Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France [First Edition] 9781317097501, 9781472454096, 9781315594941, 2014045100

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Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Titles in the series include: Education and Women in the Early Modern Hispanic World Elizabeth Teresa Howe Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández Gender and Song in Early Modern England Edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France Women Writ, Women Writing Domna C. Stanton A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt Judith P. Aikin Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England Sarah E. Johnson

Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

Edited by Lewis C. Seifert Brown University, USA and Rebecca M. Wilkin Pacific Lutheran University, USA

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Lewis C. Seifert, Rebecca M. Wilkin, and contributors 2015 Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised n any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Men and women making friends in early modern France / edited by Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin. pages cm.—(Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-5409-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Friendship—France—History. 2. Interpersonal relations—France—History. 3. Manwoman relationships—France—History. I. Seifert, Lewis Carl, author, editor. II. Wilkin, Rebecca May, editor. HM1161.M46 2015 302.0944—dc23 2014045100 ISBN: 9781472454096 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315594941 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures and Table   Contributors   1

vii ix



Introduction: Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France   Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin

2

Was Montaigne a Good Friend?   George Hoffmann

31

3

The Power to Correct: Beating Men in Service Friendship   Michelle Miller

61

4

Redressing Ficino, Redeeming Desire: Symphorien Champier’s La nef des dames vertueuses   Todd W. Reeser

81

5

Translating Friendship in the Circle of Marguerite de Navarre: Plato’s Lysis and Lucian’s Toxaris   Marc D. Schachter

99

6

1

From Reception to Assassination: French Negotiations of “Platonic Love”   Katherine Crawford

119

Friends of Friends: Intellectual and Literary Sociability in the Age of Richelieu   Robert A. Schneider

135



Making Friends, Practicing Equality: The Correspondence of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia   Rebecca M. Wilkin

161

9

The Gendered Self and Friendship in Action among the Port-Royal Nuns   Daniella Kostroun

189

10

The Marquise de Sablé and Her Friends: Men and Women between the Convent and the World   Lewis C. Seifert

219

7 8



vi

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From My Lips to Yours: Friendship, Confidentiality, and Gender in Early Modern France   Peter Shoemaker



Bibliography   Index  

247 267 293

List of Figures and Table Figures 11.1

“Sincerity.” From Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, or Moral Emblems (London, Benjamin Motte: 1709). 

250

11.2

Francisco Goya (1746–1828). La confianza. Sanguine wash with red chalk on paper. Museo Nacional del Prado.

254

Groups, Associations, and Academies, circa 1620–1648

139

Table 7.1

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Contributors Katherine Crawford is professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She is interested in the ways that gender informs sexual practice, ideology, and identity, both in normative and non-normative formations. Her current project examines the cultural questions around gender, sexuality and embodiment raised by castrated men in early modern Europe. George Hoffmann published Montaigne’s Career in 1998. Recent work includes a forthcoming book on reformation satire, Alone unto Their Distance: French Reformers, Satire, and the Creation of Religious Foreignness, “Can There Be Conversions without Conversion Stories?” for the Early Modern Conversions Project, and “Self-Assurance and Acting in the Essais.” Daniella Kostroun is associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, specializing in the history of women and religion in early modern France. She is the author of Feminism, Absolutism, Jansenism: Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns (Cambridge, 2011) and co-editor of Women and Religion in the Atlantic World (1600–1800) (Toronto, 2009). Michelle Miller completed her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 2008. She has published articles on early modern French literature and culture in journals such as Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Romanic Review, and Renaissance and Reformation. Todd W. Reeser is professor of French and director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published two monographs on masculinity, and his essay in this volume is part of his next book, Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance. Marc D. Schachter is lecturer in French at the University of Durham. Author of Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Ashgate, 2008), he is currently working on two book projects, one addressing translation in medieval and early modern France and the other focusing on classical reception and the history of sexuality in early modern Italy and France. Robert A. Schneider is professor of history at Indiana University and, since 2005, editor of the American Historical Review. His books include Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1798 (Cornell, 1989) and The Ceremonial City (Princeton, 1995). He is currently completing a large-scale study, “Dignified Retreat: Writers and Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu.”

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Lewis C. Seifert is professor of French Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690–1715: Nostalgic Utopias (1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in SeventeenthCentury France (2009). His current research concerns the notion of the modern in seventeenth-century France. Peter Shoemaker is associate professor of French at The Catholic University of America and author of Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XII (University of Delaware, 2007). His research interests include literature and sociability, food studies, and topical theater in seventeenthcentury France. Rebecca M. Wilkin is associate professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University and author of Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Ashgate, 2008). She edited Gabrielle Suchon’s work with Domna Stanton (Chicago, 2010) and is currently studying social contract theory in seventeenthand eighteenth-century French feminism.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin

Friendship appears to be enjoying a Renaissance in the twenty-first century, at least as a subject of curiosity. The virtual cultivation of relationships poses anew the age-old question: what constitutes a “friend”? Social media platforms such as Facebook seem, paradoxically, to both valorize and trivialize friendship, (re)connecting “friends” while enabling an ever expanding network of superficial contacts in which work and leisure mingle. Turbulent economic times have also put friendship in the spotlight. The Great Recession of 2008 led to talk of silver linings: were people investing more time and care in personal relations?1 Even if friends become more important when work-related stress, geographical dispersion, and divorce atomize families,2 the tasks assigned to friendship have become Herculean. Audiences are fascinated by hopeful stories of starkly unequal friends,3 as if friendship might single-handedly mitigate staggering increases in economic inequality, when the benefits of friendship as a form of social capital seem to fall disproportionately to the wealthy and the educated.4 The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian lives has both lionized friendship—friends are “families of choice”5—and 1

 A comforting story, if nothing else, according to Judith Warner, “What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life,” The New York Times Magazine, 6 August 2010. 2  Ray Pahl, On Friendship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 5. 3  The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010) recounts the reluctant friendship between the stuttering George VI who must lead his country into war against Nazi Germany, and the failed actor, Lionel Logue, who tutors him in public speaking. The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011) develops the friendship between a white college graduate and a middle-aged black woman in the civil rights era South. Les Intouchables (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011) tells of the improbable friendship between a Senegalese immigrant ex-con and the disabled, wealthy white man to whom he becomes an in-home helper. 4  Pahl, On Friendship, 147. Mark Granovetter in “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited” (in Sociological Theory, ed. Randall Collins, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1983) suggests that the poor are limited by their friendships: “individuals so encapsulated may then lose some of the advantages associated with the outreach of weak ties. This may be one more reason why poverty is self-perpetuating” (1495).   5  Pahl, On Friendship, 3.

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2

normalized queer friends. “Bromance”6 flourishes as gay marriage absorbs and diminishes the homoerotic stigma surrounding male friends. And in disaggregating sexual orientation from desire, coming out stories, albeit media sensations, dedramatize gay-straight friendships—as well, potentially, as friendships between men and women.7 Meanwhile, the silver screen and book club lists continue to celebrate friendship between women as a marginal phenomenon, with themes of solidarity in hard times and subversion against oppression,8 even though women’s access to higher education and participation in the workforce have vastly expanded their palette of friends, both male and female.9 A vast body of historical research accompanies friendship’s present-day growing pains, and Men and Women Making Friends joins this scholarship in revealing the extraordinary dynamism of friendship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though chronologies and purviews differ, narratives of decline dominate the historiography of early modern friendship. Brian McGuire, in a massive study on friendship in medieval monasticism, argues that Renaissance humanists terminated friendship’s happy coexistence with community. While friendship co-existed with community throughout the middle ages, at the end of the fifteenth century, ecclesiasts warned against the seductions of friendship, which threatened not just the virtue of individual friends, but also the discipline of the cloister. For McGuire, this suspicion toward friendship culminates in François de Sales’s proscription of “particular friendship” from the cloister.10 “Particular friends” preferred one another over other members of the community, undermining Christian charity. But this expression was also a euphemism, still in force in after World War II, for sodomy. It is ironic, McGuire notes in his epilogue, that François de Sales is remembered for his friendship with Jeanne de Chantal rather than for 6

 “Bromance,” a portmanteau term combining “brother” and “romance,” was first used in the 1990s to describe the close friendships of male skateboarders. Recent “bromance” films (I Love You, Man, John Hamburg, 2009) continue a long line of “buddy films” stretching back to the 1970s. 7  To the question of whether men and women can “ever just be friends” in Nora Ephron’s 1989 When Harry Met Sally, Harry answers, “the sex part always gets in the way.” William Deresiewicz, “A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?” The New York Times, 7 April 2012. 8  Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple (1982), adapted to the screen by Steven Spielberg in 1985, and the 1991 film, Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott, portray women’s friendships that take on purpose in the face of controlling, abusive men. Patrick Stettner’s The Business of Strangers (2001) subverts that narrative as two women bond over avenging a rape that never happened, while in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (2014), an unwieldy teen and an indifferent state precipitate friendship between two neighbors. 9  Pahl writes, “The expansion of higher education, especially among women, has greatly increased the capacity for making friends” (On Friendship, 171). 10  In his Introduction à la vie dévote (1609). Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 418–23. This is a new edition of the 1988 Cistercian Publications edition with a new introduction by the author.

Introduction

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his concerns about dangerous friendships between men. Commenting on Teresa of Avila’s contemporaneous experience of friendship, which he calls “the last full manifestation of a friendship elaborated and pursued in the religious life,” McGuire argues that “if any explicit expression of friendship continued to manifest itself in monastic and religious life beyond the Reformation in Roman Catholic Europe, it was that between men and women rather than between men.”11 Addressing a very different context—the great house of the English countryside—Alan Bray laments friendship’s decline over the course of the seventeenth century in his magisterial study of the sacramental rites, mutual obligations, and physical closeness that joined wedded brothers in medieval and Renaissance England.12 Entering The Friend is like entering a crypt. A tombstone graces the cover; the editor informs the reader that Bray left a complete typescript of the present book at his deathbed; Bray recalls in the introduction his last meeting with his “friend and colleague,” the French historian Michel Rey, whose unfinished work on friendship evokes in turn the lives of other friends cut short by the AIDS epidemic. So many dead friends prepare Bray’s mourning of friendship itself. Pre-modern friends served each other in more fundamental ways and possessed greater claims to one another than did friends following the emergence of civil society in the seventeenth century, he argues. The “broad highway” on which so many wedded brothers passed “has dwindled to a neglected bridlepath” on which the wedded friendship of Anne Lister and Ann Walker in the 1830s and 1840s is “little more than a rock or a signpost that seems to mark a continuing way” across a wintry landscape.13 Though Bray assures his reader that that path is leading somewhere, the present, he also asserts, is marked by “a crisis of friendship.”14 Less concerned with narrating the fate of friendship, Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France draws inspiration from the work of Ullrich Langer, who 20 years ago, in Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (1994), approached early modern literary representations of friendship in a manner congruent with the way in which Renaissance humanists approached the classical past. Early moderns adopted a “palimpsestic” strategy: they brought traces of the past into contact with the scripts of the present, either for purposes of appropriation or comparison.15 Renaissance humanists truly believed Cicero’s bon mot, “historia magistra vitae”—history is  McGuire, Friendship and Community, 423.  Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 2003. 13  Bray, The Friend, 219. 14  Bray, The Friend, 4. Bray’s passing inspired in turn an elegant eulogy by Valerie Traub in “Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Making of History,” in Love, Friendship, and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter, and Miri Rubin (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–41. 15  Joachim Du Bellay urged his countrymen to enrich a lexically poor French by appropriating Latin semantics in his Deffence, et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549). Charles Perrault drew up his Parallèles des anciens et des modernes (1688). Pierre-Daniel Huet in De l’origine des romans (1670) borrowed the notion of the cycle of civilizations from Renaissance historiographers to predict France’s decadence. 11

