talent as a dramatic poet, so long as the author of Le Cid accepts for his part, as the price of his genius, the radical deterioration of his social persona and stature; indeed, so long as he accepts his fundamental unsuitability for le monde, marked in a single gesture by his precipitous departure once he has sold his works:
But recognize in return that you are, in prose, the most impertinent of those who know how to speak, that the coldness and stupidity of your wit are such that your company makes one pity those who must suffer your visits, and that … you pass in high society [le beau monde] as the most ridiculous of all men. These are truths that will always be confirmed among the most honorable people [les plus honnestes gens] of Paris, of both sexes, where stories of your gracelessness are told that make melancholy itself laugh. You have good reason to flee as soon as you have sold your Poetic goods [denrées Poëtiques].55
Later admirers of Corneille would spin this by then legendary awkwardness positively as a sign of the playwright’s dedication to the integrity of his work, marked by his lack of interest in the frivolities of high society56; and in light of this reinterpretation of his social ineptness, Corneille’s equally mythologized efforts to sell his “Poetic goods” would themselves be revalorized as significant expressions of this seriousness and authorial independence. But such reasoning says far more about later ideals than about anything that might have been going through Corneille’s head as he transacted with libraires or requested letters patent from the administration, or through the minds of his detractors as they pointed derisively to these negotiations. The discourse of the anti-Corneille forces presented a strong connection between a vision of the playwright’s autonomy and his publishing activities. Yet it was a distinctly symbolic association forged by the use of images of Corneille’s commercial literary activities as powerful figurations of his isolation by those who sought, indeed, to isolate him. The rhetoric does not allow us to conclude that Corneille desired this autonomy, and turned to commercial publishing in order to establish the conditions in which he might claim it. In fact, in its polemical aspect, the invective suggests a relation of influence that goes in the exact reverse direction; publishing activities do not lead to autonomy. It is instead the positing of autonomy—or the perception and imputation of a certain type of autonomy manifested in Corneille’s rude and antisocial demeanor—that leads to the production of images in which publishing activities and venal motives are highlighted.
Thus, if Corneille was assailed for not having sufficiently respected his social ties and obligations, it was not because he sought to go it alone in the “market.” The equation goes the other way; a depiction of the playwright seeking to earn his living commercially became current because of his failure to be integrated into le monde. The social isolation was prior to commerce, and had its roots elsewhere, in a natural aversion for court life and in his attachment to older forms of elite selfhood, which he would articulate against the model of the courtier.57 To be sure, the self-sufficiency Corneille celebrates in the “Excuse à Ariste” is set against an image of the court poet who goes obsequiously from “Réduit en Réduit” looking for voices of support:
We speak of ourselves with complete frankness [franchise],
False humility does not bring one credit,
I know what I am worth, and believe what I am told of it.58
This is the vocabulary of a “feudal” nobility. Radically self-legitimizing, nostalgic, conscious of its vanishing preeminence, and intensely hostile to the emerging culture of the court with its communal, self-inhibiting ethos, this language is spoken in Le Cid by the Comte.59 It is, in any case, hardly that of the professional author looking to make a decent living “by the pen.”
Alternative New Realities of Literary Life
All this raises a key question. Given the polemical nature of the connection tying Corneille as an autonomous writer to commercial publishing, what can we say about the underlying reality of the authorial condition? To what extent, in other words, does the association forged by writers such as Mairet and Claveret point to a real “stratégie éditoriale” pursued by Corneille and characterized by an unprecedented focus on property rights and profits? Answers to the question remain speculative in the absence of any direct statement from the playwright himself. It might, though, be fruitful to pose it a little differently; that is, what reality do these images truly reflect? They are normally assumed to indicate the legal and economic reality of the seventeenth-century book trade and commercial theater, in which Corneille’s participation, gauged by the 1643 “Demande de lettres patentes,” was in fact intense compared to that of his contemporaries.60 We have, however, observed that other interpretations of the "Demande" are plausible, according to which it reflects not an effort to improve the legal and economic status of the writer, but contemporary theater and court politics.61 It is worth recalling, moreover, that the lettres patentes for which Corneille applied did not constitute a privilège en librairie, despite being incorporated by Viala and others into the type of historical account of the development of literary property in which the privilège is often highlighted as a key intermediate stage. “Corneille was not simply content to defend his literary property rights to printed editions; in 1643, he tried to advance them durably to the performances of his plays,” contends Viala, seeming to equate the two mechanisms.62
Yet even granting that the lettres patentes might be fully comparable with a privilège, there are still reasons to doubt that the request was so unusual as to be “unheard of at the time.”63 Nicolas Schapira has recently shown that in fact a good portion of seventeenth-century writers, above all, “literary” authors as opposed to those involved in other kinds of writing—scientific, historical, philosophical, theological—asked for and received privilèges for their works in the Classical age, more than is usually assumed.64 Studying the records of the bookseller-printer Toussaint Du Bray, who specialized in printing nouveautés littéraires in the early part of the century, Schapira notes that, while only 6.5 percent of his editions were protected by a privilège granted to a writer in the years from 1604 to 1613, between 1624 and 1633 this percentage rose to 26 percent, and by 1634–36 over half his editions had privilèges directly held by the author. “By the end of the century,” concludes Schapira, “the privilège to the author seems to have become the norm”; indeed, a full ten of the fifteen privilèges the bookseller Claude Barbin held in 1680 had initially been requested by and delivered to gens de lettres.65
But, Schapira argues, if writers became increasingly interested in privilèges, it was not out of a nascent attachment to intellectual property or profits. It was instead out of a wish to enhance their reputations as gens de lettres inasmuch as they become aware of the effectiveness of the privilège in conveying royal favor. Bearing the king’s seal and the approving words of a royal censor or a secrétaire du roi, and printed by law in every copy of the book, the privilège was appropriated as an especially functional medium for advertising the social, political, and cultural legitimacy of writers before a public that always remained sensitive to the decorum of authorial gestures and was predisposed to receiving a book with a high degree of suspicion toward the individual who would be connected to it as its author.66 In his late seventeenth-century biography of Descartes, Adrien Baillet recounts that the philosopher requested a privilège in 1637 for the Discours de la méthode “to mark his love for and perfect submission to the King.” Living in Holland, Descartes was eager to maintain his good standing with the authorities in France. He would in fact be embarrassed by the eulogistic privilège général Marin Mersenne obtained for him from the Conseil du roi.67 Indeed, Descartes’s anxiety shows, as well, that the privilège posed dangers if the effort to acquire it was mismanaged, for it might, in upholding an image of the writer’s favor, also shed light on less admirable efforts of ingratiation and self-promotion. François Charpentier’s satirical account of Martin Pinchesne excitedly reading before a circle of friends the text of a privilège
