Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle by Anne-Marie-Louise D'Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier

Renaissance Quarterly, Fall, 2004 by Abby E. Zanger

Anne-Marie-Louise D'Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier. Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle by Anne-Marie-Louise D'Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier.

Ed. and trans. Joan DeJean. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. xxix 86 pp. index. bibl. $35 (cl), $14 (pbk). ISBN: 0-226-53490-1 (cl), 0-226-53492-8 (pbk).

This volume presents a small slice of early modern "feminist" discourse by reprinting a correspondence between two women who frequented the French court of Louis XIV. The letters concern a project for a utopian retreat where all the pleasures and none of the pains of contemporary court life would be experienced. Chief among the pleasures that would be retained in what is termed "a simple Christian life," were music, food, and promenades, as well as good discourse among high-minded persons. Chief among the pains to be excluded was one evil above all: marriage. This is the central discussion in the correspondence that Joan DeJean has so elegantly edited and translated in a bilingual edition put out in the ever growing and increasingly invaluable University of Chicago Press series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.

It is not surprising that the exchange between Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans, the Duchess of Montpensier and first cousin to King Louis XIV, and Francoise Bertaut Motteville, lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria, should focus above all on marriage. Both had suffered the ill effects of the early modern marriage plot. One of the most eligible (and richest) women in Europe, Madame de Montpensier was also a subject of the king, who manipulated and frustrated her own marriage prospects endlessly in order to protect his own power by undermining that of his wealthy and rebellious cousin. Madame de Motteville, on the other hand, had been married at eighteen years of age to a man in his nineties. When he died soon thereafter, he left her with no children as his heirs, and thus little means of support. The two women's correspondence was begun in May 1660, while in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a town on the border between France and Spain, where they were awaiting the marriage of Louis XIV to the Spanish Infanta. In the midst of ongoing festivities, but also, one imagines, the boredom and the physical discomfort of camping out in small towns invaded by the court, they began an epistolary exchange. Even though they would have surely seen each other daily, the two, it seems, wanted more than a conversation. They wanted to preserve their thoughts on paper. The first four letters, which contain the bulk of the discussion of Montpensier's project for a utopia, have already been published, initially much to Montpensier's stated displeasure. DeJean adds four new letters to those previously known, which she brings to light from a recently acquired manuscript in the collection of the French National Library. While less interesting than the previously known correspondence, these new texts flesh out the relationship between the two correspondents and add another chapter to Montpensier's own marriage woes in outlining her fears in the face of pressure to accept the king's plans for her to marry, and then her triumph at once more escaping the kinship exchange projects of the absolutist state.

DeJean's translation is to be lauded, particularly when she tackles the long sentences of Madame de Montpensier, whose syntax is at times treacherous. Where there are ambiguities, DeJean adds judicious notes. The dual language nature of the volume makes it useful for both the student and specialist of early modern French women, as does the ample introduction. The only mild critique one might make is DeJean's relegation of Montpensier's interlocutor, Motteville, to a decidedly secondary position. Indeed her identity as an author of the correspondence is erased in the volume's title. It is true that Montpensier is the better-known historical figure, and, as DeJean points out, Motteville's only other attributed writings are her memoirs, where she serves as Anne of Austria's mirror. DeJean would also have Motteville be Montpensier's mirror. But in fact, both in the letters and in her own memoirs, Montpensier pays ample homage to Motteville's learning, her admirable writing, her knowledge of Italian and Spanish, as well as of Scripture, the Church fathers, poets, and historians. Indeed DeJean's volume is especially valuable precisely because it adds to our knowledge of Madame de Motteville and her corpus. Of particular interest are Motteville's hesitations about Montpensier's utopian project, most particularly her comments concerning the nature of governance and the dangers even of female sovereignty as well as her comments on current writings on marriage with which she disagrees. Indeed in these letters Motteville shows herself to be not just "another" voice, but as significant a voice in early modern Europe's discourses about women as her better known, higher born, and better studied interlocutor, Montpensier.