FACTS AND FICTIO S IN ALL THREE GENRES
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as the suicide of the Prince Royal's chief cook, Yatel, who kills himself
upon learning that the seafood he had ordered the night before might
not arrive in time to make his famous
quenelles de brochet
for the royal
party's lunch (the most famous culinary incident in history).
As for fact and fiction in the more emotive autobiographical part of
Sevigne's letters, I would be far more cautious, for this reason: Sevigne is
very cagey and shrewd about the image she projects to the world. Her
survival as an independent single woman depends on it. She is a prag–
matist and a consummate diplomat, and her talent for self-preservation,
for working the room, for networking, is renowned. No wonder she is
sometimes referred to in Paris society as "the chameleon." Even though
she is extremely drawn to Jansenism, and to the politically dissident
movement called the Fronde, she is careful never to be officially associ–
ated with those factions, for she dreads falling out with the networks of
protection she has carefully cultivated with the Church and the Court.
She takes equal care in grooming her public image as ideal mother, for
motherhood is a determinant factor in her construction of a public iden–
tity. Her social standing as one of the most gifted epistolary artists of her
day, after all, has been in part achieved by the renowned intensity of her
maternal emotions. She gets very upset, in fact, when her daughter makes
public those passages of her letters which reveal the women's stormy
relations. "Let us reestablish our reputation by a reunion at which we'll
show ourselves more reasonable," she writes. "Never again let them say,
'They are killing each other.'" Such phrases clearly indicate that we
must approach her maternal rhetoric cautiously. Did she really contem–
plate suicide a few days after her daughter left for Provence? We'll never
know. We can only venture that the forcing of these women's tempestu–
ous emotions into socially sanctioned maternal/filial behavior may have
involved a great deal of exaggeration and role-playing.
Moreover, Sevigne's correspondence calls into question the very nature
of the letter form-an issue which deserves an entire conference of its
own. And it calls into question the adequacy of the letter as a vehicle of
autobiographical veracity. What kind of an "autobiographical pact," let's
say, in Philippe Lejeune's sense, is made between the reader and the writer
in different circumstances? I have an example in mind, and
I'm
going to
wing it on this, because it's something that just came to my mind today.
As an example, let's compare the letters of Cicero to the letters of Sevigne.
We often examine Cicero's letters, when we teach autobiography, as
the first true instance of fully developed autobiographical conscious–
ness, in the sense that they trace the full spectrum of his emotions and
ambitions and pains and sorrows over a matter of years.
In
Cicero's
