Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Scott’s complicit audience that they were entering the twilight world of Lenoir’s Jardin Elysée.
This was a narrative experience in which gaps in the historical material were filled by the
creative imagination of the artist and the subjective experience of the visitor-reader was to take
precedence over the acquisition of information. Disbelief was not so much to be suspended as to
be risen above, despised as the pedantic response of a Dryasdust.
Throughout Ivanhoe the story is dressed, propelled and contextualised by antiquarian
detail, from the armour at the tournay, to the jester Wamba’s stockings, all buoyed up by
occasional footnotes to explain what an ‘arblast’ was (a steel cross-bow) or how Gothic
fortifications were arranged. The dry bones of antiquarian research live again as modern fiction.
In Quentin Durward, which appeared in both Britain and France in 1823 and was his greatest
and most influential French success, Scott used the same techniques of historical detail and
layered narrative. His first Continental novel, it is set during the reign of Louis XI, the period
that saw the emergence of modern France as the first European nation state. By now the Anglo-
Norman balance of power had been reversed, with the French struggling to drive the English out
of Calais.
The novel follows the fortunes of the eponymous hero, a Scottish archer in the service of
the King. This story, as the reader is told in another contextualising Introduction, has also
survived in a manuscript. This one is in the possession of the Marquis de Hautlieu whom the
unnamed Scottish author, who is not, he explains, Sir Walter Scott, has met during a sojourn in
France. Once again the way into the narrative is via British antiquarianism with which the
Marquis, like many of his contemporaries, is thoroughly up to date, having read the work of
Dibdin and John Hughes’s Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone of 1819. This time, however, the
background, out of which the narrative will be pieced together, is not more fiction, as in Ivanhoe,
but the facts of the Revolution, the great propelling event for the antiquarian enterprise of
reconstruction. The narrator tells us that he has studied the manuscript in the library of the
Marquis’s ruined chateau, to which it has been returned by the good offices of the Curé having
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