Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France

Mastering Memory

Faith E. Beasley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351902205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The first half of the book is a detailed study of how the salons influenced the development of literature. Beasley argues that many women were not only writers, they also served as critics for the literary sphere as a whole. In the second half of the book Beasley examines how historians and literary critics subsequently portrayed the seventeenth century literary realm, which became identified with the great reign of Louis XIV and designated the official canon of French literature. Beasley argues that in a rewriting of this past, the salons were reconfigured in order to advance an alternative view of this premier moment of French culture and of the literary masterpieces that developed out of it. Through her analysis of how the seventeenth century salon has been defined and transmitted to posterity, Beasley illuminates facets of France's collective memory, and the powers that constituted it in the past and that are still working to define it today.

Chapter 1

The Voices of Shadows: The Salons and Literary Taste

In 1664, when the genre of the nouvelle historique was just coming into its own in France, the erudite scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet composed a history of the entire novel form in which he tried to account for French supremacy in the genre. A salon habitué and friend of some of the century’s most illustrious women, such as Mlle de Montpensier, Mlle de Scudéry, and Mme de Lafayette, Huet glorifies women’s position in France and attributes the superiority of the French novel to their unique status:

Il est vrai qu’il y a sujet de s’étonner que notre nation ayant cédé aux autres le prix de la poésie épique et de l’histoire, ait emporté celui-ci [the novel] avec tant de hauteur que leurs plus beaux romans égalent à peine les moindres des nôtres. Je crois que nous devons cet avantage à la politesse de notre galanterie qui vient à mon avis de la grande liberté dans laquelle les hommes vivent en France avec les femmes.¹

(It is true that it is surprising that our nation, which has allowed others to excell in epic poetry and history, has taken the prize with the novel, so much so that the best novels [of other countries] barely equal our minor ones. I think we owe this advantage to the politeness of our gallantry which is derived, in my opinion, from the great freedom with which men in France live with women.)

According to Huet’s reasoning, women in France have created what he terms a “rampart” of virtue, to replace the real walls society usually builds around them, and men use language to climb these walls. Huet explains that “C’est cet art qui distingue les romans français des autres romans”² (It is this art that distinguishes French novels from others.) In Huet’s assessment, sociability and gallantry, traits traditionally identified with France, have developed because of women’s particular status and especially freedom in society. More important, women and the arts they cultivate and encourage affect the literary forms in which France is viewed as excelling, specifically the novel.

It is of course hardly revolutionary to underscore how the social institution that embodied female influence the most during the Ancien Régime, the salon or ruelle, was related to the development of the sociability and galanterie now so identified with French culture today. More striking is Huet’s allusions to women’s influence on literary expression and culture through this particularly French institution of the salon. If one sifts through the myriad correspondence, memoirs, commentaries, critical treatises, letters, and literary texts of seventeenth-century France in particular, and some of the histories and commentaries of succeeding centuries that attempt to illuminate France’s classical past, it is possible to get glimpses of an association of the ruelles with much more than galanterie and sociability, athough these are always present. Dominated by the illustrious women who founded them, the ruelles of seventeenth-century France are often depicted as the spaces of supreme arbiters of literary taste and innovation and thus as an institution that constitutes a determining force of French culture.³ For instance, in 1702, a commentator on the previous century gave the following description of the already renowned and applauded playwright Pierre Corneille’s method for ensuring that his literary efforts would find favor with his public:

Quand il avait composé un ouvrage, il le lisait à Mme de Fontenelles sa soeur, qui en pouvoit bien juger. Cette dame avait l’esprit fort juste; et si la nature s’était avisée d’en faire un troisième Corneille, ce dernier n’aurait pas moins brillé que les deux autres. Mais elle devait être ce qu’elle a été, pour donner un neveu à ses frères.⁴

(When he had composed a work, he would read it to Mme de Fontenelles, his sister, who could judge it well. This woman’s mind was very accurate (juste), and if nature had dared to produce a third Corneille, this one would not have shown less brightly than the other two. But she had to be what she was, to give a nephew to her brothers.)

