of the critical view condemning print publication as vainglorious and uncouth, “that not one of those who preach it would observe it if he had written something worthy of being printed.”116 Saint-Amant’s tack gives his anxiety a distinct resonance, for the stakes are not determined by a writer’s desire to ensure the integrity of his text as an authentic expression of his innermost thoughts. Presumed to be a “natural,” defining authorial desire, the latter motive orients most understandings of the proprietary claims of intellectuals to their writings. But those of Saint-Amant are determined by a wholly different aspiration: the desire for social legitimacy as shaped by the dynamic of a self-consciously “modern,” intellectualized aristocratic culture. It is in this framework that Saint-Amant’s proprietary feelings are conceived and expressed: not as a constrained or embarrassed desire that would be more freely and forcefully articulated if the writer were not so held back by heterogeneous considerations of decorum, but rather as a visible, significant, powerful vehicle of affect and value, which allows the writer, though self-denigration and modesty, to lay strong direct claims to the credibility of the honnête homme.
The negativity of the commercial rhetoric in the self-presentation of Classical-era writers speaks less to the weakness or awkwardness of these writers’ assertions of preeminence than to the complexity of the book trade as an institution that enabled such claims. In this respect commercial publication must be distinguished from those other institutions of literary life—academies, salons, and so forth—with which it nonetheless shares the twofold agenda of integrating intellectuals into aristocratic society and providing le monde with the venues and media for its linguistic reinvention. For while, say, the “salon” as a cultural institution points above all to a specific type of refined, intellectualized sociability into which writers sought to insinuate themselves as they pursued their renown, it also happens to describe an actual space and a real event in an aristocratic household that they might frequent in the effort. As a result, the “salon” is a relatively intuitive concept, in spite of the fact that the conflation of “worldly sociability [sociabilité mondaine]” as a cultural system with the concrete practices of elite sociability can lead to confusion.117
But as it is institutionalized, manifesting the rise of writing and print as social practices and vehicles of personal quality and elite status, the book trade refers, by contrast, to a space from which the writer is absent. It could, in fact, be argued that it is in and through the staged withdrawal of the writer from its sphere that la librairie can be said paradoxically to have been transformed as an institution of literary life, one in which writers might acquire recognized identities as gens de lettres and honnêtes gens, along with the autonomy to write in an ennobling leisure signaled—or even constituted— in the evocation of this disappearance: “[I] have no other goal in this work than the sole desire to please myself: for far from being mercenary, the printer and the actors will bear witness to the fact that I did not sell them that for which they could not pay me,” writes Scudéry in the preface to Ligdamon et Lidias.118
In light of this, Corneille’s pivotal place in the history of writers and publishing becomes more intricate; he was not just a heroic “precursor” who alone among the gens de lettres of the period became aware of his rights and interests as an author, and then took the initiative to act on this awareness. He also came to play an integral role in the staging of this withdrawal as a negative model: “Really, if your writings are remembered by posterity, the fruit that they derive from this will be marvelous,” wrote Claveret, “but it will be in the manner that the Lacedemonians got their slaves drunk, in order to foster a horror of drunkenness among their citizens.”119 Indeed, for those seeking to affirm their absence from the book trade as evidence of their honnêteté, Corneille offered the stark counterexample of presence. His self-promoting rush to publish—“nobody twisted your arm to hasten you into publishing your mistakes with a royal privilège”120—and to inhabit the sphere of the book trade in order to try to valorize his identity there was elaborated as a foil against which his detractors could portray their publication activities as symptoms not of their own desire for status and fame, though of course they were this, but of their restraint and selfless dedication to the collective. In his Observations, Scudéry points out that, having had no intention to criticize publicly Le Cid despite his reservations about its doctrinal correctness, he felt obliged to make a statement only out of a sense of duty to the community of honnêtes gens, whose core values were assailed by Corneille’s celebration of self: “I thought that I could not without injustice and cowardice abandon the common cause.”121 Claveret, too, plays up his gracious reluctance to get involved through a sharp contrast with Corneille’s eagerness to jump into the fray: “I am not happy that a remark so unfavorable to you must come from my pen, and that I am reduced to this shameful necessity of circulating my letter by the same means that you used in order to sell [débiter] your attacks.”122
Corneille’s presence in the publishing world, not as an objective “reality” but as the emblematic figure of an overly strong personal investment in publishing, and therefore of an authorial arrogance and singularity that the honnête writer had to avoid, is ultimately what, in the context of the premier champ littéraire, “commercialization” denotes. It develops, in other words, as a polemical articulation of the self-interest and vanity of writers, to the degree that these moral attributes are rendered particularly visible and readable in their engagements with the commercial production of their writings. It makes sense that writers who emphasized their reluctance to publish in upholding their honnête integration into le monde would be remembered for their resistance before a mounting outside force. But in positing the commerce of letters as an “objective” phenomenon existing independently of its repudiation by honnête writers, such an appraisal obscures the fact that resistance to the book trade was, paradoxically, the framework in which literary commerce took form in the seventeenth century as a viable, which is to say, a conceivable albeit illegitimate authorial mode.
These writers would, by the same token, also be remembered for their attachment to “old-fashioned” practices, attitudes, and values; correlatively, their “anticommercialism” would become one of the identifying traits of their archaicness. Yet this brings to light a historical contradiction, in the context of which the following chapters will situate the formation of the “literary market.” For in the 1630s it was Corneille who, as a bad example, pointed not to the future but to the past, and it was his adversaries who fought beneath the banner of modernization. Those who attacked Corneille for his publishing activities did so not out of respect for tradition but in the name of a progress represented in their minds by the reciprocal integration of writers into aristocratic society and intellectualization of court culture.123 The abbé d’Aubignac criticizes the playwright for not being up to date with current tastes. He chose violent and fantastic subjects such as that of Oedipus, which might have pleased an audience from an earlier, more vulgar age, one still plunged “in that old ignorance which [Corneille] had up to this point found indulgent toward his first mistakes,” but which no longer amused the polite society of midcentury: “it is better to adapt oneself to one’s time when one wants to please,” he writes, warning Corneille to conform to the “values of our century.”124 In this reversed dialectic, “commerce,” too, rather than “anti-commerce,” is associated with being behind the times. Corneille’s “eagerness to profit” functions in the Querelle much like his “thirty years of schooling” or his crude Norman patois, namely as the sign of his backwardness.125 Underscoring editorial activities that manifest this lack of honnêteté inasmuch they give expression to his vanity and unbridled self-importance, “commerce” indicates not Corneille’s prescient transcendence of the domination of lettres by nobility but the fact that he has yet to enter into this transformative relationship with elites. It places him at the beginning of a process not looking ahead to the end. Described by Mairet as a “clerk’s move [pas de clerc],” his involvement in publication points to an older humanistic model, to an older, coarser nobility that would have better appreciated his out-of-date subjects, and indeed to an earlier time whose real coherence consists in the simple fact that it precedes the
