Pierre Loti's Judith Renaudin

As Oscar Wilde became more involved with Alfred Douglas he spent more time in France, meeting many of his French counterparts and making something of a name for himself among them. ⁽¹⁾ This and the notoriety of his subsequent trials explain the allusions to what has come to be known as the Wilde Affair in turn-of-the-century French literature. The most famous of them is probably the ambiguous presentation of Ménalque in André Gide's L'immoraliste (1902). Less well-known to Anglophone readers is Monsieur de Phocas (1901), a novel by Jean Lorrain--himself a very notoriously gay figure in Belle-Epoque France-that evokes Wilde with its largely negative portrayal of Claudius Ethal. Pierre Loti, a member of the French Academy then at the height of his fame as one of turn-of-the-century France's most popular and respected novelists, alludes to Wilde in one of his most successful novels, Ramuntcho (1897), with the descriptions of the title character's father. ⁽²⁾ What all three of these novels have in common is an attempt to distance their title character from traits like effeminacy and effeteness that, as Joseph Bristow has remarked, were firmly associated with all homosexual men in the general public's mind by the Wilde Affair. ⁽³⁾

Less well-known than these three works is Loti's five-act drama Judith Renaudin (1898), written for André Antoine, the founder of the innovative Théâtre Libre, who created the role of Pierre Baudry in the first production. The play has received almost no scholarly attention. That may be, at least in part, because of the nature of the rest of Loti's theatrical output. Of the five plays that bear his name, two are collaborations that were largely the work of his collaborators: a French adaptation of King Lear (1904) done with Emile Vedel and an Oriental spectacle, La fille du ciel (1912), conceived by Judith Gautier. Two are collaborative adaptations of his own novels, Pêcheur d'Islande (1893) and Ramuntcho (1908), again projects initiated by others to which Loti only supplied a subsequent helping hand. Only one, Judith Renaudin, is the traditional object of literary study: a solely-authored non-derivative work.

Though it had an initial success, receiving 27 performances in its original Théâtre Antoine production as well as a staging the next year in Brussels ⁽⁴⁾, Judith Renaudin does not seem to have been performed since and has been almost completely ignored even by those writing on Loti. Loti's major contemporary biographer, for example, Alain Quella-Villéger, barely mentions the work in his recent and large biography. ⁽⁵⁾ Still, when read in its historical context, it seems to have as its very focus the Wilde Affair and the potential consequences for French homosexually-oriented men, taking a very different perspective from that of the three novels cited above and therefore earning it a re-examination for those interested in gay studies and French cultural history.

Judith Renaudin takes place in 1685, just after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by which Henri IV had granted certain rights and protections to French Protestants in 1598. The play shows how the title character, a young French Huguenot woman, refuses to convert to Catholicism though that means she and the rest of her family will have to leave their beloved father and grandmother and go into exile in Holland in order to escape emprisonment.

Loti, himself Protestant, had been raised with stories of the persecution of his maternal Protestant ancestors, ⁽⁶⁾ among whom figured the Renaudins. He evidently found papers relating to the latter's persecution while negotiating the repurchase of his ancestral home in 1897, and these supposedly provided the original inspiration for the play. ⁽⁷⁾ As Guy Dugas and Claude Duvigneau note in their introduction to a recent re-edition of the work, however, Loti's choice of subject matter and even genre must strike anyone who knows his work as strange:

Pendant longtemps pourtant, il parut se désintéresser de ses ascendances oleonaises comme de la religion protestante au sein de laquelle il était né. N'est-il pas significatif de noter qu'aucun de ses héros n'est explicitement présenté comme protestant; qu'aucune de ses pérégrinations ne semble jamais le ramener au Temple; que ses constantes interrogations face aux religions du monde ignorent toujours celle dans laquelle il a été éduqué? Alors pourquoi seulement à quarante-cinq ans révolus, et à travers un genre pour lui inédit, le théâtre? (134)

In partial answer to these important questions, it bears noting that, despite its subject matter, the play does not actually deal with religion. There is no debate on the relative merits of the Protestant and Catholic faiths. No character bemoans losing the freedom to worship as a Protestant. Loti does not seem to have turned to the theater to discuss or defend the faith of his maternal ancestors. Still, why, for the only time in his life, he should have chosen the theater to express his thoughts is a very intriguing question. Given that all the rest of his fiction has contemporary settings, one might also wonder why he chose an historical topic here.

