The Saint-Sulpice
Dictionary of Marivaudage
- This week's words:
- aventure &
- déguisement
Two words this week, because each is used in defining the other.
- aventure: Noun, feminine. As in "quelle aventure!" -- what an adventure. The sequence of events launched when one assumes un déguisement (a disguise) or a stratagem in order to achieve some end related to the heart of the beloved.
- A déguisement (noun, masculine) can be as simple as a "white lie" or as complex as assuming another identity, often -- as is the case in The Game of Love and Chance -- for the sake of amorous "espionage" or close observation of the heart's object without the knowledge by that person that he or she is being observed.
- "Quel malheureux déguisement! Surtout que Lisette ne m'approche pas, je la hais plus que Dorante." (Miserable disguise! Above all keep Lisette away from me, I hate her more than I do Dorante.)
- -- (Silvia, unhappy, having assumed the déguisement of her own maid, Lisette; unaware that her intended spouse, to spy on whom she has assumed the disguise, is in disguise as well. From Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hazard)
- With this concept, we are close to the essence of marivaudage: the play of the known and the unknown, the revealed and the masked, which accelerates the pulse of the play and subjects the characters to a roller-coaster of emotions.
Previous: "Adorer "
- The heart of the mattter. In Marivaux's language of feeling, Adorer, to adore, is a term for a feeling far more intoxicating and overwhelming than that indicated by the word to love (aimer). Adoration subjects one to "transports" -- another term to be defined later. To adore someone, says the Abbé, is a great power.
To adore someone can also be, being helpless on the rack of love's torment, so to speak. One's destiny is perceived to be in the hands of whomever one adores. One is beyond oneself.
"Je descendis enivré d'amour et d'espoir . . . Je n'avais pas des idées bien nettes de ce qui allait arriver . . . Nu en chemise, malgré le froid qu'il faisait, ja traversai la cour. Je brûlais . . ." (Nicolas I, 548)
If that love is returned, one will be in heaven -- refused, the other endroit. In some of Marivaux's greatest plays, adoration and the intense longing of the soul it induces, are kept hidden from the beloved -- yet hints of its existence are the
Magic elixir!
This condition of the coeur caché, the hidden heart, is what drives the plot -- and is it not that way often in our own lives? Destiny lies between what we feel and what we can express.
"Calmé, j'écrivis dans un des instruments de mon bouillant écart: 'Je vous adore!' en petits caractères, et je remis l'élégante chaussure à la place où je l'avais prise."
"Now calmed, I wrote inside one of the instruments of my boiling folly: 'I adore you!' in small letters, and I restored the elegant shoe to the place from which I had taken it."
-- from Rétif de la Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas, I
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