12

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Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

the teacher of life. The past was alive, and the famous friends of antiquity were not just commonplaces to call up, but exemplars to emulate.16 Today’s readers live on the other side of the seventeenth-century crisis of exemplarity and are unlikely to approach texts as sources of behaviors to imitate.17 Yet they still stand to gain from studying early modern friendship. The “usefulness” of early modern representations of friendship, Langer says, consists in their “imaginative experimentation … with the multiple codes and values of an expanding civilization.”18 Men and Women Making Friends recognizes more overtly than Langer did, however, that “codes and values” pertaining to gender and sexuality are fundamental to any civilization. The publication of Langer’s book coincided with the opening salvo of queer studies’ transformative exploration of friendship: Bray’s “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Early Modern England” (1994).19 Interpreting “signs” such as the kiss and the shared bed, Bray explores what it meant for a man to express desire for the body of a male friend in Renaissance England. But he offers no straightforward answers. Depending on context, this desire might indicate social or political allegiance, affirm a shared affective bond, express same-sex desire, or convey a combination of these messages. In both this essay and The Friend (2003), Bray concludes that more often than not, the relationship between intimacy and sexuality in friendship is unknowable. It is impossible to determine whether expressions of affection between friends reflect a physical relationship.20 Accepting Bray’s insight, queer approaches resist categorical interpretations of friendship discourse—i.e., as 16  Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 138–52. 17  John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 18  Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 28–9. 19  Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Early Modern England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 40–61. Other notable studies include: Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Traub surveys queer scholarship on friendship in “Friendship’s Loss.” For early modern France, queer studies of friendship center on Montaigne’s “De l’amitié.” See Marc D. Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), and Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 191–243. 20  In The Friend, Bray avoids the question of eroticism in male friendship by consistently privileging the ethical over the physical. According to Traub,“the materiality of the body is displaced onto the memorials—the gravestones and churches—that populate his account” (“Friendship’s Loss,” 23).

Introduction

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either erotic or non-erotic—revealing instead the tensions within it.21 Thus, rather than speculate about the nature of Montaigne’s relationship with Étienne de La Boétie, queer readings of Montaigne’s “De l’amitié” (I.28), the most celebrated text of the friendship canon, show that the essay works at cross-purposes with itself.22 “Montaigne intimates the impossibility of separating friendship from the sexual, even at the same time as he attempts to do so,” observes Gary Ferguson.23 Analyzing Montaigne’s lexical choices, Ferguson asserts that although “friendship may claim to fly high above sexual desire … it nevertheless stoops down to borrow much of its language.”24 Marc Schachter argues further that “Montaigne’s deployment of an erotic discourse in his characterization of his friendship with La Boétie … serves precisely to put hegemonic virility into question.”25 In linking eroticism in “De l’amitié” to the question of masculinity, Schachter reinforces the connections queer readings make between sexuality on the one hand and norms such as gender and social status on the other. In this critical perspective, texts that queer intimacy within friendship also queer the broader social and political ideologies that exploit friendship.26 Men and Women Making Friends is greatly indebted to the ways in which queer studies has foregrounded questions of sexuality in the study of friendship. However, the emphasis on loss that pervades much queer work on early modern friendship—understandable given the AIDS epidemic—occults the “imaginative experimentation” that, according to Langer, characterizes early modern representations of friendship.27 Michel Foucault, whose legacy looms large in queer studies, emphasized an unrecoverable, less repressive past. Yet he expressed an almost utopian optimism with respect to friendship’s creative potential. In an often cited interview, he calls upon gay men, whose friendships are incomprehensible in a world where affective relations are limited to the nuclear family or “obligatory comradery,” to create “as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships” with pleasures all their own.28 Like Langer, Foucault recognized friendship’s capacity to conceive 21

 Unlike Jaeger, for whom expressions of desire and affection were “social gestures,” and the purpose of “the public manifestation of a sanctioned [and] idealized way of feeling” was to display “the actor’s acceptance and embodiment of a society’s or a communities ethical values,” which opposed virtue and sexuality (Ennobling Love, 7). 22  Ferguson, for instance, finds little if any evidence of a physical relationship between Montaigne and La Boétie (Queer (Re)Readings, 221). 23  Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 206. 24  Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 207. 25  Schachter, Voluntary Servitude, 17. 26  This is the premise of Shannon’s Sovereign Amity, which explores the erotic, gendered, and political dimensions of friendship in Elizabethan England. 27  The theme of loss traverses the important collection of essays edited by Jody Greene, “The Work of Friendship,” special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004). 28  Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1988), 301.

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new forms of relationality that shape the “codes and values” of the culture within which it arises. Before friendship becomes loss, therefore, it entails creation. The essays in Men and Women Making Friends attend to that creative power, showing how the activity of friendship in early modern France both embodies normative interaction and reshapes it. The Creativity of Friendship First, this volume shows that making friends entails creative engagement with a tradition comprising a diversity of ideals pertaining to gender and sexuality. All of the essays explore the early modern French “palimpsestic” appropriation of coexisting friendship texts. Humanists celebrated Aristotle’s and Cicero’s ideal of “perfect” friendship, which stipulated that friends be of equal moral and social stature. Specifically excluding women, this model was premised on homosociality, the mimetic desire between men often involving the exchange of women.29 Montaigne celebrated perfect friendship in his essay “Of friendship”; yet most of his own friendships, as George Hoffmann shows in his essay, did not adhere to this ideal: for reasons of self-interest and personal affinity, he counted as friends men of lesser rank and prestige and several women. Aside from Montaigne’s interested use of it, however, perfect friendship is barely represented in this volume. Three essays deal instead with the sixteenth-century reception of Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism, which Langer curiously dismisses because it did not conform to perfect friendship. Unlike Aristotle and Cicero, Langer observes, Plato confused “erotic love and friendship … especially in the opening of the Lysis.”30 In the Lysis, in effect, Socrates initially distinguishes between two kinds of relationships between men.31 The first, eros, features the unreciprocated desire of an older man for a boy in an educational context. The second, philia, is a non-sexual, reciprocal bond between men of the same age. Yet Socrates goes on to conflate the reciprocity of philia with the utility of eros; he also undermines his definition of philia by claiming that sameness precludes reciprocity. Langer rightly describes the Lysis as “a somewhat inconclusive dialogue.”32 The ambiguity of Plato’s account of friendship was precisely what made it such a versatile alternative to the categorical character of perfect friendship. Whereas Aristotle described equality as a prerequisite for friendship, Katherine Crawford explains in her essay that Plato accommodated hierarchy, since he situated friends within an educational and political context. And while both the Nicomachean Ethics and De amicitia tie the virtue enabled by friendship to masculinity, Marc Schachter shows that humanists, adopting Socrates’ contention that like will not  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick developed this concept in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985). 30  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 34. 31  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 22. 32  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 22. 29

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befriend like, contemplate the possibility of friendship between women. The homoeroticism of Platonic friendship remained an impediment to recuperation, however, and French humanists, such as Symphorien Champier—the first to grapple with Platonic friendship in the French language—tried to purge that troubling element, as Todd Reeser demonstrates in his essay. Sixteenth-century humanists “tried on” Platonic friendship, tailoring it to their own friendship projects; but in the context of political crisis, ambiguities were liabilities, and they abandoned the Platonic strand of the friendship canon after the wars of religion. Considering friendship as a creative process means, second, addressing friendship as “a relation that is essentially creative of the self.”33 Because friendship participates in the construction of the self, historicizing friendship reveals the self as a historically variable concept. In his multiple appropriations of the proverb “the friend is another self ” (allos autos), which Erasmus made the very first of his Adages, Aristotle characterizes friendship as the result of shared experiences over time, and he describes the selves constituted through friendship normatively, as “harmonizing, within their own lives, the claims of reason, emotion, and appetite.”34 Friends become more coherent selves, ever more assertive in their autarkeia (selfsufficiency), albeit increasingly redundant with respect to one another and to all other virtuous friends.35 Whereas for Aristotle, and the Stoics as well, friendship enabled the actualization of the self, in the early modern period friendship allowed for the discovery of the self. Construed by Aristotle as a virtuous and reasoned tie between men of equal station, friendship between men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries entailed a more intensely affective experience.36 Augustinian theology inspired the notion of a self with hidden motivations,37 while confession, which the Fourth Lateran Council made obligatory in 1215, cultivated a reflexive gesture unknown to the ancients. Michel Rey argues that through the sharing of secrets, early modern “friends entered into a specular relationship … that led to self-discovery … [T]he other became familiar at the same time that the self became other, and thus a potential object of knowledge.”38  Pahl, On Friendship, 163.  Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 172–3. 35  Jean-Claude Fraisse, Philia: La notion d’amitié dans la philosophie antique: Essai sur un problème perdu et retrouvé (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 276. 36  Daniel T. Lochman and Maritere López, “Introduction,” Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 1–26. 37  Notably by Jansenius and his followers. This is one interpretation of Augustine’s comments on the self. Aquinas, also inspired by Augustine, proposes the love one feels for a friend as a model for understanding a good kind of self-love. See Michael Moriarty, Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162–7. 38  Michel Rey, L’amitié à la Renaissance: Italie, France, Angleterre (1450–1650) (San Dominico: European University Institute, 1999), 179–86. We cite Peter Shoemaker’s paraphrase. See 247, this volume. 33 34

