4
Friendship, Love, and Civility
The apparent unity of the aristocratic family, I have argued, concealed powerful tensions and anxieties. The family's successes came at visible expense to its individual members, whose wants the family sacrificed to its larger needs; at the same time, educational practices encouraged young men (and, to a lesser degree, young women) to think of themselves as distinct individuals, specific in character and life histories, and brought up far from parental controls. Such tensions within the family help to explain the intensity with which seventeenth-century nobles turned to other kinds of relationships, to friendships and love affairs. These offered emotional attachments based on choice and little affected by family demands. Passionate friendships and love affairs, what contemporaries called gallantry, thus formed an important element in seventeenth-century lives, women's as well as men's. These relationships filled needs that other kinds of relationship failed to meet. At the same time, by their nature they further disrupted efforts to make the ideology of dynasticism a functioning reality.
To claim an important role for either friendship or love in seventeenth-century society runs counter to an important tradition of historical thought. Lawrence Stone and others have argued for the superficiality of most such emotions before the eighteenth century. When seventeenth-century men spoke of friendship, it is claimed, they typically referred to the self-interested bonds of clientage; when they spoke of love, they meant chiefly the sexual impulses generated by a courtly society and a system of arranged, loveless marriages. Seventeenth-century practices, so Stone and others have argued, so damaged children as to leave them as adults incapable of much feeling toward either friends or lovers.[1]
[1] Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977). Sharon Kettering is currently preparing a study of friendship in early modern France. For another interpretation of some of the issues taken up here, see Roger Chartier, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 3, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 163ff. In general, these accounts stress the radical difference between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emotional lives (see, for instance, 371-75).
This chapter argues instead for placing such affections at the center of seventeenth-century culture. Partly because of the very childrearing practices to which Stone and others have drawn attention, seventeenth-century men and women had enormous needs for affection from others, needs so strong as to blur the distinction between sexual and nonsexual relations. Thus the forms of friendship and its complicated manifestations occupied a very large place in seventeenth-century thought.
Medieval French law recognized friendship, but mainly as an appendage to familial ties, and relics of this view survived into the early modern period. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century legal commentators needed to make sense of the phrase parents et amis , which they encountered in the provincial law codes. The customs used the term regularly to describe the group that was to formulate decisions about orphans: that is, the group that was to step in when patriarchal authority was absent or incompetent. The phrase, the lawyers concluded, referred, not to friends in the classical sense, but to well-disposed family members, those who were friends as well as relatives. In the medieval tradition thus interpreted, friendship by itself had little independent existence. It was mainly an appendage to family.[2] Friendship in this tradition served to replace paternal relations, and the same held true of another form of friendship, that based on patronage. Through the seventeenth century, writers commonly used the term "friend" to refer to protectors and patrons. This was friendship not as intimacy but as a means of organizing political and social life. Thus the former minister Villeroy began his memoirs by stressing the importance to an homme de bien of being well regarded by "those to whom he has promised amitié et service ."[3] Olivier Lefebvre d'Ormesson recalled at about the same time that "my father was greatly loved and ever since greatly favored by M. de Morvilliers [a relative of his wife's], from whom we still have several letters, testifying to the affection he felt."[4]
[2] J. Brissaud, Manuel d'histoire du droit français [Paris, 1908], 1821.
[3] Monsieur de Villeroy, Mémoires d'estat , in M. Petitot, ed., Collection des Mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France , 44 (Paris, 1824), 19.
[4] Olivier Lefebvre d'Ormesson, Journal , ed. M. Chéruel, 2 vols. (Paris, 1860), 1: viii.
Medieval traditions of this kind received further strength from classical thought about friendship. Just as feudalism had presented political bonds in the guise of personal friendship, so also ancient theorists had presented friendship as the basis for the collective life of the polis. They had seen the polity as essentially a web of friendships within its ruling class. Because the political stakes of friendship were in this view so high, friendship's rational and ethical content counted heavily. For Cicero, only the virtuous could enjoy real friendship, and it developed slowly and thoughtfully, rather than from immediate attraction.[5]
These opinions remained vigorous through the sixteenth century. In the middle of the century, Antoine du Saix cited Aristotle to the effect that friendship held together the monarchy, "for loyal service comes from amityé , not money."[6] Even Michel de Montaigne reflected this tradition, despite the intensity of his friendship with Etienne de La Boétie. He and La Boétie, he reported, had sought each other out because of reports of each other's excellence. Friendship had preceded personal acquaintance, because it began in universally acknowledged virtues; thus Montaigne quoted with approval Cicero's dicta on the necessary overlap of virtue and friendship.[7] Villeroy made the same point. Men in his situation needed to justify political choices to their friends, "in order not to cause them to change the good opinion that they have . . . , which is the chief foundation of friendship, since it is impossible for us really to love someone whom we do not esteem."[8] Friendship here rested on rational choice and ethical behavior. It reinforced civic and ethical responsibilities, serving as a motive for the efforts and self-sacrifices that civic life demanded.
By the eighteenth century, these connections among friendship, family, and politics had largely broken down. Friendship no longer complemented blood relations but, rather, opposed them as a competitor for the individual's emotional and material resources. "[O]ught
[5] Cicero, De Amicitia , in De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione , trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, Mass., Loeb Classical Library, 1964), XXVII; see also Aristotle, Ethics , trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London, 1953), 227–57, for friendship as essential to the functioning of the polis. My understanding of early modern friendship owes much to studies of medieval friendship by Brian Patrick McGuire: see Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Kalamazoo, 1988).
[6] Robert Aulotte, ed., Plutarque en France au XVIe siècle: Trois opuscules moraux, traduits par Antoine du Saix, Pierre de Saint Julien, et Jacques Amyot (Paris, 1971), 18–19.
[7] Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes , ed. Maurice Rat and Albert Thibaudet (Paris, Pléiade, 1962), 186–87 ("De l'amitié").
[8] Villeroy, Mémoires d'estat , 20.
not friends to be preferred to relatives in intestate successions?" asked an eighteenth-century author. "Friendship is often placed above the ties of blood relationship [parenté ]." He ultimately concluded against such a procedure, but that he could raise the question suggests the role friendship had acquired.[9] The same author offered an extended definition of the bases of friendship, and in doing so he suggested why friendship and family now stood in conflict. Whereas familial relations (even those between siblings) rested on difference and subordination, between older and younger or male and female, our author situated the sources of friendship in likeness and equality: "[F]riends are those who resemble each other in their temperament, their inclinations, their passions, their professions, their age, their way of thinking, etc., and their relationship is always a function of this resemblance. Man is always his own greatest friend; to approach him in this respect, and substitute so to speak for him someone comparable, the latter must resemble him in everything; and it is only then that one can say that he has found a true friend, another self."[10] Medieval friendship had in some measure been a substitute for patriarchy. The parents et amis of the law codes replaced the absent father, and the friends of patronage relationships supplemented paternal protection; these forms of friendship rested on inequality. Eighteenth-century friendship offered instead a second self, perfect equality.
Nor did eighteenth-century friendship fit so easily within the relations of civic life. For by the end of the eighteenth century friendship acquired much of its significance from its contrast with life in society. A friend was another self, with whom one could exchange the secret thoughts that social life excluded. What created friendship was, in Kant's terms, "the complete confidence of two persons in disclosing to one another their secret thoughts and feelings, so far as such disclosure is compatible with mutual respect."[11] Such disclosure, Kant believed, emerged from a basic human need: "Man is a being meant for society . . . ; and in cultivating social qualities he feels powerfully the need to disclose himself to others. . . . On the other hand, since he is also cramped and forewarned by the fear that others might misuse this revelation of his thoughts, he sees himself constrained to lock up in
[9] M. de Félice, ed., Code de l'humanité ou la législation universelle, naturelle, civile et politique . . . composé par une société de gens de letters . . . , 13 vols. (Yverdon, 1778), 1: 279.
[10] Ibid., 1: 278.
[11] Kant, quoted in H. J. Paton, "Kant on Friendship," Proceedings of the British Academy , vol. 42 (Dawes Hicks Lecture on Philosophy, 1956), 45–66, 54.
himself a good part of his opinions." Finding a friend with whom he can share these thoughts, Kant said, meant that "he is no longer entirely alone with his thoughts as in a prison, but enjoys a freedom which he cannot have among the common herd, where he must shut himself up in himself."[12]
Friendship, in this view, began with the individual's contradictory place in society: on the one hand, alone in a competitive situation, in which social masks provide a necessary defense; on the other hand, driven by a powerful need for exchanges with others. Except for his friendships, the individual survives in public life through his disguises. Again, these functions imply a need for equality between friends; the communication that is basic to friendship demands that the two friends share abilities and outlook, as well as affection. Such views also imply a difficult relationship between friendship and public life. Friends could express secret thoughts that would pose dangers elsewhere. Friendship expressed humanity's essentially social nature, but it also showed that society failed to satisfy that nature.
The seventeenth century uneasily combined elements of medieval, classical, and eighteenth-century visions of friendship—and precisely because the concept incorporated so many elements, friendship had an especially prominent place in seventeenth-century thought and sensibility. Talk of friendship was everywhere. The comte de Souvigny, a successful military man, concluded his memoris with five basic rules for his children to follow through life. The first was "to maintain yourself constantly in God's grace"; the second, "to acquire a faithful friend, who can give you good advice."[13] The great Jansenist patriarch Arnauld d'Andilly similarly concluded his memoirs by claiming friendship as the central thread of his life, and he used the language of Montaigne or even Cicero: "My greatest passion, after my salvation, has been friendship with those persons whom I have known to be the most worthy of esteem; I believe that no one has had as many true friends as I, friends whose merits and virtues make it a great honor to have been loved by them."[14] Arnauld's fellow Jansenist Pierre Nicole
[12] Ibid., 64; emphasis in original.
[13] comte de Souvigny, Mémoires , ed. Ludovic de Contenson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1906–09), 3: 69.
[14] Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, Mémoires , in M. Petitot, ed., Collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France , 34 (Paris, 1824), 102. Arnauld's son, it will be recalled, bitterly agreed; his father's love for his friends meant neglect of his children (above, Chapter 3).
presented the related view that friendship formed the basis of society: "It is absolutely necessary, in order that human society subsist, that men like and respect one another. . . . An infinity of small things, all of them necessary for life, are given freely and, since they do not enter commerce, can only be bought with love."[15] For Adam Smith, of course, this was precisely not the essence of society; according to Smith, we rely for our needs on others' interests, not their altruism. For Nicole, friendship played the socially integrating role that liberal thought would accord to the market.
