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Pascal's Room, Mandeville's Bees, and Baroque Spending

"I have learned," wrote Pascal, "that all the unhappiness of men comes from one single thing, which is that they do not know how to remain at rest in a room" (Pensées , no. 139). For man without grace is anxious, restless, subject to ennui, and the prey of his all-too-human and corrupted nature, omne animal . Pascal's room, however, was not Sartre's huis clos , that room with no exit in which men and women, born free—indeed, in Sartre's terms, condemned to be free—torture each other endlessly. There was a door in Pascal's room, and one might leave it to seek grace or diversion, divertissement. There were three roads one might take after leaving the room: the narrow path of the Jansenist doctrine of grace, the far more easy and agreeable road proposed by the Jesuits, or the road to court and town in search of glory, pleasure, riches, or some moderate manner of life made bearable by wisdom and philosophy. This third road was that of divertissement from one's own self and one's ennui; it was the road of worldly ambition, dominated not so much by Providence as by Fortuna . It was, one might also say, the road of Dr. Mandeville's bees.

Dr. Bernard Mandeville, a native of Holland who lived and wrote in Augustan England, is a puzzling figure made

famous by his doggerel poem The Fable of the Bees (1714). Its notes clarified the moral—the amoral moral—of the poem, to the effect that private vices made for public benefits. This was a doctrine at odds both with the civic humanist tradition linking private and public virtue and with Christian morality. Even later economists disapproved; for, being rationalists, they could hardly be expected to appreciate paradox and accept a characterization of what they saw as productive forces, improvement of living conditions, and initiative as being the result of private vices.

Mandeville puzzles us less than he did his own contemporaries, for not only are we post-Enlightenment and postbourgeois but we also live in what is characterized as a consumer society. If he seems paradoxical, it may be because he belonged both to a passing world and to one in the making but not yet clearly delineated. His allusions to Montaigne and Bayle place him within a well-established tradition of skepticism, a tradition closer to Christian pessimism than to a latitudinarian Christianity accommodating itself to the ways of the world. To the Jansenists and other austere Christian sects, the world was largely evil and salvation was to be sought elsewhere. Mandeville's poem might thus be seen as a satire on those who would accommodate Christian morality with the world, or perhaps on those who would have all men be virtuous, moral, and righteous.

In truth Mandeville is very much of his time, the Baroque. He points clearly to what can be called baroque spending, divertissement, and glory, and to the view prevalent in the Baroque that men are driven by passions rather than by reason, thoughts of virtue, or generosity; thus man without grace, or without culture, is an animal. Mandeville's view of man is not without affinities to that of Hobbes or that of the Spanish moralist Baltasar Gracián, who thought man is born a barbarian and can rise to true humanity only through culture. Society is possible only be-

cause men have been persuaded by clever lawgivers to give up real and immediate advantages for "imaginary" rewards such as honor, glory, the reputation for virtue, civic distinctions, and praise. The social world is thus a cloak hiding the beast beneath it, which explains the baroque's preoccupation with appearances, masks, and a psychology aimed at unveiling the true motives of men beneath the appearances of affability, civility, charm, and manners. Mandeville's poem and his copious notes to it, as later Rousseau's discourses and other writings, lifted the various masks invented by and for society.

Men had learned to live in society; but their nature had not changed. If for Pascal it was ennui that lay at the heart of man, for Mandeville it was pride. The state of society did not eliminate passions; and Mandeville's view of man was thus no different from that expressed by Candide as he and Martin sailed toward France:

"Do you think," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical and silly?" "Do you think," said Martin, "that sparrow-hawks have always eaten the pigeons they came across?" (290)

Mandeville's paradox lies in his demonstration that these vices ultimately add up to a general prosperity. Consider, for example, prodigality:

Was it not for prodigality, nothing could make us amends for the rapine and extortion of avarice in power. When a covetous statesman is gone, who spent his whole life in fattening himself with the spoils of the nation and had by pinching and plundering heaped up an immense treasure, it ought to fill every good member of the society with joy to behold the

uncommon profuseness of his son. This is refunding to the public what was robbed from it. (75)

This argument was later used by Diderot to explain the function of the mistresses of the financiers, and on a higher level it was also used, as we shall see, to justify luxury spending. It was certainly not a very moral point of view; Hogarth did not look on his Rake's Progress with the same eye as that of Mandeville. Nor was it to be the view of the later economists, either the Physiocrats or Adam Smith and his adherents. The important point is that Mandeville is here concerned with spending rather than production, and the vice of prodigality rather than the virtue of frugality, which he dismisses:

Frugality is like honesty, a mean starving virtue, that is only fit for small societies of good peaceable men, who are contented to be poor, so they may be easy but, in a large stirring nation, you may have soon enough of it. It is an idle dreaming virtue that employs no hands, and therefore very useless in a trading country, where there are vast numbers that one way or other must all be set to work. Prodigality has a thousand inventions to keep people from sitting still that frugality would never think of. (75–76)

Mandeville puzzled austere Christian moralists as well as those in the tradition of neo-Stoicism. He did not puzzle Voltaire, whose poem Le Mondain celebrates luxury and therefore civilization rather than the state of nature and the much-vaunted frugal and simple ways of the ancient Romans. Mandeville's paradoxes about the beneficial aspects of what were considered human vices point to the baroque solution for Pascal's restless man: the ennui and anxiety of the soul may be dispelled by prodigality as well as divertissement. Thus Pascal and Mandeville both point to two related developments of the eighteenth century: the appearance of economics and of aesthetics as autonomous areas of

inquiry. Pascal's true successor is the abbé Du Bos, whose aesthetic derives from the Pascalian notion of divertissement, while the successors and critics of Mandeville are the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. Du Bos's aesthetic of taste and pleasure is as baroque as Mandeville's apology for prodigality.

But with the Physiocrats and the new morality of the philosophes and encyclopedists, such as Rousseau and Diderot, a new aesthetic arose to challenge that of Mandeville and Du Bos, one implying a new economics as well. It spelled the end of the Baroque as an era in which the aesthetic and the economic were inextricably mixed—a time when gold was specie as well as plate, exchange value as well as beauty, but sometimes also mere false glitter.