Some, perhaps feeling that the uncustomary historical setting had to refer to a contemporary issue, have argued that Loti decided to make use of the persecution of the Renaudins to criticize the French military in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. French captain Alfred Dreyfus had been condemned at the end of 1894 by a military tribunal for betraying his country to the Germans, and since then, as more and more people became convinced of the injustice of that verdict, anti-military sentiment had been growing in France. ⁽⁸⁾ Zola's justly famous "J'accuse," accusing the Army of a major coverup, appeared on the front page of L'Aurore in January, 1898, and Loti's play, though written the summer before, opened in December of that same year. While it certainly deals with religious persecution carried out by the military, Judith Renaudin offers no other parallels with the Dreyfus Affair, however: no false accusations, coverups, etc. Loti never took a public stand on Dreyfus' case and maintained, in the Avant-propos that he wrote for the play's initial publication, that he had not had it in mind when writing his drama (141). ⁽⁹⁾ Here it would seem to make sense to take him at his word.

Trying another approach, Dugas and Duvigneau point out that at the time he wrote the play Loti, a career naval officer, had been forced into retirement after over twenty years of service, and so may have been using his drama to express his resentment toward the military establishment. That is possible, of course, but rather unlikely, since Loti was intent on being re-instated-which he was. And, again, the play does not focus on criticism of the military. In fact, it makes clear from the outset that the idea to revoke the Huguenots' freedoms and persecute them came not from the army but from Louis XIV. Pierre Baudry begins the play by reading the royal third-person proclamation from the king that has just been posted in Saint-Pierre d'Oléron: "à présent, ayant fait la Trève avec tous les Princes de l'Europe, il s'est entièrement appliqué à travailler avec succès à la réunion de ses sujets de la Religion prétendue Réformée à l'Eglise Catholique. . . . [Il] ordonne que tous les temples qui se trouvent encore dans son royaume seront incessamment démolis" (6). ⁽¹⁰⁾ The explanation for Loti's decision to write a play on his own, and this particular play, would therefore seem to lie elsewhere.

The first reaction to the announcement of the Edict of Nantes' revocation, at the opening of the drama, provides an important clue, particularly since its perspective on the revocation is the one repeated throughout the five acts that follow. The second Protestant peasant, having listened to Baudry, the local curate, read the declaration affixed to the village news post, asks: "Et nos enfants, monsieur le curé? Est-ce la vérité ce qu'on annonçait pour nos enfants?" (6). Like all the other Protestant characters in the play and many of the Catholics, the peasant's concern is not with religious freedom but with the potential loss of his children.

This perspective reappears over and over with the Protestant characters. Libaud, one of the wealthier Protestants, asks: "Eh, j'ai des enfants, moi, il faudra bien que je les emmène, que voulez-vous, pour qu'on ne me les prenne pas?" (8). Judith's blind grandmother, unable to travel to Holland like the younger members of the family, exclaims to Jeanne, a young friend: "Mon Dieu! . . . Et moi, l'aïeule bientôt sans enfants, dire que, avant de mourir, je verrai peut-être encore passer un été,-deux étés, qui sait,-dans cette maison et dans ce jardin vides, où je n'entendrai plus jamais ta voix, ma Judith, plus jamais la voix de mes chers petits. . ." (40-1). When the commander of the dragoons that have been sent to enforce the new edict, Raymond d'Estelan, shows up to announce it to the Renaudin household, Samuel Renaudin, Judith's father and the head of the family, tells him: "Posez nettement vos conditions, et qu'au moins je sache. . . Ne faisons point languir l'entretien terrible, parlez vite! . . . Nous les prendre de force, n'est-ce pas? C'est ça? Nous les enlever?"(48), etc.

