ABSTRACT
“What do I see here? … Is it an illusion or the truth,” asks the bewildered Prince de Montpensier, stunned to find the Comte de Chabannes, a man whom he has “loved so dearly,” in his wife’s chamber, at the nocturnal climax of La Fayette’s 1662 nouvelle historique; “[Explain] the meaning of [this event] … that I cannot believe it to be as it appears to me.” a 1 But this unique moment of “[chaotic confusion]” and of “despair heightened by … uncertainty,” which could potentially transform a violent, autocratic, warrior-husband and give him a crucial understanding of ambiguity, is lost, notwithstanding the insistence of the devoted, elderly Chabannes that “[appearances are truly false]” (La Fayette, LCT 185; NDDS 384–5). The prince rejects intolerable uncertainty, reflexively embraces vengeance and upholds his unshaken belief in clarity: “I must take my revenge and discover the truth afterwards at my leisure” (LCT 185). b In the rapidly unfolding and laconic dénouement, with the count’s despairing exit and his wife’s loss of consciousness, the prince never does ascertain “the truth.” But to his satisfaction, he discovers his friend’s dead body the next morning lying in the street: “he was glad to find that he had been avenged by the hand of fortune,” says the narrator (187), c though ironically, Chabannes’s demise has less to do with fortune than with indiscriminate murder by Catholics during the St. Bartholomew’s day Massacre in 1572, which frames the text’s ending. Indifferent to the broken-hearted and guilt-ridden death of his wife as well, Montpensier gains no illumination, much less any recognition of the illusions of perception and the persistent ambiguities in acts of interpretation. 2 Read in this light, the culminating scene of La Fayette’s first and founding nouvelle historique may contain self-reflexive signs that the text should not be interpreted literally, that is, according to outward appearances. As the heroine’s mother states in La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678): “what [appears to be] is almost never the truth” (19). d
