which celebrated the self in its connections to a tight-knit and highly exclusive community of exceptional individuals. In the éloge to Voiture with which he prefaces his edition of the poet’s Oeuvres, Pinchesne calls attention to Voiture’s “too familiar” style in his letters and poems to nobles: “he had acquired this privilege by his habit of interacting in this way with the most noble individuals, and by the liberty that they themselves allowed him.”105
As a result, patronage and service to political and social elites were more likely to be experienced as an opening up of possibilities for “literary” self-expression rather than as a limitation on them. And it is in this opening that seventeenth-century “court writers” located their autonomy, the most powerful figuration of which lay in an image of leisure manifesting their now enhanced standing.106 This leisure was represented as the crucible of their writing and, in turn, transformed the writing by infusing it with prestige and cachet. Offered as a backdrop to the activities of composing epistles, poems, plays, and prose romances, it rendered the various practices of belles-lettres as credible reflections of their privileged status, and therefore as the vehicles of plausible claims to “noble” identities.107 The “autonomization” of belles-lettres—and we could add, echoing Timothy Reiss, the invention of “literature”108—might be gauged by the extent to which such practices became, through the elevation of esprit as a marker of personal quality, sufficient for establishing valorized identities insofar as they were able, in and of themselves, to situate gens de lettres in social milieus where their ennobled selves would be recognized as such: Voiture’s “facility of intellect,” Pinchesne pointed out, “led him to be warmly welcomed by the highest noblemen and princes of the court.”109
Put another way, the “autonomization” of the first literary field consisted in the process by which the activities of belles-lettristic writing and publishing, as these increasingly opened opportunities for service to political and social authorities, also increasingly afforded possibilities for individuals to represent themselves as integrated into the elite. Expressing gratitude to the Académie for its final judgment in the Querelle du Cid, Scudéry writes: “It is not in the mass of people nor in the cave of a loner that one must seek sovereign reason; it is where I have always found it, that is, in a society of excellent individuals.”110 By dint of their service, they were able to project themselves into a state of leisure that was at the same time a respite from the weighty responsibilities that had come with their social ascension and the underlying reality of their day-to-day existence in the upper reaches of the hierarchy. This leisure was then reinterpreted as the cause rather than the effect of their writing; it was offered as a condition that, in allowing them to “do as they please,” freed them to write, with “freedom” understood not as a “lifting of barriers” but as a “privilege” or “entitlement” ensuing from their high social position. Scudéry depicts himself in his prefaces as a retired soldier having once served the king in battle but now with time to kill: “Poetry is for me an agreeable entertainment, and not a serious occupation,” he writes in the preface to his 1631 tragicomedy Ligdamon et Lidias. “If I write verse, it is because I do not know what else to do.”111 Such a stance, of course, downplays any hint of professionalism; and as he would do in the course of the Querelle, Scudéry affects insouciance toward his writing, which contributes to the sense of an identity rooting itself not in any intellectual practice but in his past as a former commander of Royal troops. Poems and plays were no more than side occupations for a now idle man of the sword:
You will easily overlook the mistakes that I have missed, if you realize that … I’ve spent more years amongst arms than hours in my study, and used far more wick firing an harquebus than burning a candle; such that I know better how to arrange soldiers than dialogue.112
Scudéry was called out on this posturing, as we have seen.113 But while it was challenged, the image gained credibility. In the polemics of the Querelle, the motif of Scudéry as a soldier who battled heroically for the common cause insinuates itself not only into his own writing but into the language of other anti-Corneille pamphleteers as well. Surprised by Corneille’s attack against him, Claveret imputes it to “a remainder of pride that the arms of the Observateur du Cid [Scudéry] have not yet been able destroy.”114 Mairet brings the militaristic imagery into sharper focus, recounting a critical assault on Le Cid in which “Monsieur de Scudéry slashed twenty times with his sword into its body.”115 Against the arrogance of Corneille, Scudéry offers the model of a viable, honnête intellectual autonomy that was established in two moves: first, a rhetorical inversion by which Scudéry’s “literary” practices are presented as the reflections of his military service and hence of his aristocratic identity, whereas it is really his “service” as a commander of troops and by extension his “noble” self that are the emanations of his writing and publishing activities; and second, the imposition of this inverted relationship into certain quasi-official discourses such as dedications and privilèges, and consequently onto a small but crucial public willing to buy into it—if not fully, since there were many within that public who sought to unveil the artifice of the reversal, then at least somewhat. But no doubt, this was the best for which one could realistically hope. For in the context of the “first literary field” what was at stake was less the undisputed recognition of a “literary” identity than its recognizability, and the possibility that it could be claimed and defended. Opposition not only went without saying but was in the end essential to this recognizability.
“Corneille,” the Book Trade, and Honnête Publication
Commercial print publication became one of the first literary field’s central institutions as it was perceived to open up this honnête autonomy to writers. In this respect, the book trade found its coherence and shape for seventeenth-century cultural life not by offering writers an escape from dependence on aristocratic patrons but in the manner of other formations such as academies and salons, that is, insofar as it offered a medium for the invention and projection of an identity that would be legitimized, valorized, and thus freed to speak by the integration of the intellectual into le monde. It entered into the mental landscape of writers as an “institution of literary life” to the extent that writers appropriated commercial print as a mechanism of their elite acculturation, which in the spaces of self-presentation defined by the printed text—prefaces, dedications, notes to readers, introductory letters, privilèges, and letters patent—facilitated the illustration of their sociability, quality, and esprit.
Correlatively, while we are inclined to assess writers’ early contacts with the book trade as implicit, primitive, and indirect claims to “literary property” or payments, the reality is that these contacts came to play meaningful roles in the literary lives of Classical-era gens de lettres insofar as they were converted into devices and tropes for fashioning, controlling, and polishing their images as honnêtes gens before the elite public from whom they sought their consecration. Even when they expressed proprietary sentiments. Saint-Amant justified the publication of his Oeuvres in 1629 by indicating in the preface his fear that counterfeit copies would circulate if an authorized version did not. The gesture is open to interpretation as a “modern” claim to the ownership of his writing. It is, though, appropriated by the poet not as an assertion of his individual rights but in an effort to find and maintain that fine line between modesty and distinction that was essential to honnête self-presentation. Hence the deep ambivalence of a gesture offered in the end as an expression of both self-effacement and self-promotion, with Saint-Amant initially submitting his concern about pirated copies as evidence of his humility:
The just vexation that I have when I see the many small poets impudently claiming items that they have stolen from works appearing in my name, and the fear I have that some provincial bookseller would have the gall to print these items without my consent, as they have threatened to do, are what have led me to try to beat them to it [printing my poems], rather than any desire I have to acquire in this way glory.
He
