The French novelist and dramatist Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763) created a complex and eminently personal style, indicating the gradual transition in France from 17th-century neoclassic art to an introspective art of individual sentiment and experience.

Born in Paris, the son of a royal mint official whose bourgeois origins fringed on those of the lesser nobility, Pierre Carlet de Marivaux spent his childhood in the provinces and returned to the capital in 1710. While ostensibly though rather fitfully studying law, he was already immersed in literary efforts, composing first satires and then serious imitations of extravagant adventure novels. Little is known about his private life, except that he married in 1717, fathered a daughter 2 years later, and never remarried after his wife's death in 1723.

The year 1720 was doubly significant for Marivaux: he was financially ruined in the collapse of the Law Bank, and he saw his first dramatic work produced, L'Amour et la vérité, a dismal failure in its own right. Undaunted, he struggled to earn a living writing for newspapers, even launching the ephemeral Spectateur français (1722). Meanwhile, an unsuccessful stage encounter with the heroism and classical verse required by the Théâtre Français (Annibal, a tragedy in five acts, 1720) convinced him that his fantasy Arlequin poli par l'amour (Robin, Bachelor of Love), well handled by the Théâtre Italien that same year, and marked the real domain of his dramatic talent. This "minor" genre of irregular prose comedy, although it earned him the disdain of contemporary arbiters such as Voltaire, was to promise survival and eventual glory to a talent ranked second in France only to that of Molière.

Among 30 pieces written for the stage, Marivaux's most important comedies remain La Surprise de l'amour (1722), La Double inconstance (1722; Double Infidelity), Le leu de l'amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and Chance), and Les Fausses confidences (1737; Sylvia Hears a Secret). Departing from the farcical inspiration of Molière but holding to the conventional figures provided by his best interpreters, the Italian players, Marivaux sought to mingle fantasy with a graceful portrayal of amorous sentiment. His eternal subject is the nascent sentiment of love, its arduous avowal, the blind simplicity of its disguises, and the drastic involvements required by this world for the pursuit of happiness. Love, in Marivaux's sometimes precious dialogue analyses, is forever that "surprise" generously assured to youthful pride and purity of heart.

Although scarcely a year passed at the height of Marivaux's career without at least one successful comedy in production, he was never able to attain real celebrity in his own time, a fact due largely to current prejudice in favor of the neoclassic heroic genre, tragedy. Destined to announce preferred genres of the future, Marivaux was important in the evolution of narrative as well as dramatic art: his two unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne (1731-1741; The Life of Marianne) and Le paysan parvenu (1735-1736), remain signal efforts in the long fight of that other "minor" genre to attain recognition. Although admitted to the French Academy in 1742, Marivaux outlived the uncertain literary renown he had won. Producing little over the final 20 years of his life, he died in relative poverty.

Further Reading

Critical works in English include the general study by Edward Joseph Hollingsworth Greene, Marivaux (1965), as well as Ruth Kirby Jamieson, Marivaux: A Study in Sensibility (1941), and Kenneth Newton McKee, The Theater of Marivaux (1958). For additional material on Marivaux, Geoffroy Atkinson, The Sentimental Revolution: French Writers of 1690-1740 (1966), and John Cruickshank, ed., French Literature and its Background (1968), vol. 3, are recommended.

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Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de (1688-1763). Playwright, novelist, and essayist. The son of an administrator, he grew up in the provinces and subsequently lived in Paris. Little is known of his private life. He married in 1717; his wife died six years later, and his one daughter became a nun. Partly ruined by the collapse of Law's system, he was never well off and died a poor man.

With the exception of one play, Le Père prudent et équitable, his early writings were for the most part burlesque parodies of the classics, such as L'Iliade travestie (1716) and Le Télémaque travesti (published in 1736). He knew little Latin and less Greek, and followed Fontenelle and La Motte in their hostility to the anciens [see Querelle Des Anciens Et Des Modernes]. He frequented Parisian salons, notably those of Madame de Lambert and Madame de Tencin, both of whom are portrayed in his La Vie de Marianne. Contemporary accounts speak of his witty conversation and his excessive sensitivity to praise and criticism. In 1743 he was elected to the Académie Française, for which he composed ‘Réflexions’ on a variety of topics.

