ABSTRACT
The preceding chapter has shown how seventeenth-century women-and their writing-began to cross, recross and redefine the thresholds of conventual space. This chapter will explore how, as the century advanced, the outside world encroached on the cloister itself: rather than a separate alternative to secular life, it increasingly became part of a larger social and political network, fully implicated in the twistings and turnings of real and novelistic plots.1 Instead of seeking or remaining in static retreat, women on the move flee to friendly convents or are carried off to hostile ones. These moves are represented in the women’s self-writing which flourished in the latter half of the century: personal memoirs like those of Hortense and Marie Mancini, as well as fictional accounts like Mme de Villedieu’s Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière and the Comtesse de Murat’s Mémoires de la Comtesse de M***. These works also served as long-unrecognized prototypes for canonical eighteenth-century memoir novels, notably Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne.2 In the development of women’s self-writing, truth and fiction are inextricably blended. Not only does Marie Mancini’s account read like a romance novel; in 1676, two years before Marie’s own memoirs were published, an apocryphal version of them
appeared.3 And four years before Hortense Mancini published her own life story in 1675, it was alluded to by Catherine de Villedieu in her Mémoires de HenrietteSylvie de Molière, which is also dedicated to Hortense.4 Villedieu’s novel, published between 1671 and 1674, is the first French work of fiction to bear the title Mémoires.5 Thus, written memoirs, letters, even the gossip of the time served as models for the new memoir novels, and influences were both reciprocal and simultaneous. As Claire Carlin points out, “Both [Mancini] sisters present themselves as exceptional in their misfortune, as heroines in an adventure novel despite themselves” (1). The beginning of Hortense’s account confirms this characterization: “And if the events that I have to recount to you seem like something out of a novel, blame it on my unhappy fate rather than my inclination” [“Que si les choses, que j’ai à vous raconter, vous semblent beaucoup tenir du roman, accusez-en ma mauvaise destinée plutôt que mon inclination,” trans. Nelson 27, ed. Doscot 32; italics added].6
