Alcoforado, Mariana (1640–1723)

Portuguese nun whose love for Noël Bouton, the Marquis of Chamilly, reportedly led her to write five love letters, which gained fame as the Lettres portugaises (1669). Name variations: Mariana Alcoforada. Baptized in the Portuguese city of Beja on April 22, 1640; died on July 28, 1723; daughter of Francisco da Costa Alcoforado and Leonor Mendes.

Her paramour Noël Bouton de Chamilly born (April 6, 1636); her parents married (1637); Portugal rebelled against Spain (December 1, 1640); her brother Baltazar born (1645); Mariana placed in Our Lady of the Conception convent in Beja (1652); her stepmother died and Peregrina Maria joined her in convent (1663); Bouton arrived in Portugal (February 8, 1664); Bouton promoted to captain of cavalry by Count of Schomberg (April 30, 1664); Mariana met Bouton when his detachment quartered in and around Beja (mid-1666); Bouton departed for France (late 1667); Mariana allegedly wrote five letters to Bouton (December 1667 to June 1668); Claude Barbin published first edition of Lettres portugaises in Paris (January 4, 1669); Mariana lost election to serve as abbess of convent (July 30, 1709); Bouton died (January 6, 1715); French scholar Jean François Boissonade claimed Mariana authored the letters (1810).

Mariana Alcoforado was born in 1640, baptized on April 22 of that year in the Portuguese city of Beja, and lived in relative obscurity for 83 years until she died in 1723. Almost a century after her death, fame was unexpectedly attached to her name by Jean François Boissonade, a French literary scholar. Writing under the pseudonym "Omega" in the Journal de l'Empire, Boissonade reported his discovery of a marginal notation written in his first edition of Lettres portugaises traduites en français. The book, first published in 1669, is a series of five letters allegedly written by a Portuguese nun to her lover, a French military officer. An immediate sensation for their desperate passion and scandalous theme, the letters went through five editions during the seven months following their first appearance and had won lasting renown as celebrated examples of amorous correspondence. Yet the identity of the nun had remained unknown, until Boissonade revealed the marginalia: "The nun that wrote these letters was named Mariana Alcoforada, a nun in Beja, between Extremadura and Andalusia. The gentlemen to whom these letters were written was the Count of Chamilly, then called the Count of Saint-Léger."

The literary world had never heard of Mariana Alcoforado, nor did it have any proof of her existence. But Boissonade's report caused researchers to seek verification. Had there been a nun named Mariana Alcoforado in Beja during the 1660s? Had the Count of Chamilly's military career taken him there, and might he have known Sister Mariana? In short, was there documentary evidence to substantiate the marginal note?

Investigation revealed Mariana to public view. In 1652, her parents, Francisco da Costa Alcoforado and Leonor Mendes placed Mariana in the Our Lady of the Conception convent of Beja. Her father was a public official, administering royal properties in the region, and descended from an old noble family. He possessed enough property and had sufficient political connections to establish an entailed estate and stipulated that no monk or nun could inherit it. Mariana was one of his eight children by two wives. Her parents lied about her age when they put her in the convent. Rather than 12 they said she was 16, the minimum age at which a young woman could take vows. The few documents that mention her give no indication of her spiritual vocation for life in the cloister. Perhaps she had shown a preference for prayer and meditation, but many families used convents as a dumping ground for daughters, "the general situation of woman" in the words of one Portuguese writer. Mariana's condition was, wrote Humberto Delgado, another of Mariana's compatriots: "A human tragedy. A tragedy of women. A tragedy of the poor girls cast against their will into the monotony of the cloister, and against nature into meaningless chastity."

A Carmelite institution founded in 1467 by Beatrice of Beja and Ferdinand, duke of Beja and Viseu, parents of King Manuel I, the convent was a large urban establishment without gardens or orchards. But it had a verandah from which the sisters could see the outside world, barred to them by the convent's high walls. Silence and discipline ruled within. By 1660, Mariana had taken her final vows. Her sister Catherine was a novice within the same house. In 1663, Mariana's stepmother died, and her father placed three-year-old Peregrina Maria in the convent in the nun's care. Mariana raised the child, the two apparently living at times in a small house outside but close by the convent.