The false glitter was perceived and exposed by another moralist. La Bruyère also pondered upon the confusion of the economic and the aesthetic as well as the relation of money to the nobility. In his classic Caractères , which first appeared in 1687, La Bruyère looked at court and town, the great and the rich, and saw mostly appearances belying what lay behind them. As one of his recent exegetists, Doris Kirsch, writes: "Instead of considering the privileges and refined exteriors of the courtesans as symbols of their 'gratuitous superiority,' La Bruyère ... sees in them a paid and paying superiority measured solely in terms of material advantage" (La Bruyère, ou le style cruel , 133). The finding is amply illustrated by current historical research on the wealth, status, privileges, and finances of the nobility of the ancien régime; La Bruyère indeed unmasks the society of his time. Kirsch goes on to an even more telling conclusion:

In the Caractères , the two fundamental aspects of court life are no longer conformity to tradition and pleasure, which had historically defined worldly morality; they are, rather, conditioning and consumption, the two characteristics which mark the advent of modern bourgeois society. From La Bruyère's perspective the luxury of the privileged class can no longer be defined

as liberty or an aesthetic pleasure, but has on the contrary become a constraint, an activity of consuming, and even a necessity of which the aristocracy was prisoner.

La Bruyère saw the same thing that Mandeville and others saw at the time, but his perspective was different: where Mandeville concentrated on the social effects of luxury, La Bruyère focused on moral truth and individual wisdom. The eighteenth century, one might venture, resolved the opposition between dissipation and morality, spending and frugality, sin and virtue, Mammon and God, by disentangling the economic from the aesthetic, thinking thereby to purify both through the moralization of spending and the naturalization of the aesthetic.

The difference between baroque spending and the new attitude to prodigality, a stance implying a new economics as well as a new aesthetics, can be exemplified with reference to gardens. These, like metaphysical systems, may be taken as paradigms of society's ideological assumptions. The formal gardens of Le Nôtre are pure art and pure expense, having only a metaphysical relation to nature. The formal garden—with its clipped hedges and shaped trees, its expanse, its multishaped, geometric parterres, basins, fountains, pools, and water mirrors, its allées , circles, and statues, and its picnics and festivals or fireworks, with music and dancing and the appearance of king and court—presupposes a metaphysical distinction between a crude, given, empirical nature, and a purer, superior, intellectual, systematized, generalized nature. Such gardens might indeed be spoken of in connection with Descartes's universe, though they were being designed even as he was building up that universe. Such gardens are the gardens of the king, of princes and great lords, and they are the result of immense expense. Prodigality and all its effects are plain to

see here, for not only architects, sculptors, and mechanics but also armies of workers and gardeners were kept busy.

We can borrow from contemporary financial jargon the notion of cash flow to distinguish between baroque and nonbaroque spending. In fact, amusingly enough, waterworks were among the most expensive features of the formal gardens: cash flow in the baroque, when not used for war, was water flow. At Versailles, where there was no water to begin with, the consumption costs of water and maintenance of the waterworks were immense, even though the fountains were not kept on continually but were reserved for special occasions. In 1678, some 821,000 livres were allotted for the parks and gardens. The following year the costs had risen to 965,000 livres, and by 1680 to 1,627,000 livres. Four years later work on an aqueduct to bring more water to the gardens and ponds cost an additional 1,143,000 livres, while hundreds of thousands were spent on an elaborate machine erected at Marly to pump water uphill from the Seine to the king's ever-thirsty gardens. The water was for spectacle.

But there were other expenses once the initial reconfiguration of the site was concluded. It cost 200,000 livres in 1668–69 just to dig the first basin for the grand canal complex with its flotilla of nine pleasure boats. In 1671,696,000 livres were allotted to extend and broaden the grand canal, with an additional 264,000 required in 1672. Further, once the gardens were constructed they had to be planted, and at the Grand Trianon the parterres required, according to Le Nôtre's calculations, two million flowerpots. The parterres, like the waters, had to please the eye, and so pots with wilting or dried-out flowers were changed daily. It is significant that by the reign of Louis XV this expense could no longer be borne; one could look back nostalgically to a time when one could afford nine hundred thousand pots at Trianon and a daily change of wilting flowers.

By contrast the landscape gardens of the type "improved" by Capability Brown implied not only a different aesthetic, based on a different metaphysics of nature, but

also a new economics. Not that they were inexpensive; rather, they looked inexpensive because they looked as if they were nature, and nature was bountiful. In the baroque scheme of things, bullion might be converted into flowing water, cascades, spouts, water mirrors, and water theater. In the Enlightenment scheme, bullion was thought better applied to agricultural improvement, trade, and manufacturing. Beauty was perceived less in what artists had called the "general nature," or the "ideal nature," the model of the classical landscape painters, than in the given, empirical, experienced nature, a piece of land which might be improved so as to yield not only a truer beauty but also an increased net product. When Arthur Young traveled through France, he not only commented on the state of agriculture but also experienced a new form of aesthetic pleasure associated with a flourishing agriculture and the beauty of tilled fields, rich orchards, the regularity of well-tended vineyards, well-kept farms, and well-cut hedges—in short, the prosperity of the land. By then the old aesthetic built on the notion of ideal nature, or art, taste, and luxury, had been relegated to the sphere of critical inquiry. The beautiful had changed, and so had economics. This does not preclude the writing of a history of art or aesthetics separate from that of economics. But such separate histories could only arise once luxury had been separated from art on the conceptual level.

Art or Luxury?

When one writes about the arts today one does so, willy-nilly, under the often unstated influence of Kant and the nineteenth-century notion of Art with a capital A. Art is art and luxury is luxury. Any art dealer will tell you that art is beyond price—which of course is why flowers by Van Gogh may go for millions on the auction block. And because of museums, art is part of culture, and in museums

what was once considered luxury turns into art. Art is thus connected with the aesthetic, while luxury is connected with money.

But before Kant and before the museums, the line between luxury and art was far from clear, and neither was clearly differentiated from the manner of life permitted by baroque spending and prompted by pride and ennui. Mandeville reminds us that what we call a style is also a way of life:

The worldly-minded, voluptuous, and ambitious man, notwithstanding he is void of merit, covets precedence everywhere and desires to be dignified above his betters. He aims at spacious palaces and delicious gardens; his chief delight is in excelling others in stately horses, magnificent coaches, a numerous attendance, the dear-bought furniture. To gratify his lust, he wishes for genteel, young, beautiful women of different charms and complexions that shall adore his greatness, and be really in love with his person. His cellars he would have stored with the flower of every country that produces excellent wines; his table he desires may be served with many courses, and each of them contain a choice variety of dainties not easily purchased, and ample evidences of elaborate and judicious cookery; while harmonious music and well-couched flattery entertain his hearing by turns.... He desires to have several sets of witty, facetious, and polite people to converse with, and among them he would have some famous for learning and universal knowledge. (104)

What is being described here, in all the richness of its multiple pleasures, is the noble life. The very use of the word noble bestows upon this lifestyle an aura which makes one forget that it rests on mere money and not necessarily on merit. La Bruyère and Mandeville are at one in this baroque turn of mind and in their observation of their contemporaries, just as both saw a tendency at work,

already in their own time, to sublimate mere riches. For, continues Mandeville, this same rich man living this noble life would have the world believe that his life is a burden he must bear, and that what really matters are the higher things of life and the public good. Conventional wisdom has it that spiritual values are superior to dependence on material goods, and that self-reliance, self-denial, and a contented and serene mind are the true virtues of this world. But Mandeville could not quite believe, any more than Pascal or La Bruyère, that the world acted according to this conventional wisdom. They believed the evidence of their eyes: "How can I believe that a man's chief delight is in the embellishment of the mind when I see him ever employed about and daily pursue the pleasures that are contrary to them?" (107). Mandeville thus points not only to man's pride and pretensions, but to the prevalence of Pascalian divertissement. The noble life is the love of luxury and pleasure, not the sign of some superior quality or merit.

