of authorship with the privilège system did not manifest the professionalization of literary activities, as many literary histories assume. On the contrary, Charpentier tells another story in which Georges de Scudéry turns to the mechanism in an effort to bolster— perhaps to fabricate—an image of himself as a retired soldier devoting his idle hours to poetry rather than as a writer earning a living from his plays: “Scudéry went to Saint Germain in order to have a privilège issued in his name, in which he has the King say that he commanded Royal Troupes, whereas truthfully, he has never commanded any troupes other than those of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, and a few other troupes of provincial actors.”69 The privilège pointed in a wholly different direction, and indeed to quite another cultural reality of which the images of Corneille’s involvement in commercial publication might also be a reflection: not the slow progress of the writer toward professional independence but the evolving stakes of literary legitimacy in the 1630s, in the context of what Alain Viala called “the first literary field.”70
This reality is characterized at least in part by two decisive developments. On one hand, we have what might be called a socialization of intellectual practices epitomized by the emergence of distinctly social qualities like politeness and honnêteté as essential criteria for the evaluation of writers and their works. More exactly, this socialization was an “aristocratization” of letters, with “société” understood in the seventeenth-century meaning recorded by the dictionary of the Académie française, which accentuates the pleasure of leisured interactions and the exclusivity of elite gatherings.71 The process was thus one of the integration of writers into the networks and values of social elites, a process mediated by what Viala calls “institutions of literary life,” such as the Académie, court patronage, and salons. These and other similar bodies offered privileged venues and mechanisms for introducing gens de lettres and their writings into “the Court and high society,” where both authors and their productions would be judged according to emerging worldly criteria.72 Charles Sorel offers an allegorical account of this “New Parnassus,” describing the Muses leaving “their rustic caves for golden palaces where they frequently lived, having been received by the nobility of the age.” Apollo abandoned Pegasus, “an old horse” and “hideous beast,” for a stylish “Carriage.”73
At the same time, the elite assimilation of letters was matched by a reciprocal process, a “literary” transformation and redefinition of noble society and identity. We can understand this in two ways. First is the manner described by Delphine Denis, who, in her excavation of the intellectual production of midcentury salon society—“l’archive galante”—highlights the “aestheticization” of a self-consciously rarefied community, according to which the participation of its members consists in efforts to please the others through impressions made by dress, gestures, and language.74 These individuals become like works of art, to recall the analysis of Domna Stanton, defining themselves as objects of contemplation.75 Yet the pleasure they offer resides in their capacity to focus the attention of others not on their own éclat, but on their beauty as a direct reflection of the excellence of the group and its dynamic. They represent its interactivity and thus its cohesiveness.
This “aestheticization” is as a result fundamentally linguistic, and not only to the degree that the charming exchanges of the group are to be perceived above all in its conversations and correspondences, but also insofar as language—indeed, written language—becomes the primary medium of this representation. Schapira points out that, as a site of refined social and cultural exchange, the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and by extension the “salon,” is as much a discursive construct mythologized by writers who celebrated it as an actual space carved out by the marquise through architectural design.76 In this respect, the “salon” is a rewriting of reality through the diffusion of textual depictions, often in letters but also in printed items such Madeleine de Scudéry’s romances, which shape and channel the hopes, anxieties, and choices of those who then seek to situate themselves within this space. Both the “court” and the “Académie française” would circulate in printed media as the sublimated images of a “real” context, whose history they tell,77 and which they claim faithfully to imitate—in a 1678 letter to her friend Lescheraine, Madame de Lafayette famously deemed the princesse de Clèves “a perfect imitation of the Court”—but whose perfection and thus authority as institutions legislating social, cultural, and intellectual norms they in fact postulate and impose. The elevation of the “court” and the “salon” as central institutions of literary life in the mid-seventeenth century would depend on this “production of belief” through writing and print in their authority to discern and elevate the good and to exclude the bad.78
Which brings us to the second way in which we might understand the “literary” transformation of elite identity; that is, in terms of the growing importance of writing for those who lay claim to the distinction of being noble.79 This development grows out of a broader phenomenon: the role played by language itself as a medium of self-expression for a “modern” aristocracy that sought to distinguish itself not only from non-elites but also from a nobility identified with an earlier age, whose coarseness and vulgarity provided a countermodel against which a new elegant “salon” society oriented itself. In the early decades of the century, Rambouillet had created her “théâtre de … divertissements” as a kind of private refuge from the barbaric court of Henri IV: “She said that she found nothing pleasant there.”80 The refinement of the pastimes that occupied its participants compared with the amusements of the Louvre—they were the most gallant and polite, to recall Tallement—was in large part the effect of their linguistic nature; for they mobilized intellectual skills not physical dexterity, and thereby reflected an elevation of its noble practitioners who expressed themselves in elegant phrases rather than in feats of strength and prowess. Sorel registers the further development of the linguistic turn in his 1664 La bibliothèque françoise. Surveying works that “deal with [its] purity,” he represents the ascendancy of language as a distinct innovation in elite life: “Today,” he stresses, “we take those who speak French badly to be men of lowly condition and little wit.” Relative to older markers of social superiority, language imposed new imperatives on those who would fashion themselves according to the cultural ethic of mondanité: “One must learn politeness and polish in language [la politesse du langage], as much as in composure, or in the way of dressing and in everything that appears on the exterior.”81
Sorel emphasizes speaking; but writing was a critical part of the trend. In his treatise from 1630 on “l’honnête homme,” adapted from Castiglione’s Renaissance sketch of the courtier, Nicolas Faret counsels the political and socially ambitious “to develop a good writing style, including for serious matters, for compliments, for love, and for so many other subjects the occasions for which arise everyday at the court. He continues, “those who do not have this facility can never aspire to great functions [grands emplois].”82 Faret admittedly focused on official kinds of writing—memoirs and letters—and considered belles-lettres—poetry and other “literary” forms—to be “more agreeable than necessary.”83 Three decades later, however, Molière’s nobleman and would-be poet Oronte from Le Misanthrope would speak to the necessity of “literary” writing for those claiming a rightful place in le monde. Indeed, this is what the central character of the play, Alceste, really hates in Oronte’s sonnet; not so much the bad verse in and of itself, but the idea that he offers it as a privileged expression of his honnêteté.
Monsieur, cette matière est toujours délicate,
Et sur le bel esprit nous aimons qu’on nous flatte.
Mais un jour, à quelqu’un, dont je tairerai le nom,
Je disais, en voyant des vers de sa façon,
Qu’il faut qu’un galant homme ait toujours grand empire
Sur les démangeaisons qui nous prennent
