Fact and the Factitious in Amours de Voyage

Abstract

Late in Amours de Voyage, Claude, the letter-writing protagonist, plays momentarily with the sense that through trusting himself and looking within he might have ‘gained a religious assurance’ and found in his own ‘poor soul’ a secure ‘moral basis to rest on’.1 It is a moment of potential comfort, suggesting the solace of a philosophical idealist when he discovers wisdom and authority within the structures of internal feeling. And yet it is not comfort. There was comfort in the previous fragment when he suddenly heard the sound of an English Psalm tune, but in these lines the assurance is only something he could ‘almost’ believe. In typically self-conscious fashion Claude regards the prospect of belief in an internalised ‘moral basis’ as mere possibility, as the conceptualisation of a ground he would dearly like to believe in. The assurance is the product of desire and the tone is self-mocking and detached. The moment of grounded belief was therefore never there and even its possibility is rejected: ‘Ah, but indeed I see, I feel it factitious entirely’ (V.v.98).