The major Catholic figures in the play repeatedly make it clear that they, too, understand the sorrow of being deprived of children. Act III focuses on the efforts of curate Baudry to hide the Protestant children until their families can escape with them by sea to Holland. It ends with an unsuccessful attempt, during which one of the young children, Jean, is killed by the dragoons. This incites Baudry's devoutly Catholic housekeeper, Benoîte, who had previously been outspoken about her dislike of Huguenots, to cry out at the soldiers: "Je suis une catholique, moi! Et une servante de curé encore! Et je vous le dis, oui, que vous êtes des gueux et des pendards! . . . Mais regardez donc ce que vous en avez fait, de ce petit! . . . Mais regardez-le donc!" (75). Even d'Estelan, when not allowed to talk to the Renaudin children, expresses sorrow at being deprived of such contact: "Ah! C'est vrai, je suis le maudit, moi, avec qui les enfants ne doivent point jouer, n'est-ce pas? . . . je suis le maudit, vous entendez, et le bourreau!" (46).

In the final scene of the play, where d'Estelan, after a change of heart, helps the Renaudins escape to a waiting ship, the last characters on stage, and therefore the final focus of the play, are not Judith and her siblings but the small Renaudin children saying goodbye to Samuel, leaving him in tears (122-23). Even as it stands in the final version of the play, published in Loti's complete works, this drives home one final time the point introduced by the already-cited opening lines: Judith Renaudin is not about religion, it is about the anguish experienced by individuals who are separated from children, in particular their own children and in particular young children, by a lack or, more specifically, a revocation of government tolerance for difference. The fact that, in the initial edition of the play, published immediately after it opened in 1898 and probably reflecting Loti's actual manuscript, Samuel Renaudin's grief-stricken final comments are attributed not to S. Renaudin, like all his other lines in the play, but simply to "The Father" (Le Père) ⁽¹¹⁾, makes it even clearer that Loti himself saw this play very specifically as the story of a father's grief at the loss of his children.

This focus and its historical context would seem to provide a key to why Loti should have chosen for once in his life to write a play, and this play. Sentenced to prison in 1895 for gross indecency, Oscar Wilde had been released in May, 1897, shortly before Loti set to work on this play, and promptly sailed for France, where he was therefore once again in the news. ⁽¹²⁾ Because he had been found guilty of having engaged in homosexual acts under the Labouchere Amendment, passed into law only ten years before, Wilde was deprived of his two beloved young sons. ⁽¹³⁾ Loti, himself the father of three young sons ⁽¹⁴⁾ and the object of repeated public speculation concerning his sexuality ⁽¹⁵⁾, would have been aware of all this, in part because the Wilde Affair had received such extensive coverage in the French press, in part because Wilde had sent him an autographed copy of his French play Salomé just a few years before. ⁽¹⁶⁾ A close reading of Judith Renaudin with this historical context in mind suggests that it may have had its very inspiration and subtext in Wilde's paternal loss-and Loti's fear of similar persecution.

When the curtain rises, Pierre Baudry, in a passage already cited, reads to a group of illiterate peasants the decree that has just been posted: Louis XIV, having made peace with the other countries of Europe, has now decided to focus on unifying his own people in the Catholic faith (6). To this end, he revokes the freedoms and protections accorded Protestants in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes. Baudry, though himself Catholic, views this as "un égarement . . . inconcevable!" (7).

The nineteenth-century same-sex-attracted Frenchman's equivalent of the Edict of Nantes had two parts, the post-Revolutionary penal reforms of 25 September-6 October, 1791, which did away with the definition of sodomy as a crime and its punishment, and the Napoleonic Code of 1810, which maintained silence on the question of homosexuality. ⁽¹⁷⁾ The time differential between these protections and 1897, 106 and 87 years respectively, is sufficiently similar to that between the Edict of Nantes and its revocation, 87 years again, to be striking, and leads to my basic argument: Loti, having seen how England treated Wilde, decided to write a play-Wilde's literary medium, not his own-to project with all the impact that theater can provide what could happen to him and other Frenchmen perceived as engaging in homosexual acts if France were to pass a law similar to the Labouchere Amendment that revoked the freedom established during the Revolution. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Such a decision would not have been based on simple paranoia. Overt establishment homophobia had been increasing dramatically in France during Loti's adult lifetime. In his Histoire de la sexualité, Michel Foucault pointed out some of the highly homophobic pseudo-scientific writing produced in France starting with the appearance of André Tardieu's Etude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs in 1857. ⁽¹⁹⁾ As Michael L. Wilson, among others, has shown, some of the second-tier French literature of the period had also been bashing gays (194-96). In her fascinating study of L'identité masculine en crise au tounant du siècle 1871-1914, Annelise Maugère demonstrates that, after the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870, several parts of the French establishment began arguing that French men needed to recover their supposedly lost masculinity, castigating anything that was seen as having caused that loss, including, of course, homosexuality. ⁽²⁰⁾ With the international attention that the Wilde Affair focused on homosexuality and the creation of laws to punish it, Loti would have had every good reason to fear that the century-old freedom accorded same-sex-attracted men in France was in jeopardy. ⁽²¹⁾

