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Chapter 1

The Social Aesthetic of Play in Seventeenth-Century France

In the second half of the seventeenth century French authors commonly gave their nation pride of place in the creation of a distinctly modern literature. The natural grace of literary French seemed to make it superior not only to other European vernacular languages, but also to classical Greek and, perhaps more striking, to the classical Latin on which boys and young men labored in the collèges, heard university lectures, and conducted academic theses and disputations. There was much arrogance and more than a little pretension to the assumption that French belles lettres were, or ought to be, the envy of Europe. And yet many of the innovations that came to characterize “modern” literature did have their origins in seventeenth-century France, and the reason is not hard to find. It was in le monde—the elite society of Paris—that the writing of prose and poetry entered into symbiosis with a new culture of orality, the polite conversation of the salons and other venues of sociability among the titled and the wealthy.¹ Out of this chemistry came a wide array of new stylistic forms and genres in the vernacular, among them the mock epic, the “gallant” love letter, the vernacular poem, the epistolary essay, the polite dialogue, and the novel. Strict traditionalists among “the learned” (savants) might disapprove, but they were scorned as mere “pedants”; there was no need to imitate classical literature unswervingly on the assumption that it could not be superseded. The eloquence of public rhetoric in the royal law courts and the pulpits was owed respect, of course, but polite conversation and writing prided itself on being unsullied by it.

This was the goût moderne, the “modern taste” developed by, among others, Vincent Voiture, Madeleine de Scudéry, Mme de Lafayette, and Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. The eighteenth century witnessed a growing distaste for the goût moderne as the fluffy mannerism of a self-absorbed aristocratic society. Diderot and other philosophes equated its modernity with decadence; national rebirth required something quite different, an uplifting literature of high moral seriousness. Over the last several decades literary scholarship has taken exception to the self-righteousness of this verdict.² Two interlinked themes have emerged: that the goût moderne was modern in a far more positive sense than its eighteenth-century critics allowed, and that women—or more precisely, the women of le monde—played the central role in forming it and endowing it with cultural authority. In the French monarchy, Mlle de Scudéry has one of her characters observe in a conversational essay on “politeness” (politesse), the conversation of women is more “free” (libre) than in republics.³ Scudéry’s Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653) and Lafayette’s Zaïde (1669–1671) and La princesse de Clèves (1678) were founding texts in the history of the modern novel. Women’s presence as listeners and readers was essential to the formation of a worldly literary culture and the fledgling literary public that emerged around it. Stylistic experiments in constituting a new relation between author and reader—a shift from the rhetorical imposition of authority to a more reciprocal intersubjectivity—simulated the reciprocity expected in the “sociable equality” of polite conversation, of which women were the acknowledged masters. If aesthetic judgment was not individualized in the modern sense, it nonetheless gave more play to the “free” subjectivity with which women, unencumbered by learned rules, seemed especially endowed.

The goût moderne confronts us, however, with a deep paradox that we have not taken sufficiently into account. It is all too obvious that leisure was the way of life of the French old-regime aristocracy. It is so obvious, in fact, that we rarely plumb the alterity with which that way of life confronts us. We observe seventeenth-century polite culture from our side of a great social and cultural divide. One of the defining assumptions of modernity is that labor, and especially intellectual labor in various kinds of professional work, is a vital route to personal and social self-validation. When we speak of labor that is dehumanizing, it is with the certainty that labor ought to confer moral dignity, and indeed that it is essential to the realization of human potentialities. The certainty owes its centrality in modern culture to a concatenation of social and intellectual changes, some of them already underway in the late seventeenth century. One thinks of the Protestant and particularly Calvinist ideal of the calling, the Jansenist recognition of the need for the motive power of self-interest in human societies, and John Locke’s ethical thought.⁴ The norm of utility in assigning personal worth—of social “usefulness” through labor—is one of the enduring legacies of the Enlightenment, and it has been powerfully reiterated, if also impoverished, in our current saturation in an ideology of immediate market utility. Modern advertising insinuates that disciplined labor is not only materially rewarding, but also emotionally satisfying and even liberating. Enthusiasts of contemporary crime novels and television series will agree, I think, that the detectives, so obsessed by their work that they have little or no personal life, are emblematic of this ethos. Only in work do they find the meaning they cannot do without.

Most pertinent for our purposes, the work ethos permeates the pursuit of equality in modern feminism; among the essential human rights owed to women is the right to equal access to labor and its rewards. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, approved at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, claimed for women equal rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and women’s exclusion from most intellectual labor surely figured in its denunciation of men for endeavoring “in every way that (they) could to destroy woman’s selfconfidence in her powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” Feminists regularly appeal to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, because it makes no distinction between men and women in stating that “everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

In the light of these lineages of modernity, the norms of le monde and its literary culture were profoundly un-modern. The preeminence of this world rested on a perceived incompatibility between the socially validating freedom of play and the socially invalidating constraints of labor. In the spaces of polite sociability, labor was taboo. Women were the emblems and guardians of a social aesthetic of play that scorned utility, and that required that the performance of intelligence appear to be effortless, untainted by the concentrated and sustained effort that the term “labor” evoked. Hence the paradox of a profoundly unmodern modernity in which gender and status norms were so tightly interwoven as to be barely distinguishable. The paradox reminds us pointedly that, just as perceptions of social institutions and practices are refracted through the lens of gender distinctions, so too gender distinctions are refracted through the lens of status imperatives.⁵

To avoid presentism in studying seventeenth-century mondanité, I have made the social and cultural logic of un-modern modernity central to my reading of its texts. That is essential to understanding another paradox: that gender and status norms fused to set strict boundaries for women’s performance of intelligence even as they made female thought and speech exemplary for men aspiring to polite cultivation. Awareness of this duality has been implicit, and sometimes explicit, to two rich scholarly traditions, and my agenda here is largely to synthesize them in an effort to grasp the ways in which seventeenth-century French discourses contributed to perceiving and valuing male and female performances of intelligence. The first tradition is one that intellectual historians have not sufficiently engaged: the large and growing corpus of literary scholarship on the texts produced by the sociable and literary culture of le monde. The second tradition can be broadly described as the historical sociology of knowledge. Beginning in late nineteenth-century German sociology, and flourishing today in scholarship in which sociology and cultural anthropology meet, it is indispensable to positioning our texts within structural and normative wholes.

Aisance and Labor

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac’s Oeuvres diverses, published in 1644, included an imagined “conversation” (entretien) with Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, the daughter of a prominent Roman family and the wife of a royal councilor of state. More than a quarter century earlier the marquise had withdrawn from the court of Louis XIII, which she found tiresome and crude. In delicate health after bearing seven children, she preferred not to make the social rounds in Paris. Instead she created a kind of court that brought Parisian high society to her. She herself designed a new hôtel, begun in 1618, with high-ceilinged reception rooms leading into each other and a smaller chamber, known as the ruelle, where she received her guests reclining on her bed. The room was painted blue rather than the usual red or tan, with a matching décor, and the atmosphere was at once elegantly luxuriant and intimate, projecting aristocratic grandeur but offering a retreat from the demands of public life. This “Blue Room” became the fabled archetype for the salons of old-regime France.⁶

Balzac’s Lettres, published in 1624, used the discursive latitude of the epistolary genre to conduct a high-spirited and mischievous discussion of a wide range of subjects, including politics. The book was a literary triumph in le monde, “so much in vogue,” one of Balzac’s adversaries observed, “that for a long time one has not seen such a small book make such a grand name.”⁷ In the ensuing querelle about Balzac’s prose among men of letters a central issue was the relative value of tradition and modernity, imitation of the ancients and innovation. Balzac’s critics among the learned attacked his unrestrained ornamental exuberance and his impertinent tone for perverting ancient Greek and Latin rhetoric. His defenders haled him for endowing authorship with an unprecedented free subjectivity.⁸

