Customer Reviews

Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

History is a messy place.

A lot gets lost, and a lot is saved that would perhaps be better off lost. When looking back on the scrambled fog of the past, people often see only what they want to, and only what they can believe to be true. Unfortunately this means that a lot of what actually happened becomes distorted by the biases of the day. And in the shuffle, it's often the stories of the individuals that are lost, invalidated or claimed to be something they are not.

Luckily, there are those such as actress Myriam Cyr who are willing to work to give a voice to those individual stories that are distorted by the warped mirror of time. In her first book, Letters of a Portuguese Nun, she explores the story of Mariana Alcoforado, a seventeenth century nun who fell in love with a French officer. Gracefully intertwining their individual stories and the cultural events of the time, Cyr takes us on a journey back over three hundred years ago into the heart of a forbidden passion. Against the claims that the 1669 publication of a volume of love letters entitled Portuguese Letters was the fabrication of a (male) French aristocrat, Cyr asserts that the 27 year old nun Mariana was the real author and the letters did, in fact, come from the heart of longing and of loss.

In spite of all the passion and drama of the story, what struck me most in reading the book was the passion of its author. Through the work, the reader can feel the author's irresistible drive to tell the truth as she sees it. A quote from the introduction lingers with me, she writes: "...I thought of the times when, as women, we are not heard, and how after 300 years Mariana, whose words have changed so many lives, is not allowed the most basic of rights, the right to claim her own voice."

Myriam Cyr gives her that right, and in turn validates the whole contested history of female authorship from Sappho to Dorothy Wordsworth, giving the privileges of ownership back to a millennia of women who could not claim them for themselves.

For that I am cannot help but feel both inspired and grateful for her work.

This is a beautifully produced book and a fascinating story. Myriam Cyr relates history with an engaging style that kept me turning pages compulsively. Along side the story of a nun's forbidden love for a French officer, she gives all sorts of interesting facts about life in 17th century Portugal and in the courts and salons of France. Ultimately, she draws a lively portrait of her main subject- a woman who reaches across the centuries and touches our hearts and minds with her potent words and story.

They were an international bestseller when they were published, five love letters from a devastated woman who had been left by her lover as he went on to military duties. It does not matter that this was more than three hundred years ago; the theme is one that is immediate. The letters were so piercing that immediately a controversy arose over their authorship; no woman could have written them, it was said, because women generally didn't write, never wrote well, and never felt love as deeply as men. The controversy has persisted, and will persist, because there is no proof on either side, but in Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love (Miramax Books), Miriam Cyr argues the case for authorship by the nun herself. This is Cyr's first book; she has had a successful career as an actress, and first heard of the letters when they were performed as a play. She determined to translate them herself (unaware that they were hugely famous and had been translated many times), and performed them on stage herself. She could not answer questions from those who heard her readings about the authenticity of the letters, but sympathized with a woman who told her the letters expressed her feelings during a painful breakup and was outraged that anyone thought they were fictional. Cyr, probably motivated by the same sort of feeling, did three years of research, and even though her conclusions are not watertight, her advocacy of the nun's authorship is convincing. More importantly, she has brought the heartbreaking letters to a new audience and supplied them with sufficient context to understand their themes.

Mariana Alcoforado was born in 1640 in the picturesque town of Beja, Portugal, and was put in a convent at the age of ten. The Marquis of Chamilly was a Frenchman, a born soldier who was helping the Portuguese fight incursions from Spain. He was garrisoned in Beja in 1666, and the nuns looking out on the fields around them were entertained by the sight of officers exercising their horses. Mariana was captivated by Chamilly's dash in such capers, and inevitably the officers were invited into the convent. As she often has to do, Cyr invites us to imagine details, such as their meeting and growing acquaintance; even in the letters there are few details about any courting. We also have to imagine how the pair eluded detection, or how Chamilly might have been able to sneak into Mariana's quarters before she was locked inside for the night, and how he sneaked out again. Cyr summarizes, "Unsuspected and unseen, Chamilly and Mariana entered a world more intimate than a prayer and more ethereal than air." There was no dramatic discovery of the affair by authorities, but it ended when Chamilly was called back into the official service of his king, Louis XIV. He simply chose duty over love. In her letters to him, Mariana wrote, "It may be you will find greater beauty, but never will you find such love, and all the rest is nothing."