Such comments suggest the continuing strength in the seventeenth century of classical traditions of friendship, a friendship of rational choice and one that reinforced larger bonds of collective life; personal and public life here interlocked, and fitted well with moral and religious structures. But the seventeenth century also had other models of friendship, which fitted far less well with these other concerns. Aristocratic men felt driven to the intense intimacies that Kant described, and they often presented friendship as an alternative to the competition and insincerity around them. At the same time, they sought to preserve the idea that friendship could be based on inequality and could function within the unequal relations of patronage and political power. Nicole himself stressed the psychological as well as material needs that friendship fulfilled, and he sought to link the intensity of men's need for friendship to the weakness of the human condition itself. "Nothing is so natural to man," he opened one of his essays, "as the desire to be loved by others. . . . Our soul is so languishing and weak that it could not sustain itself were it not carried, as it were, by the approval and love of others. . . . [I]magine being forgotten by all men; who could endure such a vision without terror and melancholy?"[16] Friendship involved need as well as rational choice.
Monarchs displayed this need in extreme form. They experienced intense emotional involvement with chosen friends, but without the
[15] Pierre Nicole, Oeuvres philosophiques et morales , ed. C. Jourdain (Paris, 1845; repr. Hildesheim, 1970), 239. On the other hand, Nicole's essay "De la grandeur" virtually anticipated Smith: "Quelle charité serait-ce que de bâtir une maison tout entière pour un autre, de la meubler, de la tapisser, de la lui rendre la clef à la main? la cupidité le fera gaiement. . . . Il n'y a donc rien dont on tire de plus grans services que de la cupidité même des hommes" (398). I discuss this passage below, Chapter 5.
[16] Ibid., 267.
possibility of equality. Both Henri III and Louis XIII depended desperately on favorites, to the point that contemporaries widely suspected them of homosexual practices. Even those who did not express such suspicions stressed the intensity of the kings' feelings, their ardor when relations went well and their despondency during quarrels. His physician Jean Héroard described Louis calling in his sleep for his friend Luynes and recorded Louis's dream of, in effect, marrying Luynes;[17] Tallemant des Réaux retailed stories of Louis in bed with his last favorite, Cinq-Mars; and Louis regularly confided to Richelieu his anxieties about the course of this and other friendships.[18]
Both kings evoked scandalized disapproval from some contemporaries, but in fact their infatuations typified larger patterns in seventeenth-century high society. Whether in the provinces or at court, noblemen often described friendships originating in immediate, nearly physical attraction, and they stressed the intense emotions that arose as friendships evolved: "The changes that arrive in friendship have about the same causes as those that arrive in love: their rules have a great deal of similarity."[19] This was La Rochefoucauld's view, and memorialists from the noblesse d'épée repeated the parallel in recounting the specific circumstances of their lives. Thus Jean de Mergey, in the mid-sixteenth century: a distant relative "took such an amitié for me" that he devoted himself to Mergey's education.[20] The maréchal de Bassompierre recalled that in the early seventeenth century, "Monsieur the constable at that time could not live without seeing me, so much did he love me, and he thought only of my advancement."[21]
Antoine Arnauld in his sixties still felt bitter at his father's enthusiasm for "his new friendships [amitiés ], which in the case of another man might reasonably have have been termed love affairs [amours ]."[22] The comte de Souvigny recalled his uncle's experiences
[17] Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, Louis XIII: The Making of a King (New Haven, 1986), 135–36.
[18] A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII, the Just (Berkeley, 1989), 285–86.
[19] François de La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes , ed. L. Martin-Chauffier (Paris, Pléiade, 1957), 398.
[20] Jean de Mergey, Mémoires , in Michaud and Poujolat, eds., Nouvelle collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France . . . , 9 (Paris, 1857), 559.
[21] Maréchal de Bassompierre, Mémoires , in Michaud and Poujolat, eds., Nouvelle collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France . . . , 20 (Paris, 1854), 54.
[22] L'abbé Arnauld, Mémories , in M. Petitot, ed., Collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France , 34 (Paris, 1824), 146.
in the same years: a small town merchant "took such an affection for M. de Beauregard that he could not live without him," and for this reason arranged his marriage with his daughter.[23] Bussy-Rabutin mused angrily on the mystery of "whence came to the prince [de Condé] so much amitié for this boy [one of his followers], in the course of such a brief acquaintance." Condé, Bussy explained, "finding [the boy] to his taste, took an affection for him, and made his fortune."[24] Of two of the more notorious of Louis XIV's courtiers, Bussy likewise wrote, "[T]hey had by nature the same inclination to harshness and mockery, also they loved each other greatly, as if they had been of different sexes."[25] Tallemant des Réaux described the success of the handsome chevalier de Boisdauphin in his regiment: he "was not there long before making himself loved by everyone. . . . I tend to believe that his beauty did him no harm in this respect, for he was one of the most beautiful and well-built gentlemen in France." Having illicitly married the Chancellor Séguier's daughter, he soon found himself "in the good graces of his father-in-law. The chancellor could no longer live without him."[26] As Nicolas Faret, the early-seventeenth-century theorist of courtliness, summarized the matter, some men have such abilities that whatever they undertake, they "make themselves attractive [agréables ] to anyone who has eyes to look at them."[27] Like love, friendship began in visual pleasure.
Novelists made the same point. In d'Urfé's L'Astrée , it is a female lover disguised as a male friend whose "beauty, youth, and affection" for the man whom they believe to be her friend "moved all those who were present"; onlookers take for male friendship the signs of what in fact is heterosexual love.[28] In Francion there is no ambiguity of gender, but physical attraction retains its power: soon after meeting Francion, Raymond tells him "that his good face, whence he had noticed streamed forth something noble and distinctive, was a charm that had
[23] Comte de Souvigny, Mémoires , 2: 47.
[24] Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires , ed. Ludovic Lalanne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1857; repr. Westmead, 1972), 1: 159, 160.
[25] Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, Histoire amoureuse des Gaules , ed. Paul Boiteau, 4 vols. (Paris, 1866), 1: 68.
[26] Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , ed. Antoine Adam, 2 vols. (Paris, Pléiade, 1960–61), 2: 347.
[27] Nicolas Faret, L'honnête homme, ou l'art de plaire à la cour , ed. Maurice Magendie (Paris, 1925; repr. Geneva, 1970), 11.
[28] Honoré d'Urfé, L'Astrée , abridged edition, ed. Jean Lafond (Paris, 1984), 95 (Part 1, book 12).
invited him to make him an infinite number of offers of his service"; having seen Francion's qualities in action, Raymond assures him, "[M]y dear friend, it is now that I shall give you proofs of the affection that I carry for you."[29] Pierre Marivaux took up the theme in the early eighteenth century. "There's no need to thank me for what I have done," explains his Jacob to the man whose assailants he has just driven off. "I was only too pleased, and I took to you at once just from your looks."[30] Such stress on personal attraction fitted easily with the ideology of nobility. Jacob's friend, Francion, and d'Urfé's heroine all attract strangers because they are of noble birth; indeed, their attractiveness serves as an outward sign of social standing, which their new friends will learn of only as the plot unfolds.
Like these literary depictions, Furetière's late-seventeenth-century dictionary presented friendship as a mixture of passionate attachment and practical service. For Furetière the point of friendship lay in effective assistance; a friend was someone "who has affection for some person, and who procures or wishes for him all sorts of advantages. There are friendly peoples and friendly maisons , which have the same interests." Yet Furetière combined this stress on utilitarian friendship with a view of friendship as a passion. Affection he defined as a "passion of the soul which makes us wish someone well. . . . One speaks thus of both love and friendship." Furetière's language juxtaposes passion and interest and emphasizes the place of action in friendship. Friendship, he suggested, is an urge to advance another, a wish that the other receive "every sort of advantage." It is thus bound up with calculations of interest. Yet he also defined friendship as a passion, which in Cartesian fashion he understood to begin with the senses: passion, he wrote, is one of "the different agitations of the soul following the various objects that appear to our senses." Though its aims were calculating, in other words, friendship's origins, like those of love, lay in a physical inner agitation. Hence it is not surprising that for Furetière true friends, intimate friends, are amis de jeunesse ; he linked friendship to a youthful capacity for receiving external impressions and responding passionately to them.[31] In this view he followed
[29] Charles Sorel, Histoire comique de Francion , ed. Yves Guiraud (Paris, 1979), 81, 327.
[30] Pierre Marivaux, Le paysan parvenu (Paris, 1965), 302.
[31] Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel , 3 vols. (The Hague, 1690; repr. Geneva, 1970), s.vv. ami, amitié, affection, passion .
Aristotle, who believed that purely utilitarian friendships occurred most commonly among the old, because the old are readier to pursue self-interest than emotion.[32] Even within Furetière's vision of friendship as serving usefulness, there remained the assumption that friendship was essentially a passion.
Because of friendship's basis in the passions, it was not limited to masculine relations; in seventeenth-century opinion, at least some women could have friendships as well. A pamphlet described Madame de la Vallière, Louis XIV's first mistress: "[S]he is sincere and faithful, far from any coquettishness, and more capable than anyone in the world of great attachments; she loves her friends with an unbelievable warmth."[33] Arnauld d'Andilly numbered two women among the four great friends of his life.[34]
If seventeenth-century friendship began in physical attraction, however, it developed also from strongly felt needs for intimacy and service. In the seventeenth century, these needs were not so separate as might be supposed; to be able to exchange confidences with a friend figured as an important practical need in the unsettled, disguised world of court society. "The thorniest problem" that a newcomer to court encounters, counselled Nicolas Faret, "is to know how to choose a faithful, wise, and experienced friend, who can supply les bonnes adresses and give us an idea of the customs that are followed, of the powers that reign, of the cabals and parties that are in favor, of the men who are admired, the women who are honored, of the morals and fashions that prevail, and in general of everything that can only be learned through being there."[35]
Faret presented friendship as an instrument to success, but also as a source of sincerity in an otherwise unknown, potentially hostile setting. In this view, friendship acquired its importance partly from the ill-defined social relations within which the courtier moved; the need for friendship rose with the uncertainty and anonymity of other relations. For Faret, the concept of friendship combined calculating self-interest, self-revealing intimacy, and physical attraction. With "our particular friends," he wrote, "our souls feel free of that constraint
[32] Aristotle, Ethics , trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London, 1953), 238.
[33] "Le Palais-Royal ou les amours de Mme de la Vallière," in Histoire amoureuse des Gaules par Bussy Rabutin , ed. Boiteau, 2: 35.
[34] Arnauld d'Andilly, Mémoires , 34: 102–3.
