The two reviews and the management of admiration

Use in the book

The first extract, from the Mercure of 15 Floréal Year X and signed P. M., begins by treating René both as part of the larger defence and as a small work capable of standing alone (Review p. 351). Its language of inner storm and muffled fermentation closely articulates the problem of passions without an object. It praises the precision with which such hard-to-name experience has been rendered and anticipates readers recognizing their own confused youth in the description.

That recognition is ethically double. The review admires the first Amélie letter as chaste and passionate, with love perceptible beneath religion’s veil (p. 353), while also locating the novel’s moral in the missionary’s abrupt rebuke. Its final joke about young people beginning with eccentricity while waiting for genius targets the conversion of a literary attitude into a claim of superiority. Aesthetic identification and moral distancing are therefore joined inside the same favourable response.

The second review, dated 20 July 1805, presents innovation as an extension of established artistic principles rather than their destruction (pp. 354–3552). It accepts the author’s account of fiction as bait for readers unlikely to approach doctrine directly. Yet it explicitly concedes that the tenderness and melancholy may be too intoxicating for the young. Its defence depends on the predominance of the ending’s moral emotion, and it even imagines a future in which the episodes could be removed from the doctrinal work while remaining masterpieces for connoisseurs.

The reviewer’s phrase about “René’s passion” exceeding legitimate bounds must not be treated as better evidence of reciprocal incest than Amélie’s explicit negation in the story. Critical shorthand may name the work’s transgressive matter without precisely distinguishing whose passion it is. The two reviews are most valuable when read as active interpretations: both celebrate imaginative achievement, both work to secure moral legitimacy, and neither entirely suppresses the disturbing attractiveness that makes that work necessary. Their reprinting records and promotes a way of reading; it does not dissolve the tensions they themselves register.

Places to read

1. Review p. 351un petit ouvrage à part — The first reviewer recognizes potential independence from the Génie.
2. Review p. 353à la fois si chaste et si passionnée — Admiration centres on the mixed language of Amélie’s letter.
3. Review p. 354en attendant le génie — The first review mocks eccentricity adopted as a substitute for achievement.
4. Review p. 356La passion de René sort, il est vrai, des bornes légitimes — A reviewer’s broad characterization, not an overriding narrative fact.
5. Review p. 358son petit discours vaut lui seul un long traité de morale — The second reviewer gives Souël’s rebuke exceptional didactic authority.

Translation in this edition

The first extract ends with the initials P. M.; this entry does not expand them without additional evidence. The reproduced second extract omits a signature, but the supplied p. 358 editorial note reports that the complete review was signed Ch. D. These initials are likewise not expanded here. The extracts are reproduced in the 1826 volume but retain their distinct original dates.