The School of Courtly Manners in the Age of Louis XIII

Historians have long recognized in the romances of the French Renaissance a “school of civility.”^[49] Contemporaneous readers appeared to appreciate the psychological and social nourishment of what Étienne Pasquier referred to as “vraye courtizanerie.” A learned critic, Pasquier was determined not to allow the new humanistic standards to chase into oblivion the glorious past of medieval French literature, including the troubadours and the romances. The old chivalric romances (though no further back than the prose Lancelot ) went on being read, always as a favorite genre of the higher and lower aristocracy and their imitators among the high bourgeoisie. Jean Chapelain countered the Aristotelian classicists' theoretical objections by suggesting that Aristotle himself, had he been confronted with such texts as the Lancelot, would have

adjusted his principles to accommodate the new works alongside the IIiad and the Odyssey. Yet, the romance decayed into a genre of mere entertainment to be enjoyed as pure fantasy, in full consciousness of its being divorced from present reality: at the height of the “classic” period, Louis XIV's court nobles knew full well that they were no longer Gawains and Lancelots.

In the meantime, France had acted as a mediator in the Renaissance fashioning of the ideal gentleman as social canon. Italian definitions were transmitted almost literally within a broadened context that made the ideals once developed for the knight and the courtier universally valid for all educated people, all honnêtes gens. This last term appeared in the programmatic title of a text that remained crucial throughout its century, Nicolas Faret's L'honeste homme ou l'art de plaire à la Cour (1630).^[50] There the art of the courtier seemed to become, in essence, the art “to please,” specifically to please at court. For the remainder, Faret leaned heavily on the Galatea, the Civil conversatione, and of course Castiglione's Cortegiano, whose key term sprezzatura he rendered with negligence (as in Guazzo's negligenza o sprezzamento ): one must above all avoid l'affectation and use “une certaine negligence qui cache l'artifice, et tesmoigne que I'on ne fait rien que comme sans y penser, et sans aucune sorte de peine” (1970 ed.: 20).^[51]

The change from courtois to honnête and civile was more than a matter of linguistic fashion. It reflected a gradual change from the image of a knight who drew his authority and legitimacy from a court but acted as a relatively independent agent in his adventurous endeavors, to that of the man of court who saw himself and was seen by the whole society as the acme of civilized living, regardless of his having become completely dependent on that same court, to the point of seeing his nobility practically equated with the status of successful bourgeois courtiers. This process spanned the twelfth through the seventeenth century, the moment of transition coming at the time of Henry IV of France (1594–1610), who, as Henry of Bourbon, Prince of Navarre, had been one of the last heroes of the chivalrous ideal of resistance to monarchic centralization, but upon becoming king felt compelled to execute “those who resisted, those who did not understand that from free lords and knights they were to become dependent servants of the king.”^[52]

Later on, the school of politesse mondaine that the romances had become kept attracting readers to the otherwise hardly readable tomes of such popular heroico-sentimental novels as Madeleine de Scudéry's Le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653, 10 volumes). The most popular of its

century, Honoré d'Urfé's (1567–1625) pastoral novel Astrée (1607–1628, including Baro's edition of the posthumous fourth part in 1627 and “conclusion” in 1628) was eagerly received as a civilizing manual of manners and polite conversation, especially among the courtiers—and the ladies, who delighted in finding themselves so flatteringly idolized, as the ladies of courtly love had once been. Critics have recognized the book's practical civilizing impact, reflecting a new taste for noble sentiments and refined behavior.^[53]

Elias offers a rewarding analysis of the Astrée as an expression of the mentality of the lower, noncourtly nobility vis-à-vis the higher nobility that had yielded to royal pressures and become a court aristocracy.^[54] Belonging to a leading group of rural provincial noblemen, d'Urfé had been a militant member of the Catholic League against the Protestant armies led by Henry of Navarre, to whom, in a gracious gesture of surrender, he dedicated the second part of his novel after Henry became king. D'Urfé's personal background, from a prosperous and prominent southern family close to the Savoy house and to the high clergy, had exposed him to a refined courtly education without making him an active courtier. The Astrée is the imaginative work of a nobility that recognizes its defeat without joining the victors in adopting the ways of the ruling court, hence it remains cut off from the rewarding yet humiliating conformism of the courtly aristocracy dominated by the absolute monarch. Despite lingering resistance, the new court represented an irreversible new situation. The price of heeding Montaigne's demurrers was too high for most.

