Sygne’s marriage to Turelure

Sygne de Coufontaine’s marriage to Turelure is a sacrificial act undertaken to protect the Pope and the old order, but it does not secure the cause it serves. Turelure is the son of Sygne’s servant and wet nurse, a political climber who used the Revolution to gain power and ordered the execution of Sygne’s parents in the presence of their children. By marrying a man she utterly despises, Sygne gives up her love, family name, and estate. The marriage thus binds her to an enemy while making the loss of what she sought to preserve part of the sacrifice itself.

Background and Stakes

Before the marriage, Sygne and her cousin Georges are betrothed, promising fidelity in a bond that represents their commitment to the traditional order. She breaks off that engagement to save the Pope, who is hiding in her house. Turelure, meanwhile, embodies the revolutionary power that has displaced the world Sygne and Georges seek to defend. The decision is therefore not presented as a private union: it is a choice made under political and ethical pressure, with Sygne’s relationship to her family, her love, and the old order all at stake.

The Marriage as Sacrifice

Sygne’s decision to marry Turelure is the second in a sequence of four acts: after her and Georges’s betrothal, she sacrifices what matters to her for the Pope, the symbol of the old order. The marriage requires more than the loss of her engagement. It makes her enter a symbolic order represented by the enemy she has chosen to marry, while the intended beneficiary of her sacrifice remains the cause she hopes to preserve.

The book frames this structure through Versagung, a radical renunciation in which the subject gives up everything for a cause and then loses the cause itself. Sygne sacrifices everything for the old order embodied in the Pope; the sacrifice does not restore that order as a secure possession. Instead, she is bound to Turelure, and the cause for which she acted is lost. In this sense, the marriage is not a successful exchange in which suffering purchases the preservation of what matters. Its consequence is the loss of the very object that gave the sacrifice its purpose.

Aftermath and Refusal

The marriage is followed by Sygne’s suicidal act of intercepting the bullet Georges aims at Turelure, thereby saving her husband’s life. This later action deepens the marriage’s contradiction: Sygne has given herself to an enemy and then saves him, but that deed does not amount to a declaration of marital love. When the dying Turelure asks her for a sign that might give meaning to what she has done, Sygne gives no spoken answer. Her involuntary tic communicates rejection rather than reconciliation.

That final refusal throws the marriage’s symbolic meaning into question. Sygne’s sacrifice brought her into an order that she ultimately negates from within it: she refuses to let the act of saving Turelure be inscribed as a gesture of love or as a final affirmation of the bond. The account treats the marriage and its aftermath as more than submission to a prescribed feminine role. Sygne’s decision to bind herself to Turelure, and her refusal of the meaning he seeks from her, form distinct acts with opposing consequences.

Theoretical Significance

The marriage is used to clarify Versagung as a refusal that can occur within the symbolic order, rather than as a simple escape from it. Sygne first enters that order through a primordial sacrifice, taking on a bond that requires the surrender of her prior attachments. The later negation does not erase the marriage; it arises within the situation the marriage created. The book connects this self-negating dimension of Versagung to the later concept of the sinthome, while emphasizing that the contradiction is already present in the marriage’s outcome: sacrifice for a cause culminates in losing that cause.