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The self, whether construed as an achievement enabled by friendship or reified as an inner space to sound out through friendly confidences, is rarely gender neutral. The consolidated self is implicitly masculine: the attainment of (manly) virtue through friendship (with another man) results, in Aristotelian and Stoic moral philosophy, in the actualization of the (male) self. Christian spirituality introduced a dissolved self that was usually feminized. Saint John of the Cross, a mystic in the “negative theology” tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, personified his soul as a woman.39 Because of the ostensible porousness of their selves, women were thought to be more vulnerable to possession by the Devil and his minions than were men.40 Men and Women Making Friends shows how friends asserted themselves as male or female selves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.41 Michelle Miller addresses the way in which Clément Marot fashions the masculinity that makes him worthy of François I’s friendship through poetry in which he portrays his physical aggression toward other men. François’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre, questioned the commonplace characterization of women as leaky vessels in stories that illustrated men’s inability to keep confidences, as Peter Shoemaker explains in his essay. And while Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia cited the mind-clouding vapors of her female body as an impediment to her understanding of Descartes’s dualism, which rooted the self exclusively in the mind, Rebecca Wilkin shows that she also foregrounded her female body’s medical needs to create a pretext for exchange with Descartes, and in this way circumvented the masculinity of friendship. Friends either reinforced or undermined prevailing ideologies as they gendered their selves through friendship. Third, to say that friendship is a creative process means that making friends is a collaborative endeavor, and that the things friends create together embody their negotiation of gender and sexuality. The concept of collaborative production is an intuitive one in a post-industrial age, when marriages are described as partnerships, and when friendships, such as the one that animates this volume, are deepened through shared work. Yet it is hardly anachronistic to think about friend-making as collaborative production in the early modern period. The most basic product of friend-making is, simply, friendship. Many of the texts that give access to those friendships were produced together by friends.42 Attesting to the awkwardness of friend-making between men and women, Marc Schachter emphasizes male humanists’ studious avoidance of the idiom of friendship in 39  See his “Noche oscura” in The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, ed. and trans. Willis Barnstone (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), 38. 40  Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 41  Katherine Kong considers “how gender emerges in epistolary practice as a central way of understanding the self and positioning it in relation to others” (Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France [New York, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2010], 11). 42  “[T]extuality … was constitutive of early modern friendship,” according to Penelope Anderson (“The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early Modern Women’s Friendship,” Literature Compass 7, no. 4 [2010]: 250).

Introduction

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dedicating their translations of classical friendship texts to the noblewomen who commissioned them. Between men, he shows, such gestures were conventional; but addressed to a noble female dedicatee, they would be read as presumptuous flirtation. Friendships between men and women of letters that were identified as such tended to support women’s writing. Peter Shoemaker explains how women writers, such as Madeleine de Scudéry, avoided being perceived as “public women” by publishing their works pseudo-pseudonymously, under cover of male friends. The collaborative labor of men and women friends sometimes produced divergent theorizations of friendship, as Wilkin shows in Descartes’s and Elisabeth’s rhetorics of friendship, and as Lewis Seifert demonstrates with respect to the Maxims of Madame de Sablé and of François de La Rochefoucauld. Cross-Gender Friendship Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across inequalities of class and race—perhaps because they inspire hope in the face of a stubbornly unequal society, perhaps (more cynically) because they mask structures that perpetuate such inequality. The friendships that exerted an analogous level of fascination in early modern France were those that defied the ostensible impossibility of friendship between men and women. Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France argues that imaginative experimentation in friendships between men and women was a distinctive feature of seventeenth-century French culture, made possible by the intersection of the secular imperative of heterosociality, on the one hand, and the Catholic Reformation’s celebration of spiritual friendships, on the other. Friendships between male spiritual directors and penitent women, together with interaction between mondain men and women in salon circles, reframed the principles of reciprocity and equality integral to the Aristotelian ideal of male friendship. The attention this volume brings to experimentation in crossgender friendships is one of its most important contributions. To contextualize this development, the “palimpsest” provides evidence of previous experiments involving friendship between men and women. Jaeger argues that the phenomenon of courtly love (of men for women) grew out of an ideal of ennobling love between men. Before the eleventh century, men could only enhance their virtue while interacting with women by heroically resisting a supposedly overpowering female carnality. But then an opposition emerged between whore and matron that changed this formula; women, affirmed Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035–1123) in his Liber decem capitulorum, could take the shape of God’s image more easily than “stiff-necked” men.43 Now women could play an ennobling role with respect to men, so long as sexuality was avoided. Jaeger shows how sexuality was eventually incorporated into this discourse as an everreceding lure for virtue, which produced the dynamic of courtly love: “The deficit of education and burden of vice shifts from woman to man; man recedes from  Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 93.

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the virile warrior armed against sexuality to the one in need of moral instruction; woman advances from the ruin of man to his tutor in ethics.”44 The reversal of roles that Jaeger traces enjoyed a kind of sequel in seventeenthcentury France. Celebrated as evidence of the renewal of urban life in the wake of the Wars of Religion, the emergence of salon culture extended an ethos of heterosociality to a broad public.45 Early seventeenth-century salons granted elite women access to cultural forms produced by men as well as cultural authority over men. Although scholars debate the extent of that authority, few contemporaries doubted that the cultivation of honnêteté, the aesthetic and ethical ideal that signified men’s success at court and in the city, depended on their interaction with women.46 “Go into the city to see which noble Ladies are deemed to be the most honnête women and in whose homes are the most beautiful salons,” Nicolas Faret enjoins ambitious bourgeois men in his 1630 L’Honnête-homme ou l’art de plaire à la court.47 Men were to achieve the refinement paramount to success by conversing with women and practicing galanterie, a lighthearted form of courtly love wherein men submitted to women’s tastes and judgments as an act of pseudoamorous homage. To be sure, the rhetoric of galanterie should not be mistaken for evidence per se of friendship between women and men. A number of early seventeenth-century male authors who pursued the advantages afforded by galant devotion to salon women resented their subservience.48 Still, some genuine crossgender friendships did flourish in the salons, spaces in which women were not as readily marginalized as they were in the tradition of perfect (male) friendship.49

 Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 105.  Seventeenth-century salon culture originated in late sixteenth-century circles led by aristocratic women such as the Maréchale de Retz, Madame de Villeroy, and Marguerite de Valois, who were linked to humanist traditions promoted by the Valois court. The decline of humanism and hostility toward pedantry during the reign of Henri IV led Madame d’Auchy, Madame des Loges, and the Marquise de Rambouillet to set a different tone in their salons. See Linda Timmermans, L’Accès des femmes à la culture (1598–1715): Un débat d’idées de Saint François de Sales à la Marquise de Lambert (Paris: Champion, 1993), 63–71. 46  In addition to Schneider’s essay in this volume (155–6), see Erica Harth, “The Salon Woman Goes Public … or Does She?” in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Deena Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 179–93. For contrasting views of women’s influence in eighteenthcentury salons, see Deena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 47  “Il faut donc descendre à la ville, et voir qui sont celles d’entre les Dames de condition que l’on estime les plus honnestes Femmes, et chez qui se font les plus belles assemblées….” (Nicolas Faret, L’Honnête-homme ou l’art de plaire à la court [Paris: Toussaincts du Bray, 1630], 226–7). 48  See Schneider, 158–9. 49  See, for example, the discussion of friendship between Sablé and La Rochefoucauld in Seifert’s essay. 44 45

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In his account of “the Big Bang of amatory ideals among the European nobility,”50 Jaeger emphasizes not only that courtly love extended the homosocial paradigm of ennobling love (between men), but also that it altered that paradigm decisively. Whereas McGuire attributes worries about “particular [i.e., sodomitical] friendships” between men to changes in the cloister, Jaeger locates the origin of that worry in the advent of courtly love. Prior to the eleventh century, men’s expressions of passionate physical love to other men were interpreted as displays of virtue, while women represented—and thereby contained—the debasing effect of sexual desire. However, courtly love eroded that gender-based compartmentalization of virtue (between male friends) and sexuality (between men and women): Admit women to the gentlemen’s club [of ennobling love] … and the smooth surface of innocent erotic discourse shattered. It was invaded by irony, double entendre, ambiguity, and shame. Its magic cloak of invulnerability lost its powers, and gentlemen in love with women had to ward off dishonor and suspicion in the ordinary ways, something they were spared when their only object of desire was some quintessence of male virtue.”51

From the twelfth century on, men accompanied their friendly overtures to women with reassurances regarding pure intentions, and they became more circumspect in their expressions of affection to other men.52 Might the practice of galanterie in seventeenth-century French salons be considered a bookend to the era of suspicion that began, according to Jaeger, with the emergence of courtly love? While in the eleventh century, the inclusion of women in the paradigm of ennobling love put male friendship on the defensive, in the seventeenth century heterosociality provided cover for men’s friendships with other men. Structured interaction with women in the salons was instrumental to men not only because it polished their manners and enhanced their wit; but also because it protected them against insinuations of suspicious male friendships. Charges of sodomy had been central to the Catholic League’s propaganda campaign against Henri III, which scrutinized his relationship with his “mignons.” These charges resurfaced after the Edict of Nantes (1598) in attacks on libertinage, the catchphrase coined by Ultramontane factions to target heresy and debauchery. In the trial against the period’s most infamous libertin, Théophile de Viau, the prosecution targeted homoerotic verse attributed to him as “evidence” of sodomitical friendships with men. Though he was exonerated, censorship became unavoidable after his trial.53 Writers submitted to constraints imposed by a state determined to control the diffusion of print, and men became more attentive to  Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 157.  Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 157. 52  Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 99. 53  On the development of censorship following Théophile’s trial, see Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 29–55. 50 51

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the way in which their associations with other men might be interpreted. The pressure on male friends to avoid homoerotic insinuations created an imperative of heterosociality of which the salon was a major beneficiary. Male friends deflected suspicions of sodomy through observable interaction with women.54 While salons provided a forum for practicing and theorizing heterosociability, the Protestant Reformation’s ideal of companionate marriage—appropriated to a lesser degree by Post-Tridentine Catholics—tempered the traditional opposition between heterosexuality and friendship. Sexual intimacy need not preclude friendship between the betrothed, François de Sales insisted; rather, spouses could be fully compatible so long as a “completely holy, sacred, and divine love” united them.55 François Poulain de la Barre, a promoter of the equality of the sexes and a convert to Calvinism, imagined marriage as “the most perfect friendship” in which “there should be no more subordination and dependence than between two reasonable friends.”56 Such marriages existed: the Comte de Grignan and his third wife, the daughter of the Marquise de Sévigné, were good friends, according to Sévigné at least. Yet the negotiations involved in becoming friends leaves little trace in marriage, and as a legal contract, marriage imposed dependence on women. In a letter to the Duchesse de Montpensier, Madame de Motteville characterizes marriage as “the honorable slavery that the Church dignifies by calling it a sacrament.”57 Motteville anticipates Poulain de la Barre’s feminist reworking of Hobbes’s social contract story in the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673)—which he dedicated to Montpensier—when she laments “[t]he authority that men have appropriated for themselves by unjust usurpation.”58 The salon sanctioned heterosociability, and the Church blessed matrimonial amity. Without an accepted model to emulate, however, men and women would have struggled to create friendship with each other. More than companionate marriage, it was women’s only alternative to marriage—the religious life—that provided 54  The writer François de Boisrobert was accused of using his friendships with salon women as a cover for his same-sex attractions. See Lewis C. Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 176. 55  “un amour tout saint, tout sacré, tout divin” (François de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, in Oeuvres, ed. André Ravier [Paris: Pléiade, 1969], 234). 56  “la plus parfaite amitié”… “pas plus de subordination et de dépendance qu’entre deux amis raisonnables” (François Poulain de la Barre, De l’excellence des hommes, in De l’égalité des deux sexes, De l’éducation des dames, De l’excellence des hommes, ed. Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin [Paris: Vrin, 2011], 313; On the Excellence of Men, in Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch, trans. Vivien Bosley [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 280–81). 57  “cet honnête esclavage que l’Eglise honore du nom de sacrament” (undated letter from Françoise Bertaut, dame de Motteville, in Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle, ed. and trans. Joan DeJean [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 63). 58  “Cette puissance que les hommes se sont attribuée par une injuste usurpation” (Motteville, in Montpensier, Against Marriage, 62).

