Un enlèvement peut en cacher un autre: Kidnapping the Past in La Duchesse de Langeais

Un enlèvement peut en cacher un autre: Kidnapping the Past
   in La Duchesse de Langeais

   Elisabeth Gerwin

   Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 41, Number 1 & 2, Fall-Winter
   2012-2013, pp. 25-47 (Article)

   Published by University of Nebraska Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2012.0038

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/488932

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Un enlèvement peut en cacher un autre:
   Kidnapping the Past in La Duchesse de Langeais
                                                          elisabeth gerwin

   In La Duchesse de Langeais (1834), Balzac indicts the Restoration aristocracy for
   its egotistical disregard for the recent past. However, his criticism of the de-
   sire to repress history’s lessons extends far beyond one political moment. This
   article explores how personal and political evolution remain indissociable, for
   Balzac, in reappraising the significance of past acts and present values. When
   Armand de Montriveau kidnaps the aristocratic Duchess, the intended result of
   his violent act is to make her conscious of her narcissism; yet Montriveau him-
   self remains unconsciously amnesiac concerning his own complex past. Finally,
   it is the coquettish Duchess who understands the symbolism of his gesture and
   of her position; but without reciprocal insight, history is destined to remain a
   dead letter.

Honoré de Balzac’s 1834 novella La Duchesse de Langeais is a story in which
journeys abound. Paradoxically, the most significant of these symbolically-
charged voyages are involuntary, at least on the part of the main traveler, for
they take the form of a kidnapping. The primary objective of kidnapping is
as much psychological as physical, in that it seeks to bring its victim from a
public into a private space, and thus into direct confrontation with the inti-
mate thoughts of the kidnapper. The public sphere, particularly at the time
of the Restoration when the story is set, is represented by Balzac as entirely
dominated by conflicting systems, from the political and ideological to the
libidinal and psychological. Underlying the motive for kidnapping is the as-
sumption that if someone is violently removed from this hypocritical milieu,
and completely disoriented with respect to his or her public identity, the true
value associated with a hidden and self-enclosed private system will be re-
vealed; that is, the private self will be laid bare to the desiring eye of the kid-
napper. However, as the notion of desire suggests, the captor’s position is far
from neutral, for kidnapping in Balzac is also conceived as the forum for the
self-revelation of the kidnapper, and this secondary objective is somewhat at

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013       25

odds with the primary one. Where the victim is being profoundly and even
ontologically challenged, the degree to which the perpetrator is also forced to
abandon firmly-held ideas remains unclear. Balzac’s earlier novella Sarrasine
(1830) stands as a case in point that kidnappers, too, should beware of what
revelations their abductions may unleash, concerning their own self-identity
as much as that of their victim.1 In La Duchesse de Langeais, the question of
the kidnapper’s position is complicated still further by Balzac’s preoccupa-
tion with the issue of how even the most emancipated of his contemporaries
remained fundamentally bound up in historical events within living memory.
In challenging the victim’s constructed identity, kidnapping implies at once
a re-examination of the social and personal evolution of that identity, and
a radical break with this past. Yet even a kidnapper has a past that is being
reworked in the violence of the abduction. A character like Armand de Mon-
triveau in La Duchesse de Langeais, for all that he is exemplarily detached from
family and from the state, still runs the risk of seizing upon kidnapping as an
opportunity to remain fixated on a repressed past, rather than using it as an
opportunity to evolve into a newly-forged modernity.
   Among all the other journeys that are undertaken or described in La Duch-
esse de Langeais—military exploits, scientific expeditions, flights of fancy or
narrative flash-backs—, kidnapping stands as a strategic combination of phys-
ical and psychological transportation. A violent and transformative gesture,
kidnapping wrenches its victim loose from all the material and conceptual
anchoring points of his or her identity, whether personal or political, in the
past or in an imagined future. The key plot-twist in the novella consists of an
elaborate abduction of the Duchess by her lover, Armand de Montriveau, and
this pivotal act is also echoed several times within the text in significant ways.
The Duchess herself embodies all the qualities of latent heroism and manifest
pettiness that characterize the milieu from which she will be extracted, that is,
the Restoration aristocracy of the faubourg Saint-Germain.2 In reference to
her, Balzac explicitly justifies his long-held realist belief in incarnating social
types. If, he proposes, one can say of Richelieu that he is the face of an entire
chapter in France’s history, and declare that “cette identité de physionomie
entre un homme et son cortège historique est dans la nature des choses,” then
the same must clearly be true within the “drame national” of public mores
that is played out across the social strata on a daily basis. “Pour briller dans
une époque,” asks the narrator rhetorically, “ne faut-il pas la représenter?” (5:
934). In this sense, kidnapping the dazzling Antoinette de Langeais amounts
to carrying off and holding to account an entire social set, and indeed one
that had flourished precisely in the age of Richelieu. Balzac’s scathing critique
of the dying aristocracy is overt and far-reaching in this text, as many critics
have pointed out; in fact, it is for this vilification that the novella is arguably