When, after the opening scene, we first meet Samuel Renaudin, head of the town's leading Protestant family, he focuses attention on another issue that remains central throughout the play: this revocation of existing freedom will result in the breakup of families, since those Protestants who can will go into exile rather than abjure their faith or accept imprisonment. As he explains to Baudry, "les jeunes, tous nos chers enfants . . . tous nos enfants tenteront de partir. . . . ils tenteront de prendre la route de l'exil, la route de la Hollande, où se trouvent déjà tant de Français réfugiés" (18-19). This was, in fact, what had been happening in England since 1885: homosexually-inclined men faced with the threat of imprisonment under the Labouchere Amendment had been fleeing to Europe, often leaving family behind. After his first, inconclusive trial, friends of Wilde had urged that he do the same. ⁽²²⁾

Judith, Renaudin's daughter, is also distraught at the idea of being separated from part of her family-her father has decided that he will remain behind with his aged mother, as she is blind and too old to travel. In addition, however, Judith is being pressured by her father and her beloved grandmother to marry Daniel Robert, a young man who claims that he lacks the courage to maintain his faith and leave his homeland if she does not accompany him as his bride: "mon courage et ma foi ont besoin qu'on les soutienne" (20). Judith asks for time to consider, clearly not interested in him (ibid), and brings down the curtain on Act I with her declaration that she cannot marry him: "Mais ce mariage, non, je ne pourrais pas. . . Laissez-moi rester libre. . . Pardonne-moi, mon cher Daniel. . . Tous, pardonnez-moi. . . Non, je ne pourrais pas" (27). In Act IV, d'Estelan, by now in love with her, also pressures Judith to marry, threatening that if she does not wed him he will increase his persecution of the island's Protestants: "si vous me repoussez, oh! alors, seul dans la vie, je resterai soldat plus dur, persécuteur plus acharné de ceux que vous m'aurez fait davantage haïr, en me sacrifiant à leur hérésie maudite" (91). All this pressure to enter into marriage parallels the pressure to convert, likening the latter to the former and thereby reinforcing the parallel between Louis XIV's pressure on Huguenots to abandon their faith and contemporary England's pressure on homosexuals to give up their homosexual life. (The notion of distinct, fixed sexualities had not yet entered English culture, ⁽²³⁾ so the English legal system saw its punishment of homosexual acts as a way of getting those who engaged in them to go back to women.) Loti himself had experienced such familial pressure to marry, resisting until his mid-thirties, and conveyed it in several of his works, most notably his last novel, Les Désenchantées (1906). ⁽²⁴⁾

Other aspects of the play take on similar depth when read against the Wilde Affair. At one point Baudry reminds d'Estelan that the persecuted Protestants are also Christians and then adds: "peut-être même . . . leur foi en Notre-Seigneur, avivée par tant de persécutions, est-elle en ce moment plus ardente que la nôtre" (68-69). In a famous passage from the first volume of L'Histoire de la sexualité, Michel Foucault wrote that the appearance in late nineteenth-century medical and legal discourse of a largely negative presentation of the newly created male homosexual, while making possible the control of all men's sexual activity and even emotions, "a permis aussi la constitution d'un discours 'en retour': l'homosexualité s'est mise à parler d'elle-même, à revendiquer sa légitimité ou sa 'naturalité'" (134). The persecution of Wilde only increased those efforts, in France as well as elsewhere. As Florence Tamagno has written, "les procès d'Oscar Wilde ont également joué un rôle détermimant dans le processus identitaire. En révélant l'existence d'une subculture homosexuelle déjà bien organisée, du moins dans les grandes villes, et en engageant une discussion de l'homosexualité masculine dans la presse, ils permettaient à de nombreux hommes de prendre conscience de leur singularité". ⁽²⁵⁾