This skeptical attitude renders impossible an aesthetic which would sublimate luxury into art, spiritualize riches, and elevate the noble life to an object of admiration. La Bruyère's attitude toward collectors, connoisseurs, and the curieux is as negative as his view of the great, the courtesans, and the rich. Men of taste, antiquarians, are not men of particularly noble passions, and are more likely to be followers of fashion than lovers of true beauty or true quality.

Neither La Bruyère nor Mandeville thus singles out the "virtuoso" for praise, as would Shaftesbury in his Characteristics . If La Bruyère's style can be called one of cruelty, then Shaftesbury's is that of noble generosity. It is through him that the man of taste would eventually be seen as something more than a mere seeker after divertissement and connoisseur of luxuries and pleasures. For Shaftesbury represents precisely the type alluded to by Mandeville: a believer in the superiority of spiritual goods over material and

worldly goods and pleasures. But that belief could not be justified without separating luxury from art and rigorously distinguishing the economic from the aesthetic.

When the abbé Du Bos looked about him while writing his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture , which was published in 1719, five years after Mandeville's Bees , he saw much the same thing as had Mandeville. But he took the argument further, and laid the foundations for a distinction between luxury and art. With the ancient Greeks in mind he wrote: "The works of the great masters were not looked upon, in the times of which I speak, as ordinary furniture destined to embellish the apartment of some private individual. They were reputed the jewels of a State and a public treasure, the enjoyment of which was owed to all citizens" (176). The distinction would not be lost on the philosophes. For Du Bos's contemporaries, however, the line between art and luxury remained blurred—though this did not prevent the development of a sophisticated poetics, a therapeutic view of the function of comedy and tragedy, a theory of the passions in the arts, and the insight that over the course of history the arts have risen and fallen in conjunction with the general prosperity of a society. Du Bos's remark, however, does point to the preponderance of luxury in his own time as contrasted with other historical eras, and more precisely with the four great moments of western civilization—the Age of Pericles, of Augustus, of Leo X, and of Louis XIV. From this historical perspective, the great moments of art in the past stood in contrast to the all-too-obvious reign of money and luxury in 1719. Historical perspective created an aesthetic illusion in a present which seemed all divertissement and luxury.

If today we do not see things quite the way Du Bos did, it is in part because of Kant, as stated above, but also because the furniture Du Bos alluded to is now to be seen in mu-

seums, and what is in museums is ipso facto "art." But consider a masterpiece contemporary with the publishing of the Réflexions critiques: Gersaint's Sign , by Watteau. It is, for us, a prized masterwork reproduced in books of art history. In its time it was commissioned as a sign for a picture dealer. One did not commission "art," one commissioned specific types of pictures for specific purposes and designated spaces. Watteau, being Watteau, outdid himself in the case of Gersaint's commission, and painted a sign which could hardly be hung outside the dealer's shop. But in doing so he gives us a most telling view of the status of "art" in the early eighteenth century. Watteau's painting depicts a view into a luxury shop. The pictures within the picture, seen hanging on the wall, are not in the grand manner but in the petite manière, or goût moderne , and appear in elaborate and highly decorative frames ready to be sold as luxury items to decorate some private person's apartment—precisely as Du Bos said. The grand manner, art associated with magnificence, with the court or the church, is also represented, by a picture of Louis XIV; it is being packed off, as a lady looks on and her escort beckons her not to linger over the old king. For the escort, as for the viewer of the picture, the center of attention is the group of amateurs or curieux looking at a landscape in an oval frame, while another group is examining a mirror, a small picture, or some jewelry at a counter. We are looking at an art market inseparable from the luxury trade. The marchands-merciers of the rue Honoré who catered to court and town sold not only pictures and delicate furniture, but also jewelry, miniatures, watches, and bibelots.

To us this is the Rococo, and we tend to consider this period in terms of style and the givens of art history and aesthetics. But in its own time, as indicated by the testimony of Du Bos, Mandeville, and Shaftesbury, the age was one of luxury, and from the point of view of economic history it partook of the luxury capitalism described by Werner Sombart or the way of life of the privileged con-

suming class discussed by Herbert Lüthy. And, historical distinctions between Rococo and Baroque notwithstanding, it also partook of baroque spending. Stylistically and historically one may associate baroque art with the Church, the palace, and the court, with the propagation of the faith and the magnificence of monarchical power. In this case Rococo may be considered as baroque in the private sector, the Baroque of the town and the hôtel particulier and even the petite maison , of the feminine and the rich. And the latter meant, at that time, the financier class.

The Rococo is thus the feminine moment of the Baroque. After the baroque hero and his high worth, after the moment of spirituality and martyrdom with its spiritualized sensuality (witness Bernini), the Rococo represented a more mundane moment in which at times the flesh seemed to triumph over the spirit. It was not for nothing that Stendhal thought the eighteenth century the age of goût . As the age of metaphysics yielded gradually to that of sensationalism in philosophy, so in the private sphere the sensual, the pretty, the light-colored, the gilt overcame the more somber, sublime, noble, and spiritual images of the Baroque.

Had the designation style Pompadour caught on outside France as well as it did within it, a great deal of confusion as to how to define and distinguish the Rococo from the Baroque might have been avoided. The Marquise de Pompadour is emblematic of the "Rococo moment," as Winckelmann is of the later eighteenth century, and she certainly deserves as much attention from cultural historians and aestheticians as does Winckelmann, even if she did not write treatises on beauty or the imitation of ancient art. For the two not only represent the contrast and the essential difference between two styles of art, but also two essentially different attitudes toward the arts and spending in the arts. They epitomize the difference between art for life and life for art. But it is also the difference between the stance of the patron of the arts and the purely aesthetic attitude of the collector and scholar.

