extemporaneous, though he may have prepared his verbal magic in private. His writings had no room for Guez de Balzac’s view of learned “leisure” as a periodic Ciceronian retreat from public affairs; they record worldly “leisure” as a total way of life in which the value of the written word lay in its air of ephemeral entertainment.
By the 1660s salons, modeled on Rambouillet’s, though usually on a less grand scale, were a fixture of the Parisian social scene. The classical “virtue” that Guez de Balzac had in mind in calling for a new urbanity was not explicitly repudiated, but it lost the moral rigorism of the ideal of republican citizenship as it was folded into what I am calling a social aesthetic of play. Mlle de Scudéry was a protégé of the marquise de Rambouillet and became a prominent salon hostess in her own right. She has Cleonte, one of the characters in her dialogue on politeness, observe that the word “urbanity” has acceded to “politeness” because the latter was better suited to the “natural conversation” of women; though acknowledging that the urbanity celebrated by Guez de Balzac and the Blue Room was clearly at the origins of modern politeness, Cleonte thinks the term should now be left to the learned and to “grand eloquence.”15 In the second half of the seventeenth century the discourse of honnêteté and politesse assumed a new level of selfconsciousness; its family of words acquired a kind of coded meaning for the initiated, and as the self-justification of a privileged and exclusive world it became, in the broadest sense of the term, an ideology. A variety of literary forms—among them model letters and conversations, advice books, essays, dialogues, and novels—sought to capture the essence of honnêteté, drew the boundaries between what it encompassed and what lay outside it, and tried to identify its emblematic forms of behavior without reducing it to a set of rules or abstract principles.
The discourse of honnêteté, it should be stressed, was largely prescriptive. It tells us how a social milieu imagined and justified itself; how it thought it ought to be, and indeed how it thought it had to be if it was to sustain its claim to singular honor. Beneath the lacquered surface lay the actual workings of sociability in what Antoine Lilti has called “the space of mondanité.” Lilti has shown in impressive detail that the high aristocracy dominated that space, linking the salons to the royal court through both patronage and a shared style of worldly amusement; and that in the multiple hierarchies of le monde, the arts of politesse at once enabled and veiled an intense jockeying for social and political power in the circulation of “reputations” and attendant rewards.16 Lilti focuses on the eighteenth century, but there is no reason to think that seventeenth-century mondanité was any different. The prescribed norms surely governed behavior to some degree, but just as surely they allowed the honnêtes to delude themselves by conflating the reality into a normative imaginary. One might argue, in fact, that the imaginary marked the need for a respite from the competitive realities of aristocratic life. We cannot assume, though, that the respite actually eliminated the competitive maneuvers for reputation. It was just as likely to veil them. To captivate others on apparent terms of equality might be an act of aggression, an imposition of superiority; one could prevail by not seeming to want to prevail.
The term honnête could still be used to describe an upright man, or a man of integrity, but that meaning was overlaid by the emphasis on “pleasing” to win the approval of others. A galant was not primarily a seducer; he had mastered the art of pleasing women in erotically charged but inconsequential conversational play. In his supreme incarnation the honnête homme was a bel esprit, a brilliant performer entertaining with seemingly effortless wit. Moralists like La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère pointed to the fine line between pleasing others and deceiving them, presenting a false self. Finding self-validation in the gaze of others was a far cry from having the inner core of integrity that the term “virtue” had long evoked. Even as they cast a cynical eye on the ways of mondanité, however, the moralists were immersed in them and contributed to defining their normative ideal. To them, as to so many others, the sine qua non of honnêteté was mastery of the art of conversation, and the raison d’être of conversation was to give and receive “pleasure.” The verbal circulation of pleasure in turn required a collective equanimity and harmony, a commitment by all participants not to introduce a discordant note.17 There could be no winning an argument, no closure in that sense. It was necessary, La Rochefoucauld wrote, to “observe the same precise sense of harmony (justesse) that the different voices and diverse instruments ought to observe in music.”18 Honnêtes gens were always “agreeable” and “obliging” (complaisant); they said nothing “shocking” or “wounding.” They acted with a “sense of the appropriate” (bienséance), always finding the “juste” word or phrase, the one the moment required. They spoke with natural “ease” and “grace.” They all did their part to ensure that social interaction was an “enjoyment,” and indeed a “joy.”
This is the coded lexicon of a social (and socially bounded) aesthetic, an emphatically aestheticized set of norms that made sociability a kind of play and virtue always “agreeable.” To engage in this play was to maintain an illusion of equality within the interlocutors’ self-enclosed space, however unequal they might be outside it. No matter what tensions and rivalries lurked beneath the surface, the sociability of polite conversation could not be sullied by the audible (or visible) exercise of authority, or indeed by the intrusion of power in any form into the free circulation of verbal gifts. The line of demarcation between insiders and outsiders was permeable, but paradoxically the ineffable moments of intersubjective and aesthetic experience conveyed by the “je ne sais quoi” (literally the “I know not what”), that indefinable something that distinguished a pleasing phrase, or a facial expression, or a gesture, kept the line clear. “The je ne sais quoi” is “so delicate and imperceptible,” the Jesuit language critic Dominique Bouhours wrote, “that it escapes the most penetrating and subtle intelligence.”19 With the “je ne sais quoi” honnête society declared its effortless aesthetic to be beyond philosophical analysis and scholarly explanation. At a deeper level, it asserted its exclusiveness in the very act of admitting that even its language, as psychologically and aesthetically fine-tuned as it was, had its limits. The outsider betrayed himself by failing to recognize the limits—by trying to explain what insiders knew defied explanation.20
The novels of Scudéry and Lafayette—the most conspicuous examples of French literary modernity in the seventeenth century—were fashioned in this social and discursive space. We can clarify the social geography of the space by taking a critical look at the work of the literary and feminist scholar Joan DeJean. In her Tender Geographies (1991) DeJean argues that the early French novels were informed by a feminist ideology that was “sexually, socially, and politically subversive.”21 In Ancients Against Moderns (1997) she returns to this theme; “the most successful first novelists” made the early novel “a feminized, and often a feminist, and even a feminizing (in the sense of that which promotes its creators’ feminocentric values), literary genre.” In the controversy that the novels occasioned, DeJean contends, the issue was, contra Jürgen Habermas, more “gender” than “class.”22 Defenders of the novel formed a loose but vocal feminist movement; and this literary feminism aimed to effect a democratization of taste and criticism in an emerging public sphere.
For historians, and for literary scholars with an historical orientation, DeJean’s work is fatally flawed by its presentism. The early novels surely were a feminized literary genre. Much of their material came from conversations among society women; they were written primarily for a female audience; their depictions of gallantry gave women a new respect and agency. Hence we can fairly call their values “feminocentric,” but only so long as we keep in mind that, as will become apparent, the role of intellect in the female-centered world that produced the novels was at least as strictly circumscribed for women as it was for men. But DeJean’s application of the term “feminist” to this context is highly problematic. Her declared aim was to combine literary history and history, with its attention to “a precise historical context,” but that is precisely what she does not do, particularly when situating her subject in a social context. Rather than giving
