Origins
Hoffmann got the idea for his tale from the seventh chapter of Wagenseil's chronicle of the city of Nuremberg titled Johann Christof Wagenseil's Book on the Gracious Art of the Meistersingers . 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 (Tübingen, 1802), Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann's Paris as It Was and as It Is (Leipzig, 1805), and a translation of Voltaire's Times of Louis XIV (Dresden, 1778) (Feldges & Stadler, 1986, 158). It seems certain also that Hoffmann also referred to Friedrich Schulzen's Of Paris and the Parisians (Berlin, 1791).
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. With the exception of the Mademoiselle, the King, and the Marquise de Maintenon, however, the characters of the novella appear to be Hoffmann's inventions. It is possible that the Cardillac character was inspired by an autobiographical account by the Italian goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, where he writes of the cold-hearted way in which he contemplated and carried out murders during his time in Paris:
"When certain decisions of the court were sent me by those lawyers, and I perceived that my cause had been unjustly lost, I had recourse to a great dagger I carried. 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) (Kaiser 1988, 76).
It is likely that Hoffmann drew on Chapter 1 of Wagenseil's chronicle for the characteristics that he ascribes to the heroine of the title. Wagenseil reports that he "had the honor of visiting Mademoiselle Magdelana de Scudery, a woman from a most distinguished noble family and world famous for her virtue, great intelligence, and multilingualism." Kent and Knight (1972, 173) write that
"Madeleine de Scudéri (1607-1701) came to Paris in 1630 and became connected with the salon of Mme. de Rambouillet (Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet). Later she formed a literary circle of her own. Highly artificial, poorly constructed, flawed by pointless dialogue, her works were popular at the court, primarily because of their anecdotes about public personages. They served the parvenu well."
For his description of Olivier's legal proceedings, the jurist Hoffmann also drew on his extensive knowledge of and experience with the law. A colleague wrote that Hoffman's professional activities were without fault, but also commented that
"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. In these areas he occasionally fell into constellations that reflected more his ingenuity and fantasy than a process of calm deliberation. His presentations of the facts, however, were always impeccable and of a precision that cannot be praised enough." (Schweizer ca. 1896, 231-232).
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.
Read more about this topic: Mademoiselle De Scuderi
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