Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice par Nathalie Azoulai

Abstract

Reviews 209 is attracted to Pierre’s difference: his intelligence, his cultivation, his resistance to social expectations. Despite their intimacy, Pierre maintains Rachel at a social distance, claiming that marriage is banal. He makes a show of unorthodox principles that will later be invoked as proof of honest brokering. The birth of their child does not break Pierre’s resolve not to marry Rachel. The second relationship is that of the daughter and narrator, Christine, and her mother, redoubled in the early years by the presence of Christine’s grandmother. The narrator offers her self-portrait as a child at the hub of a near idyllic family life. Moreover, Christine is sheltered from any sense of privation or lack of privilege. She is an unequivocally beloved and affectionate child, almost excessively so. Unconsciously, the child reenacts gestures specific to her father, such as admiring and caressing her mother’s beautiful hands. These moments in the text announce the triad that the three characters will become. In a third major development , Christine is introduced to her father, who spends long weekends and vacations with her alone. Like Rachel, Christine is drawn in by her father’s knowledge, urbanity, and privileged social milieu. For some time, the narrative betrays nothing untoward in the father-daughter relationship. Indeed, there is room to imagine that Christine’s fascination with her father corresponds to a “classic” adolescent reorientation away from one parent (Rachel) and toward another (Pierre). The unwary reader may even be taken as much by surprise as is Rachel at the sudden and tardy revelation of Pierre’s long-standing incestuous episodes with his daughter. The story gives short shrift to the years intervening this discovery and the fourth relationship, which is more accurately a reevaluation by Christine, the adult child, of her relationship to her mother. Christine attributes full responsibility for her victimization and its consequent psychological damages to her mother, accusing her of willful ignorance. The unraveling of this last relationship and its deep connections to the parents’ fraught couple is where the title resonates most clearly and has its greatest emotional weight. Relatively spare and understated in style, Angot’s novel nevertheless achieves a level of complexity and intensity that rises well above easy moral judgments. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Azoulai, Nathalie. Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice. Paris: P.O.L, 2015. ISBN 978-2-81803620 -4. Pp. 320. 18 a. Titus quitte Bérénice. Alors que la pièce de Racine tend vers cette séparation, l’annonce donne à Azoulai matière non à une tragédie moderne sur l’amour et le chagrin mais à un roman—couronné du prix Médicis—où elle revisite et imagine la vie et les pensées, les désirs et les tiraillements de celui que Rimbaud a appelé “le pur, le fort, le grand” (14). Bérénice délaisse le “babil de convalescence” (11) de ses amis et se plonge à corps perdu dans une œuvre reflétant ses humeurs successives, convaincue que si “elle comprend comment ce bourgeois de province a pu écrire des vers aussi poignants sur l’amour des femmes, alors elle comprendra pourquoi Titus l’a quittée” (18). Bérénice s’efface devant le jeune Jean, enivré de grammaire à l’abbaye de PortRoyal des Champs. Au contact de ses maîtres et du médecin Hamon qui dispensent cours de latin et observations sur le fonctionnement du corps, le futur tragédien peaufine son apprentissage de la condition humaine mais demeure fasciné et perplexe devant la souffrance de Didon, si contraire à la retenue et la rigueur jansénistes. Son départ pour Paris l’éloigne de Dieu. Il découvre dans les salons les plaisirs lettrés auprès de Boileau et de La Fontaine, et les plaisirs charnels auprès des actrices et dans les cabarets. L’orphelin puis le provincial désargenté et sans statut font d’abord place au poète qui grâce à ses odes gagne une pension, puis au courtisan qui se rapproche tant de Louis XIV qu’il le suit dans ses campagnes militaires et devient son historien, et finalement gentilhomme ordinaire de la Maison du...