[35] Faret, L'honnête homme , 39–40.
that other people cause us, and we allow free expression to all its natural movements, with a nonchalance that often renders us almost entirely different from what we seem in public."[36]
Faret was not alone in these thoughts. When Bussy-Rabutin described his friendship with the duc de Candale, he made the revelation of secrets its defining element: "[T]his friendship lasted until his death, and reached the point that he scarcely had a secret that he did not confide in me."[37] Arnauld d'Andilly claimed of a friend that "the friendship between two brothers could not be stronger than that between us, and . . . thus I knew the secrets of his heart as well as I knew my own."[38] From Corneille's early comedies onward, friendships gave structure to seventeenth-century drama; both men and women in the plays require friends in whom they can confide their inner thoughts. "Have I ever concealed from you my heart and my desires?" asks Orestes of his friend at the outset of Andromaque .[39] "Friend, what dare I say? You who have known my heart since first I drew breath," asks Hippolyte of his friend at the outset of Phèdre;[40] and the latter drama points throughout to the contrast between the confidences of friendship and the ferocity of familial bonds, which ultimately destroy Hippolyte. Britannicus too opens with an exchange between the hero and his confidant, in which Britannicus describes false friends revealing to Nero "the secrets of my soul, . . . the movements . . . of my heart."[41] We may recognize such stage friendships as a convenient dramatic device, allowing rapid exposition of the characters' situations and hopes. But the dramatists, who were much concerned with realism, nonetheless presented intimacy as a normal need: to expose one's heart to a friend was at least an important cultural model, and the need was especially strong at court, where sincerity was not otherwise to be found.
Partly because of its origins in the passions, friendship was also dangerous. One might reveal oneself to inappropriate people, to false friends; one might misunderstand the social realities that governed friendship and pay insufficient attention to the insincerities of the so-
[36] Ibid., 57.
[37] Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires , 1: 404.
[38] Arnauld d'Andilly, Mémoires , 34: 103.
[39] Andromaque , Act I, Scene 1, in Jean Racine, Oeuvres complètes . Vol. 1: Théâtre-poésies , ed. Raymond Picard (Paris, Pléiade, 1950), 247.
[40] Phèdre , Act I, Scene 1, ibid., 751.
[41] Britannicus , Act I, Scene 4, ibid., 403.
cial world. These ideas received extreme elaboration in the eighteenth century. Marivaux sets false friendship at the center of La double inconstance: "You, Arlequin, whatever happens, you can always look upon me as a friend who would like to help you," promises the paid seductress Flaminia, and misleading promises of friendship pass back and forth throughout. "[N]ow I can laugh at the trick that our friendship has played on us," says Arlequin to conclude the play.[42]
The plot of Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses likewise moves forward mainly because of a series of false friendships. Like Kant's individual, Laclos's characters need to confide in others whom they suppose to be like themselves; they fail to perceive their fundamental isolation. The seducer Valmont thus writes to his fellow-conspirator the marquise de Merteuil, "Finally I know him [Danceny] completely, this fine romantic hero! He has no more secrets from me. . . . [H]e found in me ways of thinking so like his own that, in his enchantment at my candor, he told me everything and swore friendship without reserve."[43] In this case, Laclos ascribes the quixotic urge to imagine real life as a novel to the specific context of friendship; self-revelation rather than great deeds is the absurd dream. In parallel, the innocent Cécille Volanges continually reveals herself to another false friend, using the most flowery terms of friendship.[44] Danceny and Cécille believe themselves to be no longer alone, in Kant's phrase, but in fact they are more isolated and vulnerable than ever. (But in the end it is the self-revealing Danceny who kills Valmont, and by this point the urge to self-disclosure has shifted; Valmont brings to the fatal duel the packet of letters that explicates his actions and reveals his thoughts.)
Though not in such elaborated form, the theme of false friendship already troubled seventeenth-century writers. "Around me I see only perjured friends, all of them assiduous spies, bought by Nero for this repulsive trade, trafficking in the secrets of my soul"—thus the unfortunate Britannicus, complaining to the false friend who is in fact Nero's spy.[45] Yet the convolutions of the exchange go beyond simple irony. There is no equality between Britannicus and his putative
[42] Pierre Marivaux, La double inconstance , Act I, Scene 11, in Théâtre complet , ed. Marcel Arland (Paris, Pléiade, 1949), 216.
[43] Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses , 57, in Oeuvres complètes , ed. Laurent Versini (Paris, Pléiade, 1979), 115 (letter 57).
[44] Ibid., 58 (letter 27).
[45] Britannicus , Act I, Scene 4, in Racine, Oeuvres complètes , 403.
friend, the one a royal heir, the other a freed slave; part of Britannicus's folly lies in his belief that he could share the "secrets of my soul" with one who is an equal neither in birth nor in circumstances.
Saint-Evremond's "On Friendship" argued the point explicitly: social inequality stood in the way of friendship. Thus no real friendship with a prince was possible, because of the distance between prince and courtier; the insincere and calculating courtier, he argued, had far better chances of preserving the prince's affection, for he was less likely to intrude on the prince's goodwill. Social inequalities did more than restrict intimacy; they virtually demanded the creation of false relations. But this was only one instance of the larger opposition that Saint-Evremond perceived between the functioning of civil society and friendship. Thus he contrasted friendship with two other qualities, justice and prudence. These stand at the base of civic life, the former "established for maintaining human society," the latter "to help us acquire property." But neither is in fact compatible with friendship. The essay opens with praise of a Spartan king who overturned civil rules in order to help a friend, and it argues that justice by itself is "wilder than the men she brought together." As for prudence, "the deep reflections of a wisdom that holds us back when inclination pulls us toward another" are in fact the enemies of friendship.[46]
Saint-Evremond here offers a vision of friendship as in some senses the enemy of society itself, and he presents the contrast as one between nature and culture. Justice is "the achievement of men; friendship is the achievement of nature."[47] This is a paradoxical conclusion that we will encounter in other areas of aristocratic culture. "The achievement of nature" here supplies the most genuine content of social relations; the political is not only the artificial but the asocial, the sauvage . Saint-Evremond's emphasis on the polarity between friendship and civic life is the more striking because of his belief in the importance of reason and the dangers of excessively passionate friendship.
With Saint-Evremond's distinction between civic engagement and personal friendship, the problematic qualities of seventeenth-century friendship received their most elaborate statement. Friendship was not
[46] Charles de Marguetel, seigneur de Saint-Evremond, Oeuvres en prose , ed. René Ternois, 3 vols. (Paris, 1962–66), 3: 307–10, 311, 314.
[47] Ibid., 310.
the ally of civic relations (as in Ciceronian tradition) but their enemy; it was not a constituent of political life but a shelter from political deceptions, struggles, and disappointments; its relations to morality were essentially hostile. Though men needed social rules and political bonds, Saint-Evremond suggested, these had less reality than the amoral, "natural" relations of friendship.
Both the intensity of seventeenth-century friendships and their origins in physical attraction posed a further ethical problem: friendship easily shaded into sexual feeling and activity.[48] Anxiety about homosexuality formed an ongoing theme in courtly literature from the reign of Henri III through that of Louis XIV.[49] Henri III and Louis XIII, of course, were famous for the intensity of their feelings for their favorites,[50] but well-informed gossips such as Bussy-Rabutin and Tallemant des Réaux attributed comparable feelings to a wide range of courtiers. "From the beginning monsieur le prince has been accused of this vice," wrote Tallemant of the Grand Condé's father.[51] The Grand Condé himself was likewise widely reported to have had extensive homosexual relations and to have taken little trouble to conceal them.[52] Tallemant presented Richelieu's companion Boisrobert boasting of his sexual relations with the pages around him, and he quoted Mademoiselle de Gournay: "[O]ne day when someone asked her whether pederasty was not a crime, 'Please God,' she replied, 'that I not condemn what Socrates practiced.'" Tallemant quoted popular
[48] Cf. the similar findings of Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England," History Workshop 29 (Spring 1990): 1–19, and for nineteenth-century America, Estelle Freedman and John D'Emilio, "Problems Encountered in Writing the History of Sexuality: Sources, Theory and Interpretation," Journal of Sex Research 27, 4 (November 1990): 481–95.
[49] For strong emphasis on the frequency of homosexuality in seventeenth-century society, see Maurice Lever, Les bûchers de Sodome (Paris, 1985); conversely, Chartier, ed., History of Private Life , gives very little attention to the subject. Anxiety, rather than the absence of homosexual behavior, appears to explain the nearly complete absence of French artistic portrayals of homosexual themes, in contrast to the frequency of such subject matter in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy (James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society [New Haven, 1986], 7, 179–85).
[50] Jacqueline Boucher, La cour de Henri III (Rennes, 1986), argues that Henri was not homosexual; Moote, Louis XIII, the Just , and Marvick, Louis XIII , agree that Louis had strong homoerotic desires, but hesitate as to whether he acted on them.
[51] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 1: 417.
[52] Georges Mongrédien, Le Grand Condé: L'homme et son oeuvre (Paris, 1959), 60; Lever, Les bûchers de Sodome.
songs attributing similar feelings to the maréchal de Grammont ("Monseigneur prenez courage, / il vous reste encore un page") and retailed stories of the group surrounding the notoriously homosexual Théophile de Viau.[53]
Even the most sober observers offered similar assessments of the seventeenth-century court. Ezéchiel Spanheim, the scholarly envoy of the elector of Brandenburg, noted that Louis XIV "has vigorously spoken out against the crying vices in which the youth of the court and his own blood have unfortunately involved themselves, and he has not hesitated to punish or correct those who were suspected or convicted of [these vices]"—including Louis's brother, his illegitimate son the duc de Vermandois, and the prince de Conti. At a later point Spanheim noted that the cardinal de Bouillon had "the reputation of being touched by the same disgusting vice that was spreading among the leading jeunesse of the court."[54]
Homosexuality frightened early modern Europeans as a violation of nature. It was traditionally believed also to be associated with heretical views of all kinds—an association that seventeenth-century libertines did nothing to dispel.[55] But the practice also overlapped with forms of friendship that constituted the normal fabric of nobles' careers and political lives. Nobles perceived the civic world in which they moved as a web of such friendships, but these relationships existed at the margins of what could be considered natural behavior. Bussy-Rabutin suggested the uncertain boundary between sexual relations and the more acceptable relations of friendship. His Histoire amoureuse des Gaules included the story of the comte de Guiche and his intimate friend Manicamp. Invited to make love with the beautiful Madame d'Olonne, Guiche finds himself impotent. To "repair his fault," he takes special precautions before a second rendezvous: "I . . . went to bed without Manicamp. I was so determined to repair my fault that I fled my friends like the plague." [56] Men frequently slept
[53] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 1: 413–14, 379–80, 528.
[54] Ezéchiel Spanheim, Relation de la cour de France en 1690, ed. Charles Schefer (Paris, 1882), 6, 58, 92, 127. See also the discussion of these circles in Nancy Nichols Barker, Brother to the Sun King: Philippe Duke of Orleans (Baltimore, 1989).
[55] Judith Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1986), 13; cf. Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes , rev. ed. (New York, 1968), for a more purely intellectual view of seventeenth-century libertinism.
[56] Histoire amoureuse des Gaules , ed. Boiteau, 1: 127.
together in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Bussy's story made clear the anxieties this situation might produce.