Madame de Pompadour was a woman of taste, excellent manners, and education (of the kind then given to women who were destined for the higher circles of society). She was trained from her youth on to play a role at court, and as such was a woman of action. Winckelmann was a scholar, a librarian, a cicerone, a convert to Catholicism, and an enthusiast of ancient art. He was an aesthete avant la lettre whose imagination turned to the beauty of the past with a corresponding disdain for the works of the present, indeed dismissing most of baroque art as a deviation from the true taste and beauty defined by the Greeks.

Madame de Pompadour was no aesthete but a woman of the world, for whom the arts were a means to perfecting the noble style of life in the present. In this sense she was not a romantic, whereas Winckelmann's love of ancient Greece was already a romantic sentiment, a nostalgia heralding the poetry of Hölderlin or Keats. The Winckelmannian ideal and his vision and projection of ancient Greece may thus have been a creative force for romanticism, but as regards the visual arts they were productive rather of antiquomania, antiquarian studies, and ultimately the academic doctrine of the classical ideal as the supreme and only valid standard of taste in the production of painting and sculpture. This was not the self-imposed discipline of true classicism such as obtained in the Renaissance and the Baroque, the creation of order in the face of tendencies toward disorder, disintegration, exaggeration, multiplicity, and unbounded imagination, but rather a neo classicism requiring that certain works be imitated and imposing doctrinal standards from outside. The truly revolutionary style of the eighteenth century was not neoclassicism but the modern manner, the petite manière , adapted to the requirements of the present and founded on the imagination of artists rather than on doctrines grounded in scholarship and on some supposedly lost ideal of beauty.

The contrast between the two styles and tastes is also illuminating in economic terms. The taste for the antique

did call forth new works in the manner of the antique, but within the market of art, as against direct commissions connected to the construction of a new town house or château; it also made for the success of charlatans, middlemen, and dealers and collectors. Indeed, the ancient works were themselves turned into luxury commodities. Winckelmann and others might have written treatises on ancient art as works which in their time were not luxury, but this did not prevent the items themselves, dug up in the eighteenth century and written about and illustrated, from being turned into marketable items—in short, luxuries from the past. As Quatremère de Quincy would point out after the Revolution, the signs of the past had been turned into collectibles.

At least Madame de Pompadour and those who followed her example and surrounded themselves with the comforts and pleasures of the modern manner never had any pretensions of raising their luxuries to the level of an aesthetic or of philosophical discussion. Her taste had no theoretical underpinnings or justification. It was a discernment, a choice, made within the parameters of the arts of her time—a conception of art which was soon to be denied in the name of an ideal beauty of the past by those who knew that past but partially. One can see here the conflict of two opposed eighteenth-century elites: one for whom art is luxury and pleasure in the present; another for whom art is "aesthetic" and distinct from luxury, an art partaking of the essence of a beauty thought of in terms of eternity and universality—luxury opposed to High Art.

Though the background of the Marquise de Pompadour was bourgeois, her education was not. She was destined for higher things. She would never be the compliant bourgeoise, content to remain in her apartment and social station; she could never be a Madame Jourdain, who found it ridiculous of her husband to take on the manners of a gentleman. Through her mother, the mistress of the financier Lenormand de Tournehem, the future marquise

was allied to the financial class, a class which was indispensable to court and king and which did not live bourgeoisement but noblement —for the boundaries between the sword, the robe , and finance were rather fluid, with finance taking on more and more luster over the course of the century. With her triumph at court the financial class also triumphed, and once she had risen to the rank of marquise and was recognized as the titled mistress of the king, she spent in a manner to be expected of those in high places. She may have kept excellent accounts, like a good bourgeoise, but like the nobility of the court she overspent. And like a baroque prince she loved buildings and building, and what she did not build she transformed and redecorated. Thus patronage of the arts, in her case, meant not so much collecting works of art as building and decorating, and this meant that the arts—what we call the arts—flourished hand in hand with luxury spending.

She first bought the now all-but-vanished Château de CrécyCouvé, south of Dreux. The château and adjacent land cost 790,000 livres. But the structure was in need of repair, and for the work required she turned to her favorite architect, Lassurance. Masonry, carpentry, and roofing cost an additional 100,000 livres; the interior decoration, the work of the sculptors J. Rousseau, Verberckt, and Pigalle, amounted to a total of 2,500,000 livres. Maintenance costs were high, too, since considerable personnel were required: one concierge, one chaplain, eight gamekeepers, one doorman, four maids, one valet and decorator, two waiters, one scrubber, two boys to help in the garden. Total wages for all these came to 10,460 livres per year. The marquise had to give up CrécyCouvé in 1757.

Needless to say there were other châteaux, petites maisons in which to relax away from court, and two splendid hôtels—one in Versailles, the Hôtel des Réservoirs, and one in Paris, the Hôtel d'Evreux, now the Elysée. Bellevue was her preferred château, situated at Meudon overlooking the Paris plain and built by Lassurance according to plans by

Gabriel. Eight hundred men worked on it, and she made use of the best talent of the day for the garden sculpture and the interior décor: Pigalle, Oudry, Caffieri, Verberckt, Coustou, Boucher, Van Loo. The château included a theater in the chinoiserie style. It marked the high point of her career and cost her 2,576,000, perhaps more. But here again she was forced to sell, to Louis XV in 1757 for a mere 325,000 livres, because she needed the money to pay off her debts.

She had always overspent, for the pensions she received from the king and through her positions at court were not that high. From 1746 through 1764 she received 977,207 livres, but spent 1,767,687; the difference she made up by gambling and selling off some of her jewelry. All this did not prevent her from distributing a great deal of money to diverse charities, or from promoting and helping to finance the establishment and building of the Ecole Militaire. These charitable expenses were also part of the obligations of baroque spending, and the great did not fail to include the poor in their wills.

The Marquise de Pompadour's prodigality was only the most highly placed example of a type of spending which was imitated by the lesser mistresses of men occupying lesser ranks in society. The most conspicuous spenders were the farmers-general, or tax collectors under the ancien régime, and those occupying lesser posts in that vast and complex bureaucracy which raised revenues for the king's treasury, the army, the navy, and the apparatus of the state. The police reports are eloquent testimony to the spending lavished by this class on their mistresses and pleasures. Bertin de Blagny compromised his fortune by keeping too many mistresses. He spent 18,000 livres on jewelry and 20,000 on dresses for La Testelingue, with two other mistresses to maintain at the same time. He subsequently gave up La Testelingue for an infantry officer's wife, who only cost him 3,000 in furniture. But between 1760 and 1766 the police noted a total of eight more mistresses. Brissart spent perhaps 500,000 on the actress Deschamps; Mile La Guerre

ruined the Duc de Bouillon, after due warning, and also the tax farmer Haudry de Soucy.

