Conclusion

At a climactic moment in the novel, the prince de Clèves addresses his wife: "I have only violent and uncertain feelings, of which I am not the master . . . I adore you, I hate you; . . . I admire you, I feel shame at doing so. In the end there is no longer either calm or reason within me."^[1] The prince's statement may stand for the elements in seventeenth-century culture that this study has explored. Seventeenth-century nobles, I have argued here, came to view the self as complex, unstable, yet ultimately more real than the groupings to which it belonged. The prince de Clèves needs others, yet is basically alone; to his emotion his wife can respond only with dutiful self-control. Containing the diverse impulses that the prince seeks to define, the self might develop in radically different directions, in response to both personal experience and wider cultural change. It had a history, which could not be predicted from its origins but required interpretation in the form of autobiography. Alongside this personal history, nobles saw a parallel historicity in the cultural expectations that surrounded the self. "All ages have their own characters," wrote Saint-Evremond. "[T]hey have their forms of politics, self-interest, business; they have their own moralities, in some sense, their own faults and virtues. It's always man, but nature varies within man."^[2]

This vision of the self as subject to both personal and cultural change emerged during years when noble ideology purported to define identity with great certainty. The ethic of race fixed the self within a series of overlapping entities. Whatever her or his merits and achievements, the individual remained an expression of these larger entities, notably the lineage and order from which he or she emerged. The

[1] Madame de Lafayette, La princesse de Clèves , in Romans et nouvelles , ed. Emile Magne (Paris, 1961), 362–63.

[2] Charles de Marguetel, seigneur de Saint-Evremond, Oeuvres mêlées , ed. Charles Giraud, 3 vols. (Paris, 1867), 3: 179 (letter to Hortense Mancini, 1677).

individual might change, but the race was eternal, a chain of continuity to the distant past. French nobles believed these ideas and heard them often.

Yet they failed in much of their explanatory promise. Nobles in fact often chose not to employ the ideology of race as they described their lives, and they embraced ideas that contradicted the ideology. They interpreted their lives in terms of individual ambition and achievement; they stressed hostilities and barriers within the dynastic family; they used language that undercut the legitimacy of political and social hierarchy. Worse yet, daily practice often contradicted aristocratic ideology as well. Passionate friendships functioned as alternatives to the social world. Writing offered both retreat to a private selfhood and submersion in the anonymity of publication. Play with money erased social differences. Many of these practices blurred gender as well as social boundaries. Men and women mingled in friendships, at the gambling table, in the process of publication; contemporaries guessed wrong about the authorship of both the Princesse de Clèves and the Lettres portugaises . Strong emotions surrounded many of these practices. Contemporaries saw their fellows becoming passionately involved in poetry, gambling, love, and careers, and they stressed the moral dangers these involvements entailed. Their excitements conflicted with conventional religious as well as social beliefs.

This study has explored reasons, many of them highly specific, for such choices. The court encouraged a new elegance of manners and demanded new forms of political calculation. Long-standing educational assumptions encouraged the individual's departure from home and family; seventeenth-century political conditions often made this separation a confrontation with foreign cultures and religions. Changing patterns of warfare demonstrated the distance between current practice and traditional beliefs, and evolving theories of monarchy challenged old ideas about loyalty and political morality. Money became an increasingly common presence in ordinary life, and with the venality of offices it came to permeate public life as well. The rise of printing changed nobles' uses of writing, and the widening audience for both printed and staged words had similar effects.

All of these forces were important, but, I have argued here, they fail to explain the emotions with which nobles pursued new models of selfhood in these years. They fail to explain the excitement nobles felt

about writing and new economic practices, the passion with which they entered friendships, or the intensity of their critique of dependency, whether on fathers, les grands , or the king himself. Such emotions, I believe, should be understood as responses to the increasing pressure that the ideology of hierarchy and lineage itself exerted on seventeenth-century men and women. Seventeenth-century ideology glorified dynasticism wherever it could be found, and in practical ways it strengthened the dynasty's hold over its members. Kings exercised tighter controls over courtiers, soldiers, and magistrates; fathers over sons; husbands over wives. Contemporaries came to define social status more purely in terms of ancestry, and their views received institutional form, with commoners excluded from a widening range of important positions. In the seventeenth century, vague social pressures in favor of ancestry and paternal authority acquired a newly systematic and effective character. Authority weighed more heavily on individual lives, and the weight was all the stronger because most seventeenth-century men and women accepted its moral legitimacy; they believed in the rights of ancestry and monarchy.

Yet they were not entirely comfortable with their beliefs and turned readily to alternatives. Some of these were explicit, as in the libertines' critique of religious tradition or the pursuit of friendship at the expense of family. Other alternatives were implicit and even unconscious: when tragedians presented royal fathers as rapacious and lawless, presumably the court audience could not have responded with explicit assent.

Few of these alternative visions were entirely new. Courtly elegance had a long history by the seventeenth century, and so did the social criticisms it generated. The ingratitude of the great was an old theme, and theatrical metaphors for the social world had circulated since the twelfth century.^[3] The culture that seventeenth-century nobles inherited must be seen as a heterogeneous collection of images, ideas, expectations, and values, rather than a cohesive system of beliefs. Within this assemblage, contradiction was inevitable and not necessarily troubling. Different values applied in different contexts, and their contradictory implications rarely had to be faced.

[3] Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages , trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), 138-40.

But seventeenth-century experiences, I argue, made cultural contradictions more visible and more painful.^[4] On the one side, moral debate acquired a new centrality in seventeenth-century polite society. Religious-minded moral critics brought new scruples to the examination of conduct and spelled out its troubling implications; libertines proposed non-Christian alternatives; and both groups noted that widely accepted forms of behavior diverged from religious standards. On the other side, the growing coherence of official ideology allowed less room for the play of contradictory values. Seventeenth-century men and women were expected to display greater loyalty to the state and to the patriarchal ideas that it represented. Acknowledgment of contradiction could not so easily be avoided in these circumstances, and old practices acquired new colorings. Medieval literature had spoken of friendship, for instance, but in the seventeenth century friendship became a longed-for shelter from the society of orders. This study has tried to stress the number of comparable shelters seventeenth-century men and women sought to construct and the pleasure they took in them.

After 1715 and Louis XIV's death, the pressure that maintained this doubling of social practices diminished. The monarchy continued to police the values of the society of orders, jailing unruly sons and legislating advantages for high birth. But its efforts lacked the coherence of the seventeenth century and suffered from its own contradictory intentions. In response to this relative opening of practice, eighteenth-century nobles turned eagerly to a variety of liberal ideologies and to the visions of emotional life that accompanied them. Their enthusiasms have long been seen to prefigure and explain the Revolution; but eighteenth-century enthusiasms can also help us to understand the psychological pressures that seventeenth-century society had generated.

[4] My understanding of how long-standing moral contradictions may move from implicit to conscious stature owes much to Roberto Mungabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (New York, 1976), passim.