Similarly, given this context, the second scripture-reading scene in Judith Renaudin is particularly striking. As his family is getting ready to try their own escape by sea, Samuel Renaudin, too moved to read it himself, hands the family Bible over to his daughter and, telling her to let the book open as God wills, asks her for a reading. She intones aloud this passage from John:

Ce que je vous commande, est de vous aimer les uns et les autres. Si le monde vous haït, sachez qu'il m'a haï avant vous. Si vous étiez du monde, le monde aimerait ce qui serait à lui; mais parce que vous n'êtes point du monde, c'est pour cela que le monde vous hait. Souvenez-vous de la parole que je vous ai dite: S'ils m'ont persécuté, ils vous persécuteront aussi. . . . Je vous ai dit ces choses afin que vous ne soyez point troublés. Ils vous chasseront des temples et le temps vient où quiconque vous fera mourir croira faire une chose agéable à Dieu. Ils vous traiteront de la sorte parce qu'ils ne connaissent ni mon père, ni moi. Or je vous ai dit ces choses afin que, lorsque ce temps-là sera venu, vous vous souveniez que je vous les ai dites. . . (108-9; John 15:17-20, 16:1-4)

This passage would have struck home for persecuted Protestants in 1685, of course, but also for persecuted same-sex-desiring men in 1897, who would have appreciated the comparison of their own persecution with that suffered by Christ and its explanation as simply the result of their being different: "you are not of the world, . . . therefore the world hates you." ⁽²⁶⁾ Certainly the description of the persecutors as men who think that "whoever kills you . . . is offering service to God," but who do so "because they have not known the Father, nor me," would have been particularly telling in a world where, then as too often even today, those who persecuted gays regularly cited the Bible as their justification.

In the end, Judith and the other younger Renaudins do escape, in part thanks to the help of d'Estelan. When she went to plead for protection, Judith had given him a copy of the Bible in French (98), and Father Baudry informs the Renaudin family that "à la lecture de l'Evangile, une lumière soudaine s'est faite en lui sur l'horreur de la mission qu'il avait trop légèrement acceptée" (114). While some have found this sudden change of heart improbable, ⁽²⁷⁾ it fits with an idea then developing in Loti's work: literature has power both to awaken the oppressed to an awareness of their oppression and to move anyone to act for the betterment of the oppressed. While this is best demonstrated in Loti's last novel, Les Désenchantées, ⁽²⁸⁾ it is also present repeatedly in Judith Renaudin. At both the beginning and the end of Act II, the title character turns to the story of Blanche de Prémontal, another young Protestant woman, for the strength she lacks to plead with d'Estelan to spare her family. "Oui, redis-les-moi," she tells her friend Jeanne. "Si craintive je suis, que les récits des actions audacieuses me charment" (30), and at the end of the act, "Les détails que tu sais, répète-les-moi . . . et comment elle s'y est prise" (56). If the Bible wins d'Estelan over to tolerance for the Huguenots-in the final version of the play he does not convert; he only learns to respect their different faith ⁽²⁹⁾-could Loti have hoped that his play might win some of his contemporaries over to tolerance for other forms of difference? He had already hinted at such a function for literature with his autobiographical Roman d'un enfant (1891) several years before. ⁽³⁰⁾ The very last line of the play could also refer to this. As the little children leave to join their parents for the voyage to Holland, Baudry makes the sign of the cross and calls out: "Oui, Seigneur, et vous, Vierge Marie, ayez pitié d'eux! Guidez-les, protégez-les! Et, de votre sainte lumière, Seigneur, pénétrez leurs âmes!" (123). The first part, "have pity on them! Guide them, protect them!," certainly refers to the fleeing Renaudins. But the last part, "fill their souls with your light," does not reflect Baudry's respect for his Protestant neighbors' convictions throughout the play. Instead, it seems to be a prayer to God and the Virgin to fill their persecutors' souls with understanding and tolerance such as d'Estelan had found reading Judith's Bible.

