Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Although, as I have previously noted in these pages, feminist politics did not take its first giant stride forward in France until the publication of Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights ofWomen, issued in association with the Revolution of 1789—which got its author sent to the guillotine during the Terror—the sentiments contained therein had been stirring for some time in the works of numerous female novelists. Most such novelists, of course, produced “naturalistic fiction” in which settings and storylines pretended to depict the world as it was; while frequently protesting against its iniquities, there was not much scope in their plots for speculating about how things might be different. There were, however, two genres of fiction produced in the early eighteenth century with noticeable frequency that offered ready opportunity for the imagination of alternative states of being: utopian satire and “fakeloristic” fantasy largely inspired by the popularity of Antoine Galland’s Mille-et-une nuits.
Many of the female writers of the period dabbled in the latter to some extent, but one who ventured into both, and therefore warrants particular attention was the author of Voyages de Milord Cétondans les sept planettes, ou Le Nouveau Mentor, first published in four separately issued volumes in The Hague in 1765–66, with the by-line “traduits par Madame de R.R.” It was subsequently reprinted in volumes seventeen and eighteen of Charles Garnier’s collection of Voyages Imaginaires, songes, visionset romans cabalistiques [Imaginary Voyages, Dreams, Visions and Cabalistic Fictions] in 1787. Garnier also reprinted the same author’s much shorter novella, Les Ondins, conte moral (1768), a more colorful and freewheeling fantasy, which—in spite of its apologetic subtitle—is a pure entertainment.
The former work represents the “seven planets”—the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn—as Earth-clone worlds in each of which a single human penchant is exaggerated to become an overriding theme of existence, thus exposing it to analysis, criticism, and sometimes ridicule. Venus, not unnaturally, is a planet ruled—quite literally—by Amour, but it is also a world in which the balance of power between the sexes is allegedly equalized. This is a translation of the summary of the society of the “Idalians” offered by the story’s narrator, Lord Céton (who, because he is supposed to be English, is called Seaton in the English translation, The Voyages of LordSeaton to the Several Planets):
The Idaliennes, more skillful than the women of our world, do not recognize the rights that men have judged it wise appropriate to claim for themselves, nor the severe rules that are imposed upon them; they say that they are almost impossible to observe. It is true that on our world men think they have the right to demand everything. They take their generosity so far as to attribute to women a great deal of weakness and more vivacity in their passions, and simultaneously demand more strength than they have themselves to surmount them; I would like to ask them whence comes that exclusive privilege of being able to anticipate all their desires, yield to all their impulses and only listen to the voice of nature, while they scarcely accord to women the faculty of vegetation; they only regard them as automata, who should only serve as the ornament of a drawing room , which they would like to decorate with various changes.
It would be necessary, to judge with equity the weakness and flighty humor that is said to be the portion of the fair sex, to reduce things to a fair equality, in order to be able to examine, setting prejudice apart, whether, in spite of the frivolity attributed to women, they are not a thousand times less inconstant than men. It is well known that when a fop becomes unfaithful, his conduct is justified to all those of his species; no one bothers to protest against his perfidy, and the mistress he has abandoned becomes one triumph more for him; but if that mistress wants to avenge herself on the infidel by substituting a new lover for him, it is settled that she is a coquette, fickle and perfidious, and the entire nation of lovers condemns her without appeal. The same action that adds to the glory of the man dooms forever the woman who has been unfortunate enough to conceive a liking for him and confide herself to his probity.
Meanwhile, women are incessantly decried; they are accused of inconstancy and infidelity; a virtue proof against anything is demanded of them, and the unjust men who have made the laws want to reduce them to a harsh slavery, while they accord themselves a complete liberty. The consequence of that is what one sees every day, which is to say that a surly, jealous, eccentric, bigoted, or miserly husband imagines a thousand chimeras and mistakes the frenetic visions that agitate him for realities, which he publishes loudly; then all of marital society takes his side, condemning the wife without a hearing, and all women in general find themselves engulfed by the devastating verdict that the jealous senate delivers against them.
I am always astonished that women do not band together, that they have not imagined forming a separate society, in order to avenge themselves on the injustices that men do to them; may I live long enough to see that fortunate usage of their courage! But until now they have been too coquettish and too dissipated to occupy themselves seriously with the interests of their sex. I have noticed on almost all the worlds that it is nothing but self-regard and vanity that enchains them; personal interest comes to the rescue of a heart already seduced by the lure of the pleasure they promise themselves, and which often only resides in their imagination; those are doubtless the reasons that prevent them from banding together, and which make them abandon the common cause.