Balzac had had high ambitions to pursue a political career at court, but having failed to win Cardinal Richelieu’s sponsorship he had retired to the family chateau in Angoulême in 1628, with only occasional visits to Paris thereafter. “I would rather ruin my little hopes than renounce entirely my liberty,” he wrote his friend René Descartes on April 25.⁹ Having marooned himself among provincials, he spent much of his time writing. In letters to friends in Paris he extolled the satisfactions of a solitary life of Ciceronian otium, or leisure, removed from the demands and intrigues of court life. If Balzac had renounced the life of the courtier, however, he could not live in isolation from Paris. Volatile and fiercely polemical by temperament, he would not have shone in polite sociability. But he remained virtually present in le monde through his letters to Jean Chapelain, a celebrated man of letters who was an habitué of the Blue Room and saw to it that Balzac’s letters were circulated and sometimes read aloud there. Balzac wrote his “conversation” with the marquise knowing that, in a limited but real sense, it would be a public event, and that he was addressing the nascent public of le monde.¹⁰

The opening conceit of the entretien was that, having read selections he had provided her from the canonical Latin texts, the marquise now wanted to learn about the “private” life of the Romans, their “play” (jeux) and “diversions,” and their “conversation” rather than their “ceremony.” Balzac used the opportunity to suggest that the “pleasures” enjoyed in the Roman republic and at the Augustan court, which had been “virtuous,” not “sensual,” should inform the new conversational sociability of the Blue Room. The French, guided by the Romans, would develop a culture of “urbanity,” a term Balzac coined, a “liberty” in social exchange that was “accommodating” without being “servile,” that avoided both “vain ostentation” and “affected restraint,” and that eschewed the burdensome “rules and precepts” of “public rhetoric.” In the new art of conversation, as in Roman urbanity, there would be nothing “studied or acquired.” And yet, even as he went so far in adapting to an aesthetic of play, Balzac, in the same polite prose, asserted his identity as a savant. He explained to the marquise that he was drawing on the fourth book of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, where the “three virtues” needed for rational and self-disciplined conversation were spelled out. That was a daring move: Aristotle was held responsible for university scholasticism, for which le monde had contempt. Balzac claimed to take great pride in having acquired a recently discovered cache of Caesar’s letters to Cleopatra, translated into Greek in an ancient manuscript, though he acknowledged that their authenticity would remain in doubt until an “infallible” philologist at the University of Leiden was consulted. The point was clear: there could be no knowledge of Roman private life—the knowledge the marquise had requested—without the labor of scholars.¹¹

Balzac was somewhat fatalistic in adapting his literary talents to the demands of mondanité. Even as he supported the French monarchy against the Huguenots and other enemies, he retained his admiration for the civic life of the Roman republic. But he understood that under the political authority of the French monarchy and the cultural supremacy of le monde he could only dream of being a modern reincarnation of the Roman orator addressing “the people.” It was a matter of rhetorical strategy; the eloquence of the Roman orator, intent on persuading his audience on a great public issue, had to accede to a seemingly light, informal, and discursive style that made “pleasing” the condition for instruction. In his heyday Guez de Balzac did please, but in doing so he walked a fine line between two social personas that were not easily combined: the savant laboring in his study, and the “polished” (honnête) man or woman enjoying the diversions of le monde. It was the difference between two meanings of the word loisir, or leisure. In the new social and institutional form the Blue Room gave to the aristocratic ethos of leisure, the usual entertainments acceded to a rarified play of esprit, precious precisely because it had no tolerance for any appearance of strenuous intellectual effort. In his provincial retreat Guez de Balzac tried to practice an otium studiorum; free from negotium, or the demands of public life, he had the liberty to work at his own pace, to let his work ripen. Such “leisure,” he wrote in another entretien, was entirely different from “laziness” (paresse); while “we are in the power” of laziness, leisure allows us our “liberty.”¹² Solitary reading and writing offered liberty in the control of one’s time.

It was entirely compatible with Guez de Balzac’s agenda that, like most other erudite men of letters, he considered women incapable of the manly labor of “study.” There should be no violating the divide marking the different “duties and conditions” and “virtues” of the sexes, he advised Mme Desloges. “Pedantry” was even more intolerable in a woman than in a schoolmaster. The woman who spoke the language of philosophy (even the Platonic ideal of love), or who laid down rules about literary genres and style, was ridiculous.¹³ As politely deferential as his conversation with the marquise de Rambouillet was, he took care to assert the cultural authority of his own, exclusively male world.

By the 1640s, however, the tone was being set by Vincent Voiture, a very different sort of man of letters. The son of a wine merchant who supplied the court, Voiture knew that despite his personal merit he would always be regarded as a plebeian by the aristocratic guests of Rambouillet. But his extraordinarily nimble and entertaining wit, made all the more piquant when he courted insolence, made him the central attraction of the Blue Room. It was essential to his carefully cultivated image that he not appear to be laboring as a savant or even as an author. As his nephew recalled in the preface to his posthumously published Letters, he always pleased the ladies, whose “very exquisite taste” was due to “the delicacy of their esprit.”¹⁴ He was perhaps the first complete galant homme, applying his gifts to amuse women with poetry, ballads, and charming, playfully flirtatious letters, all seemingly extemporaneous, though he may have prepared his verbal magic in private. His writings had no room for Guez de Balzac’s view of learned “leisure” as a periodic Ciceronian retreat from public affairs; they record worldly “leisure” as a total way of life in which the value of the written word lay in its air of ephemeral entertainment.

By the 1660s salons, modeled on Rambouillet’s, though usually on a less grand scale, were a fixture of the Parisian social scene. The classical “virtue” that Guez de Balzac had in mind in calling for a new urbanity was not explicitly repudiated, but it lost the moral rigorism of the ideal of republican citizenship as it was folded into what I am calling a social aesthetic of play. Mlle de Scudéry was a protégé of the marquise de Rambouillet and became a prominent salon hostess in her own right. She has Cleonte, one of the characters in her dialogue on politeness, observe that the word “urbanity” has acceded to “politeness” because the latter was better suited to the “natural conversation” of women; though acknowledging that the urbanity celebrated by Guez de Balzac and the Blue Room was clearly at the origins of modern politeness, Cleonte thinks the term should now be left to the learned and to “grand eloquence.”¹⁵ In the second half of the seventeenth century the discourse of honnêteté and politesse assumed a new level of selfconsciousness; its family of words acquired a kind of coded meaning for the initiated, and as the self-justification of a privileged and exclusive world it became, in the broadest sense of the term, an ideology. A variety of literary forms—among them model letters and conversations, advice books, essays, dialogues, and novels—sought to capture the essence of honnêteté, drew the boundaries between what it encompassed and what lay outside it, and tried to identify its emblematic forms of behavior without reducing it to a set of rules or abstract principles.

The discourse of honnêteté, it should be stressed, was largely prescriptive. It tells us how a social milieu imagined and justified itself; how it thought it ought to be, and indeed how it thought it had to be if it was to sustain its claim to singular honor. Beneath the lacquered surface lay the actual workings of sociability in what Antoine Lilti has called “the space of mondanité.” Lilti has shown in impressive detail that the high aristocracy dominated that space, linking the salons to the royal court through both patronage and a shared style of worldly amusement; and that in the multiple hierarchies of le monde, the arts of politesse at once enabled and veiled an intense jockeying for social and political power in the circulation of “reputations” and attendant rewards.¹⁶ Lilti focuses on the eighteenth century, but there is no reason to think that seventeenth-century mondanité was any different. The prescribed norms surely governed behavior to some degree, but just as surely they allowed the honnêtes to delude themselves by conflating the reality into a normative imaginary. One might argue, in fact, that the imaginary marked the need for a respite from the competitive realities of aristocratic life. We cannot assume, though, that the respite actually eliminated the competitive maneuvers for reputation. It was just as likely to veil them. To captivate others on apparent terms of equality might be an act of aggression, an imposition of superiority; one could prevail by not seeming to want to prevail.