This gay reading of Judith Renaudin remains only that, since there is no proof that Loti had the Wilde Affair and its potential consequences for same-sex-attracted Frenchmen in general and himself in particular in mind while writing it. Here I could cite for support Gregory Woods' recent History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition:

it may be completely beside the point whether William Shakespeare was 'gay' or 'queer' or a 'homosexual' or a 'sodomite'; or if he and the male addressee of his sonnets were 'just good friends'; or even if no such friend ever existed and the sonnets in question were--as so many heterosexually identified critics have claimed--mere poetic exercises, common to their time. All of this is irrelevant if any of the sonnets are amenable to being read by a gay reader as if they were 'gay poems.' If they work as if they were, they are. The reader's pleasure is paramount. ⁽³¹⁾

While such arguments for gay reading may be valid for ahistorical interpretation-seeing some of Shakespeare's sonnets as love poems addressed by one non-specified, non-historically-situated man to another-they do not really work for historically-situated and intention-focused criticism, however, such as relating Judith Renaudin to the Wilde Affair. Given Loti's concern with that Affair in Ramuntcho, published the year he wrote Judith Renaudin, however, and all the striking parallels between the play and implications of that Affair for same-sex-attracted men in France, not to mention Loti's decision to take de Montesquiou to the general rehearsal and the fact that, as the original edition of the play's last lines demonstrates, Loti definitely saw his drama as the story of a father's loss of his young children because of government intolerance and persecution, it would not seem to require too great a leap of faith to see this reading as a valid interpretation of Loti's one solo theatrical creation. Since having children, and in particular male children, to keep from being left alone in his old age was of paramount concern to Loti, and at no time more so than when he wrote Judith Renaudin, it is not surprising that he should have chosen, having seen Wilde deprived of his two young sons, to write a work about what would happen if the French government were to follow its neighbor across the Channel and take to denying French men accused of same-sex activity their parental role. That he chose to do so with theater, the genre by which, several years before, Wilde had paid homage to him, would certainly seem to be the sort of sincere and appropriate gesture that one might imagine from a gifted author truly moved by Wilde's plight. As Wilde himself had written some time before, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." That Loti did so so movingly-parts of Judith Renaudin are very powerful-suggests that his one play deserves re-discovery by those among us interested in gay history and theater and French social and cultural history in general. It certainly provides a particularly moving insight into at least one facet of gay thought in the not-so-idyllic France of the Belle Epoque.

1. The standard biography of Wilde, good on this as so many other issues, is Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987).

2. On the allusions to Oscar Wilde in Ramuntcho, see: Richard M. Berrong, In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Emergence of Gay Identity and the Novels of Pierre Loti (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 198, 205.

3. "So familiar is this queer stereotype that it is easy to forget that the connection between effeminate behavior and same-sex desire was firmly established in the public imagination only after Wilde was sent to Reading Goal for two years in solitary confinement with hard labour" (Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995] 2). Gide talks about his reluctance to be seen with Wilde after the trials for fear of being imagined to be as effeminate as the Irishman and, even worse, Douglas, in his autobiographical Si le grain ne meure (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) 290. In her fascinating and thoroughly researched "The French Trials of Oscar Wilde," Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996): 549-88, Nancy Erber provides a very good survey of reactions to the Wilde Affair from homosexually-oriented and non-homosexually-oriented French writers in the French press of the time.

4. While various works on Loti mention a Haymarket Theater production as having taken place in London in 1899, it evidently never did. Cyril Maude, one of the joint managers of the Theater Royal, Haymarket, at the time, wrote Antoine a letter dated 20 December, 1898, requesting a copy of Judith Renaudin for possible production the next year. See Pierre Loti - André Antoine, "Les deux chattes sont à leur poste, et les décors s'achèvent," ed. Guy Dugas (Alluyes: William Théry, 2000) 55. In the section of Maude's memoirs that discusses his activity at that theater, however, no play by Loti figures among the works staged. Cf. Cyril Maude, Lest I Forget (New York: Sears, 1928) 107-53.

5. Alain Quella-Villéger, Le pèlerin de la planète (Bordeaux: Aubéron, 1998). Michael G. Lerner devotes a chapter to Judith Renaudin in his Pierre Loti's Dramatic Works (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1998) 21-38, but focuses on the details of its production and plot summary rather than an analysis of the work.

6. See his autobiographical novel, Le Roman d'un enfant, Ch. 29.

7. Guy Dugas, Claude Duvigneau, "La fibre protestante," Pierre Loti et son pays natal, ed. Claude Duvigneau (Paris: Le Croît vif, 1998) 135. (This essay is followed by an unannotated edition of the play.) Dugas and Duvigneau's assertion is based on a comment in the "Avant propos" that Loti wrote for the play (140).

