The Salt Smugglers (32 page)

91
salty Burgundians:
During the Hundred Years' War, the Burgundians captured the coastal fortress of Aigues-Mortes; when its inhabitants revolted in 1422 and massacred the occupiers from Burgundy, they preserved their bodies in local sea salt so that they could be placed on display as trophies.

91
the spats between Fénelon and Bossuet:
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715), Catholic theologian, poet, and writer, and advocate of Quietism, considered heretical by the pope. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), French bishop, theologian, and renowned pulpit orator. Madame Guyon (1648-1717), French mystic and practitioner of Quietism, imprisoned in the Bastille from 1695 to 1703 for having published
A Short and Easy Method of Prayer
.

93
La Trappe:
La Trappe Abbey in Soligny-la-Trappe (Orne) is the house of origin of the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Its fourteenth abbot, Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé, the stepson of Cardinal Richelieu, was the subject of an 1844 biography by Chateaubriand.

93
a number of caps:
I.e., Phrygian caps, ancient symbols of liberty?

95
Ninon de Lenclos:
French author, courtesan, and patron of the arts (1620-1705). Her lovers included the king's cousin, the Great Condé, Gaspard de Coligny, and La Rochefoucauld, and in 1656, she was briefly imprisoned in a convent for her libertine ways. At the age of sixty, she was the mistress of Charles de Sévigné, son of the marquise — hence the latter's disparaging portrait of her in her
Memoirs
.

100
when it comes to history:
Froissart and Monstrelet, previously mentioned, were medieval authors of Chronicles. Le père Daniel (1649-1728) was Louis XIV's royal historiographer, as was François-Eudes de Mézeray (1610- 1683); Hardouin de Beaumont de Péréfixe (1605-1671) wrote a history of the reign of Henri IV; Alexis Monteil (1769-1850) was the author of
l'Histoire des Français des divers états
(1827-1844); Lamartine's
History of the Girondists
appeared in 1847; Prosper de Barante (1782- 1866) was a specialist of the Dukes of Burgundy; François Guizot (1787-1874) wrote a number of histories of France and Europe in the 1820s; Louis-Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was the author of a ten-volume
History of the French Revolution
(1823-1827).

103
My brothers, only God is great:
The first sentence of Massillon's funeral oration for Louis XIV.

104
Villars off in the distance:
The Duke of Villars (1653-1734) was the last great general of Louis XIV; after pacifying the Cévennes, he led France to several decisive victories in Germany and Austria during the War of the Spanish Succession.

104
visiting the wings of a theater:
Adapted from Poe's “Philosophy of Composition” (1846).

104
when the Bastille was finally demolished:
Nerval took most of his information about the Bastille from Constantin de Renneville's four-volume
L'Inquisition française
(Amsterdam and Leyden, 1724).

107
Fouquet and Lauzun:
Nicolas Fouquet (1615-1680) was superintendent of finances under Louis XIV — who, displeased with his enormous wealth and extravagance, had him imprisoned at the fortress of Pignerol in 1665, where he died fifteen years later. The Duke of Lauzun (1633-1723), a favorite of Louis XIV, was imprisoned for ten years, first at the Bastille and then at Pignerol, after a passionate romance with the king's cousin Mlle de Montpensier.

108
the performances at Saint-Cyr:
Founded by Mme de Maintenon in 1685, this school for the daughters of impoverished noblemen was also the scene of the performances of Racine's late Christian dramas
Esther
(1689) and
Athalie
(1691).

108
the existing inscription:
The Latin reads “The College of Clermont of the Society of Jesus,” which was changed to “The College of Louis the Great.”

120
J.-B. Rousseau:
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1671-1741), no relation to Jean-Jacques, was considered one of the premier poets of his age.

121
Heinsius:
Antoine Heinsius (1640-1720); the Dutch title is the equivalent of a prime minister.

122
d'Holbach and La Mettrie:
The Baron d'Holbach (1723- 1789), French encyclopedist and early proponent of materialism in his 1770
Système de la nature
. Julian Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), best known for his atheistic
L'Homme machine
of 1748.