Introduction

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this model. The Catholic evangelical movement in the early sixteenth century and then the Catholic Reformation following the legalization of Protestantism in 1598 endowed friendships between women and men with a kind of countercultural cachet.59 Aspiring saints—both female penitents and their spiritual directors—imitated Church fathers and early Christian women in published correspondences.60 Referring to the correspondences that Jerome maintained with the wealthy Roman matrons Marcella and Paula, and Chrysostom, with Olympias the Deaconess of Constantinople, Elizabeth Clark explains how the practice of friendship often contradicts ideological certitudes: “in so many social movements,” Clark writes, “the vision of the new order precedes its actualization; for Jerome and Chrysostom in contrast, the living reality of their friendships with women was in the vanguard of the theoretical baggage they dragged with them.”61 “Spiritual” friendships between male confessors and female penitents, as prescribed by devotional manuals like de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life, provided a framework for cross-gender friendship alongside that of companionate marriage. Urging his pious readers in the “world” to establish “a holy and sacred friendship” amongst themselves, he does not restrict them to same-gender friendships and cites the cross-gender friendships of early Church fathers.62 Such cross-gender friendships were a model for the secular Republic of Letters, as Wilkin shows in her essay. Friends of opposite sex were superior souls; by defying temptations of physical intimacy, they demonstrated either holiness (from a Counter-Reformation perspective) or noble generosity (in Stoic ethics). For these men and women, the benefits of friendship—they could be social, physical, spiritual, or intellectual in character—were commensurate with the risk of passion averted. Friendship moreover subverted the hierarchy entailed in the male confessor/female penitent relationship. As Daniella Kostroun shows in her essay, Abbess Angélique Arnauld collaborated with her friend Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran, on the reform of Port-Royal. Similarly, Seifert argues that the Marquise de Sablé developed her independence as an author by eschewing the galanterie typical of salon culture and cultivating frank exchanges with her friend La Rochefoucauld. Historians of friendship have not ignored cross-gender friendships, but they have given them short shrift. McGuire alludes to the new acceptability of friendships between men and women in a discussion of the impact of cross-gender spiritual 59

 Constance Furey, “Bound by Likeness: Vives and Erasmus on Marriage and Friendship,” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 29–43. 60  Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 61  Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations (New York, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1979), 79. 62  “une sainte et sacree amitié” (de Sales, Introduction, 185); “Saint Augustin témoigne que saint Ambroise aimait uniquement sainte Monique, pour les rares vertus qu’il voyait en elle, et qu’elle réciproquement le chérissait comme un Ange de Dieu” (de Sales, Introduction, 186).

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friendship in the seventeenth century, yet he portrays friendships between men and women as the last vestige of a fading ethic.63 Indeed, whether as friends of men or of other women, women figure the end of something great. Bray normalizes the extraordinary marriage of Anne Lister and Ann Walker in terms of a crepuscular wisp of a once ordinary worldview.64 Penelope Anderson captures the impoverishment that the narrative of decline has caused to the study of women friends through a series of oppositions—public vs. private; power vs. affect; men vs. women: “Friendship changes from being a feature of public life, with embraces, letters, and shared beds signifying power and influence … to being something that occurs in the now private domestic sphere, a relation relegated to women.”65 Being attentive to “imaginative experimentation” reveals, to the contrary, the power of friends to transform the meaning of friendship and to remake the contexts in which friendship signifies. The Essays We begin in media res with the text that has come to epitomize “perfect friendship” in the Renaissance: Michel de Montaigne’s encomium to his friend, Étienne de La Boétie. In contrast to queer approaches to “Of friendship” that proceed from a hermeneutics of suspicion,66 George Hoffmann measures the claims in the essay against the actions of its author. “Was Montaigne a Good Friend?” he asks. Montaigne and La Boétie had very good reasons to become friends, Hoffmann contends, as each man “embodied a realized exemplar of the other’s ambitions.”67 Montaigne’s family pedigree and patrimony appealed to La Boétie, while Montaigne admired La Boétie for his scholarly accomplishments and aspirations. Montaigne, however, dodged the question of why he loved his friend: “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”68 For the ancients, friends cultivated virtue through mutual beneficia. Aristotle distinguished in the Nicomachean Ethics between utility, pleasure, and perfection as categories  McGuire, Friendship and Community, 422–3.  Bray, The Friend, 241–6. 65  Anderson, “The Absent Female Friend,” 243–53. 66  Such as those by Marc Schachter (in Voluntary Servitude) and Gary Ferguson (in Queer (Re)Readings). Paul Ricoeur developed the notion of a hermeneutics of suspicion in De l’interprétation: Essai sur Sigmund Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965). 67  Hoffmann, 36. 68  “Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l’aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en respondant: ‘Parce que c’estoit luy; parce que c’estoit moy’” (Montaigne, Les Essais, 3 vols, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier [Paris: PUF, 1965], I.28.188; The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958], I.28.139). Subsequent references to the essays will provide the volume number, essay number, and page number of the Villey edition, followed by the page number of Frame’s translation. 63 64

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of friendship. Cicero portrayed “the mutual love of friends” as the foundation of both the family and the state.69 In construing God as the only friend one should love for his own sake, however, nominalist theologians in the Middle Ages emptied human friendship of its ethical content. Loving a human friend for his own sake, no matter how virtuous, amounted to idolatry. Consequently, when Renaissance humanists returned to the ancients, they were convinced that loving the friend “for his own sake” must mean loving him for something more essential than for the goodness he revealed through beneficent actions—for to appreciate these would now mean instrumentalizing the friend.70 Montaigne’s refusal to name the reasons for his love of La Boétie reflects this concern.71 Leaving “Of friendship” aside, then, Hoffmann attends to the characteristic practices of perfect friendship to determine whether Montaigne was a good friend. Aristotle emphasized the importance of togetherness in shared space—what we might call “unity of place” (borrowing from seventeenth-century interpretations of the Poetics): “The mere presence of friends is pleasant both in prosperity and adversity.”72 The Hellenistic schools and their early modern emulators took presence for granted too. Justus Lipsius cultivated a contubernium in his home, where scholar-friends lived in intimate daily contact with one another.73 The Epicureanminded cohorts of the early seventeenth century that Robert Schneider studies in this volume also prized face-to-face contact—so much so that each friend group became associated with a physical space. Montaigne and La Boétie were neighbors in Bordeaux, yet Hoffmann identifies notable moments when Montaigne chose to be absent from his friend. Literary friendships cultivated through letters were commonplace at a time when “the proto-Republic of humanist letters was literally an epistolary world,”74 but Montaigne stands out for electing epistolarity when he could have made house calls.75 Moreover, even though La Boétie “bequeathed 69  Cicero, De amicitia, 7.23: “[Y]ou may understand how great is the power of friendship and of concord from a consideration of the results of enmity and disagreement. For what house is so strong, or what state so enduring that it cannot be utterly overthrown by animosities and division?” (De senectute, de amicitia, de divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953], 135). Horst Hutter argues that Aristotle believed friendship to be more fundamental to the state than did Cicero (Politics as Friendship: The Origins of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and Practice of Friendship [Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1979], 26). 70  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 47–64. 71  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 174–5. 72  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 9.11.2, 569. 73  According to Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 74  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 25. 75  Katherine Kong argues that the friendship of Montaigne and La Boétie was above all “a textual affair”: “What Montaigne achieves through his varied writing and publishing projects is a textual, instead of a sexual, ‘alliance’ with his friend” (Lettering the Self, 233, 228).

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his library and his papers” to Montaigne, 76 Hoffmann observes that Montaigne contradicted La Boétie’s most important ideas and thus Cicero’s claim that perfect friends “have the same ideals and the same tastes.”77 Montaigne’s tepid practice of friendship leads to Hoffmann’s central question: Why did Montaigne infuse the memory of this friendship with the sacramental overtones of marriage in an essay published seventeen years after La Boétie’s death? Exclusion, Hoffmann argues, was the purpose of this most perfect friendship. Celebrating an exclusive friendship allowed Montaigne to minimize obligations while maximizing opportunity. Projecting a perfect friendship with La Boétie protected Montaigne from the demands that colleagues might make of him. Spared the obligations emanating from his immediate social and professional cohort, he could pursue what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “the strength of weak ties,” the connection-making opportunities afforded by disparate acquaintances, as opposed to a group of closer associates who all know each other already and whose connections are redundant.78 In the tradition of wedded brothers that Montaigne develops in “De l’amitié,” La Boétie’s death should have freed Montaigne for another best friend. However, spurning the overtures of the equally distinguished Lipsius, he befriended men 10 to 15 years his junior, to whom he played the kindly uncle. Montaigne adopts an avuncular attitude toward the reader as well throughout the Essays, and Hoffmann identifies the exclusive tone of “Of friendship” as an anomaly. Those who assign great biographical significance to this essay, Hoffmann argues, must also contend with the misanthropic Montaigne that it projects. In revealing that the “perfect friendship celebrated by Montaigne could prove deeply impoverishing,” Hoffmann extends, sociologically, Langer’s remarks about the impoverished language of perfect friendship.79 He also challenges the nostalgia that infuses Bray’s work—a nostalgia that according to Langer inheres in the discourse of friendship in the Renaissance. If “Of friendship” served to extract its author from friendship’s reciprocal economy, as Hoffmann argues, what loss do we mourn when we lament the passing of the “Renaissance friendship” it is said to epitomize? And what might we gain in attending more closely to the practice as opposed to the ideal of friendship? Hoffmann’s essay suggests that this approach may bring less perfect, but more diverse friends to light—such as the women whom, in theory, Montaigne excluded from friendship.80 76

 “il [me] laissa … héritier de sa bibliothèque et de ses papiers” (I.28.184; 136).  Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), 1.17.56, 59. 78  Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–33. 79  On the “lexical and semantic poverty” of Montaigne’s rationale for his friendship with La Boétie, see Langer, Perfect Friendship, 172. 80  Perfect friendship exempla boil down to a half dozen or so couples, leading Langer to speculate that “the very limitedness of the examples is proof of the perfection of the friendships involved; perhaps perfection is obscurely felt to be redundant” (Perfect Friendship, 23). 77