That sort of sentiment is unsurprising now, but when the letters were published in France, they were a sensation, at least partially because they addressed romantic injustice; women were supposed to keep quiet about men's behavior toward them, however painful or unfair. How the letters came to be so widely known is full of mysteries. The dashing and victorious Chamilly may well have been invited to the evening salons of the marquise de Sabl?, and may have circulated the letters himself, which would not have been seen at the time as a violation of privacy. The marquise had a fear of germs, and perhaps her doctor copied the writing out for her (as he did do for other documents) so she would not be contaminated by holding the originals. Perhaps the doctor sought out the worldly and beloved Guilleragues, a witty and well-educated man, to help translate Mariana's colloquialisms. Indeed, many scholars attribute the authorship of the letters to him. With the publication of the letters, any love letter became known as "a Portuguese." Counterfeit versions came out, and whether the letters were real or imaginary was a question that was argued then as now. It was all settled in the mind of Rousseau, who sniffed that "women in general do not like art... they cannot describe or feel love...I would bet everything in the world that the Portuguese letters were written by a man." It is this sort of sentiment that has entered even into scholarly debate over the centuries. Cyr can't prove her case for Marian's authorship, but she still makes a good argument, reminding us that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. The resolution is only part of the book, which invites us to read the letters for ourselves, and to contemplate the dance of love performed in an exotic and distant locale.

Mariana Alcoforado was a Portuguese nun at the end of the 17th century who wrote a series of love letters after her lover, a visiting aristocratic solider, returns to France. The five letters she wrote, full of passion, reproach and sadness at the loss of her love were later published in Paris where they turned into an instant best seller.

The strange thing, in modern eyes, is that at the time nobody could believe a woman had actually written the letters because they were so full of life and so well expressed - and this view continued right into the 20th century.

Myriam Cyr has put the letters back in the context of the times that they were written and in doing so has taken us into the little known world of 17th century Portuguese convents and politics. She has managed to bring alive a world of war, love and letters. This is a genuine mystery that has been clarified in this book. Having said this, the letters themselves don't seem quite as remarkable today but then we have the benefit of a couple of centuries of literature to draw on that the Mariana did not. This book is a quick and easy read that may make you look at the 17th century world in a way that you'll probably never see in another book on the period.

Let it be known that Simon Schama (The Embarrassment of Riches; A History of Britain) has very recently chosen Myriam Cyr's LETTERS OF A PORTUGUESE NUN as one of his "top reads" for the 2006 London's GUARDIAN Summer Reading List. This surely says it -- this book tops many well-researched literary offerings in a very long time. It is no wonder that the Kirkus Review dubbed it "Pulp romance for the Masterpiece Theater set." Scholarship and imagination have indeed prevailed -- all in a perfect piece of beautifully written non-fiction.

In addition to her detailed and carefully attended and written literary history, and to the subtle nuances of a love relationship still quivering in its newness, Myriam Cyr tends to the unfolding darker corners of this mysteriously entangled love story as she interprets the searingly passionate LETTERS: Cyr draws the reader closer and closer to the beating pulse of what makes love real for each of us -- then she sweeps us away, and we are breathless.

Four years of critical work by the author -- scouring with painstaking care the books, letters and papers in the old libraries of Europe and beyond, checking data and facts -- have blossomed into this lovingly researched first novel. As well, Ms. Cyr has an irresistible speaking voice for listening audiences: In her Boston speaking tours she reads the Portuguese Nun's LETTERS with a surge of such poetic passion, beauty and emotion that it is as if she wrote these letters herself.

LETTERS echoes in the feeling heart of the contemporary reader --and lingers. The tender power of this haunting 17th century love story reaches to our essence and activates an empathic compassion for the longing and desire for what is fundamentally vital to our souls in our search for love.

There is some doubt surrounding the authenticity of the heart-rending love notes claimed to have been written by a cloistered nun to a French officer, the lover who abandoned her. Published in the seventeenth century, the four passionate letters filled a tiny, but incomparably-popular book measuring only 5 1/2 inches by 3 inches. The four letters are included in Myriam Cyr's book, but the largest part of the book reveals the well-researched and well-written story about the history supporting, as well as explaining, the circumstances in which the letters were written. The author also illustrates the opposing opinions that the letters are truly those of a Portuguese nun, and that they were actually written by a French aristocrat. The author believes that the letters were indeed those of a jilted, heart-broken nun. I sincerely hope that she's right!

A masterpiece by Myriam Cyr...

