The lure of women’s conversation made itself felt in all kinds of writing during this period. In 1655, a text devoted to eavesdropping (if far removed from the deeply restrained anxieties of Lafayette) forever changed the erotic landscape of France. This was the anonymous dialogue L’école des filles, soon made available in translation in Restoration England, a society avid for such French titillation (Samuel Pepys recounts his reading of it with mingled shame and pleasure). The Ecole lets the reader eavesdrop on an extraordinarily intimate conversation between two young women discovering sexual pleasure and intent on fulfillment. Where the Princesse de Clèves gives us the conversation of aristocrats, the Ecole is resolutely a tale of bourgeois women, but we know it was consumed with as much fervor in court as in town—when in 1687 it was discovered in the room of the ladies who attended to the daughter-in-law of Louis XIV, it caused a great scandal.
This text was certainly written by a man—two men were charged with obscenity for its publication—but it presents men as inarticulate fools and women as skillful verbal strategists. The naive Fanchon is instructed in sexual pleasure by her older cousin Suzanne, and the two of them set out what one needs to know in order to progress in physical pleasure. But in this text, sex cannot be separated from speech: in order to have good sex, one must take up a whole new style of conversation. Fanchon, an eager student, learns important new vocabulary with alacrity, and the quick-witted pair of young women mock men’s inability to speak articulately during sex, laughing at the ways men yell out without any verbal capacity at all.
The Ecole suggests a cultural fascination with and anxiety about what it is that women get up to when they talk among themselves, and about women’s abilities to deploy speech to such effective ends. The same anxiety can be seen in the mocking satires of salon conversation, like Molière’s comedy Les précieuses ridicules (The Pretentious Young Ladies, 1659) and Antoine Baudeau de Somaize’s faux-dictionary of salon speech, Le grand dictionnaire des précieuses (1660), both of which tongue-in-cheek texts peddled the notion that salon women used particular and outlandish language, and which encouraged the reading public to ape such vocabulary dismissively. Small wonder, then, that women writers like Lafayette might be particularly concerned to trace the downside of this eavesdropping culture. In giving us a world in which women are worried that their conversations might be overheard, La Princesse de Clèves seems to reflect sadly on the cultural obsession with listening in.
Lafayette’s reflections on women’s private conversation and its pitfalls stage a defense of conversation as what has been called “feminist pedagogy.” The novel revolves around a series of digressions that frequently baffle the modern reader. Just as the plot seems to advance tentatively, suddenly it pauses for a character to tell the princess (and by extension the reader) a lengthy historical story, which often seems surprisingly irrelevant to the love story that we today regard as the central business of the text.
These digressions derive from earlier forms of prose fiction, like the romance, which featured multiple storytellers and strange inserted tales that could be imagined as set-pieces but also reflected on the central concerns of the text. Here, even in Lafayette’s terser form of fiction, the digression serves a similar purpose, but it is more tautly staged: the princess is told a story she needs to know in order to navigate the court. For as her austere mother puts it, “If you judge by appearances in this place, you will frequently be deceived; what you see is almost never the truth.” To know what’s what when one arrives in a new place, one must know one’s history, and that history is transmitted through conversation, chiefly through conversation between women and about women. So the princess learns from the example of Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henri II, whose exceptional political power derives from her intimacy with the king, and in counterpart she also heeds the story of Anne Boleyn, a figure of loathing in Catholic France, whose unfortunate end suggests that the power derived from sexual politicking might not be durable or peaceful. If we judged on appearances, these tales would look like narrative detours. But the painful examples they present will be central to the princess’s decision making and thus to the ending of the novel. If the princess retreats from Nemours and from the reader at the close of the text, it is because she does not wish to become a moral tale that could be circulated to future young ladies who need to learn the ways of the court.
