Nouvelles Asiatiques
In 1870, "exiled," he felt, in the hyperborean darkness of Stockholm, Gobineau returned to the remedy that had worked in Rio—writing a book, this time to conjure up Asia. Thus, the book will be an Asiatic pendant to Souvenirs de voyage . Garbed in his brown and white aba, surrounded with Persian mementos and keeping the narghile burning, he wrote three stories over the summer months: one on the Caucasus ("The Dancing Girl of Shamakha"), one on Persia ("The Story of Gambèr-Ali"), one on Afghanistan ("The Lovers of Kandahar"). Taking his time over them, Gobineau wrote the last three Asiatic tales in 1873–74: "L'Illustre magicien," inspired by his love for Mathilde de La Tour, "The War with the Turcomans," and "A Traveling Life." The collection was only published in October 1876.[18] Gobineau boasted that it was a commercial success. There is no evidence of this, but it pleased a few friends, among whom were Wagner and Robert Lytton. Today it is the best known of Gobineau's literary works and the most appreciated. Romain Rolland's quip that he would give up all of Stendhal and Mérimée for the Nouvelles asiatiques[19] is but one example, among many, of their belated success.
The terror inspired by the Turcomans' raids into the bordering Persian provinces was a recurring theme in travel books, such as the Aventures d'Arminius Vambéry (1865), and magazines of the time.[20] Gobineau had been able to
verify its truth since in 1862 he had to see to the release of a rather questionable character, Henri de Blocqueville, who had been a captive of the Turcomans for fourteen years. Moreover, he found a model in a similar episode of Morier's Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan .[21] "The War with the Turcomans" has been compared to Gil Blas and to Candide , but it is less didactic than either. In contrast to the obvious grip Voltaire holds on Candide 's plot, Gobineau disappears behind a kind of moral unobtrusiveness. We live this minor historical episode solely through the eyes of an Oriental good soldier Schweick, who copes with an absurd war by means of an admirable survival instinct.
Gobineau said in the introduction to Nouvelles asiatiques that "the habit of lying masters the Persian mind."[22] He would more aptly have described "Turcomans" had he said that the Persians are masterful liars who mingle lie and truth to the point where everything is to some extent both true and false, suggesting in this manner a whole philosophy of life. The several examples of this in the text are rendered totally acceptable by the absence of outside criteria such as a judgmental Western observer would have implied. The same goes for various traits in the characters which might otherwise seem negative: their fascination with clothes, the deceptiveness of women, their overly ornate speech. The story has sometimes been read as reflecting Gobineau's poor opinion of Persians. Nothing is further from the truth. In the introduction he again extols what in his view are their qualities: "in all of them [Persians] an incomparable abandon and the absolute tyranny of the first impulse, whether it be good or of the worst." So Aga Beg may not be as pure an Aryan as Akrivie or Adélaïde, but his instincts, his adaptation to his environment, are as correct, and his vitality is equal to theirs. It is even clear that Europeans have lost something in comparison with the Persians. Thus, the charming rogue Aga Beg verifies Gobineau's
proposition (in Les Pléiades ) that beggars too can be "sons of kings."[23]
"A Traveling Life" follows Trois ans en Asie closely enough that its status as fiction may seem questionable. The footnotes of the Pléiade edition refer a great number of characters or details to Trois ans en Asie : for instance, Signora Cabarra, the Shemsiyèh, the muleteers, and caravaneers, and the ambush by Kurd bandits were based on real people or events; Lucie Conti's homesickness precipitated the end of the voyage as had that of Mme de Gobineau herself. As for Count P., the initial and his description both point to Gobineau's old friend, Count Prokesch-Osten. A variation, though, and surely a clue to Gobineau's feelings in 1874, is that the Contis have been made Italians as an homage to Mathilde de La Tour. Their itinerary is the reverse of the one followed by Gobineau on his return to France in 1858.
