Mademoiselle de Scuderi

E.T.A Hoffmann

Description

As Paris is shaken by a spate of murderous robberies, the aristocratic Mademoiselle de Scuderi pens a poem to poke fun at the cowardly lovers who now fear to go out at night to see their mistresses. But when she receives an unexpected visit from a young man, who gives her a box of jewels with a note thanking her for supporting the robbers' cause, the elderly writer is plunged into a dangerous web of passion, intrigue and murder. First published in 1819 to great acclaim, and displaying all the author's trademark wit and ingenuity, E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale has inspired and delighted writers and readers ever since, and remains a benchmark for all modern crime novels.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714550305
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mademoiselle de Scudéri
Mademoiselle de Scudéri
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Translated by Andrew Brown
ALMA CLASSICS
an imprint of
ALMA BOOKS LTD
3 Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
Mademoiselle de Scudéri first published in German in 1819
This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2002
This revised translation first published by Alma Classics in 2020
Cover image: Will Dady
Translation, Introduction and Notes © Andrew Brown, 2020
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN : 978-1-84749-833-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
Mademoiselle de Scudéri
Note on the Text
Notes
Mademoiselle de Scudéri
Introduction
Madeleine de Scudéri (more usually Scudéry, 1607–1701), the ageing protagonist of Hoffmann’s tale, was the author of sprawling, slow-paced novels detailing the amorous adventures of contemporary French aristocrats often disguised as exotic figures from antiquity, all as endlessly talkative as she was; she was mocked by Molière as “ précieuse ” (ridiculously affected), and in eighteenth-century England she might have been part of the Blue Stockings Society.
In her vast Clélie, histoire romaine (published in instalments between 1654 and 1660), she included a Carte du Tendre , the map of an imaginary country called “Tendre”, or “Tender Passion”. It was designed to give its readers some cartographical orientation through the difficult terrain of a love affair and to show, in particular, how the heart of a woman could be won. Setting out from “Nouvelle Amitié” [“New Friendship”], you might take in the town of “Jolis Vers” [“Pretty Poems”], en route to “Billet Doux” [“Love Letter”] and “Sincérité” [“Sincerity”]. But if you deviated only slightly from your course, you might find yourself successively in “Légèreté” [“Casualness”] and “Oubli” [“Forgetfulness”], possibly ending up in the “Lac d’Indifférence” [“Lake of Indifference”].
If Mademoiselle de Scudéri had ever produced a street plan of her own contemporary Paris, marking the places of danger for a lover on his way to visit his mistress, she would have needed to include such spots as the Rue des Bijoux Volés [“Street of Stolen Jewellery”], or the Impasse de l’Adultère [“Adultery Close”], or maybe the Quartier des Amants Assassinés [“District of Murdered Lovers”]. For the story in which she becomes embroiled, in Hoffmann’s tale, is one where peril lurks at every corner of the capital, and targets the passion of love in particular.
Though set in Paris – the “ Ville Lumière ”, or City of Light – and nominally presided over by a king, Louis XIV, who liked to appear in his ballets as Apollo, the sun god, this is a nocturnal story full of references to necromancy and pacts with the Devil, alchemists and poisoners in thrall to strange obsessions, moving statues in the walls of houses, hidden doors and secret staircases leading into shadowy backstreets. Above all, it presents us with Cardillac, an artist of genius who is an upright and esteemed member of society, but one prone to enigmatic whims and alarming mood swings that become especially problematic after sundown.
The author, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776– 1822) – he adopted the second of his middle names in homage to his beloved Mozart – was the author of uncanny fantasies, ghost stories and apparently supernatural tales in which characters are driven by bizarre compulsions, their lives profoundly affected by inexplicable coincidences, prone to dramatic emotional reactions triggered by oddly symbolic objects or by encounters with other people whom they seem to recognize from their own distant pasts. It is no wonder that Freud honed some of his hermeneutic skills on this haunting writer, who seemed to anticipate so many of the themes of psychoanalysis.
The Paris of Louis XIV was still largely a medieval place, far removed from the modern city of long rectilinear vistas and open boulevards that we owe to Baron Haussmann’s renovations in the mid-nineteenth century. Also, Louis’s reign was often reminiscent of life in the Renaissance courts of the Borgias and the Medici, especially in the way that poison was an ever-present threat. The “Affair of the Poisons”, peaking in the 1677 trial recounted by Hoffmann, was only the most notorious example. Hoffmann dwells on it in unusual detail, even though it is something of a sideline to his main narrative. Through the depiction of the poisons flowing through the body politic, he establishes an atmosphere of corruption and paranoia, demonstrates how even the apparently most closely knit families can conceal guilty secrets and emphasizes how, in a France that was turning into something of a police state (albeit, in his depiction, an ineffectual one), suspicion could attach to even the highest in the land.