The term honnête could still be used to describe an upright man, or a man of integrity, but that meaning was overlaid by the emphasis on “pleasing” to win the approval of others. A galant was not primarily a seducer; he had mastered the art of pleasing women in erotically charged but inconsequential conversational play. In his supreme incarnation the honnête homme was a bel esprit, a brilliant performer entertaining with seemingly effortless wit. Moralists like La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère pointed to the fine line between pleasing others and deceiving them, presenting a false self. Finding self-validation in the gaze of others was a far cry from having the inner core of integrity that the term “virtue” had long evoked. Even as they cast a cynical eye on the ways of mondanité, however, the moralists were immersed in them and contributed to defining their normative ideal. To them, as to so many others, the sine qua non of honnêteté was mastery of the art of conversation, and the raison d’être of conversation was to give and receive “pleasure.” The verbal circulation of pleasure in turn required a collective equanimity and harmony, a commitment by all participants not to introduce a discordant note.¹⁷ There could be no winning an argument, no closure in that sense. It was necessary, La Rochefoucauld wrote, to “observe the same precise sense of harmony (justesse) that the different voices and diverse instruments ought to observe in music.”¹⁸ Honnêtes gens were always “agreeable” and “obliging” (complaisant); they said nothing “shocking” or “wounding.” They acted with a “sense of the appropriate” (bienséance), always finding the “juste” word or phrase, the one the moment required. They spoke with natural “ease” and “grace.” They all did their part to ensure that social interaction was an “enjoyment,” and indeed a “joy.”

This is the coded lexicon of a social (and socially bounded) aesthetic, an emphatically aestheticized set of norms that made sociability a kind of play and virtue always “agreeable.” To engage in this play was to maintain an illusion of equality within the interlocutors’ self-enclosed space, however unequal they might be outside it. No matter what tensions and rivalries lurked beneath the surface, the sociability of polite conversation could not be sullied by the audible (or visible) exercise of authority, or indeed by the intrusion of power in any form into the free circulation of verbal gifts. The line of demarcation between insiders and outsiders was permeable, but paradoxically the ineffable moments of intersubjective and aesthetic experience conveyed by the “je ne sais quoi” (literally the “I know not what”), that indefinable something that distinguished a pleasing phrase, or a facial expression, or a gesture, kept the line clear. “The je ne sais quoi” is “so delicate and imperceptible,” the Jesuit language critic Dominique Bouhours wrote, “that it escapes the most penetrating and subtle intelligence.”¹⁹ With the “je ne sais quoi” honnête society declared its effortless aesthetic to be beyond philosophical analysis and scholarly explanation. At a deeper level, it asserted its exclusiveness in the very act of admitting that even its language, as psychologically and aesthetically fine-tuned as it was, had its limits. The outsider betrayed himself by failing to recognize the limits—by trying to explain what insiders knew defied explanation.²⁰

The novels of Scudéry and Lafayette—the most conspicuous examples of French literary modernity in the seventeenth century—were fashioned in this social and discursive space. We can clarify the social geography of the space by taking a critical look at the work of the literary and feminist scholar Joan DeJean. In her Tender Geographies (1991) DeJean argues that the early French novels were informed by a feminist ideology that was “sexually, socially, and politically subversive.”²¹ In Ancients Against Moderns (1997) she returns to this theme; “the most successful first novelists” made the early novel “a feminized, and often a feminist, and even a feminizing (in the sense of that which promotes its creators’ feminocentric values), literary genre.” In the controversy that the novels occasioned, DeJean contends, the issue was, contra Jürgen Habermas, more “gender” than “class.”²² Defenders of the novel formed a loose but vocal feminist movement; and this literary feminism aimed to effect a democratization of taste and criticism in an emerging public sphere.

For historians, and for literary scholars with an historical orientation, DeJean’s work is fatally flawed by its presentism. The early novels surely were a feminized literary genre. Much of their material came from conversations among society women; they were written primarily for a female audience; their depictions of gallantry gave women a new respect and agency. Hence we can fairly call their values “feminocentric,” but only so long as we keep in mind that, as will become apparent, the role of intellect in the female-centered world that produced the novels was at least as strictly circumscribed for women as it was for men. But DeJean’s application of the term “feminist” to this context is highly problematic. Her declared aim was to combine literary history and history, with its attention to “a precise historical context,” but that is precisely what she does not do, particularly when situating her subject in a social context. Rather than giving the term “feminist” contextual specificity in an old-regime social milieu that was jealous of its singular honor, and that was open only to the few commoners who could master its performative culture, DeJean wants to find the moment of origin for the modern feminist agenda for women’s rights, which does indeed require a process of democratization. She in effect shunts aside the unmodern in seventeenth-century French literary modernity. Scudéry and Lafayette were society women living in something like a caste, permeable to some degree but, in the self-image that sustained it, contemptuous of other ways of life as vulgar. The notion that they aimed to democratize taste and criticism is simply wrongheaded.

Max Weber’s conceptual precision about social hierarchy is a good place to start in correcting DeJean’s work. To Weber there were two fundamental categories for understanding social hierarchy: classes and status groups (Stände). While one’s class position was a function of the objective power of disposal afforded by command of economic resources, one’s status position, or one’s position in a hierarchy of honor (Ehre), was a subjective phenomenon, a matter of social and cultural perception; it depended on the norms and values that informed “the privileging of social estimation” and especially the value attributed to an entire “way of life” (Lebensführung). Class and status were ideal types, indispensable as analytical distinctions but always bound together to one degree or another in social reality. Elements of class and status mingled in myriad ways in old-regime society, and the elite that gathered in the salons is a striking case in point. The salons mixed people from the upper and lower ends of the steep scale of rank and wealth in the nobility of the sword; families from this ancient nobility with families of the judicial, or “robe,” nobility with virtually hereditary rights to the expensive and lucrative offices of the royal parlements; robe and sword families with families in commerce and finance who had acquired titles as the Crown’s sale of offices and noble titles commodified honor; scholars and men of letters drawn from all these groups.²³ The venality of offices introduced anxiety-ridden instability into what was supposed to be a clear hierarchical order of inherited ranks and attached moral qualities. As one historian has aptly put it, it “monetized status,” converting “the attributes that determined one’s identity into qualities that could not only be acquired but also purchased in a marketplace.”²⁴ This confusing conflation of the calibrations of honor with economic (class) positions helps explain why salon society took such pains to demarcate itself as a status group, a circle whose members, however different in origins, wealth, and power, were united, and set apart from everyone else, by a unique social honor that could only be acquired with the personal mastery of worldly self-cultivation and selfpresentation.

