Querelle du mari sentimental

Le Mari sentimental is an epistolary novel published anonymously in Geneva describing the disastrous marriage of a middle-aged man to a younger woman who mercilessly gets rid of his old furniture, dismisses his servant, kills his dog, accuses him of seducing a young peasant, the result of which is that M. Bompré shoots himself. A certain Mme Caillat whose husband had committed suicide in 1780 felt it was directed at her, made a deposition at the notaries, and published a letter in self-defence. An anomymous response was then published denying that she was in any way targetted. Isabelle de Charrière read Le mari sentimental and heard about the scandal in Geneva while taking her Lettres neuchâteloises through its second edition (as she explains in her letter of Jan 1804) and wrote a quick response, the Lettres de Mistriss Henley, published anonymously in March 1784. In it Mistriss Henley writes to her unnamed presumably Swiss friend (« Quel aimable et cruel petit livre que celui qui nous est arrivé de votre pays il y a quelques semaines! ») to ask why the friend hadn’t written to tell her about it, launching immediately into a critique, explaining that it will do much harm, all the husbands considering themselves hard done by, and the wives in an even worse situation than before. She then tells her own story of having married the decent-looking country gent, whose reasonableness fails to meet her sensibility, and whose adherence to the Rousseauian principles of country v. town actually (paradoxically) denies her own nature. We assume that Mistriss Henley dies of grief: she states she is too weak to commit suicide like M.Bompré. A further justification was published, purportedly as a continuation of Mistriss Henley’s story, and then a further skit, the Lettres de Salomée, which made explicit its knowledge of Charrière’s authorship in naming the innkeeper’s wife’s neighbour « La Dupontet », this latter being the name of her home. Subsequently Le mari sentimental, the Lettres de Mistriss Henley and the Justification were published as a single volume in Paris, and reviewed. Charrière took out an announcement denying that she had written either Le Mari sentimental or La Justification de M. Henley. In her Jan 1804 letter, Charrière claims that she had caused « un schisme dans la société de genève. Tous les maris étaient pour Monsieur Henley ; beaucoup de femmes pour Madame ; et les jeunes filles n’osaient dire ce qu’elles en pensaient. » (ref below, OC VI 559)