But if "A Traveling Life" is only barely a fiction, it is, at any rate, a fable or a parable, recapitulating Gobineau's Persian experience, and, since Persia answered many of his favorite obsessions, it can be seen as his summa. At the center of the parable is a caravan. It has all the features important to Gobineau: it is transient and unpossessive (woe to the bourgeois and materialist way of life); it constitutes a collective body whose nonchalant pace reveals, rather than arbitrariness, a superb adaptation to the terrain; its spontaneous hierarchy is as precise as it is implicit. An organism itself, it will coexist with other organisms (other caravans, other racial groups) while preserving its own integrity against truly foreign elements such as the Shemsiyèh. It has an organic rather than a mathematic sense of time. It accepts death with animal simplicity and practicality. In brief, it is the perfect symbol of an ecology, one for which the Oriental mind is better prepared than the Western because it is less structured by rationalism, more empirical, less prejudiced.
The Contis' initiation to this nomadic life in a foreign milieu coincides with their honeymoon and is presented as an edenic episode in which, as in Genesis, Eve is imaginatively more acute than Adam. After a few weeks, Lucie, until then more responsive to the enchantment than even her husband, experiences a great anguish, as if edging an abyss. The vast horizons, which used to talk to her so eloquently , she now perceives as an unintelligible prison . Is Gobineau suggesting, then, that East and West will never meet, that the fusion of cultures is impossible regardless of goodwill? Is that why at the beginning of the story he chose the Christian Eden as an incongruous symbol of bliss and innocence in the midst of an Islamic context? Is the Gobineau who not only in the Middle East but in Berne and Stockholm griped about fleas or bedbugs[24] more genuine than the one who at the beginning of "A Traveling Life" pokes fun at tourists for doing exactly the same? Probably not. Contradictions are more in his character than cynicism. Reading this story as a disenchanted fable about the impermeability of cultures seems farfetched. Rather than remarking that in the early days of their voyage Valerio and Lucie perceive the landscape through the grid of the Occidental tradition, we find significant that, as they proceed East, they desist; also, that descriptions of the landscape are minimized as their intimacy with nature increases. Even if, in the end, Lucie is not capable of relinquishing her Western identity (thus stopping short of penetrating the true "sense of things"), even if, as Professor Kaufmann states on the last page, our puritan constitution does not tolerate prolonged felicity, and even if Gobineau himself was not always up to it, he offers it as an ideal for anyone well "tempered." After all, he had warned us that the art of traveling, like that of loving, was not given to everyone. The anticlimactic ending reaffirms the parallel: once back in Europe, Lucie forgets her panic and, for the benefit of her friends, spins the
usual clichés about their trip; but her husband stops her rather sharply and—it seems—with irony, if not resentment. So much for love.
Gobineau's last story is both his simplest and his most daring. It has no other plot than the Contis' spiritual adventure (a relative fiasco at that), the adventures of the caravan itself being nothing out of the ordinary. What sustains our attention, therefore, is the narrative voice, coinciding most of the time with the young couple's impressions but provided off and on by other travelers (Kerbelai Hossein, Cabarra, Redjèb Ali, and the sage Saiyid Abderraman). In so doing, Gobineau achieves two things. In terms of plot, he completes a journey away from the melodrama of "Mademoiselle Irnois", which has taken him through "Akrivie Phrangopoulo"'s simple story, "Adélaïde"'s antistory, and "Turcoman"'s rambling tale to this absolute, minimal argument. In terms of narrative technique, he has gone from the neutral third-person narrator of "Irnois" to an empathic one in "Akrivie" to the quasi-complicity of "Adélaïde"'s narrator and the coincidence of narrator and author in "Turcomans." This trajectory would look like a modernist move toward the arbitrary and the subjective if the multiplicity of voices in "A Traveling Life" did not make it, in flagrant contradiction to some recent literary dicta, more, rather than less, objective. The balanced points of view convey adequately the ecological message of the story. In itself, it says more than any words could have about the genuineness of Gobineau's tolerance—his rallying to the Oriental belief in the complexity of life and the ambiguity of truth—and about his ultimate realism.