"I like to skip back in time every now and again.

This time, I'm back in 1678 when Madame de Lafayette, who was part of the court of French King Louis XIV, published this novel anonymously. The fact that she initially didn't put her name to it might make us think she was writing about people she knew and events of her time but in fact she set her intrigue more than a century earlier, in the court of an earlier French king, Henri II.
That makes her book an historical novel, perhaps the first historical novel in French literature. And while most of the characters are real people of the mid-fifteen hundreds, the princess of the title and her husband, the prince of Clèves, are fictional. But the author gives the princess an uncle who was a real historic personage and an important figure in the court of Henri II thereby weaving her fictional characters into the history of the time very neatly.

The author also makes the princess one of the ladies in waiting to Mme la dauphine, the young girl who is married to the king's fifteen year-old son, Francis, the dauphin or heir to the throne. Many of us know Mme la dauphine better by her English title: Marie or Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots. She was reared at the French court because her mother, Marie de Guise, was related to the French royal family. In this novel la dauphine is never called Mary Stewart, she's simply Mme la dauphine throughout, though she eventually becomes Queen of France when Henri II is killed accidentally in a tournament and his young son succeeds him briefly (this is all taking place before she was to return to Scotland to claim that throne).

Mme la dauphine is a very interesting character and a perfect foil for the fictional princess of the title. Where the princess is quiet, discrete, never flirting with anyone, la dauphine is outgoing, fond of gossip, and always flirting with someone. The princess's story is greatly improved by la dauphine's presence whose fondness for gossip is a key element in the playing out of the plot.

The main part of the plot centres around the Duke de Nemours, another real figure in Henri II's court, who falls hopelessly in love with the princess de Clèves, and she, eventually with him. His love wouldn't be hopeless if he'd fallen for any other of the ladies-in-waiting or even for Mme la dauphine herself, but our princess is not like the ladies of the court and she doesn't permit herself to betray her husband, though she has never loved him.
In the meantime, la dauphine does everything she can to find out who Nemours has lost his heart to—since he doesn't flirt with her or with any of the other ladies anymore, it's clear to them all that he has a secret lover.

There wouldn't be much more to this story except that our princess decides to do the unthinkable: she confesses her love for Nemours to her husband, even though she has never betrayed him or even considered betraying him. The dilemma that results, and the contradiction at the heart of it—the 'confession' of a 'sin' that hasn't been committed—becomes the crux of the book, and a subject for much debate in Madame de La Fayette's circle when the novel was published: how much information is too much information to share. Things don't change that much, do they!

As a complement to that quandary, the author's writing style constantly plays with the idea of contradictory dilemmas. Sentences are often presented with paradoxes within them, but beautifully phrased for all that. Take the following passage, for example, concerning Nemours's feelings about what a man experiences when the woman he loves is getting ready for a ball. Whether his love is returned or not, he faces a range of dilemmas, which are often funny and ridiculous in spite of being utterly serious for the man concerned :
M. de Nemours trouve…que le bal est ce qu'il y a de plus insupportable pour les amants, soit qu'ils soient aimés, ou qu'ils ne le soient pas. Il dit que, s'ils sont aimés, ils ont le chagrin de l'être moins pendant plusieurs jours ; qu'il n'y a point de femme que le soin de sa parure n'empêche de songer à son amant ; qu'elles en sont entièrement occupées ; que ce soin de se parer est pour tout le monde, aussi bien que pour celui qu'elles aiment ; que lorsqu'elles sont au bal, elles veulent plaire à tous ceux qui les regardent ; que, quand elles sont contentes de leur beauté, elles en ont une joie dont leur amant ne fait pas la plus grande partie. Il dit aussi que, quand on n'est point aimé, on souffre encore davantage de voir sa maîtresse dans une assemblée ; que, plus elle est admirée du public, plus on se trouve malheureux de n'en être point aimé ; que l'on craint toujours que sa beauté ne fasse naître quelque amour plus heureux que le sien. Enfin il trouve qu'il n'y a point de souffrance pareille à celle de voir sa maîtresse au bal, si ce n'est de savoir qu'elle y est et de n'y être pas.
Summary translation: Nemours believes that balls are unbearable for (male) lovers, whether they are loved in return or not. If they are loved, there is the pain of being less attended to during the days before the event; that there is no woman whose concern for what she will wear doesn't prevent her from thinking about her lover while she's getting ready; that she is therefore completely occupied with preparing herself; that this preparation is aimed at everyone not only at the one who loves her; that when she is at the ball, she wants to be admired by all who see her; that when she is pleased with her own appearance, she experiences a pleasure that her lover can't be part of. He also believes that when a man isn't loved in return, he suffers even more from seeing the loved one at a ball; that the more she is admired, the more he suffers from not being loved; that in addition, he has the constant fear that her beauty will inspire a love in someone else that will be more acceptable to her than his own. Finally, he believes that there is no pain as unbearable as watching his lover at a ball except the pain of knowing she's there, and not being there himself.