The connection between money, luxury, art, and women need hardly be stressed. It was an integral part of the Rococo, pervading taste, manner, style, and divertissement. It was also inseparable from that ennui Pascal had discerned in the human soul. The connection between ennui and the need for divertissement had been noted by Du Bos; the connection between ennui and the life and luxury of the rich was also noted by the sensualist philosophe Helvétius. The search for divertissement, pleasure, and luxury came down in the end to a flight from ennui.

Luxury as Disease

If for Pascal man's fundamental ennui was linked to original sin, for the materialist philosophe Helvétius, author of De l'esprit (1758) and the posthumously published De l'homme (1772), ennui was a disease of the soul due to an insufficiency of lively sensations. In this analysis Helvétius followed the abbé Du Bos; however, unlike Du Bos and Pascal, he did not think of ennui as a universal condition, but primarily as an affliction of the idle rich. The entire life of the rich and the great, the men and women living in luxury such as Mandeville had described, was thus organized, at least in France, to escape ennui:

In France ... a thousand duties of social behavior unknown among other nations have been engendered by boredom. A woman gets married; she gives birth to a child. One of the men of leisure hears of it; he takes it upon himself to make so many calls; goes to her door every day, talks to the doorman; climbs back into his carriage and goes off to be bored somewhere else.

What is more, this same man of leisure condemns himself each day to so many calling cards, so many

letters of felicitation written in disgust and read the same way.

The man of leisure would like to experience strong sensations at every instant. These alone can tear him from his ennui. Failing these strong sensations, he takes hold of those within reach. I am alone; I light a fire. The fire keeps me company. (De l'homme , 4:145)

Helvétius's books were generally condemned, and De l'homme was singled out by Diderot for a philosophical refutation. Helvétius's materialism may be rather simple, but as a social commentator he is not without authority. He had been a farmer-general and so had experience of what he was writing about. He knew high society, he knew the world of the financiers, and he was also acquainted with that other focus of the search for sensual gratification, the best brothels of the city. All this imparts added weight to his observations on ennui in his society.

For Helvétius, ennui and the various remedies proposed for it varied according to nations and their constitutions. In Portugal, for example, where the rich and the great had no voice in the affairs of the state and where the Church, or superstition, did not allow them to think, love and jealousy were the sole remedies for ennui. Other societies could have recourse to the reading of novels, amusements of all sorts, the pursuit and seduction of women, or the chase. In some instances, even religious practices might be explained in terms of ennui: the devout life, regular attendance at mass, devotions of all sorts, and frequent communion and confession were all ways of combating boredom. And of course there were the arts d'agrément , the "agreeable" or fine arts. Following Du Bos, Helvétius constructs an aesthetic of pleasure based on sensationalism: "The object of art ... is to please and consequently to excite sensations in us which, without being painful, are yet lively and strong. When a work produces such effects it is applauded" (4:157). Beauty is what strikes us sufficiently to enliven our soul and please

us. The sublime makes for stronger effects since it may evoke terror and fear, but even that is better than being bored. But too much beauty, like too much pleasure, soon produces disgust, satiety, and renewed boredom, whence the constant need for variety in one's diversions and pleasures. Depending on the nature of the pleasure sought or given, one may set up a hierarchy of the arts as a hierarchy of genres corresponding more or less to a hierarchy of taste and culture, with burlesque reserved for those of low taste, and tragedy, comedy, or epic for the higher and nobler strata, who can be stimulated to thought as well as feeling. In fact, the classical aesthetic which had ruled the arts since the ancients and which reasserted itself during the Renaissance and the Baroque is not incompatible with the sensationalism of Helvétius or with the social and cultural interpretation of the hierarchy of genres. The arts were to be judged not by the rules of the pedants but by sentiment, which could be explained by sensationalism, while the hierarchy of genres was justified by the social hierarchy. One might read the history of the arts in terms of the development of society, as did Batteux, Montesquieu, and Du Bos; one might also think of the arts in terms of a therapeutic for ennui, as did Pascal, Du Bos, and Helvétius.

Yet, reading Helvétius, one may also infer that he considered the therapeutic to have failed, since the idle rich, enjoying wine, women, and all the pleasures of the arts, were still subject to ennui: "It is in vain that the rich man assembles the pleasurable arts about him: these arts cannot endlessly produce new impressions for him, nor distract him for long from his ennui" (4:187). This failure of the aesthetic of pleasure and divertissement was signaled at about the same time by Voltaire, in the person of the rich and grand Venetian senator Pococurante, whom Martin and Candide call upon as they pass through Venice. Candide thinks him a man of immense superiority because he is so difficult to please amidst his splendor. Martin explains that Pococurante is simply dis-gusted: he has lost all taste for

those very things which have been destined to please him. Indeed, Helvétius found it very difficult to amuse the idle rich:

Nothing is more difficult than to amuse the leisured. They are easily disgusted. And it is this universal disgust [in the sense of loss of taste] which renders leisure such a severe judge of the beauties of the arts and requires such perfection. Were this passive leisure more sensitive and less bored it would be less difficult [to please].... It is in vain that dancing, painting, in short the most voluptuous of the arts, and more specifically arts devoted to love, recall frenzy and rapture; for what effect will they have on those exchausted by enjoyment and blasé about love? If the rich man runs to balls and spectacles, it is only to change his ennui and thereby soften his malaise. (4:188–89)

Happiness thus does not come from the passivity of the soul, but from activity, not from luxuries possessed, but from the acquisition of objects desired, not from twenty million in the bank, but from the activity of acquiring that twenty million. For then the soul is active, or, as the Baroque put it, in motion—occupied, fixed upon an object not possessed but desired, and thus ignorant of ennui.

From ennui considered as a disease of the individual soul to ennui as a social disease was but a single step, and luxury was seen as the symptom of the disease, or corruption, of society. And the counterpart of seeing luxury as a disease of society was of course to posit nature as health. Thus luxury, which in the minds of Mandeville, Pascal, and many of the moralists of the Baroque had been an effect of human nature, pride, sin, barbarism, greed—in brief, all human vices—became, in the new, non-Christian, even nonskeptical critique, an aberration from the natural. This rethinking of the natural implied a general critique of ap-

pearances—that is, a full-blown critique of baroque society encompassing both economics and the arts. This great change in French thought began about 1750, and its most eloquent spokesman, the most devastating and thorough critic of baroque society in its advanced state of luxury and hence corruption, was the citizen of Geneva, the capital of Protestantism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His eloquence was such as to raise the problem to a universal plane. The question of luxury ceased to be a debate between moralists and the nouveaux riches, or between clerics and the rich, or a debate on trade versus landed wealth. Rather, it turned into a debate between nature and society, and thus became a critique of the constituted society and regime. The question involved not only philosophers and philosophes, moralists of the old persuasion, literary critics, the new art critics, and even musical critics, but a totally new type of thinker belonging to a new sect: the economists. It is no coincidence that many of the events and phenomena which will figure in the coming pages—the critique of opera, the famous battle of the buffoons involving an attack on French lyrical drama, or court opera, the rise of art criticism and the critique of court painting, Rousseau's discourses on the arts and the origins of property, the publication of the first volumes of the Encyclopédie and the first books of economics, the first critique of baroque architecture by the abbé Laugier, and the publication of Montesquieu's Esprit des lois —occur between 1748 and 1755. Those years mark the beginning of the end of the baroque world—an end initiated by a critique of its art forms, its ruling class, and its outward manifestation, luxury.