26   Elisabeth Gerwin

best known today.3 Arlette Michel proposes that in this tableau of “un monde
fossilisé” where nothing moves with the times, Antoinette de Langeais is the
last incarnation “dans l’aristocratie de style Restauration, des valeurs cheval-
resques autrefois spécifiques de sa caste” (94), values that, while admirable,
have nevertheless lost the power to signify in the wake of the first Empire.
True to the mœurs and “passions [. . .] hypocrites” that govern “la femme du
faubourg Saint-Germain” (5: 934)—and true also to the duality that is often
associated with Balzac’s representation of femininity—,4 Antoinette de Lange-
ais is drawn as a character of internal contradictions: “C’était une femme arti-
ficiellement instruite, réellement ignorante; pleine de sentiments élevés, mais
manquant d’une pensée qui les coordonnât; dépensant les plus riches trésors
de l’âme à obéir aux convenances; prête à braver la société, mais hésitant et
arrivant à l’artifice par suite de ses scrupules” (5: 935). Her personal evolution
has been arrested within an early modern matrix of repression, artifice and
appearance: “elle était ce qu’elle voulait être ou paraître” (5: 948).5 Ironically
in all of this, affirms Balzac, “rien n’était joué”; all her repressed potential for
grandeur “ressortaient de sa situation autant que de celle de l’aristocratie à
laquelle elle appartenait” (5: 935). In contrast to the Napoleonic qualities of
the general who is on the brink of revolutionizing her world, Antoinette de
Langeais is, true to her kin, “une créature véritablement multiple, susceptible
d’héroïsme, et oubliant d’être héroïque” (5: 935).
    The repressed nature of her latent heroism means that prior to her kidnap-
ping, the Duchess remains enslaved to the worst social “convenances”, caught
in a private/public bind that results in her being “souverainement coquette”
(5: 935). As Arlette Michel observes, “la coquette de haut-vol est une des fig-
ures majeures de la mythologie féminine balzacienne” (101), and here again
Antoinette de Langeais initially serves as a clear social type. Admirable as the
coquette is for her subversive power, the label in Balzac is nevertheless consis-
tently associated with a feminized form of narcissism, a form that tiers with
Freud’s characterization of narcissism as a predominantly feminine misdi-
rection of object choice.6 For Balzac the self-satisfied coquette manifests in
feminised terms a more general trait that is among his most frequent critical
targets: that is, the tendency to hoard. Elsewhere in Balzac’s writing, and par-
ticularly among male characters, the most obvious and symbolically-charged
object of hoarding is, of course, money. We might note parenthetically that
in many real-world cases, money is the motive behind a kidnapping as well,
leading to the horrific gesture of putting a price on a human life. However,
such is not the case for Balzac’s kidnappers: though their acts are indisputably
violent, they do not hoard bodies as barter in exchange for capital. In case of
the Duchesse de Langeais, it is the flirtatious victim rather than the perpetra-
tor of kidnapping who is initially portrayed as a miser, and of a particularly

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013   27

condemnable sort, for what she consciously gathers and refuses to give out
is love. Brooks, in his 1993 Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative,
proposes that the Duchess operates within what he calls “a restricted libidinal
economy” (74); similarly Mireille Labouret-Grare speaks of her representing
the cult of the “aristocrate” who, among the “‘avares’ balzaciens,” seeks ful-
fillment by denying the body and thus controlling appearances.7 But more
than being merely contextualized by such a economy, Antoinette has herself
set up the very terms of her own system, such that she generates ex nihilo a
one-way flow of desire: “Madame de Langeais apprit, jeune encore, qu’une
femme pouvait se laisser aimer ostensiblement sans être complice de l’amour”
(5: 939). Within the modern era, the duchess betters the courtly love model by
wisely investing only what she can afford to lose, thereby creating an affective
stockpile while remaining physically and emotionally untouched by what she
has set in motion. In so doing, she fosters public admiration while retaining
private control of her sentiments, upholding a powerful Lacanian noli me tan-
gere that bolsters the egotism of the proud, frail aristocratic set, “qui se mo-
urait sans vouloir [. . .] ni toucher, ni être touchée” (5: 935).8
    Thus a combination of subservience to the conventions of her flaccid soci-
ety, and a narcissistic hoarding and withholding of affection, has made of this
potential heroine a mere puppet-master directing and deferring unproductive
desire.9 As a type, the Duchess is set up as the antithesis of the rare “beaux car-
actères, exceptions qui prouvent contre l’égoïsme général qui a causé la perte
de ce monde à part” (5: 927). Whether or not he is meant to directly incarnate
one of these “exceptional” beings, Armand de Montriveau will deliver the cru-
cial challenges to Antoinette de Langeais’ self-contained system. He is clearly
contrasted to the Duchess on several important points: his status as the pen-
niless orphaned son of a republican general, raised as a ward of Bonaparte’s
state, presents an initial foil for her aristocratic pedigree;10 his brooding man-
ner and lack of discursive prowess serve to underline her grace and command
of rhetoric; and where she is hamstrung by social conventions, Montriveau
“s’était habitué à n’exister que par une estime intérieure et par le sentiment du
devoir accompli” (5: 941). Nevertheless, the characters have two psychologi-
cal similarities: firstly, they are both internally contradictory—Montriveau
is described as a paradoxical combination of “naturellement bon” and “des-
potique” (5: 946–7). Secondly, despite his many heroic peregrinations, Mon-
triveau, like the Duchess, has never been touched by love or desire, though
this shared ignorance is founded in contrasting causes: “Or, la duchesse et
Montriveau se ressemblaient en ce point qu’ils étaient également inexperts en
amour. Elle en connaissait peu la théorie, elle en ignorait la pratique, ne sen-
tait rien et réfléchissait à tout. Montriveau connaissait peu de pratique, igno-
rait la théorie, et sentait trop pour réfléchir” (5: 976). His naïveté, combined