His comments also make it clear that in the seventeenth century homosexuality remained chiefly a definition of acts rather than of persons.[57] Guiche could be both one of the leading gallants of the court and a man rumored to enjoy physical intimacies with his friend. The same was true of Condé and his petits maîtres , notorious for both homosexual and heterosexual debauches. Despite recent arguments,[58] it seems mistaken to view such figures as participants in a homosexual subculture. Rather, their experiences reflected the ease with which members of courtly society moved from fully acceptable to dangerous modes of behavior.
Further complicating assumptions about homosexuality were the connections contemporaries drew between sexuality and the vagaries of courtly power. Bussy-Rabutin, we have seen, ascribed his failure with Condé to the latter's preference for a beautiful young follower, and Condé was assumed to be surrounded by libertine, sexually ambiguous young men. Henri de Campion used vague but similar terms to describe the duc de Vendôme: "I knew that he was controlled by young valets, who, according to common opinion, maintained themselves in his favor by shameful and infamous means. I had always detested them in France without this ever disturbing the duc; since I was not his domestic, he made no effort to subject me as he did his own people [les siens ]. But I thought that if I attached myself to him in places where he had no need to restrain himself, he would wish me to enter into relations with his favorites, so as to sanction his mode of living; or, if I couldn't bring myself to do so, I would fall out with him and would receive nothing for my efforts. I reflected that all his gentlemen . . . had formed friendships with his mignons to maintain their positions."[59] In his delicate language, Campion conveyed another side of the sexualized and unequal nature of fidélités with a prince. Power allowed sexual relations; those who criticized such relations could expect to suffer, since connectedness to the prince required at
[57] This is the position developed by John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980), and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality . Volume 1: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978).
[58] Lever, Les bûchers de Sodome.
[59] Henri de Campion, Mémoires , ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris, 1967), 175.
least good relations with his mignons . Homosexuality symbolized power on one side, submission and weakness on the other.
Passionate friendship provided one alternative to familial relations during the seventeenth century. Heterosexual love might have supplied another such alternative, but for most men and women it apparently failed to do so. They spoke often of feeling intense, even overwhelming love, but they also stressed the likelihood that love would eventually fail. The failure raises important questions about seventeenth-century culture and practices: given the emotional needs that, I am claiming, dominated polite society, why was love so rarely successful?
Historians have of course proposed answers to this question. Political and financial calculations surrounded early modern marriage arrangements, often leaving husband and wife hopelessly ill-matched. There was little chance in these circumstances that stable relations between men and women would develop, and those that occurred often came about outside marriage.[60] This was recognized even at the time. Tallemant des Réaux quoted one noblewoman notorious for her adulteries: "If they'd married me as I wanted, I wouldn't behave as I do."[61] Traditional European misogyny further limited hope of successful relations between men and women, by suggesting that women were unworthy objects of male affections. Montaigne argued that women could not equal the depth of male feelings and hence were incapable of real friendship.[62] From an early age, finally, aristocratic young men were encouraged in a predatory form of sexuality; military metaphors permeated even courtly love poetry, offering images of women as fortresses to be captured and celebrating love as male power.[63]
All of these interpretations reasonably characterize male views of women and of relationships with them during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But they are also clearly insufficient, for they fail to convey the complexity either of seventeenth-century men's feelings or
[60] Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage.
[61] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 2: 110 (the comtesse de Suze).
[62] Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes , 185; cf. Brown, Immodest Acts , 6ff.
[63] Marvick, Louis XIII , 40ff.; Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron , trans. P. A. Chilton (London, 1984), 214–19; A. Jordan, "L'esthétique de Malherbe," XVIIe Siècle 104 (1974): 3–28.
of the position these accorded to women. They fail, in the first place, to give a place to the seriousness with which contemporaries talked about love, and even about married love. That talk of love permeated late-seventeenth-century drama was a truism of contemporary criticism; audiences now demanded beaucoup d'amour, as Fontenelle observed in explaining the declining popularity of his uncle Corneille, and indeed all of Racine's principal characters are violently in love.[64] Capacity for love formed part of what contemporaries expected of an elegant man. "One cannot be a true gentleman [honnête homme ]," wrote Bussy-Rabutin, "without being always in love."[65] For Bussy himself this chiefly meant adulterous love, but he was not the less serious for that reason. When his mistress abandoned him after his arrest, "I was in despair at her inconstancy; I almost died of it, but time consoled me, and in the end I arrived at the blessed state of indifference that she had long merited."[66] Bussy contrasted this love with mere sexual feeling. "Gallantry does have its limits," he counselled. "There is an age at which it is ridiculous, and if there remains enough heat at that advanced age that one cannot do without women, one should meet them in private, rather than parading the perfect love publicly."[67] For the old, love might be a matter of mere bodily heat and hence something to be kept private; but for others it was more substantial and more important.
Nor was the ideal of intense marital love absent from seventeenth-century high society, however unusual the reality might be. Jean de Mergey described the mid-sixteenth-century comte de La Rochefoucauld, who on learning of his wife's death "locked himself away in the abbey of Saint-Victor to sigh away his regrets," until his friends finally drew him out (and into a rapid remarriage).[68] Tallemant's friend Madame Pitou, an acute observer of mid-seventeenth-century high society, told him that "as long as they're not outrageous, she strongly approves of love matches [les mariages par amour ]"—suggesting that such matches occurred often enough to stimulate contemporary
[64] Fontenelle, "Vie de Corneille," in Pierre Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, ed. André Stegman (Paris, 1963), 24; for a theoretical exploration of seventeenth-century love, see Nicolas Luhman, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Oxford, 1986).
[65] Quoted in C. Rouben, Bussy-Rabutin épistolier (Paris, 1974), 196.
[66] Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires, 2: 264.
[67] Ibid., 2: 203.
[68] Jean de Mergey, Mémoires, 561.
debate.[69] Antoine Arnauld ascribed his failure to marry to his insistence on a love match, though he believed himself unusual in preferring love to money: "[Y]oung though I was, I could never understand how someone could decide to marry without love."[70]
A few years later, the comte de Souvigny recalled the love that had in fact marked his own marriage. When his wife accidentally discovered that Souvigny had soon to return to the army, "her heart was so stricken with grief that she spent the whole day without drinking or eating."[71] Underlying love was intimate companionship. "It often happened," he remembered after his wife's death, "that after having strolled for three or four hours in the great hall at Souvigny and they told us that dinner was served and the soup turning cold, we said to each other, '[W]e'll take one more turn'; and then we would spend several hours without realizing it, unable to end our talk [nos discours ]. This was not of domestic matters, fifteen minutes a day sufficing for our family, nor news of the neighborhood, nor of the fashionable world, for we spoke little of others. Such conversations can only be imagined by those who love each other faithfully and sincerely, as we did."[72] Souvigny believed that his brother had enjoyed a similar marriage: his brother's wife was so upset at the young man's death that she refused all nourishment and died in childbirth two weeks later.[73] Clearly there existed marriages that were successful in modern terms, marriages that combined intense attachment with intimate companionship.
Contemporaries might seek to present even failed marriages in these terms. By the early 1630s Louis XIII and Anne of Austria had lived for a decade on terms of indifference or outright hostility; yet for public consumption the newly formed Gazette presented their marriage as idyllically happy. "The affection their majesties have for one another is such that they can bear to be separated only when the king goes to make foreign conquests," reported one article. "They bear such affection for one another that they could not put up with being
[69] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 2: 174; cf. Stone's discussion of these issues in mid-seventeenth-century England, The Family, Sex, and Marriage, chap. 5.
[70] L'abbé Arnauld, Mémoires, 34: 170.
[71] Comte de Souvigny, Mémoires, 2: 110.
[72] Ibid., 2: 333.
[73] Ibid., 2: 274.
housed apart," reported another.[74] These were outrageous fictions, but fictions that mattered to the reading public; a happy marriage formed part of what the public expected of its king.[75]
Contemporary fears, like contemporary fictions, testified to the strength that was seen in some marriages. Montmorency-Damville fell so in love with his second wife, a woman far below him in standing, "that they say she'd made a pact with the devil."[76] Montmorency's successor as constable, the duc de Lesdiguières, was so in love with his wife that contemporaries believed she too must have used sorcery to snare him.[77] Madame de Lafayette's prince de Clèves claimed to have concealed most of his passion for his wife, "for fear of importuning you, or losing some of your esteem with manners unsuited to a husband."[78]
Indeed, it was precisely the overlap between ideals of romance and ideals of married love that disturbed pious contemporaries. Pierre Nicole, for instance, had to address the nature of marriage as he sought to evaluate the culture around him by rigorous Christian standards. Nicole thought plays, poetry, and novels dangerous because they stimulated love: "Since the passion of love is the strongest trace that sin has left on our souls," he wrote, "there is nothing more dangerous than to excite it, nourish it, and destroy what holds it in check. . . . Now, nothing serves this purpose better than the horror of love that custom and a good education establish; and nothing more diminishes that horror than theater and novels, for that passion appears there with honor, in ways that, far from making it seem horrible, make it lovable. It appears there without shame or infamy; the characters boast of being touched by it. . . . It does not justify novels and comedies, to say that only legitimate passions appear there, passions that end in marriage. For even though marriage turns sinful desire to good use, desire in itself is always bad and uncontrolled. . . .
[74] Quoted in Ruth Kleinman, Anne of Austria, Queen of France (Columbus, Ohio, 1985), 90.
[75] It is worth noting that Louis XIV presented his relations with his mistresses as stable, long-term intimacies, and that Racine converts the king's flirtation with Mancini into the tragedy of Bérénice, illustrating the sacrifice of personal fulfillment in favor of public responsibilities.
[76] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1: 66.
[77] Ibid., 1: 52.
[78] Madame de Lafayette, La princesse de Clèves , in Romans et nouvelles , ed. Emile Magne (Paris, 1961), 374.
Representations of legitimate and of sinful loves have almost the same effect and excite the same feelings. . . . Indeed, portrayal of love covered by this veil of honor is the more dangerous, for the observer watches less warily."[79]
Nicole believed that images of passionate love were all about. He thought them dangerous because they appealed so powerfully to his contemporaries and because they were legitimated by images of marriage based on love. Nicole was clearly right at least about the frequency of such images. Starting with L'Astrée , at the turn of the century, readers and theatergoers were surrounded by depictions of romantic love. Even if few had the experience of happy marriage, most would have seen its image on the stage and in novels. Nicole feared that fascination with love might spread beyond marriage and encourage adulterous relations. But he also believed that romantic marriage itself posed dangers, for the ideal encouraged Christians to attach excessive importance to sex and romance, at the expense of the love that they owed God. His contemporaries disturbed Nicole, not because they expected too little of marriage, but because they expected too much.