There are striking commonalities between Mandeville's presentation of the workings of human vices in society and Rousseau's account of how society was founded on and corrupted by the institution of private property in a remote time when men were still near-beasts. The points of view differ, to be sure, and the points of departure as well: pride for Mandeville, property for Rousseau. Where Mandeville is all irony or paradox, Rousseau is profoundly serious. But

their accounts of society in the eighteenth century coincide remarkably well. Both deal with appearances, both lift the mask of baroque society, both take in the phenomenon of luxury. And this society, as Rousseau saw and experienced intimately, was one in which "being and appearance have become two entirely different things" (First Discourse ).

This idea had been a commonplace of baroque theater, but with Rousseau the tone was different. The distinction between being and appearance was no longer viewed as an attribute of man after the Fall, or as an object of comedy, or as part of the study of statecraft. It was perceived, rather, as an effect of luxury, and thus as an aspect of politics and society in general and of mid-eighteenth-century France in particular. Madame de Graffigny, in her highly successful novel of 1747, the Lettres d'une Péruvienne , noted that "the unhappiness of the nobility is born of the difficulties they find in reconciling their apparent magnificence with their real misery." But this unhappy state, in turn, was itself the result of a broader national trait: "The dominant vanity of the French is to appear opulent. Genius, the arts, perhaps even the sciences, are all related to this magnificence; everything works to the ruination of fortunes." Several decades later the Baron d'Holbach, in his Politique naturelle of 1773, saw luxury as having become the central passion of the whole society:

Luxury is the situation of a society in which riches have become the principal passion. As soon as money has become the exclusive object of the greatest number of society, there can be no more powerful motive than the desire to acquire it. There is no enthusiasm but that of opulence; there is no other emulation but to procure by the swiftest of routes those signs which are admitted by all to represent power, pleasures, and felicity. (130)

From this preoccupation with money and the signs of a rich and happy life follow all the effects in society described by Madame de Graffigny, Rousseau, Helvétius, and others

both before and after them in France, England, and Scotland. Unlike Mandeville, d'Holbach did not conclude that private vices in the end worked out to the advantage of society as a whole, for he saw the society itself as "infected" by that private propensity toward luxury. The critique of luxury was thus also a critique of Mandeville's paradox. Private vices may well prompt the production of luxury commodities; but to what purpose, since the rich remain bored? Indeed, perhaps it is the boredom itself which prompts art and industry to invent ever-new forms of diversion and new sensations to extricate the rich from their lethargy. Here Pascal and Mandeville agree in their critique of luxury. The ennui of the rich leads to a renewed search for and multiplication of possible pleasures; for only novelty, rarity, and the bizarre can rouse the rich from their jaded torpor. But this very intensification turns everything into a fiction. The diseased minds of the rich seek truly imaginary remedies: in Pascalian terms, divertissement cannot penetrate to the heart of the matter, the worm in the apple, the ennui in the soul.

It stands to reason, then, that the individual striving for luxury, power, pleasure, and the signs thereof does not add up to public felicity. Instead the society catches the individual's disease. The desire to possess and to display wealth reaches epidemic proportions. And yet, because of this very display, this very visibility of wealth, no one is satisfied with what he or she possesses. All become envious of one another, and no one can be happy because everyone wants to appear to be happy. There is no escape from the appearances which were the original cause of unhappiness, the unnatural, the original lie. And so everything is sacrificed to appearances; for the necessity of amusing oneself and appearing happy takes precedence over everything else. The fable of the bees has turned into the rat race.

Adam Smith had been preoccupied with the same phenomenon of the power of appearances in his Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759, which can be taken as a devastating critique of appearances and an attempt to respond to

Mandeville. As a critique of appearances, it is as good an example of a critique of the Baroque as can be found. Like Rousseau and other moralists, Smith perceived the importance of appearances and the fact that men were governed by them. As much as Rousseau, he stresses the effects of the gaze of others. For Smith, to be seen is to exist; hence the pursuit of wealth:

The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all those agreeable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him. At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him. The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. (51)

Now why is the poor man ashamed? In the Christian scheme of things, after all, the poor are the salt of the earth and so have nothing to be ashamed of. But Smith's analysis has nothing to do with Christianity. He too is looking for natural causes and explanations for human behavior. The poor are ashamed because poverty places the poor man, as Smith so tellingly puts it, "out of sight of mankind." To be poor is to be unseen, and therefore, in the baroque scheme of things, not to exist: "To feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature." To be seen is to be happy. This psychology of appearance , or visibility, was also the very essence of court life; it was important to be seen at court, to be noticed by the king. As Louis XV put it one day, noticing the absence of one of his courtiers: So-and-so must be sulking, since I do not see him. Thus the power of appearances, and the dependence upon the gaze of

others that Rousseau remarked. "The man of rank and distinction ... is observed by all the world. Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, at least by sympathy, that joy and exultation with which his circumstances naturally inspire him" (51).

The life of the great and the rich thus presents images of human felicity. And men, all too inclined to take appearances for realities, are dazzled and corrupted by the exterior signs of wealth, pleasure, and happiness that are the attributes of the great of this world:

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain distinction of rank and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages. (61–62)

In brief, men are governed through the power of imagination.

For, looked upon closely, it can readily be seen that the rich and the great govern by virtue of the flimsiest of accomplishments and talents: a certain air, a certain deportment, elegance, grace, "frivolous accomplishments," and of course rank. And Smith produces, as the supreme example of this talent for ruling by appearances, none other than Louis XIV. He ruled because he was an accomplished courtier in every respect: manner, air, walk, gracefulness, a noble and impressive bearing. "Compared with these, in his own times, and in his own presence, no other virtue, it seems, appeared to have any merit. Knowledge, industry, valour, and beneficence, trembled, were abashed and lost all

dignity before them" (54). Smith makes short shrift of the accomplishments of the man of rank: "To figure at a ball is his great triumph, and to succeed in an intrigue of gallantry, his highest exploit" (55). Ultimately, in fact, these men of rank and wealth run a grave danger through their very advantages: "To those who have been accustomed to the possession, or even the hope of public admiration, all other pleasures sicken and decay" (57). In effect, they are the prisoners of luxury and of the gaze of others.