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Montaigne confirms one of the pillars of perfect friendship when he claims that women’s souls are too flimsy “to endure the strain of so tight and durable a knot” and discounts marriage as “a bargain ordinarily made for other ends” that has “no dealings or business except with itself.”81 It is nevertheless with respect to women that Hoffmann observes the most flagrant distinction between Montaigne’s ideal and practice of friendship. Allusions to card games in the Essays allow Hoffmann to reconstruct a convivial domestic environment in which Montaigne enjoyed the companionship of his wife and daughter, his mother and two of his sisters. Here Hoffmann’s essay raises an epistemological problem: if the practice of friendship is more than—or different from—its written expression, how do we know what it means to practice friendship without resorting to criteria that may be anachronistic? How can we know that time spent together around a card table weighs more heavily on the scales of friendship than the time spent composing a letter? Montaigne’s dedications to five noblewomen as well as his publicized bond with Marie de Gournay indicate that his relationships with women were not bracketed to a domestic sphere beyond the elective arena of friendship. Did the claim that Gournay would one day be capable of the “most sacred kind of friendship”82 foreclose the friendship potential of other women, as that of La Boétie does for other men? Or might women readers respond to this perfect amie manquée as a perfectible exemplar? In “The Power to Correct: Beating Men in Service Friendships,” Michelle Miller tests Bray’s claim that friendship between men gradually “became less public, less expressive, and less acceptably part of ethical and political life” over the course of the early modern period. Miller confronts Bray’s thesis—which pertained to England only—with one of the master-narratives of early modern French studies: Norbert Elias’s study of the rise in bodily and affective restraint from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. In the companion volume to his History of Manners, Elias attributed the gradually chastened habitus following the late medieval period to increasingly complex networks and differentiation in social hierarchy that accompanied early modern state formation. Miller cites “the civilizing process” as a possible explanans for Bray’s thesis regarding increasing circumspection in the expression of friendship. One might speculate that physically demonstrative friendships became uncouth as a result of a newly chastened decorum. But this is not what Miller argues. Rather than using the civilizing process to corroborate the claim that men became more restrained in their friendly overtures, Miller uses the civilizing process to explain the endurance of intense physical interaction, a feature of friendship that, according to Bray, began to wane in the early modern period. She sharpens Elias and Bray against one another to suggest, first, that the modes of physicality in friendship are themselves variable and contingent, and second, that aggression has its place in the civilizing process. 81

 “leur ame ne semble assez ferme pour soustenir l’estriente d’un noeud si pressé et durable” … “marché qui ordinairement se fait à autres fins” (I.28.186; 137–8). 82  “cette tressaincte amitié” (II.17.661; 502). Did Montaigne write this allongeail or did Gournay herself interpolate it? See Hoffmann, 58.

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Miller examines physical aggression as a function of friendship—of the friendship, specifically, of the poet Clément Marot for François I. The reign of François I (1515–1547) was a transformative one in terms of the civilizing process. François I’s ideology of translatio studii et imperii joined literary emulation with continual military campaigns in Italy to claim France as the heir to Rome’s greatness, and the French language as the new Latin. The genteel conversants in the handbook of Renaissance civility, Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), praise this king for his attention to letters and the arts. Within France, bureaucratic reforms, such as the replacement of Latin by French as the administrative language and the registration of marriages, baptisms, and deaths within parishes, brought knowledge more directly under the control of the crown. Miller links the notion of correction to the agenda of the state: the friend of the sovereign advances his claims by correcting the bourgeois men who transgress distinctions of rank through beatings doled out in poetry. She shows that Marot’s poem redirects his own experience of correction: his Protestant sympathies had earned him a flogging and exile to Italy. By redeploying violence against a social equal, Marot recovers his place in “Team François”—at the king’s side, with access to his bedchamber. Violence that serves the friend, Miller concludes, strengthens social bonds. Clément Marot’s impolite actions on behalf of François I attest to the association of friendship with masculinity not just in perfect, equal friendships, but all the more so among friends of unequal rank. One of Bray’s most important insights in The Friend is that rank-unequal friendships between men were vulnerable to charges of sodomy insofar as disregard for social order mapped easily, in political polemics, onto the transgression of natural order.83 Marot’s self-styling as the enforcer of François’s corrections obviated sexual interpretations of their unequal friendship. His lowliness allowed him to engage in fisticuffs unfitting for kingly comportment; he advertised aggression, not sex, as the nature of his utility to his friend and king. Given Marot’s efforts to assert a shared masculinity, it is surprising that the dedicatee of his poem is not François I, but the king’s cousin, Renée de France. Renée supported the Reform and was Marot’s patron during his exile in Italy. In Renée’s kitchen, Miller shows, servants plot to avenge wrongs done to her and to her cousin. By situating the origins of his mission in the for intérieur of Renée’s home, Marot codes correction as an activity protected by royal patron(s) and constructive of the civilizing process. Correction participated in the constructive project of self-improvement that philosophers identified as the principle justification for and benefit of friendship. It was also a feature of humanistic activity with respect to the friendship canon. In “Redressing Ficino, Redeeming Desire: Symphorien Champier’s La nef des dames vertueuses,” Todd Reeser examines Symphorien Champier’s importation of Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism to France in support of the pro-woman side of the querelle des femmes. Reeser argues that correction is a function of translation 83  Alan Bray first developed this argument in “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship.”

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as well as of friendship, for Champier presses Plato’s privileging of the sexless soul over the sexed body into an argument for the equality of women and men, all the while disguising the homoerotic content of Ficinian Neoplatonism. Champier “corrects” Neoplatonic friendship by “heterosexualizing” it when he replaces Ficino’s tale of Achilles and Patroclus, which exemplified love between men, with Boccaccio’s story of two brother-like friends, Titus and Gisippus, who marry, respectively, each other’s sister and fiancée. Champier’s La nef begs a question also raised by Marot’s poem to Renée de France: to what extent are women imagined as potential friends and to what extent do they mediate access to other men? This question arises in Champier’s case with respect to the humanists he emulates. Champier acknowledges deviating from his sources when he retells a tale recounted by Ficino about a wayward daughter, Lucilia. Lucilia’s father advises her to correct her promiscuity by trading lascivious outfits for modest attire. Reeser links this sartorial switch to Champier’s hermeneutic “redressing” of Ficino: in excluding from his appropriation of Plato the attractive young men whom Lucilia also renounces, Champier has strayed from the father—for in the Symposium, Plato states that love between men is the highest form of love. Champier enters fraught textual territory to recruit Plato for his pro-woman polemics, and Lucilia serves him in the same way that women serve Titus and Gisippus: as a bridge between men over pesky obstacles. Lucilia mediates Champier’s bond to Ficino and ultimately to Plato by allowing him to selectively claim their legacy. The question of humanist homosociality, particularly in the friendship canon, deserves closer scrutiny. Lorna Hutson, in The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and the Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994), distinguishes between a medieval pattern of gift-exchange, in which women served as the “signs of credit” that bonded men, and literary reciprocity between humanists in sixteenth-century English literature. Texts, she argues, took the place of women as objects of exchange.84 Reeser’s analysis of Lucilia’s changing outfits nuances this opposition: sixteenth-century humanists may not have traded their fiancées and sisters like Titus and Gisippus, but Champier at least established the legitimacy of his link to other humanists (Ficino) by leaning on Lucilia. Did other humanists call upon women to iron out the kinks in their appropriations of the friendship canon? Female patronage, a theme in Miller’s essay, is central to Marc Schachter’s contribution, “Translating Friendship in the Circle of Marguerite de Navarre: Plato’s Lysis and Lucian’s Toxaris.” Focusing on the humanist activity surrounding François I’s older sister, Schachter queries the purpose and effect of dedicating translations of friendship texts to women. Marguerite de Navarre commissioned a translation of Plato’s dialogue, Lysis, from Des Périers, her valet de chambre, as one of many evangelical humanist projects involving translations of Neoplatonic texts about love. Schachter shows that in his French translation, Des Périers adapted Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the Greek original to conjure an 84  Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 2–13.

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evangelical interpretation of perfect friendship that included women. Like Reeser, therefore, Schachter reveals the perception that Plato’s philosophy was womanfriendly. The friends that Ficino talks about in his commentary on the Lysis are men, but Des Périers, glossing the same text, ignores the friend couple as well as marriage in favor of a more capacious and diffuse notion of friendship. In Des Périers’s commentary and translation, God becomes both the origin and the goal of friendship. The quest for this most perfect friendship unites a community of women linked “by contiguity and consanguinity.” When “grace and biblical inspiration are the keys to salvation,” Schachter explains, “singular earthly attachments must be attenuated.”85 Imagining God as the perfect friend softened the sharp demarcations that structure Aristotle’s version of perfect friendship—demarcations between friendship and love, between friends and family, between men and women. Dedications were gifts, and gift-giving was integral to the reciprocal economy of friendship, as Hutson and Natalie Zemon Davis have shown.86 Dedicating a text on the theme of friendship was a particularly overt friend-making gesture. Erasmus, for instance, alluded to friendship in dedicating his Latin translation of Lucian’s Toxaris to Bishop Richard Foxe. Jacques de Rozières dedicated the same text to Marguerite de France, daughter of François I (the niece of Marguerite de Navarre), lifting much of Erasmus’s dedicatory epistle. Schachter shows however that De Rozières did not copy Erasmus when it came to characterizing his dedicatee as future friend. “In de Rozières’s letter, something—perhaps both social status and gender—prohibits the deployment of the power of friendship to bridge difference, while this is precisely the use Erasmus seeks to make of it in the original epistle.”87 Eschewing the reciprocity of friendship, De Rozières offers his work in a one-way dynamic reminiscent of courtly love. Was De Rozières engaging in the homosociality observed in Champier’s humanistic practice, appealing to Marguerite de France to claim the countenance of her deceased brother, who had originally commissioned the work? Or was De Rozières seeking to cultivate a friendship that could not be named? De Rozières’s awkward dedication to Marguerite de France leads the scholar of early modern friendship to a nominalist knot. Does a friendship that cannot be named exist? Alternatively, do concrete gestures—such as dedications—hold more weight than abstractions such as “friendship”? By the end of the sixteenth century, Neoplatonic texts were readily available in French. The homoerotism of Platonic friendship was familiar, too, despite the “corrections” administered by early humanists like Champier and Des Périers. Katherine Crawford emphasizes the political utility and liability of Platonic friendship in “From Reception to Assassination: French Negotiations of ‘Platonic Love.’” Where Schachter shows that Neoplatonic friendship provided an inclusive basis for an evangelical community of women, Crawford reveals the attraction of an “exteriorized, social ethics of friendship” for a monarch trying to rise 85

 Schachter, 114.  Nathalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 46. 87  Schachter, 116. 86