8. The bibliography on the Dreyfus Affair is enormous. On the Affair in French literature, the classic study is Cécile Delhorbe's L'affaire Dreyfus et les écrivains français (Neuchatel: Victor Attinger, 1932). See also: Géraldi Leroy, ed., Les écrivains et l'Affaire Dreyfus, Actes du Colloque organisé par le Centre Charles Péguy et l'Université d'Orléans 29, 30, 31 octobre 1981 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983).

9. The original Avant propos, written for the initial publication of the play following its first performances, is included in the edition presented by Dugas and Duvigneau (140-41). Cf. also Pierre Loti, Judith Renaudin, La Revue de Paris 5, 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1898): 2-3. When the play was reprinted several years later as part of a multi-volume edition of Loti's complete works up to 1905, the part of the Avant propos dealing with the Dreyfus Affair was cut. See Pierre Loti, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, n.d.) XI, iii.

10. This and all further quotations from Judith Renaudin are taken from the edition in vol. 11 of the Oeuvres complètes.

11. Loti, Judith Renaudin, La Revue de Paris 60-61.

12. Erber, passim.

13. As he wrote to Douglas in the text that has come to be known as De Profundis, "Setting aside other reasons [for asking his wife not to divorce him while he was in prison], I could not bear the idea of being separated from Cyril, that beautiful, loving, loveable child of mine, my friend of all friends, my companion beyond all companions [cf. Samuel Renaudin's parting words to little Daniel: "Va, mon petit Daniel! Va, mon bien-aimé! Va-t'en, cher ange, va-t'en, ma joie, va t'en ma vie" (123)], one single hair of whose little golden head should have been dearer and of more value to me than, I will not merely say you from top to toe, but the entire chrysolite of the whole world: was so indeed to me always, though I failed to understand it till too late," De Profundis, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Row, 1989) 900. And: "But my two children are taken from me by legal procedure. That is and will remain to me a source of infinite distress, of infinite pain, of grief without end or limit. That the law should decide, and take upon itself to decide, that I am one unfit to be with my own children is something quite horrible to me. The disgrace of prison is as nothing compared to it. I envy the other men who tread the yard along with me. I am sure that their children wait for them, look for their coming, will be sweet to them" (911). "Suddenly [Cyril] was taken away from me by the law. It was a blow so appalling that I did not know what to do" (925-26); etc.

There is much discussion about which version of De Profundis Wilde intended for which audience. Though the issue is not relevant to the discussion at hand, interested readers can consult Ian Small's informative "Love-Letter, Spiritual Autobiography, or Prison Writing? Identity and Value in De Profundis," Wilde Writings, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 86-100.

14. So intent was he on having sons that, after the birth of his one legitimate child, Samuel, in 1889 and several failed attempts to produce additional legitimate offspring, Loti, in 1894, began a relationship with a Basque woman, Crucita Gainza, in order to father more sons, two of whom survived to maturity. On Loti's strange relationship with Gainza, see André Moulis' edition of the author's letters to and about her, "Amours basques de Pierre Loti," Littératures 2 (1980): 99-131.

15. Patrick Cardon, "Caricature," and Louis-Georges Tin, "Littérature," Dictionnaire de l'homophobie, ed. Louis-Georges Tin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), discuss the depiction of Loti as gay in various satyrical Parisian publications of the time, which associated him with notoriously gay Frenchman like Jean Lorrain and Robert de Montesquiou (78-9, 265). In their April 25, 1903 issue, for example, L'Assiette au Beurre published a cartoon in which a woman holding a copy of Mon frère IV by Pierlo To addresses a flower-sniffing, overly-bejeweled man with the line: "Allons donc, mon cher! ... Vous n'avez même pas l'excuse d'être dans la marine!" Edmond de Goncourt, in his famous and often malicious diary, repeatedly declared that Loti was sexually interested in men (Journal, ed. Robert Ricatte [Paris: Fasquelle, 1956] 3:1230, 4:227, etc.). As early as 21 February, 1888, when Loti showed up at a dinner hosted by novelist Alphonse Daudet with a handsome sailor in tow, Goncourt had wondered: "Is this homosexuality that he presents really sincere?" (3:758), and that same issue of L'Assiette au Beurre also featured a cartoon in which a fashionably dressed woman out for a stroll with her husband asks some third unseen party "Vous venez, ce soir, dîner, n'est-ce pas? . . . Nous avons Pierre Loti et son nouveau frère Yves." Given this context, that Loti chose to write a play about people who are persecuted for something in which they believe very deeply rather than for something of which they are innocent is worth remarking.