Corneille’s method was hardly unique for his time. Throughout the seventeenth century, one finds this type of collaboration between an author and his/her public. But it is not the kind of collaboration that comes to mind when today’s readers turn to examining the creative processes of France’s canonical minds. While one might feasibly envision Corneille asking one of his learned male colleagues for his opinion of his work, one would hardly think of him choosing his own sister as his ultimate arbiter and literary critic. And rather than seeking approbation founded upon knowledge of the ancient texts Corneille used as his sources, or the learned knowledge of rhetoric and rhyme associated with the established academic milieu, Corneille seems content to appeal to his sister’s taste, rational mind, and good sense, her “esprit fort juste,” hardly the criteria a modern reader would associate with proper literary criticism.

The process of literary evaluation described by Vigneul-Marville is not unique to Corneille. Throughout the seventeenth century, similar references are made to women’s proficient ability to discern the quality of literature. For example, in 1633, Jacques Du Bosc states:

J’en connais plusieurs [Dames de grande science] qui savent si bien juger des bonnes choses … que leur conversation sert d’école aux meilleurs esprits; que les plus excellents auteurs les consultent comme des oracles, et qu’on s’estime glorieux de leur approbation et de leurs louanges.⁵

(I know many very knowledgeable women who judge things so well … that their conversation serves as a school for the best minds; the best authors consult them like oracles … and they consider themselves fortunate to have their approval and their praise.)

Again, women are portrayed as the ultimate arbiters for the century’s “meilleurs esprits” and its best authors, even though their critical criteria are elusive. These women are “oracles,” not scholarly volumes that can be accessed easily to learn the formulae for literary success. In his preface to Vincent Voiture’s Oeuvres, Martin de Pinchesne underscores women’s position as literary critics: “Cette belle moitié du monde, avec la faculté de lire, a encore celle de juger aussi bien que nous, et est aujourd’hui maîtresse de la gloire des hommes.”⁶ (This beautiful half of the world, with the ability to read, also is able to judge as well as we are, and today is the master of men’s glory.) As we shall see, women are responsible for creating an alternative system of values for literary evaluation and production.⁷

These representative voices from the past raise a number of issues that will be at the heart of the present study, questions that will help us to elucidate the complex cultural atmosphere surrounding literary production in seventeenth-century France. What role were women seen as playing in literary criticism? What were the criteria used to judge literary works? How did they develop and how did they shape the literary landscape? What was the relationship between author and public? What form did literary criticism take and what were its contexts? What was the relationship between what can be termed these “worldly” forms of literary debate and criticism and the more traditional, scholarly forms of literary evaluation?

My goal in this chapter is not to give definitive answers to such broad questions—an impossible task—but rather to delve into the relationship between women and the arena they developed for their cultural activities, the salon or ruelle, and the literary field of seventeenth-century France. As shall become clear, while the salons are typically viewed today as merely “schools for politeness,” to return to Gillet’s description, where social skills were honed, seventeenth-century depictions of this very French institution accorded them a much broader social function, and most important for my purposes here, a precise role with respect to literature. In this chapter, I will begin with an overview of the salon movement and its relationship to the literary field. Focusing on some of the most important “shadows,” to use Yourcenar’s formulation, I will elucidate the nature of these gatherings and especially the criteria associated with what I will term “worldly” critique as opposed to the voices of the learned scholars traditionally viewed as the purveyors of literary values. How are these criteria defined by the worldly milieu and to what ends? By the mid century, the status of the salon milieu as arbiters of literary value was so established as to incite intense opposition. An analysis of the voices of dissent will further elucidate the perceived nature of the relationship between the salons, and literary critique and production. I will further examine the influence of the worldly milieu on the building blocks of literature, that is, on the language of classical France. A reading of two representative texts of the period, Marguerite Buffet’s Nouvelles Observations sur la langue française avec Les Eloges des illustres savantes, and Dominique Bouhours’s Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, reveals not only the influence of the worldly milieu on language, but more importantly the stakes and even danger of allowing women to determine a politically-charged cultural product.⁸

