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6/01 cJCIRC/DateDuepGS—p. 15

PRECIOSITE AND LA PROMENADE DE VERSAILLES:
FROM MYTH TO PRAXIS

By

Margaret Anne Trotzke

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Romance and Classical Languages

2001

ABSTRACT
PRECIOSITE AND LA PROMENADE DE VERSAILLES:
FROM MYTH TO PRAXIS
By

Margaret Anne Trotzke

In seventeenth-century France, Madeleine de Scudéry’s novels were best-
sellers. However, due to the satirical works of Moliere and Boileau, she was
labeled a prudish precieuse. Around that appellation grew a misogynous
mythology that clouded the concept of préciosité and Scudéry’s reputation. The
twenty-first century ushers in a renewed appreciation of Scudéry's work and a
reassessment of preciosité.

La Promenade de Versailles was written in 1669. In Part 1, it describes
the extravagant beauty of Louis XlV‘s pleasure palace and the celebrations he
staged for conquering Franche-Comté and Flandres and for a “secret” guest, his
mistress Louise de LaValliere. The novel, using exemplarity and subversion of
the example, becomes a brilliantly cloaked écriture politique. Scudéry's text
eulogizes Louis XIV, but also subtly critiques the Sun King's preoccupation with
conquering territory for France at the expense of his subjects.

La Promenade de Versailles demonstrates a dramatic shift from the
exteriority of the heroic novel, whose main purpose is to relate the exploits of the
hero, to the interiority of the modern novel, wherein dialogue replaces the
narration of heroic action. Joan DeJean contends that this narrative shift of focus

originated in Scudéry’s longer works of fiction, Cyrus and CIé/ie. Scudéry

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perfects her narratological invention in La Promenade de Versailles. The story-
line, interspersed with conversations, a narrative form that Scudéry appropriates
from the salon, creates a positive space for preciosite and for an egalitarian
discourse in the novel.

Scudéry uses préciosité as a seventeenth-century écn'ture feminine. The
classic love story in La Promenade de Versailles finds both a feminist and a
political focus and offers yet a second and indirect critique of seventeenth-
century society. From the frontispiece of Cupid to the myriad of textual
ekphraseis, the secret and powerful signs of Eros literally and figuratively
decorate the novel. In Part 2 of La Promenade, entitled “Histoire de Celanire,’ the
heroine of the title loves Cleandre, but she is determined to set the parameters of
their relationship. She demands that it be kept secret. When Celanire’s uncle
orders her to marry the wealthy cad Cleonte, she seeks her freedom by a self-
imposed exile. Celanire reunites with her lover in the end, but only on her own
terms.

Along with unveiling a protofeminist claim for self-assertion, Part 2 of the
novel allegorizes the difficult years during which Scudéry’s closest friends, Paul
Pellisson and Nicolas Fouquet were imprisoned. Once disparaged as a
mauvaise précieuse, Scudéry, the précr'euse, in fact stands as an avatar of early
écriture politique and écriture feminine. La Promenade de Versailles may offer

praise of Louis XIV and Versailles but it is through a mirror darkly.

Copyright by
Margaret Anne Trotzke
2001

 

Wm George.

To my parents:

Milton George Trotzke, Elmer Joseph Boucher, and Constance Nemetz Boucher

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Acknowledgments

My first mentor for this project was Professor Domna Stanton at the
University of Michigan. I thank her for encouraging me to submit my original
paper on La Promenade de Versailles to a graduate student conference at
Stanford and then to the SE-17 conference at the University of South Carolina. I
wish to thank Cahiers du Dix-septieme for their permission to include a revised
version of my article “Framing the Police: Scudéry’s Secret Critique of Louis XIV,”
1991 Spring, 5 no. 1: 169-82, in this dissertation. I also want to thank Slatkine
Reprints for their permission to publish a photocopy of the frontispiece and title
page of their 1979 reproduction of Madeleine de Scudéry’s 1669 edition of La
Promenade de Versailles.

Without the continued assistance of the Supervisor of the Circulation
Department at the University of Michigan Graduate Library, Joanne Spaide, I
would not have been able to complete my research. I thank her.

My heartfelt thanks go out to the professors and staff of the Department of
Romance and Classical Languages at Michigan State University. In particular, I
want to thank the Chairman of my dissertation, Professor Ehsan Ahmed. Without
his encouragement, this project would not have been completed.

I thank all my friends and family for their encouragement. Finally, the
continuous and loving support of my husband, George Edward Laws, and of my
daughter, Lisa Anne Trotzke-Laws, was my most valuable resource. Thank you

both.

vi

INTRODUC

CHAPTER
Poesy and
The Recep

CHAPTER

Fenlnrsm 2

CHAPTER
Exenplanfi

CHAPTER
Secrets. W

CONCLUS
APPENDIC

APPENDlX
AReader's

APPENDIX

FWSDIec
La Promen

APF’ENDlx
The Mister

WORKS Cl

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1
Poesy and Politics:
The Reception of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Works 15

CHAPTER 2
Feminism and Scudéry: Préciosité and Ecn'ture Feminine .................. 53

CHAPTER 3
Exemplarity and Subversion in La Promenade de Versailles ............. 143

CHAPTER4
Secrets, Women’s Rights, and the Conversation 198

CONCLUSION 229
APPENDICES 236

APPENDIXA
A Reader’s Guide to La Promenade de Versailles 237

APPENDIX B
Frontispiece and Title page,
La Promenade de Versailles, 1669 edition 261

APPENDIX C
The Mysterious Origins of Moliere’s Les Précieuses Ridicules ............ 264

WORKS CITED 267

vii

Introduction

How does an author create a space for her work? Madeleine de Scudéry,
known as Sapho by her vast seventeenth-century European readership knew
how to create such a space. Scudéry created a time and a place to write and
she wrote prolifically in various genres of prose fiction. She wrote novels‘,
historical biography and essays. She also wrote poetry. And, as many of her
century, she corresponded frequently with her myriad of acquaintances, including
members of the nobility, important political figures of the day, other literary
aficionados and her many, many friends. In her own time, she was one of the
most read authors of the century. Her French contemporaries read her. The
English read her in translation, as did the Germans. In fact, editions of her works
appeared in print in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Arabic in her
lifetime.

Scudéry created a place for herself and her works in the seventeenth-
century literary community. She attended salon gatherings, such as Madame de
Rambouillet’s chambre bleue, with other literary and societal figures and
eventually drew other writers and literati as well as political figures to her own
home for her weekly literary circle, the samedis.2 Scudéry received a royal
pension and in 1671; she was the first writer to receive [9 pa): de la Prose from
the Academie F rancaise, founded by Louis XIV and Richelieu, for her essay
entitled Discours de la Gloire.3 She was considered for election to the Académie
Francaise, but was not admitted.‘ (Of course, no woman was elected to the

Academie F rancaise until Marguerite Yourcenar in 1980). Scudéry was elected to

be As:
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the Academy of the Ricovrati of Padua in 1684. Scudéry was the only woman
admitted to a seventeenth-century French academy, the Académie d’Arles, in
1689. (DeJean, Tender 67)

Despite the phenomenal publishing success of her novels in the
seventeenth century, Madeleine de Scudéry’s life was ridiculed and her work
severely criticized by certain of her contemporaries, such as the dramaturge
Moliere and the literary critic Boileau. Perhaps the criticism arose, because her
works challenged both sociological and political constructions of seventeenth-
century French society, and most especially because she praised and criticized
the king. Furthermore, Scudéry’s works did not continue to retain the high status
they obtained in the seventeenth century. The space she had created for her
work slowly vanished under the pressure of several centuries of further
ambiguous, if not negative criticism.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, seventeenth-century scholars
and feminists have shown a resurgence of interest in Scudéry’s works. The
renascence of interest encourages a reconsideration of the importance of
Sapho’s literary contributions in her own time and in the larger space of the
development of the modern novel.

Scudéry’s life and works, especially her novels, and most especially La
Promenade de Versailles5 (published in 1669), included a socio-political
critiques. La Promenade de Versailles did so in several innovative ways. The

novel demonstrates a complex rhetoric of exemplarity and the subversion of the

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exemplum. Scudéry‘s use of the conversation proves to be a precursor the
modern French novel.

The title of this dissertation, Préciosité and La Promenade de Versailles,
From Myth to Praxis, succinctly defines the scope of the present project. Myriam
Maitre’s recent publication, Les Précieuses, Naissance des femmes de Iettres en
France au X Vll" sie‘cle, contains a chapter entitled “Du mythe noir a la réalité, Ia
nébuleuse précieuse.’ Because of the persistent and pernicious nature of the
mythology that grew around the notion of préciosité, one feels compelled to
dispel the myth before one can adequately address the substantive issues of
narratological, sociological and political significance in Scudéry’s corpus.

La Promenade de Versailles is a novel in two parts. Part 1 repeats the
title of work on its first page. It is rather long introductory chapter that eulogizes
Louis XIV. The second chapter or Part 2 is entitled “Histoire de Celanire."6
Similar to Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cleves, which begins with a
didatic historical overview before the love story begins, La Promenade de
Versailles, also begins with a lengthy description of Louis XIV and of Versailles.

John Lyons hypothesizes that the historical introduction actually plays a
pivotal role in the exemplarity of Lafayette’s novel.7 Part 1 of La Promenade de
Versailles also plays an important role in the novel. Narratologically, the first few
pages fulfill a narrative function. They provide the raison d’étre of the novel. The
narratn'ce of the novel begins by acquitfing herself of her duty. Her opening
words create a mystery that cannot be solved until the problems posed in the

novel are resolved. Of what duty is she speaking? The first obvious answer is

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her duty to her king, Louis XIV. The praise of the king in Part 1 of the novel
proves her loyalty to her sovereign. However, soon the reader learns that the
narratrice also has a duty to la belle Etrangére. She is responable for her
safekeeping while she is in France. Which leads to the next obvious question,
why is la belle Etrangére at Versailles? The reason for her flight to France and
the mystery surrounding it will become known in Part 2, the “Histoire de
Celanire,’ namely her escape from a unjust patriarchal hierarchy in which, as a
woman, she has no say. This mystery is a kernel or noyau of the novel, that is
an element that is “logically essential to the narrative action and cannot be
eliminated without destroying its causal-chronological coherence (Prince 48).”
The resolution of the conflict comes only in the end of the novel. The details of
the introductory paragraphs, while seemingly fortuitous, actually demonstrate
Scudéry’s precocious conception of modern narratlvity.

The daring political and feminist critiques written into the story line of the
novel require the eulogy of the Part 1 to mitigate the potential danger to the
author for having penned them. If Part 2 of the novel is a darker reflection on
Louis XIV’s monarchy, the importance of Part 1 becomes even greater. Only an
understanding of the narrative strategies and underlying critiques can explain the
juxtaposih'on of two such seemingly unrelated examples of Scudérian textuality.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation, entitled “Poesy and Politics, the reception of
Madeleine de Scudéry’s works,” traces the history of the reception of her novels,
which proves circular. Her novels were at the height of their success in the

seventeenth century. They receive mixed reviews in the eighteenth century and

.10

m

undergo a general downward trend in acceptance with a dwindling readership in
the nineteenth century. Gustave Lanson’s pronouncement of her texts as
unreadable leads to further deterioration of the status of Scudéry’s novels in the
twentieth century.

Currently, however, Madeleine de Scudéry's novels are enjoying a
revalorization by historians of the novel, seventeenth-century specialists, and
feminists, including such scholars as Margaret Anne Doody, Alain Niderst, and
Timothy Reiss. Scudéry’s novels have undergone a true renaissance.

Joan DeJean’s contribution to Scudérian scholarship has been particularly
noteworthy. In her groundbreaking Tender Geographies, Women and the
Origins of the Novel in France, DeJean states unequivocably that seventeenth-
century French female novelists begin the “great French tradition of the novel.”8
She also proposes that the progressive changes in Scudéry’s narrative strategy
create a new mode of novelistic fiction. DeJean contends that Scudéry’s
innovative narration progressively redirects the action-driven exteriority of
Ibrahim to the thoughtful-provoking interior discourse of Cyrus and Clélie9 and
that this innovative narratological shifl begins the tradition of the modern French
novel. I in turn suggest that in La Promenade de Versailles Scudéry penned an
exemplary novel of interiority. And I further hypothesize that the shift from the
masculine discourse of exteriority to the feminine discourse of interiority, flirough
the dialogism of the conversation, creates a space for the feminine voice in the
text. Thus La Promenade de Versailles employs an innovative narratological

technique that leads to the radical feminization of the novelistic form.

Chapter 2, “Feminism and Scudéry,” defines two literary terms that have
primarily been associated with French female writers, préciosité and écn'ture
feminine. The discussion begins with a justification of the term “feminism” in a
seventeenth-century context. DeJean’s Tender Geographies provides the
underpinning for the critical discussions of préciosité and écn'ture feminine. The
chapter offers a review of pertinent literature on préciosité. The work of
revaluating an author who has been maligned for so long requires a thorough
critique of the term preciosité that has stood for so long between her texts and
her readers.

The first section, “The Problematics of Préciosité,’ situates Scudéry in
terms of the literary movement that began in seventeenth-century France and
has come to be known as préciosité. Overtime, Scudéry and her works become
preciosité’s most (in)famous example of the term. The detailed discussion traces
the extensive critical literature that over the centuries repeatedly redefines
préciosité. A stable construction proves elusive as the term and its connotations
change over the course of time. Political and social motivations of précieux
scholars clearly influence their evaluative critiques from the seventeenth century
to today.

Madeleine de Scudéry was a woman writer, and as such, has been the
victim of the vagaries of a male-dominated critical literature. Aligning Scudéry
and her works with the conservative, royalist right or the so-called bourgeois
liberal left of French politics has determined whether the author and literary

production have been praised or demeaned. Victor Cousin claims that Scudéry’s

7135‘

and

aid

socio-political sensibility changes from Cyrus to Clélie and because of the
change that he perceives, he praises the first and pans the second. Cousin
declares Cyrus to be an innovative form of the historical novel. He then
denounces Clélie as a ridiculous précieux and bourgeois text. The first section of
Chapter 2 traces the seventeenth-century construction of a purported contrast in
style between Catherine Vlvonne de Rambouillet, the aristocratic précieuse, and
Madeleine de Scudéry, the bourgeois precieuse. This construction proves the
most problematic. It negatively influenced the reception of préciosité, Scudéry,
and her works for centuries.

In addition, the first section of chapter two describes the fate of Scudéry
and her works as a result of the satirical anti-précieux discourse found in the
works of Somaize, Pure, Tallement des Reaux, and Boileau. The identification of
Scudéry as the target of Moliere’s play Les Précieuses ridicules proves to cause
the most lasting damage to her literary legacy. The replication in critical literature
of the hypostazing and apocryphal good and bad précieuses dichotomy,
supposedly represented by Catherine de Rambouillet (Cathos) and Madeleine de
Scudéry (Madelon) in Moliere’s play, perpetuates the myth. As with any reader’s
relationship to any writer, the political bias of the reader of Scudéry may still
influence his or her critical evaluation of her work.

The second half of Chapter 2, entitled 'Précreuse Identity: Ecn'ture
Feminine, " first defines the construction of twentieth-century feminist writers. A
study of the polysemous vocabulary of Cixous and Clement’s poetic definition of

women coming to writing as “invisible, foreign, secret, hidden, mysterious, black

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and forbidden” creates a mosaic of associations (69). Avant Ia Iettre, Scudéry's
protagonist, la belle Etrangére of La Promenade de Versailles, personifies the
characteristics of feminist writing that Cixous and Clement artistically describe.
Scudéry’s self-depiction as Sapho also aligns her work with twentieth-century
feminist portraiture.

Thus, La Promenade de Versailles pre-figures the metaphors of the
woman coming to writing that finds full expression in twentieth-century theoretical
works of French and American feminists. The chapter seeks to show that the
novels of Scudéry find their fullest expression of écn'ture feminine through the
device of her invention, the egalitarian dialogism of the conversation.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the bold feminist and political statements
cloaked in subtle disguise in La Promenade de Versailles. Chapter 3, entitled
‘Exemplarity and Subversion," outlines the novel’s critique of absolutism. It
begins with a section entitled “Rhetoric of Exemplarity,” and is informed by John
Lyons’s definition of the term exemplum. The explanation of exemplarity is
followed by an analysis of the Scudérian innovation of the conversation and
discusses the merits of dialogue and description over action in narrative
discourse.

After having defined description to be the model discourse, the first half of
the novel presents a lengthy portrait of Louis XIV and his palace that exemplifies
this discursive model. An image of Cupid appears in the frontispiece facing the
title page that beckons the reader to look for a secret message in the novel and

search for the hidden message behind the ostensible description of Louis XIV

and Versal:

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and Versailles. Moreover, the seemingly innocent exclamation of the heroine, la
belle Etrangere, in the very beginning of the novel, “[Elst-ce la ce que vous
appellez la petite maison du plus grand Roi de la terre (2),” recalls Colbert’s
celebrated remonstrance to Louis XIV because of the Iatter’s pronounced
predilection for his pleasure palace at Versailles over what Colbert considers to
be the “most superb palace in the worId,” the Louvre in Paris. These signs open
the rhetoric of subversion in La Promenade de Versailles.

A passage in the second half of the novel, the “Histoire de Celanire,“
wherein the participants in a typical Scudérian conversation discuss the merits
and deficits of various forms of government, presents a cloaked but daring
critique of Louis XIV's monarchy. The off-handed remarks of several of the party
regarding the sacrosanct role of the king and a negative critique of hereditary
monarchies become the sensitive moments of the novel about which the
ekphrasis of Cupid at the beginning of the work had forewarned the reader. It is
the secret critique of absolutism, which were it to be more direct, could have
landed Scudéry in prison and could have constituted an act of lese-majesté.

Chapter 4, entitled “Secrets, Women’s Rights, and the Conversation,”
informed by Margaret Anne Doody and Louis Marin, traces the intersection of
textual clues such as the ekphraseis and the discourse of Eros and the excesses
of Louis XIV‘s reign. These clues point the reader’s eye not only to the secrets of
the characters in the novel, but also to the secrets of Louis XIV. The myriad
textual clues conflate the secrets of the novel with the secrets behind Louis XIV’s

absolute reign.

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Juxtaposed with Louis XIV’s absolute desire for power, the heroine’s
desire for self-determination, especially in matters of the heart and home, plays
out in the novel. This thesis will ultimately show how the innovative narrative
strategies of Scudéry’s La Promenade de Versailles enable revealing and

edifying feminist and political critiques of Louis XIV and Versailles.

10

 

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1 See Maitre 746-747. Her work provides the most current bibliographic listing of
Madeleine de Scudéry’s works. Therein, she attributes three voluminous novels,
four shorter novels or nouvellas, a discourse, and six books of essays, which are
in the form of the conversation, and a book of poetry, to Madeleine de Scudéry.
Note however, that even the most recent scholarship still disputes the attribution
of her novels. Her brother, Georges de Scudéry, signed Ibrahim ou L’lllustre
Bassa, Artamene ou Le Grand Cyrus and Clelie. In addition, the descriptive
passages relating to warfare in Cyrus suggest to some that her brother may have
penned those passages. See Dejean, Tender. DeJean discusses the
problematics of signature and attribution in the seventeenth century. Of particular
interest to our study will be DeJean’s definition of salon writing which was the
result of a cooperative effort of the participants of any given salon. The leader of
the salon, in our case Madeleine de Scudéry, would be considered the author,
since the works emanating from a particular salon would be under the editorial
direction of the host or hostess of the salon (23). See also Krajewska. In her
charmingly speculative and anecdotal style, Krajewska describes the problem of
attribution in Scudéry’s work. “La clé de la veritable proportion de la cooperation
littéraire du frere ainsi du soeur ainsi que le secret sur Ieurs mérites respectifs
sent a jamais ensevelis (15).”

2 See Krajewska. She discusses Scudéry’s salon based on the correspondence
of Scudéry’s contemporaries. Krajewska claims to have renounced a literary

reading of the letters “en portant tout l’intéret a Ieur transparence factuelle (11).”

11

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3 See DeJean Tender, 67.

‘ See DeJean, Tender, 234-35 note 52 where she refers to Ménage’s discussion
of Scudéry’s consideration for election to the Académie F rancaise. See also
Reiss. His analysis suggests that at the core of both literary and political
determinations in seventeenth-century France was gender exclusivity. It defines
Richelieu’s founding of the Académie F rancaise as a dramatic symbol of “The
Invention of Literature" With that invention came the choice as to who would
promulgate the rules and rights pertaining to it. Received notions of equality and
inequality of the sexes influenced the selection. “For it is a fact that the problem
of violence and individual rights had been linked throughout the first half of the
seventeenth century with an argument about reason and gender that had
anxiously sought to respond as well to issues of exclusion and dominance.
These matters became more problematic as they were felt to be increasingly
central. The debate was a fundamental one: over nothing less than the question
of who would have the right to produce and control the literary culture in
formation (97).” Scudéry’s success undoubtedly deeply troubled those who
believed that that right belonged exclusively to men and favored the exclusion of
women in the production and control of literature. Moliere’s satire of the
pnécieuses and Boileau’s scathing critique of Scudéry suggest that both writers,
consciously or unconsciously were troubled by her success.

5 The edition of La Promenade de Versailles referred to in this work is the
Slatkine Reprint of 1979, prefaced by Rene Godenne. In the 1669 text, the title

page includes the title, followed by a dedication, La Promenade de Versailles,

12

 

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Dediée au Roi. It also includes the publishing location, Paris, the publishing
house and its location, Chez Claude Barbin, au Palais, sur Ie Perron de la Sainte
Chapelle, the publication date of 1669, and a notice “Avec Privilege du Roi.” A
frontispiece faces the title page. Godenne mentions a second edition in his
preface to the Slatkine reprint edition. “L’cauvre fut reeditéé en 1671 sous un titre
different, mais sans aucun changement: Celanire, dédié au Roy, Paris, Barbin
(III).'

6 For further details about the novel, consult Appendix A which provides a
summary of the novel and a discussion of the stylistics of the novel.

7 See Lyons Chapter V, “Marie de Lafayette: From Image to Act,” 196-240.

8See DeJean, Tender, 71-93. Her chapter entitled “The Politics of Tenderness:
Madeleine de Scudéry and the Generation of 1640-1660” presents an informative
and interpretively innovative reading of Scudéry and précrosité. See also 82.
DeJean explains Scudéry's “complex political project” in Clélie.

9 In this work Ibrahim ou I’ll/ustra Bassa may be referred to simply as Ibrahim.
Artamene ou la Grand Gyms may be called Le Grand Cyrus, Gyms, Artame‘ne,
or referred to by the complete title of Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel. Clélie,
hr'stoire romaine may be referred to as simply Clélie.

1° In this thesis, the spelling of the characters’ names appears exactly as they do
in La Promenade de Versailles. Therefore, for example, Cleandre and Celanire
appear without accent marks as they do in the 1669 text of La Promenade de
Versailles. Also, in La Promenade de Versailles, the first “e” of Etrangére has no

accent and the second “e” of Etrangére in the name la belle Etrangére takes an

13

 

_______.._——

accent I
dsserta

06 V95

 

accent aigu. In having the spelling conform to that of the original text, this
dissertations follows Alain Niderst’s example in his discussion of La Promenade

de Versailles in his book entitled Paul Pellisson, Madeleine de Scudéry et Ieur

monde.

14

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Chapter One
Poesy and Politics:
The Reception of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Works

Continuity and change appeal to the Western mind. A millenarian period1
particularty captures the imagination of Western civilization. It is truly a unique
time to look back in order to reassess the past, as well as to look forward to
predict the unfolding future. Scudérian scholars have been caught up in the
millennium fever. The last twenty years of the twentieth century have witnessed a
growing interest in Madeleine de Scudéry’s work. From the height of their respect
and popularity in mid-seventeenth-century Europe, over the course of time, the
fortunes of Scudéry’s work dwindle and by the late nineteenth century they are all
but bankrupt.2

Caught up in his own end of the century fever, in 1894, Gustave Lanson
compiles a 1,200-page volume on the status of French literature from the Middle
Ages to the present, entitled Histoira de la [literature francaise. As the Western
world entered the twentieth century, Lanson believed that it should leave Scudéry
behind. He declared Scudéry’s work unreadable.3

In 1999, Myriam Maitre published her lengthy opus entitled Les
Précieuses, Naissance des femmes de Iettras en France au X W" siecle. She
identifies the use of the term “illisibles’” in no less than six critical works on
Scudéry (30). She also takes three critics of the first half of the twentieth century

to task for their mistreatment of the précieuses.

15

liarlF
pail
corI
metl
liar
doc

To:
senoarsm
recessed,

SEEOUS re-

 

lhe Dassw
Eiropean
Mar
Seventeen
may l’eac
tile book c
Success 0
Acc
arm/Ed an,

Sur un ton gaillard ou haineux, Ia “Troisieme République des Lettres" est
franchement misogyne et ce ton dure jusqu’au milieu du XXe siecle, en
particulier chez Emile Magne, Georges Mongrédien, Antoine Adam. Les
considerations moralisatrices qui guident les biographes ou les
métaphores sexistes qui dévalorisent Ia poesie “femelle” rendent ces
travaux difficilement utilisables en dépit de leur richesse
documentaire.(31)

Today, a hundred years after Lanson’s fatal blow, a revitalized Scudérian
scholarship had produced a fervent discourse mandating the return of the
repressed. A growing readership of nouveaux Scudérian scholars have begun a
serious re-evaluation of Scudéry’s works. The revalorization of her work rekindles
the passion and interest of her vast and approving seventeenth-century
European readership.

Madeleine de Scudéry was a phenomenal success as a writer in the
seventeenth century. How did a writer, and especially a female writer, attract so
many readers? For she was read. Henri-Jean Martin, the venerable historian of
the book culture of the seventeenth century, first qualifies and then quantifies the
success of Madeleine de Scudéry’s novels.

According to Martin, in 1630, the moment of the grand roman-fleuve had
arrived and with it Madeleine de Scudéry’s success. “En cette période de
troubles et de guerres, [...] a partir de 1630, au roman d’aventure et d’amour
succede le roman épique [...] Le temps de Mademoiselle de Scudéry est arrive
(Livra 295).” Le Grand Cyrus was published by one of the most “powerful editors”
of the seventeenth century, Augustin Courbé (353). In contrast to a weakening

market for books of the novelistic genre in the mid-seventeenth century, Martin

confirms Scudéry’s unquestionable publishing success.

16

 

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measured ll

Et bientbt intervient Mademoiselle de Scudéry, qui a fait paraitre a partir
des 1641 sous le nom de son frere, un roman historique, inspire par un
premier séjour provencal: Ibrahim ou L’illustre Bassa. Puis arrive, a partir
de 1649, Ie tour du Grand Cyrus dont les dix volumes se succedent sans
interruption jusqu’en 1653... et enfin de 1654 a 1660, celui de Clélie. Or
ces longs ouvrages connaissent a coup stir un immense succes. On sait
par exemple que les premiers tomes du Grand Cyrus sont épuisés avant
que les demiers aient été mis au jour: il faut augmenter le chiffre du tirage
de ceux-ci et remettre ceux-la sous presse mais ainsi Ie fait que des
impressions datant de 1654 portent une mention de quatrieme edition ne
nous renseigne que bien peu sur la diffusion reelle de ce texte.(635-636)
Martin assures us that Scudéry’s long novels were an “immense success,”
but he qualifies the success he has just elucidated. He suggests that printings do
not necessarily reflect the actual diffusion of the text in the market, information he
did not discover.

Subsequently, however, Martin reviews the account books of the
bookseller Jean II Nicolas of Grenoble, which give a further indication of the
successful distribution of Scudéry’s works in the seventeenth century. The
people of Grenoble “followed the efforts of...the de Scudéry’s [sic]...to endow
French letters with Christian and national epics (Reading Public 9).” He adds,“Far
from Paris, Parisian manners were adopted much more quickly than might have
been thought (10).” In the salons of Dauphine one sought many novels,“in
particular, those of Mlle. de Scudéry (10).” Martin acknowledges the profitability
of Scudéry’s publications. In Grenoble, Nicolas sold her works for the
astronomical price of twelve Iivres per volume or he would rent them for six
Iivres.(10)

The success of Scudéry’s novelistic career in her own lifetime can be

measured in another way. The monies from her publications and pensions

I7

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her wor

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awarded by Louis XIV’s mécénat allowed her to support herself. In Tender
Geographies Joan DeJean claims Scudéry to be the “first French woman writer
to depend on her literary productions for her livelihood (Tender 232).”4 DeJean
goes on to say that according to Rene Godenne, a noted Scudérian scholar,
Sapho had made the publisher Courbé a very wealthy man (232).

Statistical evidence indicates that Scudéry’s works were published and
distributed throughout Europe. What did her contemporaries have to say about
her work? Several of Scudéry’s literary colleagues recognized her talent.

The New Oxford Companion to French Literature declares that “Pierre-
Daniel (1630-1721) Huet has frequently been referred to as the most learned
man of his age (391).” He knew Madeleine de Scudéry well, since he attended
her salon. In Huet's De I’on‘gine des romans, published in 1670 as a preface to
Lafayette’s Zayde, he clearly recognizes Scudéry’s talent as a novelist. DeJean
defines it as a landmark moment.

With this tribute, Huet enacts the initial public inscription of Scudéry's

name in the ranks of the modern authors to be included in French

literature’s first canon, different versions of which were being proposed by
his contemporaries. (Prior to his treatise, Madeleine de Scudéry’s
authorship was common knowledge in seventeenth-century literary circles,
but had not yet been acknowledged in a professional critical context).(170)

However, the form of the praise comes in a rather unusual context. Huet
begins by complimenting Honoré D’Urfé.

Monsieur d’Urfe fut le premier qui tira nos Romans de la barbarie, & les

assujettit aux regles dans son incomparable Astnee, I’ouvrage le plus

ingenieux 8. le plus poli qui eust jamais paru en ce genre [...](228)

What seems like a solid endorsement is then undercut by what will be a

nod to Scudéry.

18

Mais quelque merveilleux que fust son Roman, il n’osta pourtant pas Ie
courage a ceux qui vinrent aprés luy, d’entreprendre ce qu’il avoit
entrepris, & n’occupa pas si fort I’admiration publique, qu’il n’en restast
encore pour tant de beaux Romans, qui parurent en France aprés le
sien.(228)

The praise left in reserve goes to Mlle de Scudéry.

L’on n’y vit pas sans étonnement ceux qu’une fille, autant recommandable
par sa modestie, que par son merite, avoit mis au jour sous un nom
emprunte [her brother’s, Georges de Scudéry], se privant si
genéreusement de la gloire qui luy estoit deue, 8. ne cherchant sa
recompense que dans sa vertu: com-si lors qu’elle travailloit ainsi a la
gloire de nostre nation, elle eust voulu épargner cette honte a notre sexe.
Mais enfin Ie temps luy a rendu la justice qu’elle s’estoit refuseé, & nous a
appris que l’lllustre Bassa, Ie Grand Cyrus, & Clelie, sont les ouvrages de
Mademoiselle de Scudery; afin que desmormais I’art de faire des
Romans, qui pouvoit se défendre contre les censeurs scrupuleux, non
seulement par les loiJanges que luy donne Ie Patriarche Photius, mais
encore par les grands exemples de ceux qui s’y sont appliquez, pust aussi
se justier par le sien; 8. qu’aprés avoir este cultivé par des Philosophes...il
eust encore I’avantage d’avoir esté exercé par une sage & vertueuse fille.
(228-229)

Huet mitigates his chauvinist surprise that these novels could have been

written by a woman when he praises the humble novelist and her works. He

suggests that by keeping the female authorship of the novels a secret, Scudéry

appeared to be working for the glory of the French nation. We will learn that

being able to keep secrets and the pursuit of glory were both fundamental to

Louis XIV’s personal and political projects.

Huet read and respected Scudéry’s works. His unusual reference to the

revelation of the gender of the author of her novels and her purported effort to

allow France to save face by her secret, may actually be a gendered joke. In a

discussion concerning the rivalry between Huet and Boileau, DeJean refers to

Boileau’s writing as a “man to man discourse.”(170) Perhaps Huet’s unusual

19

Lafaye‘.
us that

D'OFIOU

reference to the cloaked gender of the author of Scudéry’s novels was a subtle
dig at Boileau, whereby Huet pokes fun at Boileau’s boys-only club, since Huet
belongs to a more refined discursive school that eschews gender bias. DeJean
suggests that “Huet praises Scudéry in terms that seem calculated to provoke
Boileau’s wrath (170-171).”

Scudéry’s colleague, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de
Lafayette (hereafter known simply as Lafayette) also respected her. DeJean tells
us that “in her last letter to Scudéry, not long before they both died, she
pronounced to Scudéry: ‘You are still...inimitable (Tender 125) 3'5

Other of Scudéry’s fellow writers proved less generous. Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux was her contemptuous contemporary. He condemned her work.
Several other contemporary authors satirized Madeleine de Scudéry and
préciosr'té in their works, most notably Moliere, in his play Les Précieuses
ridicules. Why would Scudéry, such a popular novelist, be so ill received by
certain of her male literary colleagues? Several reasons come to mind, differing
personal tastes, professional jealousy, and/or misogyny triggered by a
phantasmagorical fear of women in power and especially of women empowered
by the word. Obviously, publishing success and critical acclaim do not guarantee
universal appreciation of one's poetic worth.

Turning to the eighteenth century, Scudéry’s literary fortunes began to
wane, in no small part perhaps because of Moliere and Boileau’s attacks on her

in their satirical writings.

20

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A review of Scudéry’s inclusion in the eighteenth-century Bibliotheque
universelle des romans and the Encyclopedia méthodique by Kathleen Hardesty
Doig indicates that Scudéry continues to be read in excerpts and shortened
versions.(153-168)

In eighteenth-century France, Scudéry’s works are praised, but also
panned. Doig cites a review of the medieval Roman de la Rose in the March
1779 Bibliotheque wherein the editor “makes mention of Clélie. He dismisses
Clélie as a novel “qui fit un tort momentane a l’esprit de la Nation, dont le gout
commencoit a s’épurer. Moliere, heureusement, en attaquant ce ridicule prévint
ses imitateurs (8).” The editor of this eighteenth-century French chronicle, the
Bibliotheque universelle des romans, warned of the dangers of imitating this
“ridiculous” woman writer, Madeleine de Scudéry. And Doig reminds us that “this
canard linking Scudéry to the excesses of préciosité would remain the theme of
critical opinion of her work for almost two centuries (8).” The impact of Moliere’s
Précieuses ridicules will be considered at length in Chapter 2, which outlines the
history of the term préciosite.

Because Scudéry’s works had been translated in the seventeenth-century
into Arabic, German, Italian, and Spanish, in the nineteenth-century many
Europeans and arabic speakers could read Scudéry’s novels in their own
language. It is not surprising that in the nineteenth-century the German
storywriter E. T. A Hoffrnann paid homage to Scudéry by referring to her directly
in one of his stories. Hoffrnann invents a fantastic story about Madeleine de

Scudéry that is included in his Tales of Hoflinann. Although biographically totally

21

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reoeot

Scude
plays.
transaz
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and is

(IL

(I,
17.
(I)

apocryphal, Hoffmann’s tale does tell us something of Scudéry’s positive
reception in early nineteenth-century Germany.6

A French writer of the nineteenth century, Germaine de Stael, like
Scudéry, had a literary salon. Stael alludes to Scudéry obliquely in two of her
plays, “Le Mannequin, Proverbe Dramatique” and “Sapho.” Vivian Folkenflik, a
translator and commentator of Stael’s works, explores the feminist theme of
female silencing in “Le Mannequin.” For a woman, interprets Folkenflik, “a
conventional upbringing without the exhilaration of intellectual experience creates
nothing but “a doll who has teamed her lesson well (12).’ “ By implication then,
and without any formal education, what a woman learns is to keep silent and not
display any wit or intelligence.

“Le Mannequin” brings to mind Moliere’s “Les Precieuses ridicules,”
wherein the so-called précieuse Scudéry is the target of his satire. The roles of
the satirized and the valorized are reversed in Staél’s play. The female character
Sophie refuses to marry a man who defines the ideal woman as one that never
speaks. She dupes her unwanted suitor into falling in love with a mannequin.
Sophie’s father’s name is Monsieur de la Morliere, an obvious reference to
Moliére. With her play, Stael sets Mo(r)liere straight.

Significantly, Stael also wrote a play entitled “Sapho.” In her self-portrait
in volume ten of Cyms, Madeleine de Scudéry called herself Sapho and her
seventeenth-century admirers also called her by that name. She seems to have
been universally recognized by her self-selected pseudonymn. Joan DeJean

suggests that “Scudéry’s portrait is most remarkable because of her painstaking

22

sugge

(Fictic

Scoot
de 8:
tithe
Sing;
ronoa

femir

to 5;

effort to tell her own story only as it can be told through Sappho’s, and thereby to
suggest that her Sapho could serve as an exemple for future literary women
(Fictions, 104).”

The two Stael plays juxtaposed in her complete works, while not naming
Scudéry by name, give a strong, if silent, feminist nod of approval to Madeleine
de Scudéry. In addition the play may have intended to give an appreciative nod
to the important last chapter of Cyrus, “The Story of Sapho.” DeJean points to the
singular importance of this chapter. For DeJean, it “signals the death of the
roman (romance) and the inauguration of a new model for French prose fiction,
feminocentric and oblique in narrative stance (Tender, 48)."7

Helen O. Borowitz’s convincing and well-documented article entitled “The
Unconfessed Precieuse: Madame de Staél’s Debt to Mademoiselle de Scudéry,”
demonstrates DeJean’s contention. Borowitz meticulously documents her thesis
that “[it] was Mlle de Scudéry’s literary self-portrait under the pseudonym of
Sapho that was to become the model a century later for Mme de Stael’s fictional
heroine Corinne (33).”8 Further, Borowitz also describes Scudéry’s La
Promenade de Versailles and its impact on Corrine.

Like Mlle de Scudéry’s “belle étrangere,” Corinne’s tourist is a melancholy

foreigner, but in contrast to the visitor of Versailles who marvels at Louis

XIV’s good conception, Oswald fails to respond to the monuments of the

ancient Rome.(56)

Borowitz’s description of La Promenade de Versailles and her references
to Steel and Moliere will be referred to again in Chapter 2.

By implication both of these nineteenth-century writers, Hoffmann and

Stael, pay tribute to Madeleine de Scudéry. To be as successful as she most

23

anr

Moi;

assuredly was in her own century, Scudéry would have had to unlearn the lesson
of Steel’s silent doll. One can better appreciate the requisite ingenuity of
Scudéry’s rhetorical strategies and her use of exemplarity and subversion of the
exemplum if one understands how difficult it has been for female writers of all
ages to bring their voice to literature.

In Rhetoric Retold, Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the
Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn summarizing Stallybrass writes: “For the past twenty-
five hundred years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by
cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and
an enclosed life (domestic confinement) (1).”

Scudéry radically broke two of the three cultural codes of the ideal woman,
the need for silence and domestic confinement. She rejected a purely domestic
life for that of a writer and opened her home to the literati of her time for her
weekly samedi salon gathering. Through her writing, her voice was heard by all
of seventeenth-century Europe.

Perhaps the dismissive or negative criticism that Scudéry received from
Moliere and Boileau in her own era and male literary historians after them were a
reaction to her choice to break the cultural codes of silence and domesticity.
Scudéry appears to have adherred to one cultural code. Legend has it she
remained chaste. Her critics turn even what should have been a positive, her
presumed chastity into a negative, prudery. The précieuses supposed “refus

d’amour” becomes a rallying cry for those who decry Scudéry and her works.

24

In La Promenade de Versailles, on the other hand, the heroine speaks
out against excessive military and royal spending, and portrays a heroine who
chooses to be chaste rather than to accept a domestic companion not of her own
choice. Celanire, the heroine of La Promenade de Versailles, also chooses exile
over a domestic confinement with an unsuitable partner.

To continue the chronological review of Scudéry’s reception, in
nineteenth- century France, while Stael appreciated Scudéry’s voice, other
French readers give her works mixed reviews. In mid-nineteenth-century France,
Victor Cousin, writes La Société francaise aux X VII” siécle d’apres Le Grand
Cyrus de Mlle de Scudéry. In it, unfortunately, Cousin perpetuates a myth about
Madeleine de Scudéry, the so-called précieuse writer. Cousin attributes
Scudéry’s supposed précieuse pruderie, her “refus d’amour” (one of the several
deadly sins of the précieuses), to her looks.

ll est vrai que contre I’amour elle avait un puissant préservatif, qui pourtant

ne Iui eat pas suffi, a elle comme a bien d’autres, si elle n’avait eu Ia ferme

resolution d’etre sage. Disons-le: Mlle de Scudéry etait Iaide, et sa laideur

n’était surpassee que par celle de l’homme [Pellisson] qui, plus tard, arriva

le plus pres de son coeur.( 1886 Volume 2 122)9

In brief, Cousin perpetuates the legend that Scudéry was an ugly spinster.
However, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

In La Société Francaise au X VIP, Cousin proudly announced his discovery
of a key to the identities of the characters in Scudéry’s Cyrus.(20) In the
Bibliotheque de I’Arsenal attached to a copy of Cyrus, he found an actual listing

of the characters matched to renowned seventeenth-century figures. Cousin

triumphantly uses the key to expound on the identity of the characters in

25

 

Sou

not

no

as

an:

Ion

Q

Scudéry's Cyrus. But men Cousin condemns the novel Clélie for which he does
not believe a key exists. He finds it a ridiculously précieux and bourgeois novel.

En un mot, La CIe’lie appartient déja a I’école des précieuses que Moliere

n’a cessé de poursuivre depuis le commencement jusqu’a la fin de sa

camere, et Le Cyrus, tout en inclinant un peu trop vers cette école, releve

de ces précieuses illustres que Moliere a toujours respectees.(13)

Cousin alludes to Moliere’s attempt to mitigate the negative image of the
précieuses that one can glean from Les Précieuses ridicules, that is, a
differentiation between the illustrious précieuses and the ridiculous ones. Cousin
incorporates Moliere’s good précieuse/ bad précieuse paradigm into his critique,
as he applies the term précieux to La Clélie and Le Cyrus. Boileau intentionally
and Moliere perhaps unintentionally begin the tradition of baiting the précieuses.
Cousin merely reinforces a negative stereotype and a false paradigm that began
long before his time.

For Cousin, the novel that reflects the aristocratic précieuse society,
Cyrus, has merit. He describes CIéIie, for which he did not find a key, as
bourgeois claptrap.

Deux fois Mlle de Scudéry a entrepris de peindre la société de son
temps sous des noms étrangers: Ia premiere fois dans Le Grand Cyrus, la
seconde dans Clélie. Ces deux romans sont évidemment de la meme
famille, mais its different plus qu’ils ne se ressemblent. Le Cyrus, malgré
des défauts que nous ne dissimulerons pas, est encore Ie modele du

. genre: La Clélie en est l’exces et l’abus. Le Cyms avait répandu le 90th du
roman historique au dela de la juste mesure, comme it arrive toujours; La

Clélie l’a décrié et I’a fait périr dans Ie ridicule.(9)

Cynis provides a model of the historical novel on one line of Cousin’s

critique and Clélie is described as an abusive, excessive book destined to perish

in ridicule on the next. Cousin finds that Scudéry has invented an innovative

26

form

bring

ohar
else;
not:
her 1
man
sub‘.

critic

form, a historical, metaphorical novel but then he claims that she managed to
bring the form to shame, in the space of two works!

Certainly, Cousin took great pride in having discovered the key to the
characters identified in Scudéry’s Cyrus. Critics such as Niderst and Godenne
disagree as to the merit of Cousin’s key. Close consideration must be given the
notion of the key since Scudéry’s production of roman a clefs may have allowed
her to critique seventeenth-century political events and person in an indirect
manner. In fact, indirection proves to be a model for the possibilities of
subversive writing through a novelistic form. For it is the depth of the Scudérian
critique of absolutist France that ultimately proves of utmost interest.

By 1894, Gustave Lanson sounds the death knell to Scudéry’s positive
reception. “La longeur de tous ces romans, s’ajoutant a leur faussete, les rend
illisibles,” posits Lanson (388). French readers and literary critics at the turn of
the century took great stock in Lanson’s Histoire de la Iittératura francaise,
considering its pronouncements to be revelations of literary and historical truths.
Significantly, Lanson does recognize the merit of Scudéry’s conversations (388).
Scudéry demonstrates the art of the conversation in La Promenade de
Versailles. The conversation is the literary device that allows for the interiority of
Scudéry’s novels and that puts her works in the forefront of a dramatic innovation
in genre of the novel.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Scudéry’s works become
marginalized. Only the famous Carte de Tendre of Clélie and Scudéry’s

association with précrosité bring her any recognition. The critical literature of

27

Scudi

deco:

ago 6
flight
her life
and hi

histonr

Scudéry and her connection to the problematic concept of préciosité will be
discussed in Chapter 2.

In the rebirth of Scudérian criticism that began about twenty-five years
ago, even critics who began writing about Scudéry fairly recently and therefore
might be expected to attempt literary rather than historical interpretations, have
cited Scudéry’s novel’s, particularly, Cyrus and Clélie, as historical evidence of
her life and times. Critics endowed Scudéry’s texts with the weight of authority
and historical accuracy. They empowered Scudéry by associating her works, her
historical descriptions, and her voice. But therein lies a problem.

The association of the “incomparable Sapho” with her texts helped them to
gain critical acclaim by her seventeenth-century readers. Just as certainly, the
metonymic association of Scudéry’s précioisité with her works has been a major
factor in subsequent negative critical reception. The association led to the critical
devaluation of her works for many years.

Before Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault problematized the role of the
author in the critical analysis of a work, it was commonplace for critics to
associate a writer and her production.10 And, further, the problematics of
authorial intention have been further complicated by the rise of feminist criticism.

Foucault asks the question “What difference does it make who is
speaking?” In Subject to Change, Nancy K. Miller contends that “[the] sovereign
indifference” of Foucault’s question “authorizes the “end of woman” without

consulting her.”(75)

28

CIT

got

aft

3.“;

Scudéry’s novels were historic in two senses. The Scudérian characters
donned the names of characters from novels of the Ancients, such a s
Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika.11 But, the novels were also
believed to be allegorical. The historic names stood for contemporary French
figures. Sapho in Clélie is purported to be Scudéry herself.

The intent of this dissertation is to release Scudéry and her works from the
350 years of negative criticism directed at them and at her person. Scudéry’s
text, that is, the words of La Promenade de Versailles, will speak to us rather
than the apocryphal construction of Scudéry perpetuated in much Scudérian
criticism.

What has bio-driven criticism produced? Until the late twentieth century,
notions of authorial intentionality had driven much of the criticism of Scudéry’s
works. Critics writing in eras prior to Foucault, Barthes, and twentieth-century
feminists, were guided by Scudéry’s presumed intentions that they believed
governed the meaning of her novels. Critical works on Scudéry in the later years
of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century love to trace
the biography of the Scudéry family to Italy and then to Apt and then to Le Havre,
where her brother Georges and Madeleine were born.

The criticism of Scudéry is then strung out as her life story, supplemented
and amplified by quotations from her own works! In her book Mademoiselle de
Scudéry, Nicole Aronson’s summarizes works on Scudéry from the turn of the
nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Her survey of the critical

literature of this perioid underlines their reliance on biographical as opposed to

29

textual criticism. For example, according to Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry,
Reine de Tendre, written by Claude Aragonnes, is “[v]aluable mostly for the
description of Mlle de Scudéry’s friends (173).” Dorothy McDougall’s title
Madeleine de Scudéry, Her Romantic Life and Death points to the biographical
nature of her inquiry as does Rathery and Boutron’s Mademoiselle de Scudéry.
Sa Vie et sa correspondence.12

In such works, Scudéry, sister of Georges, sister-in-law of Marie-
Madeleine, soul mate of Paul Pellisson, host of her weekly literary salon, Samedi,
correspondent of Huet, target of Boileau, and finally author, is described. This
type of critical work makes claims for Scudéry based on quotations of her
seventeenth-century admirers. Using snippets of letters from her voluminous
correspondence, quotations from her novels, and descriptions by her peers, the
authors piece together a historical mosaic that attempts to valorize her life and
one supposes her works. Critics analyzing and affirming the literary content of
Scudéry’s works begin tobe published in the late 1970's. Nicole Aronson’s work
is groundbreaking in this sense.

Twentieth-century readers of Scudéry’s works might compare them to a
literary gazette. The volumes of her long novels were published in serial. In the
seventeenth century, the avid readers of Scudéry’s novels awaited the
publication of the latest volume with great anticipation, perhaps eager to discover
if they themselves were one of the characters of Cyrus or Clélie disguised as

characters from Antiquity. Current Scudérian scholars disagree as to the

30

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existence and importance of the keys to her novels that Cousin claimed to have
discovered in the nineteenth century.

Following Cousin, certain critics frame their critiques of Scudéry’s novels
based on their conclusion that her works are romans a clef. Interpreting the key
is seen by some as adding an important historical dimension to her work, while
others believe it detracts from the inherent aesthetic worth of her novels.
Madeleine de Scudéry herself makes reference to characters in Clélie in her
correspondence with Paul Pellisson.13 In Rene Godenne’s lengthy and
meticulous compendium of the Scudérian novel, he minimizes the importance or
existence of keys to Scudéry’s novels.

