Luxury as Disease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

unequal distribution of wealth, as Montesquieu makes clear:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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