In the Nibelungenlied Kriemhild had sought revenge not because Siegfried was the most lovable man, even though he was the perfect warrior hero, but because her man had been taken away from her in an act of personal injury to her honor. Both in the Middle Ages and at the time of Louis XIII “romantic” troubadourlike devotion in a framework of absolute fidelity was not the modus operandi of the higher but of the middle nobility. By taking this sublimated posture the “poor nobles” made up for their inferiority to the true masters, who could afford to love freely (as the first troubadour, William IX, had done, and as the court nobility of eighteenth-century France would continue to do). Reflecting the ideal standpoint of this middle nobility, the sentimental novel of which the Astrée was the most successful example extolled a pure, chaste, marriage-oriented love of constancy, fidelity, and reasonableness. Compare the titles of some of the most popular sentimental novels of the time: Chastes amours d'Eros et de Kalisti; Le triomphe de

la constance où sont décrites les amours de Cloridons et de Melliflore; and so on. D'Urfé explicitly opposed the love of Céladon for the shepherdess Astrée to the libertine mores of the high nobility and the “nymphs.” “The simple, good, free life of the lower-ranking shepherds and shepherdesses is contrasted again and again to the customs and morals of the higher-ranking lords and ladies of the court, the actual wielders of power in this world.”^[55] It was d'Urfé's way of carrying on the struggle at the vicarious level of imagination by nostalgically romanticizing a feudal nobility which thought it could go on living on the land, away from the central court, even while it depended on the central government for its survival. This pattern of absolute romantic fidelity recalled not only the chivalrous manners of old, but also their most radical interpretation, Dante's love for Beatrice.

The general orientation of d'Urfé's meandering narrative comes forth in the letter to Céladon at the beginning of the second part, which praises the traditional (read: feudal) moral values of sincerity, loyalty, honor, and purity of mores still to be found (in the book) among the bergers of the land of Forez. The perfect love of the shepherds, which was the feudal love of twelfth-century knights, is called l'honnête amitié since its radical sublimation leaves little room for sex. It does involve, however, a lot of sensitive casuistic conversation. The formula also contains an interesting echo of the Ciceronian term honestum, that d'Urfé, the pupil of a Jesuit school, had learned to apply to his honnêtes gens— courtly though not of The Court. “Amour,” that is, sensual love, the novel avers, has disturbed the peace of Forez by introducing rivalry and dissension, just as ambition had done at court.

The revealing formula of the preface, “vivre plus doucement et sans contrainte,” refers to the ethic of a “dual-front class”: the freedom of a romantic, utopian, idyllically rustic life—at the country homes of the feudal nobility. This meant freedom from the humiliating constraints and high etiquette of the centralized court, while accepting the exhilarating constraints of a romantic, constant, and refined Petrarchan love that placed its upholders above the coarse lower classes of foul-smelling real rustics (remember the medieval vilains ).^[56]

The consciousness of rank is peculiarly acute in this seemingly abstract pastoral world, because it addresses a specific audience. These shepherds and nymphs are understood for what they really are on the basis of their line of descent: “Only if one knows the social origin and thus the social rank of a person does one know who and what this person really is . . . . For descent and social rank are keystones of the social existence of the nobility. Astrée is

an aristocratic novel that puts variously disguised aristocrats on the stage for an aristocratic audience. That was—and is—the first question that interests nobles when they meet another noble: “From what house, from what family does he or she come?” Then he can be classified.