However, Godenne admits that seventeenth-century readers were quick
to accept the notion of keys in Scudéry’s novels, especially Clélie.“ “Que Mlle de
Scudéry alt songe a dépeindre dans son roman plusieurs de ses familiers n’a
jamais éte mis en doute au XVII” siecle” (200). Godenne cites Boileau, perhaps
Scudéry’s most harsh critic, as the first of her contemporaries ”a avoir mentionné
l’existence d’une clé de Clélie [...] (201).” Jean Mesnard in his article “Pour une
Clef de Clélie” cites Boileau to that effect: “On en donnait autrefois une clef qui a
couru , mais je ne me suis jamais soucié de la voir. Tout ce que je sais, c’est
que la genereux Henninius, c’était M. Pellisson; l’agréable Scaurus, c’etait
Scarron; Ie galant Amilcar Sarasin, [etc] (377).”

Godenne acknowledges Cousin’s claim to have found a key to Artamene,

ou le Grand Cyrus in the nineteenth century, however, all of the hypotheses

31

3220

be

0‘,

about keys prove to him that they have little value. “Ces forrnules sont, pour moi,
Ia preuve que rien n’est stir [...] (203).”

On the other hand, the twentieth-century Scudérian scholar, Alain Niderst,
fervently believes Scudéry’s novels to be romans a clef. He claims to recognize
fifty-nine certain keys in Clélie, for example.(202) As we shall see, Niderst
identifies several characters in La Promenade de Versailles as important figures
of Parisian courtly society.

To some critics, labeling a novel as a roman a clef takes away the status
of the work, debasing or tn'vializing it. However, the material existence of a key
or keys is not the issue. Historically and sociologically important personages from
the seventeenth-century Parisian society could identify themselves and their
surroundings in the works of Scudéry. This added to the works” popularity, but
not necessarily or directly to their worth. However, the social commentary of
Cyrus and Clélie produces a significant discourse on seventeenth-century
Parisian society. The biographical allusions of the characters to heroes of the
Fronde, lead DeJean, for example, to identify those works as politically
subversive.

Interestingly, though DeJean relies on the identification of the characters
in Scudéry's novel to bolster her contention that the novels are political, she also
takes exception with the form of Cousin’s argument with regard to the keys he
supposedly discovered. Because of the importance that the notion of keys holds

for our interpretation of La Promenade de Versailles and because of the

32

potentially problematic existence of such keys, DeJean’s rationale is cited in its

entirety.

On January 7, 1649, just four days before the heroic drama at the H6tel de
Ville that was for Retz [the famous cardinal who was imprisoned for his
participation in the F ronde] Astree come to life, the first two volumes of a
new roman were printed. Artame‘ne, ou la Grand Cyrus would fire the
collective imagination of the contemporary reading public as no prose
fiction since d’Urfé’s magnum opus had done. The heroines and heroes
of the Fronde were self-conscious, novelistic actors on the stage of
history; Artamene is in a sense a literary recreation of the living-out of a
novel. Yet this is not to say that Artame‘ne is merely a novelistic mirror of
the F ronde years. Such was the position of Victor Cousin, who devoted his
La Société au X We sie‘cle d’apres “Le Grand Cyrus”to establishing the
‘key’ to the novel’s characters, out of a conviction that the works popularity
could only be explained by the aristocratic public’s desire to recognize
familiar faces [especially their own] in a ten-volume, 14,000—page
novelistic mirror. The reading Cousin inaugurated has successfully
obscured the more intricate bond between history and fiction in Scudéry’s
work, in particular the parallelism between its literary evolution and the
contemporary evolution of feminist activity.(44-45)

Assuming that the characters allegorized in Scudéry’s novel were worthy
and exemplary figures, what readers would not appreciate finding themselves
allegorized in the latest print sensation? More importantly, what DeJean adds to
the equation makes the difference between a gazette and critical socio-political
commentary on seventeenth-century society. The juxtaposition of feminism and
the evolution of literary rhetorical devices in the novel makes Scudéry’s works not
only forerunners of the modern novel, but also of what blooms into full-fledged
feminist fervor at the end of our twentieth century. DeJean’s analysis of
Scudéry’s romans a clef certainly points to their historical importance.

Niderst speculates about characters in the far-off land of the “Histoire de

Celanire” as representatives of Scudéry and her friends and acquaintances,

33

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particularly Fouquet, Pellisson and even Louis XIV himself.15 His speculation will
prove useful in the analysis of the political and the feminist critiques described in
Chapters 3 and 4. Niderst carefully distinguished a mere representation of Louis
XIV’s court society at Versailles from the novelistic interpretation of that society.
Scudéry’s interpretation proves the most significant aspect of her novel. Let us
remember that political allegory, a tradition in French literature which begins in
the Middle Ages, allows a powerful narration to critique a culture while providing
a certain cover for the author.16

Of course, this thesis intends to encourage a twenty-first—century audience
to read Scudéry’s La Promenade de Versailles. It is only fairly recently that such
a goal could be taken seriously. As late as 1985, the Concise Oxford Dictionary
of French Literature, while acknowledging that Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie “were
immensely popular in their day,” concludes that “this type of romance-tediously
long, insipid and unreal—was condemned by Boileau and is as a whole quite
unreadable today (582).”

Ten years later, in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, the
recommendation had changed. It states:

Commentators have often presented Scudéry’s work as an unambiguous

eulogy of political absolutism and aristocratic privilege. They therefore

eliminate the nuances in her political thinking—eg. her eyewitness

accounts of the F ronde—that subtly predict the dangers of absolutism. The

cautiously subversive Scudéry could find new readers today.(753)

How does one explain the change in the evaluation of Scudéry’s work

from 1985 to 1995? The first clue is the fact that the revised entry for Madeleine

de Scudéry was written by Joan DeJean. Recent narratological and feminist re-

34

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readings of Scudéry’s works have re-valorized them in a dramatic return of the
repressed. Because of late twentieth-century narratology and the success of
feminist theory, a space for Scudéry’s work is being re-created. Most importantly,
in La Promenade de Versailles, Scudéry’s rhetorical strategies demonstrate
political and feminist ideologies and therefore this work could but should be re-
read by scholars.

Many critics already acknowledge Scudéry’s important place in the history
of the modern novel. Among them, Timothy Reiss in The Meaning of Literature
speaks directly of Scudéry’s considerable influence on the development of the
genre. Reiss summarizes the teamed seventeenth-, early eighteenth-century
Pierre-Daniel Huet’s respect for the novelistic form. Reiss cites Huet as stating
that the “knowledge which attracts and charms most is that which it acquires
easily [...] That is what novels do (216).” In the context of his discussion of Huet’s
positive evaluation of the genre of the novel, Reiss adds, “it is not surprising,
therefore, that women were in fact the principal readers ‘de cette lecture si
delicieuse’ and had produced their greatest author, Madeleine de Scudéry (216).-
One male reader of seventeenth-century France also read and praised
Scudéry’s works, Pierre-Daniel Huet himself. And he was both a privileged and
important reader of the novel at that, since he was a seventeenth-century literary
cnfic.

Margaret Doody is one twentieth-century expert of the novel who also
finds Scudéry’s works worth reading. In The True Story of the Novel, she

dramatically situates Scudéry in the same novelistic tradition that began with

35

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Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in c.428 B.C.17 Doody tells us that her own book “is an
attempt to trace connections rather than to assert division (xvii). “ Important to a
re-valorization of Scudéry’s work is Doody’s assertion that “the concept of
‘Romance' as distinct from ‘Novel’ has outwom its usefulness, and that at its
most useful it created limitations and encouraged blind spots (xvii).”18 Doody
adds, “If I emphasize continuities, it is because discontinuity, absolute division,
has been harshly and hastily asserted before now. The fences have been too
sturdy or too barbed—it is good sometimes to leap over fences, or even to break
them down (xviii).”

There has been much discussion in critical literature about the definitions
of Romance versus Novel versus History, etc. English Showalter, Jr., devotes an
entire chapter to the difference between romans, romances, nouvelles, novels,
histoires, etc. (11-37).

Doody simplifies the discussion. To her “[a] work is a novel if it is
ficitional, if it is in prose, and if it is of a certain length (16).”19 La Promenade de
Versailles fits Doody’s definition.

Doody’s respect for Scudéry’s contribution to the history of the novel is
underscored by the fact that the index of The True Story of the Novel offers 35
citations referencing Scudéry. Doody compares Scudéry to several authors
considered great novelists from antiquity to the twentieth century, from
Heliodorus to Balzac and Proust.20

Doody reminds us that fiction can be truer than fact:

The long-breathed French novel of the earlier seventeenth century was
readily understood by contemporaries to be allegorical. An English

36

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translator of Le Grand Cyrus comments, ‘the Intrigues and Miscarriages of

War and Peace are better, many times laid open and Satyriz’d in a

Romance, than in a downright History, which being oblig’d to name the

Persons, is often force’d [...] to be too partial and sparing.’ Novels can tell

the true history, while historians are under pressures that make them

false. As well as offering political allegories of the present, novels at a

deeper level express the knowledge that individual human beings are

subject to—and part ofuhuman structures and arrangements over which
they have little and sometimes no control—including war and slavery. In
such a situation, even a heroic capacity of great deed (as in the case of

Scudéry’s Cyrus, modeled on Xenophon’s hero) will not be all sufficient-

there will be not only ‘intrigues’ but ‘Miscarriages’ in ‘War and Peace.’

Everyone wants power and feels the lack of it; even the great folks really

have very little.(263-64)

Fiction can be truer than fact. Doody suggests the importance of Sapho’s
contribution to the historical and rhetorical traditions of the novel. La Promenade
de Versailles unveils the intrigues and miscarriages of war and peace during the
early years of Louis XIV’s reign. The “Histoire de Celanire” becomes a dark
allegory of absolutism that contrasts with the brilliant praise of Louis XIV and
Versailles in the introductory description of La Promenade de Versailles.
Consideration must be given to the definitions of allegory as opposed to example
and how they intersect.

Doody places Scudéry in a novelistic tradition that begins with the ancient
Greeks and Romans.21 Reiss acknowledges Scudéry as a major French novelist.
In their respective books, both of these critics speak to the exclusionary practices
of critics from the seventeenth century to the present, practices which have
attempted to marginalize the importance of Scudéry’s works. The political content
of her works may well have threatened both the male political and literary power
centers of seventeenth-century France, especially since powerful literary figures

such as Boileau, did work ostensibly in the interest of the king. The politically

37

 

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sensitive nature of Scudéry’s works, even though they managed to slip by the
censors, may have forced those in power to mitigate her influence by denigrating
her work and her lifestyle.

Doody and Reiss both affirm that the tradition of political commentary
coming out of a pastoral literary setting has ancient roots. Scudéry tapped into
that current of pastoral and political story telling. She spoke and her words could
well have been dangerous. Only the twentieth-century re-reading of texts by
women lost to the canon for centuries have brought Scudéry and the importance
of her works back to center stage.

Late twentieth-century critical re-readings of Madeleine de Scudéry’s
works tend to cluster in two camps. A group of more traditional Scudérian
scholars includes Rene Godenne, Nicole Aronson and Alain Niderst, of whom
Niderst offers the most pertinent analyses of Scudéry’s works. Niderst has
fostered much of the current work being done on Scudéry as well as on her
brother Georges and her sister-in-law, Marie Madeleine. He has written
numerous articles and books on the three Scudéry.

One fact that has contributed to the repression of Scudéry’s works is their
unavailability. Aware of this critical problem, Niderst edited a modern edition of
Célinte, one of Madeleine de Scudéry’s nouvellas. Niderst also published a
lengthy work entitled Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellisson et leur monde, in
1976.

More recently, in 1991, Niderst organized a colloquium in Le Havre,

Madeleine and Georges’s birthplace. Niderst noted the millenarian spirit

38

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motivating the reunion. The dates of the conference approximately corresponded
to the birth of Georges and the death of Madeleine in 1601 and 1701
respectively. The proceedings of the colloquium were published in a volume
entitled Les Trois Scudéry, referring to Madeleine, her brother Georges and his
wife. The depth of Niderst’s research and its overall positive evaluation of
Madeleine de Scudéry work attest to Niderst’s favorable reading of Madeleine de
Scudéry’s works. Niderst’s scholarship contributes to the arguments presented in
Chapters 3 and 4.

Niderst and his followers believe in a true restoration of Scudéry. Their
notion of a restorative reading of Scudéry confirms her place in the court of Louis
XIV as one of his supporters. To Niderst, La Promenade de Versailles was
written as a “promenade,” that is a literary genre reflected in the title,22 one that,
in this case, was composed as a eulogy to the king.

On y trouve comme un echo des grands romans d’autrefoisuquelques
allusions a Hérodote eta Polybe [. . . ] Mais tout cede maintenant, au roi,
a qui la nouvelle est d'ailleurs dediée; Ie souverain est glorifié, Ia
campagne de Flandre, la campagne de F ranche-Comte, et le Dauphin, qui
montre a “une soumission ties-profonde pour son Roi et pere, qu’il aime
autant qu’il le craint.”(483)23

Here, Niderst’s reading implicitly yearns for a restoration of the monarchy
and for the greater glory of the Royalist ancien regime of the Bourbon dynasty.
However, in our conclusion, we will see that Niderst’s reading of La Promenade
de Versailles also points to the novel’s underlying critique of absolutism.

Several of Scudéry’s critics eschew the notion that her works are politically

motivated, or more specifically, that they challenged Louis XIV. At the 1991

colloquium organized by Niderst, Jtirgen Grimm presented a paper entitled “Les

39

ldées politiques dans les romans de Mlle de Scudéry.” 'He begins by defending
his thesis. “Proposer une telle lecture pour une oeuvre qui, dans le passe, a
plutbt invite a une lecture esthetisante, peut paraitre quelque peu hérétique”
(443) Noemi Hepp took exception to Grimm’s characterization of Scudéry as a
Frondeuse. 454/ Hepp asked Grimm “ce qui lui perrnet de voir dans Le Grand
Cyrus une plus ou moins nette apologie de la F ronde (Grimm 455)”? She cites
Grimm’s own equivocacy when he first cites Marlies Mueller as a reference to
Scudéry’s “loyalisme monarchique” in Cyrus and then he declares that Scudéry
was a “demi-frondeuse inconsclente.” Hepp contends that her own work
indicates that there is not textual evidence in Cyrus to classify Scudéry as a
Frondeuse. rather that the text of Cyrus goes to extremes to to “eviter Ie
dilemrne, enfin le confiit entre le heros et le roi [...] (455).”

In her 1978 article “La notion d’Héro‘r‘ne,” Hepp defines female heroism in
the seventeenth century strictly in terms of a traditional subservient role with
regard to her hero and her king. The hero in Hepp’s construction of Clélie,
exhibits classic heroism, that the male protagonist performs heroic acts. The
heroine exhibits “feminité.” Hepp contends that “Clélie a voulu fuir le camp
etrusque pour sauvegarder sa fidélite a Aronce [. . . ] c’est I’amour d’un homme
plus que la volonte de libérer un groupe de la servitude qui a été Ie mobile de
l’action hero'i‘que (15).” Hepp’s construction of Clélie defines her as a heroine in
search of her man, not as a woman seeking political ends.

Hepp’s construction of female heroism rejects the possibility that a woman

could or would actually perform heroic acts. Metaphorically, Hepp defines the

40

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heroine as the moon, the pale reflection of her hero, the sun, obviously, a well
chosen metaphor for the era of the newly rising Sun King, Louis XIV. Hepp’s
notion of female heroism dictates that a good woman stand by her man! And her
king!

Hepp’s derision of a truly heroic woman becomes more explicit. “On dirait
que la femme-heros répugne profondément a la pensee du XVIIe siecle (16).”
Certainly, the femme—heros was repugnant to those in power in seventeenth-
century France, especially to males who saw the femme forte as a political, if not
sexual, predator.

Clearly, Hepp resists the new feminist critical voice of the 1990’s and its
most vocal and successful proponent, Joan DeJean. DeJean’s Tender
Geographies offers an extended and complete answer to Hepp’s question to
Grimm.

All the volumes of Artame‘ne were dedicated to the Duchesse de

Longueville, and the novel’s central couple Cyrus and Mandane, were

seen from the beginning as the fictional counterparts of the great Conde

and his sister, the Duchesse de Longueville.(45)

These historical figures were the leaders of the rebellion of aristocrats
against royal power that has become known as the Fronde. DeJean contends
that with Artaméne, ou la Grand Cyrus “[tjhe bond forged thereby between prose
fiction and political subversion marks the origin of the modern French novel; it is
the founding gesture that makes Artamene, rather than Astrée, the earliest
indication of prose fiction’s definitive early modern tradition (4546).”

According to DeJean, the positioning of Scudéry and her works in relation

to the Fronde and the rise of absolutism become part of the dramatic shift in

41

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seventeenth-century feminist tactics, from political activism to literary subversion
that becomes the modern novel. DeJean claims that the failure of the Fronde
marked the end of an era of female political activism that was redirected to
literary production. In her article “La notion d’Héro‘ine,” Hepp interprets the
heroines of Scudéry’s novels as implicitly affinning the kings of the ancien regime
and their allegiance to them.

Nostalgia for the ancien regime can hardly claim to be apolitical. Neither
can a work that praises Louis XIV. Is praise for a monarch equivalent to an
endorsement of the king’s actions? In La Promenade de Versailles, many
passages in Part One of the novel do praise Louis XIV. But, in an absolute
monarchy, to do otherwise or actually to go so far as blatantly to criticize the king
could have been considered an act of lese-majesté. To criticize the king, as
Chapter 3 will discuss, was a dicey matter at best.

The ingenuity of La Promenade de Versailles lies in the fact that the
critique of Louis XIV was disguised. In this, Scudéry follows the model of kingship
manuals such as Jean-Francois Senault’s Le Monarque ou les Devoirs du
Souverain, wherein Senault praises the king but also subtly suggests how he
might improve as a monarch. Rather than accuse the king of being a tyrant, Le
Monarque proceeds by describing positive role models for Louis XIV to emulate,
enumerating the ways in which previous “great Princes” remained worthy
monarchs and never abused their people.

The success of La Promenade de Versailles lies in its ability to advise

Louis XIV without negative consequences for its author. In fact, Scudéry actually

42

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has an audience with Louis XIV and receives a pension from him, which speaks
to the subtle art of Scudéry’s critique of her king. Even though indebted to him
and in his good graces, she still finds it her duty to criticize him, a tricky textual
manoeuver .

The twentieth-century revisionist readings of Scudéry by feminists such as
DeJean proclaim her feminist and political agendas. Proponents of this re-
reading of seventeenth-century female novelistic production seek to re-visit the
political discourse, whether obvious or subversive, embedded in Scudéry’s
works. Joan DeJean and Erica Harth are in the forefront of the feminist and
sometimes deconstructive re-evaluation of Scudéry’s works.

What some scholars purport to be Scudéry’s critique of Louis XIV is
neither blatant nor necessarily obvious. One can hardly be overtly critical of an
absolutist regime and hope to stay alive. Many Frondeurs did not live to tell of
their participation in the uprising. Even an indirect challenge to Louis XIV’s
supremacy could lead to severe punishment or death. Nicolas Fouquet, a friend
of Madeleine de Scudéry and Paul Pellisson, died in prison after he was
condemned to life imprisonment. Fouquet, Louis XIV’s financial administrator,
was charged with excessive irregularities in his administrative duties. However,
Fouquet’s audacity probably was his undoing, for his financial abuses were in
fact no more blatant than previous financial ministers to Louis XIV.

Fouquet had made the mistake of building a palace that could rival
Versailles. That Vaux-le-Vicomte might surpass Versailles in opulence and

beauty threatened Louis XIV where he lived. Fouquet also propositioned Louis

43

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XIV's love interest, Louise La Valliere. Fouquet seems to have acted in such a
way as to deliberately challenge Louis XIV. Pellisson, Scudéry’s best friend and
soul mate, took up the defense of their mutual friend Fouquet. For his allegiance
to Fouquet, Pellisson was also imprisoned. Fortunately, Pellisson was eventually
released, and shortly thereafter, in a dramatic change of fortune, became Louis
XIV’s historiographer.

This historical incident bears directly on a possible interpretion of La
Promenade de Versailles. Niderst actually sees parallels between the characters
in Scudéry’s novel and the principals involved in Fouquet’s case (Leur monde,
489).

Neither the more traditional school of Scudérian criticism nor the late
twentieth-century avant-garde feminists avoid politics. The traditional, aesthetic
scholars have their own implicit political and conservative agenda. The feminist
scholars have an openly radical one, namely, the politics of feminism. In turn,
feminist politics lead to innovative literary advances.

DeJean states her case in Tender Geographies, Women and the Origins
of the Novel. “In the following pages I hope to go beyond the assertion that the
early novel was a vehicle for feminism to demonstrate that the feminist ideas
played a crucial role in the development of the French novel.”(Tender 5)

Scudéry’s novels are both central to the history of the novel and contain
feminist ideology. Her novels are both literary and political. And they are political
in two directions, exhibiting an interest in feminist ideals and the politics of

absolutism in seventeenth-century France. Therefore, late twentieth-century

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scholarship, whether emphasizing the aesthetic and forrnalist aspects of
Scudéry’s work or the political and feminist critiques found therein, share a
common interest, that is, reappraisal of the Scudérian oeuvre.

Margaret Anne Doody consciously combines both aesthetics and politics
in her discussion of Madeleine de Scudéry’s works. To Doody, the novel is par
excellence the aesthetic form that defines itself by its political agenda. “There is a
real sense in which all history and most written discourse is fictional (from
fingers, to shape, mold or model): that is, it is something made or made up”(16)
The novel provides an opportunity for “aesthetic pleasure and thinking about
experience (28).” “There is a political dimension to imagining any kind of
alternative to a present reality (15).” And finally, about the genre “Romance,”
Doody says “is most often used in literary studies to allude to forms conveying
literary pleasure the critic thinks the reader would be better off without (15).”
Clearly, at the onset of her discussion of the history of the novel from its inception
to its modern incarnations, Doody believes that Scudéry’s novels have something
to offer the reader.

Doody contends that “the seventeenth-century novel is by and large a
political novel in a political age (262).” She contends that “novels have always
been playing around with history (28).” Certainly, literary history has been playing
around with the reputation of Scudéry since she began writing in the
seventeenth—century. The last twenty years of the twentieth century bring an

intense revitalization of the interest of scholars in Scudéry’s work.

45

 

Consider a specific aspect of Scudéry’s life and work, namely, the world of
préciosité. Madeleine de Scudéry’s talent as a novelist has been fraught with
disagreement and dissent through the centuries. Now, in the new millennium,
twenty-first century scholarship about the world of seventeenth-century préciosité

and Scudéry’s place in that literary and cultural milieu remains controversial.

46

 

 

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‘ I am truly indebted to Margaret Anne Doody for her work The True Story of

the Novel. I appreciate Doody’s insightful and timely reference to the coming of
the twenty-first century as a privileged moment for scholarly reflection.(4-5) I
appreciate that Scudéry figures extensively in her book.

2 See Maitre 21-36. Her chapter on the history of the précieuses reception from
the seventeenth century to the present presents a most cogent and thorough
summary and much of it relates directly to Scudéry’s reception as well.

3 See Lanson 388. “La Iongeur de tous ces romans [those of Madeleine de
Scudéry] s’ajoutant a leur faussete, les rend illisibles.”

‘ See The New Oxford Companion to French Literature 167. The Oxford
Companion states that after the death of her husband, Christine de Pizan “was
left a widow in 1390 with her financial affairs embarrassed and with no resource
other then her pen.” Certainly both Pizan and Scudéry were exemplary in their
professionalism.

5'l’ he last words of Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cleves were “ des exemples de
vertu inimitables,” and Lafayette’s description of Scudéry thus invites further
speculation. Alter suggesting that Lafayette pays a tribute to Scudéry with the
word inimitable, DeJean further explains the importance of the gesture of calling
a colleague inimitable. “It was thus an accepted maxim of salon society that
someone whose incomparability was a ‘reputatation justly dispensed’ could in
turn assign a share in this status to others. It was also accepted that

incomparability defined someone’s essence, that it functioned as a nom

47

5830.”

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‘auth

resu'

 

(d’auteur). ‘Incomparable’ and ‘inimitable’ were thus the collective names of
salon writers, signatures that identified a particular conception of originality by
acknowledging that the individual voice was also a collaborative production. An
‘author' wrote with a single voice; salon writing was ‘inimitable’ because it
resulted from the combined forces of collaborators. When at the end of their
careers Lafayette called Scudéry “still inimitable,’ she both took her place as
Scudéry's successor and gave Scudéry her due” (Tender 125—125). I would also
add that La Princesse de Cleves as Madeleine de Scudéry both chose to remain
single, the fictional Cleves making this choice after the death of her husband and
Scudéry choosing to remain single her entire life. Scudéry’s marital choice, i.e.,
decision to remain single, thus lives on in the fictional work of Lafayette.

6 See Kent, Leonard J. and Elizabeth C. Knight ()ooriv). In their introduction the
editors find the tale entitled “Mademoiselle de Scudéri” to be “one of Hoffrnann’s
greatest stories [...] an early example of detective fiction...a splendidly exciting
plot [...] set in a Paris which is described in wonderful and accurate detail [...]
along with the magnificent Madeleine de Scudéri [...]”.

7 See DeJean 48-49 for her riveting analysis of this pivotal moment in the history
of the novel.

8 Given Borowitz’s meticulous documentation of her comparison of Scudéry and
Stael, it is surprising that she did not mention either of Stael’s plays we have
considered here. Perhaps because she was focusing on the genre of the novel,
she overlooked these plays that could also have served to support her

argumentation. Stael on the other hand, had personal as well as professional

48

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sir

 

reasons for satirizing Moliere’s satires. Her mother had been labeled a
“précieuse ridicule” by a contemporary and she also performed in “Les Femmes
Savantes” So Stael was very familiar with the seventeenth-century satirlst’s
works. (See Borowitz 32, 39)

9Refer to the different editions of Cousin’s La Societé Francaise au dix-septieme
siécle. Note that the sixth edition of 1886 is sometimes more nuanced than the
original edition of 1858.

1° See Barthes and Foucault in Rabinow for a discussion of authorial
intentionality.

‘1 See Doody The True History of the Nova! 30, 257 and passim.

12I would like to acknowledge the positive contribution to Scudérian scholarship
that Rathery and Boutron’s compilation of Scudéry’s correspondence provides.
‘3 See Mesnard “Pour une clef de Clélie,” 378. “Toutefois iI existe un rapport
remarquable entre CIeIie et un echange de correspondance entre la romanciere
et Pellisson du 9 au 13 octobre 1656.” Mesnard references the letters
reproduced in Rathery and Boutron, pp. 258-267. And, indeed, therein Rathery
and Boutron cite the Conrart Ms. which contains an exchange of letters that refer
to “I’incomparable Sapho, le généreux Cleodamas, Ia sage Ibérise, I’aimable
Agélaste et Ie galant Mérigene,” all characters in Clélie that WCtor Cousin
identifies as specific seventeenth-century French personalities: Sapho being, of
course, Madeleine de Scudéry, Cleodamas and lbérise, Monsieur et Madame
Conrart, etc. What is less certain is whether the Conrart Ms. letters were actually

penned by Scudéry and Pellisson. The manuscript as it is reproduced in Rather

49

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y and Boutron and in Victor Cousin's La Société Francaise au X VII” Siécle do not
have addresses. Those are provided by Cousin and reproduced by Rathery and
Boutron. Further inspection of the Conrart Ms. might clarify this point.

1" Not to put too fine a point on it, phonetically one could read the title of Clélie,
as Clef Iis! A familiar entreaty to look for keys, that is to say, allegorical
characters representing contemporary seventeenth-century figures in the novel
Clélie.

‘5 See Niderst Leur monde 490. He suggests that the prince of the far-off land of
Celanire may represent a darker side of Louis XIV.

‘6 See Le Pastoralet, Blanchard, editor. See also Blanchard La Pastorale en
France aux XIV” et X V” siécles. In the Avant-Propos of Blanchard’s critical
edition of Le Pastoralet, he describes the work as an “atypical text “qui évoque
sous Ie voile de la pastorate une des periodes les plus agitées de l’histoire de
France, Ie conflit tragique entre les factions des Arrnagnacs et des Bourguignons
[...] (5).” In Chapter IV entitled “Fiction et histoire, Le Pastoralet,” Blanchard hails
the text as an “[hjistoire-fiction qui est la promesse d’un nouvel age d’or, Ia
representation de la lutte que mene l’imaginaire contre les fantasmes
destructeurs du désordre et de la mort. En elles s’investissent des valeurs
exemplaires (149-150).” Le Pastoralet is indeed a precursor to the exemplary
historical fiction of Madeleine de Scudéry.

‘7 A study comparing Zenophon’s Cyropaedia and Scudéry’s Cyrus could prove

most enlightening.

50

 

 

‘8 The definition of “Romance” depends on the literary period with which it is
associated. Here, Doody’s point is to emphasize the historical continuity of a
broad definition of narrative fiction that she defines as the “novel,” from ancient
times to our day.

‘9 I interpret the non-specificity of Doody’s definition of the novel with regard to its
length as a contrast to other theoreticians’ definitions, such as Showalter’s ,
which she implies try to split hairs to differentiate the various historical forms of
the novel such as the roman, romances, etc. The implication is that the novel
will be rather long, that is, longer than a short story. Doody’s very simple
definition supports her contention that readers should begin to concentrate on the
similarities rather than contrived differences of the novel in the historical
perspective beginning with ancient Greek and Latin texts through time to the
present.

2° See Doody, 257-258, 315. Doody discusses Scudéry in relationship to
Heliodorus, Proust, and Balzac.

2‘ See Doody’s The True History of the Novel. In her historical review of the
novel, she argues this point convincingly.

22 Another work in this genre would be Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Amours de
Psyche et de Cupidon, published in 1669. The work resembles Scudéry’s in
several ways. In it, the characters also visit Versailles and the work is also
interlaced with poetry. The reference of Cupid in the title reminds us of the
several Eros ekphraseis in La Promenade de Versailles. See Picard, 52. “La

Fontaine’s genius is astonishingly rich and varied. He also composed a

51

 

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mythological novel in prose with verse interludesuLes amours de Psyche et de
Cupidon(1669) in which the story, both touching and humourous, of the heroine’s
adventures alternates surprisingly with the description of the gardens of
Versailles which were then being laid out, or the literary discussions of four
friends as they strolled in the grounds (52).” The narrative strategy of La Fontaine
in Les amours de Psyche et de Cupidon appears most similar to Scudéry’s in La
Promenade de Versailles. The style of La Fontaine’s novel is more similar to
D’Urfé’s Astrée than La Promenade de Versailles.

23 See Niderst, Leur monde 483. The page numbers of his citations refer to the
work entitled Celanire, a 1671 re—release of La Promenade de Versailles. See
also Godenne (La Promenade de Versailles, Preface llI). Godenne notes that a
modern editor published Part 1 of La Promenade de Versailles separately in
1920. Godenne references the text in a footnote. “Mlle de Scudéry, La
Promenade de Versailles, Paris, ‘A I’enseigne du masque d’or,’ chez Devambez,
1920, 60 p.(Estampes de Robert Mahias) (Etudes 61).” See also Niderst 483. He

notes that Mongrédien thought the two parts of the novel were two different texts.

52

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Chapter Two
Feminism and Scudéry:

Préciosité and Ecriture feminine

Since the seventeenth century, more ink has been spilt defining
Madeleine de Scudéry as the incarnate précieuse than has been spent on
determining the degree to which her literary works define écriture précieuse. A
twenty-first century scholar must decide whether to free Scudéry of the mantle of
préciosité that historically envelops her biography and the analyses of her
extensive literary corpus or to embrace the term, appropriating it to refashion the
author and redefine the vast Scudérian corpus.

Joan DeJean clearly chose the latter. She appropriates the historic icon of
Scudéry, the Carte de Tendre, as the design for the book jacket of her ground-
breaking work, Tender Geographies, Women and the Origins of the Novel in
France. The title of her work refers to the geography of Tender that Scudéry’s
map details in Clélie.

DeJean intends her reappropriation of the iconography of preciosité to be
a feminist re-reading of seventeenth-century female authors, especially, but not
exclusively, Scudéry and Lafayette. Tender Geographies includes a chapter
devoted to each novelist and ample references to both can be found throughout
the text. In fact, DeJean offers many examples of Scudéry’s influence on

Lafayette, as well as Stael, Sand and Colette.1

53

Historically Scudéry has been considered the epitome of the précieuse
and her works précieux tracts, whereas Lafayette’s novel La Princesse de Cleves
has been identified as the avatar of the modern novel. To her great credit,
DeJean’s text dispels the myth that La Princesse de Cleves sprang miraculously
from the pen of Lafayette to become a historical literary landmark. She traces at
length Lafayette’s literary debt to Scudéry. One of the important reasons to study
La Promenade de Versailles lies precisely in the fact that due to its political and
feminist daring, it was a precursor to Lafayette’s historic novel.

In her introduction, DeJean acknowledges that applying the terms
“feminist” and “feminism” to seventeenth-century female authors may be
anachronistic. DeJean relies on Joan Kelly for the solution, namely, that the
activities of “defenders or advocates of women” from Christine de Pizan to Mary
Wollstonecraft can be ascribed the same feminist terminology as their twentieth-
and now twenty-first-century descendants(6). Even though the terminology of
modern feminism did not yet exist in the seventeenth century, the project of
feminist advocacy begins in the Middle Ages and continues today.

DeJean asserts in the introduction to Tender Geographies that “[ijn
seventeenth-century France, the strength of prowoman sentiment generated
repeatedly, in a space where history and literature meet, what can be termed a
feminist textuality.”(6) La Promenade de Versailles models the radical,
narratological shift from exteriority to interiority that DeJean posits as the

beginning of the modern French novel (82).

54

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DeJean’s re-appropriates the rhetoric of preciosité. A manifest feminist
textuality by definition infers gender marking. The terms of this discussion of
feminist textuality in La Promenade de Versailles are écn'ture précieuse in two
instances, that of ecriture politique and of ecrr'ture feminine. Scudéry’s précieuse
writing yields an intricately woven écriture politique and écriture feminine that will
be considered in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. The conversation, an invention
of salon women, but ingeniously adapted to the genre of the novel by Madeleine
de Scudéry, allows a gender-marked discourse in Scudéry’s works, and
particularly in La Promenade de Versailles.

Because of the importance to this dissertation of the terms écriture
feminine and preciosité, they must be carefully defined. The noun précieuse
existed as a lexical item as early as the fourteenth century, so it will be
considered first, followed by a discussion of the the twentieth-century feminist

term ecriture feminine.

The Problematics of Préciosité
Preciosité is a construction and the construction of preciosité changes
through time, depending on the intention of the person or persons using the term.
Significantly, unlike the Pleiade poets of the Renaissance or the nineteenth-
century Romantics, the seventeenth-century précieux did not self-identify with the
term. It has always been a term applied to the so-called précieux from outside

their enterprise.

55

 

Philippe Sellier unearths a quotation from the correspondence of the
Chevalier Renaud de Sévigne to the Duchess de Savoie. “II y a une nature de
filles et de femmes a Paris que I’on nomme Précieuses, qui ont un jargon et des
mines avec un démanchement merveilleux: l’on a fait depuis peu une Carte pour
naviguer en leur pays (Névrose, 95).” One must read Sévigné’s comment
accurately. His statement does not prove that the so-called précieuses identify
themselves with the term, but only that others have so labeled them. The fact
that Sévigné alludes to what has become Scudéry’s iconographic label, the Carte
de Tendre, indicates that he considers Scudéry a précieuse, whether she did or
not.

To his credit, however, Sellier has been part of a late twentieth-century
critical movement to stimulate the reading of texts that have been identified as
précieux works. In 1998, Sellier published an article entitled “’Se tirer du commun
des femmes’: La constellation précieuse,” in which he again attempts to define
precrosité as a self-actualizing movement. He cites a character from Scudéry’s
Mathilde d’AguiIar, published in 1667, two years before La Promenade de
Versailles. “ll est bon de se tirer du commun des femmes, qui sont d’ordinaire
plus considérées pour les enfants qu’elles donnent dans Ieurs families, que pour
leur propre mérite (Constellation, 313).” Sellier comments on the citation. “Se
tirer du commun des femmes, c’est évidemment se donner du prix, etre
précieuse (Constellation, 313).” According to Sellier, Scudéry’s text links the

desire to escape the common duties of motherhood with female self-

56

improvement. He then implies that a woman’s self-conscious desire to realize her
own merit requires her to look beyond motherhood, to préciosité.

Sellier presents a protracted argument. One would hardly conclude on the
merit of this citation alone that Scudéry suggests that women abandon their
children for their own betterment. But, Sellier correctly points to an idea that La
Promenade de Versailles promulgates, namely, that women take control of their
lives. Juxtaposing préciosité and female emancipation may prove enlightening.

The present inquiry will trace the history of precrosité through the
overarching discourses of particular historical, political, and social currents
germane to the discussion. The definition and evaluation of preciosite changes
as a reflection of the agendas of literary critics of differing time periods.

One cannot expect to find a single, precise definition of précrbsité in the
discussion that follows. Sellier’s attempt to affirm the value of précrbsité
demonstrates how tricky the enterprise can be. However, both history and
historiography reconstruct the term over the centuries.

In his opus on preciosité, written in 1966, Roger Lathuillere’s lengthy
definition of the term emphasizes its ambiguity. Myriam Maitre recently penned
her own lengthy volume in an attempt to situate the illusive term.

In the history of preciosité from seventeenth-century France to the
present, several major evaluative shifts can be discerned in the reception of the
term from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. At its inception in the mid-
seventeenth century, préciosité received a favorable reception as literature and

as a life-style. Several scholars have identified the apogee of préciosite as

57

occuring approximately in the decade between 1650 and 1660. In her work
entitled Precious Women, Dorothy Anne Liot Backer claims that the “précieuses
had seven years they could call their own (154).” “These years (1653-1660) can
be seen as a kind of hiatus in the history of France, a moment of suspension
between the wild and willful heroics of the F ronde and the final relieved descent
into absolutism (154).”

Backer contends that préciosite thrived during a “hiatus in the history of
France,” does she mean to imply that the précieux were not or should not be
considered part of that history? Backer suggests a political frame for the advent
and closure of the précieuses’ success. And, she chooses colorful and evocative
adjectives to describe the Fronde and Louis XIV's absolute reign. Her word
choice subtly reveals the aristocratic bias of her text. It is fortunate, her text tells
us, that the “wild and willful” frondeurs and frondeuses who played at limiting the
French monarchy’s power were subdued. And, she implies further, that French
society was thus saved by its fall into absolutism. Absolutism brought relief.

Political persuasion proves to be an important element in the historical
evaluation of préciosité. We shall see that the politics of préciosité frame most
reactions to the writings of the so-called précieuses, and certainly the reactions
to the Reine de Tendre, Madeleine de Scudéry. The writing and the publication of
two of her most important works, Cyrus and La Promenade de Versailles were
written in the same crucial political moments in seventeenth-century society that

Backer suggests frame the précieux movement.

58

DeJean claims: “Madeleine de Scudéry had become the official novelist of
the rebel camp, whose military and amorous exploits she fictionalized in
Artamene, ou la Grand Cyrus [...] (Salons 301).” In La Promenade de Versailles,
Scudéry became the conscience of the king and his absolutist policies, regarding
politics, female rights and in general with regard to the rights and well-being of
his subjects.

Scudéry published La Promenade de Versailles in 1669, several years
after the ten-year period that Backer calls the “precious decade.” Scholars of
préciosité vary as to the time period that should be delineated as that of the
précieuses. Sellier, for example, extends the boundary from 1643 to 1715, a time
period that embraces most of Scudéry’s publications. Continuing his commentary
on his citation from Mathilde d’AguiIar, Sellier adds:

Cette revendication d’une réussite personnelle et d’une supériorité, cette

quete de ‘gloire' feminine caracterisent un mouvement de Iongue durée

dans la culture francaise, puisqu’on peut Ie faire partir a peu pres de

I’avenement d’Anne d’Autriche comme regente, en 1643, et qu’il se

prolonge jusqu’a la mort de la marquise de Lambert, la protectrice de

Marivaux, en 1733.(Constellation, 313)

The presence and power of the female regents and protectors aided the
cause of the female voice in seventeenth-century France, but also contributed to
a phantasmagorical fear of women in power as well. Ironically, Scudéry’s
success and the vicious satirical tirades against her, especially Boileau’s, both

may have been the result of the preeminence of powerful women in the

seventeenth century.

59

Precisoite has been defined metonymically as the space of the literary
salon of the seventeenth-century. The literati engaged in a flourish of literary
activity, encouraged by the societal construction of the literary salon.

The salon2 of Mme de Rambouillet metonymically stands for the original and
purifying notion of preciosité. Rambouillet, remembered as a paragon of virtue
and purity, has been defined as the first précieuse and thus the creator of the
précieux movement. Charles-Louis Livet describes her thus, ”Madame de
Rambouillet est Ie type Ie plus pur et Ie plus elevé de la vraie précieuse, dans Ie
meilleur sens du mot: elle para‘it d’abord dans ce livre, et elle y occupe la
principale place [etc] ()oorv).”

Literary historians suggest that Rambouillet’s distaste of the crude warrior
King Henri IV and his courtiers inspired her to set up her own off-site court. Her
salon became known as la chambre bleue where strict rules of decorum and
speech were enforced and an appreciation of fine literature was de rigueur.
Madame de Rambouillet, born Catherine de Vivonne-Savelli, married Henri
d’Angennes, who inherited the family title of Marquis de Rambouillet. La divine
Arthenice (Arthenice being an anagram of Cathérine3) is further attributed with
inaugurating a sea-change in the profile of the French nation, setting a lasting
model for good taste in manners, literature and in all things polite.

The heroine of La Promenade de Versailles compares favorably to Mme
de Rambouillet. While Rambouillet has left no writings to attest to the truth of her

legacy, Scudéry has. In fact, the genius of Scudéry’s novelistic shift from

60

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exteriority to interiority is due to her inscribing the rules of decorum and speech
of the salon into her novels. Her work reflects her salon and her exemplary life.

Further, in La Promenade de Versailles, the heroine Celanire stands as a
paragon of virtue and purity. She too provides a model for good taste in manners,
literature and in all things polite. And, she takes leave of a court in her far-off land
because of the crude demands of her uncle Euribiade who wants to marry her off
to a rich old cad unworthy of her graces. While historically Scudéry herself has
been compared unfavorably to Rambouillet, Celanire seems a worthy counterpart
to the founder of the chambre bleue. La Promenade de Versailles reconstructs
through Celanire a perfect précieuse, the legacy denied to its author.

The original moment of preciosité’s conception always described in
glowing, complimentary terms is strictly associated with Rambouillet who
becomes the patron saint of French manners and decorum and supposedly sets
the standard for the behavior and language of polite society in France for future
generations. La Promenade de Versailles reenacts the language and behavior of
that Parisian society.

In La Promenade de Versailles, Scudéry creates a fictional character
worthy of Rambouillet’s reputation. The rules of decorum and speech attributed
to Rambouillet become a format for a Scudérian invention, namely the
conversation. Wherever la belle Etrangére and her entourage travel, the
conversation proves the favorite pastime of Celanire and her companions.
Godenne goes so far as to suggest that in La Promenade de Versailles the

conversations are too numerous to consider. “Quant aux conversations de salon

61

 

sur les mérites de tel amant, sur les qualités de divertissement, elles sont bien
trop nombreuses pour qu'on s’attarde ales relever (Etudes, 59).”

The 1985 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of French Literature
gives a definib’on of préciosité based on Rambouillet as the original pure
précieuse whose imitators fell into excess, pedantry and affectation.

Précieux, Précieuses. Préciosite, brought into fashion by Mme de

Rambouillet and her circle [. . .] was in origin the pursuit of elegance and

delicacy in thought, language, and manners. In language, it led to the

coining of metaphorical expressions (some have survived, e.g. travestir sa
pensee), the avoidance of low or barbarous words, and a general attempt
to achieve clarity and precision. But in checking coarseness it also
inhibited spontaneity, and in time it was carried to excess, e.g. in the cult
of periphrasis for its own sake. The précieuses, the ladies who practiced
it, were ridiculed for their pedantry and affectation, and Boileau, Racine
and Moliere reacted against it.(491)

Note that though historically Scudéry has been associated with preciosite
as often as Rambouillet, this particular definition fails to mention her or any works
by précieuses, only the works of their detractors, Moliere, Boileau and in this
case Racine. The entry for Madeleine de Scudéry repeats Gustave Lanson’s
claim that her novels were unreadable(582).

One hesitates to include such a definition at the onset of a chapter
seeking to define preciosite, lest this vague and exclusionary definition leave a
lasting impression with the reader. The association of Scudéry’s work with
pedantry and affectation has been all but too frequent in the critical literature on
seventeenth-century France. Until most recently, there has been little recognition
of the clear and precise nature of her work. In the final analysis, this work will

demonstrate the clarity, precision, and even daring displayed by Scudéry in La

Promenade de Versailles.

62

 

 

 

 

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A discussion of Scudéry’s conversations proves them to be anything but
pedantic and affected. The rules of decorum for a formal conversation require
the very clarity and decorum purported to be Rambouillets forte. The
conversations by definition are informative, lively, and establish a dialogue of
equality between the speakers.

The last few years have seen a phenomenal rebirth in interest of her
works and an acknowledgment of her great literary accomplishments in the
seventeenth century. But, as surely as Rambouillet’s name has become
synonymous with an original and refined moment of preciosité, Scudéry has
been branded as a pedantic and affected précieuse.

As late as 1900, Leon H. Vincent reiterates the Rambouillet/Scudéry
comparison. In his publication HOteI de Rambouillet and the Précieuses, Vincent
poses the question “Who were the Précieuses (71 )?' He alerts us to the danger
of impostors. “Every good and useful thing has its parody. There is not a patent
medicine of reputed worth which does bear upon its label the warning, ‘Beware of
imitations(73).’ “ He goes on to say that,“The salons which came into existence
just before and during the decline of H6tel de Rambouillet were modeled more or
less imperfectly upon it (73).”

Fortunately, we have Scudéry’s ample corpus that allows us to re-evaluate
Scudéry’s salon in terms of Rambouillet’s. Only the legend of Rambouillet’s
chambre bleue provides data on which to evaluate the précieux exchanges that

purportedly took place in her salon.

63

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56

Vincent refrains from commenting on Scudéry’s work, but he does speak
about her salon. “She began to hold her famous ‘Saturdays’ some time between
1645 and 1650. Her house became the ‘normal school’ of précieuses of the
thorough-going sort (84).” He compares Rambouillet’s salon to Scudéry’s. The
participants “talked of everything, of war, of religion, or politics (85).” “On the
other hand,” Vincent contends,”the ‘Saturdays’ were out and out literary, and
therefore apt to be afflicted with that malaise which is always apparent if a
number of people with ‘literary leanings’ get together. The salon of Mademoiselle
de Scudéry had its better and its worse state, to be sure, but the general
tendency was in the direction of preciosity pure and simple (84-85).“ Vincent
wrote as a historian, so perhaps we can understand his bias toward
Rambouillet’s salon over Scudéry’s, since the former, according to Vincent,
concerned itself with issues beyond literature. It is more difficult to understand his
bias against literature and the literati.4 At any rate, it will become clear that La
Promenade de Versailles dealt with issues of war and politics, if not directly of
religion, just as Rambouillet’s salon supposedly did.

Vincent’s little history of the salon links Scudéry to préciosité supposedly
at its worst. Beyond the association of préciosité with the space and place of the
salon of Rambouillet and Scudéry, scholars have studied the satirists of
seventeenth-century France for further definition of the term and Scudéry’s link to
it.

While the so-called précieuses do not call themselves by this term,

Moliére, Somaize, Tallemant des Réaux, Pure and Boileau do. These writers

satirize the précieuses and several use the term in the title of their works. Moliere
pens Les Précieuses ridicules. Somaize compiles Le Grand dictionnaire des
précieuses and writes Le Proces des précieuses. Pure entitles his novel La
Prétieuse. Tallemant de Reaux’s Historiettes and Boileau’s L’Arf poétique,
Satires, and Les Héros du roman also satirize Scudéry, but the targets of their
satire are not reflected in their titles. Tallemant’s work includes dozens of
satirical descriptions. Boileau’s works satirize other seventeenth-century writers
as well, but he takes Scudéry to task more severely.

The dichotomy between history’s favorable attribution of the term
préciosité to Rambouillet as opposed to its negative depiction with regard to
Scudéry is important to this thesis. In his preface to the published version of Les
Précieuses ridicules, Moliere himself put forth the idea of worthy précieuses to be
contrasted to despicable précieuses. He defends his attack on précieux men and
women by insisting that his play only satirized the ridiculous précieuses.

J’aurai voulu faire voir qu’elle [la comedie Les Précieuses Ridicules] se
tient partout dans les bomes de la satire honnete et permise; que les plus
excellentes choses sont sujettes a etre copiées par de mauvais singes
qui méritent d’etre berries; que ces vicieuses imitations de ce qu’il y a de
plus parfait ont été de tout temps la matiere de la comédie...aussi les
véritables précieuses auraient tort de se piquer, Iorsqu’on joue les
ridicules que les imitent mal.(Flammarion 225)
Here, Moliere claims to reserve the force of the satire for those précieuses
aping the true précieuses. Attempting to emulate the true précieuses, they fall far

short of the mark. Instead of bettering themselves, they make themselves

ridiculous.

65

Historically, the good, the bad and the ugly précieuses have been so
designated.5 Rambouillet always the good, founding précieuse, holding court
from her melle, Scudéry a blatantly bad imitator of Rambouillet and a third group
of largely unidentified “false précieuses” defined as truly deplorable.6

The binary opposition between the true and the false or the good and the
bad précieuses has been around since Moliere. He establishes the opposition
between the good and the bad précieuses that still stands today. In 1658,
Moliére’s play Les Précieuses ridicules opened a literary Pandora’s box that has
yet to be closed.