16. Quella-Villéger notes (212 n. 41) that the auction of books from Pierre Loti's collection held in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot on 12 November, 1964, included a copy of Salomé (1893) that Wilde had sent, with a dedication, to Loti. I have not been able to locate that book, much as I would, of course, love to know what effusive French words Wilde chose to address the author of such highly homoerotic novels as Aziyadé (1879) and Mon Frère Yves (1883).

17. Christopher Robinson, Scandal in the Ink (New York: Cassell, 1995) 2.

18. Unlike in France, in England before the infamous Labouchere Amendment homosexual acts were not altogether free from sanction. On this see Jeffrey Weeks, "Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1989) 195-211.

19. Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir, Histoire de la sexualité I (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Particularly good on these early French pseudo-scientific "studies" of male homosexuals is Vernon A. Rosario II's fascinating "Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederasts' Inversions," Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick, Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 146-76. See also: Michael L. Wilson, "Drames d'amour des pédérastes: Male Same-Sex Sexuality in Belle Epoque Print Culture," Homosexuality in French History and Culture, ed. Jeffrey Merrick, Michael Sibalis (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2001) 189-94.

20. Anneline Maugère, L'identitié masculine en crise au tournant du siècle 1870-1914 (Paris: Rivages, 1987).

21. To the dress rehearsal of Judith Renaudin Loti took Sarah Bernhardt, a friend to so many same-sex-attracted men, and Robert de Montesquiou, one of the most notoriously flamboyant figures in turn-of-the-century Paris, often cited as the model for Proust's Baron Charlus (Pierre Loti, Cette éternelle nostalgie, ed. Bruno Vercier, Alain Quella-Villéger, Guy Dugas [Paris: La Table ronde, 1997] 407). One can only wonder why the very reserved Loti invited the very flamboyant de Montesquiou and what the three of them talked about as they watched the play from Antoine's box, "avec des tentures, des coussins et des fleurs." It is worth noting in this context that in 1903 satirist Paul Iribe lampooned de Montesquiou and Loti as gay in the same April 25^th issue of L'Assiette au beurre (Cardon 78).

22. Seymour Kleinberg, "Oscar Wilde," Who's Who is Gay and Lesbian History, ed. Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (New York: Routledge, 2001) I: 487, and Wilde, De Profundis 879. In fact, Wilde in that literary epistle told Douglas that only his inability to pay their hotel bill at the Avondale had prevented him from leaving for France as soon as Douglas' father began to accuse him of lewd conduct (890-91).

23. For example: Dr. Barry, to whom E. M. Forster's Maurice goes for help with his 'perversion' and who, Forster is careful to point out, "had read no scientific works on Maurice's subject," refers to same-sex desire as an "evil hallucination," a momentary "temptation from the devil" that could befall any man, but not as a sign of an essential difference or sexuality (Maurice [New York: Norton, 1971], Ch. 31-32).

24. On this, see Ch. 11 in Berrong. Loti had already used a female character in Pêcheur d'Islande (1886) to discuss problems in his own life, and would do so again in Les Désenchantées.

25. Florence Tamagno, "Oscar Wilde," Dictionnaire de l'homophobie 430.

26. Wilde does not seem to have held such an enlightened understanding of homosexual desire and activity. Even in De Profundis, he speaks of it as "a curious perversity of passion and desire," a "pathological phenomenon" (902).

27. Cf. Pierre Loti - André Antoine 20. Dugas provides the correspondence between Loti and his producer during the production of Judith Renaudin (25-56), which offers fascinating insights into how the author continued to revise his play up to opening night.

28. See Berrong, Ch. 11.

29. On why the change was made, see Loti - Antoine 44.

30. On this aspect of Le Roman d'un enfant, see Berrong 151.

31. Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (New York: Yale University Press, 1998) 9.