In fact, that summary is not really borne out by the more elaborate description of Idalian society painted in the novel both in the section of the main narrative that describes the exceedingly peculiar adventure of Céton (turned by his tutelary genius into a fly) as he witnesses the methodical and overwrought seduction of his sister Monime (temporarily deprived of her sense of identity by the same genius) by the charming but flawed Prince Petulant, while tormented by a seemingly incestuous jealousy and in the various inserted stories bulking out that section of the narrative. In all those accounts, the initiative supposedly shared equally by Idalian women seems to be exercised entirely by men, and the standard perfidies of man’s inhumanity to woman run riot as they seem to do on all the other planets, not excluding the Sun, the other world where a more equal balance is reported to have been achieved.
The report on the Sun’s egalitarian principles is delivered by Zachiel, the tutelary genius and “new Mentor” who is taking Céton and Monime on their educational tour of the planets:
In this world, men have no superiority over women unless virtue, science, common sense, and reason gives it to them. It is certain that a woman can equally well possess all these gifts, especially when she receives the same education; these have that advantage; they are taught the same sciences and the same talents; it is by means of that education that they acquire the accuracy of reasoning in useful and necessary knowledge. From birth they are taught to think justly, to reflect, and to speak reasonably about all things; one can say that there is scarcely anywhere except this world where their veritable triumph is established because common sense, intelligence, and erudition shine equally in all their expressions—which proves that the truth resembles light and that it strikes all minds attentive to seeking it.
Nature, always judicious and liberal in distributing to humans an equal portion of her gifts, has not had the pretention to favor one sex over the other. I do not know by what fatality women on other worlds have been forbidden an exact and profound knowledge of all the sciences; one can never offer them an insult more marked, the consequences of which are more deadly; for it is certain that it is only the ignorance in which they are raised that occasions their weaknesses, their superstitions, and all their deviations.
That is one thing that you ought to have noticed on all the worlds we have visited. You are not unaware that the majority of pretty women almost always spend half the day on their toilette; they are seen to examine with expert care the relationship that foreign ornaments have with their face and only settle on one or another embellishment after the most scrupulous examination of the effect that it ought to produce on their charms; what ought to be presumed of the time that the old and the ugly spend on it, especially when the graces contribute nothing of their counsels.
You will not see here, either, those women who, with simple and stupid expressions, listen to the numerous discourses of numbskulls as frivolous as butterflies, who only deign to talk to them with a view to seducing them by the false impressions that they create in their minds. People are unaware, or seem to be unaware, on several of those worlds of the utility that is obtained by giving women a suitable education, which would procure both sexes their happiness and tranquility. Those reflections, which are usually the prerogative of a genius, are self-evident to the way of thinking and acting of the inhabitants of the sun.
Again, this description is not really borne out by what Céton and Monime observe on the Sun, and that section of the text actually serves to demonstrate the author’s woeful lack of a scientific education as she strives heroically but impotently to offer an account of what all the scientific geniuses reincarnated on the sun have discovered, sometimes employing them as mouthpieces in order to misinterpret their own work. She is particularly fond of astronomy—the idea of it, at least—and gives the ex-astronomers of Earth a chapter all to themselves in order to wax lyrical on the joy of their recent observations, but seems blithely unaware of the incongruity of her parallel insistence that there is perpetual daylight on the sun and no darkness: a factor that is surely inconvenient for the exercise of an astronomical vocation. The sequence set on the Sun is also blithely anachronistic, as the story is supposed to be set in the seventeenth century Céton and Monime being refugees fleeing from persecution by Oliver Cromwell although many of the scientists they meet on the Sun did not die until long thereafter.
Again, although Zachiel insists that the section of the City of the Philosophers attributed to women is well populated, the author cannot actually think of very many wise women who might be found there, although the list of men who briefly dazzle Monime with their supposed wisdom extends to dozens. This is the whole of Céton’s note on the women’s quarter:
When we arrived at the arbor, the genius pointed out Madame de Maintenon, who, with a majestic and tender expression, was showing Madame de Sévigné several letters that a skillful secretary had written in her name but which she disavowed in part. Sappho, Deshoulieres, de Villedieu, and several others were walking on the terrace, among whom the genius pointed out to us the ingenious du Châtelet, the Urania of a scholar of our world, whom Zachiel assured us is one of the greatest geniuses of our century.