Moliére tries to mitigate the furor over the possible identity of his
précieuses leading ladies, Cathos and Madelon, by specifying in his Preface that
he was only making fun of the false précieuses and not the true ones. However,
his hedging only served to encourage more speculation. Historically, Madame de
Rambouillet, whose first name is Catherine, and Madeline de Scudéry are the
two women most consistently identified as précieuses. The similarity of Catherine
and Madeleine to Cathos and Madelon is all too obvious.7 After the success of
Moliére’s play poking fun at the précieuses, several other seventeenth-century
satirists take on the newly invoked world of preciosite.

Between 1660 and 1661, Antoine Baudeau de Somaize writes his own
satirical comedy Les Vén’tables précieuses and publishes two dictionaries
purporting to define préciosité, the précieuses and their précieux language. In
the twentieth century, critic after critic refers to the work of Somaize as if he were

a certified sociologist. In their zeal to either defend or deride the précieuses,

66

twentieth-century critics seem to have lost all sense of perspective themselves,
to say nothing of their sense of humor.

In serious tones and with a strident style, writing in 1963, Mongrédien
introduces a collection of seventeenth-century works devoted to the précieuses
and their definition. In his work, La Preciosité et les précieux, he includes
excerpts from Somaize’s several dictionaries defining the précieuses. 8 One
dictionary, Le Grand dictionnaire des Précieuses ou la clef de la langue des
rueIIes 9, purports to translate the euphemisms of the true précieuses. Examples
are as follows. “Asseoir(s). Seyez-vous, s’il vous plait: Contenez, s’il vous plait,
l’envie que ce siege a de vous embrasser (72). Under the letter K, there are no
words, just an advisory. “Les Précieuses, qui ne veulent pas que I’on connaisse
rien a leur K [k(ilo)], l’ont Oté de leur alphabet (78).“ A twentieth-first century
reader can still identify with a woman’s desire to hide her weight, or a man for
that matter. Today, it is less comprehensible that a woman would feel so
compelled to avoid the verb to sit that she would impute a desire to a chair to
embrace her in order to do so.

Lathuillere confirms that the renowned historian of seventeenth-century
French literature, Antoine Adam, also believes Somaize’s dictionary is just a
laughing matter. “M. Antoine Adam ne voit dans son Dictionnaire qu’une ‘plate
sottise’, un ‘livre ridicule’ qu’il faut se garder de prendre au sérieux (158).”
Lathuilliere also demonstrates that most of the expressions in Somaize’s Grand
Dictionnaire, were borrowed directly from Moliere’s Les Précieuses ridicules

(164).

67

 

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Somaize’s definitions persist. The works of two other French
seventeenth-century satirists are also taken as deadly serious critiques of the
précieuses. Tallemant des Réaux wrote a two-volume work called Les
Historiettes. In it, he writes short, caustic biographies of seventeenth-century
personalities of the court and of the literary world. His joint entry for Madeleine
de Scudéry and her brother becomes acerbic. While most of his barbs are aimed
at Georges de Scudéry, he ridicules Madeleine de Scudéry’s looks and her vain
airs.10 To his credit, Tallemant des Réaux does publish the attribution of
Madeleine de Scudéry’s novels to her. However, his goal may have been to
discredit Georges rather than to compliment Madeleine.

The 1995 edition of the New Oxford Companion to Literature in French
describes the Historiettes as salacious, scandalous and entertaining anecdotes
(791 ), but also notes that Tallemant’s work was not published until the 1800s. Of
course, unpublished copies of his work may have circulated as works by Boileau
did. O

Michel de Pure, also known as I’abbé de Pure or simply Pure, wrote an
account called La Précieuse ou la Myste‘re de la ruelle published 1656-68.
Backer, in Precious Women, compares Somaize and I’abbe de Pure.

Perhaps the abbe de Pure was wiser than Somaize, he refused to pin

down the butterfly, but contented himself with contemplating it, in a long,

spongy novel... He portrays the typical précieuse in her shadowed retreat,
spinning out her conversations, discussing womanly problems with her
friends. This mysterious woman has no past or future. She is the persona

of the précieuse, the paragon for all the girls in Somaize’s Dictionnaire to
emulate.(17)

68

One wonders exactly what Backer meant by a “spongy” novel and whether
that characterization affirrns or negates Pure’s description of the précieuses. Did
he soak up a lot of information about the précieuses or does the work lack focus?
Backer suggests that his ephemeral portrait of a précieuse ressembles the
description of the women in Somaize’s satires. In this case, Backer uses one
satian definition, Pure’s, to support a second portrait, Somaize’s, and hopes to
come out with a biographically sound definition of a précieuse.

Reading biography into satirical fiction can be treacherous. In the critical
literature of Scudéry, much of what passes for biography draws on fictional and
often satirical works of the seventeenth century. Thus, separating fact from fiction
proves problematic in determining the “reality” of Scudéry’s life and and the merit
of her works. Indeed, Domna Stanton, informed by Barthes, de Certeau and
Haydn White reminds us of the limits of historical discourses.

Literary historians, even the most revisionist, have interpreted the
précieuse, like the précieux or Preciosity, as the expression of ‘a great
social current'[see Fukui p.41] Some have identifed her with a specifically
female outcry, what Mongrédien called complaints of ‘bourgeoises mal-
mariées’(pp.16-17), and more dissident critics, such as Lathuillere and
Lougee, define as an emancipatory, feminist impulse. These nominations
and associations, however, presuppose that the etiology of literature can
be located in the real, as history records it. According to Barthes,
Le[sicherteau and White, however, history cannot record the real, which
always remains inaccessible; instead historical discourse signifies or
constitutes the real, citing ‘facts’ which function as indices and create a
referential illusion. Indeed, historiography may be more prestidigitorial
than fiction, since the myth of the resurrection of the past, propounded by
historians, has been accepted as fact.(119)

As this review of the historical reception of préciosité unfolds, it contains
its own a reading of precioisite as “emancipatory, feminist impulse.“ In Chapter 4,

the definition of écriture précieuse as it is manifested in La Promenade de

69

Versailles will be explored in terms of Scudéry’s innovative narrative technique of
the conversation.

Scholarship may be undertaken from a particular point of view, such
scholarship must be interpreted with an awareness of the prejudice of the scholar
in order to neutralize his or her bias. Too many scholars have been all too willing
to accept Madeleine de Scudéry as the model of the false précieuses of Moliere’s
play.

Certainly, Moliere has maintained a favorable position in the French
literary canon as an author and playwright. Today, Moliere’s works are still known
by the general reading population and his plays are still successfully produced
and are Immensely enjoyed. On the other hand, until most recently, few have
heard of Madeleine de Scudéry outside of the seventeenth-century literary
academic community. We trust that the growing interest among seventeenth-
century French scholars in Scudéry will encourage an ever-widening audience
for her works.

Audiences continue to enjoy Moliere’s plays today. However, the facile
association between Scudéry and Les Précieuses ridicules must be re-examined.
We can reconsider the reliability of Moliere’s play as a source for literary critical
judgments.

The rigorous negativity of much Scudérian scholarship would be as
laughable as a Moliere play, if the results of the centuries of biased scholarship

had not done so much damage to the literary reputation of Madeleine de

70

 

Scudéry. Let us consider Backer’s “analysis” of Moliere and Boileau’s
relationship to Scudéry as a case in point.

Backer claims that “Moliere made Paris laugh with the best kind of
laughter, laughter which is a kind of self-criticism (187).” Her statement seems
fair enough. “We” still laugh at Moliere’s plays today. But, do we do so because
we see in them “self-criticism”?

In his work Laughing Matter, An Essay on the Comic, Marcel Gutwirth
quotes Moliere as saying “C’est une étrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les
honnetes gens,” which he translates as “It is not easy matter to make the better
sort [les honnetes gens] laugh (31).” Did Moliere intend to have the “better sort”
of his audience laugh at themselves or at the so-called less good sort, les
Précieuses? Do we laugh at ourselves when we laugh at the Other? Moliere may
well have considered Madeleine de Scudéry to be an honnéte femme., even as
he considered her to be ridiculous. Whatever the playwright’s intention, we can
imagine the face that the seventeenth-century theater patrons put on the
characters of Cathos and Madelon.

To return to Backer’s analysis, essentially, she admits that she has not
read Scudéry. She contends: “And on the scale of art, it is Moliere who still
makes us laugh at our own folly, Racine who makes us wring our hands in
despair. The writings of Madeleine de Scudéry, if we were to read them at all
today, could only make us yawn (200).” Of course, I disagree with Backer. One

can read her writings today and Scudéry’s writings can arouse our interest.

71

To dispel the myth of unreadability of the Scudérian corpus is one of the
important underlying goals of the present study. La Promenade de Versailles
offers a provocative read. Because it is a relatively short and an engaging text,
it offers an excellent primer for further Scudérian reading.

Backer’s praise for Moliere confirmed, she continues with a reading, not of
Scudéry, but of Somaize. She reminds us that his Les Véritables Précieuses also
attempts to define the difference between true and false précieuses, but that his
“’true précieuses,’at least in the play, prove to be only a pair of silly fools modeled
more or less on Moliere’s (161).” She refers the reader to a footnote that claims
that “Somaize, always eager to blow with the wind, ineptly tried to copy Moliere’s
wit in this play, while in other works he lashes out at Moliere in defense of the
précieuses (171).” Backer does not comment on Somaize’s inconsistency.11

Even today the critical reaction to Moliere’s play continues to promote the
hypostatization of the apocryphal representation of the good précieuse Catherine
Rambouillet (Cathos) versus the bad précieuse Madeleine de Scudéry
(Madelon)). Even if apocryphal, Moliere’s play has proven the most pervasive
and damaging source of negative criticism against Scudéry.

Roger Lathuillere discusses Les Précieuses ridicules and the possible
targets of the satire. He suggests that Scudéry herself had condemned not only
provincial imitators of “le bon ton de Paris” but also pedants putting on airs (131).
In a lengthy argument, he concludes that in order to evaluate Gorgibus’s tirades
against reading Scudéry’s novels, one must consider the source. Gorgibus

appears as a character in Les Précieuses ridicules and Sganarelle. Lathuillere

72

contends that in both plays the audience will understand that one must do the
opposite of what this ridiculous character Gorgibus says!

Les Précieux, amis du Surintendant [Fouquet], et les admirateurs de

Sapho, pas plus que Sapho elle-meme, ne pouvaient se choquer de ces

propos de Gorgibus; sa raillerie a l’égard de la Clélie n’a pas plus de

valeur que ses eloges d’ouvrages d’un autre age. lls etaient meme en
droit d’estimer que ces contre-vérités, proférées par un personnage
ridicule, déconsidéraient seulement celui qui les énoncait. Ala limite,
c'était un hommage indirect rendu a Mlle de Scudéry.”(127)

Lathuillere posits an argument that runs against much of the literature
concerning Les Précieuses ridicules and Madeleine de Scudéry. To suggest that
Scudéry herself attacks false provincial précieuses and becomes part of an
appreciative audience of Moliere’s plays at her good friend Fouquet’s residence
runs counter to the endless discussions in the literature featuring Scudéry as the
butt of the satire in the plays. Scudéry may well have enjoyed Moliere’s plays in
the company of her friends. However, to further suggest that the play indirectly
paid hommage to Scudéry runs in the face of centuries of literary criticism, even
though it may be the “true” intention of Moliere.

Yet Lathuillere presents a plausible, well-documented argument. His
interpretation of Moliere’s plays represents an affirmation of Madeleine de
Scudéry and her life. It suggests that the alignment of Scudéry with the false
précieuses of Moliere’s play must have entered the critical literature well after the
success of Les Précieuses ridicules. Moliere may have alluded to Madeleine de
Scudéry and her works in his plays to capitalize on her immense success. The

playwright cannot be held accountable for the interpretations of his viewers and

readers.

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Obviously, one cannnot contend that Moliere's play Les Précieuses
ridicules does not allude to Scudéry. The play contains an allusion to the
characters of Clélie and the famous Carte de Tendre, followed by a heated
discussion between Madelon and her father Gorgibus about courtship. Her long
speech provides the sketch for the production of a play about how to affiance
your lover. Her father responds; “Quel diable de jargon entends-je ici? Voici bien
du haut style.” To which Cathos, Gorgibus’s niece, replies with a description of
the Carte de Tendre. (230-231)

Again, Lathuillere does not find the representations of
Madelon and Cathos problematic with respect to Madeleine de Scudéry.

De maniere analogue [to his discussion about Gorgibus and Clélie],
Cathos et Magdelon, petites bourgeoises encore tout engluées dans la
province, en invoquant la Carte de Tendre et en récitant gauchement,
sans considérer leur propre condtion, toutes les péripéties d’une
recherche dans les formes, digne d’Aronce et de Clélie, de Cyrus et de
Mandane, ne ridiculisaient qu’elles-memes; leur snobisme maladroit trahit
par une application grossiere un ideal qu’elles admirent, amis que ni leur
niveau social, ni leur education, ni leur intelligence ne leur permettent de
realiser. lncapables d’imiter les modeles qu’elles se proposent, elles ne
peuvent que les singer. Mlle de Scudéry serait-elle concernee plus
directement dans les Précieuses ridicules que la vrai devotion dans
Tartuffe? On a vu qu’elle n’en voulait aucunement a Moliere [...].(127)

Scudéry may well not have been upset with Moliere. In fact, Moliere is
cited in La Promenade de Versailles in the section entitled “La Feste de
Versailles, A M.*** (574).”

Ensuite, une agréable comedie de Moliere fut representéé, le theatre

changea plusieurs fois tres-agréablement, 8 la comedie fut entremelee

d’vne symphonie la plus surprenante 8. la plus merveilleuse qui fut jamais,

de quelques scenes chantees par les plus belles voix du monde, & de
diverses entrees de balet, tres-divertissantes,& tres-bien danséés.(586)

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Scudéry’s description of Moliere’s presentation of George Dandin ou Le
Mari Confondu for the Fetes de Versailles of July 166812 certainly seems to
indicate her approval of the playwright and that she harbors no grudges with
regards to Les Précieuses ridicules.

The epigraph to Chapter 3 of this work quotes Lafayette’s La Princesse de
Cleves. “Si vous jugez sur les apparences en ce lieu-cl [. . .] vous serez souvent
trompee: ce qui parait n’est presque jamais Ia vérite (157).” The citation from La
Promenade de Versailles just quoted certainly raises the topos of para‘itre/ etre.
Alain Niderst identifies this passage of La Promenade de Versailles as a citation
of Andre Félibien’s “Relation de la féte de Versailles de juillet 1668 (Leur monde
484).” Félibien plays an important role in recording the celebrations of Louis XIV
and Versailles. Obviously by 1669, Scudéry was willing to allude to the words of
one of the king’s architects and historiographers in her work. Scudéry’s inclusion
of Félibien’s “Relation” gives credence to DeJean’s theory of collective literary
writing in seventeenth-century France.13 (Tender 101)

Perhaps Moliere had read Clélie, since most everyone was reading
Scudéry’s novel. The substantive though humorous dialogue between Gorgibus,
his daughter and his niece about love, marriage, and the casuistics of Tendre
respond to a greater threat to patriarchy than the status of Scudéry as a good or
bad précieuse or her personal description. Young women suggesting marital
practices that could undermine the sanctity of matrimony, such as the Amolphe’s

marital “protégée”Agnes in Moliere’s “L’Ecole des femmes,”

75

must have been perceived as a far greater threat.14 In Chapter 4, the feminist
issues regarding marriage in La Promenade de Versailles will be discussed.

Historically, critics had much at stake in pitting Moliere against Scudéry.
Defining Scudéry as the ridiculous précieuse devalues her person and her works.
What better way to undermine Scudéry’s liberated views on marriage than to
label her a precious, ugly prude? It is a characterization that we find in
anthologies published as recently as 1993. Backer describes Scudéry as a
precious prude in her Precious Women.

The speculation about the authorship or authority behind Les Précieuses
ridicules is discussed in Appendix C, “The Mysterious Origins of Moliere’s Les
Précieuses ridicules.” The possible roles of Michel de Pure, Somaize, Moliere,
and unknown Italian actors in the writing of Les Précieuses ridicules are
considered. The arguments presented demonstrate the cabalistic nature of this
centuries long debate about Madeleine de Scudéry’s identity as a bad précieuse.
Indeed, Scudéry’s work gave established masculine power bases reason to feel
discomfiture. But the incessant personal attacks on Scudéry’s character and
appearance, the descriptions of her as an ugly, false précieuse can be put aside
forever. Scudérian scholarship must focus on the substantive issues to which
her works give rise.

The debate as to whether Moliere stole Michel de Pure’s outline for the
play, gives credence to the idea that Pure might have penned a comedy that
aimed the satire at conversative establishment views, especially regarding

questions of female marriage and sexuality, rather than at the so-called

76

précieuses. Carolyln C. Lougee demonstrates that Pure among other male
seventeenth-century thinkers, sought to “rehabilitate” women’s roles. Perhaps an
overly paternalistic enterprise, but at least one of some merit for its sympathetic
support. According to Lougee, for example, Pure supported women’s “rejection of
domestic roles [which] extended beyond the role of household management to
the rejection of marriage itself and of all family relationships (22).” In La
Promenade de Versailles,as in many of Moliere’s plays, the heroine must
struggle with paternal restrictions of marital choices. The substantive issue at
stake in Les Précieuses ridicules and in La Promenade de Versailles will prove
much more pertinent than any discussion of Scudéry’s attribution as the
précieuse ridicule.

The reception of Scudéry as précieuse continues in the literary criticism of
the nineteenth century, during a period of great nostalgia for the aristocracy of
the ancien regime.

In his La Société francaise au X VII” siécle d’apres Ie Grand Cyrus de Mlle
de Scudéry, Victor Cousin’s overall evaluation of Scudéry’s work and life proves
double—edged. . His critique includes obsequlous praise too often followed by
damning qualifications, the most blatant example being Cousin’s praise of Cyms
but condemnation of Clélie.

While Cousin denies that Rambouillet could have been the target of
Moliere’s Précieuses ricidules, neither does he believe that Scudéry or her
entourage served as a model for the play (206). However, his endorsement of

Cyrus and rejection of Clélie, subtly reinscribes the true/false, good/bad binary

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oppositon of Moliere’s preface. As James S.Munro reminds us, “Ie Grand Cyrus
and Clélie are both romans a clef, in each of which a different social group
appears in transparent disguise-in Cyrus the hotel de Rambouillet, in Clélie the
guests at Mlle de Scudéry’s own samedis (14).” So by favoring Cyrus over Clélie,
Cousin once again confirms his bias for the aristocratic over the bourgeois.
Granted, at the time of writing La Société, Cousin believed there was no key for
Clélie. Cousin points out that Cyrus represents both the aristocratic and the
bourgeois milieu of seventeenth-century society since the Sapho of Cyrus is
purported to be the self-portrait of the bourgeois writer, Scudéry herself.

Other nineteenth-century critics besides Cousin are disdainful of
Scudéry’s novels. However, Sainte Beuve did find merit in Scudéry’s
conversations, as did Lanson. In fact, the conversation plays a pivotal roll in
Scudéry’s novels. Despite Scudéry’s innovative narrative invention, Cousin, then
Lanson, and other critics following them, find Scudéry unreadable.

Scudéry’s birthright suddenly becomes part of the argumentation about
her work. She was born at best into the petite noblesse, but in point of fact was a
bourgeois. Scudéry’s successful seventeenth-century career could not change
her societal status. An anti-bourgeois bias clouds the interpretation of Scudéry
and other seventeenth-century writers labeled as précieux, such as her
contemporary, the poet Vincent Voiture.

Another classic instance of Rambouillet and Scudéry being paired as the
good and bad précieuses. The most important factors determining their

respective status as good or bad précieuses resides in their social standing,

78

Rambouillet the respected aristocrat, Scudéry the underated bourgeoise. The
reason for the attacks on Scudéry and the précieuses by these nineteenth-
century critics becomes clear once one realizes that the political agenda of their
works takes precedence over their formal literary criticism.

Maitre summarizes their parti pris cogently in the “Chapitre Iiminaire” of
her opus entitled La Preciosite ou Les Précieuses? Du Mythe Critique a
I’Enquete Historique:

[Nlous ne saurions commencer cette enquéte et nous lancer a la

recherche des précieuses sans exposer briévement la facon dont les

critiques ont pose Ie probleme avant nous ni interroger les circonstances
historiques, morales et esthetiques dans lesquelles s’est elaboré le mythe
complexe de la préciosité[...] L’idéalisation de la civilite francaise d’Ancien

Regime est a la source de ce mythe.(21)

Maitre explains that post-revolutionary nostalgia for the ancien regime
brought about a definition of preciosité “construite prématurément a des fins
polemiques.’(21) Based on Norbert Elias’s reading of La Société du cour, she
conflnues:

La societé du XVIIe siecle, séparée de cette du XIX” siecle par la fracture

de la Revolution, se substitue a la pastorate defunte pour incarner les

anciens reves arcadiens et I’ultime expression du “romantisme
aristocratique.” C’est dans ces circonstances que s’eleve un veritable
monument aux précieuses, qui foumira Ie socle d’un mythe critique

Vivace. (22)

Rambouillet becomes the emblem for the romanticization of seventeenth-
century aristocracy. Victor Cousin reading after Louis de Roederer’s Mémoires
pour servir a I’histoire de la société polie en France, published in 1835, published

his La Société du X VII” siécle d’apres Ie Grand Cyrus de Mlle de Scudéry.

Maitre asserts that it is Roederer’s work that contains:

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I’opposition, qui va devenir un topos de l’histoire de la préciosité, entre

I’hotel de Rambouillet, berceau du bon gout, et son imitation dégradéé par

Mlle de Scudéry ou par d’autres femmes de Iettres a la conduite moins

respectable.(25)

Stanton had already identified Roederer’s Memoires as the source of this
binary opposition in 1981. She states that the Mémoires:

gave rise to the myth of an initial, pure, aristocratic phase of preciosity,

exemplified by the Marquise de Rambouillet and her celebrated chambre

bleue, and a mid-century bourgeois, degenerate imitation, represented by

Madeleine de Scudéry.(111)

Maitre adds the motivation of Roederer to Stanton’s reading of the
Mémoires, that is the patriotic nostalgia for absolution. Maitre appropriates
Stanton’s reading of the unstable status of the Rambouillet/Scudéry binary and
the associated and suspect nature of the critical myth of preciosité in the title of
the chapter where Maitre elaborates on Stanton’s thesis, “La Preciosité ou les
Précieuses? Du Mythe Critique a I’enquete historique (21)” Separating the myth
from the speculated truth defines the problematics of preciosité!

In the 1989 edition of The New History of French Literature, Joan DeJean
already suggests the link between political events and a favorable interpretation
of preciosité. She cites French historian Roger Picard, writing from exile during
the German occupation of France, who believed France would be reconstituted
with the help of the “Salons (298).” And in 1966, Lathuillere has already warned
us that overly simplistic definitions of préciosité have lead to mythical
constructions of the concept.

A son image veritable on a substitue des representations partielles ou

erronees qui ont fait na‘ltre tant d’interprétations problématiques qu’il s’est

crée des mythes de la préciosité, interposés entre elle et nous comme des
ecrans.(1 5)

8O

Maitre reminds us that Cousin had found the key to Cyrus, an icon of the
greater glory of the ancien regime. According to Maitre, Cousin’s avant-propos:

souligne son ambition de reveiller par ce livre la foi dans les destinées de

la patrie,’profondément monarchique et profondément Iibérale.’Les propos
contre la monarchie absolue sont cependant moins vifs que ceux contre la
république, contraire au genie francais et fourriere de I’anarchie qui guette

la France depuis la fatale surprise de 1848.’”(24-25)

Other examples can be found in the literature of the Rambouillet/Scudéry
topos no doubt written by authors also influenced by Roederer. Lanson’s anti-
bourgeois bias extends beyond Madeleine de Scudéry to any writers male or
female associated with Scudéry’s salon. For example, his depiction of Voiture as
the haughty son of a wine merchant reveals his class bias. Lanson entitles the
chapter in which he condemns Scudéry’s novels as unreadable and in which he
links class and the shortcomings of other writers of her ilk, “Attardés et Egarés.”
Lanson explains that the writers of the school of preciosite were mislead by
foreigners, the Italians led by Marina and the Spanish led by Gongora. Although
Lanson was a champion of the Third Republic,15 in the chapter entitled “Attardes
et Egarés,” the text seems to be haunted by a fear of the Other, manifested in the
bourgeoisie and in the foreign born.

The misogyny and class bias of Roederer and Cousin are not justified by
having been identified. Linking their anti-female and anti-bourgeois attacks to
their clearly deep-seated desire to return to the mythic grandeur of the ancien
regime at least begins to explain their prejudices. Their deep-felt hatred for the

politics of the Republic motivate their angry assaults against bourgeois writers of

the seventeenth century.

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Lanson’s description of preciosité has endured. Literary history proves the
high esteem in which this influential scholar has been held. For example, critics
and literary dictionaries published in the last decade of the twentieth century
reflected Lanson’s association of préciosité, gongorism, marinism, and a host of
other devalued terms.

Rene Bray, for example, states that one must cross “linguistic borders” to
fully define preciosite and further suggests one must explore “l’euphuisme, Ie
marinisme, le gongorisme (9).” He devotes a chapter of La Préciosité et les
précieux to “Reperes Etrangers: De Lily a Gongora.” Lathuillere also devotes a
chapter to Les Influences étrangeres, in which he discusses the British Lyly, the
Spanish Gongora and the Italian Marino.

Lanson’s association of preciosité to other European literary schools can
still be seen in J. A. Cuddon’s 1991 edition of A Dictionary of Literary Terms.
First, we need to read the definition of préciosité that is found in Cuddon’s
dictionary.

“préciosité, la” The term denotes that refinement of language and

manners which became the concern of civilized and sophisticated French

men and women early in the 17‘“ c. The Marquise de Rambouillet appears
to have been one of the prime movers in this matter. From 1608 and for
forty years thereafter, she established salon (q.v.) life at her town house.

To this venue came many of those who wished to refine and polish

manners and literary style. Honore d’Urfé’s pastoral (q.v.) novel L’Astrée

(1607) inspired many aspects of their urbane code. The main sources for

a knowledge of les précieuses are A. B. Somaize’s Dictionnaire des

précieuses (1660), Madeleine de Scudéry’s Le Grand Cyrus (1649-53)

and Clélie (1654-60, and Tallemant des Réaux’s Historiettes. The pursuit

of elegance was a civilizing influence, but it also led to affectation. Some
of the habitués of this salon helped to found the Académie F rancaise in

1653. Their affectations were satirized in Moliere’s Les Précieuses

ridicules (1659) See also BLUE STOCKING CIRCLE/SOCIETY;
SECENTISMO." (739)

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The definition refers to an original purity and a fall into disgrace. It speaks
of an original elegance that becomes pedantic. The definition reinscribes the
true/false binary of préciosité that glorifies Rambouillet and denigrates Scudéry.
If one then goes on to read the definitions that are suggested for further
clarification or comparison, the content of those definitions all include a parallel
fall into abusive exaggeration.

Granted, a definition of preciosité in a literary dictionary would be very
different from the definitions that inform many French literary critics. And there is
only one word that is immediately offensive in the definition of préciositié:
“affectation.” But the definition once again points to the source of the good! bad
précieuse paradigm.

The quo vadis interspersed in the definition and the citations suggested for
further reference prove troubling as well. The definition for “Blue Stockings” is
very non-prejudicial until the caveat that “[wlhen used pejoratively, as it often has
been (and was in the 18th century) the term ‘bluestocking’ denotes a woman who
affects literary tastes and behaves in a dilettante fashion, a pedant (99).”
Bluestocking, by implication, thus becomes the definition of the “false précieuse.”

In Cuddon, a constellation of dictionary entries including preciosite,
bluestocking, secentismo,16 baroque, euphuism, gongorism, marinism, and salon
are heavily cross-referenced. Each definition has something that devalues the
literary description and thus directly or indirectly devalues the concept of

préciosité. Euphuism for example yields the following definition:

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An ornately florid, precious and mazy style of writing (often alliterative,

antithetical and embellsihed with elaborate figures of speech) which takes

its name from a two-part work by John Lyly; namely Euphues, the

anatomy of wyt (1578) and Euphues and his England (1850) [...] (314-31).

Gongorism is defined as an “affected style [...] Comparable features are to
be found in the French Ia préciosité (380).” Marinism is defined as an “affected
style [...] Writing characterized by an exaggerated and rather aritificial language
and imagery (526).” The cross-references for marinism are to euphuism,
gongorism, mannerism, and secentismo, all of which contain an explicit or implicit
reference to préciosité.

A similar study of the index listings for preciosité in Bernard Dupriex’s A
Dictionary of Literary Devices, Gradus,A-Z, yields the same cross references to
gongorism, euphuism, etc.

Even a recent edition of a standard French dictionary, that is, one that has
no pretension of being a literary dictionary, subtly reflects the history of the binary
reception of the précieux. Le Robert, Dictionnaire des Synonymes, continues the
myth of the pure and the impure, the aristocrat and the bourgeois, the elegant
and the affected précieux in its definition of précieux and its opposite.

If Scudéry had been an aristocrat, perhaps preciosite would have
maintained its non-literary value-laden characteristics, as they are enumerated in
Le Robert, Dictionnaire des Synonymes:

précieux, précieuse. l. Quelque chose: avantageux, beau, bon cher,

inappréciabte, inestimmable, introuvable, irremplacable, parfait, rare,

riche, utile. Il. Quelqu’un: favorable, competent, efficace, important,
utile.(534)

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As bourgeois literature, the précieux and the synonymes for précieux
become its opposite. “III. Litt. affecté, difficile, efféminé, emprunte, maniéré,
mignard, muscadin, musquet recherche (534).” Le Robert goes on to offer a list
of synonyms for Préciosite’ itself.

Préciosité. Affectation, afféterie, concetti, cultursime, entortillage,

euphuisme, galanterie, gongorisme, maniere, manierisme, marinisme,

marivaudage, mignardise, raffinement, recherche(sic), subtilité.(534)

To the credit of the Le Robert editor, the definition recognizes the
dawning of a new and positive definition of préciosite’ with the addition of the
terms “refine,” “subtlety,” and perhaps even “recherche.”

However, Lanson’s descriptions of the précieux and preciosité as affected
and pedantic after the fashion of Gongora and Marino have had a lasting
influence. This fact demonstrates the power of the gesture of nomination. It also
suggests how pervasive and permanent the association of a name with an idea
or ideology can be. Stanton’s critique of préciosité rests on the premise that
power resides in the hands of those who may name, that is, always already male
patriarchy.

No field of human enterprise, no system for the production of meaning

lacks the magic stamp of man’s naming, and literary history is no

exception. Our conceptions of genres and schools, methods and readers,
first and second-rate texts, these are the ideological creations of the first,
not the second sex.(107)

Notice the painstaking detail the negative stamp of male naming of
preciosite from the seventeenth-century horde of masculine critics including

Moliere, Somaize, Pure, Boileau to the eighteenth-century critics Livet, Cousin,

Sainte-Beuve, to the turn-of-the-century critics Roederer and Lanson. For

85

Stanton, the history of preciosité serves to demonstrate “a replay of the mythic
drama that predicated the exclusion of the female as subject from the symbolic
[as pre-ordained in Genesis] (107).”

It is logical that a writer such as J.-E. Fidao—Justiniani, reading and writing
after Roederer, Cousin and Lanson, marginalizes Scudéry in his L’Esprit
classique et la préciosité au X VII” siecle, written in 1914. His work demonstrates
the exclusion of the female that Stanton describes.

At the turn of the century, Lanson had declared Scudéry unreadable.
However, Fidao-Justiniani needs to appropriate Scudéry and preciosite in order
to rehabilitate the reputation of Jean Chapelain. To re-define Chapelain as a
classicist, Fidao-Justiniani finds he must rely on Scudéry’s depiction of
Chapelain. Knowing that préciosité had become completely devalued property,
he begins by innuendo. “[L]a préciosité était peut-etre, de toutes les questions du
monde, la plus mal posee [...] (1).” The propose of his book is to “bien poser Ia
question (1).” Having stated his goal, he immediately covers his argument with a
disclaimer. Yes, he admits, habit has attributed certain Iocutions to the ridiculous
précieuses. “ll n’en pouvait guere alter autrement, puisque les précieux, dans
I’espece, étaient personnes de si peu de consequence, qu’il y eut de la sottise a
se compromettre pour eux [...] (2).”

F idao-Justiniani does include a famous anecdote describing Madeleine de
Scudéry’s audience with the Louis XIV. “Elle [Madame de Sévigné] fit obtenir, en
1663, a Mlle de Scudéry, une pension du roi et Mme de Sévigne raconte la

chose fort joliment,” and he then quotes Sévigné in the same footnote.(72)

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Vous savez comme Ie roi a donne deux mille Iivres de pension a Mlle de
Scudéry. C’est par un billet de Mme de Maintenon qu’elle apprit cette
bonne nouvelle. Elle fut remercier Sa Majeste un jour d’appartement, et
elle fut recue en toute perfection. C’était une affaire que de recevoir cette
merveilleuse muse: le roi lui parla et l’embrassa, pour l’empecher
d’embrasser ses genoux. Toute cette petite conversation fut d’une
justesse admirable; Mme de Maintenon était I'interprete. Tout le Pamasse
admirable est en emotion pour remercier et Ie héros et l’héroine.(72)
Fidao—Justiniani nominally pays homage to Scudéry by this marginal
account in a tone that could almost be described as précieux! This extra-textual
tribute to Scudéry, intending to congratulate her posthumously on her pension, at
the same time paints a picture of Scudéry hovering beneath Louis XIV who
embraces her to keep her from embracing his feet. It’s an embrace that wards off
embarrassment. Remember that Fidao—Justiniani’s reading is influenced by
Lanson. How appropriate that he would freeze this particular moment in time
that depicts the bourgeois Scudéry supposedly groveling at the feet of the most
exalted aristocrat of the seventeenth century, her monarch, Louis XIV.

In his concluding chapter, entitled “Grand Précieux et Précieux Ridicules,”
Fidao-Justiniani once again repeats the tapes that has become famous since
Moliere's successful comedy, Les Précieuses ridicules.

Nous avons distingue ceux que nous avons appelés les grands précieux
des précieux ridicules, et c’est peut-etre Ie moment de nous demander si
ceux-cl sont nés de ceux-la, et s’il y eut des uns aux autres descendance
directe et Iégitime, ou au contraire filiation suspect. Mais je m’exprime
mal, car it eut des précieux-Madeleine de Scudéry, en particuliere, et un
peu ses amis Conrart et Petlison, qui furent successivement grands
précieux et précieux ridicules, quoiqu’ils ne soient jamais tombés dans le
galimatias dénoncé par Moliere.”(99-100)

In a footnote to the words “précieux ridicules” Fidao—Justiniani adds “

Grande précieuse dans le Cyrus (1649-1653) Mad. de Scudéry fut précieuse

87

ridicule dans la Clélie (1654-1661) (99).” By the end of the work, Fidao-Justiani
has thus repeated Victor Cousin’s approval of Cyrus and rejection of Clélie and
reinscribed Moliere’s mythic topos of refined and true aristocrat versus the
pendantic, affected and false bourgeois .

The post-war years finally bring an end to the worst critical attacks on
Scudéry. Critics in post-war France, looking to glorify all things French, even the
précieux, finally begin a slow re-valorization of Scudéry and la preciosité. In
1948, Rene Bray once again poses the perennial question: “Qu’est-ce que la
préciosité (7, 9)?” To answer the question he writes La Preciosité et les précieux,
de Thibaud de Champagne a Jean Giraudoux. He defines preciosité in such a
way as to expand the notion beyond the historical boundaries of the seventeenth
century. Instead of delimiting the notion of précrbisité to the seventeenth century,
Bray finds elements and examples of preciosité and précieux writers scattered
throughout the history and the entire corpus of French literature, from the
medieval troubadour Thibaut de Champagne to the twentieth-century playwright
and novelist Jean Giraudoux.

In 1964, Yoshio Fukui poses the question once again. “Qu’est-ce qu’une
Précieuse (12)?” Fukui actually formulates reasonable guidelines to conduct his
search for the answer to his question. He writes at the beginning of the new
generation of Scudérian critique which will flourish and then like a ray of sunshine
finally bring enlightened research to the field of preciosité and so-called precieux

writers.

88

Not surprisingly, the dramatic increase of interest in Scudéry’s works
coincides with the entrenchment of feminist studies at universities across the
United States and Europe. The interest that feminist scholars have shown in
Scudéry has encouraged other seventeenth-century specialists who though not
feminists nonetheless begin serious studies of Scudéry’s works. Their studies go
beyond the simplistic definitions of préciosité and begin to re-read the Scudérian
corpus in a scholarly fashion.

Fukui informs his research by etymological documentation. He finds an
acceptation of the word précieux in both fourteenth- and seventeenth-century
contexts. He cites a line from a letter dating from 1654: “II y a une nature de filles
et de femmes a Paris que I’on nomme Précieuses [...] (11).” Also, he finds the
word used in the fourteenth century:

Ala verité, de temps a autre, depuis Ie XIV” siecle, on usait

substantivement du féminin de l’adjectif “précieux” mais dans une

acception fort différente de I’ordinaire, pour designer les femmes hostiles

a l’amour; catégorie de femmes qui s’apparentent de facon assez sensible

aux “Précieuses” du XVII” siecle. (11)

Fukui cites Bray’s work as the source of this revelation. Bray’s attempt to
define the word précieuse historically proves laudable. Lathulllere, writing against
Bray, does his own etymological search and finds the term to be historically
vague. Lathuillere begins with a twist on the question most often asked question,
what is preciosité?

lI ne s’agira donc pas de se demander: Qu’est-ce que la préciosité? en

posant Ia question a toute l’histoire de la littérature francaise; d’une

maniere plus modeste et plus limitée, on s’efforcera de comprendre ce
qu’ont été les Précieux et les Précieuses au temps de Mlle de Scudéry

[...] .'(13)

89

Lathuillere’s introductory comments make it clear he intends to read
against Bray’s definition of préciosité as a literary enterprise that spans all the
centuries. Lathuillere, as several other scholars studying preciosité in the late
decades of the twentieth century, prefers to focus on the mid-seventeenth-
century years which Backer called the “precious decade.” To begin his analysis,
Lathuillere insists on the triple ambiguity of the term.

Ambigui‘te tout d’abord du mot précieux et de ses derives, comme

preciosité, précieusement, qui recoivent, selon les emplols, une acception

tantbt favorable, tantbt défavorable [... ]Ambiguité aussi de la situation
historique de la preciosite [...] qui laisse une trop large place aux
interpretations esthetiques ou subjectives...ambiguite enfin, par voie de
consequence, des rapports du mouvement précieux avec les autres
courants de son temps auxquels on a voulu Ie comparer: le burlesque, Ie
baroque et Ie classicisme; les paralleles, les filiations ou les oppositions
s'en trouvent faussés.(16)

A survey of the literature on preciosité confirms Lathuillere’s hypothesis as
to the ambiguity of the term. The critical literature on préciosité that constantly
reiterates the paradigm of the good versus the bad précieuse inscribes that
ambiguity. We agree with Lathuillere that the proliferation of aesthetic and
subjective interpretations, rather than clarify the term, leads to further ambiguity.
And, finally, we have seen, for example in the work of F idao-Justinani, the
(con)fusion of préciosité and classicism.

In his discussion of preciosite, Fukui readily admits the success of
Scudéry’s novels in mid-seventeenth-century France. “La période qui s’étend de
1650 a 1660 est la belle époque du “Royaume de Tende,” dont Mlle de Scudéry
était la reine. Le Grand Cyrus et La Clélie ont porté Mlle de Scudéry au sommet

de la gloire.” (283)

90

Fukui credits Bray with one of the acceptations of preciosité that we find
most problematic. That is, preciosité as a term to “designer les femmes hostiles
a I’amour; categorie de femmes hostiles a I’amour qui s’apparentent de facon
assez sensible aux “Précieuses” du XVII” siecle (12).” Our reading of La
Promenade de Versailles will show that the heroine of Scudéry’s novel is not
hostile to love, rather she refuses to partake in arbitrary, paternal restrictions and
requirements.

Lathuillere also takes up this issue, that is, the purported hostility of the
précieuses to love, as part of an overarching discussion of the amibiguity of the
seventeenth-century testimonials to preciosité. Given that preciosité and the
précieuses were not uncontested in the seventeenth century, Lathuillere outlines
the three principal complaints of seventeenth-century contemporaries with
regards to la preciosité: “le jargon (Ia corruption de la Iangue), l’affectation des
manieres, le refus de I’amour (3).” To his credit, Lathuillere also finds critics who
offer a favorable acceptation to I’esprit précieux. Lathuitlere quotes Larroumet:
“L’esprit précieux, comme I’esprit gaulois, est une part necessaire de I’esprit
francais (27).” Lathuillere even paraphrases Fidao-Justiniani who surprisingly
finds Louis XIV himself to be not just précieux but “Ie plus précieux (27).”

Even before Lathuillere defines the three complaints of seventeenth-
century contemporaries of the précieux, he is already building a case for the

insufficiency of the data to verify the validity of those arguments.

91

Significantly, since so much criticism, as described herein, relies on the
satires of Moliere, Somaize and de Pure, Lathuillere casts doubt on their
reliability as “witnesses” to the the trial of préciosité.

ll s’agit la [in the words of the three satirists], sembIe-t-il, d’une démarche

fort naturelle; pourtant, chacune de ces oeuvres, de qualité tres inégale et

de caractere different, souleve de grandes difficultés d’appréciation; on a

émis a leur sujet les opinions les plus divergentes, parfois diamétrialement

opposees, minimisant ou meme niant completement Ia valeur de leur
témoinage.(29)

Thus, in a subtle, understated fashion, in the first thirty pages of his opus,
Lathuillere succeeds in undercutting the impact of the three seventeenth-century
writers most often cited as denigrating Scudéry.

In another subtle move, Lathuillere also dismisses the seventeenth-
century critics’ concern with the précieuses” “refusal of love”. Intelligently, with
regard to Michel de Pure as a witness of this complaint against preciosité,
Lathuillere simply states that there is a difference between refusing love and
believing in marital rights. In so saying, Lathuillere turns one witness supposedly
hostile to of préciosité’s into more of an equal rights advocate than many of the
so-called précieuses themselves.(59) We shall see that the heroine of La
Promenade de Versailles may herself be classified as an equal rights advocate.
Arbitrary determinations regarding her freedom cause her to flee to Versailles in
self-imposed exile.

In the introduction to his collection of seventeenth-century works,
Mongrédien denegrates préciosité. However, Madeleine de Scudéry et son

salon, Mongrédien offers a short but ramer charming tribute to La Promenade de

Versailles.

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Admise a la Cour aux fétes somptueuses que Ie souverain galant donne
en l’honneur de Mlle de la Valliere, puis de Mme de Montespan dans son
domaine de Versailles, ou architectes, décorateurs, macons et jardiniers
travaillent fiévreusement a la transformation du chateau, Madeleine
decide de conserver par ecrit le souvenir de ses visites. C’est la facon a
elle de remercier Ie Souverain de son accueil et de lui faire sa cour. C’est
ainsi que parait en 1669, sous Ie titre de La Promenade de Versailles, un
agréable petit Iivre ou sont chantés les charrnes de la demeure qui est en
train de devenir la plus belle des residences royales. Encore agréable a
tire aujourd’hui, la relation de Madeleine est aussi un document fort
précieux, dont les historians modernes ont tres grand profit, sur le premier
Versailles, celui qui precede I’installation definitive de la Cour.(180)

Mongrédien wrote this short but cheerful homage to Scudéry’s La
Promenade de Versailles in 1946. Mongrédien, of course, does not give any
specifics as to what in La Promenade de Versailles proves “fort précieux.”

Carolyn C. Lougee in Le Paradis des Femmes, offers yet another
definition of préciosité. The term précieuse requires definition, she tells us:

The term was originally coined in the early 16505 to ridicule the affectation

of one group of young women in Paris. At that time other women

prominent in polite society, Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Madeleine
de Scudéry among them, vigorously distinguised between the overzealous
c6terie of précieuses and themselves. Gradually, however, the term came
to be applied without pejorative connotations to more and more groups of
women until by 1661, when Somaize published the Grand Dictionnaire
des pretieuses [...] the term précieuse was commonly applied to all
women in Parisian salons.(7)

In her study, Lougee tells us, “the term conforms to this more general
usage, designating simply a woman who frequents a salon, a member of Parisian
polite society (7).”

As the documentation shows, since the time of Moliere’s Les Précieuses

ridicules, Scudéry has become synonymous with the term précieuse. It took all

of the 350 years since Moliere’s stage success for a feminist of the seventies like

93

Lougee to reappropriate the label of pre’ciosité that the enemies of the salon
writers had used to denigrate them.

In the late twentieth century, a different solution for the problematic term
préciosité attempts to argue the term out of existence. Maitre identifies this
strategy in the writing of Domna Stanton, and Ian MacLean and Roger Duchéne.
Maitre finds a rational for their point of view.

[lls] partagent cette opinion: it nous semble que c’est leur féminisme ou du

moins leur respect des femmes qui conduit ces critiques a refuser statut

de réalité a une figure feminine qui semble sortie tout entiere de la satire,
de la malveillance ou du phallocratisme.(32)

Stanton’s posture on préciosité needs clarification, which will be
forthcoming. Maitre and Lougee embrace the term.

Maitre’s work builds on the scholarship of the last twenty years. Since
around 1980, scholars have tried to resuscitate the notion of preciosité in an
attempt to rescue from oblivion through revisionist feminist readings the
seventeenth-century female précieuses writers. Clearly, these readings are a
step in the direction that will lead to significant re-evatuations and re-readings of
Scudéry’s works. Maitre recognizes, as I do, the importance of Joan DeJean’s
work, Tender Geographies, for the realization of this project. As we have noted,
DeJean’s work provides the cornerstone of this thesis.

Carlo Francois offers a revisionist reading in his 1987 work entitled
Précieuses et autres indociles, Aspects du feminisme dans la littérature francaise
du XVII” siécle. Francois defines Moliere as a feminist apologist and reads his

satires as feminist tracts for women’s rights. In chapter 2 of his work, entitled

“Moliere, I’avocat des femmes,” Francois perpetuates the myth of the good/bad

94

précieuses of Moliere’s plays, but insists that Moliere pleads in favor of the
“vraies précieuses.”

Mais iI [Moliere] avait toujours laisse entendre que la pacotille qu’il

dénoncait dissimulait de vraies perles. D’autre part, les précieuses elles-

mémes n’avaient rien fait pour le tirer d’embarras; plus elles se
muttipliaient, plus elles devenalent ridicules et plus les vraies précieuses
refusaient de Iivrer leurs secrets...MoIiere, courageux, avait elévé le débat
d’ou avait surgi la Querelle des Femmes; du meme coup, Ie 26 décembre

1662 [avec L' coles des Femmes], il portait ce débat sur les tréteaux du

Palais-Royal et il mettait en lumiere les preoccupations principales dont

les vraies précieuses s’obtinaient a parler dans la pénombre et le secret

des alc6ves.”(65)

If Francois intends to include Scudéry amongst the “vraies perles,” in the
same gesture, he fails to recognize the degree to which Scudéry was also an
“avocat des femmes.” Given the sheer volume of her works and their popularity,
she hardly chose to speak of women’s rights only in the shadow and secret of
her salon. Francois does recognize that Les Précieuses ridicules concerns the
feminine issue of life choices, which most often came down to marriage or the
convent in the seventeenth century.(56) This particular feminist issue is also a
central concern in La Promenade de Versailles. However, perhaps it is
disingenuous of Francois to profit from the changing fortunes of the erst-while
maligned précieuses.

Lathuillere’s thesis that Moliere did not intend Scudéry as the target of his
satire encourages re-evaluations and new interpretations of Moliere’s play. In
fact, appropriating Moliere into a feminist critique could prove fruitful. Moliere’s
views on women’s rights in marriage and particularly on a woman’s right to

choose her own husband are fonivard thinking. And, indeed, Chapter 4 will

demonstrate, they mirror the pro-female views of marriage implied in La

95

Promenade de Versailles. How Ironic that one of the seventeenth-century French
authors whose work most harmed Scudéry’s reputation, Moliere, can be
considered an advocate of women’s rights!

Can one differentiate between Moliere’s representation of women as
opposed to his representation of précieuses? The précieuses are most clearly
targeted in Les Précieuses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes. Roxanne
Decker Lalande’s recent work, Intruders in the Play Worid, the Dynnamics of
Gender in Moliére’s Comedies, provides an answer. “Most frequently, women
are portrayed as outsiders, outcasts and spoil-sports in Moliere’s comedies.[. . .]
By articulating their otherness, Moliere’s female characters inevitably articulate
the powers attempting to marginalize that otherness, opening up, albeit
momentarily, the possibility for modification of the societal structure only to be
ultimately reappropriated by the reigning political order (31).”

According to Lalande’s argument, female characters in Moliere’s plays
seek empowerment in the course of the “ludlc circle.” However, in the end, the
male hierarchy recuperates the power momentarily gained by the women in the
plays. “Moliere’s texts generally close in upon themselves, suturing the open
wound caused by a female presence. They harden themselves to intrusion, yet
not without having offered a glimpse of what might be, what might have been
(32).”