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above sectarian strife. An account of friendship that supported hierarchical social order, such as Plato’s Lysis, appealed to a king who struggled to contain warring enemies, and whom nobles undermined and debt crippled. Blaise de Vigenère, Henri III’s secretary, characterized friendship as the building block of peace and the solution to the nation’s civil war. Yet like Socrates in Lysis, Henri III mixed up philia and eros and got neither one right. His friends were young—too much like him to offer sage counsel—and undistinguished—too different from him to deserve the affections he showered on them. The elements that humanists had tried to purge from Platonic friendship surfaced with a vengeance in League and Huguenot propaganda alike, and following Henri III’s assassination, the French monarchy turned its back on this strand of the classical friendship canon. To the old theme of the solitude of princes,88 political theorists such as Jean Bodin and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet grafted the ideology of political absolutism that further isolated the king, extricating him from all vestiges of reciprocity.89 The implementation of absolutism was a gradual and an imperfect process that depended initially on the crown’s ability to subordinate the groups of friends that cut across Paris’s highly compartmentalized social landscape after the Edict of Nantes.90 In “Friends of Friends: Intellectual and Literary Sociability in the Age of Richelieu,” Robert Schneider reconstructs the cohorts of friends in Paris during the 1620s and 1630s that comprised the diffuse literary field from which Richelieu formed the Académie française. Schneider builds on the inquiry begun by Christian Jouhaud in Les pouvoirs de la littérature, but reaches different conclusions about the composition of the literary field and its relation to power. Jouhaud construes the emerging literary field and political power as mutually constitutive. Writers’ dependence on royal patronage, he argues, allowed them to construct individual voices free from corporate identification, and their authority as literary figures in turn augmented the power of the crown. Examining the emergence of the literary field through the lens of friendship, Schneider recognizes multiple cohorts with which writers associated. This diversity complicates the mutuality of literature and power, because in Richelieu’s own time and until the advent of the Fronde, 88

 See Shoemaker, 249.  On Bodin’s reworking of feudal reciprocity, see Rebecca Wilkin, Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 59–61. Practice did not necessarily follow theory; Louis XIII had notorious favorites: his falconer, Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes and Henri Coiffier de Ruzé d’Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, executed for conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu in 1642. 90  In Paris in 1600, writes Orest Ranum, “clergy, merchants, artisans, and royal officials … lived oblivious to one another in exclusive corporations, notably chapters, guilds, and courts.” Architecture reinforced this social compartmentalization: “Their residences, abbeys, hotels, and even bourgeois houses were built like fortresses, with high walls, barred windows, and iron-reinforced doors.” No common language, food source, or tax burden led the inhabitants of Paris to transcend their narrow corporate interests. Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism: An Essay, 2nd revised ed. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 42. 89

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friends spelled revolt. Whereas Jouhaud portrays literature and power as mutually constructive entities, Schneider underscores mutual wariness. In his analysis, (male) writers’ acceptance of corporatization—and the servitude it implied—was a kind of defeat, which they romanced as deliverance from the rule of women.91 In Schneider’s empirical approach to friendship, friend groups appear almost as spaces that individuals can enter and exit, reflective of the fact that friends defined the tenor of their friendships spatially. During the wars of religion, Neostoics administered their harsh therapy in lush gardens92 far from the fracas of the city and the intrigue of the court. Private retreats in bucolic spaces retained their appeal well after the Parlement de Paris’s registration of the Edict of Nantes. The model for the friend-groups studied by Schneider was not the austere Stoa, for whom friendship was a means to virtue, however, but the pleasure-seeking Epicureans, for whom friendship was an end in itself.93 By tracing the comings and goings of two relatively obscure literary figures (Guillaume Colletet and Michel de Marolles) and the shifting composition of two friend-groups—the circle of Valentin Conrart (from which Richelieu recruited the nucleus of the Académie française) and the “Bergers illustres”—Schneider reveals a range of coteries whose memberships, ideologies, and aesthetics overlapped with those of the academy, peopled by men devoted to erudition, and the salon, hosted by women opposed to pedantry and concerned with questions of linguistic refinement. From this landscape, Schneider draws three intriguing conclusions. First, he argues that the salon—notably the Marquise de Rambouillet’s Chambre bleue—did not comprise one coherent group, but that it brought together subgroups whose members enjoyed a sociability of their own. Consequently, cultural innovations associated with the salon, such as honnêteté, are perhaps more appropriately attributed to these more elemental groups of friends. The friendgroups that Schneider identifies as constitutive of salon sociability were exclusively male, and so, similar to Antoine Lilti’s work on eighteenth-century salon culture, this argument has the effect of minimizing the cultural influence of women.94 Second, Schneider observes a gender gap with respect to social capital. When friendship is construed in spatial terms, mobility emerges as an important ingredient of cultural agency. Men such as Colletet and Marolles accumulated ties by frequenting a diversity of venues. Women, in contrast, received but did not frequent.95 Women had fewer opportunities than men to hone their skills and exert influence through 91  Robert A. Schneider, “Political Power and the Emergence of Literature: Christian Jouhaud’s Age of Richelieu,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 357–80. 92  Justus Lipsius, De Constantia in publicis malis (1583). Lipsius was no doubt aware that Epicurus had met his disciples in a garden. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 119. 93  Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 250. 94  Lilti, Le monde des salons. Goodman makes a strong claim for women’s cultural influence in The Republic of Letters. 95  Schneider, 156.

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patterns of accumulated friendships; they were less able than men to take advantage of “the strength of weak ties.”96 Here Schneider takes issue with Daniel Gordon’s characterization of the salons as early spaces of social equality predating Habermas’s public sphere on the grounds that Gordon ignores the structural inequalities in seventeenth-century sociability, not least women’s restricted mobility.97 Third, Schneider clarifies the gender politics that allowed cohorts of male friends to embrace subjugation to political absolutism. Richelieu’s founding of the Académie française was a means, Schneider argues, of coopting “friends of friends.” It is easy to understand that a dense network of friends comprised a parallel polity that Richelieu was eager to access and control. It is less obvious, Schneider concedes, why men who had celebrated the freedom of retreat and who characterized literary activity as a by-product of sociability rather than as its raison d’être, should exchange freely cultivated friendships for the yoke of royal patronage and the imperative of productivity. He finds some clues in the words of salon regulars Jean Chapelain, Guez de Balzac, and Antoine Godeau: membership in an unquestionably virile group, close to the seat of power, represented delivery from the emasculation of idleness. Schneider’s intuition is nicely supported by Ziad Elmarsafy’s work on the interrelated notions of freedom, slavery, and absolutism in seventeenth century French literature. While La Boétie in De la servitude volontaire wondered what could possibly motivate a whole nation of people to willingly enslave themselves to an absolute monarch, “the idea of absolutism as liberation was part and parcel of the endoxa of the seventeenth century.”98 Elmarsafy shows that Pierre Corneille’s plots hinge on an opposition between the tyranny of the passions—usually involving love for a woman—and liberating submission to the king. And Schneider shows that the friends of friends who became the first members of the Académie française rationalized the loss of the leisure they cultivated in similar terms: subjugation to the crown meant freedom from the “tyranny” of women. In a poem dedicated to Richelieu, Colletet insinuates that it is because Richelieu has been smitten by women—the muses—that he has chosen to patronize poets. Yet the poet himself looks forward in entering into the exclusively masculine Académie française to “being more solitary” and to “possessing [him]self.”99 96

 On Granovetter’s “weak ties” concept, see above, 16, and Hoffmann, 45.  Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 98  Ziad Elmarsafy, Freedom, Slavery, and Absolutism: Corneille, Pascal, Racine (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 18. 99  Richelieu “[e]st épris de la muse, & ravi de nos Vers! / Et par une faveur digne de son courage, / Enfin la recompense égale nostre ouvrage! … Je veux plus que devant frequenter leurs deserts [des Muses], / Estre plus attentif a leurs doctes concerts, / Observer de plus pres leur dance, & leur mystere, / Me posseder moy-mesme, estre plus solitaire, / Avoir tousjours l’Esprit attaché dans les cieux, Et quitter les Mortels pour ne voir que des Dieux” (Guillaume Colletet, Le triomphe des muses, à Monseigneur le Cardinal duc de Richelieu [Paris : Veuve Jean Camusat, 1640], 3–4). 97

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Clearly, there was deep ambivalence, on the part of some men, about the codes of heterosocial galanterie that regulated much of the cross-gender interaction in the salons.100 Yet friendships between men and women flourished in early seventeenthcentury France. In “Making Friends, Practicing Equality: The Correspondence of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia,” Rebecca Wilkin parses the letters of the French philosopher—an expatriate to the Netherlands—and the German refugee to reveal the construction of a philosophical friendship between a man and a woman. Wilkin reveals two different strategies for friend-making across gender lines. Similar to De Rozières with respect to Marguerite de France, Descartes never dared to call his noble addressee a “friend.” He nevertheless outlines a stoic ideal of friendship that implicitly includes the princess: knowledge and virtue are the stuff of friendship, and she has them in abundance. Elisabeth in turn balances gender and rank through a dual medical metaphor. On the one hand, the Calvinist princess calls Descartes the “doctor of her soul,” an epithet common in the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, but used in the seventeenth century by female penitents with respect to their spiritual directors. On the other hand, Elisabeth places the philosopher in a servile role by soliciting medical advice from him; she treats him as a court physician, reflective of his inferior rank. In this way, Elisabeth balances his philosophical authority with her social superiority. Wilkin shows that the two correspondents construe equality through rhetorical frames that hinge on opposite approaches to gender difference. Descartes, true to the universalism of ancient stoicism (and in contrast to the masculinism of contemporary Neostoicism), makes gender and rank irrelevant to friendship; he emphasizes their essential sameness. Elisabeth, in contrast, foregrounds her sick female body to create a pretext for their exchange (medical advice). Wilkin borrows from Alison Weber’s work on Teresa of Avila to show that through a selfdeprecating “rhetoric of femininity,” Elisabeth justifies her continuing adherence to skepticism, the very school of thought that Descartes claimed to overcome by means of his dualist metaphysics. Whereas equality for Descartes means sameness, Elisabeth’s skeptically derived notion of equality embraces difference. Gesturing toward political implications, Wilkin compares Elisabeth’s construction of friendship to the contractarian philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which also acknowledged difference within equality. In Descartes’s correspondences with men, philosophical disagreement led invariably to personal enmity. By showing that Elisabeth’s body mediated a relation of equality in which divergent philosophical commitments could co-exist, Wilkin corroborates Miller’s claim that the physicality of friendship contributed to the civilizing process rather than being disciplined by it. Of course in the case of Marot and Elizabeth, the bodies being corrected or offered up for healing were first and foremost words on paper. Marot punched another man in a poem, and 100  Claude Habib, Galanterie française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Alain Viala, La France galante: essai historique sur une catégorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’à la Révolution (Paris: PUF, 2008); Seifert, Manning the Margins, 57–97.