Similarly the Princess is constantly beset by contradictory feelings: when she realises she has fallen in love with Nemours, she feels shame at entertaining feelings for another man that she can't feel for her own husband, but at the same time, she feels intense jealousy of any woman Nemours is seen talking to, and when a letter that seems to implicate him in an affair with someone else falls into her hands, she suffers torments.

There's another character whose mistress dies while he is away from Paris and who subsequently discovers she loved someone else in his absense. He expresses his wonderfully contradictory feelings as follows: "cependant j'ai la même affliction de sa mort que si elle m'était fidèle et je sens son infidélité comme si elle n'était point morte. Si j'avais appris son changement avant sa mort, la jalousie, la colère, la rage m'auraient rempli, et m'auraient endurci en quelque sorte contre la douleur de sa perte ; mais je suis dans un état où je ne puis ni m'en consoler, ni la haïr...Ainsi, j'éprouve à la fois la douleur de la mort et celle de l'infidélité ; ce sont deux maux que l'on a souvent comparés, mais qui n'ont jamais été sentis en même temps par la même personne."
Summary: He says he feels the same sorrow for his mistress's death as if she'd been faithful to him, but at the same time, he feels her infidelity as if she'd weren't dead. If he'd known of her change of feelings before her death, he'd have been beset by jealousy, anger and rage, and that would have protected him somewhat from the sorrow of her death, but he's left in a situation where he can neither find consolation for her death nor properly hate her. And so he feels both the sorrow of her death and the sorrow of her infidelity; two agonies that are often compared but are rarely felt at the same time by the same person.

I loved that Mme de La Fayette had a writing style that perfectly suited her material, and it was that aspect of this novel I enjoyed the most. But it was also interesting to see how many elements of modern romance novels and tv soaps are already in place in her text. Not only those already described but also such tropes as overhead conversations and people observed secretly, letters falling from people's pockets and things told in confidence that are then shared with others—and which become further distorted in the process.
It was all there in this novel from 1678 but written with such style and elegance that lifts it far above any soap opera I've ever seen. Bravo Mme de La Fayette."

"I didn’t like The Pat Hobby Stories. Fitzgerald writes very well, of course, but I found them unpleasantly bitter, profoundly depressing and in the end a little vacuous.

Pat Hobby is an almost-forgotten hack writer, scratching a living in Hollywood where he was once a celebrated writer. Written at a time when Fitzgerald himself was working in Hollywood, they represent a satirised picture of his life there. The problem for me is that, rather than satire, each story is a slightly farcical tale of Hobby pulling various fast ones to try to get work and improve his status, in which he fails humiliatingly. To me, thestories just weren’t funny, they had no real bite as satire and really didn’t add up to much at all. I just found them a rather insipid and depressing portrait of a place and an industry awash with ego and self-interest – but we already know all that about Hollywood. Added to Hobby’s own unpleasantness, manipulativeness and litany of failure and humiliation, it produced a series of stories which I tired of very quickly. I read about half of them, which was as much as I could take, and then gave up, I’m afraid.

F.Scott Fitzgerald may have produced some of the great literature of the 20th century, but The Pat Hobby Stories most certainly don’t qualify as that; they are more a rather sad footnote to the life of a fine writer."