122
the king of Sweden:
Charles XII, who ruled Sweden from 1697 to 1718. He was victorious over the Russians at
Nar
va — and not, as Nerval writes (following the abbé de Bucquoy),
Ner
va — but then was routed by Peter the Great at Poltava in the Ukraine, before taking refuge at Bender, in Turkey. Quintus Curtius was a Roman historian who wrote a ten-volume biography of Alexander the Great.

TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT

Nerval's
The Salt Smugglers
was never published in book form during his own lifetime; to this day, this experimental serial novel lies largely forgotten in the pages of tome two of the Pléiade edition of his
Oeuvres complètes
, unavailable to the general reader. An ephemeral journalistic performance addressed to the political topicalities of the ailing Second Republic, the text first appeared in twenty-seven installments in
Le National
between October 24 and December 22, 1850, a year before Louis Napoléon's coup d'état. Except for a brief hiatus in late November, it came out regularly in the Thursday through Sunday issues of the paper, the other days of the week being devoted to feature pieces on the theater, fine arts, or recent activities at the Academy of Sciences. Following the standard newspaper format of the day, the feuilleton filled four columns on the bottom third of the front page and four additional columns at the bottom of the reverse page. Each column was composed of thirty-three lines, and Nerval was probably paid the going rate for a journalist of his reputation, namely, twenty-five centimes a line — which meant he was earning a little over eight francs per column of print, or roughly seventy francs per installment. If indeed he was paid in full, he may have netted eighteen hundred francs for his efforts, a respectable sum for the period, yet a pittance compared to the thirty thousand francs that his friend Alexandre Dumas had raked in for the serial publication of his blockbuster
Count of Monte-Cristo
several years earlier.

A master of the assembly-line techniques of the new
littérature industrielle
(as Sainte-Beuve dubbed it), Dumas had used the columnar format of the newspaper serial novel to great effect: by foreshortening his paragraphs and pasting in great swatches of rapid-fire dialogue, he was able to significantly inflate the number of lines for which he was being paid. This typographical
padding out of the text with blanks, however, at the same time created a new kind of visual prosody: given the precipitous speed at which these serials hurtled along, the half-distracted newspaper reader needed only to scroll down the column of print, rapidly scanning the events that unrolled upon the filmstrip before the eyes. Nerval, who was Dumas' erstwhile collaborator and occasional ghostwriter, observes a similar economy of the page in
The Salt Smugglers
. This is the first edition that attempts to reproduce the actual disposition of the text as originally published in
Le National
: the four columns per double-page layout will, it is hoped, provide a reasonable facsimile of the novel's original journalistic pace. Similarly, the French punctuation of the original — guillemets and all — has also been systematically retained, not only in order to “foreignize” the translation but, more importantly, to articulate Nerval's quirky prose rhythms, nowhere more evident than in his liberal (and financially profitable) use of the digressional dash — atypographical flourish that earned him the sobriquet of “le Sterne français.”