28   Elisabeth Gerwin

with the sincerity of his smoldering passion, charm and intrigue the Duch-
ess, and will confirm the instinctive desire to control him that she had felt
upon hearing his story: “Elle voulut que cet homme ne fût à aucune femme, et
n’imagina pas d’être à lui” (5: 947).
    The Duchess’ signature hoarding reflex is initially triggered by Montriveau
sight unseen, simply by a narrative she has heard about him. In this sense,
their first interaction is virtual, based on Antoinette’s fantasy. The general’s
reputation has preceded him through one story in particular about his lengthy
travels in the African desert, a setting that in itself prepares both Duchess and
reader to be transported out of the demure codes of the aristocratic salons.11
The episode concerned Montriveau’s excursion to a virtually inaccessible des-
ert oasis, in search of the answers to several unelaborated scientific conun-
drums. Montriveau would have given up the desperate voyage at numerous
points but for the ruse of his guide, who told him at every stage that they
were mere hours from their destination, effectively luring him into achiev-
ing his goal. Antoinette is enthralled by this tale, to such an extent that dur-
ing the night that passes between hearing the legend and meeting its protago-
nist, she dreams that is it she, rather than the guide, who has accompanied
him on this journey. The narrator comments: “S’être trouvée dans les sables
brûlants du désert avec lui, l’avoir eu pour compagnon de cauchemar, n’était-
ce pas chez une femme de cette nature un délicieux présage d’amusement?”
(5: 946). “Présage” it certainly proves to be, although perhaps more of a “cau-
chemar” than of the “amusement” she had expected, for the real-life general
will profoundly disrupt her stable libidinal economy. Numerous commenta-
tors of this novella propose that Montriveau’s desert voyage can be read as a
direct narrative premonition or allegory of their failed relationship. Accord-
ing to Bonnie Isaac, for example, “their affair resembles his desert adventures”
(729) inasmuch as each is an indefinitely postponed search for lost illusions.
James Mileham goes further, proposing that the general’s journey prefigures
the Duchess’ abduction, with both experiences serving as “initiatory rites” in
which each character is proven to be worthy of the other (217). However if the
Duchess, like the reader, has been mislead from the outset concerning Mon-
triveau and his identity as simply a disconnected orphan and “un homme de
Bonaparte,” (5: 1014) it is also true that the adventure story doing the rounds
of the Saint-Germain gossip mill bears a much more complex relation to its
protagonist’s past than its subconscious rewriting by the Duchess can possibly
reflect, a point which is crucial to understanding its importance within and
beyond the récit.
    Montriveau’s time in the desert undoubtedly stands in the text as a means
of structuring the later voyages of abduction behind which he himself is the
driving force. Nevertheless, there is an important distinction that needs to be

         Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013   29

maintained between his initial guided journey to the oasis—a journey that,
while based on ruse, is difficult to equate with a kidnapping—, and a second
desert voyage that Montriveau also undertook. It is my contention that each
of these two desert voyages is in fact subject to a manner of rewriting within
the text, the first by the Duchess in her dream, and the second by Montriveau
himself in his carefully-orchestrated abduction of Antoinette de Langeais. In
her oniric fantasy, the Duchess casts herself as the intrepid guide, with Mon-
triveau as her “compagnon”; and while this is clearly within the terms of her
libidinal economy, wherein she prolongs their excursion by a dialectic of
promising a wondrous goal and denying its fulfillment, it also implicitly car-
ries within it the attainment of the “paradis terrestre” (5: 946), the oasis de-
scribed by the legend. This is possible, of course, because in her dream she
does not replace Montriveau, but rather embodies his guide, while the gen-
eral plays the same role as in his actual desert voyage. Like Scheherazade, the
Duchess delays through a nocturnal narrative; but like the realist author, she
embroiders a fictional structure around a historical event, without misrepre-
senting the event itself, or rewriting the memory of the one who lived it. As
with all history, including that of Restoration France, the possibility for fu-
ture transformation, even the attainment of a “paradis terrestre”, is left open.
The duchess will go so far as to propose to be guided in turn by Montriveau
through the passages of his recollections, tarrying with him instead of appear-
ing at a ball, on condition that he continue his narrative: “‘Vos aventures en
Orient me charment. Racontez-moi bien toute votre vie. J’aime à participer
aux souffrances ressenties par un homme de courage, car je les ressens, vrai!’”
(5: 957). This point is significant for understanding why the expedition to the
oasis does not, in my view, truly prefigure the later kidnapping. Whereas the
desert journey, like the dream and indeed like the relationship, represents a
seduction narrative into which Montriveau willingly enters, kidnapping is by
definition a violence imposed upon another. Instead, the abduction of the
Duchess represents Montriveau’s own fantasy, and one in which he is rewrit-
ing, in a problematic way, his second desert voyage that is recounted in pass-
ing in the novella. This other journey, told earlier in the text but occurring lat-
er in time, involves Montriveau’s own capture, enslavement, and miraculous
escape; and it is this little-discussed narrative that he seeks to revisit when he
sets in motion the kidnapping of the untouchable Duchess.
    Before looking at this second desert voyage, I would like to analyze what
occurs prior to and during the central kidnapping narrative, the key abduc-
tion that is provoked by Armand’s frustration with the hoarded desire of the
Duchess. At this point in the novella, the general has finally abandoned the
small degree of social codification that he observes at all, by asking directly:
“‘M’aimez-vous, madame? [. . .] Dites hardiment: oui ou non’” (5: 963). When