Moliere’s satire of the précieuses begins even with title of Les Femmes
savantes. In the précieuse economy of his play, the title must be considered an

oxymoron. In his works, there are no teamed précieuses. Lalande studies the

96

role of women in Les Femmes savantes and she sets it apart from Moliere’s
other plays. She contends that in this play “[mjore than in any other of Moliere’s
plays, this comedy offers a view of a world in which a balance of power is
carefully established between feminine and masculine circles of play (187).”
Further, Lalande concludes that, “the final scene of Les Femmes savantes does
seem to suggest the potential for a more permanent form of feminine
empowerment to be acquired through knowledge (208).” However, it is the
mother, Philaminte, and not her daughter Armande, the identifiable précieuse of
the Les Femmes savantes, who has maintained her ground.

Lalande’s work is well-informed by theories of laughter and her analysis of
the women in Moliere’s plays draws from credible contemporary feminist theory.
The flaw in her analysis of Les Femmes savantes is that she grounds her
discussion of précrbsité on the apocryphal noh'on that the précieux “refus
d’amour.” She describes Moliere’s construction of Armande accurately, but it
does not define the précieuses writers of the seventeenth-century, least of all
Madeleine de Scudéry.17 Acting as the nouvelle précieuse, Scudéry reinvented
the novelistic genre by means of a revolutionary new focus on interiority. And,
interiority, as opposed to exteriority, may be intrinsically gendered-marked as
feminine and précieuse. It leads to a most tenuous connection, namely, the link
between Scudéry’s writing style and her personal life choice to remain unmarried.

A satirist’s goal is not necessarily to annihilate the target of his satirical
attack. Neither does a satire aim at gratuitous humor. The intention of a satire is

to take aim at its target. Moliere’s fortune has not been damaged over the course

97

of history, nor do productions of his work lack for audiences. Female
seventeenth-century authors, on the other hand, need more readers.
Predominantly, in this discussion of the reception of preciosité and
particulary Scudéry’s place in the production of the myth of préciosité, the
opinions of male researchers through the centuries have been considered. Late
twentieth-century feminist scholarship brings a dramatically new look to the

scholarship of préciosité.

Précieuse Identity: Ecriture feminine

In this work one finds preciosité italicized and in a foreign language,
French. Each time the word appears it typographically signals its strangeness.
The onomastic gesture of leaving préciosité in its foreign acceptation intends to
permeate the text with its esoteric nature. A stranger, like la belle Etrangére in La
Promenade de Versailles, preciosité comes to France from a distant past.

Where does this term come from? In final analysis, what does preciosité
come to mean? Like la belle Etrangére it comes from un pays étranger. La
Promenade de Versailles weaves a tale that becomes an allegory of preciosité’s
strangeness. It comes from the past and from the future. Préciosité emanates
from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, from the medieval pastoral and poésie
chevaleresque, from the sixteenth century’s Marguerite de Navarre and Rabelais.

After Scudéry’s works, preciosité continues in the works of Lafayette and

Montesquieu and in the long tradition of the novel, which flourishes today. For,

98

with the coming of the millennium, the late twentieth century defined préciosité in
terms of a feminist and political critique, as in reality it did in the seventeenth
century in the novels of the seventeenth-century French writer, Madeleine de
Scudéry.

In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement define
the woman as the Other, the second term in a binary opposition that has defined
the relationship of man to woman since the beginning of the logos.
“Father/Mother, Head/Heart, lntelligibIe/Palpable, Logos/Pathos...Always the
same metaphor: we follow it, it carries us, beneath all its figures, wherever
discourse is organized (63).” Cixous and Clement’s essay creates a new space
for woman thatexplodes the historic binary pairings of Man/ Woman.

In order to do so, the position of woman must be redefined and the harm
done from the oppression of the female sign must be repaired. Rather than abhor
their bodies, women must team to embrace them. “Woman is disgusted by
woman and fears her [...] We [women] have been frozen in our place between
two terrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss (68).”

The redemption of Madeleine de Scudéry and her works from many years
of maligning criticism becomes the return of the repressed that Clement and
Cixous theorize. The myth of Medusa and the abyss will be replaced by a
reappropriation of Medusa, who, rather than falling into oblivion, soars to a critical
mountaintop. Wishing to demonize her image, Boileau described Scudéry as a
Medusa-like creature in the seventeenth century. With Clement and Cixous, the

legend of Medusa will now become an empowering female figure. “They, the

99

feminine ones, are coming back from far away, from forever, from ‘outside’[...]

(69).”

The legendary Medusa, the historical figure of Scudéry associated with

her will both be reborn as exemplary women in the twentieth-first century.

This dissertation inscribes Préciosité and la belle Etrangére into the new

feminine construction “they, the feminine ones” create. Scudéry must be

considered exceptional in space and time because of the enormous success of

her works in her lifetime. Through the character of la belle Etrangére and the

literary technique of preciosité most highly identified with her work, Scudéry

allegorizes her own coming to writing.

Cixous and Clement poetically describe the woman writer.

“A Woman ’8 Coming to Writing:
Who

Invisible, foreign, secret, hidden, mysterious, black, forbidden
Am [...] (69)”

The story of la belle Etrangere’s Odyssey to Versailles allegorizes the

female, the Other, who is characterized as foreign and strange in French feminist

tracts.

In Writing and Sexual Difference, Elizabeth Abel defines écriture feminine.

The concept of écriture feminine, the inscription of the female body and
female difference in language and text, is a significant theoretical
formulation in French feminist criticism, although it describes a Utopian
possibility rather than a literary practice. Helene Cixous, one of the leading
advocates of ecriture feminine, has admitted that, with only a few
exceptions, “there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity”
and Nancy K. Miller explains that écriture feminine “privileges a textuality
of the avant-garde, a literary production of the late twentieth century, and it
is therefore fundamentally a hope, if not a blueprint, for the future.”
Nonetheless, the concept of écriture feminine provides a way of talking
about women’s writing which reasserts the value of the feminine and

100

identifies the theoretical project of feminist criticism as the analysis of
difference.(16)

Scudéry was truly avant-garde in writing La Promenade de Versailles.
Scudéry’s seventeenth-century novel already inscribes préciosité as écriture
feminine. La Promenade de Versailles truly represents a literary and feminist
back to the future. The novel is a way of talking about women’s writing that
asserts the value of the feminine and outlines a project of feminist criticism as an
analysis of difference.

The foreign, the strange and the Other are symbols of female writing, and
these elements pervade Scudéry’s novel. In La Promenade de Versailles, la belle
Etrangére comes from an unknown, secret place. The first paragraph of the novel
introduces the heroine as la belle Etrangére and the reader never learns of her
true identity. The reader teams of the details of la belle Etrangére’s adventure,
however, her true identity and that of her entourage remains secret to the end.
The female narrator assigns aliases to the mysterious guests of Versailles.

In the original 1669 edition of La Promenade de Versailles, the novel has
two parts. Again, the title of the first part, repeats the title of the work, “La
Promenade de Versailles” and the second part is entitled “Histoire de Celanire.”
In the 102-page introductory “promenade,” the reader accompanies la belle
Etrangére and her relatives as they visit Versailles and discuss the aesthetics of
art versus nature and description versus narrative. The entourage becomes
engaged in a debate concerning the supremacy of art or nature. The reader will

accompany la belle Etrangére and her relatives as they explore Versailles.

101

Even as Versailles is revealed to la belle Etrangére and her entourage, the
identity of the visitors remains cloaked in secrecy. “Pour moi qui aime
passionnement les beaux lieux, dit Glicere, (c’est ainsi que j’appellerai une
parente de cette belle inconnue), je me prepare d’avoir beaucoup de ptaisir a la
promenade de Versailles (3-4)." The “je” of Part 1 of the novel remains
anonymous. And as Glicere prepares for a pleasurable interlude, the narratrice,
who herself is never named, assigns aliases to la belle Etrangére’s relatives. The
female relative of la belle Etrangére is named Glicere by the nanatrice. The true
identity of la belle Etrangére is never revealed in the storyline of the novel. Note
that Glicere suggests that she will take pleasure in her “promenade de
Versailles” Glicere clevely alludes to her dual role in the diegesis of the novel, as
la belle Etrangére’s companion and as the nanatrice of the “Histoire de Celanire,”
in Part 2.

To the end of the novel, the characters’ identities remain hidden. Though
the identity of la belle Etrangére is never revealed, the dynamic of secrets
revealed and masks unveiled is evoked by this lingering secret. In addition to the
secret identities and the secret love affair of Celanire, the reader will discover the
most important secret in the hidden critique of absolutism embedded in a
conversation in the second part of the novel. Like the belle Etrangére, the term
preciosité also retains its elusive quality over the centuries.

The feminist criticism of Scudéry echos the concept of the foreign, the

distant, the strange which is essential to La Promenade de Versailles. La

Promenade de Versailles is the story of a woman who wants to keep her

102

personal life private. To control one’s own destiny, one must keep one’s own
counsel. Celanire (the pseudonym given to la belle Etrangére) wants above all to
control her own destiny, so she values secrecy above all.

In Chapters 3 and 4, the importance of the secret in La Promenade de
Versailles will be discussed. The sensitive political critique embedded in the
novel obviously had to be cloaked in a nuanced discourse in order to avoid
serious repercussions from Louis XIV’s book censors. Historically, in the genre of
prose fiction, the secret is a highly charged metaphorical sign. Also, in Louis
XIV’s realm, even the king himself loved secrets.

The secret was one of the qualities of Cixous and Clement’s poetic
definition of a woman coming to writing. The secret, as opposed to the public,
also carried particular significance for the literary society of seventeenth-century
France

Erica Harth remarks that Ti]t was indeed the ‘public,’ in a narrow sense of
the term, that separated the salon from the academy”(Cartesian Women, 24).
The most important example of “the academy” was, of course, the exclusively
male, state supported and controlled Académie F rancaise. Harth continues:

‘To publish’(publier) was, according to Furetiere, to make something

public, either in speech or in writing. Its opposite was not the ‘private,’ but

rather, [...] ‘the secret,’ a word frequently used at the time. Furetiere cites
the following example of publier. ‘It is said of an indiscreet person that he
publishes the secret of his friend when he reveals it to another.’ The
academy, where writing was central, was more ‘public’ than the salon. It
gave its members instant access to the res publica of letters, a republic in
which women, if admitted at all, were generally second-class citizens.

Many women of the salons, if they wrote at all, did so anonymously or

pseudonymously. Similary, it was not unusal for women to pursue their
studies under a strict veil of secrecy and to hide their Ieaming.'(24)

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So many aspects of Harth’s explanation of the published versus the secret
relate to Scudéry and her writing. Obviously, she was of the salon society not of
the academy. As we know, though she was considered for election, she was
elected to the Academie Francalse. Most other French academies were also
exclusively male domains.

Scudéry also published much of her work anonymously or under the
pseudonym, if you will, of her brother’s signature. Remember Huet’s making a
point of her generosity to French males’ egos by having kept her authorship a
secret.

And, of course, the secret looms large in La Promenade de Versailles.
Scudéry’s novel appropriates a favorite preoccupation of the seventeenth-
century, the secret. However, the novel’s preoccupation with the secret contrasts
with its very public representation of Louis XIV and his palace.

And, last but not least, La Promenade de Versailles exemplifies
Furetiere’s definition of the secret. It bears repeating. “It is said of an indiscreet
person that he publishes the secret of his friend when he reveals it to another.”
The love story of Celanire and Cleandre becomes the tale of the consequences
of indiscretion.

According to the twentieth-century German philosopher JIirgen Habermas,
in the seventeenth century, the notion of public versus private was in its infancy.
In the seventeenth century, public and private had not yet become the

dichotomous terms of modernity. One must substitute published for the public

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and secret for the approximate definition of private to interpret correctly
Haberrnas’ proposition.

Haberrnas recognizes Scudéry and the salon as significant forerunners of
the major socio-political shift toward democracy.

Mademoiselle de Scudéry reported in her Conversations the stress of the

grand festivities; these served not so much the pleasure of the

participants, as the demonstration of grandeur, that is, the grandeur of the
host and guests. The common people, content to look on, had the most
fun... In the etiquette of Louis XIV concentration of the publicity of the
representation at the court attained the high point of refinement.(10)

The shift to democracy evolved out of the relationship between the
published, that which is made public, and the private, or in the seventeenth
century, that which remains secret. Scudéry played a small part in that transition.

In La Promenade de Versailles, as in her Conversations, Scudéry
describes the great festivities that took place at the palace. Part 1 depicts the
“grandeur of the host and guests.” Her novel participates in the “publicity” of
Versailles, that is, Louis XIV’s showing off his palace to his advisors, his
courtiers, and his people. Chapter 4 discusses Louis Marin’s interpretation of the
spectacle of Versailles.

For now, consider the revelation of Scudéry’s Conversations,wherein she
describes the stress of the participants. Scudéry understood the necessity of
paying homage to Louis XIV. One could not afford to appearindifferent to Louis
XIV‘s continual and extravagant sound and light show that was the palace of

Versailles, for the spectacle of Versailles represented the king, as he stood for

the spectacle.

105

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Ironically, Celanire travels to Versailles to conceal her secrets. Versailles,
par excellence, dramatically represents the glorification of the public as the site of
the king’s extravagant representation of himself as the Sun King. From the
immensity of the palace to its splendiferous gardens and fountains to the daily
and continuous display of the king in even his most personal, intimate moments,
Versailles glorifies the sanctity of the published, the revealed. But the glorification
takes place even as or perhaps because with the F ronde come the first
indications of the eventual dissolution of the power of the absolute monarchy and
the institutions that will supplant the monarchy after the Revolution. The
precursor of what Habennas would call the private sector begins to have a voice,
even if it is heard ever so faintly and covertly in seventeenth-century France.
Scudéry’s novel, La Promenade de Versailles, plays no small part in describing
the evolution Haberrnas theorizes.

Celanire travels to Versailles to conceal that she loves Cleandre against
the will of her uncle and her family. Because of a family feud, Celanire has been
forbidden to associate with anyone of Cleandre’s lineage. She has taken refuge
in a nunnery because she refuses to marry the man her uncle has selected for
her. She takes her destiny into her own hands by escaping the convent and
traveling to Versailles. She becomes the agent of her own desire. She does not
rely on her man to solve her problems, whether he be her lover, her surrogate or
her ruler. La Promenade de Verailles voices a defiant cry against patriarchy,

both familial and governmental.

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La Promenade de Versailles presents the heroine and the literary style of
preciosité as the Other, whose voice now cries to be heard. Recall that Stanton
argues that préciosr'té is a male myth born of a fearful male phantasm. The title of
Stanton’s article “The Fiction of Préciosité and the Fear of Women,” inscribes her
contention that “seventeenth-century texts make no mention of a précieux style
or school, much less of a précieux man or poet (109).” Seventeenth-century
women, especially female writers, and especially Madeleine de Scudéry, did not
call themselves précieuses. The myth that Stanton’s article describes was
inscribed in the fictional writing of the seventeenth-century male satirists we
reviewed in Part 1 of this chapter, “The Problematics of Préciesité.” For
example, eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics such as Cousin,
Lanson, and Mongrédien promulgated the fiction of satirists such as Moliere,
Boileau, Tallemant des Réaux and Somaize by their interpretations of Scudéry
infon'ned by them.

The truth of préciosité defined préciosité as the ideologies expounded in
the works of women writers who have been labeled précieuses, can only be
revealed by re-reading their works. Stanton’s article exposes the myth of the
fictions of preciosité, that is, the satirical and fictional works of the four major
satirists, Moliere, Boileau, Tallement des Réaux and Pure. This thesis reveals
truths of Scudéry’s précieux discourse on politics of the polls and of women’s
rights La Promenade de Versailles. Chapters 3 and 4 define the praxis of a

nouvelle preciosité.

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A second significant aspect of Stanton’s work informs this thesis. She
warns of the dangers of feminist critiques based on biological metaphors, a fear
she shares with several female feminist critics (Difference 157-182).

In her article “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” which appeared in
Writing and Sexual Difference, Elaine Showalter explains the drawback of
biological metaphors in feminist critiques.

Organic or biological criticism Is the most extreme statement of the gender

difference of a text indelibly marked by the body: anatomy is textuality.

Biological criticism is also one of the most sibylline and perplexing

theoretical formulations of feminist criticism. Simply to evoke anatomy

risks a return to the crude essentialism, the phallic and ovarian theories of
art, that oppressed women In the past.(17)

In her work entitled Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity, Judith Butler rehearses Luce lrigaray’s discourse of the Other and the
danger it poses for representation of the female.

But it is, of course, Irigaray, who exposes this dialectic of Same and Other

as a false binary, the illusion of a symmetrical difference which

consolidates the metaphysical economy of phallogocentiism, the economy
of the same. In her view, the Other as well as the Same are marked as
masculine; the Other is but the negative elaboration of the masculine

subject with the result that the female sex is unrepresentabIe-that is, it is
the sex which, within this signyfying economy, is not one.(103)

One must be cautious of the dangers of essentialism in feminist critiques.
Nonetheless, the degree to which Scudéry’s précieux novels are marked by the
female body, that is by the French feminist metaphor of the female as the Other,
may account for the oppressive reception she has received. The omnipresence
of the female Other in La Promenade de Versailles may well have engendered
the exclusionary tactics of Scudérian literary criticism across several centuries.

Her work provoked the phantasmagorical fear that Stanton so well delineates in

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“The Fiction of Preciosité and the Fear of Women.” The tactics designed to
exclude her works were all too successful.

However, mindful of the essentialist trap, in point of fact, a biological
metaphor symbolically lies at the heart of this proposal. It turns on the argument
that Scudéry’s narrative shift from exteriority to interiority represents a turning
away from a recognized male discourse, that is, the action oriented novel of the
hero, to the feminine discourse based on the descriptive and thoughtful analysis
of the conversation. Further, this narratological shift constitutes a radical
feminization of the novelistic form.

The implications of the biological metaphor substituting an external male
discourse with an internal female discourse are clear, male sexuality traditionally
being configured as outer and female sexuality as inner. The use of an obviously
biological metaphor because our gesture thus allows for a symbolic
representation of female versus male narrative.

Stanton’s article describes the fear that female writers such as Scudéry
aroused in male critics for centuries. This dissertation reappropriates the term
preciosité, as DeJean has done. Twenty-first-century feminist scholars of
seventeenth-century literature seek to rehabilitate the term préciosité, to embrace
it and redefine it. The lengthy analysis of Part 1, The Problematics of Préciosité
builds on Stanton’s theorization of the phantasmagorical fear of several
seventeenth-century male readers. It is paramount to a full understanding of the
negative, that is to say, misogynous criticism that pervades the literature on

Scudéry to review those satirical works carefullly.

109

How does embracing the term preciosité add to feminist interpretation of
seventeenth-century works, and particularly La Promenade de Versailles?
Maitre clearly embraces the concept of preciosite, and yet even after her lengthy
analysis, she is unable to define the term succinctly.18

DeJean appropriates the term. She redefines préciosité and describes
Scudéry’s works as subtle précieux feminist and political critiques, as do we.
DeJean’s revised definition of preciosité in the 1995 edition of the New Oxford
Companion to French Literature best describes Scudérian preciosite. “The
assemblies subsumed under the name ‘preciosité’ were feminist in the full sense
of this modern term. They worked to change women’s lives, to promote reforms,
in particular in marital and family law, designed to give women greater control
over their fates (638).”

Scudéry writes in a pie-deconstructive past and can be forgiven for not
recognizing the danger of a false binary opposition. After the fact, one realizes
that Scudéry’s novels redefine the genre in terms of an opposition between the
traditional male action-oriented novel and the new novel of thoughtful exchanges
under the sign of the feminist précieux discourse of the conversation. Scudéry
exploits the binary opposition to transform a traditional male discourse of
exteriority into a female discourse of inferiority in Cyms, Clélie, and La
Promenade de Versailles.

Thus, Scudéry becomes a forerunner of the self-actualized Other in her
narrative choices as well as in the actions of the heroine of La Promenade de

Versailles, la belle Etrangére. She has come to Versailles in a bold move to

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escape a patriarchal mandate forbidding her to marry her true love, Cleandre,
since he was born into a family that was the enemy of her own family.
Significantly, she becomes the agent of her own destiny. She takes matters into
her own hands.

Scudéry’s text dares to critique the repressive marital laws of seventeenth-
century France. She was the most successful novelist of seventeenth-century
France and that a female narrator speaks in La Promenade de Versailles, giving
voice to la belle Etrangére’s avant-garde strategies for female liberation. And
finally, the appropriation and perfection of the précieux discourse of the salon,
namely, the conversation, enables the liberating voice of La Promenade de
Versailles. ‘9

Agreeing with the traditional notion that preciosite springs from the salon,
DeJean views the salon culture as “a world apart.”

It is fitting, she says, that these private academies were designated by

temporal and spatial terms, for the essence of the salon’s importance in

literary life was bound up with its status as a world apart.(Emphasis mine.

299)

The space is the salon. And this space is the space of the Other, a
different world. The temporal designation alludes to the fact that many salons,
such as Scudéry’s, met on a certain day of the week. So Scudéry’s salon, for
example, became known as les Samedis.

By “private academy,” DeJean means private salon, which she defines as

the female equivalent of the “public academy.” The public academies were

exclusively male, including the state supported Académie Francalse. La

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Promenade de Versailles’s story line emphasizes the separation of the published
public and secret, therefore private, the personal from the crown.

Preciosité by contrast is the secret space controlled by women. Secret,
that is to say exclusive, coteries existed under the control of women. An
organization controlled exclusively by women was a foreign concept to
seventeenth-century Frenchmen more accustomed to male controlled
institutions, not to mention the king who preferred to control all Institutions. In
numerous scenes in La Promenade de Versailles the text emulates salon
society.

The story begins in medias res. The narratrice’s guests have arrived from
afar. We learn that their anonymity is of utmost importance. La belle Etrangére
asks if she is looking at the “la petite maison du plus grand Roi de la terre?”(2)
But no sooner have the characters been introduced than the story line is
redirected. The text neither begins the walk through Versailles promised in the
title, nor does it elaborate on the incognito visitors to Versailles. Rather, the
characters engage in a debate as to the merits of art versus nature and narration
versus description. It is as if the implied author,20 the Scudéry that can be
constructed from the text, anticipates the criticism of her previous novels being
too long on description and too short on action. The early discussions in the
novel justify the incursion of the conversation in her work. Also, the discussion
reads as a salon debate might have progressed.

In short, the novel begins by highlighting its radical new narrative

technique. The conversation provides space for thoughtful reflection and debate.

112

 

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The interiority of the discussion replaces the exteriority of the masculine novel
based on heroic action.

Glicere claims she will enjoy the promenade. Telamon insists he will enjoy
it more, because he will make a drawing or write a description of Versailles.(4)
Not incidentally, Telamon illustrates the new narrative form. Ironically, the male
voice of Telamon affirms the efficacy of an interior narrative discourse. We will
team the rules and conventions that govern the conversation and Scudéry’s
innovative inclusion of her invention in La Promenade de Versailles in Chapter 4.

In Part 1 of La Promenade de Versailles, the discussion of the great
historians and monuments of the past ensues, with the debate between Glicere
and Telamon central. The content becomes less important than the form.
However, the conversation between Glicere and Telamon does allow for an
important plug for Louis XIV’s grandeur.21

Evidence of male critics’ dissatisfaction, impatience, and general
annoyance with Scudéry’s works abounds in the critical literature regarding the
mythology that has grown around the concept of préciosité and in particular as
the term supposedly was manifested in the life and works of Madeleine de
Scudéry. What ostensibly provokes the male reader? The length of her novels?
Their overall lack of a linear, organized discourse? Their bourgeois
sentimentality? In short, their unreadability?

There is a darker side to the negative criticism that Scudéry’s works have
endured over the centuries. Myriam Maitre’s evocation of the “mythe noir” in her

opus on the précieuses implies as much(124—207). Stanton’s article,”The Fiction

113

 

 

of Prec
cndcun

WOITIGT‘

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cnflcs,
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Bénict

”quail

DOSIUC

of Preciosité and the Fear of Women,” already begins to explain the negative
criticism as a manifestation of certain male critics’ phantasmagorical fear of
women.

The critical fallout of Moliere’s Les Précieuses ridicules pervades the
critical literature concerning Madeleine de Scudéry and her works. Certain
critics, such as Carlos Francois, attempt to present a rational explanation for the
seemingly contradictory evaluation of the précieuses in Moliere’s plays. Paul
Bénichou also acknowledges the conflict.

It est de fait que Moliere s’en est pris par deux fois, au debut et a la fin de
sa carriere, a la galanterie romanesque. Les Précieuses renfennent des
allusions expresses au Cyms, a la Clélie, a la carte de Tendre, et, sur les
trois heroines des Femmes savantes, deux ou moins qui sont entichées
de la philosophie amoureuse des romans. (324)

Benichou goes on to explain the contradition.

Cependant Ia contradiction, avant d’etre dans les sentiments de Moliere,
est dans les conditions memes on se trouve place le désir féminin
d’émancipatlon. Pareil desir peut se faire jour en effet dans deux
directions, qu’une tradition toute-puissante nous montre divergentes I’une
de I’autre. Les femmes peuvent demander, a l’encontre de la morale
repressive qu’on leur impose, Ie droit de vivre et de jouir selon Ie penchant
de la nature—et elles peuvent demander qu’on leur accorde une dignité,
un rang égaux a ceux de l’homme; Moliere accede autant qu’il se peut a la
premiere demande et ridiculise volontiers la seconde. II s’émeut quand
I’instinct est outrage beaucoup moins si c’est la fierté ou Ie sens de la
justice. Tout le ridicule des femmes savantes est dans leur obsession
d’égalité, dans leur révolte contre la supériorlté de valeur et de prestige
attributée aux hommes, car c’est bien a cela que revient, en demiere
analyse, le probleme de l’ambition intellectuelle chez les femmes.”(325-
326)

According to Benichou, Moliere believed that woman’s obsession with
equality goes against man’s natural instinct. Bénichou’s explication of Moliere’s

position continues:

114

 

the all
He imr
love in
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Moliérr
love. ‘

Constn

Mohen

Si elles reclamalent, meme avec quelque scandale, Ie droit de se conduire
et d’aimer a leur guise, Moliere les ecouteraient volontiers, mais justement
elles se croient tenues de mepriser l’amour pour echapper a l’inferiorite
feminine. Moliere a fait leur pruderie inseparable de leur revolte, eta
condamne d’un seul coup I'une et |’autre.”(326)

Benichou’s text reveals the “mythe noir” of préciosité. Bénichou describes
the alleged prudery of the so-called précieuses as it unfolds in Moliere’s plays.
He implies that Moliere was correct in turning a deaf ear to women who despise
love in order to escape their feminine inferiority. Most significantly, Bénichou
rehearses the male myth and phantasmagorical fear of women demonstrated by
Moliere’s male characters and in particular, their fear of a woman who refuses
love. This “refus d’amour” is of course, one of the three aspects of the
construction of preciosite that Lathuillere identifies.

Bénichou describes a contradiction at the heart of preciosite of which
Moliére was aware.

Moliere a bien vu la difficulte d’une doctrine qui reprouve I’amour sans

cesser de I’exalter, qui en étend partout le regne pour faire regner partout

la femme, et cependant y denonce l’ecueil de I’independance féminine.

D’ou d’un type de femme obsedee par l’amour et revoltée contre l’amour,

coquette et prude a la fois, qui est exactement celui de la précieuse.(327)

Thus, the précieuse, coquette and prude, becomes the dreaded female
tease who entices but does not deliver.

Through a well-placed “Freudian slip,” namely the descriptive adjective
“neurotic,” Bénichou reveals the piece de resistance of his critique of the
précieuse in Moliere’s plays. “Moliere a fait une place privilegiee, parmi tous les

elements de la nevrose précieuse, au dispositif de guerre et de domination que

ces femmes insatisfaites de leur sort maintiennent constamment dirige contre

115

 

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beh

Hov

pror

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pris
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I’homme (328).” The précieuse whose plan of action against the opposite sex is
to withhold sexuality must be neurotic. The fear of that woman is the dark secret
behind the male constructed definition of préciosité.

Bénichou perpetrated the myth of women writing and préciosité.
However, he fails to ask who created the so-called neurosis of the précieuses or
what was the source of the malady of nevrosite. Male society’s inability to adapt
to a radically new feminine persona, the newly born woman of the seventeenth
century, that created the myth of the neurotic précieuse. In short, male society
produces the nevrose. Bénichou, as his predecessors before him, fails to see his
role in the problem.

In his article “La Nevrose précieuse: une nouvelle pleiade,” Sellier's parti
pris for the précieuses is meritorious, but his opening argumentation proves
somewhat untenable. What Sellier’s article does, as subtly as any seventeenth-
century précieux text, is to appropriate slyly the target of his attack into his
theory. The title of his article already alludes to the pages in Benichou’s text we
have just related wherein he coins the expression “nevrose précieuse.” Sellier
begins his article wherein he responds to Bénichou thus.

ll arrive que la recherche des rythmes et des correspondances sonores,

surtout dans les titres, nous egare. Celui-ci oscille dangereusement entre

Ie paradoxe et la provocation. N’a-t-on pas, tout recemment, presente la

preciosite comme une ”fable”, “un mythe”, une invention polémique?(96)

Sellier reveals the source of his expression in a footnote.22 Then Sellier

confinues.

Comment des lors, risquer, meme avec un point d’interrogation,
l’expression “nouvelle Pleiade?” D’autre part, comme l’ecrivaient on

116

 

 

Si
enhance

(liuéfaire

s’ecrireraient nos hero'i'nes,”le moyen de Iier une réussite litteraire a un

trouble, meme léger, de la personnalité, a une névrose.”(127)

Sellier’s article procedes to verify to what degree seventeenth-century
précieuses conformed to Bénichou’s supposition that they were neurotic.

Using researched clinical definitions of varying neurotic syndromes, the
article describes the potential maladies of several “reseaux de précieuses,” from
Rambouillet to Scudéry. For example, based on symptoms reported in
seventeenthy-century letters, Lafayette is posthumously diagnosed as having
suffered from “I’hystérie de conversion (106).” The “researched” symptoms of
other précieuses suggest they suffered from phobias ranging from hypocondria
to frigidity and homosexuality. Of course, the American Psychiatic Association no
longer defines homosexuality as a clinical diease.

Sellier’s article also suggests that certain clinical conditions might actually
enhance one’s literary talents. “Aussi est-on tente de voir dans I’hystérie la plus
‘litteraire’ des névroses (107).” Sellier adds:

Parler de coloration hysterique, a propos de cette riche efflorescence

précieuse, cela ne constitue nullement une attaque, bien au contraire.

D’autant plus qu’on ne peut ‘reussir ‘ son hysterie, comme disent les

psychanalystes [...] La névrose précieuse nous met en presence d’une

extraordinaire réussite, d’un phenomena de contagion benefique, dont

I’apport a la littérature, suggere Ia forrne de ‘nouvelle Pleiade.’ Les

reseaux feminins que nous avons rencontres ont joue un role décisif dans

I’assouplissement de la langue, I’affinement de I’analyse psychologique,

dans I’essort du ‘Portrait’ et celui de la littérature epistolaires; elles ont

contribue a imposer Ie genre Ie plus vivant de I’epoque, Ie roman.(119)

Thus, in his article, Sellier plays on Bénichou’s construction of “la névrose

précieuse.” Sellier never mentions Benichou in his article. However, he does

inscribe the term in his essay to point to Bénichou’s critique of preciosite. Sellier

117

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cleverly changes “Ia névrose précieuse” into a positive attribute, namely, the
unconscious motivation of poetic genius.

Like the work of so many critics before him, Bénichou’s text is blinded to
its own paranoia, its fear of abandonment that the précieuses evoked and which
produced the dark mirror image of neuroses and neurotic women, who in turn
were made neurotic by a male dominated society.

Helene Cixous exposes the male fear of female abandonment and
domination in her article entitled “Le Rire de la Meduse.” Sigmund Freud
identified Medusa as a symbol of the male’s fear of women. In a short article he
entitled “Medusa’s Head,” Freud theorizes that the beheading of the mythical
female Medusa, becomes a frightening symbol for male castration (212-213). In
Cixous” text, poetically and explicitly, she exposes the Medusa complex. Cixous
re-appropriates the myth to theorize a newly arrived woman, her head reunited
with her body.

What makes the Medusa image so compelling, is that in Boileau’s critique
of Scudéry in Les Herbs du roman,23 uncannily, Boileau uses the Medusa image
to describe Scudéry. Mocking Scudéry’s self-portrait in the last installment of
Cyrus, Boileau has the ancient Sapho describe the Sapho of Cyms. Boileau
assigns Scudéry a new pseudonym. Scudéry/Sapho becomes Tisiphone.
However, the passage in Boileau’s text is unmistakably a pastiche of the self-
portrait of Scudéry in Cyrus.

Tisiphone a naturellement Ia taille fort haute, et passant de beaucoup Ia

mesure des personnes de son sexe [...] Elle a les yeux petits, mais pleins

de feu, vifs, percant, et bordes d’un certain vennillon qui en releve
prodigieusement I’echat. Ses cheveux sont naturellement boucles et

118

 

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fema

213)

repe
Scur
reac
Scu

Scu

see
TEE
ore
(Ta
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(3e
he-

he

anneles; et I’on peut dire que ce sont autant de serpents qui s’entortillent

les uns dans les autres, et se jouent nonchalamment autour de son

visage. Son teint n’a point cette couleur fade et blanchatre des femmes
de Scythie; mais iI tient beaucop de ce brun male et noble que donne Ie

soleil aux Africaines qu’il favorise le plus pres de ses regards. (333)

Boileau literally defines Scudéry as Medusa. In the theory
of unconscious motivation, Boileau envisions Scudéry as the serpent-headed
female monster that Freud believes is a symbol for the castrating woman (212-
213)

The compelling aspect of this application of this Freudian hypothesis is the
repetition of the Medusa metaphor in the works that critique Scudéry. If
Scudéry’s writing truly elicited an unconscious castration complex in male
readers, this fact in turn bolsters DeJean’s suggestion that Boileau’s fear of
Scudéry demonstrated in Les héros de roman symbolizes a “ritual murder” of
Scudéry. (DeJean, Fictions 110-114)

In the final analysis, then, who is more neurotic? The précieuse who
seeks autonomy, at all cost? Or the male critic driven by his fear of female
rejection, which he projects back to the woman supposedly rejecting him, thus
creating the précieuse construction that has become known as “le refus
d’amour?” In La Promenade de Versailles, one could say that the heroine refuses
Cleandre’s love. Celanire does not refuse Cleandre’s love without reason.
Celanire refuses his love because she desires self-determination in affairs of the
heart as well as in affairs of state—in marriage, in divorce, in giving birth.

In order to construct a précieuse character who refuses love, due to a

neurotic tendency or to a reasoned and rational desire for self-determination, one

119

 

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must write a love story. La Promenade de Versailles is after all such a love story,
and it is also much more than that. The novel must set the stage for a romantic
fiction, so the characters do finally embark on their tour of the palace. But of
course, as expected, their promenade was interrupted by yet another
conversation that resembles a salon gathering.

Friends of the narratrice arrive and ask everyone to take sides in a debate
between two gentlemen as to whether one should say goodby to a lover or not.
“S’il y a plus an moins de tendresse a dire adieu a ce qu’on aime, ou a ne le dire
pas (52).” The debaters include several verses of poetry in their arguments.
Everyone is asked to take sides in the casuistic debate. Thus, the Scudérian text
here brilliantly subverts the notion of narration to illustrate by example the
importance of description and casuistic commentary, even as it introduces the
700-page story. The connection between narration and interpretive discourse
and debate is already well established in the first 50 pages of La Promenade de
Versailles. The exiled guests to Versailles have already established a link
between fact and fiction.

DeJean traces the importance of the connection between real world
political exile and fictional, often metaphorical, exile to the inception of the
modern novelistic form. In Chapter 4 the notion of exile and its important
implications for La Promenade de Versailles will be demonstrated.

In the seventeenth century, the term “retreat” was sometimes
euphemistically used to describe what was actually a political exile. DeJean links

the so-calted retreat of Mademoiselle de Montpensier with a definitive moment in

120

 

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the evolution of both Scudéry’s novelistic enterprise and the evolution of the
genre as a whole.

While the Nouvelles francaises [of Montpensier] was not published
until 1657, the work’s incipit shows that it was begun early in
Montpensier’s exile, at the time when Scudéry was working on the final
volume of Artamene, in which Sapho’s entrance signals the death of the
action—oriented model for fiction and in which the new amazons owe their
independence to the power of the word rather than the power of the
sword. In Scudéry’s new model for prose fiction, as in the courts in exile
like Montpensier’s the making of history if eclipsed by the writing of
history. This deferred, deflected perspective on action is a vision that,
while fatal to romance, generates what can be seen as the great French
tradition of the novel, the novel as saga of voyeurism and oblique action,
progressing inexorably toward the Iivre sur rien.(Tender, 55)

DeJean speaks of the frame of the new novel in terms of shift in focus
from the action to “the word.” Scudéry’s first novels speak in volumes about
feminist and political issues. The new novelistic form, called the nouvelle and
which will become the modern novel, speaks volumes in shorter texts than
Scudéry’s previous voluminous novels. They incarnate the momentous discovery
of the power of the word. La Promenade de Versailles demonstrates brilliantly
the realization of the power of the word to praise and in the same gesture to
criticize.

DeJean elaborates a theory of the collective nature of salon writing. She
relates this collective writing production to the forced exiles of seventeenth-
century France. “The time for the extensive salon collaboration essential to the
production of novels rather than poems was most often the result of political exile
(75).” Again, la belle Etrangére, the central character of La Promenade de

Versailles, is in exile for the duration of the novel for political and personal

reasons of her own.24

121

DeJean cites Lafayette’s Princesse de Cleves in the context of writings in
exile.

Like the Grande Mademoiselle [Montpensier] during her official

confinement, Lafayette in the course of her “exile” on her husband’s estate

was working at the intersection of women’s writing, the great actions that
founded the French State, and the private history of women’s legal rights

in marriage.(Tender, 109)

La belle Etrangére finds herself in exile because of her interpretation of
love and the personal and untenable restrictions on marriage to her love
Cleandre, which force her to leave her native land.

DeJean reiterates this connection between love, marital laws, exile, and
the nouveau roman of seventeenth-century France.

Salon writing that was a product of the Princesse de Conti’s exile indicated

the path most frequently chosen for early French women’s writing: the

novels created at Eu elect a historical setting to develop a plot composed
in equal part of political and amorous adventures. This would remain, until
the mid-eighteenth century, the stock formula for French women writers
recording women’s involvement in the body politic.(23)

The plot of La Promenade de Versailles spins a tale of romantic adventure
and political cn'tique. DeJean also recognizes the inherent danger to patriarchy of
the précieuse novelistic enterprise (Tender 9). It is the same perceived danger to
patriarchy that Stanton describes as the male’s phantasmagorical fear of women
writers and that she believes creates the mythology of préciosité. The theories of
DeJean and Stanton, while seemingly antithetical, actually reinforce one another.
The critical inception of preciosité’s literary productions becomes a major critical
force in the history of the novel. Both DeJean and Stanton would agree.

By the time La Promenade de Versailles was written in 1669, Madeleine

de Scudéry was widely known by all as Sapho. In her self-portrait in her novel

122

 

C yr

Sat

dep

pro:

liter

of ti

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hidc
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Sap

Scu

Cyrus, Scudéry calls herself Sapho. Henceforth, Scudéry is known as the French
Sapho. Like la belle Etrangére, Scudéry adopts a literary alias.

There are similarities in the biography of Sapho and Scudéry’s self-
depiction. DeJean reminds us that:

both were orphaned at an early age; both had only one brother; both were

dark, and neither was known for her beauty, although both were

redeemed by their vivacity and by certain charms, such as “brilliant” eyes
and graceful hands, show to their best advantage in a conversational

situation. (Fictions, 104)

DeJean goes on to add that “[t]his resemblance established, Scudéry
proceeds to translate her Greek precursor into the ideal image of the French
literary woman of the mid-seventeenth century (104).'

DeJean argues that “Scudéry used Sappho as the heroine of a new fiction
of the feminine (96-97).” The heroine of La Promenade de Versailles, la belle
Etrangére also shares features of Sapho and Scudéry.

As the twentieth-century feminists insist on the “invisible, foreign, secret,
hidden, mysterious, black, forbidden” female coming to writing, again we see
darkness inscribed in the autoportrait of Scudéry, in her depiction of the historical
Sapho, and in her character who comes to Versailles from afar. ln Cyrus,
Scudéry/Sapho is dark complected.

Pour le teint, elle ne l’a pas de la derniere blancheur; il a toutefois un si bel

éclat qu’on peut dire qu’elle l’a beau. Mais ce que Sapho a de

souverainement agréable, c’est que'elle a les yeux si beaux, si vifs, si

amoureux [...].”(Tome X, Livre II 554)

In his description of Scudéry, the critic Cousin insists on her dark

complexion. In fact, in his own words he admits that he considers her ugly.

123

 

 

tout

affu

her

Etl

Et
Sc
16
St
Cit
El

St.

“[...] Mlle de Scudéry était Iaide, son teint surtout tirant au noir, était a sa figure
toute prétention de beauté (Volume II 124).” Cousin’s description ironically
affirms Scudéry’s entry into the realm of écn'ture feminine.

Further, Cousin implies that Scudéry’s lack of beauty is compensated by
her finesse in the salons of Paris.

Mlle de Scudéry était la souveraine du lieu. Les charmes de son esprit, la

noblesse et la douceur de son caractere, la sflreté et l’agrément de son

commerce, la faisaient adorer, et elle se maintint constamment dans
l'estime publicque par la parfaite innocence de ses moeurs.(121)

In Cyrus, Scudéry herself elevates her own and Sapho’s wit over their
respective beauty. “Mais ce n’est pas encore par ce que je viens de vous dire
que Sapho est la plus aimable; car les charmes de son esprit surpassent de
beaucoup ceux de sa beauté (557).” According to the narratrice, la belle
Etrangére also:

a mille charmes que je ne peux exprimer, qu’elle a beaucoup & de fort

belles pierreries, que ce qu’elle a d'équipage a un certain air de qualité qui

marque que ce n’est pas vne personne d’vn rang commun [...] & qu’enfin
ce n’est pas du costé du bien que la Fortune lui est contraire.(ZS-26)

At a distance from Paris and Versailles, in her own realm, la belle
Etrangére possesses both beauty and wit. Celanire resembles the personae of
Scudéry and her literary double, Sapho. ln Cyrus one might speculate that by
1669, Scudéry felt more comfortable in her own skin. The degree to which
Scudéry self-allegorizes through the character of la belle Etrangére will become
clear. The continual insistence on Celanire’s beauty by her sobriquet la belle

Etrangére points to a narrative strategy of La Promenade de Versailles, namely,

subterfuge to allow the dangerous secret critique of absolutism embedded in the

124

fC

tr

d4

romanesque story. Scudéry transforms herself into a beautiful princess to tell the
true story of Versailles. This critique, central to the novel, will be discussed in
detail in Chapters 3 and 4.

In La Promenade de Versailles, la belle Etrangére is not described as
having a dark complexion, but she is shrouded in mystery, since the reader can
never learn of her origins. Neither the characters of the novel nor the reader will
learn of her true origin.

The novel successfully creates an aura of mystery around the characters.
And Scudéry constructs a new narrative frame by placing the story under the pen
of a female narrator. The gender of the narrator cannot be confirmed until page
64, at which the point the alert reader will realize that she is a female narrator.
The French term narratrice inscribing the gender of the enunciator of the
narration in the word, albeit by a simple change in the ending, is more evocative
of the revolutionary female narrative forces which resound in La Promenade de
Versailles.

The narratrice must make arrangements so that she and her guests might
enter Versailles. As she writes a note to that effect, a friend of hers arrives and
she inquires about the beautiful visitor.

Mais pendant que j’envoiai vn billet que j’avois, afin qu’on nous laissat

entrer, je vis sortir une de mes amies avec cinq ou six personnes qui

parurent toutes extremément surprises de la grande beauté de nostre

Etrangere, car sa coiffe estoit levee, parce qu'elle avoit voulu regarder

I’aspect de ce magnifique Palais.(21-22)

It may not be accidental that the first person to note the beauty of the

foreign guest is a woman. She needs an excuse to inquire about la belle

125

 

Etran

dem:

COD!

love

Cli

Etrangére. '[E]Ile feignit d’avoir quelque chose d’important a me dire, afin de me
demander qui estoit cette admirable personne (22).”

One is reminded of DeJean‘s argument that the Sapho/Scudéry
connection in Cyrus subtly but successfully inscribes an affirmation of lesbian
love. First, DeJean admits the suggestion is perhaps tenuous.

I am unable to make the claim that would be most telling for the history of

fictions of sexual propriety in France, that Scudéry plainly inscribes her

Sapho’s rejection of heterosexual relationships.(Fictions 104)

DeJean does go on to claim: “When Scudéry is read closely, it becomes
clear that the French Sapho’s position on sexuality and in particular on her
precursor’s sexuality is hardly so straightforward as it is generally considered
(105).” DeJean teases out the Sapho biography to reveal a “feminocentric
economy.”

Scudéry’s portrayal of the sexual orientation of Saphho’s poetry is more

complex still. In Scudéry’s revision, Sapho is constantly surrounded by

four female friends[...] Indeed, when we meet her, Sapho's entire affective
world is feminocentnc.(106)

DeJean continues:

Most crucially, she [Sapho] agrees to live with him [her lover, Phaon] only

if he promises never even to mention marriage to her. Sapho thereby

guarantees that she will never be submitted to the ‘Iong slavery’ (343) that
is woman’s legal status in marriage [...].(107)

In Cyrus, “safe within the confines of utopia, Sapho continues “to write
every day’ (608).” Finally, DeJean claims that “Scudéry’s Sapphic vision is in fact

permeated with fictions of the feminine, in particular with fictions of the woman

writer (Fictions 107-108).”

126

 

 

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The fact that the first Parisian to notice the beauty of la belle Etrangére is
a woman can be construed as a most subtle suggestion of lesbian attraction.
Nonetheless, as the ancient Sapho’s text inscribes female same-sex desire,
DeJean argues that Scudéry’s Cyrus “uses Sappho to initiate a new femaleplot
for the novel: the process by which woman rejects marriage, and the story of the
life she creates for herself outside marriage (110).”

In La Promenade de Versailles, Scudéry uses the same female plot.
Celanire also rejects an imposed marriage. She frees herself from bondage and
escapes to Versailles. In the end, Celanire does marry her true love, Cleandre,
which can be interpreted as a subtle concession to patriarchy at the end of the
novel. However, because of a declaration her father added to his will several
days before his death, Celanire can legitimately marry the man of her choice and
she does.

Of course, Scudéry herself, though she had several suitors, never
married. In La Promenade de Versailles, the first person to notice la belle
Etrangére is a woman. The friend of the narratrice draws her aside and asks she
“qui estoit cette grande beauté [...] (23).” The narratn'ce must admit that she
knows nothing of la belle Etrangére’s origins.

Je vous assure, lui dis-je, que je n’en sai guere plus que vous, & tout ce

que je puis vous en dire, c’est qu’il y a trois semaines que cét homme que

vous voiez qui n’est plus dans sa premiere jeunesse, & dont I’air est fort
d’un homme de condition, vint me trouver, & m’apporta vne lettre d’vn de
mes plus chers amis qui est en voiage[ ...] il me prie d’aimer 8. de servir
cette belle Etrangére [...](23-24)

The narratrice’s friend wishes to join the party. “Voila une aventure

admirable, me dit mon amie, 8. si j’osois, je rentrerois a Versailles avec vous,

127

pour avoir ma part d’vne si bonne compagnie (24).” The narratrice preempts this
overture by her friend, however, by telling her that “la belle Etrangére cherche la
solitude [...] (25).”
This passage hardly represents a budding and ardent lesbian relationship.
Yet, as DeJean points out, Scudéry’s texts are subtle. La Promenade de
Versailles already creates a new narrative mold by placing the story under the
pen of a female narrator. The comparison of Scudéry/Sapho and la belle
Etrangére continues. Like Scudéry/Sapho, la belle Etrangére is orphaned at an
early age. The narratrice of the first 100 pages of La Promenade de Versailles
remains anonymous. Glicere, a relative of la belle Etrangére, then begins the
romanesque story of Celanire with a description of the court in their far away
realm. After setting the stage for the story, Glicere begins the history of Celanire.
Mais sans m’arrester davantage, Celanire pouvait avoir seize ans
lorsqu’elle perdit son pere, et peu de jours aprés sa mere: elle alla
demeurer chez vn oncle qu’elle a, que j’appellerai Euribiade, dont la
femme que j’appelle Elisene, a autant d’ambition que d’esprit.(106-107)
Like la belle Etrangére, Scudéry/Sapho lost her parents in her youth. As in
Cyrus, the biographical implications are only too clear. Sapho, according to
DeJean was orphaned at an early age, as was Scudéry. In 1613, at the age of
five or six, “[alfter the death of her father, followed closely by that of her mother,
Madeleine is raised by an uncle [...] (Aronson, 13).”
To reiterate, Scudéry, Sapho and la belle Etrangére share biographical
details as well as the metaphorical descriptions of the woman coming to writing.

Sapho and Scudéry are described in like terms as to their complexion, for

example, but all three shared darkened, that is, mysterious origins.

