Published anonymously in 1678, the same year as La Princesse de Clèves, Memoires de Hollande shares many features with Mme de Lafayette’s milestone work. Combining a historical setting and a sentimental plot, the short novel embraces the spirit of the France galante. The exotic setting is sure to appeal to contemporary readers while Louis XIV is negotiating peace with the Dutch Republic. But the religious content made the novel a potential target for censorship. Lens suggests that the Memoires de Hollande’s Jansenist subscript and their author’s explicit engagement in religious controversy caused the novel to go underground after its initial success and fall into oblivion.

The present volume therefore facilitates access to a rarely mentioned work, likely to raise interest among the specialists of early modern fiction and more generally those willing to get a better grasp of a form of literary production that eludes distinctions between public and private, amateurism and professionalism, scholarly and worldly. In his 315-page introduction, Lens demonstrates that Memoires de Hollande belongs to the salon culture and brilliantly reflects the taste, style, and values of a coterie whose contributions, such as the Maximes, were the result of a collective art. A carefully documented inquiry leads Lens to designate Pierre-Daniel Huet as the novel’s hidden author, and Lafayette, La Rochefoucaud, and Segrais as a possible team of collaborators.

If the title is partly justified by the historical setting—the geopolitics of the Dutch Republic at the turn of the seventeenth century—it is also misleading as this Dutch Memoire is deeply informed by fiction and rearranged to meet the needs of the histoire galante. The tripartite structure of the novel works as follows. Part 1 opens in medias res during the siege of Amsterdam by William II, Prince of Orange, and relates his inglorious defeat by the proud and free citizens of the trading city. The active role played by the women of Amsterdam in the resistance bridges to the romance in part 2, featuring a glamorous and strong-willed Jewish heroine, Josébeth—a character seemingly straight out of a Gallerie des femmes fortes—and her French lover, Villeneuve, willing to save her from the miseries of her unhappy marriage and unsuitable Jewishness. Love and true religion triumphs in part 3, when Josébeth converts to Catholicism, divorces her unworthy husband, and marries Villeneuve to live piously ever after.

While indulging in the trendy mix of romance and politics, Memoires de Hollande builds on the curiosity aroused by a country whose republican state, mercantilism, and religious tolerance points as a miroir renversé (reversed image) of the France of Louis XIV. Lens argues that the author’s firsthand experience of the Netherlands shows through his knowledge of the specifics of the Dutch political, geographic, and religious context of his time; his use of historical figures; and his descriptions and observations of the cultural identity of the Dutch society, including its strong Jewish community. However, Lens’s approach in his introduction, consisting in a systematic tracking of the historical errors or inconsistencies, is both tedious and irrelevant since he convincingly shows that this is all about a literary use of history and that facts are subjected to the fictional and apologetic agenda of the creative team behind the Memoires.

While bringing in essential elements to understand the editing history, writing conditions, and historical content, through impressive documentation and background research, Lens’s presentation fails to account for the brilliant fantasy of the anonymous novel. There are limits to the method consisting in comparing the events and characters depicted in the novel with the historical truth. More significant is the mastering of literary codes and implicit playful game with intertextuality displayed by the Memoire de Hollande through the whole panoply of the genres mondains. The satirical portrait of the eminent scholar Huygens, a rewriting of a La Fontaine Conte with a rabbi in the role of the Ermit, and Josébeth’s self-defense in front of the rabbinic tribunal, based on her passion for novels, belong to a culture of connivance in which literature, rather than history, provides the meaningful keys.