I don’t wish to provide too many clues about the story, in case I spoil the reader’s own sleuthing. However, it is not giving away too much to say that there are two sets of crimes in this story, rather than just one. The first is, as mentioned above, associated with poisonings carried out for love or, more often, money. I have used the endnotes to give the reader an idea of the pervasiveness of poison in this story; poison, being so often undetectable at the time, evaded the gaze of even the Sun King and his ministers. The second, in which Mademoiselle de Scudéri becomes more closely involved, is the spate of murders in which the victims are men carrying rich gifts of jewellery to their mistresses. The link between them seems to be alchemy. Poison is produced by chemistry (barely distinguished, at the time, from alchemy); jewellery is produced by the alchemy of art (in this case, quite ordinary gemstones are transmuted into wonderful works of craftsmanship). This link casts a shadow over art itself: is it somehow toxic, as well as intoxicating? This theme, frequently found in Hoffmann, was of course to be explored by another nineteenth-century writer equally alert to the darker side of the City of Light – namely, Charles Baudelaire. In the present story, works of art, from Cardillac’s beautiful jewels to even a couple of off-the-cuff verses coined in all innocence by the old-maidenly Mademoiselle de Scudéri, are dangerous. The complicity of art with the evils of the world it intends to reflect or embellish is, in our own day and age, an open secret (blood diamonds are merely one of the more spectacular examples). Hoffmann’s story shows murder as one of the fine arts, and art as a vehicle of murder. Can we ever have, as it were (to adapt some words of Gertrude in Hamlet , Act ii, Sc. 2), more art with less murder?
Mademoiselle de Scudéri is sometimes considered to be one of the first detective stories. But it is an unusual example of the genre. It is not clear who the detective is, or whether the mystery is in any real sense “solved”. Are the criminals unmasked through accumulating evidence, or reasoning, or chance, or intuition, or some loose and unpredictable combination of all of these? Human motive is obscure and enigmatic. What part does deductive reason play? Hoffmann’s characters, whether the detectives or the “detectees”, rarely seem capable of rational thought: they are driven by dark forces which they cannot control, haunted by memories that they cannot master, shaped by traumatic events that continue to dominate their lives and create endless patterns of obsession and repetition.
If the crime is “solved”, is this on the basis of a hunch? Even once the criminals are put out of action, there is still the possibility of a miscarriage of justice; here, too, little reliance seems to be placed on the usual mechanisms of law and order. For where the story is akin to a modern detective story (by Simenon, perhaps) is in its blasé attitude towards the authorities. Here, the professionals of state power – the King (at first), his ministers, the nascent police force, the clergy (as in the case of the Archbishop of Narbonne) – are largely incompetent, powerless or corrupt; they fail to react, or they over-react by triggering a miniature Reign of Terror that hurts the innocent as much as the guilty.
It is curious that the Virgin Mary and the saints, who are appealed to in moments of extremity but hover somewhat ineffectually over events for much of the text, do seem to intervene at the end. The supernatural must surely be a problematic element in a detective story – despite the fact that several detectives have been men of God (Father Brown, Brother Cadfael, William of Baskerville…). But it is significant that the leftover treasures at the end of this narrative are dedicated, as spoils, to the sacred (in this case, a church). The ending of the story, in all its contingency, does bring a strange sense of satisfying closure – satisfying in that, despite ends being tied up, enough of a mystery (about the wellsprings of human motive and behaviour) remains. The story shows the perils of love affairs, but it also suggests that a certain kind of what might be called “forensic flirtation”, a fleeting alliance between an all-too-fragile power of persuasion and an all-too-human grace, can be an effective counter-alchemy, providing an antidote to some of the poisons of the past.
– Andrew Brown, 2020
Mademoiselle de Scudéri
I N THE RUE SAINT-HONORÉ was situated the little house in which Madeleine de Scudéri, well known for her graceful poetry, lived through the favour of Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon. *
Late, around midnight – it would have been