Charlotte Smith’s The Romance of Real Life

Gerard Depardieu as “the fake” Martin Guerre (1982 The Return, based on a novel, “The Wife of” by Janet Lewis, screenplay based on Natalie Zemon Davis’s book, Jean-Claude Carriere; director Daniel Vigne)

Dear friends and readers,

No this is not about the wonderful film adaptation, though I do include a source in the form of a widely-read Cause Celebre. In 18th century France lawyers routinely published judicial memoirs in which they told of cases they were arguing in court; addressed to judges, they were written so many readers could read them and were ways of trying to influence a local public; the popularity of these attracted two groups of people (I generalize): people who wanted to sell these apparently fascinating stories and those who were reformers and wanted to change norms. One enormously important influential (fluent, eloquent, intelligent) compendium was written and compiled over many years by Nicolas-Toussaint Le Moyne Des Essarts (1744-1810), and it contained the story of the two Martin Guerres.

As I wrote the other day I’m into 2 projects for this summer and early fall which are leading me back to favorite romantic and French books and themes, and hope to write about these here. First up, is Charlotte Smith’s Romance of Real Life: in 1787 she produced 3 volumes of stories from two of the more popular redactions of Des Essarts: Francois Gayot Pitaval’s and Francois Richer’s, both called Causes Celebres et Interessants (1735-44). I’ve read summaries and redactions in Mary’s Trouille’s Wife Abuse in 18th Century France and Sarah Maza’s Private Lives and Public Affairs. I write this blog to suggest Smith’s little lives, for a while a popular read, are not quite accurately represented in what has been written about them in biographies and literary accounts of Smith, nor in Michael Garner’s introduction to Pickering and Chatto’s edition of The Romance of Real Life.

Much that he and others have said is true of them. Enormously shortened, they often focus on a vulnerable heroine, but they are more than abridged. They omit the arguments of the different sides, so unless Smith is particularly interested in these, they are hollowed out narratives that she shapes. Further, most of the time the heroine is lost amid a welter of detail about everyone else involved (family, sometimes friends),and the final lesson drawn is not necessarily in her favor. Rather story after story by Smith reveals to us how the legal and economic arrangements of the ancien regime, daily familial customs, create hatred and resentment and can lead to murder and profound injustice and misery. She brings out first repeatedly how everything is inherited by one person (a male), how everyone in the family has to live with this one man, or obey his ideas or the ideas of those who control or are close to him, and how this creates the hatreds and resentments that give rise to the misery, thievery, occasional murders, physical abuse and threats to women the cases make visible.

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William Hogarth (1697-1764), The Denunciation

So, for example, in “The Count de St Geran” (Volume 2, pp 187-204 in Pickering and Chatto) where various family members seek to murder a wife’s newborn son, the origin of the action is a brother who wants to inherit the property. This is one of Smith’s longer stories and she depicts the whole households, the interactions and motives of the different people with a different relationship to the property and heir. This emphasis or perspective may be seen at length, dramatized in Smith’s The Young Philosopher where the Kilbrodie family, led by an older woman, succeed in treating one of our two heroines, Laura Glenmorris so badly during her pregnancy that her eldest born son dies.

“The Contested Marriage” is another lengthy tale (Volume 1, pp 167-77). Here Smith shows us a worthy young pair of people who want to defy their parents and marry for love and do. We see how the parents are relentless and even after marriage and the birth of children seek to destroy the marriage. In this story Smith produces arguments which in Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (translated very sympathetically by her as Manon Lescaut, or The Fatal Attachment) support Des Grieux, but for his criminal behavior — and that criminal behavior is something Grieux is driven to. In both Prevost and Smith’s texts the point is made explicitly that Grieux would have married Manon early on and gone to live with his father again had the father permitted. In “The Contested Marriage” the marriage is not wholly valid because the law forbids young people to marry who are under 25/30 w/o parental consent. Here her emphasis is on how legal arrangements pervert everyone to behave either illegally or immorally.

Tellingly, Smith depends on her reader to feel how awful is the parents’ continual appeal to legal forms when children have been born, against what I’ll call an inner sense of reality and justice, or fairness. And in all her stories she rings the changes on words like justice, the “heart” (our hearts are supposed to “revolt” at cruel practices), “terror”, “treachery” to our “affections,” and “atrocious behavior.”

Not that females are not shown (implicitly, not explicitly) especially vulnerable. “The Deserted Daughter” (Volume 1, pp. 152-59) is a good example of how females are shown to be vulnerable, but at the same time how Smith’s idea is not to show sympathy for the woman’s risk, lack of power, but rather how property arrangements can hinge on chances, and perversions of feeling emerge when variously desperate and (by virtue of the original arrangements) suspicious people have to cope with realities that result. This too is one of the longer tales.

Emma Brownlow King, The Foundling Restored to Its Mother (1858) — in the 19th century we begin to see sympathy for a women in a woman painter

Smith tells of a child who was born 7 months after her parents were re-united after a separation. As in Mary Trouille’s cases, we find an instance where a very old man (age 69) had been married to a young woman (29). Joachim Cognot just could not accept that his wife had a premature infant, and he farms her out to a woman, Frances Fremont, agreeing to pay her for her service, but in a short while stopping payment. The woman conceives real affection for the daughter and brings her up for 14 years but when she discovers who the mother is, goes to both parents to demand payment. The mother’s conduct shows wavering: she grieves when her baby daughter is taken from her, but then lavishes attention on the one son; when the nurse comes for the money, she supports her husband in refusing to pay; she and the husband do take the daughter, called Mary into their house as a servants, but after he dies, her mother begins to treat her as a real daughter, providing for her a suitable match, but after she marries again, becoming Madame Coquant, herself does all she can to marginalize this daughter. The court after much chicanery on the part of the Madame Coquant, finds for the daughter a right to half the legacy from the original legal father.

