The Story of Ernestine

Set in prerevolutionary France, The Story of Ernestine tells of the love between an innocent young woman and an aristocrat. Ernestine, German-born and orphaned, is an apprentice painter putting the finishing touches on a portrait when the marquis de Clémengis, elegant and handsome, enters the studio. Recognizing him as the subject of the portrait, she gestures for him to be seated and goes on working, looking back and forth between him and his likeness. The world-weary aristocrat is smitten.In graceful, understated prose, Marie Riccoboni shows how her heroine learns to negotiate questions of honor and appearances and to find a precarious balance between economic security and the potentially compromising nature of male generosity. The story raises questions about sexual enlightenment and social prejudice and reexamines the links of money, reputation, and marriageability that preoccupied eighteenth-century writers.

Marie Riccoboni (1713-92) was an actress and a writer who published more than twenty works. Appearing in 1765, The Story of Ernestine was a critical and popular success. Riccoboni was among the first women to support themselves through their writing. Joan Hinde Stewart is president of Hamilton College. Her scholarship focuses on 18th-century French literature, especially women writers. Her latest book, The Enlightenment of Age, a study of women and aging in early modern France, was published by the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, England, in fall 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yale University, the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a fellow at the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France, a visiting scholar at Oxford University in England, and a fellow at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Letters in Bogliasco, Italy. Philip Stewart’s study of French narrative has led to the publication of Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir-Novel, 1700-1750; Le Masque et la parole: le langage de l’amour au XVIIIe siècle; an edition of Prévost’s Cleveland; and a study of literary illustrations entitled Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century. Professor Stewart is a former president of the American Association of Teachers of French and a member of the Editorial Board of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.