With this critique of appearances, d'Holbach, Rousseau, and Adam Smith all point to the persistence of baroque culture and a baroque mentality. In the baroque the mask was various, and played various roles: it might hide the fear of death, it might serve as a means of advancement in the world, it was a necessity at court, it might even be the mask of hypocrisy and false piety. But if we are to believe d'Holbach and Smith, in the eighteenth century the mask was that of felicity and happiness. The douceur de vivre which Talleyrand claimed to have existed before 1789 thus turns out to be a fiction, an illusion made possible by 1789 and its concomitant change in morality and society. The philosophes and the economists penetrated the mask and saw not douceur de vivre but a society sick with luxury, in which the therapeutic of divertissement had failed to dissipate the ennui in the human soul.

Luxury was also inextricably linked to the monarchical regime; as Montesquieu explains in the Esprit des lois , it is the spring or motive of monarchy. The striving after luxury is a drive for distinction. In this sense Montesquieu accepted luxury while the moralists opposed it; but he was not unaware of its drawbacks. Anticipating the later moralists and philosophes, including Adam Smith and Rousseau, he too realized that this drive for distinction, of which luxury was the outward sign, would fail to satisfy the individual.

Montesquieu's reasons for this differ somewhat from those proposed by d'Holbach and by Pascal. But they are consistent with a phenomenon described and attributed to baroque culture by the Spanish historian José Antonio Maravail, who, in his Culture of the Baroque , points to the growth of cities and its effect upon the individual psyche. The great capitals of the Baroque could thus, according to Maravall, become places in which individuals might already experience a "modern" feeling of alienation and insignificance. This phenomenon is also clearly linked to the aforementioned baroque desire and compulsion to be seen. This might seem a paradox, since cities are places of crowds and easy visibility; but in fact it is not. For as Montesquieu explains:

In proportion to the populousness of towns, the inhabitants are filled with notions of vanity and actuated by an ambition of distinguishing themselves by trifles. If they are very numerous, and most of them strangers to one another, their vanity redoubles, because there are greater hopes of success. As luxury inspires hopes, each man assumes the mark of a superior condition. But by endeavoring thus at distinction, every one becomes equal, and distinction ceases; as all are desirous of respect, nobody is regarded. (Bk. 7, ch. 1)

In contemporary language, when everyone is potentially visible by means of consumer signs of distinction available to all, no one really stands out. Montesquieu is anticipating not only d'Holbach, for whom no one could be happy because everyone had to appear happy, but also de Tocqueville's views on democracy. Not only is divertissement a failure; luxury is equally ineffective as a means to distinction.

Yet luxury was, despite its disadvantages on the individual moral level, a necessity for the monarchical state. The monarchy stabilized luxury and put it to political use. It was necessarily linked to the social hierarchy and to

unequal distribution of wealth, as Montesquieu makes clear:

As riches, by the very constitution of monarchies, are unequally divided, there is an absolute necessity for luxury. Were the rich not to be lavish, the poor would starve. It is even necessary here, that the expenses of the opulent should be in proportion to the inequality of fortunes, and that luxury, as we have already observed, should increase in this proportion. The augmentation of private wealth is owing to its having deprived one part of the citizens of their necessary support; this must therefore be restored to them. (Bk. 7, ch. 4)

This amounts to accepting Mandeville's view of spending with no moral strictures attached, either directly or by indirect irony. Montesquieu expects the rich and the great to be profligate. From a Christian point of view this may indeed be profligacy; from a political point of view it is a necessity of monarchy. Montesquieu's views are based on an economy in which wealth is seen as a constant: what one part of society possesses, another does not. There is no question of increasing any hypothetical pie in order to increase the portions. This economic justification for luxury spending in the eighteenth century was that generally held by thinkers and others who were rather well-to-do, and while the reality was quite amoral, luxury spending nonetheless made for a moral duty: the rich had to spend so as to create work and services to be filled by the poor.

There was yet another way of looking at this unequal distribution of wealth, which was excellently put by the Chevalier des Grieux in Manon Lescaut , Prevost's wellknown novel about an amour-passion that also depicts early eighteenth-century society and the relation of money to women and pleasure. The Chevalier, finding that his fortune of several thousand francs has vanished from their rented love-nest in Chaillot, knows that Manon, were she

to learn of this loss, would probably be unfaithful and even leave him, since she loved pleasure and abundance too much to make sacrifices for him. The Chevalier must ponder how to rebuild his fortune—and since work is out of the question, a quick investment equally so, and borrowing is a dubious course, there remains fleecing the rich. The Chevalier's justification for this is a succinct account of what might be called Mandevillian economics:

Most of the great and the rich are fools, which is clear to anyone who knows the world. There is an admirable justice in this; for if they had wit as well as wealth, they would be too lucky, and the rest of mankind too miserable. The qualities of body and soul are accorded these latter as a means whereby to extricate themselves from misery and poverty. Some partake of the riches of the great by ministering to their pleasures: they dupe them. Others prefer to instruct them: they try to make gentlemen of them. Only rarely, in truth, do they succeed, but that is not the purpose of divine wisdom; they always reap some fruit from their efforts, which is to live at the expense of those they would educate; and, no matter what one thinks of it, at bottom the stupidity of the rich and the great is an excellent source of revenue for the small of this world. (53–54)

Many a rogue has lived by this creed—Gil Blas, Lazarillo de Tormes, Barry Lyndon, and how many others? Diderot, in Le Neveu de Rameau , also supposed that the mistresses of financiers, in fleecing their lovers, were actually restituting a part of their misbegotten wealth by putting it back into circulation. At the same time Diderot looked at this world of parasites, confidence men, and entertainers of the rich with moral disdain, and with no attempt to justify luxury as Montesquieu did. Reading Manon Lescaut in 1734, Montesquieu thought des Grieux a rascal and Manon a strumpet. If the novel was a popular success, it was because their love

was, despite their character, considered a noble passion. Yet the difference in attitude on the part of des Grieux, on the one hand, and Montesquieu and Diderot, on the other, vis-à-vis luxury and spending may well be emblematic of a signal difference between the Baroque and the Enlightenment.

