The Female Philosophe in the Closet: The Cabinet and the Senses in French Erotic Novels, 1740–1800

Abstract

L'architecture, jadis majestueuse et qui ne derogeait pas, s'est ployee a la licence de nos moeurs et de nos idees. Elle a prevu et satisfait toutes les intentions de la debauche et du libertinage; les issues secretes et les escaliers derobes sont au ton des romans du jour. L'architecture enfin, complice de nos desordres, est non moins licencieuse que notre poesie erotique.- Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1781)1Architecture, once majestic and unyielding, has succumbed to the licentiousness of our lifestyle and ideas. It anticipates and fulfills all the aims of debauchery and libertinage; secret passages and hidden stairways are in the same vein as novels of the day. Architecture, complicit in our disorders, is no less licentious than our erotic poetry.Louis-Sebastien Mercier, assessing Paris in the late eighteenth century, indicted Parisian architecture for its complicity in societal disorders. architecture of the day, quipped Mercier, was as dissolute as the obscene books sold in a thriving underground print network. In this characterization of eighteenth-century Paris, Mercier does not criticize architects or authors, per se, but their creations: it was buildings and books that signaled the debauchery looming in the social imaginary. What architecture and erotic books shared was the isolated, private experience each could provide. Eighteenth-century interiors, characterized by divided, subdivided, and specialized space, complicated the demarcations between the private and the public, creating what one might think of as three spheres: the public, the private, and the secret. fragmentation of the interior landscape into boudoirs, cabinets, alcoves, niches, and other small spaces that were then partitioned by screens (cloisons) and curtains is frequently represented in French novels of the time, from the sentimental to the erotic, as literary lovers began to abandon the outdoor encounters of the seventeenth-century pastoral in favor of the intimacy of the or the boudoir.2 These interior spaces offered the illusion of total seclusion and the potential for unbounded pleasure. In a literary context, the assumption of absolute privacy allowed for the eavesdroppers and voyeurs whose observations are a recurrent thread in erotic and libertine literature.Vivant Denon's Point de lendemain (1777; No Tomorrow) exemplifies the lure of interior space, the erotic sensibilities it engenders, and the literary stakes in its exploration. narrator's account of his one-night tryst with an older woman allows us to trace the migration from the public to the domestic sphere and, finally, to a secret, exotically appointed cabinet. Seduction and its spatial context become inseparable as Madame T... lures the young narrator from the archetypical site of sociability-an opera loge, where one sees and is seen-through a series of progressively more secluded spaces: the interior of a carriage (where the jostling motion forces their first touch), a country home, a private garden, a pavilion within the garden, and finally, the cabinet. Anticipating the ultimate destination, the young narrator confesses that his lust has migrated from woman to architecture: [C]e n'etait plus madame de T... que je desirais, c'etait le cabinet ([I]t was no longer Madame de T... whom I desired, it was the cabinet; 34).3This displaced desire in which a room inflames arousal illustrates only one of the many roles of interior spaces in eighteenth-century seduction novels. When the supplants the body as the object of desire, the penetration of an inner sanctum is a figure for sexual penetration. most famous contemporary example of this analogy is no doubt Laclos's double entendre in Les Liaisons dangereuses wherein Valmont insists that Cecile oil the lock and hinges of her bedroom door so that he can enter with ease. Architectural seduction is also the central conceit of Bastide's La Petite (1758; The Little House), in which the Marquis de Tremicour, Bastide's libertine hero, rightly presumes that if the sumptuous architectural intricacies of his petite maison can seduce the young Melite, she will, in turn, yield to the Marquis's sexual desires. …