The sage was not really meditating; he was in fact merely just “still” or “sleeping” (dormant).44 Several decades later, in an essay on “pleasures,” Saint-Évremond reported to a friend on how he was spending his time in the country. He sought constant diversion, not “profound” truths, not having any desire for “overly long and serious commerce with [himself].” “Solitude,” he went on, has the effect of imprinting on us “je ne sais quel sad and somber (funeste) air by the ordinary thought of our condition.… To live happily, it is necessary to reflect little on life, but to go out often, as it were, outside of oneself.”45
The discourse of honnêteté was no exception to the fact that collective selfimaginings are positional. Its claim to honor used several social referents as foils, defining itself as what they were not. Though honnête sociability was not informal by modern standards, it was clearly a relief from the rigid hierarchical protocol that Louis XIV instituted at court. But as at the highest levels of le monde the Parisian gentleman was also by necessity a courtier, dependent on royal patronage and vulnerable to royal reprisals, caution had to be exercised when it came to the court. Even Méré, who found the court pompous and intellectually vacuous, took pains not to challenge its social and cultural supremacy too blatantly. The discourse of honnêteté was less circumspect in fashioning its other foils, which were representations of exclusively male corporate cultures, identified above all by their control of public knowledge and their uses of public speech. There was the “eloquence” of the law courts, a formal and elaborate oratory, based on classical models, that contrasted sharply with the unstudied ease and simple grace of salon speech.46 And there was the pulpit, another platform for male eloquence. By contrasting itself with these worlds, the discourse of honnêteté asserted its aesthetic superiority over male-controlled forms of expertise and the training in Latinity on which they were founded. It staked its claim to unique value by casting a critical and bemused eye on the rhetorical performances, sometimes ridiculed as “harangues” aimed to intimidate, with which men exercised public authority and ultimately wielded public power.
It is above all in the figure of the “pedant” that we hear the voice of women distinguishing the art of conversation from exclusively male speech. The pervasive caricatures of “pedantry” in the discourse of honnêteté echoed Montaigne’s contemptuous views on that subject, recorded in an essay he wrote sometime in the 1570s; but they also marked a shift in gender values in aristocratic culture in the intervening century or so. Montaigne had ended “Of Pedantry” by observing that “the pursuit of knowledge makes men’s hearts soft and effeminate more than it makes them strong and warlike.”47 In keeping with this view, he extolled the art of “conversation” as a “quarrelsome” exercise in “strong, manly fellowship” that “delights in the sharpness and vigor of its intercourse, as does love in bites and scratches that draw blood.”48 In the contempt for pedantry a century later, there is hardly a trace of this equation of manliness with an aristocratic martial ethos. The nobleman in military service, droning on about horses and campaigns, has joined the pedant as an example of distinctly male social ineptness—though, unlike the pedant, he still commands a certain tolerant respect. The social persona of the traditional scholar has become the example par excellence of crude and overbearing masculinity.49 The reason for his social ineptness seemed obvious. After spending his boyhood being drilled in Latin grammar and translating arcane bits and pieces of classical learning, the pedant had acquired a doctorate at one of the university faculties. The quintessence of the type was the Sorbonne-educated theologian. He was still—as Montaigne had portrayed him—a boor and a bore, intent on impressing others with his esoteric and tunnel-visioned academic expertise. Far from exemplifying effeminacy, however, he was a reproof to the fact that the colleges and the university faculties were male ghettos. Having been formed in that world, the pedant was “intractable, arrogant, uncivil, impolite, opinionated.”50 His voice grated; he interrupted imperiously; he droned on. These were stereotypical traits, of course, but they pointed to certain realities of academic education. The battle-like exercise of “dialectic” in public “disputation,” often before a large and rowdy audience, was still a characteristic feature of university learning and teaching. Since their origins in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit collèges had also simulated a martial spirit by making debates between platoons of pupils central to their curriculum. There was, of course, an ancient pedagogical rationale for pitting boys and young men against each other in relentless argument, but it was one that the standards of honnêteté simply dismissed. The pedant’s combativeness betrayed the excessive masculinity that conventional male education inculcated.
Pedantry was a serviceable social stigma, not a reliable social descriptive. It was not uncommon, particularly in the Jesuit collèges, for sons of the nobility to be introduced to classical Latin literature. There were savants who had been immersed since boyhood in academic Latinity, and who were active in the epistolary exchange of scholarly knowledge in the Republic of Letters, and yet were also accepted in le monde as honnêtes hommes.51 They knew how to mute their learning when they engaged in aesthetic play. And yet there were tensions in their efforts to bridge the worlds of scholarly labor and leisured amusement, and even when they wrote in the honnête key, apparently speaking from within its habitus, they sometimes declared their independence from it. The tensions remain audible in Dominique Bouhours’s The Conversations of Ariste and Eugène, published in 1671, though he assumed the literary persona of mediator between learning and mondanitè. Having first attracted attention as a professor of literature at the prestigious Collège de Clermont in Paris, Bouhours became tutor to the two sons of Henri II d’Orléans, duc de Longueville. His publications from the 1670s onward made him a widely recognized authority on correct and elegant usage in literary French. The Conversations of Ariste and Eugène sought to convey in print the lightness of the art of conversation, and they continue to have literary importance as examples of the polite essay in a conversational mode.52 The two characters Bouhours puts in dialogue are young honnêtes hommes, and though they often question each other’s views, they do so in fluid and accommodating conversation, not in the battle formations of an academic disputation.
The entretien titled “The je ne sais quoi” is an extensive exploration of the meanings of a deliberately mystifying phrase that was much in vogue. By using the definite article Bouhours announced that the phrase, so often used sloppily, now required examination as an object in itself. It is an examination, however, that Ariste and Eugène conduct from within the social aesthetic of play. The je ne sais quoi is what “pleases” or, perhaps better, delights in a way that can neither be grasped intellectually nor captured in language. We recognize it only by its effect, an entirely spontaneous “sympathy” or “inclination” of “the heart.” Experiencing it is an entirely “natural” moment of freedom; in it we are, in fact, free not only of “reason,” but also of the need to exercise freedom of the will. This is a social epistemology that in effect bans philosophers and other savants from intruding their authority into the aesthetic of play; it will likely always be futile for them to try to understand, much less explain, the phenomenon. There are, to be sure, universal cases of the je ne sais quoi, but in matters of taste, as in individuals’ face-to-face reactions to each other, all human beings have a particular je ne sais quoi that makes them pleased or displeased at first sight. It would be hard to imagine a more explicit defense of the modern literary subjectivity of the culture of mondanité. Appropriately Bouhours includes a comparison commonly used in le monde by the 1660s. There are, he acknowledges, “great beauties” in Guez de Balzac’s works; but, turning a word against the author who coined it, he finds Voiture’s works “infinitely” more pleasing because they have that “air du monde,” that “tincture of urbanité that Cicero did not know how to define.”
In the essay on the bel esprit, however, Bouhours cautiously became a critic of fashionable mondanité. He undertook an act of lexical policing, aimed at counteracting a “usurpation” of the phrase bel esprit by all sorts of people who did not merit it. The delicacy of his task lay in politely leveling a scornful critique