It was this honor that was performed in the social aesthetic of play. Its generic characteristics have been described in a remarkable essay published in 1910 by Georg Simmel, another German sociologist and a contemporary of Weber.²⁵ Titled “The Sociology of Sociability,” the essay focuses on the “pure sociability” to be found in, among other historical examples, the aristocratic mondanité of old-regime France. Simmel finds “a special sociological structure corresponding to those of art and play, which draw their form from these realities [of the constellation called society] but nevertheless leaves their reality behind them.” Pure sociability derives its substance from the actual social relations outside its space, but is “spared the frictional resistances of real life” (179). Its aspiration to “the pure, abstract play of form” cannot be reconciled with the values of modern rationalist utility, which sees in it only “empty idleness”(179). There is nothing specialized about this “play-form”; “all the specific contents of the one-sided and qualified societies” are “dissolved away.” The required traits of character are “amiability, cultivation (Bildung), cordiality, and powers of attraction of all kinds” (180). These require an intense self-discipline, an inner “self-regulation” essential to participation in the form of play, from which both the individual’s “interests” and his “most purely and deeply personal qualities” must be excluded (180–81). Discretion or “tact”—the suppression of the “purely subjective and inward parts of [the] personality”—is essential to the engagement in “nothing but the capacities, attractions, and interests of [one’s] pure humanity (reine Menschlichkeit)” (182). In that sense the “social ideal” might be called “the freedom of bondage” (Freiheit der Bindung) (190). But precisely because the social interaction in this world is “artificial,” it can be “a democracy of equals … without friction,” “free of any disturbing material accent” (182–85). What matters in conversation is not the content, but the stylized form that makes it play; there can be no “serious argument,” no attempt at an intersubjective “verification of a truth.”

Though he does not use the term honnêteté, Simmel’s essay offers a penetrating analysis of its preoccupation with complaisance, bienséance, agrément, enjouement, and related qualities, including aisance. He constructed an ideal type, and he was aware that its actual social instantiations could ossify into “a conventionalism and inwardly lifeless exchange of formulas” (193). He suggests, in fact, that this may have happened in the French ancien regime. He is confident, though, that some social spaces have approximated the ideal purity; and in fact he tried to create such a space in the weekly salon he and his wife held in their Berlin home, which one of his friends recalled as having been designed to achieve “the cultivation of the highest individuals.”²⁶ We need to apply Simmel’s paradigm cautiously, keeping in mind how the logic of pure sociability functioned in a larger structure of class inequality that Simmel simply assumed. Simmel was well aware that “sociable equality” inside the group hinged on a strict exclusiveness, a sharp distinction between the rare few insiders and the great mass of outsiders. As the essay nears its end, however, it becomes apparent that he viewed the historical phenomenon of pure sociability through the lens of a late nineteenth-century variant on the German ideal of individual self-cultivation (Bildung) in “pure humanity.” Like many of his German contemporaries, he posed against the increasing specialization and commercial materialism of modernity a new aristocracy or, perhaps better, a new clerisy carrying the torch of aesthetic cultivation. As he tried to enact this ideal in his own salon, he looked for historical antecedents. He ends the essay on a swelling note: “the more thoughtful man” finds in sociability a “freeing and lightening,” a “simultaneous sublimation and dilution, in which the heavily freighted forces of reality are felt only as from a distance, their weight fleeting in a charm” (193).

We need a skeptical antidote to Simmel’s idealism, and it is to be found in the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is, to be sure, open to the charge of reducing the cultural to a function of social power. I use it here simply as a reminder of the need to place the internal symbolic structure of the discourse of honnêteté within the societal structure in which it positioned itself.²⁷ Le monde presents us with a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense: a cultural preconscious formed in the induction from childhood into a total way of life. What interests us here is the binary duality of Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus. It is, first, a “structuring structure,” the internalized symbolic organization of “practices and perceptions of practices.” This is not simply a matter of internalizing ideas, as in the commitment to a political ideology; it is the ground for the individual’s consciousness of himself and others as social beings. But Bourdieu is equally insistent that the habitus is, second, a “structured structure,” formed by the objective reality of hierarchy, its social perceptions being “the product of internalization of the division into social classes.”²⁸ The “distinction” attached to the aesthetic is “rooted in an ethic, or rather an ethos, of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world,” “the objective and subjective removal from practical urgencies, which is the basis of objective and subjective distance from groups subject to those determinisms.”²⁹

We proceed with the understanding that the interaction Bourdieu posits between the subjective and objective, though it leads him to a reductionist concept of culture, is essential to the study of symbolic power.³⁰ But our focus here is on Bourdieu’s structuring structure. We want to understand how the social and cultural logic of mondanité shaped and informed social relations within its own space. “In a cultural system,” William H. Sewell, Jr., writes, “the meaning of a sign or symbol is a function of its network of oppositions to or distinctions from other signs in the system.”³¹ Pervading the discourse of honnêteté is a central axiom of opposition, the deep logic of what Bourdieu calls an “elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world”: the polarity between labor (travail) and aisance, or effortlessness. In his Conversations, Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, an elder statesmen of the salons, observed that the surest sign of failure to master the art of conversation was “a constrained manner, where one senses much work (travail).”³² Méré’s essays remind us again and again that in the ideal of honnêteté “free” (libre) and “natural” were virtually synonymous qualities. We must be careful not to read back into this language the eighteenth-century critique of aristocratic society and culture, and more broadly of le monde, that would find its most impassioned articulation in Rousseau’s texts. In the discourse of honnêteté, appeals to the “natural” were not meant to censure the artificiality of polite sociability by invidious comparison with the more natural life of common people. Quite the contrary; the apparently natural aisance of the honnête femme and the honnête homme was precisely what marked their superiority over everyone outside their clearly delimited space. To be able to act naturally—to engage in the spontaneous play of the social aesthetic—meant to be free of the “determinisms” that labor to satisfy basic needs imposed on the great mass. Most obviously it marked the fact that one used one’s time as one wished, rather than as material needs demanded. Ultimately this conception of natural freedom drew a line between the choices open to a uniquely human nature and the imprisonment of the human animal in material necessities. It stigmatized labor as the mark of subjection to material need. The ideological irony lay in the fact that a universal ideal—the freedom of the human being as such—justified the exclusion of most human beings from its practice. This self-image obviously put the honnêtes at a vast social distance from people engaged in any kind of manual labor. More to the point, it made the life of the leisured mind—the pleasure of esprit—qualitatively different from the rule-governed intellectual labor of the “learned” or “liberal” professions. Their eloquentia—their distinctly male forms of verbal authority—was laborious. We miss the point, then, if we think of the discourse as perching honnêtes gens at the pinnacle of an occupational hierarchy; its imagined world hovered above the entire social organization of labor.³³

If men who practiced professions and occupied offices—university professors, magistrates in the parlements, military officers, clergymen—did not want to be branded bores, they had to leave their professional concerns behind them when they entered the salons. Even when Méré and others wrote for publication, they took pains to seem to be merely recording the “caprice” of their thoughts, without any planned order of presentation, as in the free play of conversation.³⁴ The social aesthetic would not allow any intrusion from the occupation world. At a deeper level, it would not allow conversational play to sully itself by taking on any appearance of labor in its practice, or indeed any hint that an investment of labor had been required to prepare for it. If we define intellectual labor as concentrated and sustained mental effort, that was precisely what the aesthetic excluded. To apply rules would be to degrade conversational play into something laborious and hence boring. Dwelling on one subject had the same effect; the orchestra could remain “diverting” only if it changed melodies constantly, like a meandering stream. The great gift of women—the “free” and “natural” air men had to acquire from them—was to leave the impression that everything they said was said spontaneously and effortlessly, or with “ease” (aisance). As Scudéry put it: “Although judgment is absolutely necessary so as to never say anything inappropriate, the conversation must appear so free that it seems that one rejects none of his thoughts, and that one says everything that comes to one’s fancy (fantaisie).”³⁵

As the aesthetic emphasis on appearance suggests, there was something illusory, perhaps even self-deluding, about this taboo on labor. In fact the play of honnêteté—the exclusive concern with giving pleasure, the care to avoid shocking or wounding others, the repression of any instinct to dominate—required a relentless exercise of self-discipline.³⁶ “How much art,” La Bruyère observed in his Characters, “to return to nature! How much time, rules, attention and work to dance with the same liberty and the grace as one knows how to walk, to sing as one speaks, to speak and express oneself as one thinks.”³⁷ The art might be considered an antirhetorical rhetoric—one that could not be learned in “the schools,” but nonetheless had to be mastered. However noble his birth, the individual had to acquire the requisite self-discipline through long practice. It is striking, however, that the interpreters of honnêteté—Scudéry, Méré, and many others—insisted that the art of conversation could not be mastered by reading books. However important reading was in supplying a point of departure for conversation, and in providing the language of “judgment,” it had to remain a “diversion.” Otherwise one’s speech would betray, in Méré’s phrase, “the smell of study.”³⁸ One could learn the art only as an apprentice to one of its masters, within the permeable but self-sufficient space of polite conversation. The social aesthetic needed nothing—not even print—that could be acquired in the world of labor outside it.