Love thus mattered enormously to seventeenth-century polite society. But other aspects of seventeenth-century thought and practice worked to make love seem especially difficult. One problem to which contemporaries returned again and again was that of women's independence: women were expected to spend much of their time apart from their husbands and to have separate interests and friendships. Pressure for women's independence came from a variety of sources. Montesquieu argued that all monarchical societies required sexual freedom for women. Female society was one of the lures by which kings could draw powerful men to their courts, and hence it served as a mechanism of political control. Thus Montesquieu believed that such virtual republics as Holland and England controlled women closely, whereas courtly societies accorded them enormous freedom.[80] Others saw women's freedom as a custom specific to France. "I am not surprised,"
[79] Nicole, Oeuvres philosophiques et morales , 438–39.
[80] Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. David Wallace Carrithers (Berkeley, 1977), 168. Cf. the similar observations of Marc Fumaroli, "Le 'langage de cour' en France: Problèmes et points de repère," in August Buck et al., eds., Europäische Hofkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 1981), 2: 23–32.
wrote Tallemant des Réaux of the opinion that French women were especially difficult and demanding, "for practically everywhere else they are virtually imprisoned and cannot practice gallantry, since they see no men."[81] Men who failed to allow their wives freedom could expect mockery from polite society.[82]
Expectations of women's independence took concrete form in seventeenth-century architecture that accorded wives separate apartments within the aristocratic household. Marivaux's Jacob noted of the first Parisian household in which he served that "the master and mistress each had a private suite, from which they dispatched somebody every morning to inquire how the other was"; and household manuals made it clear that this was the standard to which all aristocratic families should aspire.[83] As important, seventeenth-century comedy regularly presented women as independent, indeed, as far more independent than was typically the case in daily life.
Both Corneille and Molière presented women living and making romantic choices in almost complete independence from familial influences. Thus Corneille's heroine Mélite has a mother, to whom she owes "everything, and with any other lover I would wish to subordinate everything to her command."[84] But for her beloved she is ready to ignore her mother's wishes, and in fact the mother's powers remain invisible; she never appears in the drama, and the potential conflicts between old and young, love and family interest, never emerge. Mélite foreshadows the still more extreme instance of Célimène of Molière's Misanthrope . Célimène too makes no reference to family in making her romantic choices, and she too appears to live by herself; to all intents and purposes she is a free actor, receiving men as she chooses and in the end setting terms for an eventual marriage. Corneille's La suivante offers a different reading of women's place, with a father very much present and a sister whose marriage is entirely arranged for her, in effect as an exchange for her brother's advantage. Yet in this play as well Corneille raises the possibility of a daughter's resistance to her father's dictates; and the suivante herself offers again an image of women's explosive power. She is a female figure whose only attachments are
[81] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 1: 66.
[82] Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976).
[83] Marivaux, Le paysan parvenu, 52; Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1983), 49–51.
[84] Mélite, lines 713–14, in Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, 38.
social, with no family mentioned at all; and she is the source of repeated disruptions and uncertainties in the plot—an image of women as at once independent of organic connections (though occupying a subject social position) and dangerous.
These should not be taken as images of contemporary behavior, though they may suggest the range of possible behavior in the early seventeenth century. This was, rather, a chosen image of women's place and potential powers within society.[85] Comedy, architecture, and the expectations of courtly life itself offered intensified visions of women's independence and potential powers precisely during years when women's legal independence was probably deteriorating, and in a society that remained heavily dominated by male authority, the threat of male violence, and anxieties about dynastic continuity and purity.[86]
Women were expected to be independent during these years, but within settings that—as Nicole feared and Montesquieu claimed to observe—continually stimulated erotic impulses and made romantic love a constant preoccupation. Dance, music, novels, poetry, and plays were all thought to stimulate erotic feelings and hence to lead both men and women into dissatisfactions and adventures (as will be seen in more detail below). Romance and romantic freedom were essential components of courtly culture; the court was not a scene of heightened self-control only, but also one of continuous ruptures of self-control. At court, as Madame de Lafayette observed, love and ambition went together.[87]
This combination of ideas—romantic visions of love, belief in women's freedom, incorporation of erotic longings into the official culture of the court—accorded ill with the ideology of lineage. Seventeenth-century society prized dynastic purity and sought to explain personal qualities by dynastic inheritance. One might expect such ideas to have produced close control of women and the careful channeling of illicit male sexuality toward social inferiors, so as to
[85] Cf. Greek tragedy, in which powerful, dangerous women illustrate contemporary male fears rather than practices.
[86] On the increasing control exercised over women in these years, see Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16, 4 (Spring 1989). Cf. Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes, for the argument that autonomy and "feminism" were a distinctly robe vision during the seventeenth century.
[87] Madame de Lafayette, Romans et nouvelles, 252, discussed above, Chapter 1.
avoid troubling questions about the purity of lineages. But if anything the reverse occurred. Courtly sexuality undercut the solidity of the family as a race , an eternal chain of blood and biological qualities. Seventeenth-century visions of adultery made high-born women proper objects of sexual pursuit by their social equals and repeatedly stressed the interest such women might have in sexual relations with inferiors.
Early in the century Malherbe emphasized these troubling implications of sexual freedom for serious belief in dynastic purity: "He used to say often to Racan . . . that it was a folly to boast that one came from the old nobility; that the older it was, the more doubtful it was; and that it needed only one lascivious woman to pervert the blood of Charlemagne and Saint Louis; that someone who thought himself descended from those great heroes perhaps descended from a valet or violin player."[88] (Malherbe, it is worth noting, associated music with dangerous sexuality.) That noble ladies would find their servants attractive was a long-standing theme in French literature. " 'Ah! Madame, if you only knew,' " says one of the men in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron , " 'what a great difference there is between a gentleman who spends his whole life in armour on active service and a well-fed servant who never budges from home, you'd excuse the poor widow in this story' " for making love with her servant.[89] The ideology of race implied direct correspondence between social and natural order, by presenting the aristocracy as a collection of lineages, whose political rights and allegiances flowed from biological continuity. Courtly culture persistently contradicted this ideology and rendered uncertain the individual's place within the biological patterns it offered.
And indeed a series of noteworthy scandals suggested that these concerns were not mere literary imaginings. At the end of the sixteenth century there was the widely followed case of the princesse de Condé: strongly suspected of having become pregnant by a servant and of having poisoned her husband, she was incarcerated for seven years. The male Condé line survived only because of this pregnancy, and a decade after the event rumors about it continued to circulate.[90]
[88] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1: 113–14.
[89] Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, 232.
[90] M. le duc d'Aumale, Histoire des princes de Condé pendant les XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 6 vols. (Paris, 1885), 2: 222ff., 246.
After the Fronde the Grand Condé publicly accused his wife of sexual relations with her servants and relegated her to a country house; the ambassador of the duc de Savoie wrote to his master that "for a long time that princess had commerces infâmes with her valets; that's why her husband had for a long time not wanted to see her."[91] All of these episodes had public dimensions; contemporaries followed them in pamphlets and satirical poetry and discussed them abroad. Malherbe's snickers at aristocratic lineage and his belief in servants' sexual allure expressed common beliefs about social reality—a widespread sense that women threatened the purity of the lineage.
Fear for the authenticity of a lineage arose still more easily within the aristocracy itself. In the mid-seventeenth century the duc de Candale accused his wife of sleeping with one of his followers, and a few years later came the notorious lawsuit over the Rohan inheritance, a case that turned on Madame de Rohan's well-known infidelities with Candale himself.[92] Madame de Lafayette focused the conclusion of her novella La comtesse de Tende on the problem of illegitimacy. As she died, the comtesse "had the consolation of seeing her child born alive, but of being assured that he couldn't live and that she was not giving her husband an illegitimate heir."[93]
Fear of illegitimacy was one reason that illicit sexual relations were no mere game to seventeenth-century high society. Madame de Lafayette's fictional comte de Tende "thought only of killing his wife" on learning of her adultery.[94] Lafayette's Princesse de Cléves turns on a similar assumption: the mistaken belief that his wife had committed adultery effectively destroys the prince de Clèves, leaving him in a despair so absolute that he "could not resist his overwhelming grief. Fever took him that very night," and he died a few days later.[95] Even in the eighteenth century, adulterous sexuality might have terrible consequences for women: the three inséparables of Les liaisons dangereuses , like the présidente de Tourvel and Cécille Volanges, all find themselves confined to convents once their seductions become public knowledge. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such episodes
[91] Quoted in Mongrédien, Le Grand Condé, 181–82.
[92] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1: 640–48.
[93] Madame de Lafayette, Histoire de madame Henriette d'Angleterre, la princesse de Montpensier, la comtesse de Tende, ed. Claudinne Hermann (Paris, 1979), 124.
[94] Ibid., 122.
[95] Madame de Lafayette, Romans et nouvelles, 373.
might lead to bloodshed for men; the duc de Mayenne twice arranged assassinations in defense of his family's honor.[96]
Courtly preoccupation with love created a central contradiction within seventeenth-century aristocratic society. The ideology of the lineage required rigid control of women and careful channeling of male sexuality, if not exclusively into marriage, then in socially harmless directions; the court, on the contrary, required sexual freedom for both men and women, and many of its entertainments encouraged thought about love. Seventeenth-century scandals display contemporaries' uneasy awareness of this clash of principles, a clash that might still easily lead to violence.
If contemporaries nonetheless persisted in their pursuit of love, this reflected a vision of personality that accorded an extraordinary place to the passions. "It is on the passions alone that all the good and evil of this life depends"—the writer is no gallant, but René Descartes, opening the final section of his treatise on The Passions of the Soul.[97] Descartes confirmed this emphasis by according an extraordinary range to the passions, which he presented as much more significant and wider in scope than animal drives. Among the passions that his treatise lists are hope and anxiety, generosity, vanity and humility, pity, cheerfulness, wonder, and friendship. With regard to the passions, as with so much else, Descartes claimed absolute originality, on the grounds that the ancients had produced nothing useful on the subject.[98] But in fact ancient rhetorical tradition implied a comparable vision of passion as both larger than physical needs and ethically positive. To touch passions in this sense, after all, was the rhetorician's purpose; passion had a respectable place even within public life.[99]
[96] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1:33, 703, nn. 2, 4, 5.
[97] The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1985), 1: 404; elsewhere, of course, Descartes could use rather different language, suggesting that real felicity lies in the soul, which can stay detached from the passions (1: 345ff.).
[98] Ibid., 1: 328. For stress on the radicalism of Descartes's evaluation of the passions, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 147–58.
[99] Aristotle, On Rhetoric, ed. George A. Kennedy (Oxford, 1991), book 2, chapters 1–17, presents an analysis of passions and personality types, as a basis for effective argument; see also Paul Griscelli, "Un aspect de la crise de la rhétorique à la fin du XVIIe siècle: Le problème des passions," XVIIe Siècle 143 (April–June 1984): 141–46; and Marc Fumaroli, L'âge de l'éloquence: Rhétorque et "res literaria" de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique (Geneva, 1980), passim.