30   Elisabeth Gerwin

Antionette de Langeais naturally prevaricates, Montriveau forms a murder-
ous resolve, one in which he even imagines putting a symbolic knife to her
regal throat: “‘je te prendrai par le chignon du cou, madame la duchesse, et t’y
ferai sentir un fer plus mordant que ne l’est le couteau de la Grève’” (5: 987).
Though Montriveau correctly understands the powerful signifying force of
the guillotine for the aristocratic unconscious as the unstable “head” of so-
ciety, the Duchess will nevertheless continue to manifest her superior com-
mand of symbolism, and of her emotions. She resorts here to what Balzac
calls “son pathos à elle,” a complex sublimating of “des désirs sans cesse répri-
més” (5: 966) in neo-classical religious apologies, and then, when these have
become tiresome, in spontaneous recitals of modern romantic music: “[E]lle
quittait l’air chargé de désirs qu’elle respirait, venait dans son salon, s’y met-
tait au piano, chantait les airs les plus délicieux de la musique moderne, et
trompait ainsi l’amour des sens” (5: 967). Already Balzac’s language affirms
that her system of hoarding has begun to break down, insofar as the Duch-
ess, while still manifesting detachment, is subject to desires she must actively
displace. Her companion clearly comprehends the authenticity of this uncon-
scious language—“En ces moments elle était sublime aux yeux d’Armand: elle
ne feignait pas, elle était vraie, et le pauvre amant se croyait aimé” (5: 967)—,
but his grasp of its signifying is inconsistent, as the Duchess herself realises
and even intentionally sustains (5: 972–73). Thus the game of deferral con-
tinues: Antoinette remains “horriblement coquette,” while for his part Mon-
triveau “ne l’aurait pas voulue autrement” (5: 973).
   Despite his willingness to be lured on this adventure of physical desire and
of exploration of the unconscious, the general continues to adhere to a code
of conquest that is fundamentally military and libertine.12 When Montriveau
finally erupts in a “demande farouche de ses droits illégalement légitimes” (5:
974), the narrator again underscores his contradictory nature by describing
the despotic general as the “esclave” of the Duchess. As we shall see, the im-
age is far from arbitrary, and the Duchess immediately reappropriates this
important motif, accusing Montriveau of seeking to “‘me ravir la libre dis-
position de moi-même.’” Her point is to highlight the historical fact that a
woman under the Restoration was a virtual slave to the men who controlled
her body: “‘Si, en donnant notre personne, nous devenons esclaves, un hom-
me ne s’engage à rien en nous acceptant’” (5: 977).13 Particularly in the con-
text of a story of the hyper-masculine Treize, she articulates a valid critique
of a gender-based social injustice that will remain otherwise unchallenged in
the text. As Antoinette suspects, for Montriveau, possessing is believing: he is
seeking neither to question gender roles within the text, nor to revolutionize
societal convenances to which he is utterly indifferent, but rather to overthrow
and subjugate the closed system of the Duchess’ ego and bodily personne. For

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013   31

him, in other words, the challenge to the social and political world of the Res-
toration has been reduced to the will to subvert the self-contained identity of
its figurehead. He therefore elaborates a complicated scheme to transport the
Duchess out of her habitual world, and unhinge her conscious and discursive
control over their interaction. His avowed wish is to reveal the Duchess to
herself, for he is certain that “‘personne n’a osé mettre cette créature en face
d’elle-même’” (5: 986). But in forcing her to judge her past self and define her
present, Montriveau will in fact revisit his own past subjugation, one that he
has replayed rather than reformed in his dramatic abduction of Antoinette de
Navarreins.
    The first stage of Montriveau’s kidnapping of the object of his desire clearly
achieves its objective: the Duchess thinks she has returned home in her car-
riage after a ball, but the cascading description reveals her gradual awareness
of an uncanny surrounding: “Arrivée dans sa cour, elle entra dans un vestibule
presque semblable à celui de son hôtel; mais tout à coup elle ne reconnut pas
son escalier” (5: 991, my italics). This dizzying loss of familiarity sets up her
abrupt and mysterious removal to a room that is gradually revealed to be,
not her own boudoir, but another intimate space, one inspired by the roman
noir:14 Montriveau’s private apartment. The Duchess soon manifests a man-
ner of Stockholm syndrome whereby she sympathizes with her captor, as she
admires the masculine simplicity of the room and begins to show signs that
she loves Montriveau all the better for his act. For his part, Montriveau at-
tempts to occupy several subject positions at once relative to the Duchess. On
one hand he upholds his newfound position of power, symbolized none too
subtly by his penetrating gaze and smouldering cigar. He claims to be free of
all desire, and eventually explains that he intends to brand her forehead with
a sign to visibly mark her as a manipulator of desire. On the other hand, he
abruptly divests himself of the cigar and of all traces of its presence (“il . . .
brûla des parfums, et purifia l’air” [5: 993]), and reneges his claim to bodily
access to her “personne”. He asserts that he no longer has the sentiment to-
ward her that would make of his kidnapping a vengeful crime of passion, al-
though Balzac makes it quite clear that this is untrue, and that the Duchess is
right to identify herself as Montriveau’s object choice: “D’ailleurs, pour en-
lever une femme, ne faut-il pas l’adorer?” (5: 992).
    The general’s inconsistencies multiply as the scene unfolds. His declared
objective is to reclaim the position of the speaking subject, and orchestrate the
crucial revelation of self and other that a kidnapping seeks to bring about: “‘Je
veux d’abord vous expliquer ce que vous êtes, et ce que je suis. [. . .] Ici, per-
sonne ne peut me jeter à la porte. Ici, vous serez ma victime pour quelques in-
stants, et vous aurez l’extrême bonté de m’écouter’” (5: 992). Yet his revelation
of a hidden, true identity in either of their cases depends upon his insight into