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Descartes only observed Elizabeth’s symptoms in her handwriting. How much importance should we attribute to “paper” gestures? The essays in this volume offer an array of answers to that question. Hoffmann casts doubt on the sincerity of the literary friendship that Montaigne crafted in essays and in letters and narrows his evidence down to time spent together in a shared space.101 Wilkin, however, considers epistolary exchange a practice of equality that should be considered alongside theoretical statements promoting the equality of the sexes, such as Marie de Gournay’s De l’égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) and Poulain de la Barre’s De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673), in keeping with Anthony J. La Vopa’s “rhetorical approach” to intellectual history in which “philosophical argument … is permeable to stylistic practices, and particularly to uses of figurative language, from other rhetorics in the culture at large.”102 Daniella Kostroun grapples directly with the question of rhetoric in “The Gendered Self and Friendship in Action among the Port-Royal Nuns.” She responds to McGuire’s claim that the interpersonal environment cultivated in medieval monastic communities determined representations of monastic friendship. This premise makes McGuire wary of idealization and curious about the unsaid: if the temptation was great to account for individual friendships in light of friendship ideals, then how can we know what friends really felt, believed, or did? Kostroun, in contrast, is not worried that Angélique Arnauld, abbess and reformer of PortRoyal, might have simulated an ideal at odds with an independent “reality,” or dissimulated “what really happened” through a veneer of friendly conventions. Rather, she argues that Angélique interpreted her life struggles through available discourses of friendship. Kostroun’s empathetic reading of Angélique’s disparate accounts of her desires and decisions exemplifies Paul Ricoeur’s claim that “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.”103 Just as friendship does not exist as an independent entity outside of or beyond the language of friendship, Kostroun reveals that friends are 101  John Jeffries Martin shows how Montaigne oscillated in his Essays between the ideals of sincerity—the correspondence between an individual’s affective disposition and his or her words, which he traces to Calvinist sources—and of courtly prudence, both in public and in private contexts in Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 119. See also Alan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1990): 1474–1504. Silver argues that the emergence of consumer society in the eighteenth century led to a shift in the requirements of friendship from mutual obligation to sincerity. 102  Anthony J. La Vopa, “A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel’s Enlightenment,” The Historical Journal 52, no. 3 (2009): 717–38, 731. 103  Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15. Translation corrected by Bernard Dauenhauer and David Pellauer in “Paul Ricoeur,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/ricoeur/. Ricoeur’s title contains an obvious reference to the tradition of perfect friendship.

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not just characters who people the life story of an autonomous self. Friendship is an experience through which the self becomes intelligible to itself. As Abbess of Port-Royal, Angélique was to enforce the Benedictine rule, originally crafted for male religious. It fell to the abbot in the Benedictine rule to discourage favoritism toward individual friends that undermined charity toward all. Angélique found herself ill-suited to this paternalistic role, so much so that she sought to join the Order of the Visitation. Not only had the Visitation been founded by her close friends François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, but Angélique believed that she could be both a better friend and a better nun under the Augustinian rule, originally designed for women. She only acquiesced to remain at Port-Royal as a result of a newfound friendship with Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran, which she experienced in terms of “the traditional ‘soul mate’ friendship trope that linked heterosexual friendships and monastic reform.” Parting paths with that tradition, however, Kostroun explains how Angélique Arnauld “downgraded the heterosexual friendship between male confessor and female penitent to the level of mere catalyst for the more significant friendships among the nuns.”104 And interestingly, while the female penitent/male spiritual guide couple served in secular contexts to make cross-gender friendships intelligible, the model through which Angélique Arnauld later construed the solidarity of the nuns who refused to sign the formulary condemning Jansenius’s interpretation of Augustine was of pagan origin. Through their will to chastity, Diana and her fellow bathers transformed their reclusive space into a moral high ground in the face of a petulant male intruder (Acteon) on a par with that arrogated by perfect (male) friends with respect to a tyrant. Kostroun shows that “associative female chastity” of Ovid’s Metamorphoses provided a frame for interpreting the persecution that the nuns of Port-Royal endured when Louis XIV set about disbanding the convent.105 This collective of women—of “sisters”—recalls the contiguous and consanguineous notion of friendship among the women in Marguerite de Navarre’s evangelical circle. Though the convent comprised a distinct culture, Kostroun’s analysis of friendship tropes in the letters of Angélique Arnauld suggest that it was not entirely isolated from “the world.” Lewis Seifert makes this point explicitly in his essay on female and cross-gender friendships in the salon of the Marquise de Sablé. Like Wilkin, Seifert explores how a friendship model created for spiritual relationships was adapted to secular interactions. In “The Marquise de Sablé and Her Friends: Men and Women between the Convent and the World,” he argues that this salonnière created a discursive space that mediated between two ostensibly opposed ideals of friendship—on the one hand a “spiritual” ideal promoted by among others François de Sales and on the other the “worldly” ideal of galanterie practiced in many salons of the day. From the apartment she had built within the walls of the Abbey of Port-Royal in Paris, with one door opening onto the convent and another onto the street, Sablé negotiated between 104

 Kostroun, 205.  Kostroun cites Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 82.

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the spiritual and worldly spheres, receiving or corresponding with a wide range of friends, including Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. The Marquise did not create a synthesis of the spiritual and the galant models as much as she adapted both of them to the life she forged for herself. Some of her friendships, with both men and women, centered on spiritual concerns (though not exclusively) and allowed her to effect through correspondence the sort of retreat from the world she could not perform materially. In more worldly friendships with men, she eschewed the amorous pretext of galanterie to enjoy equitable and substantial exchange—about their literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific works and about her own writings. Sablé thus provides a counterpoint to the salonnières marginalized by the groups of male habitués that Schneider studies. Sablé’s revision of friendship ideals extended beyond lived experience to theoretical discussions; Seifert shows that her maxims on friendship oppose the thought of her friends Jacques Esprit and La Rochefoucauld. Nuancing their cynicism, Sablé asserts repeatedly that friendship is possible as long as it is grounded in virtue, and she draws out numerous exceptions to La Rochefoucauld’s condemnation of friendship. Sablé’s stance is friendlier to her readers, Seifert argues, since, by making explicit these exceptions, she allows them the possibility of inclusion in true, virtuous friendship. Furthermore, unlike the vaguely Aristotelian model she invokes, Sablé rejects the requirement that friends be of equal status, joining cross-gender friends such as Descartes and Elisabeth in defending the possibility of difference in friendship. Although the Marquise never addresses the question of cross-gender friendship, she distinguishes between love and friendship, thereby countering the notion that friendship between men and women inevitably leads to love, a position held, paradoxically, by her friends Esprit and La Rochefoucauld. Presumably exempting her from their negative views of women as friends, both men collaborated extensively with Sablé on writing maxims. No passive hostess, the Marquise critiqued their work and shared her own with them. In preparing the way for the publication of La Rochefoucauld’s collection, she became increasingly aware of her own distance from his moral philosophy and enacted the role of friend-as-counselor, in the spirit of correction central to the masculine friendship tradition. As Seifert shows, even though La Rochefoucauld did not accept all of Sablé’s advice, the frank exchanges he had with her were made possible by a practice of friendship that straddled spiritual and worldly ideals. Though Sablé’s friendships with men prefigure later examples of cross-gender bonds premised neither on romance nor on spirituality, Seifert notes that the secularization of society did not result in greater acceptance of malefemale friendships, which our culture is still reluctant to acknowledge. Trust, grounded in confidentiality, was crucial to the relationship between male confessor and female penitent on which the cross-gender friendships studied by Wilkin, Kostroun, and Seifert were modeled. Peter Shoemaker focuses on the importance of confidentiality, or more specifically, of “confidence” (confidence or confiance), to early modern friendship in “From My Lips to Yours: Friendship, Confidentiality, and Gender in Early Modern France.” From Aristotle forward,

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a good friend was understood as a person to whom one could safely unburden one’s deepest, most secret feelings. In the early modern period, intimate disclosure to the friend was a matter of ethical and social obligation as well as of selfexpression. Shoemaker shows that confidentiality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries followed a code of conduct that paralleled laws surrounding the dépôt, a precious item one deposited with another person for safe-keeping. The dépôt was not subject to the inventory of its keeper’s goods, nor could he use or exchange it. Most importantly, the dépositaire was sworn to secrecy, making him analogous to the confidant. Conceived as sort of human lockbox, the confidant bore a weighty responsibility in an era when secrets held strategic importance, particularly at court. Not surprisingly, friends were reluctant to disclose information that might be used against them, and so with the trust they placed in their confidants came restraint and distance. The gender of the confidant was crucial in this code, Shoemaker argues. Women, went the commonplace, could not be trusted with confidences made to them. Their undisciplined tongues precluded restraint and prudence, without which they were unequal to the responsibilities of the confidant. However, as Shoemaker shows, several women writers challenged this supposition. In Marguerite de Navarre’s novellas X, XXI, and LXX, men betray the confidences made by women, who go on to make God or Christ their friend of choice and the recipient of their confidences. For Marguerite, confidence is the foundation for affective bonds between men and women, but it is ultimately an impossible ideal. Madeleine de Scudéry was less pessimistic about the sharing of confidences between women and men—and more optimistic about the possibility of cross-gender friendship. In the “Story of Sapho” in Scudéry’s novel Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, Sapho and Phaon brave obstacles to become each others’ (chaste) confidants. Confidence was crucial not just to friendships between men and women, but also to women’s writing. One of the obstacles on the road to confidence for Sapho and Phaon, Shoemaker shows, is Phaon’s voyeuristic desire for her. To thwart his untoward curiosity, Sapho controls his access to the meaning of her writing with help from her confidants, Cydnon and Démocède. Shoemaker describes this episode as an allegory for the publishing practices of many early modern women writers. By making a dépôt of her work to a male confidant who would publish it, Scudéry styled herself as an “enlightened amateur” rather than as a pedantic femme savante. More generally, Shoemaker describes “confidence” as a key to understanding the ethics of early prose fiction, wherein narrative is a private speech act that constitutes the reader as a confidant. The figure of the reader-friend invites us to collaborate, through our interpretations, in the meaning of early modern friendship. At the same time, it reminds us of the responsibility we bear in adjudicating that precious dépôt. Montaigne’s exclusion of the reader in “Of Friendship” was anomalous in the Essays and in the early modern period generally, when, as Shoemaker shows, it was conventional to include the reader as a confidant. So too, perfect friendship was anomalous in the time—and impoverished, as McGuire, Langer, and Hoffmann all

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argue.106 Far more common and much richer were the friendships across difference studied throughout our volume. The diversity of interpretations and creativity of methodology on display in the following essays are testament to the variety and inventiveness of the friendships in early modern France.

106  McGuire concludes his book on the theme of the “radical isolation” of “modern friendship” (Friendship and Community, 425) exemplified in Montaigne’s “De l’amitié.” Though we question the extent to which this essay is representative of Renaissance, modern, or any other kind of friendship, Hoffmann certainly confirms McGuire’s claim that for Montaigne, friendship (or the representation of friendship) “served as a refuge for the individual rather than as a point of departure for involvement in [the] community” (Friendship and Community, 424).