The interest in overhearing women’s conversation plays out somewhat differently in a genre that appeared at the end of the century: the fairy tale. A 1677 letter by Madame de Sévigné, an eloquently gossipy aristocrat who is the source for so much of what we know about the seventeenth-century court, tells us that by that date, fairy tales were already told in court circles; they were also told in salons in town, such as that of the marquise de Lambert. The fairy tales that began to appear in printed collections (Charles Perrault, Contes en vers, 1695; Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec des moralités, 1697; Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Les contes des fées, 1697) were perhaps already familiar from oral traditions, but the printed versions made sly intertextual references to other editions: the palace of a charming cat princess in one of d’Aulnoy’s tales, for example, has murals showing scenes from “Le chat botté,” one of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault. The fairy tale was both an old genre, drawing on a long tradition of female storytellers, and a new one: the term conte de fée enters into the language in 1698, the same year that d’Aulnoy’s multivolume Contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode, a collection insisting on the new and fashionable status of these tales, was published.
Like the novel, the new genre of the fairy tale was in large part the work of women: not just d’Aulnoy, but also Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon and Catherine Bernard. When men published such collections, they worked hard to figure old traditions of female orality in their text: the frontispieces of Charles Perrault’s tales featured engravings of Mother Goose characters, decrepit peasant ladies telling tales by the fire, sometimes to entranced listeners whose flamboyant bonnets give them away as members of the court.
Although fairy tales were read avidly, literary critics for the most part steered well clear of the new genre, probably, as Lewis Seifert suggests, because they did not want to elevate it by taking it seriously. But in many ways the seemingly lighthearted fairy tale plays intelligently with literary tropes and philosophical discussions of the most serious kind: the repeated scenes of recognition in which characters recognize, for example, that a cat is really a princess recall Aristotle’s discussion of anagnorisis—the moment of transition from ignorance to knowledge—in the Poetics, a text central to the most highbrow discussions of tragedy in the seventeenth century. The strange, speaking animals of the fairy tales also recall the seventeenth century’s persistent debates about the question of human rationality (most famously that of René Descartes), since they often seem smarter and more thoughtful than the rather doltish humans who surround them, capable of thinking as a human and as an animal all at once: d’Aulnoy’s charming white cat serves her courtiers rat stew, but recognizes this might trouble her princely guest so also provides more traditionally human fare for him.
Fairy tales evinced a knowing, courtly nostalgia for fireside tales, allowing courtly readers to recall a collective past they probably never knew. Often they also gestured toward an earlier moment of the court itself. By the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV was elderly. Under the influence of his pious wife, Madame de Maintenon, the court had become deeply conservative; the luxurious and playful aesthetic of Louis’s younger years, when the court first moved to Versailles, was long gone, and political optimism had been replaced by gloom. The often hyperbolic descriptions of courtly interiors found in the fairy tales—mirrored walls, porcelain palaces, color, and comfort—nod to an earlier courtly culture that flourished when the marquise de Montespan, Louis’s official mistress, set the pleasure-seeking tone for the court in the 1670s.
But by the 1690s, the austerely ultra-Catholic dévot, o
r “pious,” culture praised women only in their role as virtuous mothers; as Seifert describes, the fairy tale became a key text in the debates about the proper role of women, offering us characters ranging from Perrault’s renewal of the Patient Griseldis, praised for her obedience to her husband, to d’Aulnoy’s witty and vigorous White Cat, who governs alone and runs circles around male cats and men alike.
Other stories of the late seventeenth century also uphold worldly pleasure-seeking against the newer and more restrictive gender roles. The writing of the mondains, or “worldly figures,” showcases all things new and magical. Mondain writers shunned the restrictive aesthetic of vraisemblance that had held earlier literary forms like tragedy and novels such as La Princesse de Clèves hostage and embraced with delight all that was improbable, crazy, and pleasurable. Take the strange “Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville,” a story traditionally credited to the cross-dressing ambassadorial abbé de Choisy, but possibly coauthored by Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon and Charles Perrault, both authors known for their collections of fairy tales.