The references to the French female poets are to Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières (1638–1694) and Marie-Catherine Desjardins de Villedieu (c1640–1683). The ultimate reference is to Voltaire—still alive and very active when the text was published—who was famously accommodated for some time by Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749). Although the latter’s “ingenuity” is summarily credited, no mention is made of her actual contributions to science; it has to be admitted, however, that they were not widely publicized at the time, and it is only recently that modern feminists have begun the work of trying to obtain due credit for them.
“Madame de R.R.” was, of course, the author rather than the translator of the work in question: Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert (1705–1771). She had been born into an aristocratic family that had already come down in the world considerably by the time she was born. Her paternal grandfather had been a provincial prosecutor in the employment of the State, but her father was obliged to go into commerce to make a living; her mother, whose maiden name was Bourée, was the daughter of an advocate. Her father was acquainted with Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), the author of Entretienssur a pluralité des mondes (1686; tr. as Conversations onthe Plurality of Worlds), an enormously influential popularization of the Copernican theory of the solar system. She met Fontenelle on more than one occasion when he came to dine in their home and retained a sufficiently elevated idea of his importance to grant him an anachronistic place of honor on the Sun, but if she ever read his masterpiece she does not seem to have taken its lessons aboard as her own account of the nature of the solar system is extremely confused, and poor Monime remains utterly bewildered, even after listening to Ptolemy and Copernicus debating the issue and receiving brief tuition from Kepler and Newton.
Marie-Anne de Roumier’s parents died while she was still a child, and the debts her father left caused a posthumous bankruptcy that left her devoid of any inheritance; the relative who became her guardian by default immediately put her into a convent from which she emerged only in order to be married off to an advocate by the name of Robert. The only biographical memoir written by someone who apparently knew the author, Joseph de Laporte—it is contained in volume five of Histoire littéraire des femmes françoises (1769)—has nothing to say about Monsieur Robert except that he was highly esteemed in his profession and does not make any mention of his age at the time of the marriage or his death, The preface of Voyages de Milord Céton finds the author alone and “without support” in struggling with her many tribulations and strongly suggests that she had been a widow for some while. Laporte also reports that her health was poor and she was often ill.
Whether she was widowed before she started or not, it was not until relatively late in life that Madame Robert decided to try her hand at writing. She might have taken some inspiration from the examples set by Madeleine de Scudery and Madame de La Fayette a century earlier in the days when the Roumier family was peripherally associated with Louis XIV’s court or from the slightly more recent success of Francoise de Graffigny, but she was undoubtedly primarily aware of and influenced by some of the successful contemporaries featured alongside her in Laporte’s volume on the works of living female writers where she features in second place, behind the former actress Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (1714–1792) and ahead of Madeleine de Puisieux (1720–1798), an occasional collaborator with Denis Diderot. Madame Robert’s works followed a pattern not dissimilar to theirs, including both naturalistic “sensibility novels”—the ancestors of stereotyped modern love stories, which included but were not initially prompted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse (1761; tr. as The New Heloise)—and fantastic “moral tales” borrowing motifs eclectically from Galland’s pastiches of Arabic folktales, Madame d’Aulnoy’s contes des fées [a term usually translated, dubiously, as “fairy tales”], and classical mythology.
Madame Robert had published two sensibility novels prior to venturing into new literary territory in Voyages de Milord Céton, the first of which, LaPaysanne philosophe, ou Les Aventures de Madame la Comtesse de**** [The Philosophical Peasant] (1761–62), had detailed the complex but relentlessly moral love life of an orphan peasant girl adopted and brought up by an aristocratic woman. That novel was reprinted three times and thus appears to have been considerably more successful than La Voix de la nature, ou LesAventures de Madame la Marquise de **** [The Voice of Nature] (1764), another tale of a plucky orphan in determined quest of true love. The plaintive preface to Voyages de MilordCéton, as well as certain comments in the account of life on the Moon, suggests that the relative failure of the second novel might well have impelled her to attempt something more eye-catchingly unusual as a measure of desperation. The text of Voyages de Milord Céton contains more than one passage suggesting, somewhat disingenuously, a strong disapproval of the public’s liking for such fantastic works, but if Madame Robert felt some resentment at the fact that she was pandering to that supposedly unhealthy appetite, it certainly did not prevent her doing so wholeheartedly and at great length.
