Women writing in contemporary France

Germain and the Christian novel 189
shift from the Medieval tradition – the ‘enluminures’ are perhaps especially
associated with illuminated manuscripts of the lives of the saints –
towards the humanism of the Renaissance. Gaddi, Giotto’s greatest pupil,
was renowned for his development of his master’s experiments with light
and perspective. His work represented a move away from the Byzantine
tradition of the iconic and two-dimensional to the representation of threedimensional,
individualised figures. In many respects, we might say that
Gaddi, in the night scene of his ‘Annunciation to the Shepherds’, in which
the hillside is lit up by a dazzling light, aimed specifically to negotiate that
difficult third way between the material and the non-material, the natural
and the supernatural: ‘Taddeo Gaddi’s adventures into the problem of
depicting light were motivated by the need to evoke not simply the splendour
of natural light, but the mystery of the supernatural light of
heaven’. 17
Ironically, however, the presence of the intertextual material, which
prompts a comparison between the visual and the written mediums, serves
to show up the latter’s limitations. Germain’s characters remain as twodimensional
as the iconic figures from which Gaddi’s art sought to distance
itself. More than this, the Gaddi intertext foregrounds the
teleological nature of the novel’s structure. L’Enfant Méduse opens with a
solar eclipse witnessed by the young Lucie and her friend Louis-Félix. At
the start of the final section ‘Patience’, we learn that thirty years have
passed, and that Lucie, having travelled the world, lacks joy. When she
receives a postcard from her old school-friend Louis-Félix, depicting
Gaddi’s ‘Annunciation’, everything changes. The symbolic light eclipsed
in her childhood returns, bringing with it that missing ingredient: joy. And
in case the reader is left in any doubt as to the symbolic reading of the text,
the precise nature of that joy is made explicitly clear in a particularly heavyhanded
move: ‘La joie que Lucie attend désormais est autre, elle est légère
. . . Une joie pure de toute colère et de toute violence, qui lui viendrait
d’ailleurs, et autrement. Une paix qui descendrait soudain éclairer la
pénombre où elle sommeille encore, comme l’ange de l’Annonciation aux
bergers’ (p. 273) (Henceforth the joy which Lucie awaits is different, it is
gentle ...Ajoypurified of all anger and all violence, which would come to
her from elsewhere, and in another way. A peace which would descend
suddenly and illuminate the half-light in which she still slumbers, like the
angel of the Annunciation to the Shepherds).
As was the case with the second volume of Germain’s diptych, where
Jacob’s struggle with the angel emerged as the structural principle behind