128

 

 

 

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of the

The beginning pages of La Promenade de Versailles introduce other
characters that are also given pseudonyms. Glicere, a relative of la belle
Etrangére, is also pseudonymous. Like la belle Etrangére, her real identity must
remain a secret. Glicere becomes extremely important to the narrative because
she takes over the role of the narratrice from Part 1. In the “Histoire de Celanire,”
she slides into that important narrative function almost seamlessly, as her name
would indicate, i.e. glisser, to slide.

Yet another character and relative of the heroine is introduced in the
opening pages of the novel. He responds to Glicere’s comment about enjoying
the tour of Versailles.

Je pretends en avoir encore plus que vous, dit vn de leurs parens que je

nommerai Telamon, car je suis si touché des beaux objets des belles

maisons, des jardins, des bois, des fontaines, 8. de tout ce qui fait la
grande beauté des Palais de la campagne, que je n’ai jamais v0 de lieu
qui ait quelque chose d’extraordinaire, sans en faire ou le plan ou la
description; & comme j’ai extremement voiagé, je puis me vanter d’avoir

les plus lieux du monde en ma disposition. (4)

Telamon is also a relative of la belle Etrangére. The narratrice assigns this
pseudonymn to him. Like Glicere and la belle Etrangére, Telamon’s true identity
must be kept secret. In his response to Glicere he emphasizes his qualifications
to evaluate the beauty of Versailles, the reader also learns that Telamon comes
from a far. He has traveled the world over and now he comes to Versailles. By
this textual gesture, the male becomes part of the metaphorical space of the
Other as he is related to la belle Etrangére biologically and metaphorically.

Significantly, Telamon’s speech begins a polemic that continues for most

of the first part of La Promenade de Versailles. In the discussion of the merits of

129

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lengthy description over narrative, Telamon and Glicere debate the merits of
each. Telamon loves to linger over a beautiful description. Glicere is anxious to
get to the action. Lanson found Scudéry’s conversations, reflective of the best
contemplative thought of the seventeenth century, but also, ironically, overblown.
Scudéry, reassessing her works in 1669, and writing a novel dramatically shorter
than her other works, acknowledges that the time for more succinct narrative
exposition has come, a narrative that capitalizes on the powerful narrative force
of the interiority of the conversation.
The beginning of the second part of the novel, Histoire de Celanire,
reminds the reader of the importance of the secrets of the novel:
Puisque par le secret qui est inseparable de cette aventure, je ne puis
vous dire, ni le veritable nom de la belle inconnué, ni son pais, ni
precisément la naissance, quoiqu’elle consente que vous sachiez toute sa
vie, je suis délivrée de la peine qu’ont d’abord presque tous ceux qui
racontent des histoires; car pour I’ordinaire ils sont exactement la
généalogie de ceux dont ils parlent. ll est vrai que je me prepare a vne
autre peine qui n’est pas moins grande; c’est de m’empescher de vous
découvrir par aucune circonstance, si cette aventure est arrivée en Italie,
en Espagne, en Angleterre, ou en quelque autre pais. J’espere pourtant
faire mon recit de facon que vous n’y pourrez rien connoistre. (103-104)
Chapter 4 will demonstrate the importance of the secret in La Promenade
de Versailles. The second narratrice, Glicere, takes as much care to conceal the
identities and the origins of her characters as the narratrice of the first part of the
novel. She adds, “Les Romans pour I’ordinaire prennent des noms connus &
celebres pour servir de fondement a d’agréables mensonges. Mais ici les
aventures sont vraies, & les noms sont supposez (104).”

Celanire cannot stress too adamantly the necessity for the anonymity of

the characters of her story. This insistence is due to the implied danger of a story

130

 

 

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that both favors women’s liberation and reveals the belligerent nature at the heart
of absolutism.

Scudéry’s enterprise was foreign. Further, it is in exile. Being secret,
private, apart and female, the salon writing of Scudéry abounds in metaphors of
exile. The Scudérian biographer, Claude Argonnes, juxtaposes Scudéry’s
conversations with exile. Argonnés suggests that the Bishop F léchier found
consolation in his exile in his reading of Scudéry.

A la meme époque, Fléchier, nommé éveque de Lavaur, puise dans les

Conversations de quoi consoler son exil: “ll me fallait une lecture aussi

délicieuse que celle—la pour me délasser des fatigues d'un voyage, pour

me guérir de l’ennui des mauvaises compagnies de ce pays-ci et pour me
faire gouter le repos ou la rigueur de la saison et la docilité de mes

nouveaux convertis me retiennent dans ma ville épiscopale.” (241)

In the secret critique of absolutism embedded in the story of Celanire,
suddenly the exilic voyages of the characters takes on deeper meaning. For,
consider the fact that the author of a tract similar to Scudéry’s critique was a
Huguenot and a political and religious dissident. Chapter 4 compares a segment
of Scudéry’s secret political critiques with a text presumedly written by Pierre
Jurieu when he was exiled in Holland. Jurieu actually was exiled to Holland for
his radical religious and political beliefs. Being in exile became a commonplace
in seventeenth-century France.

Several times during her lifetime, Scudéry found herself or her family or
friends in “exil.” For economic reasons Scudéry and her brother had to reside in

Marseille for a time. Her separation from Paris felt like a forced exile. Later, her

brother had to go into exile during the Fronde.

131

 

 

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Cyrus proves to be an allegory set in ancient times of the Condé and the
Frondeurs and Frondeuses of Paris. Even though Madeleine wrote Cyrus, her
brother penned the work, which perhaps explains why he had to flee Paris, and
she did not. As we know, Scudéry’s good friend Paul Pellisson, though not
exiled, was actually imprisoned for several years because of his support of their
mutual friend Fouquet.

In La Promenade de Versailles, la belle Etrangére finds herself exiled at
Versailles. She had to flee her native country, her realm. From whence she
comes is never disclosed in the novel. Her lover does find her in her hiding place
at Versailles, after a period of exile and chivalrous escapades of his own.

Maitre asks the question. “La Preciosité: ‘Un empire des Femmes’ (51 )?’
She suggests that even the seventeenth-century satirist Somaize defines
préciosité as a metaphorical realm. “Urimédonte [a character in Somaize’s
Dictionnaire] est un objet digne d’estime et d’amour par tout ou il y aura de la
raison et des yeux, et que l’on doit placer au plus noble endroit du royaume de la
belle preciosité (51).” La belle Etrangére comes from an unknown far off realm.
She too is most noble. Allegorically, she represents an affirmation of the realm of
the précieuse of the Parisian salon.

Scudéry herself was known as “La Souveraine des Précieusesfzs
because she regally presided over her “Samedr” salon gathering. Also, because
her novels reigned supreme in the written literary production of the précieuses.
And, finally because she created the cartographic Royaume de tendre, in Clélie,

the famous document which became known as the La Carte de Tendre.

132

Maitre cites Dominique Maigueneau’s definition of the term “Paratopie.“
L’appartenance au champ littéraire, n’est donc pas l’absence de tout lieu,
mais plutbt une difficile négociation entre le lieu et le non-lieu, une
localisation parasitaire, qui vit de l’impossiblité meme de stabiliser cette
localité paradoxale, nous la nommerons “paratopie”.(408)

Tendre and préciosr'té, Maitre hypothesizes, are such a “paratopie' or
“hétérotopie’(Foucault’s term). “Le salon rue de Beauce et dans le roman et dont
la “Carte de Tendre’ dessine les espaces et les chemins (408).”

Scudéry is then, La Souveraine des Précieuses, the queen of her
metaphorical realm of Tender. La belle Etrangére could be defined as the
sovereign of beauty and of gentility. Because of her values, she could herself be
catergorized as a true précieuse. La belle Etrangére implicity becomes an
allegorical auto-biography of Scudéry, herself. By 1669, given that Madeleine de
Scudéry actually alludes to Moliere’s contribution to the 1668 Feste de Versailles,
albeit through Félibien’s citation, we might assume a degree of amnesty between
these two important seventeenth-century French authors. Moliere may have
considered la belle Etrangére “une bonne précieuse.”

To conclude this discussion of préciosité, consider Maitre’s conclusion to
her monumental work on preciosité where she alludes to Clélie.

ll ne peut donc etre question de camper la notion de preciosité sur une

rive archa‘r'que de l’orature[sic], opposee a la littérature, pratique modeme

liee a l’imprimé. Tout ce que nous pouvons tacher d’entendre,

ce sont les “citations de voix”,[as defined in Michel de Certeau's

L’lnvention du quotien] leurs effets de sens dans ce territoire du langage

humain nomme littérature que les précieuses, femmes auteurs, ont elles-

memes explore, traversant, comme Clélie d’un rive a l’autre du Tibre, le

fleuve langagier qui sépare la presence dans la parole partagée de l’exil
de I’écriture.(Emphasis mine. 653)’16

133

 

 

 

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deep
(fixo
journ
obhvi
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A linguistic Tiber, La Promenade de Versailles is a river that embodies the
presence of the word and the exile of writing. Scudéry’s précieuse river runs
deeper than many have thought for several centuries. The characteristics of
Cixous and Clement’s inscription of woman coming to writing can be found in the
journey of la belle Etrangére. We may evoke Sapho’s river Lethe, the river of
oblivion.27 The journey of préciosité metaphorically represents the feminist
literary journey of her most exemplary author, Madeleine de Scudéry. Always
already in the present and in exile, the Scudérian corpus now returns from

oblivion.

134

 

 

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Notes

 

1 See DeJean Tender. DeJean speaks frequently of Scudéry’s influence on
Lafayette. The index directs the reader to at least a dozen discussions. DeJean
sees Scudéry’s influence as having spanned the centuries. “[. . .]Sapho’s
rejection of marriage indicates her creator’s rejection of the closure and the order
that had previously governed the novel. In Scudéry’s wake, French women
writers from Lafayette, to Stael, to Sand to Colette bring their novels to an end by
calling into question marriage’s function to regulate the social order (50).”

2 See Harth. She contends that the term “salon” as applied to seventeenth-
century gatherings is an anachronism. “Salon was not applied to social
gatherings until the nineteenth century. In the sevententh century, the term salon
was not used to refer to the interior meeting place of the gatherings which it later
came to designate. In the earlier period, fashionable people of both sexes met
either in spaces within room—alcdves, ruelles-or in cabinets (studies or “closets”)
and chambres (15).” Since the literary criticism we will be discussing here most
often uses the word salon to designate alcOves, ruelles and cabinets, we will
make no effort to correct the current anachronisitc usage here.

3 See Livet 11. He credits Malherbe with “inventing” Arthénice as an anagramme
for Catherine. “Arthénice, avons-nous dit était le nom poétique de Madame de
Rambouillet. C’était Malherbe, qui, pour suivre l’usage et donner aux poétes un
moyen de la chanter, sans trahir pour le vulgaire le secret d’un nom si respecté,

avait trouve dans Catherine cet anagramme.”

135

 

 

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4 Vincent’s contention that those who gather to discuss literature are prone to an
affliction of malaise would be humorous if the existing bias against the
Humanities were not currently such a threat to Arts, Language and Letters across
our country.

5 In the many literary histories that have been penned concerning préciosité, the
notion that there are three classes of précieuses is a commonplace. Here we
have used the phrase “the good, the bad and the ugly” sarcastically, but
unfortunately, literary historians have classified the précieuses this way in
earnest. See Backer. Her work describes an historic topos. Several of her
chapters and chapter sub-titles telegraph her evaluation of the précieuses.
Chapter I entitled Rambouillet has a sub-titled section “Queen of the Fronde.”
Chpater ll entitled “The Precious Decade has a sub—titled section “Sapho, the
Ultimate Prude,” and “Bourgeoisie and Worse (ix)." Victor Cousin insisted that
Scudéry was ugly and that that accounted for her particular “refus d’amour,”
since she never married. See also DeJean Preciosite.

6 See DeJean, Maitre, Lathuillere, and Stanton. These authors present the most
valuable texts on the subject of preciosite and Scudéry. Maitre’s work contains
the most comprehensive look at the précieuses since they lived and wrote in the
seventeenth century. It begins an exploration of the lesser known female writers
of the seventeenth century who have so far been lost to scholarship because of
the general problematics of précioisté.

7 See Brunetiere 12. He contends that Madame de Rambouillet may not have

been a target of Moliere’s play, but that Scudéry surely was. “Le nom de Cathos

136

 

 

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a tout l’air d’avoir quelque signification, mais celui de Madelon en a certainement
une, et elle est directe, et Madeleine de Scudéry s’y fut difficilement méprisé.” He
goes on to say that the play’s satire was aimed at “toutes les précieuses, de
Paris ou de la province, les illustres comme les ridicules, a fond et
indistinctement (12).”

8 Mongrédien does offer fruitful insights to seventeenth-century French society in
other essays, particulary his work on Louis XIV. However, Mongrédien’s work on
the précieuses proves prejudicial.

9 See Mong rédien 72—84. Le grand dictionnaire des précieuses ou la clef de la
langue des ruelles by Antoine Baudeau de Somaize is reproduced in Georges
Mongrédien’s Les Précieux et les précieuses.

1° Tallemant describes her thus. “Sa soeur a plus d’espn’t que luy, et est tout
autrement raisonable. Mais elle n’est gueres moins vaine: elle dit tousjours:
“Depuis le renversement de nostre maison.” Vous diriez qu’elle parle du
bouleversement de I’empire grec.” This citation is often quoted in the literature
on Madeleine de Scudéry. Tallemant may have been one of Scudéry’s
contemporaries who began the cruel descriptions of her physical appearance.
See Tallemant des Réaux, 685.

1‘ What would motivate Somaize to waffle with regards to Moliere? An anecdote
involving Moliere, Somaize, Pure, and a purported accusation of plagiarism could
account for Somaize’s seemingly inconsistent evaluation of Moliere. See

Appendix C, The Mysterious origins of Moliere’s Les Précieuses ridicules.

137

 

 

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17
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‘2 See Moliere, Oeuvres completes, Seuil 411. “La conquéte de la France-
Comte, la traité d’Aix-la-Chapelle, le rayonnnement sur I’Europe apres sept ans
de regne d’un “Roi-Soleil” de trente ans méritaient d’étre celebres avec éclat.
Colbert, le duc de Crequy, Ie maréchal de Bellefond recurent l’order d’organiser
le Grand Divertissement [sic] royal de Versailles de juillet 1668, dont les
fournisseurs furent Vrgarani, Lulli et Moliere.”

‘3 DeJean points out the advantages and disadvantages to collective writing.
“[Olne has no claim to originality, no absolute right to one’s story [. . . ]. “At the
same time [. . . ] the individual is protect by the collective from personal attacks
[. . . ] (Tender101).”

" See Bénichou 329-337.

‘5 See A New History of French Literature, Antoine Compagnon , “Gustave
Lanson Publishes His Histoire de la littérature francaise” 895.

‘6 Cuddon defines “secentismo” parathetically as “An ltalianism from seicento ‘six
hundred’ = 17"1 c.” (851) However, Cuddon spells secentismo without an “1”
following the initial s of secentismo.

‘7 LaLande discusses Clitandre’s condemnation of “the overt display of
erudition.”(192) She rightly points out mat Madeleine de Scudéry herself voiced
this concern. However, what can be interpreted as female modesty, may in fact
have been more a reaction to the difficulties and dangers tied to authorship in the
seventeenth-century France. I refer the reader to Joan DeJean’s Chapter “What
Is An Author?”, in Tender Geographies, Women and the Origins fo the Novel in

France. Therein DeJean states, “Lafayette’s novel can be seen as an extended

138

 

 

 

 

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meditation on the powerful attraction of originality that was a necessary correlate
of the establishment of modern authorial identity. However, it proposes an
equally powerful reflection on the dangers of life in the public domain and on the
personal price to the author who writes to establish a nom d’auteur.”(97) While
DeJean here refers to Lafayette, the same arguments are at least as applicable
to Scudéry as they are to Lafayette. The original 1669 edition of Madeleine de
Scudéry’s La Promenade de Versailles was unsigned.

‘8 Although there has been an explosion of work on preciosité, scholars, such as
Philippe Sellier, Maitre's mentor, concede that much work remains to be done.

“ll serait salubre, enfin, d’en finir avec la doxa, l’opinion floue, et meme erronée,
transmise par les dictionnnaires, selon lesquels précieux veut dire alambiqué,
mievre, et autres gentillesses. Bien stir, nous n’abolirons pas ces usages
courants. Mais nous pouvons espérer que la critique littéraire, elle, precise ses
concepts. Un tel travail conduirait a situer la préciosité par rapport au baroque et
au classicisme.” p. 328 “Se tirer du commun des femmes,” in Actes du 4°
colloque du Centre lntemational de Rencontres sur le XVII“ siecle, University of
Miami 23 au 25 avril 1998. He calls for twentieth-century critics to define
préciosité. In other words, the parameters of preciosité are yet to be defined. The
conclusion to Maitre’s opus begins: “La question de la préciosité peinait, malgré
les travaux de Roger Lathuillere, a sortir du débat hérité du XIX e siecle sur les
categories esthétiques, et se trouvait suspendue, depuis Ia these de Jean-Michel
Pelous, a la preuve de l’existence historique des précieuses.” Maitre entitles her

work Les précieuses, Naissance des femmes de Iettres en France au X Vlle

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siécle. The title acknowledges that a renaissance in the interest of seventeenth-
century précieux texts requires that archival work be done to unearth the lost,
female précieuses writers. Her work makes great strides in that direction.
However, in order to describe préciosité adequately as a movement or an
esthetique one must overcome the problems of its critical history. “Les
ambiguites de la question des précieuses et de la préciosité au XVII° siecle (la
distinction entre ‘vraies’ et ‘fausses’ précieuses en particulier) ont été reprises et
refondues par l’histoire litteraire naissante dans des systemes explicatifs qui
n’avaient plus grand chose a voir avec les pratiques sociales et langagieres du
XVlI°, mais qui perrnettaient aux écrivains et aux critiques du XIX° siecle de se
poser en héritiers directs du Grand Siecle, tout en tenant a distance les femmes
auteurs de leur propre temps (649).” In the ambiguous characteristics ascribed to
it by seventeenth-century contemporaries, Maitre traces an essentially negative
critical history of préciosité from the seventeenth century to the present,
particularly the attachment of nineteenth-century critics to a classicism of
nostalgia joined to an abhorence of socalled préciosr'té. Before one can
enunciate an affinnative aesthetic of preciosité one must undo the work of past
criticism and begin again by reading précieux texts buried in the archives and re-
reading the précieux texts that are more readily available. Maitre goes on in her
conclusion to question linking Preciosité to galanterie or to a discussion of orality
versus printed text. She concludes that having begun the search for the
précieuses, now the task is to read their works and glean an aesthetic from the

texts of the précieuses rather than from the analysis of their critics. “ll reste donc

140

 

l’espoir que notre contribution, se joignant a celles d’autres Iecteurs devenus ces
demiers temps toujours plus nombreux, fendille plus avant le bloc d’illisibilité
dans quuel sont encore tenus la plupart de ces textes prolixes, innombrables.
Lire est une aventure deconcertante, et plus déconcertante encore lorsque l’objet
a lire est depuis longtemps declare illisible (653).” In short, the existence of
précieuses writers can now be assumed as fact. The enunciation of a précieux
aesthetic must be determined from the works themselves. It cannot be
enunciated a priori.

‘9 Stanton agrees that Scudéry’s texts offer an exemplary model of conversation,
but she would call Madeleine de Scudéry an honnete femme, rather than a
précieuse, since Stanton denies the construction of pre’ciosité in the seventeenth
century. In this dissertation Scudéry is defined as a précieuse writer, given the
revised definition herein described.

2° See Prince 4243.

2‘ The text’s comparison of Louis XIV to historic firgures of the past is important.
In Part 1, Louis is compared to the ancient kings of Egypt, Medea and Spain. For
practical as well as for historical reasons, no comparison proves more important
than comparing Louis XIV to Julius Caesar. In fact, this gesture was almost
obligatory in the age of royal ad campaigns for King Louis. Elizabeth Goldsmith
makes the following claim. “Of the five decades of Louis XIV's personal reign, the
1660’s saw the most intensive state effort to impress upon French society and
the governments of all the European powers the image of Louis XIV lmperator,

heir to the glory of the Roman empire. Every major state institution introduced at

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this time was ceremoniously presented as part of a massive rebirth of the Roman
state, made possible by the appearance of a new French Caesar. Writers and
artist were expected to assist in strengthening the links between myth and history
that were necessary to generate political power from the symbol of the ‘sun
king’(81).” In light of Goldsmith’s contention, suddenly René Godenne’s
impatience with Madeleine de Scudéry’s lengthy historical descriptions seems
misplaced. Scudéry was able to critique the king because she had the wisdom to
follow the 1660’s formula for success. In La Promenade de Versailles, Scudéry’s
text compares Louis XIV to Julius Caesar.

22 See Sellier 121. Sellier’s footnote refers to Jean-Michel Pelous’ Amour
précieux, amour galant and I.M. Richmond’s Héroisme et galanterie, L’abbé de
Pure témoin d’une cn'se (1 653-1665).

23Boileau’s play is also known as “Dialogue des Heros de Roman.”

2‘ See Tender 109. DeJean cites Lafayette’s Princesse de Cleves in the context
of writings in exile.

25 See Sellier “Se tirer du commun des femmes” 314. Sellier cites Maitre as
having discovered the expression in “La Gazette galante, 12 et 16 juin 1657.”

’36 Presumably, Maitre defines orature in juxtaposition to littérature, that is, oral
literature versus written literature.

27 See DeJean Fictions 112-113.

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Chapter Three
Exemplarity and Subversion in La Promenade de Versailles
The Louvre is assuredly the most superb
palace in the world...This house of Versailles has much
more to do with Your Majesty’s pleasure and diversion than
with Your glory [...] What a pity if the greatest King were to
be judged by Versaillles. -Colbert
Rhetoric of Exemplarity

La Promenade de Versailles describes a space that was the center of
influence and power in the seventeenth century, the court of the Sun King, Louis
XIV. Hidden within the frame of the description of Versailles lies a bold critique of
the absolutist monarchy and Louis XIV himself. Scudéry uses both the rhetorical
device of example and the rhetorical strategies of exemplarity. Her text then
powerfully subverts the exemplum. The most striking example in the text is none
other than that of the absolute monarch and his court at Versailles. But the text
diverts attention from the Sun King only to redirect it to him in a subtle yet critical
description of absolutist policies.

How does Scudéry’s text use example as a rhetorical device? Her choice
of example as a prime metaphorical device in her works is not accidental.
According to John Lyons, the example proved to be a particularly powerful
rhetorical device in early modern texts. In Exemplum, Lyons explores the
“possibilites of exemplary rhetoric and its display or concealment”(x) in early
modern French texts. In La Promenade de Versailles the continual push-pull of

revelation and concealment permeates the text. In Chapter 4, the notion that

secrecy is a major trope of the La Promenade de Versailles will be discussed.

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Lyons gives the following working definition of example:

An example is a dependent statement qualifying a more general and

independent statement by naming a member of the class established by

the general statement [... F]or the early modern period examples are
predominantly chosen to reach common ground of belief in a domain that
writers and readers will recognize as reality.(x)

Lyons goes on to make the following important point.

The difficulty of reaching such common ground in the early modern period

is what gives the rhetoric of example in that period a particular fascination.

This is a period stricken by a crisis of belief so severe that it led to wars,

massacres, executions, yet writers differing in both general principles and

the specific ground in reality by which they attempt to clarify and validate
those principles nonetheless continue to make use of a basic rhetorical
figure, example.(x)

Scudéry’s novels use example for their own purposes, that is, they
appropriate ancient exemplum to critique her contemporaries and her society. In
Cyrus and Clélie, the characters are given the names of ancient historical and
literary figures. Scudéry's readers knew the stories were parables of
seventeenth-century court figures. While her novel provides examples of classic
exemplarity as defined by Lyons, La Promenade de Versailles also demonstrates
a bold subversion of the example. In her earlier novels, what might be construed
as a simple gazette of the machinations of courtly society, in fact, demonstrates
an audacious move to appropriate antique models for her own purposes.

Artamene, ou le Grand Cyrus boldly ennobles central players in the
F ronde. Cyrus clearly portrays the dissident leader Condé. As we know, Joan
DeJean makes a powerful statement about the importance of this novel.

All the volumes of Artamene were dedicated to the Duchesse de

Longueville, and the novel’s central couple, Cyrus and Mandane, were

seen from the beginning as the fictional counterparts of the great Condé
and his sister, the Duchesse of Longueville. The bond forged thereby

144

 

 

 

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between prose fiction and political subversion marks the origin of the
modern French novel... (45)1

Scudéry demonstrates a dangerous exemplum in Artamene. And, the
novel was a tremendous publishing success. Scudéry’s best seller was thus both
popular and pivotal in an important evolution of the novel.

DeJean goes on to point out that:

When, in Artamene’s final volumes, Scudéry shifts the spotlight from the

life of the warrior-king Cyrus to that of the woman writer Sapho, all the

elements are in place for the redefinition of the traditional heroic novel she
completes in Clélie.(82)

DeJean says further:

In Clélie, Scudéry makes the two nonnarrative components found in

Artaméne, the conversation and the portrait, her fictional staples until,in

sections of the novel, characters seem to live in order to converse, and

action is virtually limited to the displacement from the setting for one
conversation to the next.(83)

In the seventeenth century, F rance’s literate population was living to
converse in their favorite salon, as were the characters in Scudéry’s novels.
Scudéry’s salon was, of course, one of the most renowned. Since the salon as a
site of conversation and portraiture became associated with preciosité, it is not
surprising that DeJean acknowledges that “Clélie has been widely hailed as the
monument of preciosité [...] (83).”

DeJean makes a bold claim for Scudéry’s invention. She contends that in
Clélie, Scudéry “makes what may well be the major stylistic innovation in the
early development of the novel when she introduces conversations on a large

scale (84).” Chapter 4 will explore the importance of the conversation in La

Promenade de Versailles in detail.

145

DeJean reiterates that “in Clélie, Scudéry follows the political
subversiveness of Artamene with a novel of social subversion.”(86) La
Promenade de Versailles combines Scudéry’s innovative narrative device, the
précieux discourse of the conversation, with a socio-political critique of Louis
XIV’s seventeenth-century court society. The précieuse conversation becomes a
vehicle of the novel’s subtle exemplarity.

La Promenade de Versailles uses both ancient and contemporary
examples to tell its story. Through its description of Versailles and the subtle
critique of Louis XIV, the novel itself becomes even more exemplary of the
modern French novel than Artamene or Clélie and more daring. Using the king
and his court as examples subtly enables the subversion of both political and
social exemplarity in the novel. La Promenade de Versailles demonstrates par
excellence the important shift in exemplarity that Lyons demonstrates in
Exemplum. La Promenade de Versailles is a model piece for the crisis of
exemplarity in early modern France that Lyons theorizes.

Lyons describes the power of the example.

Example is the figure that most clearly and explicitly attempts to shore up

the inside of discourse by gesturing toward its outside, toward some

commonly recognized basis in a reality shared by the speaker and the
listener, reader and writer.(3-4)

The familiarity of the reader with the example outside of the discourse
allows the text to reinterpret the reality of the reader as it bolsters its inner
discourse.

Versailles represents one of the most exemplary edifices of seventeenth-

century Europe. Obviously, the palace holds preeminence in Scudéry’s text.

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Versailles first appears in the title. And, Versailles metonymically stands for Louis
XIV. The Sun King is his palace and the palace is the Sun King. Scudéry’s text
dramatically points to Versailles as the “outside,” the incontrovertible shared
reality of her readers, in order to “shore up” the inside of her discourse, a critique
of the absolutist society of seventeenth-century France.

Scudéry’s text continually draws the reader to shared visions, vistas, and
views. From la belle Etrangére’s initial exclamation “Que voi-je [...] couronner si
magnifiquement cette eminence opposée (2),” to the intricate and myriad of
descriptions of the palace of Versailles presented in Part One of La Promenade.
de Versailles. The text also invites the reader to be part of the discourse by
continually offering recognizable historical figures and places, including renown
historians such as “le Pere de I’Histoire, (10) (presumably Tile-Live) to Pline le
Jeune, writers of antiquity, such as Homer, and most importantly, famous
historical rulers and their palaces, the kings of Egypt, Spain, and most
importantly, Julius Cesar and the famous architecture of Rome. The story line is
often interrupted by literary passages, such as poetic citations from Pellisson to
Voiture.2 The novel presents a sophisticated array of literary quotations, usually
unidentified literary passages. The historic examples and literary quotations,
easily recognized by seventeenth-century readers, serve as the shared reality of
the text and the reader. They provide the “outside” that allows the text to “shore
up” the potentially dangerous “inside” discourse, the political critique found in La
Promenade de Versailles.

Lyons contends that:

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once the text has advertised an example, the complexity, not to say

trickiness, of the relationships established is often completely unperceived

by the reader. Perhaps, this is because example is so central to systems
of belief that we occasionally think of it as the direct manifestation of
reality, when, in fact, example is a way of taking our beliefs about reality
and reframlng them into something that suits the direction of a text.

Example may therefore qualify as the most ideological of figures, in the

sense of being the figure that is most intimately bound to a representation

of the world and that most serves as a veil for the mechanics of that
representation.”(ix)

Though Lyons does not discuss Scudéry in Exemplum, the novel serves
as a set piece for what Lyons calls the “possibilities of exemplary rhetoric and its
display or concealment (x).” And, of course, the subversion of the exemplum as it
plays out in La Promenade de Versailles becomes one of the most interesting
aspects of the novel.

In this novel, the example that theoretically allows for a subversive frame
becomes a frame-up and is therefore potentially very dangerous. In absolutist
France of the seventeenth century, the term subversion must not be taken lightly.
To subvert means “to ruin or overthrow.” However, we maintain that Scudéry’s
novel praises the spectacle of Versailles even as it seeks to overthrow the
menacing forces of absolutism.

Readers of La Promenade de Versailles have long appreciated the beauty
and the charm of Scudéry’s description of Versailles. Perhaps not since the
seventeenth century, have readers fully appreciated the internal discourse of
dissent framed by the text’s depiction of the glorious facade of Versailles.

Lyons explains that “the example must construct or reconstruct its

reference, altering the perception of the world by selecting, framing and

regulating (that is, subordinating to a rule) some entity or event (4).” Of course,

148

no one can not change reality, but the perception of reality can be changed. It
can be influenced. To see behind the magnificent facade of Versailles to the
secret machinations of seventeenth-century political and social reality is to

behold the crisis of exemplarity in Scudéry’s text.

An Exemplary Conversation

In order to subvert the example, that is Louis XIV, Scudéry’s novel first
constructs a monument that praises the king. Since Scudéry dedicated the novel
to the king, the reader anticipates the eulogy of Louis XIV. However, a
conversation between the assembled characters, la belle Etrangére, Glicere,
Telamon, and the narratrice delays the beginning of the story, as well as the
anticipated praise of the king. Instead, an example of Scudéry’s formal narrative
construction, namely the conversation, precedes a lengthy description eulogizing
Louis XIV as the characters tour the palace.

This first conversation valorizes the use of description itself. Thus, the
eventual description of the palace by the characters and their praise of Louis XIV
prove to exalt the king twice over. The conversation prepares the way for the
eulogy of the king. La Promenade de Versailles presents an exemplary
description of an exemplary figure, le Roi Soleil.

To wit, the characters begin a debate on the importance of descriptions.
Glicere wants to embark on their promenade for the pure joy of walking. “[Jje me
prepare d’avoir beaucoup de plaisir a la promenade de Versailles (3-4)”

Telamon, on the other hand, wants to “faire, ou Ie plan ou la description (4).”

149

Rather like a modern tourist, Glicere is content simply to take in the sights of
Versailles. Telamon contends that while Glicere is just going to see Versailles,
he is going to master it. “Mais pour vous [Glicere], je voi bien que vous vous
preparez a voir Versailles, lorsque je songe a m’en rendre le maistre [...] (4).”
Telamon, by means of the drawings and descriptions he will undertake, dreams
of making Versailles his own.

Telamon, and, therefore, Scudéry, understand the potential power of
narrative. To have the ability to describe the palace of the most powerful ruler of
the seventeenth century renders the author of the description, through the power
of narration, master of his or her subject. In the case of La Promenade de
Versailles, because of Scudéry’s meticulous description of Versailles in Part 1
and the allegory of Louis XIV's court in Part 2, her text rules the ruler.3

The reader must appreciate the difference between Glicere and Telamon’s
points of view. One must not “slide by” the words of this novel, as the meaning of
Glicere’s name, glisser, “to slip or to slide,” might imply. Instead, one must read
the novel carefully in order to make it one’s own, as Telamon plans to make
Versailles his own.

To read Scudéry’s novel as thoroughly as Telamon intends to examine
Versailles, requires an effort on the reader’s part. The novel’s continuous
labyrinthine passages of description and conversation require the reader’s full
attention if he or she is to follow the point of the discussions, not to mention an

overall narrative strategy of intent.

150

This thesis will describe the extent to which Scudéry’s text becomes a
narrative of power. Ironically, Glicere’s seemingly more simplistic joy in merely
“seeing Versailles” also contains the seed of a powerful critique of Louis XIV. As
Chapter 4 will explain, every textual lure beckoning the reader to observe
Versailles and therefore the king in La Promenade de Versailles contributes to
the undertying message of Scudéry’s novel.

In order to master the subtleties of the text, the reader must be engaged in
the text, just as Telamon will be engaged in rendering his impression of
Versailles in pictorial and verbal descriptions as he tours the palace. Yet,
Glicere’s desire to “see” Versailles also serves as a model for the reader. Recall
DeJean’s juxtaposition of Scudéry’s new novelistic form with voyeurism (55).

The conversation that apparently interrupts the novel’s purpose, the
description of Versailles and the king, actually presents the required strategies
for reading the text. Glicere and Telamon’s conversation offers a textual
challenge to the reader. The reader must take up the challenge to follow the
endless narrative and conversational turns of the novel. The adventurous reader
will. follow La Promenade de Versaille’s textual maze, eager for the next
unexpected turn and the ultimate outcome of the novel. In the end, the message
of La Promenade de Versailles proves neither obvious nor facile.

Glicere and Telamon’s conversation becomes a discussion of the merits of
description versus nanative in histories or in novels. Rene Godenne, a
twentieth-century Scudérian critic, reveals his impatience with descriptions that

interrupt the action of the novel.4 Nonetheless, he correctly identifies this

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particular conversation between Glicere and Telamon as Scudéry’s plaidoyer pro
domo with regard to her narrative predilection for description over action.(lX)
Thus, the first conversation of La Promenade de Versailles signals the
importance of the visual aspects of a text. Telamon’s subtle remarks that Glicere
intends to simply enjoy the sites of Versailles. “[Vjous vous preparez a voir
simplement Versailles [...] (4).” Thus, Telamon alludes to Glicere’s expected
ocular appreciation of Versailles. Telamon’s comments in the conversation also
point to the pivotal role of description as a powerful narrative strategy as well. To
reiterate, the exemplary conversation leads to the description of an exemplary

figure, Louis XIV.

Praise of Louis XIV
“cét incomparable Prince [...] (678).”

When the gates of the palace open, the first view la belle Etrangére sees
represents Louis XIV, the Sun King. The narratrice explains.

[Ellle me demanda l’explication de la figure du Soleil qu’elle voioit en

divers lieux. Je Iuy dis alors que c’estoit la devise dont le Roi s’estoit servi

dans un Carrousel qui avoit esté 8. fort magnifrque & fort galant; 8. qu’en

effet, on ne pouvoit prendre un corps de Devise plus noble que celuy-la

pour Ie Roi, & or] H se trouvait plus de choses capables de convenir a un

Prince qui etoit la lumiere du monde, 8 qui avoit este donne a la France

pour la combler de gloire. (26-27)

Scudéry’s text acknowledges Louis XIV’s ingenious appropriation of the
sun as the symbol of his personal reign. He has turned himself into the “light of

the world” in order to cover France and its king with glory.

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The great king has drawn the attention of all of Europe to the palace of
Versailles. La belle Etrangére has heard of Louis’s commitment to his royal
duties. “C’est donc quelquefois ici...que vostre grand Roi a formé ces grans
desseins, qui ont attire tant de fois sur Iuy les yeux de toute I’Europe (34).” And
the “eyes” of the reader also turn toward Louis XIV.

The conversation on description that preceded the opening of the royal
gates thus laid the groundwork for Glicere’s sceptical reaction to the metonymic
association of Louis XIV’s grandeur and that of his palace. We will revisit Glicere
and Telamon’s little exchange. “Pour moi, dit I’aimable Glicere, comme j’aime
toujours mieux les Heros que leur Palais; je croi qu’avant que de voir celui-cl
vous devriez nous bien representer quel en est le maistre (35).” Though a man’s
home may be his castle, the castle does not make the man. Before “seeing” the
palace, Glicere asks to know about the man behind the image.

Telamon mitigates the potential danger of Glicere’s impertinence by
accusing her of an effrontery. “[Qluelle injure nous faites-vous, 8 vous mesme?
Pouvons-nous donc ignorer ce qu’est un Roi que toute Ia terre connoist 8 admire
(37)?” Glicere insults her companions and herself by suggesting that they need
an explanation of Louis’renown. She should know that the entire world knows
and admires Louis XIV.

However, if Glicere, who loves heroes, wants proof, then she is going to
get proof. Telamon assures his hostess, the narratrice, that “les étrangers ne se
Iaissent guere surpasser par les Francois” when it comes to acknowledging the

greatness of the king. Nonetheless, it is the narratrice who begins the éloge of

153

the king. (Remember Godenne’s suggestion that the narratrice might be Scudéry
herself.) She acknowledges that Telamon could relate the great deeds of Louis
XIV as well as herself.

Vous me direz sans doute, si je vous laisse parler...ce que toute la terre

sait, 8 que la Renommée publie par tout avec tant de pompe, qu’il est he

dans les triomphes, qu’ils n’ont fait que croistre 8 augmenter comme son
age, excepté que Ie cours 8 Ie nombre de ses victoires a tor‘ljours passe
de bien loin celuy de ses annéés.(36)

Triumphant at birth, the king’s triumphs have only increased with his age.
The narratrice’s praise for King Louis increases as it advances, only to be
augmented by Telamon’s praise that he offers with the narratrice’s permission.
“Un esprit amoureux de la gloire, 8 qui en fait sa premiere passion [...](37).” “Un
honnete homme...Que personne ne l‘egale ni a dire toujours ce qu’il faut, ni a ne
dire jamais que ce qu’il faut: Qu’il a de la magnimité sans orgueil, de la
magnificence sans ostentation, de la civilité sans abaissement; etc. etc.(38-39).”
In short, “un grand Roi (40).”

La belle Etrangére temporarily ends the eulogy with a suggestion that
there might not be anything to add to such praise. “[I]l est bien difficile de rien
ajoOter a cet éloge (40).” The narratrice and Telamon heaped praise on the king
for two and a half pages. The narratrice expresses her joy at the foreigners’
knowledge of her king. But, the text has not yet finished eulogizing Louis XIV.

[T]out ce que Telamon vient de nous dire convient a Louis Quatorziéme,

tel qu’il étoit avant les conquestes de Flandres 8 de la Franche-Comté. lI

nous a fait admirablement en fort peu d’espace un grand Roi fort honeste

homme, mais si la fantaisie m’en prend en quelque endroit de la

promenade, je vous Ie montrerai encore aussi grand Capitaine que vaillant
soldat, 8 nous verrons alors, s’il ne me reste rien a dire.(41)

154

Despite the stream of praise, the text offers the slightest hint that there
may be more to the picture of Louis XIV than has just been exuberantly detailed.
The text implies that the narratrice may heap more praise on Louis XIV. But her
statement offers the possibility of a secret she has held back.

The critical literature on La Promenade de Versailles almost universally
claims the text to be pure adulation of the king. In his preface to a 1991 edition of
Madeleine de Scudéry’s Les Femmes Illustres, Claude Maignien makes the case
that she praised the palace, if not directly the king, in the novel. “Pensionnée par
le roi, recue a la Cour, admise aux fétes somptueuses, elle rédise en 1669
Promenade a Versailles ou elle chante les louanges du plus magnifique palais
royal.“5 We can safely assume that praising the palace of the king implied
praising its most important resident, Louis XIV.

Alain Niderst may be Madeleine de Scudéry’s most ardent admirer among
late twentieth-century Scudérian scholars. Like Godenne, he has conducted
extensive research on Madeleine de Scudéry, as well as on her brother Georges,
and his wife Marie-Madeleine.6 He contends that La Promenade de Versailles
presents a positive reflection of Louis XIV and his court. “La nouvelle est d’abord
un flatteur miroir de la cour, des courtisans et du roi. Par dela le beau parc et les
belles fetes de Versailles, par dela Ie sublime devouement de Cleandre pour son
prince, Louis XIV a droit a de longs iéloges [...](Leur monde, 489).”

Niderst convincingly quotes Scudéry’s text to prove his points. He situates
Louis “au bal,” and offers Scudéry’s description of Louis XIV. “[l]l danse de la

meilleure grace du monde 8 est le maistre par tout (600).” He fervently believes

155

that Scudéry’s novels are examples of roman a clefs. He lists “Le prince” of
“Histoire de Celanire” as a “clef sure (529).” For Niderst, “Le prince” of the faroff
land of Celanire is Louis XIV. According to Niderst, then, a description of the
prince in the “Histoire de Celanire” also describes Louis XIV. Thus, the prince
comme Louis XIV, as described by Scudéry, becomes a remarkable ruler.

Un grand Roi, jeune, bien fait, aimable 8 aimé; redoutable a toute la terre,

a qui tous les plaisirs courent en foule, ne peut jamais par la seule force

de ses inclinations naturelles renoncer a tout cela pour courir aprés les

travaux 8 les dangers; il faut donc que ce soit sa raison qui estant
maistresse absolue de son coeur, le porte a entreprendre quelque chose
d’extraordinaire pour acquerir de la reputation [...].(489)

Mistress Reason rules Louis’ heart absolutely. Administrative work and
the dangers of warfare take him away from the pleasures to which he is so
naturally predisposed. The king’s reputation as a valiant warrior is thus enhanced
and paves his path to glory.

The above passage subtly points to Louis XIV’s obsession with his military
exploits that take precedence over his pleasant interludes at Versailles. The
narratrice tells us that while Louis seems to be enjoying himself at the palace,
actually he is often planning grand projects.

En effet, c’est a Versailles [...] ou le Roi pendant qu’il ne sembloit songer

qu’a divertir toute sa Cour, 8 qu’a se divertir Iuy-meme, formoit ces

grandes entreprises que nous Iuy avons v0 si glorieusement exécuter;
c’est dela qu’il partit pour aller conquerir Ia Flandres; c’est-la qu’il revint

Iorsqu’il en eut conquis une grande partie, 8 borne luy-mesme ses

grandes victoires; 8 c’est-la encore qu’il concut I’hero'r‘que dessein de faire

Ia guerre en une saison destinée au respos, 8 de conquerir la Franche-

Comté aussi promptement que Cesar vainquoit autrefois. (12-13)

The description of Louis XIV’s compartment at Versailles affirms his

commitment to his duties. And, the glory that comes of his conquests justifies

156

Louis leaving his pleasure palace. Taken at face value, Niderst’s description of
Louis XIV and the narratrice’s quotation from the introduction to La Promenade
de Versailles seem to praise Louis XIV. So far, both the text, that is Scudéry’s
novel, and Niderst’s interpretation describe Louis XIV as an exemplary and
heroic leader and Versailles as an exemplary edifice.

Louis XIV's choice of domicile could prove problematic in several ways.
As the epigraph to the chapter suggests, Colbert, Louis XIV's financial minister
preferred that the king reside at the Louvre rather than Versailles so that he could
better attend to matters of state. The narratrice’s statement refutes Colbert’s
criticism. Versailles was not just a house of pleasure and diversion. The king
made plans for battle and set out to war from Versailles for the greater glory of
France and himself.

Louis XIV’s attraction to Versailles obviously went beyond the king’s work
habits. Reason was not the only mistress determining the king’s behavior. In his
discussion of “The Prince’s Palace,” in addition to detailing Colbert's insistence
that Louis should spend more time in the Louvre instead of Versailles, Marin
identifies another reason for the king’s attraction to Versailles.

“Why does he [the king] go there, once or twice a week, with very little

company?’ To ‘see the buildings that he is having built there;

nevertheless, it is said that there is something even sweeter,’ writes Guy

Patin; and Saint-Simon: ‘To be more in private with his mistress.’ ‘The love

for La Valliere (which was at first a mystery) gave rise to gallant

promenades.’(182)

The introductory chapter of La Promenade de Versailles agrees that all is

fair in love and war. The introductory chapter of La Promenade de Versailles

clearly praises Louis XIV for his military exploits. The chapter also obliquely

157

refers to Louis XIV’s mistress. And, DeJean posits the use of an oblique view as
precursory to the modern novel.

In his informative and charming text entitled At the Court of Versailles,

E ye-Witness Reports from the Reign of Louis XIV, the author Gilette Ziegler
describes Versailles through the accounts of seventeenth-century personalities.
The epigraph to chapter II, “La Valliere: the Springtime of Versailles,” is an
excerpt from Ezechiel Spanheim’s “Relation de la Cour de France.” It reads:

This tender and mutual love, however irregular, accompanied by the all

delicate consideration which it is capable of inspiring in two impassioned

lovers, proved the original reason for the expeditions to Versailles and
thereafter for all the amusements and gay parties laborated there to flatter

the passion of a king in love. (35)

Clearly, by 1669, the publication date of La Promenade de Versailles,
there was no longer any mystery about the king’s mistress, Louise de La Baume
Le Blanc La Valliere.7 However, a seventeenth-century Parisian reader of
Scudéry’s novel might well have identified the standoffish guest to Versailles, la
belle Etrangére, as La Valliere. Mongrédien’s description of La Valliere “avec sa
timidité, sa reserve et son desintéressement (La Vie 96)” fits the compartment of
la belle Etrangére in Part 1 of La Promenade de Versailles. The reference to the
promenade in the title reinforces the hypothesis. The “gallant promenades” to
which Saint-Simon refers find an echo in the first part of Scudéry’s La
Promenade de Versailles.

However, in the second part of the novel, “Histoire de Celanire,“ when in

the story named for her, la belle Etrangére becomes Celanire, her portrayal no

longer permits the identification of the protagonist as La Valliere. Celanire, being

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the exemplar of female discretion and self-determination, hardly serves as a
model for the king’s mistress. La Valliere lived at the king’s wishes and the king’s
discretion, not her own. Celanire rewrites La Valliere’s destiny.

Scudéry’s choice of title for her novel clearly was not serendipitous. The
term promenade proves to be laden with meaning in seventeenth-century
France. Chapter 4 presents evidence that a promenade was synonymous with
the conversation that accompanied the walk. Scudéry chose her title wisely,
because the promenade was one of Louis XIV’s favorite pastimes. “Le grand
plaisir du Roi avec la promenade était Ia chasse [...](La Vie 151). “ Saint-Simon’s
depiction of the king’s “gallant promenade” coyly adds the pleasure of a
promenade accompanied by his mistress.

It is not coincidental that Louis XIV’s successful campaign in F ranche-
Comté is mentionned several times in La Promenade de Versailles. It was so
easily won that it has also been called a promenade. “[Lja guerre de Devolution
(campagnes de Flandres et de F ranche-Comté, 1667-1668) n’était guere qu’une
promenade [...](Morel 12).” The Feste de Versailles celebrated in La Promenade
de Versailles was in part a celebration to commemorate Louis’ successful
campaign.

The importance of the promenade at Versailles suggests that even in her
choice of title, Scudéry plays to the king’s pleasure. Besides Niderst, several
other critics believe La Promenade de Versailles was designed to do just that.

At Niderst’s colloquium entitled Les Trois Scudéry, Daniela Dalla Valle

refers to Galli Pelligrini's construction of “la fonction descriptive et laudative” in

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Scudéry’s nouvellas. La Promenade de Versailles praises “la demeure royale
(Dalla Valle 512-513).”

At the same colloquium, Jurgen Grimm finds La Promenade de Versailles
an unequivocal endorsement of Louis XIV. “[...La Promenade de Versailles] est
un éloge inconditionnel et sans restrictions de la personne d’un jeune roi et d’une
monarchie héréditaire, roi bien concret dans le cadre reel de “La Promenade” et
“La Feste”, roi fictif dans L’Histoire de Celanire.” Nul doute que Ie modele de ces
deux rois est le jeune Louis XIV lui-meme, a qui d’ailleurs La promenade [...] [sic]
est dédiée (Grimm 448).”

Grimm cites Nicole Aronson as another devoted Scudérian scholar who
considers Scudéry to be “profondement royaliste (449).”

In fact, the consensus of Scudérian scholars seems completely in
agreement that La Promenade de Versailles praises Louis XIV. And so it does.
Nonetheless, the text of the novel offers subtle, but clear indications of Madeleine
de Scudéry’s disquietude with regards to certain of Louis XIV's policies,
particularly, the king’s proclivity to wage war at the expense of his people and the
absence of women’s rights in governing their own destiny.

Even Niderst, who, as we have seen, characterizes La Promenade de
Versailles as an éloge of Louis XIV, finds a current of dissent in Scudéry’s text.

Celanire parait donc nous presenter un edifice coherent et majestueux.

Les parfaits courtisans sont comme les cariatides de ce temple ou Ie roi,

sacré, redoutable et charmant a la fois, reside au milieu de l’adoration de
tous. Mais cette fadeur est parfois troublée.(Leur monde 489)

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The Frontispiece

The frontispiece to the novel presents the first (de)mystifying sign.8 Facing
the title page with the dedication to Louis XIV is a reproduction of an engraving
depicting Cupidon standing before a Versailles-like chateau. Cupid casually
leans against a column bearing the words “La Promenade de Versailles, dediée
au Roi.” He coyly smiles, finger pointing to his lips as if to say, “I’ve got a secret.”