Montesquieu's system supposes that one must spend according to one's rank. This is purely political and applies to the monarchical state: "Hence it is that for the preservation of a monarchical state, luxury ought continually to increase, and to grow more extensive, as it rises from the laborer to the artificer, to the merchant, to the magistrate, to the nobility, to the great officers of state, up to the very prince; otherwise the nation will be undone" (Bk. 7, ch. 4). Instead of a graduated income tax such as exists in modern progressive states, we are presented with a graduated standard of spending. Luxury, within the monarchical state, acts as a safety valve for the nobility and a means of distributing work to the other ranks of society. The nobility, stripped of real power ever since the ministries of Richelieu and Mazarin and burdened by the high cost of attendance at court since Louis XIV, could still set itself apart from the common people and make distinctions based on rank, a more or less ancient name, and a visible standard of spending. But after the firm establishment of a centralized bureaucratic state, the nobility, effectively "domesticated" into service to the king, had only one freedom left it: it remained free to spend and thus to maintain appearances. Pensions, favors, and patronage permitted the survival of an essentially baroque institution, the court, even while profound changes were slowly transforming the nation and the minds of the people.

But even this freedom to spend and to maintain the court was an illusion. For visible spending was an obligation, imposed by rank and by the necessity to keep up appearances. All of this put the nobility in the king's debt and made them all the more dependent on royal favor. Luxury thus

created a society of illusion from top to bottom. Just as in the baroque world one was allowed much freedom to be creative and imaginative in the arts provided one did not question the political and social hierarchy, so in the higher social and court circles of the eighteenth century one was free to spend provided one did not question the source of the money. Spending was freedom within an absolute monarchy; it was the privilege of the great and the rich, and the aspiration of those who were not yet rich.

The political conclusions to be drawn from these reflections on luxury and its relation to the state were summed up in one of Montesquieu's most telling principles: "Republics come to an end through luxury; monarchies, through poverty" (Bk. 7, ch. 4). By 1787 the French monarchy was indeed bankrupt, but the Baroque as a mentality already belonged to the past. Luxury was still about for all to see and envy, but it was not looked at in quite the same way; and one certainly no longer reasoned about money, the great, and the rich as had the Chevalier des Grieux.

Of course, further distinctions involving luxury continued to be drawn and pondered. What, after all, was luxury? Mandeville, and Voltaire after him, realized that the concept was highly relative and elastic. Mandeville defined it as that which "is not immediately necessary to make man subsist as he is a living creature" (77). Luxury was thus the superfluous. But once the basic necessities of life are given, there is no limit to the superfluous, so that, as Mandeville well saw: "If once we depart from calling everything luxury that is not absolutely necessary to keep a man alive, ... then there is no luxury at all; for if the wants of men are innumerable, then what ought to supply them has no bounds; what is called superfluous to some degree of people will be thought requisite to those of higher quality" (78). To those

who argue that luxury corrupts and effeminizes society, Mandeville answers that this is not due to luxury as such but to bad administration of the state. Nor does he accept the argument that luxury enervates a state; enervate , to render nerveless, soft, is a word which in this case partakes of the imagination more than it sums up facts.

"The greatest excesses of luxury are shown in buildings, furniture, equipages, and clothes. Clean linen weakens a man no more than flannel; tapestry, fine painting, or good wainscot are no more unwholesome than bare walls; and a rich couch or a gilt chariot are no more enervating than the cold floor or a country cart. The refined pleasures of men of sense are seldom injurious to their constitution, and there are many great epicures that will refuse to eat or drink more than their heads or stomachs can bear. (83)

Yet even if the exact definition of luxury could be shown to be elastic to a point which rendered the word meaningless, the phenomenon of luxury, the ever-new creation of the superfluous, could not be ignored. And while Mandeville had argued that good administration might be a guarantee against the ill effects of luxury, it is precisely these ill effects that were noted in France. Sénac de Meilhan, royal intendant and later an exile in Germany, also pondered the nature and effects of luxury in relation to the state. But whereas Mandeville had written in a period of rising prosperity stimulated by war, Sénac published his Considérations sur les richesses et le luxe at a time when the state was going bankrupt, in 1787. He sought to understand what was happening about him—the problem of the deficit, the visible triumph of luxury, the equally obvious indebtedness of the old nobility. As Herbert Lüthy has pointed out, the ancien régime was truly finished with the fall of Turgot and his failure to reform the system, and the consequent rise of Necker, the banker from Geneva put in charge of finances with the task of refloating the state. This signaled the end

of Physiocratic economic doctrine and the triumph of a new money economy. Sénac saw this economic revolution as the triumph of the financiers, the moneyed class, over the old landed nobility. But this perspective required him to draw a new distinction, between le luxe and le faste . For after all, the monarchy and the nobility had spent lavishly on luxury. Sénac, while tacitly admitting Montesquieu's view of the intimate bond between luxury and monarchy, renamed luxury: in its function within monarchy he called it le faste —pomp, splendor, magnificence, grandeur.

Le faste , luxury thought of in its public capacity, lent prestige to the monarch and the state and as such was indispensable. On the other hand, the paintings, equipages, hotels, gardens, and domestics of the individual rich were "mere" luxury. A line was thus drawn between the public sector, le faste , and the private sector, le luxe . What had ruined the old nobility was its imitation of the luxury of the new financial class. The result was that described by Madame de Graffigny and the Baron d'Holbach. As the nobles grew poorer they came to be dazzled by the riches of the financier and commercial classes. The old nobility kept up appearances by conserving "a certain degree of ancient opulence which the new rich usurped in the end, but only hesitantly. The great had a considerable number of valets in brilliant livery; the rich man had but a few domestics in dull and timid liveries, but in his apartments opulence struck the eye from all parts and his table was set for the most recherché of repasts" (Considérations sur les richesses , 96). The nobility entered into competition with these nouveaux riches and were ruined. Sénac blames Louis XIV for this taste for luxury; he castigates the luxury of a court society based on leisure, immense inequalities of wealth, vanity, and the imitation of others. Significantly, he does not blame wealth that derives from trade or useful work, for this is a sign of national posperity.

Sénac singles out women for particular blame in this wasteful competitition for luxury. The role of women in

this world of luxury he traces to the institution of the royal mistress. The immense expenses of these women were imitated down the social scale, at court and in town, and thus woman became the arbiter of taste and thereby the regulator of expenditure: "She holds in one hand the scepter of fashion, in the other the sword of ridicule." Woman ruled through her beauty, her glitter, the veneer of fashion, the lightness of her wit, her caprice, and her love of novelty. The result was the effeminization of society: "A society in which women dominate is like a play in which they are the principle and purpose of the action. Man, in such a society, must move closer and closer to their mores and their mind. He must know how to bend to their fantasies, adopt their tastes and sentiments" (96). Effeminization for Sénac meant submission to the whims of women. The analysis of the workings of luxury thus merges with a critique of woman: baroque luxury spending had come to be seen as frivolous and feminine. It was also seen as detrimental to the arts.