At its deepest level, the honnête performance of intelligence can be understood as the social exhibition of a dimension of selfhood. In his study of western European thinking about “the self” since the seventeenth century, Jerrold Seigel has identified a “relational” dimension in which the self “arises from social and cultural interaction, the common connections and involvements that give us collective identities and shared orientations and values, making us people able to use a specific language or idiom and marking us with its particular styles of description, categorization, and expression.”³⁹ The worldly sociability prescribed in the discourse of honnêteté might be described as hyperrelational. In his L’honneste femme, first published from 1632 to 1636, the Franciscan priest Jacques du Bosc, in the tradition of Francis de Sales, sought to keep anchored in Christian ethics women’s obligation to devote themselves to pleasing others, and to diverting themselves, in leisured sociability. Contrary to conventional wisdom that only men could be honnête, he argued that women could be paragons of honnêteté. Du Bosc assured women that a measured worldliness, with no taint of libertinism, was entirely compatible with being a devout Christian. The virtue enabled by God’s grace provides “an interior joy” that does not make one “too melancholy” for “conversation.” Quite the contrary; it is the Christian virtue of charity that “gives us the qualities that render a person amiable in conversation.” “It is necessary, first,” Du Bosc wrote, “to put virtue in the will; after that, knowledge (la science) in the mind (esprit); and finally, gentleness in the countenance.”⁴⁰ But in the ensuing articulation of the code of politeness little serious attention was given to Du Bosc’s effort to fuse a devoutness infused with divine grace and worldly self-fashioning. In the worldly ethos of constant “diversion,” there was little room for the meditative tradition of solitary prayer, much less for the asceticism, of Jansenist women at Port-Royal and the followers of Mme Guyon’s mysticism of utter abandonment of the self in surrender to the divine will.⁴¹

Nor was there anything of modern authenticity about the social aesthetic; any impulse to make transparent the depths of one’s inner self had to give way to what Simmel called “freedom in bondage.” More to the point here, honnêteté rejected what Seigel calls the “reflective” dimension of selfhood, which makes inwardness—introspective self-examination—the route to one’s consciousness of one’s self as “an active agent of its own realization,” often in opposition to social expectations.⁴² Honnêteté was openly hostile to the most rigorous tradition of intellectual labor inherited from the ancients: the Stoic tradition of askesis, the struggle for self-command at the rational core of human nature, the inner self, in the solitude of intense and repeated meditation. Since the late sixteenth century there had been a neo-Stoic strain in French philosophy, but it was obviously at odds with the feminizing of worldly culture, and particularly with its ideal of aisance. Neo-Stoicism kept virtue manly, as a labor of rational self-control, contrasted with the enslaving imagination that the term “effeminacy” evoked.⁴³ Honnêteté preferred the joys of sociability; to enter solitude by choice, and to try to plumb the inner self, seemed unnatural and futile. In his effort to graft polite learning onto modern urbanity, Balzac dismissed the Stoic idolization of the “reasonable and judicious” sage. The sage was not really meditating; he was in fact merely just “still” or “sleeping” (dormant).⁴⁴ Several decades later, in an essay on “pleasures,” Saint-Évremond reported to a friend on how he was spending his time in the country. He sought constant diversion, not “profound” truths, not having any desire for “overly long and serious commerce with [himself].” “Solitude,” he went on, has the effect of imprinting on us “je ne sais quel sad and somber (funeste) air by the ordinary thought of our condition.… To live happily, it is necessary to reflect little on life, but to go out often, as it were, outside of oneself.”⁴⁵

The discourse of honnêteté was no exception to the fact that collective selfimaginings are positional. Its claim to honor used several social referents as foils, defining itself as what they were not. Though honnête sociability was not informal by modern standards, it was clearly a relief from the rigid hierarchical protocol that Louis XIV instituted at court. But as at the highest levels of le monde the Parisian gentleman was also by necessity a courtier, dependent on royal patronage and vulnerable to royal reprisals, caution had to be exercised when it came to the court. Even Méré, who found the court pompous and intellectually vacuous, took pains not to challenge its social and cultural supremacy too blatantly. The discourse of honnêteté was less circumspect in fashioning its other foils, which were representations of exclusively male corporate cultures, identified above all by their control of public knowledge and their uses of public speech. There was the “eloquence” of the law courts, a formal and elaborate oratory, based on classical models, that contrasted sharply with the unstudied ease and simple grace of salon speech.⁴⁶ And there was the pulpit, another platform for male eloquence. By contrasting itself with these worlds, the discourse of honnêteté asserted its aesthetic superiority over male-controlled forms of expertise and the training in Latinity on which they were founded. It staked its claim to unique value by casting a critical and bemused eye on the rhetorical performances, sometimes ridiculed as “harangues” aimed to intimidate, with which men exercised public authority and ultimately wielded public power.

It is above all in the figure of the “pedant” that we hear the voice of women distinguishing the art of conversation from exclusively male speech. The pervasive caricatures of “pedantry” in the discourse of honnêteté echoed Montaigne’s contemptuous views on that subject, recorded in an essay he wrote sometime in the 1570s; but they also marked a shift in gender values in aristocratic culture in the intervening century or so. Montaigne had ended “Of Pedantry” by observing that “the pursuit of knowledge makes men’s hearts soft and effeminate more than it makes them strong and warlike.”⁴⁷ In keeping with this view, he extolled the art of “conversation” as a “quarrelsome” exercise in “strong, manly fellowship” that “delights in the sharpness and vigor of its intercourse, as does love in bites and scratches that draw blood.”⁴⁸ In the contempt for pedantry a century later, there is hardly a trace of this equation of manliness with an aristocratic martial ethos. The nobleman in military service, droning on about horses and campaigns, has joined the pedant as an example of distinctly male social ineptness—though, unlike the pedant, he still commands a certain tolerant respect. The social persona of the traditional scholar has become the example par excellence of crude and overbearing masculinity.⁴⁹ The reason for his social ineptness seemed obvious. After spending his boyhood being drilled in Latin grammar and translating arcane bits and pieces of classical learning, the pedant had acquired a doctorate at one of the university faculties. The quintessence of the type was the Sorbonne-educated theologian. He was still—as Montaigne had portrayed him—a boor and a bore, intent on impressing others with his esoteric and tunnel-visioned academic expertise. Far from exemplifying effeminacy, however, he was a reproof to the fact that the colleges and the university faculties were male ghettos. Having been formed in that world, the pedant was “intractable, arrogant, uncivil, impolite, opinionated.”⁵⁰ His voice grated; he interrupted imperiously; he droned on. These were stereotypical traits, of course, but they pointed to certain realities of academic education. The battle-like exercise of “dialectic” in public “disputation,” often before a large and rowdy audience, was still a characteristic feature of university learning and teaching. Since their origins in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit collèges had also simulated a martial spirit by making debates between platoons of pupils central to their curriculum. There was, of course, an ancient pedagogical rationale for pitting boys and young men against each other in relentless argument, but it was one that the standards of honnêteté simply dismissed. The pedant’s combativeness betrayed the excessive masculinity that conventional male education inculcated.