Yet emotions remained dangerous, for reason and will could never fully govern them. Seventeenth-century writers took trouble to emphasize both the extent of this autonomy of the passions and its ethical implications. Beyond control, the passions stood also beyond moral censure. Though actions resulting from them might indeed be condemned, the realm of feelings admitted no such judgment. In a defense of La princesse de Clèves, thus, the abbé de Charnes argued that "since we cannot master all the movements of our passions, we do not rule as we wish their birth or duration; . . . all we can do is not to allow ourselves to be carried away by their violence, and to modulate them by our reflections."[100] This was more or less the view that Madame de Lafayette herself had taken: the princesse, grieving at her failure to love her husband properly, "told herself it was a crime to have no passion for him, as if it had been something in her power."[101] The princesse illustrated in extreme form both the possibilities and the limits that late-seventeenth-century high society attributed to self-control. She can neither prevent herself from loving the duc de Nemours nor make herself love her husband; in her world affections cannot be learned or acquired through habit. She can only make herself act with perfect propriety.
La princesse de Clèves ends, of course, with still darker reflections on human emotional capacities. Widowed, at full liberty to marry her beloved Nemours, the princesse nonetheless refuses him, not on grounds of propriety but because of her view of love itself: "Do men preserve passion in these eternal bonds [of marriage]? Am I to hope for a miracle in my case, and can I place myself in the position of assuredly seeing die that passion that would be my entire happiness? M. de Clèves was perhaps the only man in the world able to preserve love in marriage. My destiny determined that I could not benefit from this good fortune; and perhaps his passion survived only because he found none in me. But I would not have this means to preserve yours."[102]
This was a vision of love as ultimately hopeless, necessarily failing because of the inconstancy of human (or at least male) sentiments.
[100] J.-A. de Charnes, Conversations sur la critique de la princesse de Clèves (Paris, 1679; repr. Tours, 1973), 219.
[101] Madame de Lafayette, La princesse de Clèves, in Romans et nouvelles, 377–78. Here and below I emphasize the novel's pessimism more than does Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York, 1988), 25ff.
[102] Madame de Lafayette, La princesse de Clèves, in Romans et nouvelles, 377–78.
Passion arose from obstacles, even in the case of the adoring prince de Clèves, and would disappear with them. The result was a fundamental disconnectedness between individuals. Equality of love could not exist, because the one partner's indifference or inaccessibility sustained the other's passion. The princesse spoke of male infidelity, but others applied the same terms to women. "The heart is blind, hence all our errors," concluded Saint-Evremond. "[I]t prefers a fool to an honnête homme . . . gives itself to the ugly and deformed and refuses the handsomest. . . . It disconcerts the most restrained women, steals prudes from virtue . . . faithless to husbands, uncertain to lovers . . . it gives and withdraws its affections without reason."[103]
Her choosing to avoid these tumults leads the princesse de Clèves to a famous impasse. Though she has avoided unhappiness, her effort to control passion leads to the destruction of all other feeling. Having given up love, "the other things of the world seemed so indifferent that she renounced it forever."[104] She can turn only to religion and retreat from the world, and even then she survives only a short while. If passion brings misery, in this view, refusal of passion constricts human relations and eventually destroys human life.
For both the princesse de Clèves and the moral theorists around her, there could be no real control of emotion, only its channeling into the forms of social propriety. Hence some of the intensity with which seventeenth-century nobles addressed the problem of civility, the forms of behavior and self-control that the well-born ought to exhibit. Numerous books taught newcomers how they ought to behave in polite society and at court; salon members discussed standards of elegance; and, so historians have suggested, standards of behavior actually changed; men and women became less violent, less impulsive, and cleaner.[105] Interest in civility reflected attitudes toward both the self and others. As historians have pointed out, to follow the rules of the civility manuals was in some degree to view the self as malleable, as a
[103] Saint-Evremond, Oeuvres en prose, 12: 289–90.
[104] Madame de Lafayette, La princesse de Clèves, in Romans et nouvelles, 394.
[105] Among scholars who have explored these changes, see, for example, Elias, The Court Society; Jean-Louis Flandrin, Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne France (Paris, 1976); Orest Ranum, "Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the French state," Journal of Modern History 52 (September 1980): 426–51; Georges Vigarello, Le propre et le sale (Paris, 1985); Jean-François Solnon, La cour de France (Paris, 1988).
construct that could be reshaped by the exercise of thought and will. But to practice civility was also to accord great importance to other people, for civility's purpose was to win affections. Polished behavior thus represented another response to the need for others that, I have argued, permeated seventeenth-century high society. Bussy-Rabutin, as we have seen, made "being in love" part of being an honnête homme, a gentleman; Faret's handbook of civility gave a central place to friendship, as the first thing that a newcomer to court would need.
The most extensive discussion of the overlap between civility and friendship came from the Jansenist Pierre Nicole. Civility originated, Nicole argued, in those complex needs for affection that he believed dominated human personality: "Since we so need the love of others, we are led naturally to seek it and obtain it. And as we know . . . that we love those who love us, either we love others or we pretend to do so. This is the foundation of human civility, which is only a sort of commerce of self-love, in which one attempts to attract the love of others by expressing affection for them." Civility, Nicole concluded, was un langage d'affection that men and women offered in place of real feelings.[106] It expressed the asymmetry of the human condition, which mixed an intense need to be loved with a very limited capacity to love others. Yet Nicole sought to preserve the value of such civility even within his system of high ethical demands. The pious Christian, he wrote, cannot hope to attract others to his ways if his piety "is wild, uncivil, crude, and if it does not seek to show men that it loves them, wants to serve them, and is full of warm feelings for them. . . . We must try thus to purify civility, not to banish it."[107] Acceptance of civility reflected an acceptance of human nature, with all its imperfections. Even the pious had an obligation to enter into what Nicole called the "infinite number of tiny human bonds . . . which consist of esteem and affection."[108] Hence his concern with developing the basic lines of a "Christian civility." The group surrounding the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Parisian center of refined thought and manners, likewise sought to ally elegance of behavior with elevated morality.[109]
[106] Nicole, Oeuvres philosophiques et morales, 268.
[107] Ibid., 276.
[108] Ibid., 275.
[109] David Maland, Culture and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (New York, 1970).
Others had less confidence that a mixture of ethics and civility could be achieved. Instead they argued that concern with civility and manners necessarily contradicted Christian morals. Many of the leaders of the move to more refined behavior during the seventeenth century were in fact well-known libertines, lax in morals and often freethinkers in religion as well. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Queen Marguerite's household was far more important than the royal court as a center of cultivation, despite Marguerite's famous love affairs.[110] The groups around Gaston d'Orléans, Condé, and Philippe d'Orléans were notoriously irreligious; even in the more repressive moral atmosphere of Louis XIV's later reign, the courtesan Ninon de L'Enclos's home remained a center both of elegant behavior and of discreet freethinking; though the court never received Ninon, polite society accorded her a large role in defining elegant behavior.[111]
But the association of civility with libertinism involved more than individual personalities and choices. At the center of much courtly refinement stood direct challenges to Christian views. "Honnête homme and morals don't go together," went one contemporary aphorism; "the first quality of an honneste homme " is "scorn for religion," went another.[112] Such comments partly reflected the materialist orientation of much elegant behavior in the seventeenth century, its preoccupation with the physical world and its pleasures. Saint-Evremond made the point explicitly: "[T]he enjoyment of pleasure, volupté in a word, is the true purpose to which all our actions tend."[113]
In keeping with these materialist views, gastronomy became something of a mania in seventeenth-century Paris, leading to instances of extreme eccentricity. "He was a handsome man, and clean," wrote Tallemant of M. de Bernay, a member of a famous robe family, "but he was so fanatical in his vision of keeping the best table in Paris that he was ridiculous. They called him the satin cook; for he went into his kitchen, where they put an apron on him and he meddled with
[110] Jean-H. Mariéjol, La vie de Marguerite de Valois, reine de Navarre et de France (1553–1615) (Paris, 1928; repr. Geneva, 1970), 248–49 343ff., 359.
[111] Roger Duchêne, Ninon de L'Enclos: La courtisane du grand siècle (Paris, 1984).
[112] Quoted in René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1943), 1: 15.
[113] Antoine Adam, ed., Les libertins au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1964), 231.
everything. . . . He was, so to speak, a pedant of good eating, for he was a slave to the proper ordering of his dishes."[114]
Bernay was eccentric but not unique, for gastronomy formed a central part of the new standards of elegance that characterized mid-seventeenth-century Paris. Good food became a subject for books and for boasting in polite society. The marquise de Sablé, reported Tallemant, "claims that there is no one with such delicate taste as she, and that she has no use for those who do not appreciate fine things. She is always inventing some new foolishness."[115] Regnard included mockery of gastronomic excess in his comedy Le Joueur, suggesting how widespread the theme had become in the late seventeenth century: "So it's this magistrate, . . . this Doctor of Suppers, who dozes in court but pronounces sentence on the stew; who judges without appeal on wines of Champagne—is it from Rheims, the Clos, or the Montagne? who, never encumbered with books of law, carries cookbook and ground pepper in his pocket."[116] Boisrobert made fun of the exigent delicacy of a group known as the côteaux, about whom a fellow epicure complained "that in France there are not four hillsides whose wine they approve of. . . . He criticized two rather sharply, that is, Sablé and Saint-Evremond, as people who found nothing good, and who in their lives hadn't given a glass of water to anyone."[117] Elegant gastronomic discriminations, these examples suggested, involved an anti-Christian concern with the physical world, a failure of civic duties, and a more fundamental failure of charity, a mocking, critical view of those who did not meet the new standards of behavior. Its essence was critical distance from others.
Still more disturbing to moralists, of course, was the fact that elegance was so often associated with illicit sexuality. "At that time," remembered the duc de Bouillon of the 1550s and 1560s, "there was a custom that it was inappropriate for a young man of good maison not to have a mistress. They were not chosen by the young men them-
[114] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 2: 252–53.
[115] Ibid., 1: 516.
[116] Jean-François Regnard, Le Joueur, ed. John Dunkley (Geneva, 1986), 181.
[117] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1: 412–13. Late in the century, it is worth noting, Boileau turned his satire not against exaggerated delicacy but against a host who pretended to elegance but served stringy chicken, Auvergnat wine disguised as Hermitage, and "pour comble de disgrace, / Par le chaud qu'il faisait nous n'avions point de glace" (Satire 3, in Nicolas Boileau, Oeuvres complètes , ed. Françoise Escal [Paris, 1966], 21–22).
selves, still less because of affection, but, rather, were either given by some relative or superior or themselves chose the young men by whom they wished to be served." His own mistress "became very careful for me, correcting everything that I did that seemed to her inappropriate, indiscreet, or uncivil. . . . No other person helped so much to introduce me to the world and to give me the manners of the court."[118] A century later, Ninon de L'Enclos claimed to perform a similar role, introducing young men to elegant manners and thought.[119] Women were essential to the court, attracting men to it and shaping their behavior; erotic relations readily followed.