First published in 1695 in the newspaper Mercure Galant (the same paper that had brokered debate around La Princesse de Clèves), the text tells the tale of a boy whose mother brings him up as a girl so he can stay home from war. When the little marquise is brought to Paris, she is celebrated everywhere for her beauty and playfulness; eventually she meets a young man and longs to marry him, which makes her mother rather nervous. We await the revelation of bodily truth. The end of the story brings a strange and delightful twist on the trope of recognition. In their marriage bed, in the dark, the two young people reach for one another and discover that each is not as they had imagined: the wife who is really a man is thrilled to discover that her new husband is a biological woman. Each decides to stay within his and her adopted gender identities, and at the end of the story we are told that a child is on the way. On the one hand, the tale of recognition and resolution looks conventional and heteronormative—a man and a woman marry, a child is born—but its surprising variant on a familiar narrative also prompts us to question conventional appearances.
The reader who had learned from La Princesse de Clèves that appearances at court can be deceiving might find one particular kind of moral in this text. But the story of the marquise also encourages its readers to revel in the play of appearances: the authors take pains to note just where the marquise shopped for diamond earrings and how her skillful application of cosmetics set off her particular beauty in just the right way. This is a genre that delights in artifice and in all it can offer us. In doing so, it too casts a nostalgic glance to earlier days of courtly behavior: the marquise and her girlfriend bemoan the fact that girls nowadays have to do so much of the flirtatious work themselves, and do not receive the same attention from men that their mothers would have decades before. Women today, they sigh, no longer receive the same attentions from men: the little cares, the kindnesses. The characters are mourning a lost culture of galanterie, the highly coded practices of flirtatious behavior that had governed relations between men and women earlier in the century. But they do so by drawing on the terms Madeleine de Scudéry had used in setting out her Carte de Tendre, the map of tenderness. One novel’s conversation inspires another.
The centrality of conversation to this burgeoning of prose fiction in the seventeenth century points to the appropriative flexibility of these new genres: borrowing from oral traditions and salon games, writers—especially female writers—crafted a market for literature that was both titillating and educational, and in so doing positioned themselves as authors about whom people at court and in the city and even other fictional characters could not stop talking.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
French editions: Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves, ed. Bernard Pingaud (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); Honoré d’Urfé, L’Astrée, première partie, ed. Delphine Denis (Paris: Champion Classiques, 2011); Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, ed. Delphine Denis (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); anonymous, Recueil général des Caquets de l’accouchée, ed. Georges Bourgeuil (Albi: Passage du Nord-Ouest, 2012); anonymous, L’école des filles ou la philosophie des dames (Paris: Allia, 2012); Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Les contes de fées, ed. Constance Cagnat-Duboeuf (Paris: Gallimard, 2008); and François-Timoléon de Choisy, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, and Charles Perrault, “Histoire de la Marquise-Marquise de Banneville,” ed. Joan DeJean (New York: MLA Texts and Translations, 2004).
The most useful English translation of Lafayette’s court novels (and the one that I have used here for quotations from La Princesse de Clèves) is The Princess of Cleves, The Princess of Montpensier, The Countess of Tende, trans. Terence Cave, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For translations of other texts mentioned, see Honoré d’Urfé, Astrea, trans. Steven Rendell (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995); Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, The Tales of the Fairies, Compleat (New York: Garland, 1977); and François-Timoléon de Choisy, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, and Charles Perrault, “The Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville,” trans. Steven Rendell (New York: MLA Texts and Translations, 2004).