Pedantry was a serviceable social stigma, not a reliable social descriptive. It was not uncommon, particularly in the Jesuit collèges, for sons of the nobility to be introduced to classical Latin literature. There were savants who had been immersed since boyhood in academic Latinity, and who were active in the epistolary exchange of scholarly knowledge in the Republic of Letters, and yet were also accepted in le monde as honnêtes hommes.⁵¹ They knew how to mute their learning when they engaged in aesthetic play. And yet there were tensions in their efforts to bridge the worlds of scholarly labor and leisured amusement, and even when they wrote in the honnête key, apparently speaking from within its habitus, they sometimes declared their independence from it. The tensions remain audible in Dominique Bouhours’s The Conversations of Ariste and Eugène, published in 1671, though he assumed the literary persona of mediator between learning and mondanitè. Having first attracted attention as a professor of literature at the prestigious Collège de Clermont in Paris, Bouhours became tutor to the two sons of Henri II d’Orléans, duc de Longueville. His publications from the 1670s onward made him a widely recognized authority on correct and elegant usage in literary French. The Conversations of Ariste and Eugène sought to convey in print the lightness of the art of conversation, and they continue to have literary importance as examples of the polite essay in a conversational mode.⁵² The two characters Bouhours puts in dialogue are young honnêtes hommes, and though they often question each other’s views, they do so in fluid and accommodating conversation, not in the battle formations of an academic disputation.

The entretien titled “The je ne sais quoi” is an extensive exploration of the meanings of a deliberately mystifying phrase that was much in vogue. By using the definite article Bouhours announced that the phrase, so often used sloppily, now required examination as an object in itself. It is an examination, however, that Ariste and Eugène conduct from within the social aesthetic of play. The je ne sais quoi is what “pleases” or, perhaps better, delights in a way that can neither be grasped intellectually nor captured in language. We recognize it only by its effect, an entirely spontaneous “sympathy” or “inclination” of “the heart.” Experiencing it is an entirely “natural” moment of freedom; in it we are, in fact, free not only of “reason,” but also of the need to exercise freedom of the will. This is a social epistemology that in effect bans philosophers and other savants from intruding their authority into the aesthetic of play; it will likely always be futile for them to try to understand, much less explain, the phenomenon. There are, to be sure, universal cases of the je ne sais quoi, but in matters of taste, as in individuals’ face-to-face reactions to each other, all human beings have a particular je ne sais quoi that makes them pleased or displeased at first sight. It would be hard to imagine a more explicit defense of the modern literary subjectivity of the culture of mondanité. Appropriately Bouhours includes a comparison commonly used in le monde by the 1660s. There are, he acknowledges, “great beauties” in Guez de Balzac’s works; but, turning a word against the author who coined it, he finds Voiture’s works “infinitely” more pleasing because they have that “air du monde,” that “tincture of urbanité that Cicero did not know how to define.”

In the essay on the bel esprit, however, Bouhours cautiously became a critic of fashionable mondanité. He undertook an act of lexical policing, aimed at counteracting a “usurpation” of the phrase bel esprit by all sorts of people who did not merit it. The delicacy of his task lay in politely leveling a scornful critique of pretended bel esprits and, with it, a soft but pointed admonishment of mondanité, as he tried to regenerate the term by steering it into the intellectually more serious waters that the worldly shunned. “The true beauty of l’esprit,” Ariste observes, “consists of a correct (juste) and delicate discernment” that reveals “things such as they are.” If such discernment is “brilliant,” it is also “solid,” a matter of “judgment,” with a “force” to “penetrate the principles of sciences and the most hidden truths.”⁵³ Bouhours was trying to remove the true bel esprit from the mondain preoccupation with pleasing appearance, and that in turn required a male repossession of the phrase. “The beauty of the esprit,” he writes, “is a manly and generous beauty, which has nothing of the soft and effeminate.”⁵⁴ Later in the essay Bouhours has Eugène observe that “the savants de profession are ordinarily not beaux esprits,” as they are always “buried” in study and, having little “commerce with les honnêtes gens,” they lack “a certain politesse and I know not what of agrément.”⁵⁵ Bouhours acknowledges the social ineptitude of the stereotypical pedant, however, only to give more credibility to his defense of learned men who are not at home in polite sociability but can nonetheless be polite authors. He breaks down genuine beaux esprits into three types with “talents” that are rarely combined: the worldly conversationalist, the statesman at the pinnacle of government, and the polite author. “There is nothing more opposed to study and public affairs,” he writes, than “the spirit of conversation,” which is “a natural spirit, an enemy of all labor and constraint.” With the term “natural” Bouhours seems to follow the underlying logic of a pure sociability devoted to aisance. But as he continues aisance becomes a more dubious attribute: “those who have this talent are ordinarily idle people (oisifs) whose principal employment is to make and receive visits.” Even as he hales Voiture as the supreme example of the bel esprit who writes effortlessly and delicately, he detaches the bel esprit as a man of letters from Voiture’s conversational artistry. “The most brilliant and exact authors do not always shine in conversation”; they “examine things in depth,” and in company they speak seldom, “as they think too much about what they want to say.”⁵⁶ Bouhours in effect extracts the man of letters from the symbiosis of orality and the written word that the aesthetic discourse of honnêteté made mandatory. Though the author’s style must of course have “I know not what of the agreeable and the flowery to please people of good taste,”⁵⁷ the bel esprit is an emphatically male intelligence whose engagement in the labor of strenuous thought grants him a certain independence from the social aesthetic of play.

The savant Pierre Daniel Huet also moved fairly comfortably in le monde but kept himself at a remove from its ethos. In his Treatise on the Origins of the Novel, published in 1670, a year before Bouhours’s Conversations, the implicit assertion of authorial independence we find in Bouhours’s text widens into an explicit effort to reclaim the scholar’s cultural authority.⁵⁸ A prodigy of Jesuit education, Huet became a scholar’s scholar. Over the course of his career he would produce translated editions of ancient and early Christian texts as well as his own Latin poems, and would devote serious study to philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and anatomy. In 1670 Louis XIV called him from Caen, where he had founded an Academy of Sciences, to Paris to serve as subtutor of the Dauphin. In 1674 he was appointed abbot of Aunay in Normandy, and shortly thereafter he ascended to the bishopric of Avranches.

Neither his provincial origins nor his commitment to scholarship prevented Huet from being accepted in honnête circles in Paris. He became a regular visitor in Mlle de Scudéry’s salon and a friend of Mme de Lafayette. He published his Treatise as an epistolary preface to Lafayette’s novel Zaïde, histoire espagnole, which he had probably commented on in drafts as he wrote his treatise. Ignoring the tensions between a scholarly ethos of labor and a social aesthetic of play, DeJean seriously misreads this text and its larger significance in the debates it addressed. She makes Huet’s treatise a key expression of respect for the feminizing (or feminist) impulse in the early novel.⁵⁹ Huet was pursuing a quite different and in some ways opposed agenda. He did, to be sure, give the novel literary legitimacy by placing it in a lineage that went back to the classical epic. And he did conclude with a paean to Mlle de Scudéry, confessing his “astonishment” that a “girl,” not a man, had published three illustrious novels. Perhaps she had originally hidden her authorship, he suggested, and thus had deprived herself of “the glory that was her due” for working for “the glory of the nation,” because “she wanted to spare this shame to our sex.”⁶⁰ But Huet’s overarching argument was that the novel was an “entertainment,” though one that must be morally instructive. He was treading a fine line in a debate about the novel that would continue into the eighteenth century. In L’honneste femme Du Bosc had advised women that to be honnête they had to undertake serious reading, even in the works of savants; but he had warned them against reading novels, as their gallant love stories corrupted female readers insidiously, not only acquainting them with evil, but teaching them how to commit it.⁶¹ Huet obviously disagreed. But what made the novel a moral necessity was the fact that people were naturally “lazy”; unable or unwilling to understand the truth, they were instructed in the effortless reading of a story, without getting behind the fact that the story was a fictional “lie.”⁶² This was to say that the novel adapted to human weakness, whereas serious study overcame it. For all his admiration for this new genre being developed by women, Huet could not refrain from regretting its recent ascendancy in polite circles. The novel reflected the unprecedented “forms” of complaisance with which men in France had to win the favor of women. It is worth quoting in full a passage DeJean has ignored:

