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Stolen Fruit, Moral Fiction: Marmontel’s Contes moraux in Denmark–Norway
Aina Nøding
It was a late Friday night in Copenhagen in May 1781. Two soldiers had been painting the town red and decided to continue the party by breaking into the storage of an off-licence. As they opened the door, the content of the storage must have been a disappointment. Instead of barrels of spirits, there were stacks of dusty and well-worn books – in French. They belonged to a public servant, Jens Nimb. Even though the soldiers’ thirst mainly was of a different nature than the thirst for learning, they stole away with several volumes. Ironically, among the titles were several tomes of ‘true crime’ (Pitaval’s
Causes célèbres [Famous court cases]) as well as three volumes of Marmontel’s
Contes moraux [Moral tales]. Why would the soldiers bother with books they most probably could not read? According to Nimb, they were hoping to trade the books for food, which is why he advertised the theft in the local newspaper to alert shopkeepers. That is, he was only interested in retrieving a couple of them, as the rest were ‘incomplete and ruined’.
1 Quote: ‘ere defecte og fordærvede’ (Kiøbenhavns Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger (KA), 28 May 1781, p. 8). All translations by the author, unless otherwise stated. Nimb’s advertisement points to the widespread trade in and distribution of foreign language books to readers in Denmark–Norway, albeit in an unusual fashion. That this work by Jean-François Marmontel (1723–99) would be rather dusty in the 1780s is perhaps less of a surprise. The stories first appeared between 1755 and 1759 in
Mercure de France, a periodical edited by Marmontel from 1758. From 1761 he reprinted them as volumes of
Contes moraux, continually adding stories to new editions. Critics soon questioned the label ‘moral’, but the stories were instantly popular across Europe. The ‘tales’ appealed to a wide audience with their more ‘realistic’ take on the genre of short prose fiction and their stylistic ease. In his preface Marmontel insisted short stories should be told efficiently, with speedy dialogues and wit, making them suitable for readings in salons and as theatre adaptations.
2 ‘Préface’ in J.-F. Marmontel, Contes moraux (The Hague [Paris?], 1761).Numerous adaptations and imitations soon followed suit across Europe and North America, including in Denmark–Norway. Of course, moral weeklies like
The Spectator had carried short fiction aimed at instructing virtue for decades, and ‘moral tales’ was not a new term. However, Marmontel’s
Contes as
books helped liberate the genre from moral philosophy (the story as an
example), making the stories primarily literary texts within the context of a genre while carrying the label ‘moral’ with a gallant smile.
3 K. Astbury, The Moral Tale in France and Germany 1750–1789 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 11–15, 36. The combination of popularity among readers and the literary elite, paired with Marmontel’s standing as an authority on poetics, made his work a model of the genre and raised its literary value. In Copenhagen the semi-official society for encouraging new quality literature, called
The Society of Taste for short, launched a prize contest for the best short story in 1771. The listed models for contestants were Cicero and Marmontel.
4 Advertisement in KA, 16 August 1771, p. 4 by Selskabet til de skiønne og nyttige Videnskabers Forfremmelse (‘Det smagende Selskab’). Original title: ‘Sigrid, eller Kierlighed Tapperhed’s Belønning’, in Forsøg i de skiønne og nyttige Videnskaber, vol. 10 (Copenhagen, 1772). Prominent writers responded, including the historian Peter Frederik Suhm (1728–98). His medieval tale ‘Sigrid’ won, marking the beginning of marmontelian stories in Danish.
5 H. Stangerup, Romanen i Danmark i det attende aarhundrede (Copenhagen, 1936), pp. 279–85. The prize was for rhetoric (‘Veltalenhed’). Suhm later wrote two similar stories: ‘Euphron’ (1774) and ‘Signe og Habor’ (1777).However,
Contes moraux’s influence was not solely due to a top-down definition of taste but rather a result of a growing readership for Marmontel’s works and prose fiction in general. The story of the agents involved in this process is less known: how and by whom did this work reach their readers, and who were they? Furthermore, how did publications and translations across different print media play out in the tales’ reception?
6 Marmontel became the leading figure of opera comique in Denmark–Norway. That reception of the Contes goes beyond the scope here, while it certainly strengthened interest in the printed stories and vice versa. In Britain, Marmontel was the most frequently translated French author in magazines, with translations first appearing in serial form.
7 R. D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740–1815 (Evanston/London, 1962), pp. 372, 378. See also J. Grieder, Translations of French Sentimental prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Durham, NC, 1975), pp. 103–9. A similar and even more distinct pattern can be found in Denmark–Norway. Moreover, the
Contes moved along trade networks of both imports and exports of French works to and from Denmark–Norway, modifying models of book diffusion or dissemination of prose fiction as one-way movements from centre to periphery into ones of entanglement, adaptation and circulation.
8 F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London, 1998); S. Shep, ‘Books in Global Perspectives’, in L. Howsam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The History of The Book (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 53–70; M. Ogborn and C. Withers, Geographies of the Book (Farnham/Burlington, 2010). By examining the sociology (or even sociality) and geography of this work in its multiple material shapes on the fringes of Europe, the complexities of late eighteenth-century book trade and reading can be more fully understood and modified, even outside the region.
9 D. Bellingradt and J. Salman, ‘Chapter 1: Books and Book History in Motion: Materiality, Sociality and Spatiality’, in D. Bellingradt and J. Salman (eds), Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe (Cham, 2017), pp. 1–11; D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, 1999). In order to map this out, this chapter will first apply a bibliographic analysis to argue the production of an unknown French volume edition of
Contes moraux in Denmark before analysing the wider reception of the stories in terms of translation, criticism, readers and collections. Finally, the diffusion in Norway will serve as a case for arguing the diverging paths of a work depending on its language and format (volume or series).