The origin of what has become almost the mythical milieu of the salons, is usually associated with the famed chambre bleue of the marquise de Rambouillet.⁹ Linda Timmermans’s research has shown, however, that the marquise’s gatherings were not an isolated social phenomenon. Two other salonnières, the vicomtesse d’Auchy and Mme des Loges, opened their doors and exercised power in the empire of letters before the famous marquise. Perhaps because the salons of d’Auchy and des Loges were openly academic,’ and posited themselves as serious gathering places for discussion and debate, especially with respect to literary matters, Rambouillet’s chambre bleue is usually highlighted as the first to unite writers and worldly figures in the art of genteel conversation.¹⁰ What has become the most celebrated model of the seventeenth-century ruelle began in approximately 1608 and remained a social institution until the marquise’s death in 1665. Although scholars continue to debate when precisely the salon exerted the greatest influence, many identify the highpoint of the chambre bleue as the second quarter of the century, from 1624 until the beginning of the civil war referred to as “La Fronde” in 1648.¹¹ Contemporaries lauded Catherine de Vivonne not only for her abilities to assemble a fascinating group of people and facilitate social interaction, especially the art of conversation, but also specifically for her literary sensibility. The expressions “le rendez-vous de tous les beaux esprits” (the rendez-vous of cultivated minds) and “le souverain tribunal des ouvrages de l’esprit” (the ultimate court for works of the mind) are phrases that are often used by contemporaries to describe the marquise’s gatherings.¹² Not simply a foyer for social refinement, the salon de Rambouillet exerted a strong influence on the development of the literary field in genera1.¹³ The chambre bleue attracted authors and intellectuals such as Jean Chapelain and for many was an institution that could rival the French Academy founded by Richelieu at precisely the height of Rambouillet’s influence. In 1725 when the duc de Langres was received into the French Academy, M. de Malezieu, the Academy’s director, posited the chambre bleue as the inspiration for the Academy. Responding to the duc, Malezieu states:

Je vous dirai simplement, Monsieur, que c’est avec une extrême satisfaction, que l’Académie Française reçoit aujourd’hui dans son sein un digne rejetton de la célèbre Julie et du grand Duc de Montausier. Elle n’oubliera jamais que ce fut à l’Hôtel de Rambouillet, maison célèbre, dont il sera parlé tant qu’il y aura des hommes de lettres sur la Terre, et sous les yeux de vos illustres Ayeux, que les Voitures, les Vaugelas, et les Balzacs tracèrent les premiers lineaments d’un dessein dont la perfection était réservée à un grand ministre qui n’était né que pour exercer des miracles.¹⁴

(I will tell you simply, Sir, that it is with great satisfaction that the French Academy today receives into its bosom the worthy descendant of the famous Julie and the great duc de Montausier. It will never forget that it was at the hôtel de Rambouillet, famous place that will be talked about as long as there are men of letters on earth, and under the gaze of your illustrious ancesters, that the Voitures, the Vaugelas, and the Balzacs drew the first lines of a project whose perfection was reserved for a great minister who was only born to create miracles.)

Literature, philosophy, and politics were all subjects of discussion and debate and were equally if not more important than the games and practical jokes that Tallemant des Réaux in particular identifies as the hallmark of the chambre bleue.

To judge from many of the myths and histories surrounding the salons, especially the chambre bleue, one might be tempted to view the worldly public as diametrically opposed to the doctes and their academic norms, in particular to the illustrious, state-sanctioned French Academy. While their values may have differed, their habitués were the same. In reality the two spheres were emmeshed in each other, leading to a dynamic, but very complicated literary scene. Perhaps no one is more representative of this complexity than the secretary of the French Academy during its opening years, Jean Chapelain. Before being chosen to join...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• A Note on Translations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Voices of Shadows: The Salons and Literary Taste
• 2 Defining a Literary Culture: The Ruelles and Literary Innovation
• 3 From Critics to Hostesses: Creating Classical France
• 4 Disseminating a National Past: Teaching Le Grand Siècle
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index