He achieved fame, and remains best known, as the author of over 30 comedies (his one tragedy, Annibal, was a failure). They were written in almost equal proportions for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne; many of his most successful parts were written for the Italian players, in particular the leading lady Silvia and Thomassin, who played Arlequin. One fascinating comedy, Les Serments indiscrets (1732) is in five acts, but most of the best-known are in three: they include La Surprise de l'amour (1722), La Double Inconstance (1723), Le Prince travesti (1724), La Fausse Suivante (1724), La Seconde Surprise de l'amour (1727), Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard (1730), Le Triomphe de l'amour (1732), L'Heureux Stratagème (1733), Le Petit-Maître corrigé (1734), La Mère confidente (1735), and Les Fausses Confidences (1737). There are also many one-acters, including Le Legs (1736), Les Sincères (1739), and L' Épreuve (1740). A special group is formed by plays on ‘philosophical’ themes such as the relations between the sexes (La Nouvelle Colonie, 1729, and La Dispute, 1744) or between social classes ( L' Île des esclaves, 1725); L'Île de la raison (1727) exploits in three acts the recent precedent of Gulliver's Travels.

The one-act Arlequin poli par l'amour (1720) sets the tone for the plays that follow. In a fairy-tale setting, the love of a shepherdess (Silvia) transforms the rustic Arlequin. This popular comic figure appears in many of Marivaux's subsequent plays, where he represents a force of nature—naïve, gluttonous, and attractive—but is increasingly downgraded to the role of foolish servant. In all these plays a constant theme is the discovery of love, in which men and women are brought by the machinations of others to recognize their desires, which have been evident to the spectators all along. The obstacle to love is no longer, as in Molière, the tyrannical father; the difficulties lie in the hearts and minds of the lovers, which are explored with great subtlety. In spite of a disquieting stress on weakness and irrationality and the bitterness of some of the social observation, the action usually ends reassuringly with a wedding, often a double wedding involving both masters and servants. The subjects are superficially similar, but the tone varies greatly, from the stylized light-heartedness of La Surprise de l'amour to the overt cynicism of La Fausse Suivante or Le Legs, where money plays an important part. Later plays, in particular Les Fausses Confidences, show a growing interest in depicting contemporary society.

After early successes, the comedies met with an increasingly hostile reception on the grounds of their supposed obscurity or triviality, and Marivaux devoted more time to journalism, essays, and fiction. From 1717 he had written sketches of Paris life for the Mercure. Between 1721 and 1724 he published the 25 numbers of Le Spectateur français, inspired by the success of the English Spectator. These are not so much essays as capricious combinations of narrative and moral reflection, often placed in the mouths of fictional narrators and adopting the standpoint of the detached observer. He continued in this vein in the seven numbers of L'Indigent philosophe (1727), where he takes on the persona of a modern Diogenes, and in Le Cabinet du philosophe (1734).

Marivaux's ‘journalism’ led naturally to the writing of novels. His first piece of fiction had been Les Effets surprenants de la sympathie (1713-14), which was followed by comic works such as Pharsamon (inspired by Don Quixote) and La Voiture embourbée. But his great achievement as a novelist is his two memoir-novels, both published in instalments and left unfinished, La Vie de Marianne (1731-42) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734-35). These free-wheeling, digressive texts display most fully their author's gift for combining psychological exploration and moral reflection.

In all his works, Marivaux shows a strong concern for moral and social questions. His views on such matters are personal, but rarely very original. Much of his writing turns on love between the sexes, and shows great sensitivity to the problems of women in contemporary society. He pleads the cause of kindness and fellow-feeling against social arrogance. But he stops short of the radical positions of the philosophes, for whom he had little sympathy—and the feeling was mutual.

What is most striking is his language. This was constantly criticized by contemporaries as being affected and obscure. He defended his original style against the pressure to conform, claiming that it was more adequate to psychological reality and truer to authentic speech than the standard polite language. Even so, for generations the word ‘marivaudage’ came to mean, as Voltaire put it, ‘beaucoup de métaphysique, et peu de naturel’, and his writings were seen as decorative, frivolous products of the Regency years. Only fairly recently, partly as a result of pioneering theatrical productions by Vilar, Planchon, and others, has his language been fully recognized as the medium for the creation of attractive, compelling, and often disturbing images of social and sexual behaviour.

— Peter France

Bibliography

• J. Rousset, Forme et signification (1962)
• E. J. H. Greene, Marivaux (1965)
• F. Deloffre, Une préciosité nouvelle: Marivaux et le marivaudage, 2nd edn. (1967)
• H. Coulet and M. Gilot, Marivaux; un humanisme expérimental (1973)

(pyĕr' kärlā' də shäNblē' də märēvō') , 1688–1763, French dramatist and novelist. He enjoyed popularity for a time with his numerous comedies, including Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard (1730, tr. Love in Livery) and Le Legs (1736, tr. The Legacy, 1915), which analyze the sentiments and complications of love in a graceful, though often precious, style. The term marivaudage was thenceforth applied to his brand of artificiality. He also wrote two unfinished novels of middle-class life, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41) and Le Paysan parvenu (1735–36), which are important early examples of the genre.

Bibliography

See G. Poe, The Rococo and Eighteenth-Century Theater (1987); R. C. Rosbottom, Marivaux's Novels (1975).

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