Cupid may have a secret. And his gesture represents the secrets to be
kept and to be revealed in the novel. Cupid’s gesture points to two central
concerns of the novel, discretion in love and discretion in politics. The discussion
of the secret in La Promenade de Versailles in Chapter 4 will expand on the
importance of an ekphrasis of Eros in a novel. For now, consider premise that the
ekphrasis of Cupid that introduces La Promenade de Versailles represents an
initial and powerful narrative sign and further that the message of the ekphrasis
was intentional, not coincidental.

Thus, the engraving inaugurates the text’s insistence on Versailles’s
secrets and further indicates that it is both as playful as a tambourine player and
as serious as the dark-eyed figure centered in the picture. The posturing figures
of the foreground convey a sense of movement in opposition to the monumental
stability of the palace and their haunting eyes capture the gaze of the viewer
before it is directed to the palace. In short, the palace is not the focus of the
engraving, nor is a simple description of Versailles the point of the novel La

Promenade de Versailles.

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Further, the figures in the engraving reveal the narrative strategy of La
Promenade de Versailles that juxtaposes playful préciosité and deadly serious
critiques of patriarchy in the personal realm of la vie quotidienne of women and in
the political realm of the absolutist King, Louis XIV. In La Promenade de
Versailles’ critique of absolutism, Scudéry shrewdly re-appropriates the notion of
préciosité in its female and frivolous acceptation, sometimes including over1y frilly
poetic language and an exaggerated female perspective not to be taken
seriously by the male reader. Novel stuff for women. Importantly, this playful
backdrop hides the serious feminist politics of Scudéry that will be discussed in
Chapter 4.

So the novel begins with an ekphrastic model of the playful and the
serious exemplified in the same pictorial design of the frontispiece. The second
beginning, the first line of the text, continues the game playing. “Je m’aquite avec
plaisir de ma promesse, 8 de mon devoir, en écrivant l’agréable promenade que
nous times avant hier (1).” This coquettish introduction to the story offers a
seemingly offhand suggestion of promises kept and duty fulfilled. The reader
must ask what promises have been kept and what duties fulfilled, but the text
does not delay for answers. Rather, it quickly turns to a description of a group of
visitors on a promontory overlooking Versailles. The seemingly serious purposes
of the novel from the onset are continuously underplayed by constant deferral.

The playlful nature of the odyssey of the novel has already been

announced in the title, La Promenade de Versailles. The reader is about to

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embark on a leisurely, episodic “promenade,” such as the generic signature in

the title prefigures.

La “Petite Maison”

The novel not only begins in medias res, that is, with an introduction to the
story that already defers the reader from the narration. It also begins with the
enigmatic declaration from the narratrice acquitting herself of her promise and
her duty. Since this is the first line of the text, we do not yet know who is
speaking. We do not know of what promise she is gladly acquitting herself. Nor
do we know of what duty she has unburdened herself in the writing of the story.
The novel begins with an enigma. Who is speaking and about what? In La
Promenade de Versailles, the ekphrasis and the questions raised in the
introductory sentence give the reader food for thought even as the story begins.

- The characters in the novel soon discover Versailles. In the opening
paragraph of La Promenade de Versailles, the beautiful and mysterious visitor
from an unknown and therefore symbolically exotic land expresses her delight at
her first sight of the palace.

A peine fumes nous arrivés sur cette hauteur, d’ou I’on découvre tout d’un

coup Ie magnifique Palais ou nous allions, que la belle Etrangére s’écriant

avec un ton de voix d’admiration, Que voi-je [...] couronner si
magnifiquement cette eminence opposée, qui domine une si agréable
étendue de pa'r's [...].(1-2)

La belle Etrangére marvels at the magnificent and crowning glory that is

Versailles. Versailles, par excellence, represents the best example of

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seventeenth-century French architecture and its beauty devoted to the glory of
the king.

Even before la belle Etrangére finishes her sentence the grandeur of the
palace disminishes, in this case, in order to be replaced by the great King Louis
XIV. “[...Elst-ce Ia ce que vous appellez la petite maison du plus grand Roi de la
terre (2, Emphasis mine)?” The magnificent edifice is reduced to a “little house,”
but only to add to the stature of the greatest king of the land. The awesome
expanse of Versailles is arguably one of the most impressive vistas in France, if
not in Europe or in the world.

For la belle Etrangére, however, the great expanse of Versailles is
diminished by comparison to the Grand Roi. As la belle Etrangére amusingly
reduces the grandeur of Versailles, she does so only to underscore Louis XIV's
greatness. For, in the promenade of the introductory chapter of the novel, Louis
XIV and his magnificent palace of Versailles ostensibly reign supreme. His
palace exemplifies architectural grandeur and metonymically the grandeur of the
body of King Louis. However subtle la belle Etrangére’s humorous depiction of
Versailles as the little house of the greatest king may be, it is exactly this type of
subtle negation of the exemplum that La Promenade de Versailles brilliantly
plays out.

“La petite maison,” seemingly a playful description, with the addition of the
diminutive “petite,” in fact, begins the subtle critique of La Promenade de

Versailles. The choice of the word, la maison, proves to be value laden because

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it refers to the palace of Versailles. By contrast, the diminutive “petite” increases
the value of the superlative in the expression “du plus grand Roi de la terre.”

The text establishes the king’s stature. Hyperbolically, it has drawn
attention to the word “house.” Since hyperbole has been identified as a trait of
précieuse prose, the comparison draws attention to a textual style. However,
“house” may prove to be one of those necessarily “tricky” examples of which
Lyons spoke. Lest the comparison between the King and his little house offend
the monarchy, the impact of the comparison is cloaked in a précieux device. A
text that suggested Louis XIV was in any way diminutive could get an author in
serious trouble in seventeenth-century absolutist France. For, any words
associated with le Grand Roi carry extra meaning simply by their association with
Louis XIV.

How could the wordplay around “house,” that draws attention to it by the
contrast between the little house and the great king create difficulties for an
author? We must turn to Louis Marin’s Portrait of the King for the answer.

Reading through Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in
Medieval Political Theology and the logic of Port Royal, Marin explores the
representation of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century. Building on the
eucharistic incantation, “This is my body,” Marin suggests that for Louis XIV
“L’état, c’est moi,” carries an equivalent “political-juridical” sense.9

In the context of La Promenade de Versailles, one might say further that
Louis might utter the words, “Versailles, c’est moi.” To Marin, a representation of

Louis XIV is Louis XIV, in metaphor, in metonym, and in synecdoche. (11) The

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close association of Louis XIV with Versailles renders commentary on Versailles
as sensitive as commentary on the king himself.

Marin’s work addresses the significance of Versailles in seventeenth-
century France. Marin states that “The house [that is, Versailles...] will become
the first palace of all the earth, that of the first and most powerful king of the
world (181 )." His discussion turns to a reading of a “celebrated remonstrance” of
Colbert to the king on the subject of Versailles.10 Significantly, Marin quotes, here
in translation, a passage in which Versailles is compared to the Louvre:

The Louvre is assuredly the most superb palace in the world...This house

of Versailles has much more to do with Your Majesty’s pleasure and

diversion than with Your glory... What a pity if the greatest King were to be
judged by Versailles.(182-183)

In Colbert’s comparison, the Louvre represents a dignified royal palace
suitable for stately decisions. Versailles, on the other hand, is merely a house
designed for entertainment. La belle Etrangére’s description of Versailles elicits
Colbert’s discourse. Her choice of words to describe Versailles was not
fortuitous. The incursion of “la petite maison” into la belle Etrangére’s description
of Versailles clearly evokes Colbert’s tract. It points to exactly the passage of
Colbert’s “remonstrance” that Marin finds significant. And, as we have seen, the
text of La Promenade de Versailles quickly goes on to address the issues of
Louis XIV’s pleasure and diversion and glory as they are manifested by his time

spent at Versailles. Scudéry’s text, at least in the introduction to La Promenade

de Versailles, answers Colbert’s criticism.

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In a period of seventeenth-century France when polemics and querelles
proliferated, Scudéry’s text subtly but powerfully engages Colbert’s text and

Saint-Simon's commentary in a dialogue.

Framing the Police:
Scudéry's Secret Crifique of Louis XIV

“Si vous jugez sur les apparences en ce lieu-ci, répondit Mme de
Chartres, vous serez souvent trompée: ce qui parait n'est presque jamais Ia
vérité (157).” Madame de Chartres’ words to her daughter from Madame de
Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves could serve as a precautionary warning for
the reading of La Promenade de Versailles. A close reading of Scudéry’s novel
offers an exemplum of the difference between appearances and truth.11

La Promenade de Versailles appears to be a glorifying description of
Louis XIV‘s palace, followed by a courtly romance. However, the mystification of
Versailles and of Louis' court serves as a cloaking device for the political debate
in the text, which raises daring questions about the concept of the hereditary
monarchy and absolufism. The novel that ostensibly champions Louis XIV
contains subversive passages hidden within the romanesque story, a secret
critique designed to fool the police.

The difference between a hereditary monarchy and an absolute monarchy
is important to this discussion. A hereditary monarchy is of course one in which
the throne succedes from one generation to the next through the eldest

legitimate son. This process comes with privileges. In France, the concept of the

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divine rights of the king added to the king’s power tremendously, since he was
ordained by God and acted as his steward on earth.

Smith propvides a concise definition of an absolute monarchy. Although
the terms are not strictly speaking interchangeable we see that our definition of a
hereditary monarchy and Smith’s definition of an absolute monarchy are very
similar. That is, he gives the example of a hereditary monarchy as a form of
absolutism. Smith claims:

The world absolutism only became a political term in France after

1789...The phrase “absolute monarchy’ appeared in the seventeenth-

century, but contemporaries differed dramatically in their use of it... No
modern definition will be perfect, but perhaps we grasp the essentials if we
apply it to a system of hereditary monarchy where the kings or queens are
not answerable to any earthly authority because their right to rule is

thought to derive from God alone, but where they nevertheless have a

moral obligation to exercise power according to Christian principles rather

than their own whim.(5)

The intent of Smith’s short and highly informative primer on absolutism is
to encourage the reader to determine for himself or herself if Louis XIV was truly
an absolute monarch. On the basis of my reading of Smith’s text, I would have to
say that indeed the term absolutism describes the political situation in France
under Louis’ reign. The king’s letters and other documents that Smith includes in
his work clearly indicate that Louis’ word, and his alone could determine policy.
Smith concludes that “[i]nsofar as Louis achieved a degree of royal control which
was unusual by standards of his fime, he might still fairly be described as “the
great exemplar’ of absolutism in practice[...] (5-6).”12

A dramatic step that Louis XIV took to assure his word would prevail in all

policy decisions was the fact that he did not replace Mazarin when he died.

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Technically, Louis ruled alone, although of course he still required advisors.
Colbert, Louis’ financial minister, worked closely with the king. Colbert did not
always agree with the king’s decisions.13
The reaction of the seventeenth-century French absolutist monarchy to
political commentary mandated that Scudéry's critique be secret By associating
Louis XIV and his splendid court with the Sun, the most powerful source in the
Galaxy, the spectacle of Versailles was brilliantly conceived to empower the Sun-
King, absolutely. As Conley states in the foreword to the translation of Marin's
Portrait of the King:
Whoever institutes a collectively imaginary order monitors the desires and
dreams of multitudes. Power is therefore enabled as much or more from
control of ideas about life as from that of military forces or other visibly
repressive agencies. Aesthetic displays bearing no ostensible relation with
politics become instruments of force ensuring the strength of an order. (vii)
Further on Conley adds, “T he king's means of control are not those of a
repressive agency, but rather as multifanously autonomous but homologous
styles of aura. [. . . ] The king’s effect produced it consciously [. . . ] (xii).”
The court of Versailles is, par excellence, a "collectively imaginary order," with its
concomitant control of ideas and therefore its pervasive power. For Conley,
Portrait of the King "demonstrates that the West since the seventeenth century
has its beginning...in the 'hidden' persuasions of public medias (Conley, in Marin
vii).” The spectacle of Versailles transfixed and controlled its spectators, and its

power was awesome. The implications of Louis XIV’s spectacular

divertissements are explored in Chapter 4.

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For now, however, understand that since the dazzling illusion of the King's
divinely ordained grandeur could be dispelled by dissent, the absolutist monarchy
policed the borders of political commentary to fend off dissenters and established
limits of expression beyond which it was dangerous to venture.

Thus the "hidden persuaders" of Louis’ court, the designers of this
influential power display, did not rely solely on their media image to ward off
criticism. During the Fronde, as Martin indicates, the monarchy reacted to what it
considered subversive political commentary by limiting the number of publishing
houses, printers, and apprenticeships (Martin, Pouvoir 678-685). The Privilege
was used as a "censure preventive (690).” In Paris, Monsieur Ie Lieutenant de
Police La Reynie led searches of publishing houses and foreign book importers
(696-997) and seized texts (Sauvy 16, 197). In the early 1700’s, dissenting
pamphleteers were imprisoned (Klaits 52-53). Despite the fact that the Fronde
was successfully suppressed by the mid-1650's, Martin contends that vigorous
policing of the press did not lessen during Louis XIV's reign (689).

Particularly sensitive to the power of well-conceived texts-written, painted
or staged-Louis XIV and his ministers invented several more subtle and
ingenious ways of policing the arts and letters. For instance, the king and his aids
would enlist potential enemies in their own ranks. According to Martin, Louis'
ministers established royal pensions for writers who would celebrate the king,
and used the Académie Francaise to put writers in his service (Pouvoir 668-669).
Madeleine de Scudéry was given a royal pension and was the first writer to

receive the Prize of Eloquence from the Academia in 1671.

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The nature of Scudéry's relation to the monarchy's enemies during the
Fronde is viewed differently by DeJean and Aronson. Scudéry remained friends
with Mme de Longueville and dedicated Le Grand Cyrus to her. DeJean, as we
know, reads Cyrus as a fictionalized version of the Fronde's activities and sees
Scudéry as "the official novelist of the rebel camp (New History 297-303).”
However, Aronson sees Scudéry as a devoted royalist. She notes that Scudéry
dedicated Cyrus to Mme de Longueville, however, she dedicated Clélie to her
daughter-in-law, Marie de Longueville. “Or Mlle de Longueville est une ennemie
de la duchesse et de la Fronde. Des l’arrestation des princes, elle a refuse de
suivre sa belle-mere [...](Aronson 165) .” If true, Madeleine de Scudéry played
both sides of the fence to her advantage.“

In contrast to Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie, La Promenade de Versailles
appears to be safely within the borders of political decorum. The novel is
dedicated to Louis XIV himself, bears the necessary “Privilege du roi, ”and
begins with a description of Versailles and, by metonymic association, of Louis
XIV and his court. As we know, the arrival of la belle Etrangére prompts the
description of the palace. We learn she comes from a far-off land and she dares
not reveal her identity or her native country, because it could be dangerous. The
text describes the palace mirrors, the reflecting ponds and vistas, returning the
reader's gaze from the spectacle to the spectator, especially to and from the eyes
of la belle Etrangére, as she strolls around Versailles.

The text, which is supposed to describe Versailles, turns into a discussion

of the importance of description and centers on historic sovereigns—the Kings of

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Egypt, Medea, and Spain, and the Emperor Caesar. Louis XIV is metonymically
implicated in these discussions of mighty and powerful monarchs, and
occasionally, is mentioned explicifly. Chapter 3 explained how extremely
important these favorable comparisons to famous foreign dignitaries were to
authors trying to stay abreast of Louis XIV's censors.

Even though the text of La Promenade de Versailles attempts to dodge
blatant criticism of Louis XIV and his reign, Glicere gets away with potentially
dangerous comments, by her flippant tone. For example, Glicere’s seemingly
offl'rand comment about Louis XIV propensity to go off to war. “Pour moi, dit
Glicere, un de mes étonnements est, de voir qu’un Prince qui a tant de plaisirs a
choisir pendant la paix, les puisse quitter facilement pour aller a la guerre.”(81)
The king might take offense at Glicere suggesting that Louis XIV went off to war
too frequently. Her astonishment that Louis XIV could so easily leave the
peaceful pleasures of Versailles to go to war could be interpreted as a mild
indictment of the King’s propensity for warfare.

Earlier in this chapter, the narratrice explained that:

pendant qu’il [the king] ne semblait songer qu’a divertir toute sa Cour, 8

qu’a se divertir lui-meme, formait ces grandes entreprises [...] c’est la

encore qu’il concut l’heroique dessein de faire Ia guerre en une saison

destinée au respose[...]. (12-13)

The nanatrice’s words act as praise and suggest his actions are
meritorious. When Louis had a choice—plaine or guano—the king chose warfare,
and this was admirable because he put his duty above his own pleasure. He had

stepped out on a “promenade” to conquer the Franche-Comté! The same text

can be re-interpreted as a criticism if one considers that Louis used his private

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pleasure palace as the seat of his public, belligerent enterprises. And, that he
would go off to war on a whim. Can a war plan in a season of rest be heroic?

Given Glicere’s mild suggestion that peace may be preferable to warfare,
one could read the narratrice’s commentary in a less favorable light. Only a man
driven by conquest and glory would leave Versailles to go to war. An ironic
reading subverts the eulogistic praise, and an opposition between the idealizing
mystification and the subversive demystification is created.

The interplay of the spectacle and the spectator in the first part of La
Promenade de Versailles suggests that only a close inspection of Versailles will
reveal its secrets, and by extension, those of Louis XIV himself. As la belle
Etrangére indicates to her friend at the conclusion of the first half of the novel:

Et pour moi [...] je ferai aujourd'hui ce que vous disiez tantbt que vous

faites toujours; car bien qu'il n'y ait rien de plus charmant que Versailles,

les louanges du Roi sont encore demeurées plus avant dans mon coeur

que toutes les beautés de son magnifique Palais. (100-101)

La belle Etrangére insists she will remember the praises of the King more
than the beauties of his palace, which suggests by analogy that reading behind
the description of the palace in this text will reveal an assessment of the
monarch.

After the introductory valorization of description, the narrative shifts to the
secret and private machinations of an "imaginary" court beyond the borders of
Versailles in the “Histoire de Celanire.” The description, which has been central,
becomes peripheral and the story appears to take center stage, only to become

the frame for a hidden message. The stage is set for the frame-up. Scudéry's text

debates the virtues and constraints of various forms of government, including a

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hereditary monarchy, in the security of la belle Etrangere's distant, exotic, and
secret homeland.

Glicere begins the story of la belle Etrangére, to whom she gives the
pseudonym of Celanire, by insisting that all the names and places in her
narrative are invented. This effort to distance the allegory from France and Louis
XIV's police may be explained by the subtitle itself. The very words of the subtitle,
“Histoire de Celanire”suggests that the story can be damaging. The name hints
at a hidden semiological message. “Cela peut nuire.”

Richard Hodgson has written an analysis of La Promenade de Versailles
wherein he contends that the novel presents an aesthetic and architectonic
tribute to Louis’s palace.15 He also suggested that the "baroque" novel
"présupposait l’évocation d'un cadre exotique, éloigné autant que possible de la
realite contemporaine et dans I'espace et dans Ie temps (336).”

But Scudéry's text draws attention to its play with the border between the
real and the fictional, and thus signals that an exotic adventure can be the fiction
for a political critique of Versailles. La Promenade de Versailles encourages the
reader to extrapolate from the real and the fictional to the truth and the lie of the
spectacle of Louis XIV, especially as it is manifested in Versailles.

In La Promenade de Versailles, the reader is confronted with a rambling
story line that leads in and out of conversations. Near the beginning of the
“Histoire de Celanire,” the characters engage in a conversation about the relative
merits of secrets. All the characters reveal and keep secrets, the greatest being

the mutual love of the heroine Celanire and the hero Cleandre. When the lovers

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send secret messages of their love through poetic lines, the text discusses the
ways that secret codes are to be deciphered.

[I]Is marquaient non pas les mots dont ils voulaient se servir, mais ceux

qui les précédaient, ou qui les suivaient, afin que si on prenait garde a ces

mots marques on n'y trouvait point de sens et qu'on ne découvrit point leur

secret. (257)

The lovers can communicate their feelings without revealing them to
anyone, especially to their enemies who would use knowledge of their love to
harm them. By analogy, this passage suggests that Le Promenade de Versailles
may offer a secret message hidden between the lines, a message that could be
harmful if it were overt.

The secret political critique begins as just one more of the many
conversations in which the novel's characters indulge. In an apparent effort to
avert the surveillance of Louis XIV‘s police, explicit political critique is "tucked"
into the second half of the novel in a series of non-numbered pages, beginning
after page 327 of the “Histoire de Celanire."16

Glicere, as narratrice, announced the subject of the conversation; “[L]es
passions que les hommes ont inventees.” Note that Madeleine de Scudéry re-
published this conversation in Les Conversations sur Divers Sujets in 1682. It
may be of some interest that the work was published in Amsterdam.

Before the sensitive discussion on different forms of government begins,
the text insists on the playful nature of the conversation, as if to deny that
anything too serious could come out of this friendly exchange. Celanire suggests

that “le jeu, a proprement parler, n’est pas une passion naturelle, mais inventée

8 produite par l’esprit 8 par I’industrie des hommes (326,I).” She then subtly

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emphasizes the nature of their conversation, a game. How serious can a game
be?

Alcé, one of the participants in the conversation, adds: “Ce qui fait la
passion du jeu en particulier, est la passion du plaisir en général[...]fous les
hommes ont une secrette passion de se divertir [...]8 [it is] cette secrette passion
qui porte au plaisir [...](326,I-327,ll).” The conversation includes the theme of the
secret that pervades the novel. Alce’s words connect the conversation that is
about to begin with the overaching themes of the novel, the secret and
divertissement. And glory also relates to passions. Chapter 4 will prove how
important these concepts were to Louis XIV. The simple conversational gambit
aligns itself with “diversions” close to Louis XIV’s heart.

Indeed, as the nanatrice Glicere declares: “les passions que les hommes
semblent avoir inventées, ont leur origine dans Ie coeur des hommes mesmes,
qui a naturellement un penchant au plaisir (327,ll).” The text suggests that it is
only human nature to love secrets, diversions, and glory.

Philocrite adds that some people “fuient Ie plaisir (326,Ill)." Such people
“condamnent les plaisirs d’autrui [...] ils munnurent contre l’usage de leur pats 8
de leur siecle, ils se plaignent du Prince, du gouvemement, ils blament
egalement I’avarice 8 la Iiberalité, 8 ne trouvent rien qu’ils ne jugent digne de
leur censure (326,Ill).”

How ingenious of Scudéry to condemn criticizing one’s Prince, when her
text, subtly, but surely is about to engage in that very same activity! Philocrite

hedges against the critique to come as well. “[J]e donne sans peine aux Princes,

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le respect, I’obeissance, 8 si vous voulez I’admiration, quand ils sont dignes de
leur rang (326,V)." Cleandre calls this a “souveraine passion (326,V).” These
words could only be golden to the ear of Louis XIV.

Colbert and Saint-Simon expressed their dissatisfaction with Louis XIV
because of his penchant for dallying with his mistress LaValliere at Versailles,
instead of attending to his affairs of state in the Louvre. Once again, it seems
Scudéry’s text engages in a dialogue with Louis’ minister, Colbert, and his future
opposition, Saint-Simon.

The end of the conversation whose purported subject is passion, but that
interestingly turns to a discussion of forms of govemement, is followed by a
textual reference to a courtly satire passed from hand to hand in the "imaginary"
court of Celanire‘s sovereign. Could the non-numbered pages of Scudéry's text
secretly been passed from hand to hand in Louis XIV‘s court? Certainly,
seditious pamphlets were passed from hand to hand in seventeenth-century
France, especially during the Fronde.

A collation analysis done by Paul Gehl at the Newberry Library in Chicago
on an original 1669 edition of the text indicates that there is indeed something
suspicious about these non-numbered pages.17 The message contained on
these pages suggests that an effort may have been made to repress them. Did
Louis' police try to suppress them, or was the publisher trying to hide them from
the police?

In Glicere’s introduction to the pages that contain the conversation that

becomes a political critique of Louis XIV, speaking as the narratrice, she

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explains that she could easily have left this part of the story out.18 But she
assures us that it serves to acquaint her listeners with Celanire and to judge
better everything that follows. This conversation, which begins with a
consideration of the pleasure of games, proposes that everyone has a secret
passion , and that most people would dispense with their duty if no pleasure were
attached to it (326,I-327,II).

This apparently playful passage raises the possibility of ignoring one's
duty to the sovereign. Glicere daringly describes those who "murmurent contre
l'usage de leur pays 8 de leur siecle, ils se plaignent du Prince, du
gouvemement," in short, those who "ne trouvent rien qu'ils ne jugent digne de
leur censure (326-Ill).” In the climate of Louis XIV's absolutist monarchy, such
citizens could be accused of lese-majesté. And Glicere herself, if she were a
member of Louis XIV’s court, might have found herself in jeopardy.

In a short, but politically charged passage during this parlor game,
Scudéry's text outlines various forms of governments. First, Cleandre
characterizes different forms of government. He alludes to a meritocracy when
he suggests that a government may be ruled by the eldest and wisest, by the
most illustrious families or by the meritorious. His description of a government
ruled by the majority or by a variant, from a simple majority to a minority. He
refers to an elected monarch, that is, a constitutional monarchy or a Republic
with equal suffrage for all, and by a mixture of all of these (327,X-326, XI). He
concludes that the grandeur, tranquility, and continuation of the state are best

maintained by a form of government that resolves to:

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prendre leurs Rois d'vne seule race de pere en fils, tels qu’il plairait au ciel

de les leur envoyer, tantbt belliqueux, tantbt pacifiques, tantbt excellents,

tantot médiocres en connaissance, avec des vertus 8 des vices, que toute

la sagesse humaine ne pouvait prévoir de si loin. ( 326, XI)

Cleandre insists that the hereditary monarchy is best. Republics have
come and gone but they should be replaced by monarchies, and the French
monarchy “ne fut jamais si redoutable a tous les voisins, qu’elle I’est aujourd’hui
aprés tant de siécles (327,XIV).”

Cleandre and Scudéry’s text seem to avoid blatantly seditious
commentary. La Promenade de Versailles was published during a period when
the fortunes of Louis XIV’s were very high.

Nonetheless, under Louis XIV's absolutist regime, even the enumeration
of alternative forms of government could have been considered treasonous.
Additionally, in what seems to be an apology for the divine right of succession,
the text alludes to both positive and negative qualities of monarchs. The idea of a
divinely ordained King who could be bellicose, mediocre and replete with vices
might well be considered seditious in the court of Louis XIV.

In his work entitled The Impact of Absolutism in France: National
Experience under Richelieu, Mazarin, 8 Louis XIV, William F. Church suggests
that Richelieu had taught Louis XN that due to the “reason of state,” unlike “the
actions of subjects [...] the concerns of kings as kings are immediate and
practical and they should punish offenders from the standpoint of public
necessity rather than Christian charity (8).” The king’s morality was distinct from

the people. And Church adds that according to Guez de Balzac, “the King might

bypass ordinary judicial procedures and imprison or othenrvise punish anyone

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who was merely suspected of disloyalty (10).” And, La Promenade de Versailles
contains politically sensitive material. It is a post-Fronde work. In Clélie,
Scudéry had already skirted dangerous borderlines, since that novel can be read
as a manifesto of the Frondeurs. La Promenade de Versailles was published a
few years after the Frondeurs were repressed. One of Scudéry’s best friends,
Fouquet, was facing life imprisonment for charges of embezzelment. Her
soulmate, Pellisson had recently been released from prison after he was
incarcerated for defending Fouquet. Scudéry’s text once again dares to
challenge the rights of Louis XIV to absolute authority.

Surely, Louis XN would not take kindly to being described as mediocre or
replete. To be bellicose, that was another issue. The king was renowned for his
military successes. His easy conquest of Franche-Comté occurred shortly before
Scudéry’s novel was released. The concept of bellicosity was charged with
meaning in the seventeenth-century. Reiss’ theory suggests that the Académie
Francaise was founded on the premise that [t]he repair of language and letters
would foster that of society and state.(70)

Earlier in the century, France had needed to recover from the disastrous
wars of the sixteenth century. A discourse questioning the very nature of
mankind grew out of this concern. Reiss explains.

[I]n the mid-seventeenth-century some sort of almost subterranean feeling

seems to have grown that because of the specific way in which men had

participated in the historical development of societies, reason in them was
inseparable from violence. On the other hand, however, because women
had historically been excluded from the making of society and culture,
reason in them (not female reason, but simply Reason as acting in women

was free of that violence and could thus offer a solution to the dangerous
decay of political and civil order.(98)

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Salic law forbade women from succeeding to the throne in France.
Ironically, the supposition that women, not by nature, but by environment, were
less violent could mean that they were therefore less able to rule. Reiss gives an
example. “Women, wrote Le Bret however, had to be excluded from the throne
because monarchs need to be ‘warlike and belligerent’ [guerriers et
belliqueux](108).” Clearly, it was difficult, if not dangerous, to formulate a pacifist
argument in the ancien regime. As subtle as Scudéry’s anti-war statement
proves to be, undermining Louis XIV's authority in any way would have been
considered seditious.

The political commentary embedded in the “Histoire de Celanire” is
reminiscent of Jean Francois Senaults discussion of the monarchy in Le
Monarque ou Les Devoirs du Souverain (1662). That Senault juxtaposes the
advantages and disadvantages of the absolute monarchy allows him to include a
veiled critique of the King. To be sure, in its Dedicace to Louis XN, the Senault
text begins with pure praise. It offers itself as:

[U]n miroir fidele dans lequel Elle [sa Majesté, Louis XIV] pourra voir non

pas les traits de son visage, qui donne du respect et de l'amour et tous

ceux qui Ie regardent, mais les vertus de son ame, 8 ces rares qualitez
qui la font si glorieusement regner dans la France. En effet, iI semble que

Dieu ait voulu faire son chef-d'oeuvre de Votre Majesté, (Dedicace 2)

Rather than accuse the King of being a tyrant, Le Monarque proceeds by
offering Louis XIV a positive role model, enumerating the ways in which previous

"Great Princes" remained worthy monarchs and never abused their people.

Senaults text also describes the behaviors of a monarch turned tyrant. Just as

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Cleandre combines negative and positive descriptions of the monarchy, Senault
proffers a critique of the tyrant in conjunction with praise of the King.

[Sl'il est vrai que toutes les choses du monde n'éclatent jamais davantage

que quand elles sont opposées a leurs contraires, je ne saurais donner

plus de lustre a la Monarchie qu'en lui opposant Ia tyrannie [...] .(14)

Anything other than a critique cloaked in praise would have been banned
under Louis XIV. According to Senault, Seneca said that ancient monarchs' first
mirrors were fountains and streams (Dedicace, 10). Senault hopes his text will
serve as a ”faithful mirror" for Louis XIV to look into his heart and to show him "le
remede dans le mal."

In this way, the many mirrors and fountains of Versailles which Scudéry's
text describes take on special significance. Both texts define themselves
indirectly as mirrors of and for Louis XIV. And, while they serve as mirrors for the
monarch, the texts also enable readers to view their respective portraits of Louis
XIV—to see the monarch's abuses of his obligations and responsibilities.

In the critical passage from the “Histoire de Celanire,” Philocrite, whose very
name means lover of criticism, Iaughingly quips:

[...J]e serai meilleure sujette, que je n'estois; car encore que Ie Prince,

sous la domination duquel je suis nee, soit tel qu'on le peut souhaiter, il

m'a tofijours semble que si j'avais este des premiers siecles, 8 que j'eusse

eu voix pour déliberer de pareilles choses, je ne me serais point avisée de

faire des Rois, ni de vouloir estre Reine. (326,XV)

Philocrite seditiously undermines the very concept of a hereditary
monarchy, but her laughter seems to suggest she is merely playing the role of

devil’s advocate. She adds spice to the conversation, by presenting a different

point of view.

182

The problematics of this secret critique are revealed by Cleandre's
predicament during the conversation. In the discussion about sovereigns,
Cleandre overstates his love and is accused of being as amorous as he is
politically ambitious. He does not want to reveal his love for Celanire, however.
He faces a dilemma. ”[C]omment iI pourrait répondre sans découvrir ce qu'il
voulait cacher [...] (326, XXXV).” Cleandre’s dilemma mirrors the text's. Even as it
praises the King, it must hide the criticisms it wishes to expose.

The seditious implications of this 38-page section are most forcibly
presented by the "porte-parole" of the critique, Philocrite. Unwittingly, she
forecasts one of the reasons for the overthrow of the monarchy in 1789—too
much warring leaves the coffers empty and the poor hungry:

Pour moi, dis-je alors, je me suis etonnee cent fois de voir les transports

des peuples, lorsqu'on les oblige de faire des feux de joie pour quelque

victoire: car il y a des millions d'hommes qui se rejou'r'ssent en ces
occasions tumultueuses, 8 qui n'ont pas de quoi vivre le lendemain.

(326, XXI-327, XXII)

Her words evoke the menacing face in the engraving opposite the King's
Dedicace on the title page. The movement of the figures depicts a mob scene. A
hundred years after La Promenade de Versailles was published, the transports of
the people during the Revolution would indeed lead them to overthrow the
monarchy rather than to celebrate it Victoriously.

Scudéry was not alone in evoking the image of the masses watching
bonfire’s to celebrate the crown’s victories, when they watched open eyed, but on

an empty stomach. We have already referred to William F. Church’s text entitled

The Impact of Absolutism in France. In it he compiled a series of texts, written in

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the seventeenth century. In the introduction, Church raises a relevant issue. “[I]t
is infrequently asked whether the gains that accrued to France during this period
justified their cost in human suffering and more tangible losses (2).”

Church’s book attempts to ask that difficult question. One of the excerpts
is from a work entitled Soupirs de la France esclave. The presumed author is
Pierre Jurieu, a French Calvinist pastor who “fled to Holland during the
persecution of the Huguenots (2).” The plaintive image that Scudéry’s text
evokes of the starving masses looking on at the magnificent bonfires celebrating
the king’s victories is repeated in Jurieu’s text.19 Again, Scudéry’s Conversations
sur divers sujet, in which the conversation with this image can be found, was
published in Amsterdam. Foreign publication would afford an escape from Louis
XIV’s censors and the privilege du roi, as it may have for Jurieu. Here is a
relevant passage from this seditious text.

Moreover, who does not realize that conquests, instead of increasing the

grandeur of the state, are burdensome and cause its ruin? We are mad,

and our folly preserves our bondage. Whenever the king wins a battle,
takes a city, or subdues a province, we light bonfires, and every petty
person feels elevated and associates the king’s grandeur with himself.

This compensates him for all of his losses and consoles him in all his

misery. He does not realize that he loses as much as the king gains. First,

the prince’s grandeur always brings misery to his subjects, for the greater
his power, the more he indulges his passions because he may more easily
satisfy them. Now ambition, avarice, luxury and waste are always the
passions of the great, etc. etc."(108)

Because of the powerful contrasting images of the privations of the poor

and the grandeur of the king in this passage, one can understand why the author

of this text may have needed to seek exile.

184

Exile was a minor theme of La Promenade de Versailles. Celanire
escapes from her homeland because of familial oppression and a false
presumption that Cleandre had forsaken his vow of silence. Circumstances then
force Cleandre to seek exile himself. An epigraph to a chapter in Elizabeth
Goldsmith’s work “Exclusive Conversations, ” The Art of Interaction in
Seventeenth-century France conveys exactly the message that one would expect
to describe the role of exile in this work and in the seventeenth-century.
Goldsmith quotes Stendhal. “Le chef d’oeuvre de Louis XIV, ce fut de creer cet
ennui de l’exil (77).”

The citation from Stendhal is doubly apropos, because it serves as the
epitaph to the chapter of Goldsmith’s book that we need to consult for information
about censorhip during Louis XIV's reign.

Political dissent, even in a literary format was frowned upon in Louis XIV
reign. The example of Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy will serve as a case in
point. Goldsmith outlines the trouble Bussy got into with Louis XIV’s censor cops.

A collection of satirical anecdotes written to amuse a few friends at the

expense of a few others, the manuscript of Histoire amoureuse des

Gaules was eventually copied, without the author’s permission. This was

in 1665; by 1666 the book (or possiby an altered version of it) had been

presented to the king. That year Bussy was imprisoned in the Bastille, and
in 1667, he was exiled to his country estate.(78)

Today, accustomed to freedom of the press, it is difficult to comprehend
that in seventeenth-century France someone could be arrested and exiled for
distributing a satirical work. It is possible that being exiled to a country estate

might have been the same as being incarcerated in a “country club” prison today.

Nonetheless, Bussy’s arrest serves as an example of the tyranny of the network

185

of publication censorship that Louis XIV set in place. Goldsmith explains that
poor Bussy-Rabutin “could not know that Colbert’s impressive machinery of
censorship, which would remain in place until the end of the ancien regime, was
being designed and set in motion the same year that he was confined in the
Bastille (81).” One only needs to read Henri Martin’s descriptions of Lieutenant
La Reynie to appreciate the ruthless practices of Louis XIV’s censor police.
(Pouvoir)

And yet, the text of another author and contemporary of Scudéry’s also
attempts to prick the conscience of the king. In his discussion of Jean de La
Bruyere, Michael S. Koppisch traces the “dissolution of character” during Louis
XIV's reign as it is increasingly addressed in the later editions of Les Caracteres.
Koppisch confirms that criticizing Louis XIV’s absolutism was a risky enterprise.
“To criticize the concept of absolute monarchy, even indirectly, had since the
days of Richelieu been a dangerous gesture. This was even more true for a
writer like La Bruyere, who was popular and whose opinions were, therefore,
likely to reach a comparatively large audience (110).” Scudéry, of course, was
also popular and her text would also have likely reached a large readership.

Neither Scudéry nor La Bruyere were sounding a all to arms. As
Koppisch explains, La Bruyere’s “famous description of the French peasants,
those ‘animaux farouches...répandus par la campagne, noirs, livides et tout
brOIés de soleil,’ for example, is no revolutionary call to action on their account,
although it does express some sympathy for the plight of the poor in a period of

regular and serious deprivation (De L’homme, 128:4) (83).” Neither is Scudéry’s

186

depiction of the starving peasants gazing at the fireworks. Both authors sought
to remind the king of his souvereign duty to protect all of his subjects.20

In his conclusion, Koppisch returns to the same quotation and frames his
discussion in more severe terms. He claims that La Bruyere’s “portrait of those
‘animaux farouches...repandues par la wmpagne’ remains one of the most
damning social statements in all of French literature (111).”

Although La Promenade de Versailles contains a sober critique of the
plight of the peasants, her novel has a happy end. Celanire is reunited with
Cleandre at Versailles and they plan to marry. Near the end of the long passage
without page numbers, the tone is politically less explicit than the political critique
just described. However, perhaps it is symbolically more suggestive.

Using the imagery of the "parfait amant," Cleandre compares the love of
"un Amant a une Maitresse" to that of a "courtesan attache au Prince." Aloe
agrees with the comparison and goes so far as to say that:

[... d]es gens naturellement tres-eclairés, 8 qu'une Iongue experience a

rendus tres-habiles, se laisser [sic] quelquefois tromper jusques a la fin de

leur vie aux vaines espérances de la Cour, encore qu’ils sentent bien
qu’elle les trompent; it me semble que je voi cét Amant du theatre qui dit

[...] . (326, XXXIII-327, XXXIV)

lngeniously ambiguous, the text can mean that lovers are deceived by the
vain hopes of courtly romances. Or, it may suggest that clearheaded thinkers can
be duped by courtly politics.

Alcé goes on to quote a few lines of verse:

“Je la connois ingrate, 8 je I’ai-

me, 8 je meurs,

187

Et je me sens mourir, 8 n’y voi
nul reméde,

Et craindrois d’en trouver, tant
l’amour me possede.(327, XXXIV).”

Although these lines contain the traditional love/death topos, do these
plaintive and eloquent lines also reveal Scudéry's love/death relationship to Louis
XIV and to seventeenth-century absolutism? In the myth of "courtly love," the
revelation of love heralds its end. Does the author risk death to love her king so
well that her text dares to criticize him? Do the lines imply that in revealing the
injustices of the ungrateful Court, and therefore of the sovereign Louis XIV, the
text will die, that is, that it will be silenced by censorship?

In a move to recoup me grace of the king, in case the seditious remarks
give offense to the police, particularly those on the non-numbered passages, the
conversation seemingly ends on a lighter note, returning to the topic of love.
However,Philocrite accuses Cleandre of being “presque aussi ambitieux
qu’amoureux (326,XXXV)”. This remark puts Cleandre on me spot. To deny his
ambition discloses his “cover,” but to reveal his love jeapodizes his vow of
silence to Celanire. He resolves his dilemma. He tells Philocrite, “si j’avois
quelque passion de cette nature, j’aimerois mieux qu’on en jugeait par mes
actions, que par mes paroles (326,XXXV-327,XXXVI).” Glicere, the narratrice,
agrees with Cleandre.

Vous avez raison, Iuy dis-je, 8 les actions sont plus sincéres que les

paroles. Mais aprés tout, Cleandre, il y a une grand distinction entre les

Courtisans de bonne foy, qui aiment le Prince, ou les Courtisans sans
interessez, qui ne cherchent que la fortune. Tout Ie monde en convint, 8

188

 

I’heure de la promenade estant venue, Celanire 8 moi sort'r'mes, 8 le reste
de la compagnie se sépara.(327, XXXVI)

Scudéry's text constructs an opposition between a faithful courtisan and a
feckless one. Ambition and love are two qualities of the king that La Promenade
de Versailles critiques. The text has subtly suggested that Louis XN should be
less ambitious in war. The novel also subtly recognizes the presence of his
mistress Louise La Valliere at Versailles. A sub-title even obliquely refers to her.
It reads” La Feste de Versailles, A Mme La **“ “(569).” Thus, the text attempts to
salvage its good graces with the king, even as it undermines the principles of
hereditary monarchy and absolutism. First, it suggests that with the words of La
Promenade de Versailles, Madeleine de Scudéry seems to become an emblem
of opposition, but then her text assures him that she still aligns herself with the
monarchy. Her actions toward her king are more important than these mere
words of wisdom.

Because of their enigma, the non-numbered pages in La Promenade de
Versailles become a sign in their own right. Just as Celanire and her lover send
messages through secret codes hidden in poetic lines, the text invites the reader
to look for the hidden messages "tucked" within the spectacle of Louis XIV. If not
blinded by the Sun King's court, his surroundings, rituals and entourage-the
most spectacular of seventeenth-century texts—the reader will see the secret
critique of absolutism hidden within its borders and discover covert strategies

which frame the police.

189

Coda

Part 1 of La Promenade de Versailles sincerely eulogizes Louis XIV and
his magnificent palace. The “Histoire de Celanire” contains the political critique
aimed at sending a cautionary warning to the king concerning the high cost of his
military exploits. Niderst notes a change in tone from the first part of the novel to
the second and suggests that the characters act out a subtle allegory of
Versailles that includes praise as well as protest.

Allons-nous paradoxalement retrouver au fond de cette brillante apologie

de Versailles les vieux reves pastoraux de Clélie et de Mathilde? En fait,

Celanire et Cleandre sont des étrangers; leur cour n’est pas Ia cour de

France; leur prince n’est pas Louis XIV. Mais la jeune fille se promene, au

prologue, dans le parc de Versailles, et y trouve son amant dans les

demieres pages. C’est ainsi que le roi et la cour peuvent prendre deux
visages differents. En France, les délices, l’ordre, la majeste, le repos et
l'amour du peuple. A l’etranger, des courtisans parfaits, comme Cleandre,
mais sacrifiés a d'injustes intrigues, une vaine agitation, un souverain
moins parfait que la Louis XIV pompeux et charmant du prologue et de

l’epilogue.(Leur monde 490)

Did Niderst realize the implication of his use of the words “deux visages” in
English. Two faces, two-faced. According to Webster’s Dictionary, Janus is a
figure of Roman mythology. He is the “god who is guardian of portals and patron
of beginning and endings: he is shown as having two faces, one in front; the
other at the back of his head (722).” Thus Janus-faced means “two-faced,
deceiving (722).” Scudéry's portrait of Versailles has two faces. A cloaked
message deceptively undercuts the brilliant presentation of Versailles and Louis

XIV in La Promenade de Versailles just as Louis himself subtly hid his duplicity.

As suggested in the beginning of this section entitled “Framing the Police:

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Scudéry’s Secret Critique of Louis XIV, “ it does indeed offer an example of the
difference between appearances and truth.

Niderst also plaintively claims:

Deux voix se melent donc dans Celanire. L’une droite, caressante,

presque folle a la force de l'enthousiasme et de naiveté [...l]’autre plus

réservée, parfois plus dure ou plus désolée, qui nous rappelle l'amertume
de Malthilde et qui signifient, au fond, que la soumission au monarque
n'est qu’une deshonorante humiliation. Nous oserions meme retrouver
dans la courtisanerie de cette nouvelle des traces de la souplesse

gasconne de Pellisson, alors que la tristesse et la révolte qui s’y

découvrent ressembleraient mieux a Sapho.(491)

Madeleine de Scudéry was a successful novelist. She was able to live off
of career as a writer. Why would the story of Celanire offer a darker side? The
events surrounding two of her dearest friends, Fouquet and Pellisson, provide a
clue to the answer. It was Fouquet’s and Pellisson’s arrest that well may have,
indeed should, have troubed the novelist. George Mongrédien’s work L’Affairo
Fouquet outlines the details of the incarceration. Although Fouquet dies in prison,
Pellisson is released and actually, one might say, miraculously, becomes Louis
XIV’s historiographer. Louis Marin’s fascinating explication of Pellisson’s efforts
to write the king’s history is analyzed in Chapter 4. To conclude this chapter,
consider again Alain Niderst’s revealing critique of La Promenade de Versailles.

Chapter 1 traced the general reception of Scudéry’s works and discussed
the possibility of her novels being romans a clef. Niderst believes as ardently in
the allegorical significance of Scudéry’s works as Victor Cousin did. As an
appendix to the conclusion of Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellisson et leur

monde, Niderst attaches his own key to the identity of characters in Scudery’s

works (525-532).

191

Niderst offers the most poignant interpretation of Cleandre’s alter ego in
La Promenade de Versailles. The citation begins with the passage quoted at the
end of the section in this chapter entitled “Praise of Louis XIV.” Here is Niderst’s
citation in its entirety.

Celanire parait donc nous presenter un edifice coherent et majestueux.
Les parfaits courtisans sont comme les cariatides de ce temple of: Ie roi
sacré, redoutable et charmant a la fois, reside au milieu de l’adoration de
tous. Mais cette fadeur est parfois troublée. Cleandre est chasse de la
cour a cause de son imprudence, mais a cause aussi de vilaines intrigues.
Sa chute est comme celle de Foucquet: “suivant le cofitume des gens de
la Cour, la disgrace de Cleandre Iuy Otalsic], ou changea le coeur de tous
ceux qu’il avoit obligez. Jamais homme n’avoit usé plus honnestement de
sa faveur, il n’avoit nui a personne, il avoit use plus honnestement de sa
faveur, il n’avoit servi tout Ie monde, iI estoit I’objet de I’admiration 8 de
l’amite de tous les Courtisans, on ne songeoit qu’a Iuy plaire. Cependant,
dés que le Prince parut irrité contre Iuy 8 qu’on sceut qu’il n’avoit point
voulu lire la Iettre qu’il Iuy avoit envoiée [...] cela fit un changement
universel, 8 ce meme Cleandre, qui quelques jours auparavant, avoit mille
amis ne s’en trouve plus [La Promenade de Versailles 522-524].”(489)

 

Imagine today, if the lawyer defending his or her client was incarcerated
along with the defendant if he or she was found guilty. Scudéry and Niderst
together paint a most poignant picture of Cleandre and Pellisson’s, not to
mention Fouquet’s personal loss. La Promenade de Versailles, though it offers
an ornate set piece for a description of the Sun King’s palace, also offers a
plaidoyer for the changes in French society that would take place between the
ancien regime and the French revolution of 1789.

La Promenade de Versailles offers the reader a vision of Louis XIV and
his spectacular palace. Though Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel offers a shining

vision of her king and Versailles, it is through a mirror darkly.

192

 

Notes

 

1 See DeJean Tender 45. DeJean precedes her bold pronouncement of
Artaméne as the origin of the modern French novel, with historical and publishing
facts that reinforce her belief. “The privilege for the first two volumes of
Artamene was granted in July 1648, when the principal actors in the Fronde-

Longueville, Condé, Marsillac, and Gondi-were plotting the active phase of their

 

E"
rebellion, which was launched the following month. Since the intial volumes of
Aramene were publsihed just six months later, they were composed precisely
during the first day of the war against the monarchy. Throughout this time of ~
political upheaval, volumes of Artamene continued to appear at regular intervals, 1

and the final volumes (volume 10 was printed in mid-September 1653) were the
unique novelistic production during the months that nearly marked the downfall of
the absolute monarchy (45).”

2 See Niderst, 434. “La nouvelle resemble parfois a une anthologie de la poésie
du XVII°' On y retrouve non seulement des vers de Pellisson, Menage,
Montauzier et Sarasin, amis des poémes de Voiture [...]. “ Niderst goes on to
identify the poetic allusions in La Promenade de Versailles. See also 483-484
where Niderst identifies citations of Pellisson, Mme de la Suze, de Montplaisir, La
Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, and Montauzier.

