93) a significant variant of the idea is offered: the heroine thinks of the ‘order of the world’ as not only ‘inexplicable’ (unerklärlich) but also ‘great and sacred’ (gross und heilig), and we are told that she ‘wholly submits’ to it, intellectually at least. She has still to learn the full facts of her particular situation, and to face her own feelings; when this more personal acceptance is in due course achieved the story reaches its foreseeably happy ending. It would be a mistake to take either the story or its ending too solemnly: as in the case of Amphitryon, Kleist’s treatment hovers ambiguously between the serious and the comic. The contemporary setting of The Marquise of O— and the relative realism of its numerous and extensive dialogues (especially those in direct speech – an untypical feature) are consistent with an at least partly humorous intention; the style is pitched in an altogether lower key than that of most of the other stories. Although it must be conceded that the Marquise has in a certain sense been raped and that rape is not an unserious matter, it is worth noting that at no point is she threatened with anything more grave than a certain amount of social scandal and at worst a breach with her artistocratic family, of whom she is in any case financially independent. The basic idea – and here again Amphitryon is a parallel – has a long, ribald ancestry. Like that of rape by impersonation (Jupiter–Amphitryon–Alcmene) the theme of a woman made pregnant without her knowledge (while asleep or drunk or in a swoon) has wide currency in world literature and occurs for example in the following anecdote from Montaigne’s essay Of Drunkennesse (here quoted in Florio’s translation):

A widdow Country-woman, reputed very chaste and honest, suspecting herself to be with childe, told her neighbours, that had she a husband, she should verily thinke she were with childe. But the occasion of this suspition encreasing more and more, and perceiving herselfe so big-bellied, that she could no longer conceale it, she resolved to make the Parish-priest acquainted with it, whom she entreated to publish in the Church, that whosoever hee were, that was guilty of the fact, and would avow it, she would freely forgive him, and if he were so pleased, take him to her husband. A certaine swaine or hyne-boy of hers, emboldned by this proclamation, declared, how that having one holliday found her well-tippled with wine, and so sound asleep by the chimnie side, lying so fit, and ready for him, that without awaking her he had the full use of her body. Whom she accepted for her husband, and both live together at this day.

Kleist may well have read this pleasing little tale in France where he probably wrote The Marquise of O—; he himself claimed (in a note appended to the table of contents in the periodical where it first appeared) that his story was founded on fact, on events which he had fictionally transposed ‘from the north to the south’, i.e. to Italy, presumably from Germany. What matters, however, is that Kleist as narrator of course knows from the outset who is responsible for this virtuous young widow’s condition intéressante, and that from an early point in the story he allows the reader to share this knowledge. Like several of his works (The Duel among the stories and The Broken Pitcher and Amphitryon among the plays), The Marquise of O— has something of the character of a detective-story, a ‘who-dunnit’, thus betokening yet again his preoccupation with the problem of truth. All these four works revolve entirely around the seeming misconduct of a virtuous young woman. The Broken Pitcher is scarcely more than a straightforward farce in which the accidental breaking of a valuable ornamental jug is ingeniously made to symbolize the suspected loss of a simple young girl’s virginity, and the fat rogue of a village judge is involved in the ludicrous situation of trying a case in which he knows he is himself the culprit. Amphitryon ends satisfactorily with the vindication of the heroine’s moral if not technical innocence (of which the audience is of course aware all along) and her husband’s acquiescence in the prospect of becoming the putative father of Hercules as his reward for having unwittingly conceded the jus primae noctis to Jupiter; but Kleist also emphasizes Alcmene’s confusion and anguish and subtly exploits the theme’s serious potential. His procedure in The Marquise of O— is essentially similar. What has happened? During the storming by Russian forces of a citadel commanded by the heroine’s father, she has fallen into the hands of some ruffianly enemy troops who attempt to rape her; she is rescued from them by the young Russian officer Count F—, but he himself, in the heat of battle, yields to the sudden temptation offered by her fainting-fit. Kleist at first withholds this last fact from the reader by teasingly inserting a dash into the middle of a sentence, but we are almost at once supplied with two clues to it: the Count’s unexplained embarrassment when asked to identify the would-be perpetrators of the outrage, and secondly his cry, as he falls apparently mortally wounded in another battle, of ‘Giulietta, this bullet avenges you’ – using what we are told is the Marquise’s first name. The narrative presently refers to her unaccountable symptoms of early pregnancy, and then immediately to F—’s extraordinary first visit to her family’s house, when with inexplicable insistence he urged her to marry him at once: inexplicable, that is, to the Marquise and her relatives, but the reader by now at the latest shares the Count’s and the narrator’s knowledge of the true facts. If the slowness of everyone else to grasp them, and the extraordinary consternation and fuss that follow their eventual disclosure, seem excessive to the present-day reader, he must bear in mind the standards and prejudices of North German aristocratic families such as Kleist’s own – the code by which what this gentleman has done to this lady is not only unspeakable but literally unthinkable. What is not wholly clear is whether, and if so to what extent, Kleist consciously intended to put the melodramatic behaviour of Giulietta and her family in an ironic, parodistic light. If he did not, then the story does not really come off as a work of art; if he did, then it has a subtlety comparable with that of Amphitryon. In either case, however, it is a text of considerable psychological interest. One curious feature is Kleist’s depiction of the extreme rage of the father at his daughter’s supposed fall from virtue, and the more or less explicitly incestuous element in the scene of their reconciliation. The motif of a father’s jealous and protective love for his daughter and her passionate devotion to him, brought into currency by Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, was in Kleist’s time a literary topos in German drama (cf. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, Lenz’s The Soldiers, H. L. Wagner’s The Infanticide, Schiller’s Luise Miller; post-Kleistian parallels are Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena and Hauptmann’s Rosa Berndt). In The Marquise of O— Kleist accentuates this commonplace theme, parodistically perhaps, to a point verging on the grotesque.