32   Elisabeth Gerwin

their past lives, as well his clear vision of the present moment of confronta-
tion, and the general’s ability on both these counts is thrown into question by
Balzac in several ways. Most obviously, Montriveau will utterly disbelieve—
or as Brooks proposes, misunderstand (“Epistemophilia,” 130)—the signs that
his kidnapping mission has, as regards the Duchess, been successful, even as
Antoinette moves from modest submissiveness to a histrionic and eroticized
willingness to be branded with “ton chiffre rouge” (5: 998). She is still deftly
playful with symbols, as she demonstrates by snatching up a cigar and claim-
ing that to please him she would smoke it (5: 1000); at the same time she gen-
uinely wishes to convince him of the sincerity of her love, and signifies this
by adopting the position of slave in relation to his role as “‘mon unique, mon
seul maître’” (5: 997). Yet Montriveau, whose incredulity will persevere long
after this scene, replies here with studied coldness: “‘Les gages en étaient dans
le passé; nous n’avons plus de passé’” (5: 997). His melodramatic repudiation
of the past does not ring true, prefacing as it does his intention to brand the
Duchess permanently with the marker of her past acts. It does, however, un-
derscore the importance of Montriveau’s own relation to the past; and finally,
it is the ability of both kidnapper and victim to consciously reassess their own
history that will determine the success or failure of the transformative poten-
tial within this orchestrated crisis.
    Ironically, the general’s claim that their past no longer exists in fact recalls
two earlier passages in the text, each of which touches on Armand’s relation
to—and loss of—his own former identity. One is the moment when, stricken
by his initiatory experience of love in the presence of the Duchess, “d’un seul
trait, par une seule réflexion, Armand de Montriveau effaça donc toute sa vie
passée” (5: 951). By this rhetorical flourish Balzac insists on the transformative
power of passion, even in a world of immutable relics. Prior to this roman-
esque coup de foudre that erases his past, the general has already been affected
by a more serious loss of memory. He, like a few rare balzacian characters, suf-
fers from amnesia;15 however this crucial element of the story is one that passes
virtually unremarked, by the narrator of the story and by its later commenta-
tors alike. A Napoleonic hero at the defeat of Waterloo, subsequently unrecog-
nized by the new Restoration government, Montriveau had left Europe for the
unexplored regions of Egypt. His obscure departure was followed by an igno-
minious return, for when he first regained French soil, it was neither as a rein-
stated war hero, nor as a triumphant researcher and adventurer, but rather as a
recently-escaped slave. He had been betrayed, “dépouillé de tout, mis en escla-
vage et promené pendant deux années à travers les déserts” (5: 942), and after
this tortuous and extended desert wandering, had expended his last reserves of
energy on his miraculous escape. He reached the French colony in Sénégal “de-
mi-mort, en haillons, et n’ayant plus que d’informes souvenirs. Les immenses

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013   33

sacrifices de son voyage, l’étude des dialectes de l’Afrique, ses découvertes et ses
observations, tout fut perdu” (5: 942, my italics). This of course puts into ques-
tion the narrative status of the tale of his other desert journey to the promised
oasis, as it must have been among those experiences of which Montriveau has
no clear recollection when he meets the Duchess, and thus can only have been
known and recounted by others.16 Furthermore, it casts an entirely different
light on the nature of desert voyage that the Duchess’ kidnapping later paral-
lels within the text. Armand, once himself betrayed and transported against his
will, displaced from his presumed colonial identity by becoming a European
slave in Africa, and traumatized to the point of being severed from his past by
amnesia, seems to be replaying his enslavement through the violent, disorient-
ing and traumatizing act of kidnapping.
    There are two textual indications that the kidnapping scene indeed echoes
Montriveau’s African enslavement. Firstly, in the room where the Duchess is
held, Balzac describes a torch on the mantelpiece that “rappelait, par sa forme
égyptienne, l’immensité des déserts où cet homme avait longtemps erré” (5:
992). Hovering over the scene like a phantom, evoking by its “forme égypti-
enne” a forgotten experience in “la Haute-Égypte” (5: 942), this souvenir both
haunts and illuminates the present confrontation of victim and slave-cum-
kidnapper. For Montriveau, himself a manner of “revenant”17 from the first
Empire, this image stands as an mute signifier of the power of the past to
shape current acts, whether consciously or not. Secondly, the unelaborated
presence of the desert enslavement within this scene of abduction begins to
make sense of a striking gesture in the text that critics have struggled to ex-
plain, beyond associating it with the roman noir genre: that is, Montriveau’s
threatened but unconsummated gesture of branding the Duchess’ forehead
with “une croix de Lorraine adaptée au bout d’une tige d’acier” (5: 998). The
impulse to mark the body of the Duchess as the site of desire’s failure is, of
course, rich in symbolic import, given that she is drawn by Balzac as a hoarder
and even a castrator of desire itself, inspiring desire while denying its recip-
rocation, pointing out the lack in the other while refusing to signify her own.
But the specific choice of the forehead as the target, the aggressive precision
of the aim—“‘Nous vous l’appliquerons au front, là, entre les deux yeux’” (5:
998)—, as well as the elongated shape of what Brooks labels “the red-hot sig-
nifier” (Body Work 75), remain unexplained. I would argue that they serve to
recall the sole example given by the narrator of the humiliations suffered by
Montriveau during his enslavement, when his head was used for target prac-
tice by the children of the tribe’s leader: “Pendant quelques jours les enfants
du cheikh de la tribu dont il était l’esclave s’amusèrent à prendre sa tête pour
but dans un jeu qui consistait à jeter d’assez loin des osselets de cheval, et à
les y faire tenir” (5: 942–3).18 Though he is not decapitated by this cruel game,

34   Elisabeth Gerwin

any more than Antoinette’s brow is finally maimed by Montriveau’s rapier-
like brand, the gestures are reciprocal, each serving as a mocking reiteration
of mastery and servitude that explicitly targets the captive body at the site of
human thought and expression.
    Like Montriveau himself, Balzac inscribes these traces of a forgotten past
without comment. But their importance is all the more profound, for the
reader must look more closely than does the general himself to understand
why the transformative potential that is sought by the abduction, and which
promises to affect captor and captive alike, in fact remains unrealized in the
case of Armand. As victim, the Duchess suffers all the positive and negative ef-
fects of her abrupt enslavement, through the loss of her subject position and
the rupture of her identity with her past self. The kidnapper himself, by con-
trast, unconsciously returns to a former experience of enslavement, grasping
at a clear sense of self by repeating and mastering his loss of self, but thereby
recasting a repressed memory with no point of access onto a new outcome.
It is significant in this regard that in his fantasy, Montriveau skews the mod-
el of Freudian transference, substituting his enslaved self with the kidnapped
Duchess, and writing himself into the role of master. This gives a lie not only
to his past, but also to the present; for inasmuch as Montriveau is not aware
that he is replaying his own humiliation, he remains enslaved to this memory,
so profoundly under its influence that his fantasy-laced kidnapping cannot be
as productive even as the Duchess’ oniric fantasy of deferral and fulfillment.
Antoinette’s poignant prose, in her final letter to Montriveau, will directly ac-
cuse him of structuring his desire as a reversal of, rather than a response to,
her dream: “‘Dans cette terrible aventure qui m’a tant attachée à vous, Ar-
mand, vous alliez du désert à l’oasis, mené par un bon guide. Eh! bien, moi,
je me traîne de l’oasis au désert, et vous m’êtes un guide sans pitié’” (5: 1026).
Ironically, it is not the captive but the captor who seems to have missed the
sought-after revelation of a hidden identity, his own as much as hers. At the
end of the kidnapping episode, when Montriveau reinserts the Duchess into
her own past identity, and indeed into the very ballroom from which she had
been abducted, the narrator will nevertheless leave no doubt that she has been
transformed, freed of her attachment to the world. Looking around this social
gathering with new eyes, “elle trouva le monde petit en s’en trouvant la reine,”
and once she has arrived home, in a private space of introspection “elle s’y
trouva changée et en proie à des sentiments tout nouveaux” (5: 1002). She has
made a heroic escape from her affective desert, for she has entered a new li-
bidinal economy in which she will seek out Montriveau in word and in action.
Yet though he once bodily escaped his enslavement, the only light in which
he will see her remains the glow from the haunting Egyptian lamp, a relic
locked in the past and still physically juxtaposed in his apartment with the

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013   35

“énormes pattes de sphinx” (5: 992) that frame both his bed and his uncon-
scious imagination.
    If the Duchess was initially presented as the incarnation of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain and its values, her newfound liberty will manifest itself
through her emancipation from her position as figurehead for the stagnant
Restoration and its libidinal and symbolic constraints. She has recognized
her own enslavement to a retrograde system, and her legally-bound body as a
pawn moved by forces other than her own. As she declares to her aging aris-
tocratic relatives, even her closest family has treated her, not as a unique indi-
vidual, but as an exchangeable piece in a game, by marrying her to the miserly
Duc de Langeais: “‘Mon père, ma famille, en me sacrifiant à des intérêts, m’a,
sans le vouloir, condamnée à d’irréparables malheurs’” (5: 1017). When she
then ostentatiously parks her (empty) carriage outside Montriveau’s apart-
ment, she exploits and explodes the codification whereby her body is inter-
changeable with her role, sending it as “un substitut d’elle-même” in Mireille
Labouret-Grare’s formulation (24), a manner of synecdoche for her body and
thus also for the body of the society that she wishes to subvert. The Faubourg
that witnesses this act is caught in a play of mirrors: scandalized by what is
merely a lying appearance, it shows itself to be as hollow as the carriage, and
proves finally that its greatest capacity is for self-destruction. By soliciting the
predictable reaction of society, the Duchess is voluntarily engaging and sub-
verting its sign system, and thereby provoking her own expulsion from that
society. However, all metaphor is inherently vulnerable to misreading, or to
flat-footed undoing by the imposition of a literal meaning; and no other char-
acter in this text is as hermeneutically hapless as is the principal intended re-
cipient of this message, Montriveau. Equally fascinated and frustrated by the
Duchess’ indirect methods of communication, perpetually tongue-tied and
“rude” (5: 953) in her presence, the general has already bungled the opportu-
nity offered by the kidnapping, condemning his beloved to serve as a stand-in
for his past self without realizing he has done so. When by way of response to
the kidnapping she sends the rebellious carriage, as a metaphor incarnate for
her liberated self, it is no coincidence that Montriveau unwittingly collapses
this symbol, both by his witnessed physical presence elsewhere at the same
time (a fact which undoes the intended societal scandal), and by his contin-
ued inability to believe in personal transformation.
    Near the end of the kidnapping scene the Duchess assures her captor that
she is already liberated from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, for she has re-
mained capable of distinguishing and holding off its superficial values: “‘Ce
monde horrible,’” she explains, “‘il ne m’a pas corrompue’” (5: 999). Yet the
passionate Montriveau has already concluded that “‘nous ne nous compren-
drons jamais’” (5: 999), and his words are prophetic, at least as regards the

36   Elisabeth Gerwin

power of symbolic language. Montriveau’s detachment from symbolism is
established within the first few pages of the nouvelle, and directly associated
with his imperial heroism: he is “un homme dont la vie n’avait été, pour ainsi
dire, qu’une suite de poésies en action, et qui avait toujours fait des romans
au lieu d’en écrire” (5: 908). By contrast, inasmuch as the Duchess’ world is a
throwback to pre-revolutionary France, she is predisposed to see only what is
poetic and romanesque in her surroundings, to see in every referent a social-
ly-encoded signifier. “Les femmes habituées à la vie des salons connaissent le
jeu des glaces,” explains Balzac; thus at the crux of the abduction, when An-
toinette has passionately accepted, and Montriveau has abruptly dismissed,
the brandished signifier, “la duchesse, intéressée à bien lire dans le cœur
d’Armand, était tout yeux. Armand, que ne se défiait pas de son miroir, lais-
sa voir deux larmes rapidement essuyées. Tout l’avenir de la duchesse était
dans ces deux larmes” (5: 998–9). The meaning of those clandestine tears is
more genuine than the searing brand, and yet the “avenir” that they promise
will be fatally postponed, and their reader will be detained permanently, as
she later expresses it to Montriveau, “‘au lendemain de votre vengeance’” (5:
1026). The general remains a literal thinker, who has executed his first corpo-
real abduction of his lover exactly, but misunderstands how to incorporate
their past identities within this present moment of revelation. His inadvertent
self-revelation in “ces deux larmes” is quashed, their metaphoric communi-
cation replaced with the literal ex-communication of Antoinette from Mon-
triveau’s life, and the story of her symbolic capture reduced to her imprison-
ment within by-gone events. It seems that, along with the Duchess, the poetry
and nobility proper to her outmoded society, and with them a whole system
of meaning that flourished with the aristocracy, are on the verge of becoming
silent fossils in a modern era of action and conquest.
    For a writer such as Balzac, the loss of the rhetorical grace and descriptive
allusion that were the linguistic hallmarks of the aristocracy was a tragic side-
effect of the enormous changes to French society at the dawn of the nine-
teenth century. The task of realism was to transform descriptive language, to
unshackle it from the past while bringing the lessons of the past with it, to
preserve symbolic wealth within the language of immediacy and frank eye-
witnessing. Where a novelist such as Dumas sought to vulgarize history and
bring it dramatically to life, Balzac refused to write, for example, the adven-
tures of Montriveau, apart from those few stripped-down tales that structure
the nouvelle in their larger significance. Rather, he was preoccupied with the
difficult task leagued to his contemporaries: recalling the traumatic events of
recent history without being transfixed by them. The past threatens to haunt
the present, delaying it by hoarding the energy it needs to move forward; at
the same time the present is tempted to repress the past, refusing to listen for

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013   37

fear that it will hear only what time has proved to be deluding lies. When the
heroic Montriveau confronts his aristocrate, he symptomizes the difficulty of
the present as it addresses the recent past; and despite the explosive potential
for regeneration opened by the gesture of kidnapping, his unconscious solu-
tion is to replay history, unchanged but for the substitution of another for his
subjugated self. What this man of action does not see is the metaphoric power
of history itself, whereby the past can both signify and admit of interpreta-
tion, thereby bringing new meaning to the future.

In this story and in others, Balzac will explore how the inability to understand
and react to the meaningful symbolism within history proves fatal, both for
the survival of the past and for the enlightenment of the present.19 His mes-
sage is rendered all the more subtle and powerful through the tripartite struc-
ture of La Duchesse de Langeais, a pattern he had also employed in his 1830
novella Adieu.20 Both récits consist of a central flash-back story that recounts
the past, framed by two episodes set in the present; thus the crucial second
part telescopes the past within the past, while imposing on the reader the
act of remembering and rethinking the first episode. Clearly this interrupted
chronology is one that Balzac sees as a faithful model of the way in which
memory works, and also as a compelling structure for communicating the
urgency of present consequences embedded in past events. With the benefit
of hindsight we may perform the task that he expressly leaves to his reader—
“Après les faits,” he promises early in La Duchesse de Langeais, “viendront les
émotions” (5: 908)—, and restore the full diachronic context to the narrative
by examining the upshot of these past events, recounted in the opening and
closing sections of Balzac’s enigmatic story.
    The end of the novella’s second part is set months after the kidnapping.
Antoinette has written a letter offering an ultimate chance to be reconciled,
and has ensured that Montriveau has read it. When he nevertheless misses the
rendezvous it offers (for the banal but salient reason that his clock is slow),
the Duchess disappears into the night to join a remote Spanish convent of the
Barefoot Carmelites, and Montriveau begins a five-year search to find her. It
is with the conclusion of this search that the nouvelle opens, and re-reading
this first episode in its chronological order after the second reveals that Mon-
triveau has once again attempted to wipe clean the slate of his personal his-
tory. Gone is his republican heroism, replaced by devoted military service to
the 1823 monarchy and to Ferdinand VII of Spain; gone too is his skepticism
over his mistress’ genuine change of heart. This is to say that Armand has at
last escaped his unconscious enslavement to the past; however he has replaced
it with a conscious desire to rewind the clock yet again, this time to the instant
after the kidnapping, the same moment in which the transformed Antoinette

38   Elisabeth Gerwin

had found herself trapped five years before. Essentially, the five intervening
years have as little content for Montriveau as for the reader who is just begin-
ning the book, a point that is symptomized by his unexplained conversion to
the cause of the restored monarchy. Montriveau’s existence was suspended a
moment after it recommenced, when he learned that the woman in whom he
finally believed had vanished, and his purpose is to re-launch his life—and
hers—from that historical point. Yet the structure of the text means that this
initial episode is layered with meanings that will only be clarified when the
subsequent sections are read; meanings that, like repressed textual memories,
should be more evident to the main protagonist himself than they could be to
the reader.
    On a first reading of this opening chapter, it appears that Antoinette shares
Montriveau’s fixation on their shared past. Her presence in the convent is in-
directly revealed through music, as she weaves into her sacred repertoire the
melody of the Fleuve du Tage: “romance française dont souvent [Montriveau]
avait entendu jouer le prélude dans un boudoir de Paris à la personne qu’il
aimait” (5: 910). It is significant that, unlike Montriveau, Balzac’s reader is still
in ignorance of the complexity of the sublimated desire to which this speech-
less voice refers. The musical signifier, in other words, only reveals one layer
of its connection to the past: the nostalgia of the musician, whose patriotic
“regrets d’une exilée” (5: 910) are presumably intertwined with her attach-
ment to a lost lover. For his part, Montriveau, who is evidently still no reader
of metaphor, is immediately transported to a delirious memory, hearing this
echo of repressed desire as a sign that the Duchess still lives wholly in the past,
as does he. The narrator underscores this nostalgia by describing the far-flung
setting of their reunion as “ce rocher à demi européen, africain à demi” (5:
906), a liminal space that is—we see on a second reading—symbolically in-
fused with two past experiences: Montriveau’s desert wanderings in Africa,
and their subsequent multiple rewritings in Europe. Yet hindsight also makes
it clear that there will be no space that can reconcile these past narratives after
the failure of the kidnapping, and though Montriveau hopes for “la résurrec-
tion d’un amour perdu,” his only accomplishment here, as the narrator in-
timates, will be to “le retrouver encore perdu” (5: 910). The cloistered “long
suicide” (5: 905) of the former Duchess, in the over-inscribed “désert” (5: 914)
of the convent, functions as a kind of voluntary amnesia. In effect, she has
turned her foregone identity as the belle of Restoration society into a manner
of legend or myth, a source of creative inspiration for her improvised music
that no longer bears any relation to events in her ageless existence, an image as
unanchored in time as her rocky refuge is in space.
    Montriveau’s clear intention in this opening section is to revisit his shared
past with the Duchess and transform its outcome, by reanimating and re-

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013   39

sponding to the desire that she had erstwhile sublimated and suddenly ex-
pressed in response to the kidnapping. However, whereas Montriveau has the
capacity to suspend his present identity and return seamlessly to the past—he
easily trumps up a “congé” (5: 923) from his military campaign in order to
tarry on the Spanish island where Antoinette is hidden—, for her part the
former Duchess has left temporality altogether in the near-death of the con-
vent. She has entered a manner of stasis, repressed like a memory of her by-
gone self, in a new relation to time and recollection that is at once tragic and
idyllic. Sublimating her former self in her music, which Balzac presents as the
very medium of memory,21 the former coquette transmits deep sadness for
“un amant perdu, mais non pas oublié” (5: 913), but also a kind of ecstatic
transformation of a profane love into a timeless, sacred love, an idealization
of sentiments that, once confessed, are “purifiés, [. . .] transportés dans les ré-
gions les plus hautes” (5: 920).22 Balzac revised his manuscript to make it clear
that her wordless musical expression is the sublimation not only of “le passé”,
but of all temporal experiences: “Pour [Montriveau], comme pour la sœur, ce
poème était l’avenir, le présent et le passé” (5: 914).23 But whereas her former
lover will seek to revive the past through the shock of the present, toward a
future in which, he declares, “tu reviendras à la vie, à la santé, sous les ailes
de l’Amour” (5: 922), Antoinette’s own desert existence has become a kind of
unworkable ideal, in that it is timeless and therefore detached from histori-
cal contingencies. This freedom from a personal and a historical past is pre-
cisely what the gesture of kidnapping sought to bring about, but in the novel’s
opening sequence the success of that gesture is already locked in the past.
   Ironically, Antoinette’s cry of despair at the instant in which she fled to
this timeless refuge behind the veil, marking her abandonment of one fruit-
less self-transformation for another definitive one, coincided exactly with Ar-
mand’s own return in time, as he belatedly recognized the successful outcome
of the kidnapping. He now directly demands that his former slave return with
him to and in time, unable to believe that the historical moment opened up
by the revolutionary kidnapping is utterly irrecoverable. The future which
the Duchess had proposed by means of her “coup d’État féminin” (5: 1009),
signified by the empty carriage, was entirely open, responding to her abduc-
tion from time and identity by consciously overturning the social and politi-
cal framework that had hitherto defined her. Its novelty lay in its radical break
with the conventions of the past, and in its potential creation of a new society
of two individuals whose histories and temperaments had hitherto been mu-
tually opposed. Whether this unstructured and unrealized future could have
in fact become realized is now, eternally, a moot point. Montriveau continues
to be tragically out of step with the object of his desire: just as, at the onset of
his quest to find her, he joined the same monarchical order that Antoinette

40   Elisabeth Gerwin

had recently defied for his sake, so now at its conclusion he desires a seamless
return to that foregone moment of societal defiance—a moment that, along
with temporal existence, she has eternally closed. In response to his demand
that she follow him beyond the convent walls, and into a future that would
fold perfectly into the past, Antoinette makes the simple but crucial point that
“les souvenirs du passé me font mal” (5: 920). The scope of this harm is dif-
ficult to assess without prior knowledge of the “passé” in question; once again
the structure of the text means that only a second reading reveals how unlike-
ly Montriveau is to grasp the risks of reviving the past. Though he has belat-
edly recognized his lover’s change of heart, the general has gained no insight
into his own role in the kidnapping he orchestrated, and into the disastrous
consequences of unconsciously locking his victim in the trauma of his own
past enslavement. Along with his Restoration contemporaries, Montriveau is
about to discover that past identities cannot simply be taken up where they
were once left off, for they are anchored in their specific context by dark and
complex roots.
    The most surprising moment in this opening section is saved for the end;
it is also, as we learn, its most over-inscribed gesture. Montriveau affirms here
his blind conviction that he and his beloved must return in time, and his con-
tinued misunderstanding of the danger inherent in chaining a revolutionary
act to the past. The former Duchess has abruptly broken off their interview
by confessing to her superior that Montriveau is her ex-lover, and no sooner
has the curtain fallen between them than the general forms a resolve: “‘Ah!
elle m’aime encore! s’écria-t-il [. . .], il faut l’enlever d’ici’” (5: 923). Initially
the reader does not know that the proposed kidnapping of “la sœur Thérèse”
threatens to repeat an act that has already foundered once on a misappropria-
tion of the past. The promised abduction provides much more than a segue
between the opening and closing episodes, for between the utterance and the
enactment of Montriveau’s final abduction of Antoinette, both the lynchpin
kidnapping episode and the earlier enslavement that it rewrites will emerge
within the text. Thus the proposed ravishing of the former Duchess is not a
revolutionary new idea, but is itself overlaid with a complicated history by the
time it is conceived of here and carried out at the text’s conclusion. The reader
who turns the page on the second part to begin the third has gained the same
historical awareness as Montriveau, and understands this decision for what it
is: a desire to reinsert the Duchess into linear time by returning to a specific
and transformative moment of trauma. Still outstanding, however, is the mat-
ter of Montriveau’s unconscious tie to a more deeply repressed past: the story
of his own enslavement that remains embedded in his gesture of kidnapping.
Any potential for emancipation held within the act of kidnapping threatens to
be short-circuited by this eternal return to Montriveau’s repressed mis-adven-

          Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013    41