3 See Marin 42. His discussion of the power of the narrative and the narrafive of
power in his chapter “The King’s Narrative, or How to Write History.” In Chapter
Four of this work Marin’s notion is further explored. The implications of Telamon’s

insight prove extremely provocative.

193

 

 

4 For an analysis of Godenne’s impatience with Scudéry’s narrative style, see the
discussion in Appendix A, The Stylistics of Scudérian Préciosité.

50ne may wonder how well acquainted Maignien was with La Promenade de
Versailles, since he mistitles it Promenade a Versailles. That said, his comment
is pertinent. Here, the contention remains, however, that the text is an éloge, but
it is also more.

6 See Niderst, Les Trois Scudérys.

7 See Ziegler 35-49. The chapter entited “La Valliere: The Springtime of

Versailles” provides an information background to La Promenade de Versailles, :

 

as does the entire work. For example, Chapter I, “The Decor and the Cast,”
begins with the very citation about the “little house of the greatest king on earth,”
that we will discuss shortly in the section entitled “La Petite Maison” (13).
Fouquet’s spectacular fete at Vaux-le-Vrcomte made Louis XIV jealous.
Ziegler’s text offers another insight to the king’s jealousy. “La Valliere had, in
fact, attracted others in addition to the King. Soon after her entry into the Court
she had been noticed by Superintendent Fouquet, who had sent her his regular
procuress, Mme Duplessis-Belliere, with a proposition, but the rebuff she
received resulted in a furious letter to her protector (42).” It seems Louis XIV had
more personal reasons than his chAteau to be jealous of Fouquet.

8 See Appendix B for a photocopy of the frontispiece.

9 See Marin 9.

‘° See Marin 181-182.

194

 

11See Lyons, “Marie de Lafayette: From Image to Act.”, 196-236. He proposes
that although Lafayette’s novel is set in the court of Henri II in 1558 , it can be
read as an allegory of Louis XIV’s court. One must read it as a roman a clef in
that case. Or, alternatively, according to Lyons, Lafayette “is saying something
more important: that the way one lives in the court is beyond the distinction in
time and tense and is permanent, essential (197).” In this La Princesse de
Cleves is an exemplary text. However, setting the novel in a different century
does offer a cloak of anonymity. In contrast, La Promenade de Versailles places
the characters in Louis’s court at Versailles. Granted the “Histoire de Celanire”
takes place in an unknown, far-off land. Still, Scudéry’s text offers a more daring
critique of abolustism than Lafayette’s in this particular aspect of their novels.

‘2 See J. H. Burns in John Miller’s collection entitled Absolutism in Seventeenth-
century Europe, to which Smith refers the reader.

‘3 I refer the reader to Smith’s work that offers an excellent primer on absolutism.
1‘ See Aronson 152-166. In Chapter 14 entitled “Nous sommes dans un temps
de confusion [...]” Aronson discusses Scudéry’s supposed change of heart with
regard to Condé.

‘5 See Appendix A for a discussion of Hodgson’s essay.

‘6 There are 38 non-numbered pages followed by a second set of pages
numbered 326 and 327 with different text from the first 326 and 327. In this
dissertation a non-numbered page is indicated by 326 for the left hand page and
327 for a right hand page followed by a roman numeral to indicate to which of the

non-numbered ages the text is referring, I-XXXVIII. Thus, the first non-numbered

195

 

page is indicated by “ 326 I” and the second page of the non-numbered pages is
indicated by “ 327,ll,” etc.

‘7 Paul Gehl, a collation expert at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois, kindly
examined the Newberry’s 1669 copy of La Promenade de Versailles. According
to Gehl, eight leaves, that is two entire gatherings, to total 16 pages, were
inserted in the book after it had been printed. The gatherings were carefully
placed between folios x3 and x4 and the text could not be continuous wihout the
insertion. To Gehl, this indicates that the pages were probably not added as a
result of a computation error, which usually occurs at the beginning or end of a
gathering. He ventures that the insertion could have replaced something else. In
short, Gehl suggested that the pages pose a problem that the literary critic needs
to interpret. An examination of other extant copies of the 1669 edition should be
helpful in determining the extent of the mystery of these added pages.

‘8 In light of the fact that this critique reveals itself on non-numbered pages,
Glicere’s comment takes on added meaning. Did Scudéry and her printer
consider leaving these pages out, as they might prove to be too politically
sensitive? It is a possible explanation for the missing pagination.

‘9 See Shakespeare 598. A quotation from William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part
I, act one, scene one suggests that the practice of lighting bonfires to
commemorate victories was a practice common all over Europe, in continental
France as well as in England dating back at least to the fifteenth century. The
Duke of Bedford intends to go to France to ransom or rescue Lord Talbot, the

future Earl of Shrewsbury. “Farewell, my masters, to my task will I. Bonfires in

196

 

France forthwith I am to make, to keep our great Saint George’s feast withal.”
Bedford is going to France, but his statement implies that he would make such

bonfires for Saint’s George’s feastday wherever he happened to be on that day.

197

 

Chapter Four

Secrets, Women’s Rights, and the Conversation

The exposition of La Promenade de Versailles truly begins with the
frontispiece featuring Cupidon. In The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne
Doody tells us that “[a]n ekphrasis may sneak up on us in the middle of a novel,
or it may declare itself boldly at the outset (388).” The ekphrasis of Eros does
declare itself boldly at the outset of La Promenade de Versailles.

The inclusion of an ekphrasis was part of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries’ “assimilation of the antique novel (251).” Doody, in fact, offers
Madeleine de Scudéry as an example.

Illustrations were not restricted to old novels; new books were illustrated,

too, customarily with frontispiecesto each indivdual book of a novel, as

with the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry.(251)

Scudéry’s frontispiece was not merely a serendipitous ornamentation. It
was a purposeful addition to the text following an established novelistic tradition
of the seventeenth century.

Doody also finds special significance in an ekphrasis of Eros. “Eros may
appear to us in a novel in an ekphrasis [...] Eros so appearing teases us, for we
know we are to attend to and interpret images (387).” Eros stands at the
metaphorical gateway of La Promenade de Versailles, beckoning us to consider
the significance of the design of the frontispiece and further to guess what it may
have to tell us about the novel. Doody explains that an ekphrasis “reminds us of

the visible world, and thus of the sensible universe, but it also speaks of stasis,

198

"A“. .’ '

 

 

and artifice—of things out of nature. It transforms us into powerful gazers
[...](387).”

La Promenade de Versailles is above all an ocular novel. The frontispiece
includes Eros (Cupid). Then, the first part of the novel, entitled La Promenade de
Versailles, presents a minute and detailed verbal picture of Louis XIV and his
pleasure palace. In this discourse of praise or panegyric, the reader is a
spectator, who “contemplates” the speech.1 The frontispiece of Cupidon and the
introductory description of Versailles invite the reader to observe through the
novel’s eye the court society of Louis XIV and all that that society evoked. Of
course, with Doody’s emphasis of the ocular, DeJean’s construcfion of the
reader-voyeur is evoked.

“The novel,” according to Doody, ”announces itself as subject to fashion,
as product of its own era, even perhaps frivolously temporal. Its universality
tends to be hidden. The Novel secretly offers [...] a marvelous means of
incorporating and interpreting current culture (483).” La Promenade de
Versailles lends the reader a fashionable look at seventeenth-century society,
and may well offer an insight into the twenty-first century as well.2

The figure of Cupid in the frontispiece has his finger up to his lips as if he
has a secret to tell us, the readers. I hypothesized that it was a signal to look for
a secret, perhaps political, critique hidden in the novel. However, as one reads
La Promenade de Versailles, one discovers that secrecy is an overarching theme

of the novel. The word itself appears hundreds of time in the text.

199

The omnipresence of the secret in La Promenade de Versailles reflects
seventeenth-century society’s obsession with the notion of secrecy. In La
Promenade de Versailles secrecy played a role in the private domain of the
characters, especially Celanire and Cleandre, and in the critique of Louis XIV’s
excesses in war and in peace.

For, throughout his reign, Louis did wage war that imposed a great
financial burden on the country. And, he also spent unimaginable riches on
Versailles. Louis Marin brilliantly reveals the connection between Louis XIV’s
military campaigns and the spectacles he designed for Versailles. And, the notion
of secrecy seems inevitably to be included in his explanation.

The diversions, in this sense, represent war in the time of the peace that

interrupts it, as war is the prince’s fete in another field and on another

stage. War is the fete continued by other means, as diversion is politics
pursued on another register. Thus it could be said that the prince’s coup
d’état is represented in the miracle of the fete; political behavior is
dramatized in the playful gesture; and the secrets of power, the arcane
imperii, are repeated—reproduced and anticipated—according to the
intentions of the aesthetic fantasy.(197)

La Promenade de Versailles celebrates the king’s divertissements and his
success in battle, but also subtly warns of the excesses of war, particularly the
financial burden it placed on the country, and especially on the poor. In the
enclosed space of the novel, Scudéry juxtaposes the fantasy fete and the
ravages of war, just as Louis XIV orchestrates a magical representation of
political power and play in his spectacular divertissements.

Andre Félibien was a seventeenth-century historiographer who penned

several works describing Versailles and its fétes. Marin explicates Félibien’s

Divertissements de Versailles in order to formulate his own comments on

200

 

 

 

Versailles and Louis XIV. Secrecy becomes a leitmotif of Marin's poetic and
powerful commentary on the Sun King’s spectacle of Versailles.

According to Marin, Versailles, including the chateau, the gardens and the
spectacular entertainments staged there, garners its power of representation
from the secret machinations of Louis XIV who orders them finished and enacted
so quickly they appear magically to spring forth from nowhere, with no visible
effort. In his chapter entitled “The Magician King,” Marin writes:

Félibien insists on the surprising promptness with which the royal fetes are

organized, the effect of magic consisting here in the disproportion between

the magnificence of the realization and the brevity of the time needed to
accomplish it.(196)

 

IE7'-'i.. ..

Preparations for the divertissements made in haste and in secret add to
magical aura of the fetes. The “conception has remained secret, only the king
knows what he ordered the principal executors of his project to do [...](197).”3 In
short, a discourse of secrecy seems necessarily to impose itself on a discussion
of Louis XIV and Versailles, as if the time of Louis’ reign brought with it a
preoccupation with the secret. Indeed, it may well have. To maintain his glory,
Louis felt compelled to protect his privacy.

The spectacle of Versailles metonymically represents the personal and
political grandeur of the king. In truth, the fire that feeds Louis XIV’s personal
absolutist reign was his addiction to glory. Mongrédien insists on Louis’
insatiable thirst for glory. “[...Lles louanges les plus excessives et parfois les plus
immeritées ne Ie genaient pas; ll les agréait toujours avec plaisir. Il acceptait
sans lassitude les hommages d’une littérature servile et ridiculement

dithyrambique [...](La Vie 175).” Mongrédien affirms the hypothesis that Louis

201

 

 

may well have read Scudéry’s text dedicated to the king since it contained praise
of the monarch.

Further, Mongrédien cites Louis XIV’s own Mémoires as proof of the king’s
love of glory.

“La gloire n’est pas une maitresse qu’on puisse jamais négliger, ni etre
digne de ses premieres faveurs, si l’on n’en souhaite incessamment de
nouvelles [....] La chaleur que I’on a pour la gloire n’est point une de ces
faibles passions qui se ralentissent par la possession.”(175)

Glory was Louis XIV’s self-avowed mistress and obtaining glory did not
exhaust his passion. He wanted more. Mongrédien links Louis XIV’s personal
passion for glory to another of Louis’ personality traits.

Cet amour de la gloire et cette attitude vraiment royale dont il ne se
départit jamais expliquent encore un autre trait de son caractere, qui est
une étonnante maitrise de sci-meme et une aptitude extraordinaire a
garder les secrets.(175)

According to his cure de Versailles, Hebert, Louis always wanted to
appear “d’une égalité parfaite (176).” Mongrédien elaborates:

Toujours cette attitude composee d’un souverain qui doit laisser ignorer
aux courtisans le fond de ses pensées. Aussi est-il habitué a conserver
scrupuleusement les secrets: Le secret du Roi pour les affaires d’Etat est
incomparable, dit Primi Visconti. Et cette aptitude a garder les secrets va,
sinon jusqu’au mensonge, du' moins jusqu’a la dissimulation, dont l’abbe
Choisy lui reconnait le ”talent royal.” Cette discretion qu’il avait sans doute
apprise a l’ecole politique de Mazarin, s’etend jusqu’aux affaires pn’vées. ll
est d'un secret a toute épreuve, écrit le cure Hébert, on peut tout lui
confier sans la moindre crainte qu’on sache jamais de qui il a appris ce
qu’on lui a dit a I’oreille. Louis XIV avait d'autant plus de mérite a garder
les secrets qu’il en connut beaucoup, non seulement d’Etat, ce qui est tout
naturel, mais des affaire personnelles de ses sujets.(176-177)

Mongrédien’s contends that for reasons of state, Louis XIV believed he

had to keep secrets from his courtisans and in this he was “incomparable.” He

202

also kept secrets of a personal nature. Further, though he was somewhat of a
gossipmonger, he was discreet. He could keep secrets admirably well.(176-177)

In La Promenade de Versaillles, the repetition of the semantic family of the
secret and the weaving of a plot dependent on secrets on every level creates a
perfect novelistic preoccupation to please the King and reinforce his obsession.
The King’s interest would be pricked by a novel whose narratrice suggests that it
is “[|]e secret qui est inseparable de cette aventure (103).”

As destinataire privilégié of La Promenade de Versailles, Louis XIV would
enjoy reading the conversation in the “Histoire de Celanire”that explores the
importance of the secret in personal matters, amourous affairs as well affairs of
state. It may seem presumptuous to assume that Louis XIV may have read La
Promenade de Versailles. However, Mongrédien contends that he did read
Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s work.

In the mid-1650’s, Louis fell in love with Marie Mancini, the niece of
Mazarin. According to Mongrédien, “[c]e fut sa premiere passion et son plus bel
amour.”(34) “Marie lui avait revelé un monde inconnu, chimérique, cet univers
irréel creé par les précieuses; ensemble ils lisaient les romans merveilleux de La
Calprenede et de Mlle de Scudéry (36).”

Obviously, Mongrédien’s depiction of Louis’ literary interludes with Marie
Mancini shows his anti-précieux bias. However, his knowledge of Louis XIV’s
reading habits, allows one to hypothesize that the king may well have read La

Promenade de Versailles.

203

 

 

One can better appreciate Mann’s insight into seventeenth-century French
court society by juxtaposing Scudéry’s allusion to a Versailles divertissement in
La Promenade de Versailles and Marin’s reading of Félibien’s text. Marin intuits
the cloak of secrecy that surrounded the preparations for the great

divertissements. Keeping the preparations secret added to the dramatic illusion

of the spectacle. II"
In the “Histoire de Celanire,” the second part of La Promenade de E
Versailles, we learn that the prince of the far-off land of Celanire and Cleandre E
also loves divertissements. “Comme le Prince estoit amoureux, H y eut plusieurs E
festes galantes, plusieurs chasses 8 plusieurs promenades ou Celanire _t'-

 

surpassoit toutes les autres belles, quoiqu’elle affectat une certaine negligence
propre, qui faisoit voir que’elle se confioit a sa beauté (111).” The reader may not
be surprised that the fictional prince in a novel written in 1669 shares the same
pastimes as le Roi Soleil.

Glicere, the narratrice of Celanire and the heroine’s confidante,
remembers that one day the entourage strolled to “une petite isle presque
enchantée qui est au milieu d’un beau fleuve (111).” At first the narratrice
confides that everyone thought the king had arranged the fete. Later it became
known that Cleandre had given the party. “[T]out Ie monde dit que c’estoit une
feste d’ambition pl0t6t que d’amour (112).” If one were to judge Louis XIV’s
motivation for the divertissements he staged at Versailles on Louis Marin’s

reading, one could easily say that the Sun King’s motivation was more ambition

 

than love. The reader is in the privileged position of knowing Cleandre’s true

204

heart. While the courtly world believes him to be ambitious, the reader knows he
is not.

Even if everyone in seventeenth-century Parisian society did not know the
reason behind Louis’ extravagant divertissements, they would realize that the
“petite isle presque enchantée” in La Promenade de Versailles was a reference
to the divertissement staged at Versailles in 1664. The spectacle that took place
over several days was given the name “Les Plaisirs de I’lle Enchantée.”

Obviously, Scudéry’s novel alludes to Louis XIV’s divertissement. More
importantly, Marin’s description of the divertissements and Scudéry’s bare an
uncanny resemblance. Her text as well as his evokes the notion of secrecy.
Celanire implies the same secrecy of preparation Louis XIV demanded for his
divertissements, since the participants were at first mistaken about who had
arranged the fete. The preparations for the trip to the enchanted isle in the novel
had also been cloaked in secrecy.

Cleandre’s guests had every reason to believe that the prince had
arranged the trip to the “petite isle enchantée.” He loved promenades and the
guests had taken a promenade to the enchanted isle. Again, “[i]I me souvient
d’un jour, qu’ayant este nous promener avec la Princesse Argelinde a une petite
isle presque enchantéé (111).”

Note Scudéry’s evocative choice for her title, La Promenade de Versailles.
The promenade was a preferred pastime of the king and of his Parisian subjects.

When Louis XIV and his entourage walked the grounds of Versailles, it was not

205

just a stroll. The promenade had a very specific meaning in seventeenth-century
Parisian society.

The promenade evokes unequivocably the conversation. Just as the
promenade means more than a walk, a conversation in seventeenth-century
Parisian society meant more than just a chat. And the conversation plays a
privileged role in Scudéry’s innovative narrative strategy. The deliberative and
egalitarian exchange of ideas in the conversation in novels shifts the emphasis
from the exteriority of the masculine discourse of the action-hero to the interiority

of dialogue that allows equal time for male and female points of view. Scudéry’s

 

TPI‘-“ JVJJ nu.

conversations thus allow at least equal time for a feminine discourse in La
Promenade de Versailles. The new narrative form leads to a feminization of the
novel and points to the modern French novel.

Again, even Scudéry’s worse critics find merit in her conversations. After
writing her three shorter novels, Célinte, Mathilde and La Promenade de
Versailles, she wrote several works that were collections of conversations. Some
of the conversations were taken from her novels and some were penned for the
first time to appear in these collections.

In their recent critical works on Scudéry’s conversations Elizabeth
Goldsmith and Delphone Denis both refer to Furetiere’s seventeenth-century
dictionnary for the definition of conversation that frames their analyses.
Furetiere’s entry for conversation reads as follows: “Conversation. s.f. Entretien
familier qu’on a avec ses amis dans les visites, dans les promenades (Denis 18,

note 4 and Goldsmith 14, note 3).” The French seventeenth-century promenade,

206

was par excellence, the site of conversations. Also, la promenade was a favorite
pastime of seventeenth-century Parisians, including Louis XIV. Mongrédien
attests to Louis' love of the promenade.

La Majesté a fini de diner [...] Louis XIV abandonne la grande perruque

d’apparat, dite in-folio, pour en mettre une autre moins pesante et moins

genante pour la promenade [...] Le plus grand plaisir du Roi avec la

promenade était la chasse [...]. (La Vie 150-151)

And then again, Mongrédien adds:“S’il n’occupait pas son aprés-midi a la
promenade ou a la chasse, Ie Roi la passait en fetes (153).” Victor Cousin
extends the love of the conversation to the court society of seventeenth-century
France. “Apres la conversation, la promenade était une des passions de la
société au XVIIe siecle [...] A Paris meme, les agréables promenades ne
manquaient pas (284-285).” And finally, in the painting reproduced in Andre
Maurois’ Louis XIV e Versailles by J.B. Martin entitled “Vue du bassin d’Apollon
et du Grand Canal, Le Roi se promenant dans sa ‘roulotte,’ ” depicts Louis
surrounded by his entourage and evokes the feeling of a conversation en
promenade (Facing 38).

The entourage in Celanire does in fact engage in a conversation when
they arrive at the petite isle enchantée. And what more fitting topic of discussion
than Ie secret? The story of Celanire which Glicere, the narratrice of the second
part of the novel, had just begun, is interrupted by a lengthy conversation. That
is, when the prince’s entourage arrives at the enchanted island, the narrative also
comes to a halt. The visitors to the island gather in a pavillion and partake of a

magnificent collation and listen to charming music.(111-112) Then they enter a

cabinet, a place par excellence of secrecy. Part of the entourage continues on

207

 

 

 

while Celanire and Cleandre’s group stays in the room decorated with “cent petits
amours, 8 au milieu d’eux Ie Dieu du silence representé, qui sembloit leur
défendre de parler [...](112-113).” Only Celanire, trois femmes de la Cour (one
named Philocrite), Cleandre, Alcinor, Iphicrate 8 the narratrice, Glicere, stay in
the parlour of the god of Silence and his hundred mini-cupids. The characters will
soon engage in a formal conversation about Ie secret.
Thus, the text introduces another ekphrasis of Eros to signal the
importance of the conversation that is about to begin.
Apres Ia collation on passa dans un cabinet ouvert de trois faces, Ie haut
estoit un d6me assez élevé, ou I’on voioit cent petits amours, 8 au milieu
d’eux le Dieu du silence representé, qui sembloit leur défendre de parler:
on en voioint quelques-uns, qui en effet paroissoint avoir peur de respirer
trop fort; d’autres qui cachoient leur flambeau, 8 ployant les ailes se
cachoient aussi les uns les autres, 8 d’autres petits éveillez, qui se
mocquant du silence semblolient rire 8 chanter en dépit de luy.(112-113)
This time Eros is represented by a hundred-fold of capricious mini-cupids.
They are guarded over by the-god of Silence. The reader will eavesdrop on the
conversation of Cleandre’s guests. The importance of the subject of the
conversation, secrecy, is reinforced by the presence of the ekphrasis of patron of
the secret, the god of Silence. Love is here represented in coquettish defiance of
the god of Silence. The truth will out, even a message carried by précieux
nymphs. This time the ekphrasis offers a friendly warning that though the secret
may be important to this text, and by extension, to its readers, even the god of
Silence is not powerful enough to tame Eros, the truth will be revealed.

The reader will soon discover that the path of the argumentation in the

conversation about secrecy takes many twists and turns. It is a labyrinthine

208

discourse, as is the whole of La Promenade de Versailles. Doody relates the
Labyrinth to Eros.
The Labyrinth can feel very gloomy. Eros—or Cupid/Amor/personified
Love—can seem very cheering. Eros is warmth and light, activity and
movement. He is usually winged—that is, he has freedom. Our contact with
Eros is a kind of reward for undergoing the terrors of the labyrinth, and the
burial in the tomb. Yet he is a reward which cannot be possessed.(359)
The material condition of La Promenade de Versailles, with its endless
pages with no paragraph breaks or chapter markers, require the reader to remain
engaged with the text for long stretches at a time. The story and the description
take many turns as well. Reading La Promenade de Versailles is a labyrinthine
task. In the ekphrasis under discussion, the text offers the reader Eros figures
multiplied a hundred-fold to make the burden of the novelistic journey lighter. The
Cupids in the passage hide their torches and therefore, by implication also let the
light of their torches shine, as do their wings. The miniature Amors light up the
text for the reader as well as for the characters in the novel. Seemingly
incidental, they serve an important purpose.
Eros (or Cupid) as a trope of fiction is a multiple and subtle signifier, even
when introduced in apparently incidental embellishment. He stands,
usually, outside the story proper, yet to come upon him is to encounter
him, an experience always important for the reader, whether the character
is conscious of Eros or not.(359)
The text of La Promenade de Versailles doubly reinforces the message of
the ekphrasis by having a character of the novel comment on it.
Alcinor qui estoit plein de vanite se mit a railler du dessein des peintures

de ce cabinet, 8 a trouver que le Dieu du silence estoit bien mal place
parmi tant d’amours.(114)

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Alcinor quips that the God of Silence seems misplaced among so many
“petits amours.” But he throws down the gauntlet, as it were, and the friendly
argumentation of the conversation about secrecy begins shortly.

Car enfin, dit-il assez plaisamment, soit que les amans soient heureux ou

malheureux, il faut renoncer au silence; s’ils sont malheureux, il faut qu’ils

soupirent 8 qu’ils se plaignent; 8 s’ils sont heureux, il faut rire 8 chanter, 8

se louer des graces qu’on recoit.(114)

Alcinor suggests that silence will inevitably be broken among lovers,
whether they are happy or unhappy.

Celanire responds: “Je craindrois fort la reconnoissance d’un amant qui
parleroit beaucoup; 8 je suis persuadée qu’il peut y avoir des reconnoissances
muettes qui valent beaucoup mieux (114-115).” Celanire takes the position of the
god of Silence from the ekphrasis as her porte-parole. The reader of Eros in an
ekphrasis “should attend to and interpret the image (386).” The “experience is
always important for the reader (396).” The text here offers the reader of La
Promenade de Versailles a presentiment of impending doom for Celanire,
because she believes the message of the god of Silence in the ekphrasis,
instead of Eros, who should be closer to her heart.

“Ce n’est pas, ajoOta-t-elle, que de l’humeur dont je suis, je doive jamais
craindre la reconnoissance de personne; mais c’est que naturellement j’aime Ie
secret (115).” It is in Celanire’s nature to love the secret. The text describes
Cleandre as “naturellement secret,” as well (143). In this, Cleandre and Celanire
and the text of La Promenade de Versailles, place themselves in King Louis’

corner. Cleandre and Celanire’s natural inclination to love secrecy would touch

Louis XIV’s heart.

210

Philocrite adds that she agrees that the secret is a beautiful thing, but that
it is difficult. The discussion continues for twenty full pages, without respite. Each
devisant, to borrow the term from Marguerite de Navarre's L’Héptaméron, has a
different point of view, but some arguments seem somewhat more substantial
than others. The group does retain its equanimity, which, as we shall see, is a
requisite of a formal conversation.

Goldsmith’s “Exclusive Conversations,” defines the history of the formal
conversation and its parameters. She tells us that:

[e]lite culture during the reign of Louis XIV was based, perhaps more than

at any other moment in European history, on ritualized interaction, the art

of social existence encompassed an elaborate repertoire of skills, the
most important of these being conversation.(1)

Because of Scudéry’s status as a well-known and well-read novelist and
because of her famous Samedi salon, French seventeenth-century court society
considered her one of the best conversationalists, if not the best. The historical
evaluation of Madame de Rambouillet’s chambre bleue was a meeting place for
polite conversation.

By the time of La Promenade de Versailles’ publication in 1669, the
heyday of the chambre bleue had long passed. And, Scudéry’s reputation as
novelist and conversationalist was renowned. Reading La Promenade de
Versailles, whose narrative story line is interrupted by several lengthy
conversations, must have allowed the seventeenth-century reader a nostalgic
remembrance of the days when Scudéry’s salon was at its zenith. A more in

depth discussion of the phenomenon known as the conversation in seventeenth-

century France will follow.

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I

 

Louis XIV would have admired the conversation on the secret for several

reasons, foremost, because of his own preoccupation with secrecy in personal as

well as in matters of state. Louis could identify with Cleandre, the hero of La

Promenade de Versailles, when he proclaims the importance of secrecy in

“important matters.”

[Dlans les grandes affaires le secret est de grande importance... je dis que
nulle qualité n’est plus necessaire dans la société que celle d’estre
secret,8 quand on ne l’est pas, on n’est ban a rien sans exception, soit
qu'on soit de la Cour ou de la ville, qu’on ait un maistre ou une
maistresse; 8 j’ajotite mesme hardiment, que quelques bonnes qualitez
qu’on puisse avoir d’ailleurs, quand on n’a pas celle-la on devient suspect
a tout le monde 8 inutile a autruy 8 a sol-meme.(117-118)

Louis himself being imbued with the spirit of the secret would have found

Cleandre’s point of view laudable. Louis XIV would agree that someone who

could not keep a secret was worth “nothing.” In addition, Louis would concur

with the guests in the conversation that secrets of war should be guarded at all

COStS.

En mon particulier, dit Alcinor, je crois que le secret dont on parle tant,
excepté a la guerre 8 en affaires d’Etat, n’est pas aussi nécessaire qu’on
se figure: mais pour l’amour, [...] je I’y tiens presque inutile; qu’on on aime
il le faut dire [...] .(116-117)

Cleandre proves himself a courtier worthy of Louis XIV’s loyalty, when it is

revealed that “il gardait un grand Secret inviolable, en ces sortes de choses

[affairs of his prince] (non-numbered 109,III)“ More problematic, is the fact that

Cleandre is more discreet than his prince! “[L]e Prince seul Ie savoit[that a secret

was an inviolate trust for Cleandre], qui quelquefois ne pouvoit s’empecher de les

publier Iuy-mesme, channé de sa générosité (109,III-108,IV)”. Could Louis XIV

have reacted positively to that characterization of a King?

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The pages about Cleandre’s ability to keep secrets and his prince’s
inability to keep them, appear on non-numbered pages (as did the “secret”
critique of absolutism). The text thus subtly draws attention to them. And, the
pages lacking numbers allows the author and the printer an alibi in case the
pages, and therefore Scudéry and the printer Barbin as well, were found to be
too seditious.

Most likely, King Louis would find Celanire’s insistence on privacy in
amourous affairs appealing. However, besides appealing directly to Louis XIV,
the conversation about secrecy that occurs between pages 112 and 133 is
important to the novel in several ways.

The dénouement of the conversation is important to the plot of La
Promenade de Versailles. The formal conversation on the secret in La
Promenade de Versailles introduces the complication from which the entire novel
unfolds. Celanire’s insistence on secrecy provides the linchpin that, when
dislodged, causes the series of events that become the “Histoire de Celanire” to
unravel.

As the conversation draws to a close, Cleandre reads a passage from “un
Iivre de maximes ou de reflexions d’un homme de grande qualité 8 de grand
merite, qu’on peut dire avoir fait I’anatomie du coeur de tous les hommes (132).”
Cleandre believes that the maxim “revient assez au sentiment de la belle
Celanire (133).” Cleandre cites the maxim: “La voicy: S'il y a un amour pur 8

exempt du mélange de nos autres passions, c’est celuy qui est cache au fond de

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nostre coeur, 8 que nous ne connoissons pas nous mesmes (133).” Celanire
approves.

Voila precisément, dit Celanire en sor‘iriant, une amour propre au secret;

car estant cachée pour celuy mesme qui I’a au fond de son coeur, il n’a

garde de la montrer indiscretement aux autres.”(133)

With these words, “Ie jeu [est] fini (133).”

Thus, at the conclusion of the conversation on secrecy, though she is
smiling, Celanire accepts Cleandre’s definition of a perfectly discreet love, one
that is unknown even to oneself. Living up to the challenge of the maxim
becomes the conflict that separates Cleandre from Celanire as she eventually
flees to Versailles and the court of Louis XIV.

Serendipitously, Celanire and Cleandre are left alone alter the
conversation concludes. Cleandre declares himself “Ie plus heureux homme du
monde (134).” His happiness derives from the fact that Cleandre possesses a
quality that Celanire admires, namely, the ability to keep secrets. “Car il est vrai
que je fais une profession si particuliere d'estre capable de secret, que je ne
pense pas que personne ne puisse égaler en cela (135).” Cleandre’s manner of
professing his love for Celanire shows his ingenuity in that he tells her he loves
her, but not directly. That was the requirement of Celanire.

N’est-il pas vrai, Madame, que depuis que j’ai l’honneur d’estre connu de

vous, iI ne vous est point entre dans l'esprit que je fusse capable d’amour,

8 que vous m’avez regarde 8 me regardez encore, comme un ambitieux

qui cherche Ia fortune: vous m’avez mesme peut-estre pas crfi que j’ai

une espece de zele pour la Prince, qui est une nouvelle sorte de passion

que je croi avoir inventée oar je n’en ai point v0 d’exemple, 8 vous pensez
seulement que je suis assez bon courtisan. (137)

214

Cleandre’s speech sends a double message. He professes his love by
indirection when he suggests that Celanire has not considered him capable of
love. Importantly, he also addresses an implied reader, Louis XIV, as he boasts
of having created a new type of passion for his prince.

As clever as Cleandre's speech was, his words still offended Celanire.

[...D]e voix irrité, je vous declare qu’encore que je continue de vivre tres

civilement avec vous devant le monde, je n’oublierai jamais I’injure que

vous m'avez faite aujourd’hui.(140)

Through many conversational twists and turns, Celanire and Cleandre
finally agree that they love each other, but of course, Celanire requires that their
love be secret from the world. Because necessity is the mother of invention, the
lovers invent several novel ways to show their love in public without anyone
knowing and to send secret messages to one another. Even Godenne finds their
means of communication inventive, he qualifies them as examples of galanterie
(preface, VI). One involves sending anemones if a rendez-vous is possible and
sending daffodils if an impediment to the meeting has arisen (258). In another
example, the lovers borrow an invention of two lovers in Clélie. If Celanire and
Cleandre are forced to be apart, they designate a time when they will both gaze
at the moon and think of each other (348-349).

The need for secrecy in Celanire and Cleandre’s love affair is heightened
by a feud between their families. Euribiade, Celanire’s uncle forbids her to love
Cleandre. “II n’y en a qu’un seul vers qui vous ne devez jamais toumer les yeux

(225). “ Celanire laments her bad fortune. “II faut, dis-je, que je sois la victime

d’une haine de deux cent ans, qu’on me défende de regarder le plus honneste

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11.—r

 

homme de toute Ia Cour [ ...] (230).” Argelinde, who loves the prince, is jealous
of a suspected relationship between Celanire and the prince, and encourages
her uncle to marry Celanire off. He tries to force Celanire to accept other suitors,
in particular Cleonte, a wealthy but morally and physically unattractive choice.
“[L]e plus riche homme de toute la Cour, Ie plus mal fait de corps 8 esprit [...]
(281 ).” Needless to say, Celanire rejects Cleonte as a suitor.

Celanire flees to a convent, where she is virtually a hostage. Then she
arranges her own exile to France. Meanwhile, Cleandre has his own difficulties.
Ambushed by Alcinor, he kills him in a dual and is sent into exile by the prince.

While in the convent, Celanire gazes out the window and sees her name
emblazoned in the sky. Her name figures in a royal fireworks display, which lives
up to its French appellation, un feu d’artifice. This artificial fire has sent an
erroneous message. The fireworks display of her name in the heavens could
have been the most dramatic avowal of Cleandre’s love for Celanire. But,
Celanire believes that Cleandre has broken his vow of silence concerning their
love and cannot forgive him. And, in fact, he was not responsible for the
fireworks display. So, the display proves to misrepresent the truth twice over in
La Promenade de Versailles. .

The misfortune surrounding the tea d’artifice in La Promenade de
Versailles is reminiscent of Marin’s analysis of the King’s spectacular fireworks
displays at Versailles. Once again the discourse of Scudéry and Marin intersect.
The fireworks in La Promenade de Versailles and those that are part of Louis

XIV's divertissements hide the truth behind their brilliance.

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In the diegesis of the novel, the firework displays represent
misunderstandings. To Celanire, they represent a betrayal of Cleandre’s vow of
silence regarding their love. In Marin’s piece, at Versailles, the brilliance of the
display hides the polifical machinations of the king. According to Marin, the
firework displays arranged by Louis XIV represent his political and absolute
power. In the novel, the fireworks take place in the far-off land of Celanire, but
the association of the novel’s fireworks to the spectacular firework displays of
Versailles is inevitable.

Scudéry’s novel, in the seventeenth century, not secure with the protective
safety of several generations of time, subtly but accurately implies the same
critique that Marin sets forth. The message in the sky can be read as Cela nuire,
a play on Celanire’s name. The fireworks are thus a foreboding sign.

In his Portrait of the King, Marin’s brilliant description of the firework
display evokes a palpable feeling for the megalomaniac obsession of Louis XIV.
He represents himself in the ultimate dramatic spectacle of the Sun King.

In the upheaval of the luminous appearance under the king’s eyes a new

element is created. It is at once other than fire, air, and water and the mix

that reduces them to unity. He destroys the elements and totalized them

through an astonishing transmutation in which the dust of the fire of a

thousand sparks (fire, air, and water) becomes an infinity of atoms of gold

shining in a great light. a light that is metal, and a metal that is light. The
king gives himself here the figure of the great cosmic alchemist, but even
more so and inversely, the universal alchemist is the figure of the infinite
potential power of the king, an infinite potential power or, rather, an infinite
desire for absolute power.(203. Emphasis Marin.)

Marin teases out the visual and visceral impact of the fireworks of

Versailles. The golden sky lit up over Versailles becomes the Sun King. The

217

fireworks are a metaphor of his greatness but also of his desire for
transcendance.

In La Promenade de Versailles, Celanire’s insistence on secrecy allows an
interpretation of her as a character consistent with the medieval topos of la belle
dame sans merci. From the moment of the fireworks, an original plot line
unfolds. It is a feminist reconstitution of a romanesque tale. Celanire does not
play the role of the demoiselle in a tower, or the demoiselle in distress. She
escapes using her own intelligence, cognition, and resources.

In a reversal of the Cupid and Pscyhe legend rather than Celanire-Psyche
wandering the earth in search of Cleandre-Cupid, the reverse is true. Celanire
seeks exile in Paris, affording her the opportunity to visit Versailles. Cleandre,
wanders the earth, and he arrives in Versailles to discover Celanire.

The novel does have a happy end. Celanire and Cleandre are able to
wed. The uncle has been won over by Cleandre’s valour. The femme forte that
escapes patriarchal institutions by escaping from the convent and creating a self-
imposed exile at Versailles, in the end returns to the fold. But she does so on her
own terms.

Scudéry’s other novels are read as anti-marriage tracts. For example, in
Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus, Sapho, the autobiographical character
representing Scudéry herself, rejects marriage. As we remember from chapter
Two, the précieuses were made out to be prudes. Celanire cannot be described
as a prude. DeJean attributes the concept of inclination to Scudéry.

In Clélie, inclination is defined as a force of attraction that works against
prearranged marriages and encourages women to rebel against the

218

 

authority and the values of the patriarchal system. (Unlike love at first

sight, which strikes both partners simultaneously, inclination is consistently

described from the woman’s perspective as the force that makes her lean
in the direction of one suitor over all others.)(88)

Where exactly does La Promenade de Versailles fit into the feminist
politics of Madeleine de Scudéry? First, the association of prudery with Scudéry
is part of the phantasmagorical fear of female writers on the part of men that
Domna Stanton illustrated. If a woman refuses to engage in a male-female
sexual relationship, the consequences are too threatening. The woman’s
behavior can only be explained as deviant.

In La Promenade de Versailles, Celanire does not refuse to engage in a
relationship with Cleandre. She does insist that her standards of propriety prevail,
to wit, that their relationship remain secret to the rest of the world until such time
that she deems appropriate to reveal it.

Scudéry’s critics might condemn her for creating a character so fixated on
secrecy. They might do so at their own risk, since their king, Louis XIV, shared
Celanire’s obsession. As applied to the king, one might indeed call it a
magnificent obsession. As we have seen, Louis did everything on a grand scale.

The economy of the secret is important to both Celanire and Louis XIV.
They both want to keep secrets for power and self-assertion, Louis for political
power and his role in the governing of France and indirectly of Europe, Celanire
for personal power, to assure her own agency in her relationships.

When the correct elements align themselves in the text, Celanire is happy

to marry Cleandre. With regards to Celanire and Cleandre’s relationship, it is a

matter of coming to terms agreable to both parties.

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Although the language of contractual law does not play a part in La
Promenade de Versailles, the romantic economy of the novel corresponds to that
of the Carte de Tendre as it was codified in Clélie.

Both the important conversation about the secret and Celanire and
Cleandre’s private tete a tete after the debate reflect the logic and semantics of
the Carte de Tendre. Celanire insists on the importance of la reconnaisance, for
example.

This allusion to Clélie and the Carte de Tendre is neither incidental nor
coincidental. Rather, Scudéry purposefully alludes to an intertext that had
become a national pastime in France. Any reference to her Carte de Tendre
would be recognized immediately by a literate person of seventeenth-century
France.

In a chapter entitled “The Politics of Tenderness,” in Tender Geographies,
Joan DeJean presents two revisionist readings of La Carte de Tendre that “stress
Scudéry’s originality and her subversiveness.”(88) One is Alain-Marie Bassy’s
article “Supplement au voyage de Tendre” and the other is Claude Filteau’s “Le
Pays de Tendre: L’Enjeu d’une carte.”

DeJean explains Bassy’s position thus.

Bassy emphasizes in particular her radical departure from a tradition with

which the Carte de Tendre has often been compared, that of courtly love

speculation: for the courtly notion of a unique, predestined, irresversible
passion, Scudéry substitutes the idea of choice, of multiple amorous

trajectories, in Clélie, courtly Iove's fatality is replaced by codes of
behavior that an indivdual can be taught to master [...] (88-89).

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Choice. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, choice has become a
politically charged feminist icon. Scudéry’s novels demanded a choice for women
three hundred years ago.

Celanire could not make her case any clearer. She wants to decide when
a relationship will be established and even more importantly, when it will be
announced to the world. In legal terms, it may be compared to posting the bans
of marriage. Celanire wants to control when the bans will be posted and to
whom. In the economy of the Carte de Tendre, raconnaisance holds a lion’s
share of the stock. Celanire wants to hold the certificates and decide when they
will go on the market.

Acccording to DeJean, “Filteau emphasizes the practicality of Scudéry’s
goals ‘AII speculations about tenderness [...] aim at the formulation of a contract’
[...] (89).” DeJean concludes her reading of Bassy and Filteau with a reference
to the icon that hasa become symbolic of Scudéry, the Carte de Tendre.

The Carte de Tendre is the most visible sign of Scudéry’s social project, a

demonstration that aims at nothing less than the justification of private

contracts as a legitimate counterforce to the officially sanctioned legal and
political order.(89)

DeJean states: “Clélie must be seen as the first salvo in the post-Fronde
women’s war, a literary war that sought to win for women new status within
marriage and outside it, ultimately to redefine marriage as an institution in France
(90) .” Finally, DeJean concludes her chapter on Scudéry by claiming that
“Scudéry’s salon writing was the first indication of the new politics of marriage

and married life that would be the dominant concern of French women’s fiction

until the 1820’s (93)."

221

DeJean makes a convincing case for Madeleine de Scudéry’s privileged

 

place in the history of feminist writing in France. Scudéry’s legacy as a feminist

writer lies somewhere in the intersection between her life and her works.

The Conversation
La Promenade de Versailles is a pivotal work in the development of
Scudéry’s writing style. Obviously, it is dramatically shorter then the voluminous
Cyrus and Clélie. It is the last novel that she wrote. All her subsequent
publications were books containing the formal convention called conversations.

Further, the innovation of the formal conversation that she included in La

 

Promenade de Versailles, becomes the form of choice in her last works:
Conversation sur divers sujets, Conversations nouvelles sur diver sujets, etc.

In La Promenade de Versailles, perhaps more than in any of her other
works, the voice of the writer comes through the prose to the reader's mind.
Is Scudéry the narrator of the first part of the novel? Though Godenne does not
put much stock in the notion of mmans e clef, even he hints that the voice of the
first narratrice in Le Promenade de Versailles may be Scudéry. “Au cours d’une
visite a Versailles, Ia narratrice (Mlle de Scudéry?) et un groupe d’amis font la

connaissance d’une étrangere qu’ils promenant a travers les galeries et les

 

jardins du chateau royal (pp.1-102) (Godenne, Etudes 55).” While there has

 

been much critical discussion about her brother, Georges de Scudéry’s
contribution to her other novels, there is no critical debate about the authorship of

La Promenade de Versailles. Perhaps because La Promenade de Versailles was

222

published in 1669 and her brother Georges died in 1667. Or, perhaps, it is
because the voice of La Promenade de Versailles is uniform and clearly
Madeleine de Scudéry’s.

Scudéry’s relationship with her brother was problematic at times. For one
thing, he squandered money she had earned from her novels. But, perhaps the
passing of her brother liberated her mind. For, though neither Scudéry nor
Celanire are radical feminists, both the author through her voice in La
Promenade de Versailles, and Celanire in her role in the novel, present a
coherent case for a woman’s right to choose her own destiny, especially with
regard to love and marriage.

Celanire states her case for her right to choose the moment of disclosure
of a love affair in the conversation about secrets and in her discussion with
Cleandre after the others guests have departed. The structure of the
conversation allows Scudéry’s voice to ring through as clear as a bell.

In Exclusive Conversations, Goldsmith explains the invention of the
conversation in seventeenth-century French society and the unique composition
of a formal conversation. “Conversation created its own social space with
carefully marked bounderies; to ‘be somebody' one had to be ‘in the best
conversations. (2).” A Scudérian conversation was the best. “Scudéry, Sévigné
and Bussy-Rabutin were as famous in their own day for their mastery of the art of
conversation as they were for their writing (2).”

According to Goldsmith, “[w]hile most of the habitués of both court and

salon preferred to pass freely between both places, the social milieu of the salon

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was increasingly viewed as the more hospitable environment for perfect
sociability (7).” No wonder Scudéry writes a novel praising Louis XIV and
Versailles. Her novels and la samedi, at the height of its popularity, were in
competition with Versailles. She needed to reassure him that his palace was still
“the place” to be.

In the salon, a formal conversation was not a spontaneous exchange of
ideas. “Conduct literature offered a growing number of readers a system of rules,
methods and techniques for making social interaction more agreeable and
Iasting.”(4) Goldsmith entitles her book “Exclusive Conversations,” because
exclusivity was an element in this spoken genre. However, the notion of
exclusivity did not dominate the scene of the conversation.

Exclusive groups counterbalance their collective sense of superiority with

the conviction that they themselves are a community of equals.

Communication among the members of the group must be based on the

principle of reciprocity, with each speaker contributing to the equanimity of

the circle as a whole [...] . When we look at seventeenth-century
discussions about proper social conduct, we see that an important
requirement is that individual partipants present themselves in balanced
relation to others, and that it is only the group support provided by this
ambiance of mutual generosity that gives value to the contribution of any

single member. (9-10)

La Rochefoucauld’s contribution to the discourse of the conversation
confirms Goldsmith’s contention. “The pleasure of conversation, writes La
Rochefoucauld, is often destroyed by one individual demanding gratification at
another’s expense.”(10) La Rochefoucauld understood the economy of the
conversation. What is important in conversation is that all participants allow the

form and flow of talk to continue without paying too much attention to what is

being said or weighing too carefully the value of each contribution: “on doit entrer

224

indifféremment sur tous les sujets agréables qui se présentent, et ne faire jamais
voir qu’on veut entrainer Ia conversation sur ce qu’on a envie de dire.(p.193)”(12)

Surely, La Rochfoucould understood that a speaker in a conversation
might have a point of view he or she wanted to get across, but the rules of the
conversation required that one’s own point of view not be allowed to dominate.

Neither the individual participants nor the specific content of their speech

can be given more weight than the play of conversation as form [...]

Members of the group must be careful to exclude rhetorical expressions

which draw attention to, rather than disguise, relations of power within the

social group.(12)

For La Rochefoucauld, “Too much expressed difference destroys the
necessary illusion of unanimity (12).”

So, it is not to say that a member of the group is so in harmony with his
fellow conversants that he or she unconsciously suppresses one’s point of view.
One may well have a different point of view, but for the sake of the group and for
the sake of the conversational play, one must underplay it. The power relations of
a group are there, but they are disguised.

Thus, the formal conversation is a safe haven. One is not expected to
convey information, let alone seditious information. But, if one gets caught, one
can always claim that one was just playing the game.

If Scudéry came of age, literally and figuratively with the conversation, the
lack of cognitive dissonance due to the cooperative attitude of the participants,
must have freed her creative talents. The conversation, rather than being

exclusive, actually by its nature and by its formal rules of organization, made it

inclusive. The unique rules of the conversation empowered the Scudérian

225

 

 

 

discourse. “Scudéry’s speakers live out an interactive fantasy, where
embarrassment and other forms of what Goffman calls ‘alienation from
interaction' do not exist (68).”

It seems that if one remains within the rules and boundaries of the formal
conversation, that one can engage in ideal, utopian discourse.

In the late 1660’s, Scudéry was able to maximize her creative forces. The
composition and content of Le Promenade de Versailles benefits from Scudéry’s
new found freedom. Free of her brother’s domination and enabled by a literary
and verbal construction that at least ostensibly eliminates alienation, such an
environment allowed Scudéry to create her most ingenious novel, La Promenade

de Versailles.

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Notes

 

1 See Marin 49. Marin explains that for Aristotle, in the genre of the panegyric or
eulogy, “the auditor [in this analysis the reader] is spectator, he ‘contemplates’
the speech being given ‘theoretically, and when he judges, he does not
pronounce himself on what is said but on the potential (the talent) of the person
speaking, not on the content of the speech but on the way in which it is given.
‘theoreticallly,’ and, when he judges he does not pronounce himself on the
content of the speech but on the way in which it is given (49).” Additionally, the
context of Marin’s discussion of the panegyric is of interest to this thesis. First,
the critics of La Promenade de Versailles have universally agreed that the text
praises Louis XIV. Secondly, Mann’s discussion of the panegyric is found in the
chapter entitled “The King‘s Narrative, or How to Write History,” in which Marin
discusses Paul Pellisson's letter of 1670 to Colbert suggesting a format for a
history of Louis XIV. Marin skillfully uses the text of Pellisson’s letter to elaborate
a theory of the power of narrative and the narrative of power. Madeleine de
Scudéry is Paul Pellisson’s best friend. Her novel may have served as a test
case for Pellisson’s proposed history of Louis XIV. In an era of power politics,
where the master of powerful persuasion was Louis XIV himself, Scudéry’s novel
may prove as powerful a narrative as Pellisson’s proposal for a history of the
king.