The first volume of Voyages de Milord Céton , which only contains the description of the Moon, although the preface and the opening sequence clearly indicate the intention to take in the entire solar system, belongs to the tradition of lunar satires spectacularly launched in France by the posthumous publication of Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre monde, ou Les États etempires de la lune (1657; tr. as Comical History ofthe States and Empires of the Moon) and more recently carried forward by Charles-François Tiphaigne de Le Roche in “Zamar” (1754 in the second edition of Amilec; tr. as “Zamar”) and Le Voyageur philosophe dans un pais inconnu auxhabitans de la Terre (1761; tr. as The Philosophical Voyager) signed “Monsieur de Listonai.” Madame Robert had definitely read the last work as she borrowed a passage from it, rather clumsily, to shore up a description of laboratory apparatus in which she was clearly out of her depth, and she almost certainly read Tiphaigne’s novel too; both works carried forward in their own idiosyncratic fashions the traditional notion of the Moon as an abode of folly, which is reproduced with an equally idiosyncratic twist in Madame Robert’s satirical depiction of that particular “heaven.”
It seems probable, too, that Madame Robert was familiar with the Chevalier de Béthune’s Relation du monde de Mercure (1750; tr. as The Worldof Mercury); although her account of Mercury is very different from Béthune’s, the patchwork narrative strategy she employs, including both allegorical and anecdotal inclusions, is very similar, as is the stratagem of employing a prefatory account with a salamander to account for the existence of the main narrative. Madame Robert’s subtitle, however, indicates that her endeavor’s principal literary model is not an interplanetary fantasy but François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699; tr. as The Adventuresof Telemachus), in which the protagonist is taken on an educational tour by his tutor, Mentor, who gives him extensive lectures on the kind of government that he ought to adopt when he succeeds his father, Ulysses, as King of Ithaca.
Madame Robert’s account of the more far-ranging educational tour to which Zachiel subjects Céton and Monime is to a large extent an homage and certainly echoes many of the criticisms that Fénelon made of the court culture of Louis XIV’s reign (which resulted in his expulsion therefrom) but also rebukes the earlier Mentor to some extent for the implication of lèse-majesté contained in his more radical ideas about parliamentary government. Although it is not explicit in the early sections of the novel that Monime and Céton are being trained for sovereignty, that does eventually turn out to be the case, Monime eventually being revealed as the rightful heir to the throne of Georgia, who is enabled by Zachiel to reclaim it in a strange “alternative history” that refers to various individuals implicated in the seventeenth-century history of Georgia in our world but develops their life-stories and the fate of the nation very differently.
After publishing Voyages de Milord Céton, Madame Robert went on to publish a third naturalistic novel, Nicole de Beauvais, ouL’Amour vaincu par reconnaissance [Love Vanquished by Gratitude] in the same year as Les Ondins, conte moral (tr. in the same volume as The Voyages of Lord Seaton as “The Water-Sprites”) three years prior to her death. LesOndins bears a far closer resemblance to the whimsical fantasies produced by such contemporary female writers as Madame Roccoboni and Madame de Puisieux than Voyages de Milord Céton does to any other near-contemporary interplanetary fantasy, but it is more extravagant than the general run of such stories, packing in far more incident and a much greater abundance of disparate motifs. It also makes an interesting stylistic contrast with the early novel, cramming more action into its 33,000 words than Voyages de Milord Céton contrives to accommodate in more than 200,000. She published no more, however, before her death, and there is considerable evidence in the novella that she brought it hastily to a premature conclusion, having intended to write far more, presumably because her perennial health problems had finally gotten the better of her.
It has to be admitted that Voyages de Milord Céton is not the most readable of texts even by the standards of its day; it is not only prolix, repetitive, and inconsistent, but in some respects remarkably lacking in seemingly necessary intelligence although certainly not in boldness. It requires a defiantly eccentric courage to set out to write an interplanetary novel if you are not only unsure as to whether the Ptolemaic model the solar system or the Copernican is the correct one, but not even sure as to why it makes a difference and to offer an account of the population of the definitive City of Philosophers when you only have the slightest idea what any of the philosophers you feel obliged to name-check believed or opined or why it was significant.
Like many writers of philosophical extravaganzas, however, Madame Robert appears to have been using the writing of her novel as a means of attempting to clarify her own ideas about various matters and trying to fix her own moral compass by working on some difficult personal issues. That is undoubtedly the explanation of some of the story’s inconsistencies and also of its incessant repetition of the conclusions it attains. Not all the issues in question were resolved, and it is arguable that the remaining ambiguities and ambivalences are more revealing of her own state of mind and the confusions of her historical moment than the firm commitments she makes.
Her attitude to war offers one interesting instance as her occasional polemics against it—many famous warriors receive exceedingly short shrift in her allegorical account of Céton and Monime’s visit to the Temple of Glory on Mars—are counterbalanced by her account of Céton’s preparation for a military career in the same section and even more so by the striking intervention of Monime in the battle fought in the climax of the plot. Throughout the text prior to that point, Monime had seemed distinctly timorous and squeamish, but once her true royal identity is revealed to her, she unhesitatingly takes command of her troops on the battlefield and far outdoes Céton in the business of enthusiastic slaughter; there if nowhere else in the plot, a reckless feminism, albeit of a rather suspect variety, does break traditional shackles in no uncertain terms. It is notable in the same context that the gushing depiction of the utopian world of Saturn takes it for granted that the planet’s inhabitants still fight wars routinely even though there does not appear to be any possible source of their provocation.
Most of the other targets of analysis and criticism addressed in the novel are relatively conventional: the follies of social affectation prominent on the Moon, the viciousness of avarice dominant on Mercury, and the relentless pursuit of social status on Jupiter are all conventional targets conventionally addressed, and the accounts of those “heavens” lack something of the insistent quirkiness of the accounts of Venus and the Sun. In the same way, the account of the supposedly ideal society of Saturn, heavily influenced by the glorification of the pastoral so frequent in eighteenth-century French fiction, also seems a trifle anemic. There is, however, a remarkable sequel to the account of Prince Petulant’s infatuation with Monime in the sequence set on Jupiter where the monarch of that world, echoing the tendencies of his planet’s namesake, becomes determined to have his way with her while his Junoesque wife sets her sights imperiously on Céton by way of reprisal—but the potentially interesting carnal threats stand no real chance of consummation with the ever-watchful Zachiel standing guard, and that particular subplot fizzles out far less melodramatically than the account of Prince Petulant’s eventful wedding day.
As well as the interesting and partly redeeming features of what might be regarded as its faults, however, Madame Robert’s narrative also has some striking compensatory virtues. Not the least of those compensations is the sheer bizarrerie of certain parts of the narrative, both in terms of the intensely exotic imagery of its odder passages—the visit to a comet, during which Céton and Monime observe a necromancer at work in spectacular fashion, is a particularly striking example, although partly plagiarized from an obscure English text—and in the reckless mingling and confusion of the literal and the metaphorical, especially in the elaborate ventures into mythological allegory in the sections set on Venus and the Sun. Although the Chevalier de Béthune was a far more accomplished writer than Madame Robert, if she was conscientiously trying to match the imaginative range, multiplicity, and sheer eccentricity of his account of the solar system, she did not do too badly.
Most of the anecdotal inclusions Madame Robert inserted into her main narrative as supplementary asides are relatively straightforward, some of them being stereotyped exercises in sensibility fiction, but a few push that envelope quite considerably, including the most substantial ones related by secondary narrators on Venus, Mars, the Sun, and Saturn. The Saturn-set chapters entitled “Le Triomphe de l’amitié” [The Triumph of Amity]—echoing the title of a 1751 novel falsely represented as a translation from Greek and signed “Mademoiselle de **” (subsequently attributed to Marianne Falques, although Madame Robert could not have known that)—are particularly striking, by virtue of a lesbian subtext that modern readers cannot help finding blatant although it is conceivable that contemporary ones might not have done so.
Interestingly, echoes of the Falques novel also seem to be detectable in the tales inserted in the section set on Venus although the ultra-respectable Madame Robert would surely not have borrowed anything therefrom had she known that the novel was the work of a defrocked nun who was forced to flee to England and whose subsequent literary works became increasingly scandalous and seditious. Marianne Falques (c.1720–1785), who routinely introduced particules into various spellings of her own name and various supplements thereto, including de Vaucluse and de la Cépèdes, subsequently worked with William Beckford on his translations of Arabic materials and on the composition of Vathek and its episodes—originally written in French—which contain echoes of her own Oriental fantasy, Abbassai (1753). Most of her works in English as well as French were published anonymously, and some undoubtedly remain unattributed. She might well have been a far more feminist and far more interesting writer than Madame Robert had she actually contrived to publish more in the hostile literary marketplace in which she had to operate.
Returning to Madame Roberts, Les Ondins, being a pure entertainment, is certainly less ambitious than Voyages de MilordCéton, tackling no issues beyond the author’s intellectual reach, but it makes the most of her undoubted imaginative ambition in its hectic and zestful eclecticism. It is not without interest from a feminist viewpoint in its depiction of a realm from which men have been banished, to which the young heroine, Princess Tramarine, is exiled when an unfortunate oracle suggests to her parents that there might be some danger in keeping her around. (Naturally, as is the way with oracles, the reaction eventually precipitates the disaster it was attempting to avert.)
The all-female realm in question, Castora, is saved from a potential population problem after Queen Pentaphile banishes men therefrom by the intervention of the goddess Pallas, who causes a magic spring to rise there in which virgins only have to bathe in order to become pregnant, giving birth exclusively to female children. Such bathing becomes a carefully regulated ritual that works very smoothly until Tramarine’s turn comes and she creates an enormous scandal by giving birth to a boy, thus kick-starting the action of the plot. That plot involves the forced removal of her child, her imprisonment and vengeful persecution by an evil sorceress, and her ultimate rescue by the supernatural author of her disgrace. The latter turns out to be the son of the king of the ondins, water elementals who also have the job supervising a kind of hell—the very opposite of an inferno—in which human sinners are posthumously punished by being made to drink a special kind of tea.
Tramarine’s child is not the only baby misplaced in the course of the intricate plot, nor is he the only one who grows up to fulfill an exceedingly odd destiny although all of those subplots are swiftly curtailed when the novella is rapidly wound up. In the end, Pentaphile’s amazon realm is doomed, allegedly as punishment for her unjust treatment of Tramarine, and “normal” order is restored there, but the description of it in the early chapters detailing its history and Tramarine’s life in Pentaphile’s court betrays an unmistakable fascination on the author’s part, and it is, at least arguably, the most interesting of all her utopias. The story eventually gets lost in the maze of its own complications and leaves dozens of loose ends, but its narrative exuberance is quite extraordinary, and it deserves to be reckoned an eccentric classic of fantastic fiction; it has closer affiliations with modern fantasy fiction than most contemporary works in a similar vein. It makes one wonder what the author might have produced had she shed her narrative inhibitions a little earlier in life and allowed her imagination that kind of free rein when she was closer to her prime.
It is not easy nowadays to sympathize with some of Madame Robert’s views. Her intransigent monarchism and her absolutist views on sexual morality seem a trifle manic. Both attitudes were more than a trifle old-fashioned in her own day, but no one who encountered her works in the 1760s really wanted to be Mentored in the fashion that Voyages de Milord Céton set out to preach to them, and her contemporary readers undoubtedly found the two fantasies translated here interesting for much the same reasons that modern readers can still find some interest in them: their strangeness, their fervor, and their occasional sarcastic wit. It is hard nowadays not to regret that the feminist opinions that crop up occasionally in both texts were not extrapolated more fully and were routinely contradicted by the convention-bound course of the narratives, but that very ambivalence and contradiction help to make the leading female characters, especially Monime—the real hero of Voyages de Milord Céton—a little more interesting than the stereotyped heroines of sensibility novels.
Although undoubtedly long-winded and sprawling—in a manner far from unfashionable in its day—Voyages de Milord Céton’s panoramic view of human life, divided up in order to emphasize different features in turn, does add up, jigsaw-style, to an original and worthwhile whole, and the far more economical condensation of a similar whole featured in Les Ondins makes the latter into a useful and charmingly playful supplement to the longer work. It has to be admitted that Madame Robert’s latent feminist consciousness did not, in the end, contrive to raise itself very far, but when one considers the position from which it started and the environment in which it had to work, the fact that it stirred at all is grounds for some approval. Lacking the scope that she afforded Monime in her whimsical fantasy, there was little she could achieve herself, in practical terms, either in life or her literary work, but she did make an effort, and it did not go entirely to waste, thus setting a good example for the female writers who were to follow her, writers who would overtake her by far.
Olympe Chambrionne is busy finding good examples for those who follow.
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