[Women] have made novels their entire study, and have been so contemptuous of the ancient fable and history that they have not understood works which drew on them formerly for their greatest ornament. So as no longer to be embarrassed by this ignorance, of which they have so often the occasion to be aware, they have found that it would be preferable to disapprove what they are ignorant of, rather than to learn it. Men have imitated them to please them; they have condemned what [women] would condemn, and have called pedantry what was an essential part of politeness, still at the time of Malherbe. Poets and other French writers who have followed [Malherbe] have been constrained to submit to this judgment, and several of them, seeing that knowledge of antiquity would be useless to them, have ceased to study what they dare not put in usage. Thus a good cause has produced a very bad effect, and the beauty of our novels has brought contempt for belles lettres, and thus ignorance.⁶³

It is not surprising that in his later years Huet became estranged from mondain conversational sociability.⁶⁴

The Intelligence of Women

The last question raised in Bouhours’s Conversations is whether a woman can be a bel esprit. Surely he had heard the subject discussed in worldly circles. Eugène endorses the received view of women’s intelligence:

This beautiful fire and this good sense (bon sens) of which we have spoken so much does not come from a cold and humid complexion. Coldness and humidity, which render women weak, timid, indiscreet, light-headed, impatient, babbling … prevents them from having the judgment, the solidity, the force, the precision (justesse) that the bel esprit requires. This mucus (pituite) of which they are full, and which gives them that delicate tint, does not accord much with the delicacy and the vivacity of l’esprit; it blunts the point, and weakens [the mind’s] lights (lumières): and if you reflect on it, what women have of the brilliant is in the nature of flashes (éclairs) which dazzle for a moment and have no point at all of consistency. They shine a little in conversation, and provided that one speaks only of trifling things (bagatelles), they do not speak badly, but beyond that they are not very reasonable. In a word, there is nothing more limited than the mind of women.

The friends admit exceptions to “the general rule,” but agree that there is “some sort of opposition between the beauty of the mind and that of the [female] body.”⁶⁵

The passage is as compact an example of the durability of ancient perceptions of differences between male and female intelligence as one is likely to find. It is geologically layered. The bottom stratum of conventional wisdom, including humanist scholasticism, was formed by Aristotle’s view of women as imperfect or incomplete men and Galenic humoral theory, which still dominated medical thinking and had long been integrated into neo-Aristotelian philosophy. In the tight body-mind nexus that this discourse posits, intellectual strength, or “force,” is in some way a function of physical strength, which in turn is generated by the power of heat. By virtue of her role in reproduction, and in sexual intercourse as it was commonly perceived, the female is a passive instrument of nature; the male acts on nature, willing and reasoning to dominate it. Humoral composition makes the female brain, one might say, a soft cold sponge; the male brain is fire-hardened metal. No less than lifting a weight or pushing a plough, though of a qualitatively different order, intellection is an exercise of strength. In her social being woman’s weakness of body and mind takes the form of a lack of self-command, and that is exhibited above all in her indiscrete and babbling speech.⁶⁶ Here we rise to the top geological layer, Bouhours’s critique of his own era. He extends the ancient stereotype of the babbling or chattering woman—the woman unable to control her tongue—to what was being haled in other quarters as women’s mastery of the art of conversation. Often extolled for its liveliness and subtlety, female esprit figures here as “flashes” that are ephemeral, irrational, and trivial. The epistemological assumption that runs through all the layers is that women lack the capacity for judgment. Bouhours draws on a standard philosophical concept of judgment as the grasp of universal principles and the prudent and consistent application of them to particular cases. It is above all in this power to abstract—to detach universal ideas from sensate particularity—that men demonstrate their superior intellectual strength. Paradoxically “solidity” lies in abstracting from the density of material being. Women are confined to the particular, in their thought as in their social being, which is to say that they cannot rise above trivia. Again Bouhours undercuts the feminizing lexicon of honnêteté. There is a clean difference between the “delicacy” conventionally attributed to women and the true delicacy of mind required of the bel esprit.⁶⁷

The conventional wisdom had not gone unchallenged. In the traditional “argument about women” (querelle des femmes), stretching from the Renaissance to the mid-seventeenth century, women’s defenders piled on historical examples to prove that exceptional women could be just as virtuous, and just as courageous, as men famed for those qualities, and, less often, that they could be just as intelligent as men with great minds. But this amounted to challenging male supremacy on its own terms; attributes considered “natural” to men remained normative for women.⁶⁸ As the discourse of honnêteté put a premium on the distinct kind of relational intelligence required in polite sociability and particularly in conversation, female-coded kinds of cognition were revalued in a new hierarchical order of capacities of intellection. Now the qualities considered “natural” to women became normative for men. Men had to acquire from women a “natural” way of speaking; a lively sensitivity; quick intuition; gentleness or softness (douceur); delicacy; grace; amiability. To fail to do so was to risk a loss of honor, a social derogation from the elite of worldliness. Bowing to the imperatives of honor, one might say, men had to give women the lead as cultural facilitators, mediators, and even arbiters.

At issue here was the relationship between intelligence and language facility, the mind and speech. For men educated in the collèges and the universities, learning language was a laborious process of acquisition. One of the justifications for the centrality of Latin in the curriculum was, in fact, that learning the language instilled in boys the endurance, the inurement to laborious effort, essential to a manly character.⁶⁹ While men were disciplined to use language as an instrument of thought, women’s facility in their native tongue seemed to make words the “natural” and unmediated expression of thought. What had been dismissed as women’s babble about social particularity, a world of mere appearance, was now admired as the performance of women’s superior relational intelligence. To be socially efficacious thoughts must be communicable, and it was women who excelled in that kind of intelligence. Sometimes this was considered a natural gift, something women had by nature and men had to acquire. But if women had the gift, it was no less important that it had not been corrupted by the Latinate education of the schools.⁷⁰ Society women looked down on the training they neither could have nor, in their enjoyment of an exclusive liberty, wanted to have. It was not simply that they rejected academic jargon. They were free of the rules of traditional rhetorical performance, and of a manly labor of abstraction they considered laborious and therefore boring. While the French Academy sought a standard French for print, women continued to spell phonetically. It was precisely this “natural” naïveté that made women’s speech and writing the model for the elegant simplicity of a polite style.⁷¹ Natural simplicity grounded their new cultural authority as judges of literature. At once cultivated and uncorrupted by pedantry in any form, they were the arbiters of taste.

At work here was not “rhetorical re-description,” if we mean by that phrase the technique (paradiastole) of effecting social change by replacing one term with another—from negative to positive, or vice versa—to describe an attribute or an action.⁷² Instead there was a more subtle and, one might say, smoother process: the received terms were given new valuative and normative meaning. The revaluation is especially clear in the use of the word “delicacy,” a female trait by tradition, to describe an essential quality of polite conversation and good taste.⁷³ Writing in the 1630s, Du Bosc sought to persuade society women that they could make polite conversation more intellectually substantive by doing serious reading, including the ancient texts. He knew that he was challenging conventional wisdom by claiming that female “delicacy” of mind included the capacity to understand the “sciences.”⁷⁴ In the ensuing decades the discourse of honnêteté, in putting a premium on delicacy, often gave it a kind of acuteness of piercing strength. This linguistic shift made it questionable whether the intelligence that really mattered was about strength in the conventional sense, or indeed in any sense. Perhaps there were more valuable kinds of mental capacity in what had been considered female weakness.