(Elias 1983: 255)

We are reminded of Farinata's arrogant question to Dante: “Who were your ancestors?” (“Chi fuor li maggior tui?” Inferno 10.42). The firm sentiment for keeping one's place and holding inferiors to theirs was not to be challenged until the French Revolution. In one of Goldoni's masterpieces, La locandiera (1753), the progressive and democratically inclined yet firmly bourgeois Venetian playwright has his charming protagonist Mirandolina, a paragon of adroitness, wit, and solid common sense, vigorously wooed by a count, a marquis, and a knight, only to turn them all down elegantly and decide to “keep her place” by marrying her valet, Fabrizio.

The theory of love embedded in the “Douze tables des lois d'amour” read by Silvandre and contested by Hylas (book 2 of second part) is a Petrarchist/Neo-Platonic summation of the medieval code of courtly love, just as the behavior of both the shepherds on the one hand and the princes and knights on the other (bergers, princes, chevaliers —namely, the lower and higher nobility, respectively), including the warriors at Mérovée's court, is said to be constantly informed by courtoisie.^[57] Playing the role of advisors and educators, the high priests (les druides ), for their part, signally among them Adamas, interject long disquisitions on the ideology of love and virtuous living that supplement those tables. The obverse of this is conveniently supplied, in a nice dialectical counterpoint, by the libertine Hylas: he manages to counterfeit the text of the tables, declaring in his new version that, in love as elsewhere, extrème and infini are signs not of fidelité but of imprudence, and raison is the supreme criterion for a wisely selfish, practical use of love for pleasure rather than mere honneur. It is an echo of the troubadours' and Minnesingers' occasional moments of revolt against the frustrating constraints of the code of love.

The critique of monarchic absolutism comes to the fore in the case of Childéric.^[58] Before being finally deposed by the unanimous assembly of the Celts and Franks, he not only had planned to take a married noblewoman by force, as he had done with others, but had allowed himself to be persuaded by flattering courtiers that “toutes choses étaient permises au roi; que les rois faisaient les lois pour leurs sujets, et non pas pour eux, et que, puisque la mort et la vie de ses vassaux étaient

en sa puissance, il en pouvait faire de même pour tout ce qu'ils possédaient.” It sounds like a clever exposure of the doctrine of inherent power and of the king as lex animata.

The intriguing prefaces to the novel's first three parts contain precious insights into the author's attitudes. The first one (“Épître de l'auteur à la bergère Astrée”) recalls Tasso's Aminta for the convention, that d'Urfé is carrying out, of introducing refined characters (his peers and Tasso's courtiers) in the garb of shepherds. But he makes sure to remind his readers that they are not real shepherds. In the second one, in the form of a letter “au betger Céladon” the author warns his character that his way of loving is “aimer à la vieille Gauloise,” as the knights of the Round Table did, a way no longer appreciated in an age when lovers, like Hylas in the novel, want concrete reward rather than mere obedience, constancy, fidelity, honor, sacrifice, and suffering: “aimer et jouir de la chose aimée sont des accidents inséparables.” The author is conscious of going somehow against current, in a state of nostalgic retreat. The third preface (to the river Lignon) recalls the scholastic dictum, of Ficinian ring we might say, that “the lover's soul is more inside the beloved than inside the lover to whom it gives life,” “magis est ubi amat quam ubi animat,” as, d'Urfé claims, the etymology indicates: “aimer que nos vieux et très sages pères disaient amer, qu'est-ce autre chose qu'abréger le mot d'animer, c'est-à-dire, faire la propre action de l'âme. Aussi les plus savants ont dit, il y a longtemps, qu'elle vit plutôt dans le corps qu'elle aime, que dans celui qu'elle anime.”^[59] We know that this had been a favorite topos among troubadours, trouvères, and Minnesingers.