When
Le National
announced the forthcoming publication of Nerval's feuilleton in the early fall of 1850, the project bore the somewhat recondite title of ÉTUDES HISTORIQUES: LES FAUX SAULNIERS (Extrait de la
Vie et des Aventures de l'abbé Bucquoi
). No doubt anxious to avoid the punitive stamp tax that, according to the recently passed press laws of July, they would have had to pay if caught publishing fiction in their pages, the editors preferred to pass off Nerval's text as a “Historical Study” (or, perhaps, more accurately “A Study in History”). The “abbé Bucquoi” whom Nerval had promised to deliver to his editors as the genuinely documentary (and not merely novelistic) object of his narration was a certain Jean-Albert D'Archambaud, comte de Bucquoy (1650?-1740), a minor aristocrat who lived during the reign of Louis XIV and who was best known as one of the rare inmates to have successfully escaped from the state prison of Fort-l'Évêque (in 1706) and, even more incredibly, from the Bastille (in 1709). An attractive candidate for a swashbuckling tale set in
le grand siècle
(Dumas had already mined this rich vein of the historical novel in his D'Artagnan Romances), the abbé de Bucquoy also attracted Nerval's interest as an early Utopian fantasist who, during his later years of exile in Holland — where he lived to the ripe old age of ninety — had published a number of pamphlets proposing the transformation of monarchical France into a republic. In 1852, Nerval would recycle the abbé de Bucquoy portion of his newspaper serial (where, deferred until December, it occupied only the final third of the
installments) into the collection of biographical essays he entitled
Les Illuminés
, or the “Precursors of Socialism.” A portrait gallery of a series of eccentrics ranging from the semi-fictional Raoul Spifame, a mad sixteenth-century social reformer and printer, to such eighteenth-century authors and adventurers as the prophet of revolution Jacques Cazotte, the “communist” polygraph and pornographer Restif de la Bretonne, the alchemist and necromancer Alessandro Cagliostro, and the neo-pagan philsopher Quintus Aucler, the volume outlined an underground tradition of misfits and illuminati all committed to the radical reimagining of political community.

As for the title of Nerval's serial,
Les Faux Saulniers
, most contemporary readers versed in French history would have recognized the allusion to the notorious gabelle, or salt tax, one of the most despised revenue sources of the ancien régime — which required every person over the age of eight to purchase a minimum amount of salt (about fifteen pounds) each year at elevated prices set by the Crown's monopoly and its corrupt tax farmers.
Faux saunage
(or salt fraud) was rampant in the provinces where the tax was highest, and in 1675, some seven thousand Breton peasants rose up against the gabelle, provoking a brutal repression by royal troops and an even more drastic revision of the salt tax laws by Colbert. Given these circumstances, the salt smugglers or clandestine salt makers known as
faux sauniers
(Nerval prefers the archaic spelling to
saulniers
) stood to make considerable profit on their contraband and, like the rum-runners of the Prohibition Era, were often seen as romantic outlaws in league with the local peasantry against the distant and ever more oppressive nation-state. By the late eighteenth century, more than three thousand French men, women, and children were sentenced to prison or death every year for crimes against the gabelle. After the French Revolution, the new National Assembly abolished the salt tax in early 1790 and amnestied all those accused of
faux saunage
. Reestablished by Napoléon in 1806 to defray the costs of his foreign wars, it remained in effect until the revolution of 1848, when, in one of its very first February decrees (laden with symbolism), the new provisional government eliminated the salt tax altogether — only to see it reintroduced in December later that same year.

Of all of this there is virtually no mention in Nerval's feuilleton: its title,
Les Faux Saulniers
(literally, the “false salters”), turns out to be a false title of sorts. The abbé de Bucquoy's brief falling-in with a band of salt smugglers occupies only a fraction of its overall historical narrative, with these bootleggers merely
playing a supporting role within the larger drama of insurrection against the Crown during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — aprotracted civil war whose actors included the (Catholic) League, the (Protestant) Camisards in the Cévennes, and the nobles enlisted in that aristocratic backlash against absolutism known as La Fronde. Nerval calls this entire legacy of resistance against the centralized authority of the state the Tradition of Opposition and, in
The Salt Smugglers
at least, locates its epicenter in his native Valois, ancestral seat of Angélique de Longueval, the grand-aunt of the abbé de Bucquoy and the picaresque heroine whose first-person narrative of her adventuresome life and loves meanders in and out of seven early installments of the feuilleton. In 1854, Nerval cannibalized this entire portion of his newspaper serial and published it in
Les Filles du feu
as a separate novella entitled “Angélique” — a companion piece to “Sylvie,” his other tale of his childhood memories of the Valois (and Proust's favorite among Nerval's writings).