Moralists pointed to other ways in which elegance stimulated the senses. Late in life, with the enthusiasm of the reformed sinner, Bussy-Rabutin urged that court dancing be prohibited: "[I]n those places, . . . the beautiful objects, the lights, the violins, and the excitement of the dance would enflame a hermit. . . . I hold that one must not go to a ball if one is a Christian."[120] Elegant entertainments, so Bussy's complaint ran, did not produce self-control; on the contrary, they risked producing dangerous freedom.
The fashion of masked balls early in Louis XIV's personal reign expressed as well the liberating implications of elegance. Contemporaries saw this liberation clearly and found it highly pleasurable. "It's a new style of ball, and quite agreeable," reported the duc d'Enghien to an absent friend. "[E]veryone at court comes disguised . . . so that one is not at all known, and one dances sometimes for an hour without recognizing anyone whom one sees. . . . [S]ometimes rather amusing adventures occur."[121] A year later the fashion continued, and Enghien
[118] Henri, duc de Bouillon, Mémoires , in Michaud and Poujolat, eds., Nouvelle collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France . . . , 11 (Paris, 1854), 5.
[119] Duchêne, Ninon de L'Enclos .
[120] Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires , 2:299. Cf. Sorel's Francion , 340, for the impact of music, dancing, and decorations: "That tune that the musicians took up on their lutes . . . ravished all those present; there was a rhythm so humorous and so lascivious, that together with the words—themselves sufficiently so—it invited everyone to the pleasures of love. Everything in the room sighed for the charms of pleasure, even the candles—agitated by I know not what wind—seemed to breathe like men and to be possessed by some passionate desire. A sweet madness having taken hold of their souls, they struck up sarabands, which most danced in, mixing confusedly in sweet and immodest postures. A few ladies who until then had kept their modesty . . . allowed it now to escape, so that they did not return as chaste as they had come."
[121] Emile Magne, ed., Le Grand Condé et le duc d'Enghien: Lettres inédites à Marie-Louise de Gonzague, reine de Pologne, sur la cour de Louis XIV (1660–1667) (Paris, 1920), 4 (22 February 1664).
emphasized its social implications: "[S]ince masked balls have been invented, no one can endure any others; nothing approaches them; there is a liberty without disorder, one places oneself where one wishes, speaks to whom one wishes, and one acts as if everyone were equal."[122] The ball was not only a scene of heightened eroticism but a setting of deliberately created anonymity. For both reasons, it was a site of freedom.
Music by itself was thought to have the same unsettling effects, and it too was a constant presence in seventeenth-century polite society. Madame de Lafayette described the pleasures of life around the king's sister-in-law: "[A]fter supper, all the men of the court appeared there, and the evening passed amid the pleasures of comedies, gambling, and violins—in brief, with all the pleasure imaginable and with no mix of sorrow."[123] Gourville described his escape from Paris after Fouquet's arrest, in his carriage "with all my domestics, who were composed of a cook, a butler who played the bass, an officier who served also as valet de chambre, and two lackeys. All three played the violin; it was the fashion then."[124] Bussy-Rabutin described a famous debauch with several of the court's most notorious figures: "[A] little later we sent to Paris to have four of the king's violinists" to liven up the party.[125] Violins thus provided the normal background both to private life and to the morally uncertain world of libertine banquets. At least until the mid-seventeenth century, these courtly pleasures were seen to carry clear moral dangers. "At the end of three months," wrote Tallemant as a mark of a widow's immorality, "she entered houses where there were violins and comedy."[126]
The attempt to end this ambiguity, to bring courtly pleasure within the sphere of morally appropriate behavior, concerned Madame de Maintenon in her establishment of Saint-Cyr: "[A]ttentive to everything that might provide the young ladies of Saint-Cyr with an education appropriate to their birth, [she] complained of the danger that one ran in teaching them to sing and recite verses, because of the na-
[122] Ibid., 131 (23 January 1664).
[123] Madame de Lafayette, Histoire de madame Henriette d'Angleterre , 46.
[124] Jean Hérauld, sieur de Gourville, Mémoires , ed. Léon Lecestre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1894), 1:192–93.
[125] Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires , 2:90.
[126] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1:504.
ture of our best verses and most beautiful tunes."[127] She turned to Racine in the hope of finding morally suitable verses for her young ladies; Racine was sympathetic, for he had given up writing profane poetry because of religious scruples.
Like Pierre Nicole, then, Madame de Maintenon sought to reconcile the demands of contemporary civility with Christian morality, by creating a Christian poetry—an effort akin to Nicole's call for a Christian civility. But by and large contemporaries found the contradictions between Christianity and elegant behavior more striking than their potential integration. Maintenon and Nicole found themselves having to reject or modify much that was at the center of polite culture: not only gastronomy, but also novels, theater, music, and dancing. If preoccupation with civility reflected need for others, then, it also reflected a degree of indifference to religious authority. Even Nicole, in the course of his argument for a Christian civility, concluded that "we must deal with men as men, and not as if they were angels."[128]
Just as it limited the hold of religious authority on contemporary life, so also concern with civility led seventeenth-century polite culture to reject the authority of the past. In this realm at least, seventeenth-century men and women expressed an overwhelming sense of the distance between their own era and earlier generations. In the sixteenth century, aristocratic rhetoric had emphasized decline, the inferiority of the present to even the recent past; seventeenth-century writers spoke instead of progress and viewed the past as primitive in nearly all domains.
One element in this vision of progress was a readiness to see the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as an era almost entirely without self-control. Thus the brutishness of high society through the reign of Louis XIII forms a unifying theme in Tallemant des Réaux's Historiettes from that period; though Tallemant wrote only about fifteen years after Louis's death, his tales convey a sense of amazed historical distance, as he surveys an era of wildly different behavior. He stressed the violence that prevailed in the highest social circles: "The
[127] "Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Jean Racine," in Racine, Oeuvres complètes , 1:69.
[128] Nicole, Oeuvres philosophiques et morales , 275.
king did not want his first valets de chambre to be gentlemen," reported Tallemant of Louis XIII, "for he used to say that he wanted to be able to beat them, and he did not think he could beat a gentleman without losing his dignity."[129] Tallemant presented beatings as the normal fate of all early-seventeenth-century dependents, not just of servants. He reported having been told, "[B]ut I wouldn't want to guarantee it, that Bullion [Richelieu's surintendant des finances ] died from chagrin at being kicked by the cardinal de Richelieu." Tallemant had other reports that Richelieu "had a tendency to beat his men" and that the victims included the captain of his guards and the chancellor Séguier.[130] Tallemant ascribed a different form of brutality to the duc d'Angoulême, the bastard son of Charles IX who survived into the mid-seventeenth century. Angoulême refused to pay his servants; when they complained, he urged them to rob those who passed by his Parisian mansion. "It's for you to take care of yourselves," he told them. "[F]our streets end at the hotel d'Angoulême; you're in a fine location; take advantage of it if you wish."[131]
But violence was only one of the forms of vulgarity that impressed mid-seventeenth-century writers about earlier generations. Tallemant retailed a long series of stories about the loose sexual morality of the years before the Fronde. His point was not that sexual behavior was purer in his own time, but, rather, the animal quality of sexual behavior in earlier years; his contrast was not between misbehavior and virtue, but between the free rein of animal impulses and cultivated refinement. Thus François de Montmorency, who died in 1614: "[H]e was accused of being very brutal; he barely knew how to read." Tallemant doubted rumors that Montmorency had deflowered his daughters, "but as for his aunts, his sisters, his cousins, his nieces, he had no scruples. . . . They lived in complete license."[132] The duc de Sully presented only a slightly more respectable picture. Tallemant described his nightly dancing, as a collection of dependents and prostitutes watched, and his nearly incestuous relations with his daughter, the future Madame de Rohan.[133]
[129] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1:343.
[130] Ibid., 1:265, 304.
[131] Ibid., 1:96.
[132] Ibid., 1:65.
[133] Ibid., 1:49, 622. David Buisseret, Sully and the Growth of Centralized Government in France, 1598-1610 (London, 1968), describes Sully's habits.
These were stories about the gap between nature and culture. Early in his century, as Tallemant presented it, civility posed few checks on violent or sexual impulses. Other forms of disorder were likewise to be seen in the houses of the great. "One day," reported Tallemant, "[Gaston d'Orléans] saw a servant sleeping with his mouth open; he went over and farted into it. The page, half asleep, cried 'Bugger, I'll shit in your mouth.'"[134] Another of Gaston's dependents, the comte de Louvigny, was famous for his miserable clothing: "[T]hey used to say that he would have done better to do without his pants."[135] Richelieu's own household was not exempt from these kinds of vulgarity: "Once when the Cardinal wanted some clavichord music, Boisrobert [Richelieu's companion] said, 'M. de Bullion [the financier and dependent of Richelieu] pissed in it.' He pissed everywhere."[136] Into the era of Louis XIV there survived the complicated example of the Grand Condé: devoted to elegance in cuisine and the beautification of his estate at Chantilly, but someone whom Mademoiselle described as "the dirtiest man in the world"; Madame de Sévigné thought his having himself shaved and combed for his nephew's wedding so extraordinary that she described the transformation for her daughter.[137] Around Condé too there persisted rumors of incest, with his sister Madame de Longueville.[138] As Tallemant and others presented the period, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries formed an age with strikingly few checks on natural impulses. They described the age as a realm of nature, of brutality and disorder; they saw the culmination of this disorder in the incestuous or nearly incestuous households of Montmorency and Sully. Early in the seventeenth century, so these stories sought to show, even the most basic checks on natural impulses had been lacking—even among the loftiest families, even at court.
But in these respects Condé seemed a survival from another era, for alongside these stories Tallemant presented others that suggested at least hesitant progress in manners and cultivation—and that made clear the overwhelming superiority of his own times. Thus Antoine Arnauld "passed for eloquent in a time when scarcely anything was known about eloquence"—that is, in the late sixteenth and early
[134] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1:359.
[135] Ibid., 1:534.
[136] Ibid., 2:194.
[137] Quoted in Mongrédien, Le Grand Condé , 72, 175.