If Mariana Alcoforado wrote the Lettres portugaises, 1664 was a crucial year, for that was when Noël Bouton de Chamilly arrived in Portugal. Having achieved some reputation for valor in France, Chamilly joined Louis XIV's forces in Portugal, which were supporting, since 1640, that nation's struggle to assert its independence from Spain and restore the Portuguese monarchy. Chamilly served as a cavalry captain under the command of the Count of Schomberg, a Prussian officer in French employ. How Mariana and Chamilly became acquainted, if indeed they did, is a mystery, except for inferences from the Lettres. They record that from the verandah of the convent, she was "thrilled by the sight of you passing by, and I was on that verandah that fatal day when I first grew conscious of my unhappy love." Excited by his horsemanship, she convinced herself that Bouton was purposely parading before her to catch her eye. Mariana's brother, Baltazar Vaz Alcoforado, served with Bouton in the siege of Alcaria de la Puebla in 1666, and some scholars have speculated that he introduced his sister to the French officer. Their only evidence stems from the fact that Baltazar took vows to become a monk in 1669: perhaps, they speculate, he did so motivated by a sense of guilt over his role in his sister's scandal.

The letters indicate that for a cloistered nun Mariana had surprising access to the officers. If, contrary to monastic rules and royal law, she was allowed to live outside the convent while raising Peregrina Maria, she would have had opportunity. Such a living arrangement would have been irregular but not necessarily unheard of. Within the convent, it would have been impossible for her to have had an affair with the French officer without some complicity on the part of the other nuns. Even after Bouton's departure for France, during the period the letters were allegedly written, she continued to receive visits from French officers. The second of the Lettres, for example, records that one morning she spent three hours talking to a French officer about her beloved. On other occasions, Bouton's compatriots picked up letters from her to send on to him. Sometimes, they waited impatiently while she wrote. Through them, she also seems to have returned all but the last two of Bouton's letters to him. Those brief missives she kept as proof of his faithlessness and as an antidote against her violent passion for him.

The Lettres portray a woman consumed by her obsession, a "frenzy," more in love with her passion than with the French officer. "I consecrated my life to you the first time I saw you, and it gives me some pleasure to be sacrificing it to you," she writes, "… and yet I feel that I should not altogether wish to be free from sorrows of which you only are the cause." She accuses him of deceit, of bringing her to love him, all the while knowing he would desert her. He intended little more than a vulgar affair; she loved him "so much that no such suspicion ever occurred to me." Mariana pleads for him to return and take her away to France. She complains that he does not write, but when he does, his perfunctory letters prove her worst fears. "Why could you not leave me my love?" she weeps. "You had only to keep from writing to me." Determined by then to write him no more, she makes arrangements to return his portrait. Her love has turned to hate: "I have proved that I loved my passion more than I loved you; and I have had a bitter struggle to fight it down, after your insulting behaviour made you personally hateful to me."

One should love like the Portuguese nun, with a soul on fire.

—Stendahl

Such emotions did not go unnoticed within the convent, according to the Lettres. The abbess chastised her but then treated her kindly, perhaps recognizing the futility of Mariana's passion and her inability to escape the convent. Her love, Mariana reported, touched her sister nuns, and even the most austere of them showed pity for her. Some talked to her about her lover and her hopeless condition. Perhaps for that reason, she kept to her room as much as possible.

Little is known about her life after 1668, when she would have written the last of the Lettres. In one, she mentions that she had been named doorkeeper, a rather strange appointment in light of her liaison with Bouton. Thereafter, she lived in near anonymity, at least as far as surviving documents are concerned. In 1709, she was a candidate for abbess of the convent but lost the election 48 votes to 58. When she died, a sister nun, Antónia Sophia Baptista de Almeida , duly registered the death in the convent records: "On the 28 of the month of July of 1723, Mother D. Mariana Alcoforada passed away in this Royal Convent of the Conception; of 87 years of age; she spent them all in the service of God; … she was very benign with everyone; for thirty years she did severe penance; she suffered great infirmities … desiring to have more to suffer." Her age, based on the deception perpetrated when she was placed in the convent, was incorrect: she was really 83 when she died.

Mariana's scholarly partisans consider the unusual reference to 30 years' penance as an implicit confirmation of her affair with Bouton. Meanwhile, Bouton had died eight years earlier, in 1715, promoted to marshal of France and grown so stout that the Duke of St. Simon, the renowned observer at Versailles, wrote: "He was a tall and fat man, the best man of the world, the most brave, filled with honor, but so stupid and heavy that it is not to be understood how he could have any talent for war."