Amid all this Smith never loses sight of its origin: a premature baby and father’s angry suspicions. She does not produce a feminist argument against the man who would not accept this child — we never know that there was another man nor who he could have been, but rather warns the reader against “such indiscretions.” A contrast is found in Winston Graham’s Poldark novels where intense sympathy is extended to a heroine who is raped by one of the heroes, conceives a child, but married to his enemy must deal with his suspicions about her 8-month pregnancy. When after much emotional abuse heaped not only on her but the son, she takes a concoction which leads to premature birth (but also risks infection and death), and dies, we are told these two men between them killed her. Her son, Valentine (ironically named) grows up twisted. Graham’s 18th century series often has paradigms which imitate 18th century novel paradigms or realities from an instinctively feminist point of view.

Smith is somewhat interested in the mother’s treachery to her daughter, but not alive to the different mothers the girl had nor that she could be considered a child traumatized by too many re-adoptions, something we do see in novels of the era, including her own.

“The Pretended Martin Guerre” is yet another of Smith’s longer stories, and again a modern treatment brings out what is Smith’s emphasis. Smith’s title indicates how she agrees with what she supposes are conventional sympathies of the reader. Natalie Zemon Davies goes into the subtle psychological nexus we can glimpse even in Smith’s abridgement: the real Martin Guerre fled his parents and wife because he had been impotent and had been shamed and pressured over his failure to be masculine in the appropriate way. Davies sympathizes with the wife’s divagations and terror of her first husband (I’ll call him) and also makes the case that our identities are partly or even largely the result of not on inner selves, but who and what we are asked to enact. This idea is found in Anthony Trollope’s novels about children declared illegitimate as opposed to those granted legitimacy.

The film at times presents a perspective like Smith’s — but not the wife at the center

Smith’s interest is in showing how economic and social arrangements lead to deep perversions and troubles in particular family groups. She emphasizes how the case was brought by an angry deprived relative: Martin’s uncle, aided and abetted by Martin’s wife, Bertrande, originally from a rich family (but that gave her personally no power), who was swayed back and forth by need, fear, her vulnerability. There we do see the woman’s perspective. Bertrande needed a husband, one adequate to produce the heir with her; when the “real” Martin turns up we are made to see he is an angry man and may have beaten and will beat her again. More is known as this went from court to court and had the unusual end result of a real claiment turning up: often these claiments are false, with the original man really dead. Smith goes over the arguments and the welter of emotiona that arises and perspectives turns her book into an anticipation of Leonard Woolf’s horror stories of family in a traditional village, The Village in the Jungle (Woolf was a magistrate for many years in “Ceylon”).

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To conclude, the first story in the volume is the horrifying one of the Marquise de Gange (Volume 1, pp 131-59), made familiar to readers since Sade’s story, Dumas’s novel and other retellings. In Smith’s a great deal of space is spent on the Marquise’s earlier history, including her first marriage, so that we feel we are entering the world of 17th century romance redolent of Madame de Lafayette. Smith cuts short (hardly mentions except as something claimed by the marquise’s mother) the beatings of this woman, the sexual rage of the husband; rather it seems a story of “avarice” and “revenge,” that revenge partly brought on by the heroine herself for laughing at the young stupider brother. Smith is at a loss to explain the “excess of cruelty” here and spends space and time on the agonies the marquise experienced from the shots and poison, and after life of the second brother, the Abbey who escaped punishment by the way in which he elsewhere manipulated the norms and manners. “The Chevalier de Morsan” (Volume 3, pp. 249-74) is a long, the last story, “Renee Corbeau” (Volume 3, pp. 284-85) short high-romance.

But when totally serious what fuels these tales are the ironies and distortions of life set up by customs and laws, fearful worlds they are of violence, of inter-familial hatreds and abuses, desperate intense concern for money, public pride, status in circumstances which exacerbate the rigidity of these laws and horrendous punishments just thrown off. “La Pivardiere” (Volume 1, pp 160-166) about a bigamy case, one of whose victims is whipped, burnt with a hot iron, and exiled to poverty “fore ever. It is not good to be a woman in this world, and not possible to defend yourself against a violent man, but that’s not Smith’s central point. Her central idea is might be said to be to put before us what her later reform minded heroes (Desmond in his novel of the same name, Armitage in The Young Philosopher) assume is the case in life and needs radical change, not just in law but custom.

That this is will be supported by a tale still in print though the author’s name not well-known, Annette von Drost-Hulshoff’s novella, The Jews Beech, about which I hope to write a foremother poet blog soon. It may seem a mild instance but I suggest Austen gets at this too when she has Elizabeth tell Lady Catherine de Bough when Lady Catherine is indignant at the idea that the younger daughters are out before Jane Bennet, the eldest is married or at least engaged: she does not think such behavior conducive to encouraging kindness among sisters.

They also contrast very sharply with the popular sentimental and gothic tales of the era, with their unreal castles, pursuits and pirates, and gushing exemplary emotionalisms (gratitude) on the one side and supposed quiet domestic realism on the other (from Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox to Jane Austen and Elizabeth Inchbald say). I think they justify and like some of her novels are said to have done (The Old Manor House as precursor for Bleak House) the later melodramatic novels of the Victorian era.

Richard Redgrave (1804-1888), The Outcast (1851)

Ellen