[138] Ibid., 59–60.
seventeenth centuries.[139] Madame des Loges, in about 1600, was "the first person of her sex to write reasonable letters. . . . Her letters are not very impressive; they were fine for that time."[140] The duc de Nemours was "the first who applied himself to writing gallantries in verse and who taught himself to design ballets and parades."[141] Of Viète, Tallemant wrote. "[B]efore him, there was no one in France who concerned himself" with mathematics;[142] of the comte de Cramail, that he "lived in a time when it didn't take much to seem a wit."[143]
Such claims for progress formed part of a recognizable rhetoric in the mid-seventeenth century, a rhetoric that was especially congenial to mid-seventeenth-century poets and essayists: they readily presented themselves as having achieved something new, without guidance from the past. Thus Descartes, in his famous (and exaggerated) insistence on his complete rejection of previous authority.[144] Thus Boileau, in his claim that "I advanced bravely, guided by myself alone, aided on the journey by my own genius only."[145] Corneille expressed a delicate modesty about his achievements, but he too emphasized the taste for cultural innovation among his contemporaries and the novelty of his own works. He said of L'illusion comique , "Let them call it bizarre or extravagant as much as they like, it's new";[146] in 1660, reflecting on the success of his first play, Mélite , he argued that "the novelty of this kind of comedy, of which there is not a single example in any language," partly accounted for its success.[147] The seventeenth-century cultural world included strong pressures for innovation and a confident sense that real advances had been achieved.
Corneille's assertions rested not only on notions of personal invention but also on a claim to have redrawn the relationship between social class and drama. Mélite 's success, he wrote thirty years after the event, reflected its "depiction of the conversation of honnêtes gens . . . . Never before had a comedy drawn laughter without ridicu-
[139] Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , 1:504–5.
[140] Ibid., 1:606, 607.
[141] Ibid., 1:89.
[142] Ibid., 1:191.
[143] Ibid., 1:232.
[144] On Descartes's originality, see above, n. 98.
[145] Boileau, Oeuvres complètes , Epistle 10.
[146] Dedication to L'illusion comique , in Corneille, Oeuvres complètes , 193.
[147] Ibid., "Examen," Oeuvres complètes , 28.
lous characters, the comic servants, the hangers-on, the captains, the doctors, and all the rest. Mine achieved its effect with the delicate humor of people of a higher standing than those seen in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, who were mere merchants."[148] Corneille thus described his originality as lying in the new relationship he had created between aristocratic society and artistic representation. Comedy shifted from representing the distant, the stock comic figures of older dramatic tradition, the peasants, servants, boastful soldiers, to representing the like, the substantial figures of the court and the city. This meant a sharpening of social boundaries; the lower classes were not to be present even in the theatrical self-representations of the wealthy. Like elegant manners, drama became a mechanism of social distinction.
As it sought to represent a narrower band of social types, drama also became more delicate in its selection of subject matter. Sex and some forms of violence disappeared from public representation; in their place came extended treatments of the feelings. The public, wrote Fontenelle of Corneille's later years, found distasteful "the very idea of the peril of prostitution" in the play Théodore; "and if the public had become so delicate, whom should Corneille have blamed but himself? Before him, rape succeeded in the plays of Hardy."[149] Racine took delicacy still further, boasting that in Phèdre the mere thought of sin sufficed to pull down punishment. For this reason, Racine hoped, it might avoid the censures that moralists applied to the contemporary theater.[150] Racine's drama—that which drew audiences in the later seventeenth century and to which Corneille could never entirely adapt—was a drama of inner emotions. With this in mind, theorists had steadily less patience for dramatic action itself. Excessive action, so mid-seventeenth-century theorists believed, signified vulgarity and superficiality, and an excessive concern with plea-
[148] Oeuvres complètes, 28. It is all the more striking that Corneille here exaggerated his innovations. Others had already written comedies using the language and situations of polite society and avoiding the stock characters of Roman comedy (Antoine Adam, La littérature française: L'âge classique, 4 vols. [Paris, 1968], 1: 176); the claim to originality clearly had value in itself. Cf. lan Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley, 1962), 14: "It is significant that the trend in favour of originality found its first powerful expression in England, and in the eighteenth century."
[149] Fontenelle, "Vie," in Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, 23.
[150] Racine, Oeuvres complètes, 39.
sure in drama.[151] The new drama advanced by parallel exclusions, of lowly social types and of improper behavior.
As drama became steadily more refined over the seventeenth century, so its theorists asserted, it became both more socially exclusive and more inward-turning; it portrayed ever less violence and ever more shades of feeling, and it presented these in increasingly courtly milieux. These changes testify to some of the changing meanings of civility, for (as the theorists suggested) drama functioned as both a reflection and a teacher of upper-class tastes.[152] Like Pierre Nicole, the dramatists sought to link exploration of the emotions with refinement of manners; developing civility accompanied a developing preoccupation with relations of friendship and love.
But in both drama and life, concern with civility ultimately led its aristocratic practitioners into contradictions: first, between pursuit of affection and pursuit of distinction; second, between different forms of distinction. Seventeenth-century civility expressed urges for attachment to others. Through elegance and graces, so the seventeenth century believed, men and women could attract others and secure their love; the language of friendship, love, and even familial relations used the notion of "merit" to explain why individuals received more or less love from those around them. Yet civility also offered means for setting oneself apart from others. This meant partly the sharper social discriminations seen in seventeenth-century drama, the growing distance from popular social types and amusements. But more fundamentally, concern with elegance encouraged constant evaluation and criticism of others' performances even within polite society. Such leaders in elegant behavior as Bussy-Rabutin and Saint-Evremond had the reputation of being cool toward others, difficult to please, and vain about their own accomplishments. Madame de Lafayette described the comte de Guiche as "the handsomest young man of the court and the best-proportioned, appealing [aimable de sa personne ], gallant, hardy, brave, high-minded: the vanity that so many fine qualities gave him and a scornful air visible in all his actions somewhat tarnished all this merit; but one must admit that no man at court had as much as
[151] Adam, La littérature française, 1: 164–73.
[152] A point suggested by Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism: An Essay (New York, 1968).
he."[153] Such men as Guiche, Saint-Evremond, and Bussy-Rabutin were viewed as médisants, who delighted in criticism and mockery; and eventually each was punished for the failing, Bussy with imprisonment, Guiche and Saint-Evremond with exile. If civility began with the urge to please others, it seemed to lead quickly to detachment and criticism.[154]
This was the first of civility's contradictions. The second lay in its awkward place within a social hierarchy based on bloodlines and family traditions. Virtually all seventeenth-century nobles believed in the superiority of noble birth and thought that specific family traditions had an important effect on individual personalities. But ideals of elegant behavior suggested a rather different, and in some measure contradictory, understanding of social distinction. These ideals belittled the relevance of the past for contemporary practice and stressed the need for individuals to train themselves to meet new standards. Tradition could have little significance in such circumstances, for even the recent past seemed to seventeenth-century men and women an age of brutish behavior and limited ability. Religious tradition had still less relevance: much in seventeenth-century civility called into question basic Christian values. Though it did not so explicitly contradict ideas of familial inheritance, the practice of civility did require seventeenth-century men and women to view themselves as in some degree newly created, following new forms of behavior and carefully shaping their gestures and expressions.
Especially during the sixteenth century, much of the need for this kind of self-control came from the royal court, "a land," as the comte de Souvigny advised his children, "where it is permitted to watch and listen, but forbidden to speak save with very good reason, on pain of prompt penitence."[155] Contemporaries spoke often of this self-control that life at court demanded, and they noted also the manners and even the special language that developed around the court. Yet to stress the role of Crown and court in creating elegant manners is to overlook the degree to which elegance developed at the margins of court life,
[153] Madame de Lafayette, Histoire de madame Henriette d'Angleterre, 43.
[154] Cf. historians' stress on the concern for physical separation that much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century civility showed: for instance, Elias, The Court Society; Vigarello, Le propre et le sale; Orest Ranum, "The Refuges of Intimacy," in Chartier, ed., History of Private Life, 207–63.
[155] Comte de Souvigny, Mémoires, 3: 68.
around such figures as Queen Marguerite, Ninon de L'Enclos, Saint-Evremond, Bussy-Rabutin, La Rochefoucauld.[156] All of these inspired some degree of active dislike at court and suffered varying forms of exile from it; all seemed to violate established moralities. Yet such figures played the dominant role in defining what courtliness meant, and their role became more important over the seventeenth century. The grim Versailles of Louis XIV's last years offered few pleasures to compare with those of the great aristocracy's Parisian houses.
Numerous accidental factors help to explain this divergence between the court and the leading exponents of civility, but ultimately it testified to the problems that civility posed for a society based on family and religious traditions. The Crown itself sought to embody these traditions, enforcing Christian and familial discipline, presenting itself as defender of order, hierarchy, and inheritance. As a result, it could never fully endorse the ethic of civility. Patterns of elegance could be modulated so as to fit Christian and dynastic social ideals, as Madame de Maintenon and Pierre Nicole sought to do. But the accord could never be perfect. More often, the pursuit of elegance placed serious strains on the society of orders, by implicitly proposing a social order oriented to progress and to worldly pleasures, dismissive of both religion and the past.[157] Models of civility could not enjoy an entirely easy relationship with the monarchy.
French nobles, so runs a principal argument of this chapter, felt a larger discomfort about the social order they inhabited, a discomfort that came from their growing sense of the disjuncture between personal and civic life. Both classical and medieval traditions taught that the civic and the personal world overlapped. In these traditions, friendship was a constituent element of public life, a form of emotional attachment that allowed familial and political groups to function more effectively; friendship rested on virtue, that is, on publicly shared evaluations of personal qualities. Many of these beliefs remained vigorous in the seventeenth century, but alongside them had arisen quite different views of personal connectedness. These situated friendship among the passions, explained its origins by immediate personal, often physical, attraction, and saw its function as providing a private shelter from public life.
[156] In this my interpretation differs from those who have stressed the political functions of civility, cited above, n. 105.
[157] A point emphasized by Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris, 1948).
Seventeenth-century thought also stressed the difference between the self that one presented to a friend and the self that emerged in society. These ideas too had troubling implications for a society of orders, for they presented the social self as an artificial construct, in contrast to the authentic being that one revealed to a friend. Implicitly more upsetting, real attachment to others required likeness, for the friend had to be another self, whose inner life one could share; there could be no real attachment between unequals, for instance between patron and client. Seventeenth-century writers continued to describe as friendship the mutual confidence between leader and follower, but by the time of Racine the problems of friendship between unequals seemed very great. Deference and fidelity lay increasingly in the realm of the social and inauthentic, and at an increasing distance from personal emotion.
The force of such emotion during the seventeenth century is the final point to be emphasized here. Seventeenth-century nobles believed that a variety of dangers surrounded both friendship and love, and they believed both likely to fail, as feelings shifted. But they also attached large and apparently increasing importance to love and friendship. Seventeenth-century moralists complained not of lack of feeling in those around them but of excess. It was this strength of feeling that made the collision between personal and social realms so painful.