Mademoiselle de Scuderi

[1] Mademoiselle de Scuderi is regarded as one of Hoffmann's best, not only because of its exciting, suspenseful plot and interesting descriptions of life, places, and people in late 17th-century Paris but also because of the many different levels of interpretation that it allows.

These are not the only terrible crimes plaguing Paris (a series of bizarre poisonings is described in detail), and to combat them the King establishes a special court, the Chambre Ardente, whose sole purpose is to investigate them and punish their perpetrators.

One night, a young man bangs on the door of de Scudéri's house and pleads urgently with her maid to be granted entrance.

The young man eventually flees at the sound of the approach of the mounted police, but leaves behind a small jewelry box he begs the maid to deliver to the Mademoiselle.

The next morning, de Scudéri opens the box and finds exquisite jewelry and a note in which the band of jewel thieves thanks her for her support in the form of the verse quoted above.

La Régnie grants her permission to speak with Olivier, but when she meets him in prison she recognizes the young man who had thrown the warning letter into her coach and falls to the ground unconscious.

An "inborn drive," Cardillac told Olivier, forced him to create his renowned works but led him also again and again to take them back from his customers in thefts that often involved murder.

Olivier tells de Scudéri that Cardillac stored the retrieved pieces, which were labeled with the names of their rightful owners, in a secret, locked chamber in his house.

Mademoiselle de Scudéri makes a number of attempts to save Olivier, including writing a letter to La Régnie, but she is unsuccessful.

Would La Régnie, who scents crime everywhere, immediately believe me if I accused the honest Cardillac, the very embodiment of complete piety and virtue, of attempted murder?"

After a month of uncertainty, he reveals to the Mademoiselle that Olivier has been freed, that he will be allowed to marry his beloved Madelon, and that he will receive 1,000 louis d'or as a dowery under the condition that they leave Paris.

This report attributes to Mademoiselle de Scudéri the two-line stanza quoted above: A lover who is afraid of thieves Is not worthy of love.

Using Wagenseil's brief account as a starting point, Hoffmann did extensive research to ensure that his depictions of Paris at the time of Louis XIV would be accurate in the minutest detail.

A short letter from the author dated March 28, 1818, to a lending librarian in Berlin requests works that likely provided him with historical material for his novella: Friedrich Lorenz Meyers's Letters from the Capital and from within France under the Consular Government [Briefe aus der Hauptstadt und dem Innern Frankreichs unter der Consular-Regierung] (Tübingen, 1802), Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann's Paris as It Was and as It Is [Paris wie es war und wie es ist] (Leipzig, 1805), and a translation of Voltaire's Times of Louis XIV [Siècle de Louis XIV] (Dresden, 1778).

The realism created by Hoffmann's thorough descriptions of historical events, persons, and places helps ensure the believability of the plot and the characters of the story.

The first man I attacked was a plaintiff who had sued me; one evening I wounded him ... so severely that I deprived him of the use of both his legs.Hoffmann knew of this account from Goethe's translation of Cellini's Vita (1558).

Wagenseil reports he "had the honor of visiting Mademoiselle Magdalena de Scudery, a woman from a most distinguished noble family and world famous for her virtue, great intelligence, and multilingualism."

Highly artificial, poorly constructed, flawed by pointless dialogue, her works were popular at the court, primarily because of their anecdotes about public personages.

A colleague wrote that Hoffman's professional activities were without fault, but also commented Only in a few areas of his criminal work could it ever be said that he allowed himself to be led down a false path, e.g., in cases in which proof of guilt rested on artificially intertwined pieces of evidence or on the assessment of dubious frames of mind.

[6]Perhaps it was Hoffmann's tendency to lean towards the ingenious and fantastic, even in his professional life, that allowed him to write the intriguing psychological tale of crime that is Mademoiselle de Scudéri.

From the midnight knock on the door of the Mademoiselle's house at the beginning of the story until the final resolution of the crimes and the exoneration of Olivier, the reader is held in eerie suspense.

The unusual step taken by the lovers of Paris to appeal directly to the King for protection had to be motivated by an ominous supernatural force, i.e., something that lay completely outside the sphere of ordinary events.

The powerful impression that this character creates can be attributed, in part, to qualities that reflect basic elements of the author's soul: firstly, Cardillac is the artist who can never satisfy himself; secondly, he is both guilty and innocent, his fate having been sealed even before he was born by the unholy demon that drives him from one crime to another.Equal to the powerful impression made by the character René Cardillac is that created by the compelling structure of Hoffmann's story.

In a crime story, the criminal's identity is known from the start, and the interest lies in observing his psychology and his attempts to escape justice ..."[10] Alewyn argues that with Mademoiselle de Scudéri Hoffmann created not only the first German detective story, but the first detective study in any language (it appeared before Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841).

[11] He writes that In this story we find, in addition to several subordinate motifs, the three elements that constitute a detective novel: first, the murder, actually, a series of murders, takes place at the beginning and is resolved at the end; second, there is the innocent suspect and the unsuspected guilty party; and third, the detection, not by the police but by an outsider, an elderly poetess.If on first reading Alwyn's thesis seems plausible, Conrad argues it is weak.

It is not expert detective work but the confession of Miossens that eventually reveals to the authorities it was Cardillac who committed the many murders and jewelry thefts in Paris.

de Scudéri is helpful in freeing the innocent Olivier because of her humanity, nobility of character, sympathy, and access to the king, not because of her ability to investigate, reason, and draw conclusions from evidence.

[13] The story does briefly deal with the psychology of the criminal (revealed in Olivier's back-story), but Cardillac's pathology plays only a minor role in the plot.

At first, the seemingly airtight case the Chambre builds against Olivier, including a suspicion of Madelon's complicity, convinces even Mademoiselle de Scudéri and the skeptical lawyer d'Andilly of his guilt in Cardillac's murder.

He points out that one of the items Cardillac offers the mademoiselle in his first attempt to give her jewelry is a beautiful diamond crown that he had intended for the Holy Virgin in the Church of Saint Eustace.