At the peak of his reign, Louis XIV commissioned several of the best writers of the time to chronicle the story of his reign. Much like in previous historical narratives, female characters were rarely featured and often silenced. However, as twentieth-century feminist criticism has shown, women writers like Mme de Villedieu actively combatted and upended these dynamics of power by rewriting women’s role in historical events in their historical novellas. In Les Désordres de l’amour, Villedieu gives back their rightful place to sixteenth-century female characters and also gives them voices. In doing so, she not only reverses the overwhelming silencing of women in historical narratives but also asserts the power of the female voice, traditionally dismissed as babil, caquet, and rumeur. In what follows, I will show that in focusing on the material noise produced by female speech, in giving her female characters voices, tones, and individual textures, Villedieu writes a her-story that is “not one story” (Elam 37), but rather a space where “several histories (are) underway” at once (Cixous 160). I will first lay out the originality of Villedieu’s own voice. Then, using the first novella of Les Désordres de l’amour as a case study, I will focus on the character of Mme de Sauve, and examine how the paraverbal nuances rendered by Villedieu, by making her unique, also contribute to her success at court. Finally, I will focus on the choral role of the thunderstorm, a metaphor for a female alliance in the text, as a noisy locus of female power.