2 See Marin 42. Referring to Pellisson’s letter to Colbert, Marin states that “[t]here
is neither excess nor lack, and no smudging, at least in Pellisson’s project.

Hence also, on these two three-centuries-old pages, it is possible to make some

227

 

reflections that have practical value today on the relationships between the Writer
and political power, between the intellectual and the state (42). Scudéry’s novel
can also serve as such a model for twenty-first centuries readers.

3 See Marin 193-205. In the chapter “The Magician King or the King’s Portrait,”
Marin theorizes the importance of secrecy in Louis XIV’s deployement of his
divertissements. Marin contends that Félibien’s use of the expression “royal
miracle,” “is not an expression that turns toward the panegyric or hyperbole of
flattery, but rather, one that describes quite exactly the effect of belief that is
brought about by its secrecy in the decision and the omnipotence of the
realization [...](196).” Marin in turn deploys a reseau semantique that reiterates
the secrecy as key to the magic of the divertissements of Versailles. “[T]he
secrecy in the decision and the omnipotence in the realization [...](196). “[T]he
conception has remained secret: only the king knows what he ordered the
principal executors of his project to do [...] (197).” “[T]he royal gaze [...] its
secrecy (200).” “[T]he secret moment of intention and design [...] the first act of
the narrative, the secret order of the king (200).”

4 There are several series of non-numbered pages in La Promenade de
Versailles. A case can be made for each set of non-numbered pages appearing

as such because of the potentially sensitive nature of the passages.

228

Conclusion

Every discriminating individual has a perspective from which he or she
views the world. Parisians of seventeenth-century France certainly had their own
political views. The Fronde had divided Paris.

By the time Scudéry publishes La Promenade de Versailles, in 1669, the
political turmoil of the Fronde had subsided for the most part. Nonetheless,
having been frightened at his regent mother’s knee when forced to evacuate
Paris during the uprisings of his youth, Louis XIV had sufficient reason to want to
assure he alone controlled his reign. Absolutism may have grown out of his
childhood fears of resurgency. By 1669, the Sun King was in control. Versailles
had become the tangible symbol of his sole sovereign rule.

Literary critics’ interpretation of the Scudérian corpus change with respect
to their parti pris. While few French citizens might openly declare themselves
royalists today, although some do indeed, there definitely exists a conservative
critical attitude reminiscent of Victor Cousin’s, whose nostalgia for the ancien
regime frames the evaluation of Scudéry’s literary works. Contemporary feminist
critics believing in full emancipation for all beings construct an oppositional,
idealized democratic critical stance with regard to her work.

Participants in Niderst’s 1991 colloquium express opinions informed by
various critical and political backgrounds. The scholars aligned themselves from
the radical feminist left of Joan DeJean to the conservative critical contingency
that regrets the demise of seventeenth-century aristocracy and laments the

“demolition of the hero” that Bénichou outlined in his Morales du grand siecle.

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Trying to make the socio—political stance of Madeleine de Scudéry’s
novels fit into one party or the other results in divergent interpretations of her
works, or at best, critics’ dissatisfaction with interpretations that fall on the side
opposite their own. Scholars disagree as to whether Scudéry was an ardent
royalist or not. Scudéry had ties to both sides of the conflict during the Fronde.
Therefore, both conversative and liberal interpretations can be derived form
Cyrus and Clélie, as they can from La Promenade de Versailles.

Aronson contends that Scudéry had only adoration for her king
(Mademoiselle de Scudéry 357). She cites two madrigals written by Scudéry as
proof of her approval of Louis XIV’s actions in war or at peace.

“Sixtain sur la conquete de la F ranche-Comté

Les héros de I’Antiquité

N’étaient que des héros d’été:

lls suivaient le printemps comme les hirondelles,

La victoire en hiver pour eux n’avait pas d’ailes.

Mais malgré les frimas, la neige et les glacons,

Louis est un héros de toutes les saison (357).”

“Madrigal sur la Paix

Jamais on n’avait tant vanté

Ni Campagne d'hiver, ni campagne d’été,

Quand Louis revenait suivit de la Victoire.

Quelle est cette nouvelle gloire?

Sur ses propres exploits a-t-il pu renchérir,

Apres tant de succes sur la terre et sur I‘onde?

Oui, car donner Ia paix au monde

C’est plus que de le conquerir ( 358).”

The madrigals that Aronson selected to bolster her argument, actually
show Scudéry’s stance to be more nuanced. Surely, she was proud of Louis’

victory in Franche-Comté and Flandres. Part 1 of La Promenade de Versailles

230

reads as a eulogy evoked by those victories. However, in Part 2, the “Histoire de
Celanaire,” the conversation that points to the suffering of the peasantry as a
result of costly warfare demonstrates Scudéry’s displeasure with Louis XIV’s
belligerent activities. The second madrigal implies that peace is more important
than conquests as ultimately Le Promenade de Versailles does. The two
madrigals selected by Aronson could be epigraphs to the two parts of La
Promenade de Versailles. Happy for his victories, Scudéry still defines world
peace as a preferred goal.

That Scudéry loved her monarch is clear. She believed in the hereditary
monarchy as the best form of government for France. However, the task of
running a nation-state, even a nation-state in its early inception, proves too
complicated to manage alone. All good rulers, even absolutist IGng Louis XN,
need advisers. In La Promenade de Versailles, Scudéry attempts to praise the
king while subtly, but seriously criticizing Louis XIV's fiscal and foreign policies.

Scudérian scholarship seems divided on the interpretation of La
Promenade de Versailles. Several points of view emerge. Grimm, a participant in
Niderst’s 1991 colloquium, defines Scudéry’s novel strictly as a eulogy.

[D]isons que notre texte [Le Promenade de Versailles] est un éloge

inconditionnel et sans restrictions de la personne d’un jeune roi et d’une

monarchie héréditaire, roi bien concret dans Ie cadre réel de “La
promenade” at “La feste”, roi fictif dans l’”Histoire de Celanire”. Nul doute
que Ie modele de ces deux rois est Ie jeune Louis XIV lui-meme a qui
d’ailleurs La promenade [...][sic] est dediée. Tout concourt, dans ce texte,

a son éloge: Car physiquement, moralement, intellectuellement, ce rois
depasse infiniment l’humain.”(448-449)

231

Th sure and unequivocal stance of Grimm is reflected in many other
readings of La Promenade de Versailles, Aronson and Godenne’s for example.
However the author of this thesis does not agree. La Promenade de Versailles
supports a reading that admires Louis XIV and Versailles. But the novel also
suggests a subtle critique of the opulence of the palace and an equally subtle
and nuanced critic of Louis XIV’s excessive spending on Versailles and on the
frequent military campaigns aimed at the expansion of France’s borders. Near
the end of the novel, Glicere explains to Celanire, in plaintif words that recall the
anti-war sentiments considered in Chapter 3, that we are none of us masters of
our own fate.

Il faut, dis-je, avoir pris garde que la pluspart du temps les evenemens de

la vie dependent de l’amour, de la haine, de I’ambition, de I’intérest de

personnes que vous ne connoissez pas, la paix ou la guerre font mille
changements en la fortune des gens qui n’ont nulle part au
gouvemement.(564)

Glicere’s words could be directed to a twenty-first century audience given
the chain of events in the world that began in September of 2001.

A second question about which literary scholars disagree is whether
Scudéry was a reluctant spinster or an emancipated feminist. A radical feminist
interpretation of Scudéry’s works runs into difficulties. If Scudéry’s texts, for
example in the later chapters of Cyrus and Clélie, support a radical feminist point
of view, one that is anti-marriage, why do some works also end with the hero and
heroine looking forward to wedded bliss, such as Celanire and Cleandre in La

Promenade de Versailles? Dalla Valle points out:

En particulier, Madeleine a concu le mariage comme un choix douloureux,
qui decrete pour la femme Ia perte absolue de son autonomie et 00 meme

232

l’amour—quand iI existe—risque de s’avilir. Elle a oppose, par contre, a ce

choix, un autre type de vie, qui n’exclut pas l’amour ou, plutbt, en élimine

seulement une partie, mais laisse le champ libre a l’amour tendre, qui se
développe selon un itineraire complex—illustré par la Carte de Tendre--et

qui se fonde sur une affinité de sentiments et d’esprit. Malgre tout cela, il

taut quand meme reconnaitre que dans la réalité de ses romans

Madeleine accepte que les protagonistes se marient a la fin; de plus elle a

souvent melé dans ses intrigues compliquées des histoires favorables au

mariage a des histoires contraires; Mme Aronson, en particulier, a

souligne cette sorte de contradiction a l’interieur de la production

romanesque de Madeleine.((513514)

The answer to Aronson and Dalla Valle’s question is simply that there is
no contradiction because Scudéry is not a radical. Different options for her
characters signal the importance of choice, not an internal inconsistency. She
was an innovator but not a radical.

As Celanire, Madeleine was herself orphaned in infancy. Her uncle who
raised her saw to her education. But he also died leaving her in the care of her
brother. Georges and Madeleine may well have worked together, even as a
writing couple, as DeJean suggests, working in partnership, to create a novel by
committee.(23)

By the time Scudéry writes La Promenade de Versailles, her brother has
died and she is on her own. She lives by the royal pensions she receives and her
writing. However, as in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with literary
patronage comes the necessity to compromise.

Scudéry could and did compromise. She found a way to support herself

that allowed her to write and publish her entire life! Scudéry was self-

emancipated. Celanire is too. To ask why some of Scudéry’s heroines marry in

233

the end is to pose the wrong question. Scudéry is not anti-marriage. She is pro-
self-determination.

In La Promenade de Versailles, Celanire’s actions always turn on her
maintaining control of her own destiny. A clever cartoon on television many years
ago featured a princess and her father, the king. In a story line that goes back as
far as the beginning of fairy tales, the princess loves someone her father has not
chosen for her. This princess tries to explain to her father, the king, that she
wants to have a say in her choice of suitors. Her father quickly replies: “You can
have any say you want, girl, just not the last say!”

Obviously, having the last say defines self-determination. Celanire, as
many of Scudéry's other heroines, is neither against suitors nor marriage.
However, she is determined to keep control over her own life. To do so she sets
parameters. Her insistence that an amorous affair be secret provides her first tool
in maintaining her self-sufficiency. The world need not know her heart. It suffices
that she knows it. And, eventually, that her suitor knows it. Celanire and
Cleandre’s love can grow best if no one else knows of its existence. It is their
affair after all.

The overarching theme of secrecy in La Promenade de Versailles proves
central and reinforcing of both the political and the feminist critique of the novel.
Neither the écn'ture politique nor the ecriture féministe suggest a radical attack of
the polls or of patriarchy. Scudéry did not live to a ripe old age of 93 without
making appropriate adjustments and compromises during her life. Grimm almost

suggests she was blatantly opportunistic (449-450).

234

There may be a fine line between doing what one must do to survive on
one’s own terms and depending on others for one’s survival. I choose to believe

that Madeleine de Scudéry took both a prudent and critical path.

235

APPENDICES

236

Appendix A
A Reader’s Guide to La Promenade de Versailles
A Story of Love and Politics

The novel entitled La Promenade de Versailles has two major divisions:
the shorter introductory chapter also entitled “La Promenade de Versailles,”
referred to in this dissertation as Part 1, followed by another lengthy chapter
entitled “Histoire de Celanire,” herein called Part 2. The overarching romantic plot
follows the peripatetic path of the novel’s love interest, the romance of Celanire
and Cleandre. However, the story unfolds in anything but a linear fashion.

“La Promenade de Versailles”, Part 1

La Promenade de Versailles begins in medias res with the enigmatic
declaration from the narratrice acquitting herself of her promise and her duty.
Beginning the novel in medias res acknowledges the traditional opening of
historical novels of the Ancients.‘ A complex narrative scheme unfolds. As the
characters are being introduced, they become engaged in a formal Scudérian
innovation known as a conversation. The conversation is a précieux ornament
inserted into the meticulously woven description of Versailles. The assembled
characters discuss historical political figures and historians themselves, the
contemporary seventeenth-century debate of the Ancients and the Modems, and
the primacy of Art over Nature. And then, most importantly, the characters
discuss the grandeur of Louis XIV.

After many pages of discussion, the text allows for a minor plot

development. The arrival of friends of the narratrice requires the briefest

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HHS-n \ “I. Ah“! -alht'

 

 

explanation of her obligation to look after the foreign visitors. But the story
scarcely advances because the characters participate in a second conversation.
The topic of the conversation is how best to take leave of a love. “II s’agit de
savoir s’il y a plus ou moins de tendresse a dire adieu a ce qu’on aime, ou a ne
Ie dire pas (52).” The debate provides a fifteen page poetic interlude.
Respondants in the debate quote verses to support their arguments. Though not
central to the theme of this dissertation, a panoply of poetics is found woven
between the description and the story of La Promenade de Versailles.2 The
conclusion of the conversation proves less important than the exchange of ideas
and opinions expressed in it.

At the end of the set piece conversation, the characters begin their tour of
Versailles requiring more description and commentary. The action that had
become less central in Scudéry’s previous voluminous novels has been reduced
to almost zero in La Promenade de Versailles.

In short, not a lot happens in the introductory pages of the novel. The
narrafive overview just outlined gives a scarce impression of the first chapter of
La Promenade de Versailles. The text itself however presents a tightly woven
verbal mosaic, without paragraph breaks or sectional divisions. The descriptions
and conversations present a seamless and continuous discourse.

The narratrice introduces her guests from a far-off land. She welcomes the
heroine, at first known only as la belle Etrangére, and her companions, Telamon
and Glicere. The narratrice and her guests view the public and private spaces of

the king’s court. Through their eyes, the reader envisions Versailles in every

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minute detail and every aspect of architecture and ornamentation. Vistas and
visions from balustrades to fountains, gardens to omithological collections,
tapestry to objets d’art. The reader-voyeur is privy to all the public and private
spaces of Versailles, including the queen’s chamber.

La Promenade de Versailles focuses on the role of the ocular in fiction.
Scudéry’s description of Versailles serves as a pretext for an elaborate and
extended éloge of “Louis Quatorziéme, tel qu’il étoit avant les conquestes de
Flandres 8 de la F ranche-Comté”(41) and his court. La belle Etrangére and
Telamon praise Louis as a great warrior and the text describes his exploits in
battle. The textual juxtaposition of Louis XIV and the site of his latest conquests
prove not to be coincidental. While Part 1 of La Promenade de Versailles clearly
serves as a pretext to praise the king, subtle indications point to a secret political
critique which could undermine the glory that the king values above all else.

Glicere avows that she prefers heroes to their palaces. “[Clomme j’aime
toujours mieux les Heros que leur Palais; je croi qu’avant que de voir celuy-cf,
vous devriez nous bien representer quel en est le maistre.”(35) Glicere subtly
pays the king a compliment by suggesting that the man, Louis XIV, is more
important than his palace, Versailles. Telamon’s answer trumps Glicere’s
compliment by suggesting that Louis XIV is known the world over. He replies:
“Pouvons-nous donc ignorer ce qu’est un Roi que toute la terre connoist 8
admire?”(37) He goes on at length to praise the king’s renown in battle.

Significantly, he adds, “[J']ajouterai, si vous me le perrnettez, a cet éloge ce que

239

—'1

 

IF“, '_11AL"T_-

 

toute la terre ne sais pas moins desormais: Un esprit amoureux de la gloire, 8
qui en fait sa premiere passion (37).”

Love of glory drives Louis XIV. He believed that glory derived from foreign
conquests.3 Although La Promenade de Versailles has been viewed by most
literary critics as an unabashed éloge of Louis XIV, the text subtly critiques Louis’
ambitious wartime enterprises, particularly, as they were accomplished at the
expense of his less fortunate subjects. The écriture politique of La Promenade de
Versailles both praises and criticizes Louis XIV.

Scudéry’s juxtaposition of Louis Quatorzieme with Flandres and the
Franche-Comté links his great name with the War of Devolution that had most
recently taken place. Scudéry’s novel was published in 1669, just after the end
of Louis XIV’s latest conflict and conquest in a series of wars spanning from 1661
to 1715.4

Having associated Louis XIV with the conquests of F landres and Franche-
Comté, the narratrice of La Promenade de Versailles adds a somewhat cryptic
comment.

II [Telamon] nous a fait voir admirablement en fort peu d’espace un grand

roi fort honneste homme, mais si la fantaisie m'en prend en quelque

endroit de la promenade, je vous Ie montrerai encore aussi grand

Captaine que vaillant soldat, 8 nous verrons alors, s’il ne me reste rien a

dire. (41)

Admittedly, the hedge of the narratrice can only be described as faint.

But, why does she defer her appraisal of Louis’ velour? The reader must wonder

what more the narratrice has to say about Louis XIV.

240

 

 

And as the novel advances, a subtle political critique of the second part of
the novel,“Histoire de Celanire,” counter balances the ostentatious eulogy in the
first part of La Promenade de Versailles. A more open and forceful critic of Louis
XIV’s political and military policies would certainly have landed Scudéry in prison
for Iése-majesté. Her closest companions Nicolas Fouquet and Paul Pellisson

had already been arrested for political reasons.

A biographical link between Scudéry, Pellisson and Fouquet exists in La
Promenade de Versailles. Louis XIV unquestionably represents a stellar (solar)
exemplar in “La Promenade de Versailles,” Part 1. However, the subtle
subversion of the exemplar in “Histoire de Celanire” convinces the reader that
Scudéry’s text conveys a certain reserve with regard to the relationship of Louis
to his courtiers and the expenses of his foreign campaigns. Political jealousy led
to Fouquet and Pellisson’s arrest. The vast expenditures of money on Versailles
and in war led to the deprivation of the masses and eventually to the bankruptcy

of France at Louis XIV’s death.

These issues lie at the crux of the evaluation given Louis XIV as an
absolute monarch even today. And, the king’s singular verve to conquer for the
greater glory of France and, of course, for himself, provides the background for
the inner most secret critique of absolutism in La Promenade de Versailles.
Scudéry desires to praise her monarch and she does. But, she also bares the
scars of her best friend Pellisson’s arrest and her friend Fouquet’s death as he

languished in the Bastille for years. The novel seems to honor Louis XIV, as

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V W .HIII‘ ‘JJ‘J.
.1 L

 

indeed it does. It also offers a veiled critique, the only kind of critique that could

succeed in the absolutist France of Louis XIV.

Within the pages of the first part of Le Promenade de Versailles, a
foreshadowing of a major political critique can be found. Scudéry’s écriture
politique describes the results of extravagant spending in warfare through the
feminized, that is, interiorized discourse of the conversation. The legendary king
of seventeenth-century France, Louis XIV as well as the fictional warrior hero
Cleandre from the faraway homeland of Celanire, evoke images of valiant kings

and courtiers.

Louis XN’s strong desire to wage war is already alluded to by Glicere in
the first part of La Promenade de Versailles, when she questions the king’s
willingness to leave the most pleasant palace of Versailles to go off to war. The
results of his avid desire to wage war are again expounded in the politically

senstive non-numbered pages of the “Histoire de Celanire.”
“Histoire de Celanire”, Part 2

The distant land of Celanire’s birth portrays a parallel universe to
Versailles, a court society ruled by an equally belligerent king and his most
respected courtier, Cleandre. Public sacrifice for the state appears to be praised
in both parts of the novel, the description of Versailles, as well as in the
romanesque story of the “Histoire de Celanire.” The text also reveals the cost of
waging war. Public deeds for the state, such as European conquests, have
repercussions for France and for the poor masses, even as they view the

bonfires lit to celebrate the King’s costly military exploits.

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In Part 2, “Histoire de Celanire,” another critique reveals itself, in the form
of an écriture précieuse. The public deeds for the state and the public exploits of
warrior kings are contrasted to the private lives and rights of women and the
disenfranchised poor. In La Promenade de Versailles, both patriotism and
patriarchy are critiqued. Patriots and patriarchs, praised and reviled. Margaret
Doody speaks to the issue of the public and private realms as they are

delineated in Scudéry’s works.

Novels of the period [seventeenth-century novels] deal with what the
eighteenth century was going to define as ‘happiness’ at the nexus of the
public and the private. Life is understood to be a political affair [...]
Scudéry’s Artamene, ou la Grand Cyrus [...is] politically conscious and
analytical [...] The Précieuses had a strong view of the importance of
women and were visibly bringing about a social revolution. They disturbed
the dynastic proprieties in their announced insistence on the right of a
woman not to marry if she chose not to, and her right to judge her suitor
by her own standards of what is pleasing or intelligent.(235-265)

Further, Doody contends that Scudéry’s novels contain an “implicit critique
of absolute rule.”(265) Celanire could be the prototype of Doody’s Précieuse.
Celanire's declaration of her personal rights implicitly defies absolutism. She
textually declares her right to choose. At the death of her parents, she is sent to
live with her ambitious uncle. She became the object of “tous ceux qui pouvoient,
ou par amour ou par ambition pretendre de I'épouser (107).” Here, at the very

beginning of her story, the text declares her desire for independence.

Mais comme son inclination ne la portoit pas a s’engager si promptement,
8 qu’elle vouloit avoir le temps de faire un choix digne d’elle, elle éloigne
sagement 8 avec beaucoup d’adresse cette foule de pretendans; 8
l’annee de deul‘I se passa avec le plus de solitude qu’il Iuy fut
possible.(107-108)

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Celanire declares her right to choose her suitor. Then, in the ongoing
dialogue between Celanire and Cleandre about keeping their relationship secret,
Celanire’s declares her right to judge her suitor on her own terms, namely, a
strictly enforced code of silence. Utmost privacy in her love affair is what pleases
her. The discourse of secrecy revealed in the rhetoric of Celanire and Cleandre’s
amorous debates demonstrates Scudéry’s intelligence and her ability to argue

well.

In the meantime, Celanire refuses to accept the suitor that her uncle and
the king have chosen for her. Celanire is first forced to take refuge in a convent
because of her uncle’s demands. Then she escapes and flees. She goes into a

self-enforced exile that leads her to France and Versailles.

There are several subsections in the “Histoire de Celanire.” Both of
“relations”of the celebrations at Versailles in 1668 are introduced by subtitles: “La
Feste de Versailles, A Madame La ***” and “La Feste de Versailles, A
M.*“(569,574).” The concluding pages of the “Histoire de Celanire” are enh'tled

“Suite de I’Histoire de Celanire (611).”

After the accounts of the “Feste de Versailles,” the novel crowns the
success of Louis XIV's celebration with the joyous arrival of Clenadre to
Versailles The concluding pages of “Histoire de Celanire are entitled “Suite de
I’Histoire de Celanire (611).” Cleandre recounts his last days in their homeland
after Celanire’s departure. Celanire who had gone into exile to escape her
uncle’s demands that she marry Cleonte, who she considered an unworthy

suitor.

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Cleandre is forced into exile because he kills Alcinor, one of Celanire’s
would-be suitors, in a dual. Cleandre then recounts his adventures on the high
seas. He was kidnapped by pirates. But Cleandre gains his freedom as he leads
a revolt of slaves against the Turks. Upon his return to France, in another chance
encounter Cleandre serendipitously saves Celanire’s uncle’s life. All is
reconciled. Cleandre returns to the good graces of his king. Celanire’s uncle
embraces Cleandre. Thus, the stage is set for Cleandre’s triumphant arrival at

Versailles.

When Cleandre finds her in France, she coyly but happily welcomes him.
She does eventually marry Cleandre, but only on her own terms. He is the suitor
she has chosen for herself. Celanire’s plaidoirie of women’s rights outlined in the
“Histoire de Celanire” aptly follows the definition of Doody’s emancipated

Précieuse. Celanire becomes Doody’s Précieuse.

Neither the political nor the feminist critiques of La Promenade de
Versailles imply a genre change. Le Promenade de Versailles is neither a
political tract nor a feminist manifesto. The works stands as an avatar of what
DeJean calls the “great French tradition of the novel (Tender 55).” The political
and social discourses are revealed through a literary discourse, par excellence.
The radical feminization of the novelistic form that Scudéry’s novel demonstrates
does not thereby turn the novel into the discourse of a radical feminist. In fact,
the redefinition of the genre creates a space for equality of the sexes rather than

superiority of one over the other.

245

 

.Ffi-‘T

 

 

The Stylistics of Scudérian Préciosité
in La Promenade de Versailles

The material presentation of Scudéry’s novels and her style are critically
important to an interpretation of their content and worth. René Godenne and
Nicole Aronson, two eminent Scudérian scholars, discuss the stylistic
characteristics of Scudéry’s novels. Godenne has read and analysed in minute
detail the entire corpus of Scudéry‘s works. He undertook this monumental task,
only to agree with the womout cliche that Scudéry’s novels are unreadable.

Que les faiblesses occultent finalement les aspects positifs ne fait
hélas! pas de doute: séparant toujours le plan de l’action du plan de la
réflexion, sacrifiant de plus en plus Ie premier au profit du second, Mlle de

Scudéry demissionne de sa fonction de romanciere. La est I’erreur

fondamental, car, en éliminant I’action au profit de la réflexion, elle vide

l’ceuvre romanesque de sa substance premiere, elle en rend la lecture

impossible.(Romans 342)

Godenne wrote the preface for the 1979 Slatkine Reprint of La
Promenade de Versailles. However, he again subtly signals his displeasure with
Scudéry’s style, wherein reflection supercedes action.

First he indicates his approval of the “unite anecdotique” in La Promenade
de Versailles, since Scudéry limits “des recits de personnages secondaires qui
exigent dans ses romans [as oppossed to in her nouvelles] de longs
développements et qui détoument souvent pour rien—notre attention du sujet
principal [...](Preface Ill-IV).”

Godenne finds Scudéry's dialogism an unnecessary distraction from the

action.

ll y a une predilection évidente chez Mlle de Scudéry pour ce genre de
reunions [characters of the novel engaging in conversations] puisque

246

 

'FJh-‘i .505" 'I 9%?“

 

chacune de ses nouvelles [Célinte, Mathilde, and La Promenade de

Versailles] s’ouvre sur l’évocation des divertissements d’une societe de

gens d’esprit, et une evocation sur laquelle s’attarde tellement l’auteur

qu’il faut attendre la page... 103 dans Le Promenade pour que commence

I’action. (Preface VII)

Godenne clearly reveals his predilection for action over description. The
action lingers because of the author’s frequent descriptions of courtly
divertissements. Godenne fails to appreciate Scudéry’s subtle textual play. The
novel interrupts the storyline to describe the diversions of seventeenth-century
court society.

Godenne is anxious for the story to advance, but the novel disappoints his
expectations.

Dans ces conditions,[the delayed beginning of the story] il n’est pas

étonnant que le recit proprement dit de La Promenade avance tres

Ientement, car des pages entieres sont consacrées a la transcription des

vers, a la relation des divertissements ou au detail des discussions.

L’interet anecdotique passe au second plan.(VlI)

The narrative style of La Promenade de Versailles frustrates Godenne as
did Scudéry’s narration in her longer novels.

Nicole Aronson begins her work Mademoiselle de Scudéry et la voyage au
Pays de Tendre by addressing the perennial issue of Scudéry’s readability. She
also recognizes the difficult that the material condition of seventeenth-century
texts has posed for readers.

‘Aucune patience meme resignee ne résiste a Clélie ou a Cyrus. Or les

contemporains s’y amusaient infiniment.’ Cette remarque d’un éminent

dix-septiémiste a propos des deux romans les plus celebres de Mlle de

Scudéry nous aide a prendre conscience du fait que, malgré notre

comprehension de la langue du Grand Siecle, nous n’apprecions pas

vraiment le contenu de ce que nous lisons, puisque ce qui était censé

distraire nous ennuie. Cette cassure, entre les Iecteurs du XVII° siecle et
nous, peut se percevoir de facon évidente simple en feuilletant un roman

247

_' .W _ .5 -

 

 

de l’époque; nous trouvons des centaines et des centaines de pages,
sans paragraphe, sans alinéa, sans que la dialogue aere Ie texte, pour ne
rien dire de l’orthographe ou des caracteres d’imprimerie. On a, des le
premier abord, le sentiment qu'il s’agit d'un travail bien indigeste, mais les
gens du XVII° siecle trouveraient probablement que nos romans ne valent
pas la peine qu’on se lance dans leur lecture qui peut étre finie en une
heure ou deux.(13)

This dissertation presents a reading of La Promenade de Versailles that
dispels the myth of Scudéry’s unreadability. Scudéry’s novels are not replete
with fast-action story-lines. Godenne’s preference for action over reflection, and I
therefore analysis, seems outdated. Anyone even modestly knowledgeable about 3.

twentieth-century theories of narratology understands and appreciates that the

 

‘E.W wt). .r 1

merit of a novel may not and usually does lie in the plot line alone.

Aronson identified the potential difficulty of reading a seventeenth-century
novel in the original. The material condition of the texts prohibits them from
offering an “easy read.” Protracted attention must be paid since line follows line
and page follows page without paragraph breaks. The text of a seventeenth-
century novel provides no ideal place to set it down! Few breaks that we consider

normal in a twentieth-century novel exist in the texts of the seventeenth century.

 

If one begins to read a seventeenth-century novel in an original version
without preconceived prejudices, the aesthetic experience can be very powerful.
Le Promenade de Versailles is aesthetically pleasing. It begins with an intriguing
frontispiece and the work is printed in a beautiful baroque, scrolled type-set.
Even though the continuous text presents no obvious stopping points, the pages
of La Promenade de Versailles are rather small. One can take a break, as it

were, at the end of a series of pages. Also, if one is privileged to hold an original

248

text in one’s hands, such as the original copy of La Promenade de Versailles in
the Newbeny Library in Chicago, one feels transformed by the beauty of the
material text of the seventeenth century.

While many critics of the nineteenth and twentieth century found

Scudéry’s works unreadable, some twenty-first century reader’s sensibilities have

changed. Not all readers, even of seventeenth-century France, appreciated
Scudéry’s work. lrrefutably, the reading and buying public was amused by
Scudéry’s novel. Scudéry brought about the radical feminization of the novelistic
form that to this day troubles readers expecting a novel to contain a masculine
discourse of desire.

Godenne, though he has devoted much of his career to the reading and
analysis of the Scudérian corpus, is clearly troubled by the style of her novels. In
his critique of La Promenade de Versailles, he is so intent on proving the
disruptive nature of the lengthy conversations in Scudéry’s work that he fails to
mention that the novel contains a brilliant description of Versailles. Scudéry’s
description of Versailles in additon to being a tribute to the palace and Louis XIV
provides an outstanding example of her talent as a descriptive writer. This fact
seems to escape Godenne. Scudéry’s La Promenade de Versailles presents an
exemplary description of an exemplary king.

Much of the description of Versailles in Part 1 takes place in the fete e
tetes of the characters as they stroll through the palace and admire its many

treasures. Even Gustave Lanson, who declared Scudéry’s works “illisible,”

249

 

- '1 ‘ l'TJle11

 

.Fe. W” _ r
A I

 

admired her conversations. The conversations were the one aspect of her work
that he appreciated.

Godenne, on the other hand, reveals himself as a reader similar to the one
described in the first part of La Promenade de Versailles. When Glicere comes
across a description in a novel, “[elle] les passe sans les lire, et court aprés les
Heros, comme si elle avoit part a leurs aventures, et qu’elle fut Ia rivale des
Heroines (6).” Godenne’s commentaries on Scudéry’s novels reveal his bias
toward action-packed novels. He also would like to run after the Heros’

adventures and skip over the long descriptions.

If one were to assume that a men might enjoy reading about the
adventures of the heroes more than a woman, Glicere shows she readily
identifies with what might be considered a masculine preoccupation with heroic
deeds. Glicere’s predelication for what is sterotypically considered to be a male’s
preferred mode of discouse, precociously undermines the notion of such gender

specific generalizations.

In addition to the potential gender reversal in her reading habits in the
diegesis, Glicere’s name elicits her gender bending quality on the narrative level,
as she becomes a female narrator-agent in Part 2 of the “Histoire de Celanire.”
Obviously Glicere, being a character of the novel, is not an omniscient nanatrice.
Importantly, however, as in Part 1, narrated by an unnamed woman at the court
of Versailles, Part 2 also has a narratrice. The narrative voice is that of a female
for most of the novel. When Cleandre arrives at Versailles, he takes over the

narration to recount the adventures that lead him from the land of Celanire to

250

Versailles. As if to stand in stark contrast to the rest of the novel, Cleandre’s

narration recalls the earlier Scudérian style of Ibrahim.

To return to Glicere and Godenne’s reading preference, namely, running
after the heros, another twentieth-century reader of La Promenade de Versailles

found the same passage as Godenne significant.

Richard G. Hodgson, in his article entitled “Probleme d’esthétique du
roman a l’époque classique: La Promenade de Versailles de Madeleine de
Scudéry” quotes the passage concerning readers running after the Heros.
However, Hodgson’s article does not find the merit of La Promenade de
Versailles to rest in either the action or the conversations per se. He reads the

novel, as his title implies, with an eye to its intrinsic beauty.

In La Promenade de Versailles, Versailles first presents itself in the title of
the work and then becomes the ostensible subject of the first part of the novel.
The lengthy, intricate description of the first part of the novel implies that Scudéry
appreciates the beauty of Versailles and the merit of Louis XIV who
metonymically stands in for the palace. Le Promenade de Versailles does praise

Louis XIV.

Scudéry would appreciate Hodgson’s architectonic analysis of her novel.
Hodgson cites Apostolides: “Le jardin se dechiffre comme une oeuvre d’art: texte
Iittéraire et texte ’naturel’ sont deux facons différentes de tenir un meme discours

(338).”

251

 

Then, with a slightly humourous wink to his reader, Hodgson adds that
“meme si Madeleine de Scudéry n’avait sans doute jamais songé a appeler un
jardin un texte [As Foucault would say,”Ceci n’est pas un jardinl’], elle était
certainement convaincue que Ie romancier a beaucoup de choses en commun
avec l’architecte et le jardinier (338).” Certainly, if a reader of La Promenade de

Versailles found it to be as harmonious and coherent as the palace and gardens

of Versailles, Scudéry would appreciate the compliment. But Hodgson’s
contention that Scudéry sought to create such harmony and coherency proves
problematic.
Hodgson concludes his essay with an intriguing proposition. “Aux yeux de E

 

Madeleine de Scudéry, le roman doit avant tout répondre aux memes besoins
d’ordre, de stabilite et d’harrnonie qui sont a l’origine de l’architecture classique

francaise et du jardin a la francaise (361).”

There can be no question that the symmetry in the architecture and
gardens of Versailles evoke classical order, stability, and harmony. Scudéry may

well have wanted to appropriate those timeless ideals in her novel.
Hodgson quotes Ferrier-Caveriviere’s depiction of Louis XIV.

[... I] est I’Ordre incamé, immuable colosse qu’aucune tempete ne saurait
faire trembler. Au début de son regne en particulier, il est Ie modele de
I’équilibre tant desire, le maitre incomparable qui a chasse tous les
désordres et fait de son royaume un hannonieux et magnifique
édifice.(341)

Clearly Hodgson believes the gardens and the architecture of Versailles

reflect the “immuable colossus” that was Louis XIV. At least Ferrier-Caveriviere

252

 

qualifies his eulogy of Louis XIV. He speaks here only of the beginning of Louis’
reign. If one reads its history one knows that in the end, he left France in financial
ruin. The chaos that ensues eventually leads Louis XVI to the guillotine and
France to the revolution. A good Republican might say all the better that he left
things in disarray, since it eventually led to the end of the monarchy. A good

royalist might say, aprés lui (Louis), le deluge!5

Madeleine de Scudéry appears to be a loyal royalist. Her novel truly
praises Louis XIV and his palace. Her text points to the efficacy of a true
hereditary monarchy. However, another voice of the text, Glicere’s, makes light
of the notion of a hereditary monarchy. And while her characters admire
Versailles, the text warns Louis XIV of the danger of excess. La Promenade de
Versailles subtly offers Louis XIV a warning about fiscal overexpenditure on wars
and overly opulent spending on his pleasure palace. Even a virtuous monarch

must guard against abusing his sovereign rights and royal coffers.

While Hodgson’s thesis purports that an inviting classical allure adorns La
Promenade de Versailles, the overarching goal of the novel cannot be seen as
searching to create the same harmonious and cohesive effects to imitate the

palace and gardens of Versailles.

On the contrary, Scudéry’s novel disrupts the harmony and cohesion of
the description of Versailles. In so doing it also aims to shake out the novelisfic
tradition. La Promenade de Versailles looks to create textual disorder and an

apparent incoherence.

253

 

 

 

 

DeJean traces the changes in narrative style in Scudéry’s novels. We will
quote DeJean extensively and follow her argument closely, because, as we will
see, it points to a critical interpretation of La Promenade de Versailles that helps

to unlock its meaning.

DeJean claims that Ibrahim, Scudéry’s first novel “closely resembles the
production of the leading contemporary male novelists, La Calprenede and
Martin le Roy de Gomberville. It is action-oriented, centered on the exploits of its
hero and his doubles, the only major departure from this active focus is

Scudéry’s more extensive use of intercalated stories (81-82).”

By contrast, in Scudéry’s second novel, Artemene ou le Grand Cyrus,
DeJean suggests that Scudéry “develops her model for historical fiction (81).”
She gives two reasons. First Scudéry’s “extensive historical research” and the
fact that it is a roman a clef.(81) DeJean explains the importance of the keys

very carefully.

The parallels with contemporary history guaranteed that, in the highly
charged atmosphere of a period of civil war,[the Fronde] the work would
be read as a political allegory on history in the making. In the wake of
Artamene, until well into the eighteenth century, the decision to write
historical fiction almost invariably was accompanied by the desire to have
the fictional setting decoded as a reference to contemporary political
event. (81)

La Promenade de Versailles definitely offers a message to be decoded
about Louis XIV and the Parisian society of the seventeenth-century France. The
eulogy of Part 1 of the novel gives way to a romanesque story in Part 2 of the

novel that depicts a less perfect monarchy and society. DeJean further claims

254

that with Artaméne ou le Grand Cyrus “[t]he bond forged between prose fiction

and political subversion marks the origin of the modern French novel [...] (45).”

With DeJean’s powerful suppositions in mind, let us explain why La
Promenade de Versailles intentionally offers textual disorder and an apparent
incoherence. The development that DeJean characterizes in Artamene begins to

explain why an author might consciously choose to be out of order.

DeJean contends that Scudéry was infially content with her “successful

formula for Artaméne (82).” She adds:

In the course of the novel’s unfolding, however, she introduces with
increasing frequency two new forms, the portrait and the conversation,
intended to produce a radical disruption of the narrative flow. As we have
seen, these forms no longer equate character development with the recital
of exploits and achievements: they replace the pure exteriority of the
traditional heroic format with an increased emphasis on interiority-certainly
not in the fullness to which more recent fiction has accustomed us, but to
a then unprecedented degree. Rather than simply moving from one
adventure to the next, characters begin to reveal their thoughts on various
subjects, what they value in other human beings, their codes and rules of
personal conduct.(82)

DeJean attributes the invention of the conversation and the portrait to
Madeleine de Scudéry. La Promenade de Versailles offers an exemplary portrait
of Louis XIV in Part 1 of the novel and then in Part 2, the “Histoire de Celanire,” it
offers a romantic story whose conversations offer revelations concerning issues

ranging from personal integrity and freedom to political efficacy.

DeJean enunciates Scudéry’s invention of these two innovative novelistic
devices, the conversation and the portrait. I would amend DeJean’s description in

one detail, which is her contention that Scudéry’s interiority does not “have the

255

 

 

fullness to which more recent fiction has accustomed us.” Her longer novels may
not, but Le Promenade de Versailles does. It is as rich in interiority as many
twentieth-century novels.

And, this dissertation adds a twist to DeJean’s narrative formulation.
Scudéry’s overt movement toward interiority and away from exteriority, that is
preferring reflective dialogue over heroic action, becomes a précieuse invention,
in fact, an écriture précieuse. Scudéry’s insertion of the conversation in La
Promenade de Versailles gives her text the latitude it needs to put forth a daring
political critique of Louis XIV and absolutism, reflecting both the politics of the
polls, ecriture politique, and feminist politics, écriture feminine.

The turn from narrative exteriority that describes the hero’s adventures to
the narrative interiority becomes the heroes’ and heroines’ discourse in La
Promenade de Versailles. The shift in gender identification of the narrative
produces a radical feminization of narration. Chapter 3 of this dissertation traces
the bold political critique embedded in La Promenade de Versailles. Chapter 4
describes Scudéry’s feminization of the narration through the technique of the
conversation. The conversation provides the narrative frame to explore
sensitive gender issues such as the secret. The novel’s focus on the secret
allows La Promenade de Versailles to point discretely to Louis XIV obsession
with secrets and court intrique. The power of the secret drove the most powerful
warrior king of seventeenth-century Europe. Does the appropriation of the secret
in La Promenade de Versailles weaken or empower the king? Does La

Promenade de Versailles subtly attempt to teach the king to embrace his

256

 

F

 

feminine side? Surely, in an absolutist regime, the art of discretion could save
one’s life.

The pertinent question remains. How does one read a text? An impatient
reader may be eager to skip the intricate conversations of the text. To follow the
argumentation of a conversation requires a thoughtful reader willing to accept the
challenge. Even Lanson conceded the merit of Scudéry’s conversations. “II y a
beaucoup de sens et d’esprit dans ces conversations un peu longues, qui
publiees a part, devinrent comme Ie manuel de la bonne société (388).” Lanson’s
evaluation inadvertently reveals the great importance of La Promenade de
Versailles. Replete with conversations, it does indeed offer a manual for the
study of the elite society of seventeenth-century France and of its singular ruler,
Louis XIV.

How La Promenade de Versailles achieves this feat proves as important
as the counsel it provides. The fact that the novel describes Louis XIV's world
through narrative disruption (as opposed to the narrative coherence and
continuity that Godenne seeks) makes it an exemplar of the emerging modern
novel

DeJean has recognized the novelty and genius of Scudéry’s shorter
novels.

In Scudéry’s new model for prose fiction, as in the courts in exile like

Montpensier’s, the making of history is eclipsed by the writing of history.

This deferred, deflected perspective on action is a vision that, while fatal to

romance, generated what can be seen as the great French tradition of the

novel, the novel as saga of voyeurism and oblique action, progressing
inexorably toward the Iivre sur n'en.(55)

257

By the “making of history,” DeJean refers to the role of Scudéry and other
novelists directly or indirectly in the cause of the Fronde. DeJean contends that
with the defeat of the Frondeurs and Frondeuses, the only viable outlet for
feminists was in the writing of history. In La Promenade de Versailles, the
novelistic voyeur eyes the king and the oblique action progressing inexorably
toward the “rien” provides the background for the description of none other than
court of the grandest ruler of seventeenth-century Europe, Louis XIV.

“La Promenade de Versailles,” Part 1, offers a pre-text to the ’Histoire de
Celanire” Part 2, literally a text before the text. And, Part 1 of La Promenade de
Verailles provides a pretext, that is, an excuse for an elaborate and extremely

voyeuristic promenade around Versailles.

258

Notes

 

1See Prince 44 and Baldick 108. They present definitions of in medias res.

2 See Niderst, Leur Monde 483-486. ”La nouvelle ressemble parfois a une
anthologie de la poésie du XVII° siecle (484). ‘ Niderst identifies the poets and
their poetry that Scudéry includes in La Promenade de Versailles.

3 In La Promenade de Versailles, Scudéry confirms Louis XIV's glory even as she
subtly remembers the price his people paid for it. In his work entitled Louis XIV,
David L. Smith affirms Louis’ “pursuit of glory.” “The prestige of seventeenth-
century states was so closely linked to the personal reputations of their rulers
that Louis’s own pursuit of ‘glory’ was almost bound to affect France’s standing
within Europe (4). ‘Further, Smith’s text contends that: “One very influential line of
argument places ‘glory’ at the heart of Louis XIV’s concems.”(6) Smith cites
Roger Lockyer’s Habsburg and Bourbon Eumpe 1470-1720, wherein Lockyer
states that with regard to foreign expansion: “ [...] Louis’s achievement was
considerable. He gave France much stronger frontiers in the north and east; and
he secured part of the great Spanish inheritance for his own Bourbon family [...].
The price paid for this was high, perhaps too high, but Louis shared the
prevailing assumption that money must serve the demands of policy, not dictate
it. Oblivious to the sufferings of his subjects, he made La GIoire his object and
pursued it with such determination that he dazzed his contemporaries and
established at least a claim to greatness (123).” Three centuries after Madeleine
de Scudéry, Lockyer has repeated her conception of Louis XIV's glory and the

price his people paid for it.

259

 

4 See Smith 79.

5Of course, the famous quotation comes from Louis XV, not Louis XIV. Louis
XIV‘s military campaigns left the country in difficult straits financially. Under the
successful financial direction of Orly, Louis XV's reign sees economic expansion.
The financial crisis of 1787 adds to the unpopularity of Louis XVI and his ultimate

demise. He was condemned and guillotined in 1793.

260

APPENDIX B

The following photocopy represents the frontispiece and the title page of the
Slatkine Reprints 1979 publication of Claude Barbin’s original 1669 edition of

Madeleine de Scudéry’s La Promenade de Versailles used in this work.

261

The frontispiece and the title page of the 1669 edition of
Le Promenade de Versailles

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263

Appendix C

The Mysterious Ofigins of Moliere’s Les Précieuses ridicules
Emile Magne, in the introduction to his critical edition of Michel de Pure’s
La Prétieuse ou la m ystere des melles, offers an interesting insight. Magne

cites Somaize as accusing Moliere of having stolen the idea for the Précieuses

ridicules from Pure.

De janvier a mars 1660, Somaise fait jouer et publier deux comedies:
Les Véritables Prétieuses et les Prétieuses ridicules mises en vers.

Dans Ia preface et dans Ie texte (scene VII) de la premiere, dans la
preface de la seconde, il accuse violemment Moliere d'avoir vole a l’abbé
[de Pure] Ia farce que celui-ce confia jadis aux Comédiens italiens,
lesquels entirerent, de leur ceté, deux mille ecus sonnants. (Introduction

LXIV)

Magne claims that Pure:

a vu representer les Précieuses ridicules [...] Ila découvert entre le
theme de cette farce and Ie canevas de celle qu'il donna lui-meme, trois
ans auparavant, aux Comédiens italiens, des similitudes singuliers; or, il
sait, d’une part que le nouveau venu [Moliere] n’a guere trouve, depuis
son installation a Paris,le loisir de fréquenter des ruelles d’ailleurs
femiées aux gens de sa sorte et que, d’autre part, il vit en étroite amitié
avec ces comédiens italiens.”(lntroduction LXII)

Magne identifies both the title of Michel de Pure’s comedy (that which he
supposedly presented in 1656 at the Theatre italien as La Pretieuse) and the
text of the canevas of the play in Part III of the novel La Prétieuse. In a footnote,
Magne adds:

Ce canevas offre beaucoup de rapport avec la theme des Précieuses

ridicules de Moliere, piece représentée trois ans plus tard. Nous avons

dit dans notre notice que Ie comédien avait été accuse, non sans raison,

par divers contemporains, d’avoir derobé ce theme a I’oeuvre anterieure
de notre abbé.”(Part Three 172-173)

264

Magne’s research unveils several important facts. First, Michel de Pure
seems to have written the canevas and produced his play La Pretieuse three
years before Moliere’s Précieuses ridicules was produced. Secondly, the
supposed “Iarcin” (Introduction LXIII), Moliere, did not have the time nor was he
of the right “sort” to actually attend any salons gatherings. Pure, on the other
hand, did have access to salons.

Tout en siégeant fort souvent dans le ‘senat’ de Mmes les Précieuses,

Michel de Pure ne neglige pas d’entretenir ses amitiés et d’un chercher

de nouvelles a la ville comme a la cour. Il est de nature sociable; il est

devenue davantage depuis que les belles dames de ruelles lui ont
communique de I’assurance en estimant ses propos dignes de

considérations.”(lntroduction XLIII)

The actual text of Pure’s play La Pretieuse has apparently been lost.
However, Magne tries to make it clear that Michel de Pure had the occasion to
actually interact with habitué(e)s of the salons of mid-seventeenth-century
Paris. One of de Pure’s salon acquaintances actually adressed his letters to “M.
l’abbé de la Pretieuse (Introduction LXIII).”

According to Magne’s account, Moliere did not frequent any salon and
therefore, he would not have known any salon women personally. So why
would Moliere make Madeleine de Scudéry the target of his satire and the
model of the bad précieuse in Les Précieuses ridicules? Several centuries of
scholarship have linked Scudéry to the notion of the bad précieuse, the
précieuse non-vraie of Moliere’s Les Précieuses ridicules. Given her reknown

as a novelist in the seventeenth-century France, certainly Moliere knew of

Scudéry by reputation and possibly even read her works.

265

In his article written in 1994, “Une Comédie imaginarie: La Pretieuse de
l’abbé de Pure,” Roger Duchéne speculates in turn that Michel de Pure never
wrote a play called La Pretieuse, let alone staged a production of it.(213-220)
However, by continuing the theatrical tradition of the sixteenth-century of the
staging of impromptu repertory plays based on the canevas du jour, it is entirely
possible that Moliere borrowed the canevas of Pure and/or of his Italian actor
colleagues. It seems less likely that Italian players would have Madeleine de

Scudéry as the object of their satire.

266

Works Cited

267

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth. Writing and Sexual Difference. Chicago, The University of
Chicago Press, 1982.

Aragonnes, Claude. Madeleine de Scudéry, Reine du Tendre. Paris: Librairie
Arman Colin, 1934.

Aronson, Nicole. Mademoiselle de Scudéry ou la voyage au Pays de Tendre.
Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1986.

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