Sensual pleasure and horror

Use in the book

The making of quince preserves briefly offers Gamelin domestic charm and tranquil pleasure, with an imagined winter of food and companionship. He interrupts this atmosphere to pursue the accusation against Maubel. At the chapter’s end Élodie calls the killing a crime, yet horror and renewed physical desire flood her together. The painful, delicious kiss and her increasing hunger for the blood-covered lover do not cancel her condemnation or imply that she had knowingly desired Maubel’s execution beforehand: the narrator expressly says she had not known the judicial danger.

Brotteaux’s pleasure also touches death, but differently. He remembers his dungeon faint as the keenest pleasure his senses have tasted and tries unsuccessfully to lose consciousness again. Later his sensuality draws him repeatedly to the courtyard adjoining the women’s quarters. When couples embrace at the grille, he discreetly withdraws to read Lucretius. Attraction and tact coexist; the passage does not say that sensuality itself causes his withdrawal.

Élodie later grows frightened of bloody images mingling with peaceful enjoyment; her silence marks a limit to the earlier attraction. Yet the conjunction of horror and volupté returns when she imagines the execution blade on her own neck. After Gamelin’s death the word describes her languor before renewed intimacy with Desmahis. Its recurrence carries bodily desire across political catastrophe without proving that the relationships are emotionally identical or that grief has disappeared.

Places to read

1. Chapter XVI, paragraph 5Frenchla tranquille volupté: tranquil sensual pleasure. Domestic work briefly offers an alternative emotional atmosphere.
2. Chapter XVI, paragraph 39Frenchà mille lieues de soupçonner: far from suspecting. Élodie has no idea that Maubel is to appear before the Tribunal; her later desire cannot be projected backward as prior authorisation.
3. Chapter XVI, paragraph 68Frenchd’horreur et de volupté: with horror and sensual pleasure. The narration makes the two feelings simultaneous.
4. Chapter XVI, paragraph 69Frenchplus elle avait faim et soif de lui: the more she hungered and thirsted for him. The object is her lover; the repeated comparative ties desire to his increasingly terrible appearance.
5. Chapter XIX, paragraph 3Frenchla sensation de volupté la plus vive: the keenest sensation of pleasure. Brotteaux interprets a faint amid dungeon misery.
6. Chapter XIX, paragraph 26Frenchqui était voluptueux: who was a sensual man. Brotteaux’s sensuality motivates his visits near the women’s quarters; his later discreet retreat lets the embracing couples keep their privacy.
7. Chapter XXV, paragraph 24Frenchaux impressions voluptueuses des images sanglantes: bloody images mingling with sensual impressions. The narrator says Élodie has grown frightened of this mingling; her response qualifies the earlier attraction before its renewed expression at XXV.41.
8. Chapter XXV, paragraph 41Frenchd’horreur et de volupté: with horror and voluptuousness. The conjunction preserves simultaneous opposed sensations.
9. Chapter XXIX, paragraph 19Frenchtoute sa personne respirait la volupté: her whole person breathed voluptuousness. Narration describes Élodie before her encounter with Desmahis.

Translation in this edition

The supplied English varies “tranquil pleasure”, “sensual pleasure”, “sensual man” and “voluptuousness” with the scene. The “light death” is Élodie’s figurative swoon at Chapter XVI, paragraph 68, not a literal death. The repeated plus … plus … in Chapter XVI, paragraph 69 makes her desire intensify with Gamelin’s terrible appearance; it is not a universal proposition about women.