ABSTRACT
Readers are made aware, through the narrator s frequent remarks about public reaction to Isabellas activities, that they are part of an audience. Her story evolves as a local news event and is punctuated by publicly-circulated records and reports. Before the story begins, for example, the narrator explains in her dedication to Hortense Mancini that it “is true, as it is on the records of the town where it was transacted” (211). The narrator repeatedly describes the effect of Isabellas decisions on the public in hyperbole: when she goes abroad her “virtues were the discourse of all the world,” news of her return to the convent is “spread all over the town” to the “heart-breaking of a thousand lovers,” and her rejection of Villenoys “was the whole discourse of the town” (216-217). Henault and Isabellas bad luck after their forbidden marriage becomes a town proverb, for “all over the country if any ill luck had arrived to anybody, they would say, ‘They had Monsieur Beroons luck’” (240). Isabella is under constant surveillance by a public that is never identi fied except as the “whole world,” and the narrator s sensitivity to public reac tion intensifies the narrative focus.
