As for Mme de Clèves, the woman who inadvertently creates this unresolvable situation, my class felt that she was the most pessimistic of the three. After her husband dies and the period of mourning is over, she is free to marry the duc de Nemours. No one could blame her now for following the yearnings of her heart. The duke still adores her; if anything, her inaccessibility has intensified his passion for her. Yet she refuses his proposal of marriage.
Granted, she still feels some remorse over having been the indirect and unwitting cause of her husband’s death. The main reason for her refusal, however, is that she is afraid of suffering. She recalls the horrible jealous crisis she endured when she suspected Nemours of having been involved with another woman while professing to love only her. She is convinced that her very inaccessibility explains the constancy of an essentially inconstant man.
Once he could satiate his passion, he would no longer desire her as much and would be inclined to seek out other adventures. In other words, once they were married, this exciting amorous adventure would be over and so, too, would be his passion for her. Moreover, Mme de Clèves believes that love, by its very nature, is an irrational attraction that cannot last. She prefers, then, to refuse the Duke and exit in triumph rather than accept marriage with him and suffer the inevitable humiliation of betrayal.
“She’s a coward,” some of my students exclaimed during a very animated discussion we had on the matter. “How would you have acted?” I asked them. The consensus was the following: it is better to love and lose than not to love at all. That a novel written over three hundred years before my students were born could arouse such passionate debate in my classroom testified to its universal and, consequently, enduring appeal. And now they, too, fully agreed that I had been right all along.
These great writers of the French Classical Period had helped them zero in on who they were and on who they wanted or didn’t want to become. Molière, Racine, and Mme de La Fayette enabled them to reach a better understanding of human nature and, consequently, of their own natures.
My students discovered something else during the course of the semester. It occurred to them that reading great literature was a far more enriching and creative exercise for the mind than playing electronic games—no matter how sophisticated they might be—or surfing the Internet. Literary texts are composed of words. These are concepts requiring the active collaboration of the reader to bring them to life. When reading, one must marshal all the resources of one’s intellect, imagination, and sensibility to recreate the universe of an author. As I emphasized earlier, an attentive reader is a creator to the second degree.
This is perhaps why, as I explained to my students, we are rarely satisfied when one views the cinema version of a novel. It unfolded differently in our imagination because we were simultaneously all the actors as well as the director in charge of the proceedings. In the digital experience, there is so much passive absorption. By its very nature, reading demands a full commitment of the mind and the emotions. It is much more difficult than sitting back and having images squirted all over our brain, images into the fluidity of which the brain tends to dissolve.
In the long run, to read and reflect on a beautiful literary text is far more rewarding than fooling around electronically. And my students knew it now. I guess that I received one of the most beautiful compliments of my career after the final exam in the course. One of the student zappers at the beginning of the semester came up to me and said in a very sad tone of voice: “Sir, why aren’t you coming back to teach us next year?” I was so moved I could have kissed her. What greater reward can a teacher know? And in my heart, I thanked Molière and company for having given me such powerful support. With their help, I made some very enthusiastic converts: young adults who firmly believed that reading was especially important in our digital age.
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