The discourse was cutting the connection (literal and analogical) between male physical strength and mental energy. It implicitly contradicted the conventional notion that by virtue of women’s role in reproduction, their minds were more subject to their physicality. In a sense, it reversed that assumption: the nature of women’s physicality—the delicacy of their bodily makeup—gave them more freedom of mind in what mattered, in relational intelligence and the socially constructed “taste” of le monde, than men enjoyed. That was why schooling could not give men the delicacy of taste that distinguished le monde from the world at large. Only by attending “the school of women” could they become honnête. Delicacy in speech implied a cognitive advantage. Traditionally stereotyped as ephemeral prattle, women’s speech was now admired for its greater “netteté” than men’s; one of the attributes of their more natural speech was greater precision of expression. The implication was that, to a degree, women had the advantage in reasoning itself; the natural flow of their speech reflected the natural acuity of their thought. While in ordinary usage “delicacy” might continue to connote female mental weakness, a daintiness and fragility of the mind, delicacy now also attributed a superior cognitive perceptiveness and clarity to women. Other female traits gave reason a “beautiful” appearance, above all in its externalization in speech. They clothed it—not in the sense of providing mere ornamentation, but in the sense of softening it without diminishing its strength, enhancing its inherent persuasive power without making it overbearing or intimidating. It was in this positive sense that women were seen to be able to “insinuate” thoughts to others in a way that men could not.⁷⁵

In this discursive context we can better understand what makes Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, published in 1686, such a tour de force. The son of a provincial noble family related to the Corneille brothers, Fontenelle had begun visiting Paris as a young man. He entered the literary world as a fledgling playwright and a contributor to the Mercure galant. Thanks to his connections, his literary gifts, and the grace and wit with which he exhibited his considerable learning, he rose into the highest fashionable circles and was much in demand in the salons. In the Conversations he undertook the formidable task of having a gallant gentleman explain the new science, from Copernicus’s heliocentric cosmos to Descartes’s vortices, to a young and beautiful marquise who is quite at home in le monde but is spending some time at her country chateau. They have five evening conversations in the garden, where they can converse unobserved as they gaze at the heavens. The gentleman obviously accomplishes his purpose. Having been introduced at the end to Descartes’s vortices and the possibility of a vast plurality of solar systems, the marquise exclaims “I have the whole system of the universe in my head! I’m a scholar!”⁷⁶ “Scholar” is, of course, a surprising term for an honnête femme to apply to herself. The marquise uses it with more than a little irony, but not at all flippantly.

J. B. Shank has done us the service of rescuing this text from conventional misreadings and placing it squarely in the new discursive freedom of mixed-gender conversational sociability. Extricating the text from a now defunct teleology in the history of science, a linear narrative in which Cartesian science figures as a wrong turn, is only the first step. What Shank sees Fontenelle enacting so deftly is one of “the lost alternatives to Newtonian physics,” another way of conceiving scientific inquiry that is by no means irrelevant today, and that can “open up perspectives on the lost social and political possibilities of the period as well.”⁷⁷ Nor is the text, Shank argues, another conventional exercise in gallantry, paternalistically using the idiom of light flirtation to “popularize” scientific reasoning to a typical woman who cannot rise above sentiment.⁷⁸ The gentleman does, to be sure, try to engage in gallantry out of incurable habit. “It will never be said of me,” he comments on the first evening, “that in an arbor, at ten o’clock in the evening, I talked of philosophy to the most beautiful woman I know.”⁷⁹ But talk he does, at sophisticated conceptual levels, and that is because the marquise insists that she is capable of “enjoying intellectual pleasures.” She repeatedly demonstrates her intelligence by grasping truths, by countering her interlocutor’s speculations with skepticism, and by raising questions that move the conversation in fascinating directions. In this alternative view science requires rational clarity, but the essential measure of its “truth” is whether it gives “pleasure” to the imagination. Its beauty lies in the elegant simplicity of its laws, and in the apparently infinite diversity of forms and colors that clothe them. Science becomes a process of “imaginative picture making.”⁸⁰ What we are witnessing, Shank emphasizes, is the aestheticizing not just of the presentation of science to neophytes, but of the basic process of scientific understanding.

Much of this is convincing, but when Shank follows DeJean’s lead he pushes his argument too far. In the fusion of the aesthetic and scientific that we have lost, he argues, we find a mixed-sex partnership in “knowledge production”; and that in turn connects the text to “the feminist pedagogical project” of the era, whose key text was Poullain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Two Sexes.⁸¹ “Production” carries the wrong connotations; it cannot be detached from labor, the disciplined making of a product. At issue, I should stress again, is not intelligence itself; it is a measure of Fontenelle’s mastery of dialogue in its polite form that he gives us no reason to conclude that the marquise is any less intelligent than the gentleman (and she often seems quite a bit more sensible). The issue is the socially and culturally acceptable performance of intelligence. From that standpoint, Shank undervalues the ways in which gender and status reinforced each other to ban the appearance of labor in the social aesthetic of play. From the outset the marquise is assured that, though she will have to “[apply] herself a bit,” it will not be necessary to “penetrate” obscure matters “by means of concentrated thought.” She needs only “the same amount of concentration that must be given to The Princess of Clèves in order to follow the plot closely and understand all its beauty.” She understands spontaneously, only “conceiv[ing] of those things of which she can’t help but conceive.”⁸² Her imagination not only aestheticizes the suns and planets; it makes them dramatic characters she can approve or disapprove of. We have to keep in mind that it is not only the gallant gentleman who worries that these ungallant conversations will be an embarrassment to him. The marquise is no less concerned about her performance, even though it is physically removed from le monde and there is no one but the gentleman to witness it. When he proposes to make an outline of the zodiac in her garden sand, she shrinks back on the grounds of impropriety; “it would give my garden a scholarly air which I don’t want it to have.”⁸³

In his Preface Fontenelle explained that he had tried to find “a middle ground … where it’s neither too dry for men and women of the world nor too playful for scholars”; and that is precisely what he accomplished. He does not fuse the two worlds; he uses his middle ground to dance with such agility from one to the other that one hardly notices that he’s dancing. “I hold her a scholar,” the gentleman writes to his friend in the opening letter, “because of the extreme ease with which she could become one.”⁸⁴ Left unsaid—but obvious to his audience—is that she could not become one without shedding her entire social identity. Women had to embody the principle of aisance in its full purity by not betraying any sign of labor in their way of thinking and speaking in their own world, detached as it was from occupational life. That was why, despite their intellectual equality and, in some respects, superiority, their presentation of self had to remain distinctly feminine. Scudéry warned the salonnière that she must avoid “speaking with a certain affected simplicity, which smells of the child,” but also that, if she did not wish to appear “bizarre” by playing the man, she must not “[pass] judgment decisively on some difficult question.”⁸⁵ Scudéry’s point was not that difficult questions were beyond women’s mental capacity, but that women could not appear to have worked through them to a conclusion. The man whose speech betrayed intellectual labor invited ridicule. The woman who committed such a violation of the social aesthetic undermined the group claim to unique status more directly. Her resulting stigmatization as a “learned lady” (femme savante) threatened her with a kind of social death.

The imagined world of honnêteté was a community of frictionless exchange, immune to destabilization because its speech could neither offend nor shock nor stray into argument. In principle, the kind of critique that would make a society and polity self-critical was banned. Women were the keepers of the ban.