And in all places, my verse is my only partisan.]
Corneille goes on to conclude notoriously (referring back to his verse):
Par leur seule beauté ma plume est estimée
Je ne dois qu’à moi seul toute ma Renommée.40
[By its sole beauty, my pen is esteemed
I owe only to myself all of my renown.]
Much of the ensuing polemic consisted in denunciations of this self-affirmation and the personal failing that it expressed. The tone was set by Jean Mairet, a rival playwright who quickly published a rhymed response taking Corneille to task for, as the descriptive title puts it, “A letter in verse, which he has published, entitled ‘Excuse à Ariste,’ in which, after a hundred expressions of vanity, he says about himself, I owe only to myself all of my renown.” The poem begins:
I am speaking to you, Braggart, whose utter audaciousness
Has in recent days been elevated into the sky.41
The venomous exchange that launched the Querelle might be seen as incidental to the deeper issues at stake; in the words of Armand Gasté, it was a “chance cause, but a first cause.”42 Hélène Merlin, however, has recently argued that the dispute over proper comportment for writers was at the core of the debate. She inverts Gasté’s reading by suggesting that it was the doctrinal questions that were secondary, and no more than a pretext for an engagement with overriding matters relating to the place of writers in an evolving court society and to a consequent redefinition of literary practice.43 To be sure, while doctrinal matters will dominate the judgment of the Académie française, which pronounced more or less the final word in the Querelle at the end of 1637—and which has, in turn, deeply influenced historical representations of the affair—when another playwright, Georges de Scudéry, first raised the question of Corneille’s dramaturgical transgressions in an Observations sur le Cid in the spring, it was in response not to Corneille’s failures as a craftsman of tragedies, but to his ethical lapses as an homme de lettres: “when I saw that he had deified himself by his own authority; that he talked about himself as one would normally talk about others, … I thought that I could not, without cowardice and injustice, abandon the common cause.” Otherwise, Scudéry goes on, “I am good and generous; … I had been happy to know the error without refuting it.”44
For Scudéry, the questions about doctrine were subordinated to the problem posed by Corneille’s immodesty, and served, above all, as part of a behavioral lesson designed to show how out of line the playwright was. Corneille rooted the celebration of his triumph in the “applause” he references in the “Excuse.” Scudéry then sets out to show the weakness of the public’s judgment; for the audience is ignorant of the art of theater and will be duped by a spectacle, regardless of the genuine quality of the play: “the People who judge with their eyes, allow themselves to be deceived by that sense which is, of all the senses, the easiest to fool.” Only a closer and more expert examination, in light of the “principles and rules of dramatic poetry,” will indicate what a play is really worth. And in the case of Le Cid such analysis unearths serious flaws, which Scudéry enumerates in detail: “That the subject is worth nothing at all; … that it lacks judgment in its construction; that it has a lot of bad verses.”45 With the public’s reception delegitimized as a gauge of the play’s quality, Corneille’s high opinion of his own work based on this acclamation no longer has a reasonable basis, but is now revealed to be an effect of self-delusional and ungainly arrogance. Responding to the following lines from Corneille’s “Excuse”:
Et [je] pense toute fois n’avoir point de rival
A qui je fasse tort en le traittant d’égal,
[And I believe that I have no rival
To whom I do wrong by treating him as an equal,]
Scudéry censures the playwright for such misguided pride with a trenchant appraisal of his writing, which illustrates the inseparability of the doctrinal critique from the ethical attack:
Now as to the versification, I admit that it is the best we have seen from this Author. Yet, it is not perfect enough such that he can say himself that he is leaving the earth; that his flight hides him away in the heavens; that he laughs at the despair of those who envy him; and that he has no rival who is not highly honored when he consents to treat him as an equal.46
It is in the context of this fierce polemic on Corneille’s arrogance that the classic image of the playwright as excessively invested in the commercialization of his works takes shape, not for the first time, of course, but in an urgent and reinvigorated elaboration. The image is invoked as further proof of Corneille’s ethical failing. For not only did he deign to sing his own praises, Scudéry writes, “he even had the high opinions he has of himself printed.”47 In fact, more than as additional evidence, the passage to print is rendered in anti-Corneille tirades as the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It is a gesture that finally pushes Corneille over the line, whereas until that point he had merely skirted the limit. Le Cid pushed the envelope, yet despite its errors it could be excused. What had to be called out was the unseemly choice to print it. “This, my friend, is why you are generally blamed, not for having written Le Cid with all the irregularities that can be detected throughout,” explains Mairet, “but only for your indiscretion in delivering it so quickly to a bookseller.”48 Another pamphleteer similarly contrasts the fatal decisiveness of publication with other less serious missteps: “You have made just two mistakes that cannot be repaired,” affirms the unnamed author, “one, having your play, which was so well-liked on stage, printed; and the other, having responded to he who criticized you.”49
In particular, the anti-Corneille polemic constitutes the gesture of commercial publication in two key and interrelated ways. First, print is represented as a privileged medium for Corneille’s moral failings, one that concentrates and channels his greed and self-regard, transforming them from normal everyday moral lapses into something abnormal, excessive and odious. One broadside, possibly by Scarron, denounces the “excess of avarice which made you have Le Cid printed.”50 Another lambastes the “freshly ennobled” playwright for projecting his renown “not by acts of valor, but by newspaper hawkers [crieurs de gazettes],” who do not just circulate Corneille’s arrogance in print: “for the past month [they] have pounded the ears of everyone.”51 Second, as a conduit of his out-of-control amour propre, print becomes a powerful symbol for Corneille’s inattentiveness to the feelings and well-being of others, and thus of the playwright’s lack of sociability. Mairet criticized Corneille’s rush to print Le Cid because in so doing the playwright repudiated his friends and their sage advice to correct his play before publishing it.52 Further on, he represents the move as a selfish rebuke of the actors—“those who obliged you by making your Alchemy worth something”—since it denied them the chance to recoup the profits that were their due given that the circulation of the play in print opened up the possibility for other troupes to stage their own performances and compete for an audience.53
Consequently, Corneille’s publication activities will be closely associated with a representation of his social isolation, conveyed through images of the playwright’s gracelessness and outlandishness. Print thus becomes a mechanism for the transformation of the writer as a veritable monster. Jean Claveret’s “modest” concession to Corneille—“I was prepared to grant that you are a greater Poet than I am, without it being necessary for you to use the voices of all the hawkers [Colporteurs] of the Pont-Neuf to announce it all over France”54—renders the latter grotesque by the hyperbolic valence of the adjective “all,”