"It may be you will find greater beauty, but NEVER will you find such love, and all the rest is nothing"... such are the words written by 26 years old Mariana Alcoforado in a first letter -as she was a shut nun in 1665 Portugal- to her recently lost lover, a kind of misteryous, tall, intelligent, handsome and passionate french officer (monsieur Chamilly) who's destiny brought him to the scene of a local civil warfare thet involved stationed troops and a few times romantic encounters...

In 1669, in Paris, a volume entitled "Portuguese letters" was published by the most successful publisher in town, the thing was -maybe- not even him expected such a fire started out of these five love texts... and the derived controversy in regards to whom these words really belonged to, for many thought they were a fictional work... such was their power on european societies at the time. Now, for anyone who ever has lived such kind of fire in his / her belly, it is clear such controversy is absurd... the letters were written by Mariana, no doubt... or in any case don't believe me! judge by yourself... just be prepared to look at this mirror of adventure, pain, erotism, love, life and dead... after all, as a popular salon game played in 1664 Paris that involved 34 inconvenient questions in which one of them read:

"In love what is the greatest crime? to be refused or not to have dared to ask?

At the beginning of Chapter 7 of her book, Myriam Cyr includes the following quote from Choderlos de Laclos's epistolary novel, 'Dangerous Liaisons': "By dint of looking for reasons, we find them, we speak them out loud; and after, we cherish them, not so much because they are good, but to avoid contradicting ourselves".

Well, in my opinion, that's exactly what Myriam Cyr is doing.

I had read the Portuguese Letters before, and was aware that there was a long-standing controversy on whether they had been written by Mariana de Alcoforado herself or by a French man-about-town, Gabriel de Guilleragues, based on a French officer's alleged affair with a nun of that name. (The majority of modern scholars, BTW, believe that they were written by Guilleragues). Like other literary enigmas, such as the real identity of Shakespeare, the issue is not likely to be solved unless hitherto unknown documentary evidence turns up somewhere, and Ms. Cyr doesn't really advance any new arguments or theories apart from the ones that have been debated for centuries.

The problem with this book is not Ms. Cyr's warm championing of Mariana as the author of the letters, but that she doesn't seem to know much about history, and so reaches 'conclusions' on the basis of mere speculation, of reasonings that no real historian would incur in, or of a mere misreading of the scant documents available --- such as when she affirms that 'from the day Chamilly left, Mariana's health deteriorated', then quotes in her support the nun's death certificate, which merely says that she 'suffered great infirmities with patience' (the nun Mariana was supposedly abandoned by her lover at age 27, and died at the age of 87).

Sometimes, her reading of historical events or her description of characters is so naive and muddled as to be almost comical --- as when she describes the literary salons that flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as little more than gossiping venues, or when King Pedro II of Portugal, who 'indulged in promiscuous sex, and had commerce with prostitutes and African slaves', is said eight lines below to have 'slowly redressed the country's dissolute ways'. Not bad for a debaucher and philanderer.

Characters appear and disappear at odd times in the book, sometimes leaving bothersome questions behind. To continue with the example of King Pedro: at some point in the book he is described as having entered a love affair with his brother's wife, whom he subsequently married (after she got an annulment). Nothing more is said of this alleged love match, which, if real, would be extremely unusual --- at that time royalty seldom, if ever, married for love. King Pedro later reappears in an appendix, this time bedding whores and slaves. I wanted to know more about whether he really married for love.

Another big problem is that the book is disorganized (the letters, for instance, appear in the middle, and there are several superfluous appendixes at the end), as well as full of annoying typos and erratic punctuation. The author does not seem to understand the naming conventions for the nobility, either French or Portuguese, so that -for example- the Marquise de Sablé is indexed as 'Sablé, Madeleine de Souvré'. This is not about snobbery, but about accuracy --- in any serious history book, historical characters should be identified and indexed properly.

My advice? If you're interested in the controversy around the authorship of the Portuguese Letters, go to the Internet. There's a lot of information that is more accurate and better presented than the one in this book. I give it two stars for the description of the geographical setting - especially the convent - but in my opinion this is one to skip.

I am surprised to see such favorable reviews of this book. I was struck by how poorly written, poorly organized, and poorly argued it was. The only thing worthwhile was the expository section setting the scene in Portugal, describing convent life, and the actual letters themselves. I found myself wondering who had edited this and how it got published.

Enjoyed the historical portion of the book that takes place in Beja, Portugal. I worked in Beja with the Portuguese Air Force for 9 months and ws familiar with the convent and the surrounding Alentajo cities and landscape