A thorough account of seventeenth-century conversation and its significance for women writers can be found in Elizabeth Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). On salon culture and its significance, see especially Faith Beasley, Salons, History and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2006). On women and the seventeenth-century novel more broadly, see Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). On the question of the princess’s plausibility, see especially Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction,” PMLA 96, no. 1 (1981). On the strangeness of Lafayette’s novel and its status in literary history, see Nicholas Paige, “Lafayette’s Impossible Princess: On (Not) Making Literary History,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010). On fairy tales, see especially Lewis Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–1715: Nostalgic Utopias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); on the marquise-marquis, see also Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
From Moralists to Libertines
ERIC MÉCHOULAN
The French seventeenth century has often been labeled, in admiring tones, “the century of moralists.” In a widely known study, Paul Bénichou even claimed, “if today we still consider the classical centuries great, it is because in those centuries a moral philosophy developed that gave humanity a true sense of its own value.” Yet at the same time, the seventeenth century also saw the emergence of what was to be called “libertinage” (also known as “freethinking”), a movement that questioned—and, in the eyes of some, cynically undermined—the very basis of moral and religious belief. Moralists and libertines—a strange pairing of apparent opposites. And yet the pair belong together as siblings in a new literary family. Together they initiated new forms of thought and writing that embodied a largely secular outlook on the major questions of human nature and the moral life and that are also intended for a lay, as well as an erudite, reader. Ancient forms such as the fable, fairy tale, dialogue, aphorism, or “characters” are adapted and transformed to essentially “modern” purposes, while new ones, such as the portrait, maxim, letters, short stories, travel writings, and utopias, were increasingly favored by a rapidly expanding reading public. The rise of moralist and libertine writing is directly linked to the spread of literacy in the seventeenth century and fueled a growing taste for texts on practical ways of life as well as for fictional representations.
It was natural that, in a Christian environment, freethinkers and libertine writers would be viewed with suspicion as subversive. But, as Nietzsche (a great admirer of the moralists) was later t
o propose, this was also the case with “moralists.” He claimed (in The Will to Power) that the moralist was the opposite of a “preacher” and was rather someone who sees “morality” as suspect, open to skeptical inspection, and who thereby becomes himself suspect. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the word moraliste entered the French language, and a celebrated trio of moralists was established: La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and La Bruyère, whose perspectives, styles, and references are nevertheless very different from each other. La Rochefoucauld belonged to the highest nobility, and his Maximes are devoted to disclosing and anatomizing the hidden dynamic of the “vices” that underlie people’s actions and attitudes. Pascal, the son of a lawyer and tax assessor, inventor of a sophisticated computing machine, designer of a public transportation system in Paris, physicist, and mathematician, was also a fascinating theological controversialist who advocated a more rigorous faith in God and showed the paradoxical behavior human beings display in the world when caught between the richness of thought and the poverty of greed. La Bruyère, born in a Parisian middle-class family, was called to the bar; became the secretary of the prince de Condé, a prominent nobleman; and demonstrated in his Caractères an ability to decipher the social absurdities and individual obsessions concealed in the most everyday forms of behavior.
It is harder to say exactly who the libertines were: this was above all a polemical category, which therefore needs to be used with care. In the seventeenth century, Montaigne was sometimes considered to be one of the first libertine writers, because of his tone, his way of showing off his ego, and his use of skepticism or even Epicureanism. But it was with the denunciations of freethinking and sodomy in the 1620s, and the trial of the courtly poet Théophile de Viau for atheism and homosexuality that the category of “libertinage” really came into use. This was part of a Catholic Counter-Reformation strategic tactic to link sodomy and atheism. Epicurean and skeptic philosophies fueled new ways of thinking. For example, Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–59) is one of the more challenging and inventive authors cited as an example of freethinking. He received a good education in Paris, was a soldier during the Thirty Years’ War, and was part of Gassendi’s circle (Gassendi’s ambition was to reconcile Epicurean naturalism with Christian principles). Cyrano tried to pursue a career as dramatist and novelist. His contemporary, La Fontaine (1621–95), who wrote fables and short stories, was perceived as both a moralist and a libertine writer, but he was obliged to officially repudiate his licentious stories in order to secure his later election to the Académie française. Coming from a good middle-class provincial family, he took over his father’s government position and became a successful man of letters in Parisian aristocratic circles.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 28