Devereux — Volume 05 — A Closer Reading

From Cosmic Restlessness to Social Critique

The volume begins with a striking apostrophe to 'Mysterious impulse at the heart,' casting the narrator as a human planet in a 'petty orbit.' This cosmic metaphor—'hurried forever and forever, till our course is run'—establishes a tone of earnest, almost metaphysical longing. But the narrator immediately descends from the abstract to the particular: travel, he declares, offers a 'fresh draught from a new source of being,' a release from 'the jaded pleasure and the hollow love' of city life.

This personal awakening soon becomes a political one. Crossing France, he sheds 'the last scale' left by Louis XIV's glamour and sees the empire's true condition: a 'glittering and false surface' masking widespread poverty and priestly oppression. His critique sharpens into a direct warning to England against 'wars which exhaust' and 'governments which impoverish,' quoting Tacitus on public extravagance. The voice here is that of a moralist, blending travelogue with political economy.

Comic Mechanics and Narrative Pacing

The volume's second half abandons solemnity for a tightly plotted bedroom farce. The narrator is led into a chamber hung with tapestry of 'the loves of Mars and Venus,' a knowing visual cue. What follows is a chain of near-misses: a mistress of the Abbe Dubois mistakes him for a willing suitor; the Regent arrives; the narrator is thrust into a closet, which conveniently has another door. The pacing accelerates with each entrance and exit.

The comedy relies on repeated interruptions and the narrator's feigned dignity. He protests 'friendship, honour, and the respect due to the amante of the most intimate ami,' only to be dismissed with 'Pooh!' The farce peaks when Dubois himself arrives, and the narrator hides the mistress in his dressing-room—where she listens at the keyhole. Dubois then slanders her appearance, calling her a 'terrible creature' with a goitre, unaware she is eavesdropping. The scene's rhythm depends on doors, closets, and mistimed revelations.

Voice and the Shifting Register

The narrator's voice modulates across the volume with noticeable flexibility. In the opening, he employs a lofty, periodic style: 'What a glad awakening from self,—what a sparkling and fresh draught from a new source of being.' The dashes and exclamations convey genuine enthusiasm. Later, when describing the French countryside, his tone becomes analytical, even aphoristic: 'A waste of the public wealth is the most lasting of public afflictions.'

In the farcical episode, the register drops to colloquial banter. The narrator adopts a worldly, ironic tone: 'What a pity it is that one cannot always tell a woman one's mind!' He feigns passion with theatrical exaggeration—'Do not excite too severe a contest between passion and duty!'—and reports Dubois's coarse speech verbatim: 'Mort diable!' The contrast between the volume's opening earnestness and its closing comedy is stark, suggesting a narrator who can pivot from philosopher to wit without losing credibility.

Readers should attend to how the narrator's voice adapts to circumstance: the same character who muses on destiny and empire also plays the flustered gallant in a farce. The volume's structure—meditation, social critique, then comedy—invites questions about consistency and self-presentation. Does the narrator's philosophical pose survive his pratfalls, or does the farce undercut his earlier gravity? The excerpts leave this unresolved, but the tonal range itself is a feature worth tracking.

There’s something touching about watching Devereux stumble through that French farce—all those doors swinging open on the wrong person. It reminds me of the chaos in A March on London: Being a Story of Wat Tyler's Insurrection — Background and Themes, where history itself tumbles into confusion. Both feel less like grand lessons and more like the quiet wreckage we leave when plans go sideways.