In light of what the Portuguese documents showed, there was no doubt that Mariana Alcoforado lived. Nonetheless, research failed to prove her authorship. Lacking definitive proof, authorship of the Lettres portugaises largely depended on scholars' prejudices. Some of her compatriots patriotically defended Mariana as making one of the "most decisive Portuguese contributions to European sensibility." For them the Lettres were the "psychological document most truly felt, that represents the Portuguese soul in the seventeenth century." They asserted that the letters' syntax showed that they had been translated in a literal fashion from Portuguese. The nun's despair and solitude resonated with the melancholy and passion experienced by a nation of mariners, often separated from lovers and family by the sea.

Yet others, including Portuguese writers, rejected her authorship. This was especially true of conservative Catholics, who denied that a nun would have succumbed to seduction. They claimed the Lettres were nothing more than exotic French fiction. Other critics dismissed Mariana on the grounds that the original letters in Portuguese had never surfaced, that the letters' precious style, supposed internal contradictions, and lack of direct connection with Mariana Alcoforado showed them to be French literary creations. American literary scholar F.C. Green argued in 1926, based on study of Claude Barbin's royal license to print the letters, that they were written by Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne Guilleragues, traditionally thought to have been their translator. Decades earlier, before Boissonade first revealed Mariana Alcoforado's name with the Lettres, Jean Jacques Rousseau had pronounced them fakes written by a man: "That celestial fire which warms and kindles the soul, that genius which consumes and devours, that burning eloquence, those sublime transports which plunge their raptures to the depths of human hearts, will always be lacking in women's writings: these are all cold and pretty like their authors. For women are incapable of either describing or feeling love…. I would wager any thing in the world that the Portuguese Letters were written by a man."

In the end, however, the question of authorship is moot. The Lettres portugaises have brought Mariana Alcoforado to life from her anonymous cell in the convent, and she in turn has given new life to Portuguese women. In 1972, during the final shudders of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta , and Maria Velho da Costa published the Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters). They had written in homage to Mariana Alcoforado, whom they had taken as their champion in the struggle to liberate Portuguese women. The regime found their feminism offensive to public morality, and the "Three Marias" were arrested and put on trial, to the dismay of human rights organizations around the world. But the Salazar dictatorship fell in 1974, and the new government dropped all charges against the women. The Novas Cartas quickly became "a milestone in the fight for freedom for women." To the "Three Marias," Portuguese society imposed marriage, motherhood, and submissiveness on women, comparable to the convent walls that held Mariana's aspirations in check. In one of their poems, they shared Mariana's grief: "For a daughter put in a convent/is not loved in her house."

sources:

Aveline, Claude…. Et tout le reste n'est rien. Paris: Mer cure de France, 1986.

Barreno, Maria Isabel, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa. The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters. Translated by Helen R. Lane. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975.

Cordeiro, Luciano. Soror Marianna, a freira portugueza. 2nd ed. Lisbon: Livraria Ferin e Cia., 1891.

Delgado, Humberto. O infeliz amor de Sóror Mariana: a freira de Beja. Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Civilização Brasileira S.A., 1964.

Fonseca, Antonio Belard da. Mariana Alcoforado: a freira de Beja e as Lettres Portugaises. Lisbon: Imprensa Portugal-Brasil, 1966.

Garcia, Ápio. Camilo e Sóror Mariana por detrás das grades. Porto: Livraria Simões Lopes de Domingos Barreira, 1945.

Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Lisbon: Arcádia Travelling and Culture, 1973.

Rodrigues, Antonio Augusto Gonçalves. Mariana Alcoforado: história e crítica de uma fraude literária. 2nd ed. Coimbra, 1943.

suggested reading:

Beauvois, Eugène. "La jeunesse de Maréchal de Chamilly. Notice sur Noël Bouton et sa famille de 1636 a 1667," in Memoires de la Société d'Histoire … de Beaune. 1885.

Guilleragues, Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de. Lettres portugaises, Valentins et autres oeuvres. Frédèric Deloffre and Jacques Rougeot, eds. Paris: Garnier, 1962.

Lassalle, Jean-Pierre. Un manuscrit des lettres d'une religieuse portugaise: leçons, interrogations, hypotheses. Seattle: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1982.

Kendall W. Brown , Professor of History, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah