LA PRINCESSE DE CLEVES

Les jours suivants, le Roi et les Reines 1 allèrent voir Madame de Clèves. Monsieur de Nemours, qui avait attendu son retour avec une extrême impatience, et qui souhaitait ardemment de lui pouvoir parler sans témoins, attendit pour aller chez elle l’heure que tout le monde en sortirait, et qu 'apparemment il ne reviendrait plus personne. Il réussit dans son dessein, et il arriva comme les dernières visites en sortaient.

Biographical note: Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, born at Paris in 1634, married at the âge of 22 the Comte de la Fayette, a gentleman who apparently preferred to live on his estate in Auvergne. Although in the beginning their life together seems not to hâve been unhappy, Mme de la Fayette shortly ceased to resist a longing for Paris, and returned to spend the rest of her days there, leaving her husband, on the Central Plateau, to relapse into the obscurity from which their marriage had for a moment drawn him. Mme de la Fayette had many life-long friends, especially the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, with whose aid and counsel she wrote the Princesse de Clèves, and Mme de Sévigné, who was her greatest consolation in the long days of illness and weakness that followed La Rochefoucauld’s death in 1680 until her own in 1692.

The Princesse de Clèves (1678), her best novel, is the story of a princess in the court of Henri II, who, after having married a prince some years her senior, whom she respects, falls desperately in love with the young, dashing and brilliant Duc de Nemours. Grieved and ashamed at her guilty passion, she does her best to conquer or at least conceal it. Finding it however too strong for her, she confesses it to her husband, and the knowledge of it is partly responsible for his death. Although this event makes her marriage with the Duc de Nemours a possibility, remorse and illness dissuade her from the thought of it, and she spends her few remaining days, partly on her estate, partly in a convent, leading a life of saintly austerity and goodness.

At the point in the story of the passage given, Mme de Clèves is receiving the first visits after the death of her mother.

1 Henri II, King of France, his wife Catherine de Médicis, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, the wife of the King’s oldest son, who was to be François II (Mme la Dauphine).