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Chapter 2

Was Montaigne a Good Friend? George Hoffmann

Since Alan Bray first taught us to look at early modern friendship with new eyes, Montaigne’s “Of friendship” has acquired a sort of canonical status. The essay now figures as an exemplary witness of pre-modern European masculine culture.1 Yet, as even the cursory reader will note, Montaigne’s essay is exceptional—anomalous—in its unrestrained expression of feelings and idealism regarding his dead friend Étienne de La Boétie: the Essays as a whole is far better known for its skepticism and arch irony. Even if one avoids anachronistic suspicions, as Gérard Defaux would have us do,2 the problem hardly dissolves. Montaigne promotes the ideal of perfect friendship in ways quite uncharacteristic for him and, I will argue, for his age. My purpose is not to add directly to discussion of Montaigne’s proper place in the history of early modern “passionate friendship,” much less challenge such a history. Rather, I would like to raise a question of an entirely different order: how well did Montaigne practice the friendship of which he could speak so movingly? Just how good of a friend was he? Along the way, I hope to shed some new light on the practical ends such idealistic friendships in fact fulfilled in the early modern France of Montaigne’s time, uses which may go some way toward explaining their popularity. Finally, I want to ponder how Montaigne transforms perfect friendship’s practical, if hidden, function into a claim for absolute exclusivity that breaks with the openness one generally finds in the rest of the Essays and must ultimately lead one to qualify the popular impression of its author’s affability. 1  “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 1–19, expanded and significantly modified in The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); see, also, Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Studies on Montaigne that apply and extend Bray’s ideas include Marc Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship from Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), and Gary Ferguson, “Perfecting Friendship: Montaigne’s Itch,” Montaigne Studies 9 (1997): 105–20, reprised, in longer form, in Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 191–243. Jeffrey Mehlman anticipated some of these developments in “La Boétie’s Montaigne,” Oxford Literary Review 4, no. 1 (1979): 45–61. I thank Katherine Almquist, Rebecca Wilkin, and Michelle Miller for reading a draft of this chapter and for their helpful suggestions. 2  Montaigne et le travail de l’amitié: Du lit de mort d’Étienne de La Boétie aux Essais de 1595 (Orléans: Paradigme, 2001).

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Naturally, one must return to his friendship with La Boétie and the circumstances surrounding it. But, more importantly, one needs to examine how the ideal of their friendship, as Montaigne posthumously celebrated it, continued to function in his later life. How did it inform his interactions with the likes of Pierre de Brach, Florimond de Ræmond, Étienne Pasquier, and Justus Lipsius? Whether those interactions can be termed friendships—and whether his published ideal of friendship would have allowed him to see them as such—proves a very real part of the problem with Montaigne as a friend. The Montaigne that the record reveals, contrary to what “Of friendship” would have us believe, suggests someone who preferred to spend his time mentoring younger men and who enjoyed the company of women: his wife, his daughter, and Marie de Gournay. Why Did La Boétie Become Friends with Montaigne? Who is it that says most, which can say more Than this rich praise, that you alone are you.

—Shakespeare, sonnet 84

Discussion of the short-lived but apparently intense friendship with La Boétie has tended to concern itself with Montaigne’s decision to remove his friend’s masterpiece, The Will to Serve, from its originally projected place in the Essays, immediately following “Of friendship.”3 This may well remain the decisive question to settle, but one can nonetheless widen the scope of consideration to include a few matters that bear on other issues. How did Montaigne and La Boétie meet, and what can we ascertain about the rhythm and length of their encounters thereafter?  Montaigne initially intended his essay (and, perhaps, the Essays as a whole) to present and frame La Boétie’s provocative political discourse for a reading public larger than the confidential one among which it had circulated in manuscript during the preceding two decades, Michel Simonin, “Œuvres complètes ou plus que complètes? Montaigne éditeur de La Boétie,” Montaigne Studies 7, no. 1–2 (1995): 5–34. Did his elimination of La Boétie’s work imply a covert disavowal of his friend’s incendiary proposals, or did the conspicuous absence of The Will to Serve act rather as a pointed finger accusing France’s repressive political climate? André Tournon, “Notre liberté volontaire: le Contre Un en marge des Essais,” Europe 68, no. 729–30 (1990): 72–82. Did the rest of the Essays stand as an elaborate framework within which Montaigne could entertain a sense of conversing with his departed friend whose political ideas continued to haunt the central essays of each of its three books? Michel Butor, Essais sur les Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); Patrick Henry, “Return to the Tomb of La Boétie,” Montaigne in Dialogue: Censorship and Defensive Writing. Architecture and Friendship, the Self and the Other (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1987), 73–100. Or, did the Essays’ very bulk—which far outweighs “Of friendship,” even had The Will to Serve been appended to it, and, indeed, outweighs the entire surviving corpus of La Boétie’s writings—argue instead for a hidden rivalry between the two friends in which Montaigne eventually surpassed his initially more talented and accomplished friend? François Rigolot, “Montaigne’s Purloined Letters,” Montaigne: Essays in Reading, ed. Gérard Defaux, Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 145–66. 3

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Most crucially, what brought the two together? Asking what the two men might have seen in each other reopens a question Montaigne sought to forestall with the famous enigma: “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: because it was he, because it was I.”4 Although they knew each other by reputation, Montaigne and La Boétie’s first encounter had to await a public event: “We sought each other out before we met because of the reports we heard of each other … at our first meeting, which by chance came at a great feast and gathering in the city.”5 Whatever the pretext, Montaigne could have attended no official occasion in Bordeaux without being identified with his father who, in addition to acting as mayor, had served terms as alderman, provost, and vice-mayor of the city. Fathers loomed large in early modern male friendships which often served both to perpetuate a patriarch’s memory and perpetuate his family ties and alliances into the next generation. As an orphaned son of an assistant to the seneschal in the small town of Sarlat, La Boétie did not bring the same kind of social patrimony into his relation with Montaigne. True, he could boast Parlement connections through his mother’s family, and a prominent one in the person of his maternal uncle, Jean de Calvimont. 4

 “Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l’aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer, qu’en respondant: Par ce que c’estoit luy; par ce que c’estoit moy” (Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and V[erdun]-L[ouis] Saulnier [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965], 188; trans. Donald M. Frame, The Complete Essays of Montaigne [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958], 139). Unless otherwise indicated, as here, all translations are my own. 5  “Nous nous cherchions avant que de nous estre veus, et par des rapports que nous oyïons l’un de l’autre … à nostre premiere rencontre, qui fut par hazard en une grande feste et compagnie de ville” (I.28.188; 139). Lengths of time Montaigne later specified for the duration of their friendship place its origin from 1554 to 1559, Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 344. A date toward the later end of this range seems the more likely: Montaigne indicated that the Will To Serve “me fut montrée longue piece avant que je l’eusse veu” (I.28.184; 136). Guy Demerson has conclusively dated La Boétie’s discourse to circumstances arising from the Edict of Fontainebleau in March of 1554 (not 1548 as Montaigne suggested and scholars have often assumed), “Les exempla dans le Discours de la servitude volontaire: une rhétorique datée?” Étienne de la Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin. Actes du Colloque International, Duke University, 26–28 mars 1999, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Champion, 2004), 195–224. The “great feast” at which the two finally met could have corresponded to the traditional election banquet on 1 August 1554, on the occasion of Montaigne’s father being sworn into office as mayor of Bordeaux, as Katherine Almquist has suggested to me. Or, opting for a later date, it might have marked either the visit to the city by the Duke of Alba on 12 September 1559 or Elizabeth of France and Antoine de Navarre on 6 December 1559, Gabriel de Lurbe, Chronique Bourdeloise (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1594), 2nd ed.; Jean Darnal, Chronique bourdeloise composee cy devant en latin par Gabriel de Lurbe. Advocat en la Cour, Procureur & Syndic de la ville de Bourdeaus. Et par luy de nouveau augmentée & traduite en François … Depuis continuée et augmentée par Jean Darnal (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1619), 43v–44r; Jean de Gaufreteau, Chronique bordeloise, ed. Jules Delpit, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: G. Gounouilhou, 1876–1878), 1:88–90.

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But in one of the few surviving records in which La Boétie expressed his feelings for Montaigne, he begins by identifying Montaigne with his father, “To you, who in your father’s footsteps are struggling / To climb the arduous paths to virtue.”6 Montaigne, himself, linked their friendship to his father, publishing in 1571 a letter on La Boétie’s death as having been addressed to his father. In addition to Montaigne’s father, his uncle, Raymond Eyquem de Bussaguet, served as one of the senior counselors in the Parlement’s Grand’Chambre. A second counselor, Richard de Lestonnac, had married Montaigne’s sister. Montaigne’s cousin, Joseph d’Eymar, acted as one of the leading counselors in its First Inquest Chamber. Another cousin, Antoine de Belcier, would shortly become a President of Parlement; Montaigne’s mother’s cousin, Jean de Villeneuve, and his son, Bertrand de Villeneuve, also served at Parlement. Like Montaigne’s father, most of these relatives had held leading positions in the municipal administration, and together, they formed one of the leading families of the urban patriciate. Given such a highly endogamous setting,7 La Boétie could not have helped but see in Montaigne an impressive array of associated family offices, municipal positions, and inherited privileges. Conversely, Montaigne’s peers perceived public administration not in terms of offices but the persons that occupied those positions—more precisely, the families that owned them. When a counselor purchased an office, it was considered not a transaction entered into by an individual so much as an investment contracted by a family who wished to add the position to its permanent patrimony. Thus bureaucracy did not appear an abstract entity to sixteenth-century eyes, but more as components of various families’ property. Even 6  “An te paierais passibus arduos / luctantem honesti vincere tramites,” Ad Michaelem Montanum, in Poemata, ed. James S. Hirstein, trans. Robert D. Cottrell, Montaigne Studies 3, no. 1–2 (1991): 20–21. Anne-Marie Cocula points to the Bordeaux Parlement’s resistance to incorporating into its body members of short-lived Cour des Aides de Périgueux, which included Montaigne, to argue that La Boétie would have enjoyed superior status to Montaigne when they first met, Étienne de La Boétie (Bordeaux: Editions du Sud-Ouest, 1995), 86. But if one takes account of the sum of family connections and alliances, it seems clear that Montaigne was better positioned among Bordeaux’s elite. 7  Although Montaigne would not marry Françoise de La Chassaigne for several years, he was already related through marriage to her father (Raymond de Bussaguet’s brotherin-law), a future President of Parlement, Joseph de La Chassaigne, son of Geoffroy de La Chassaigne, who had himself been President since the early 1540s. When Geoffroy returned after an absence to the Parlement in 1560, a rival complained that not only were his son Joseph and son-in-law Raymond members of the body, but so were “plus de 40 parens ou allies,” letter from Christophe de Roffignac to Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, 4 December 1560, Archives Historiques de la Gironde 13 (1872): 144–5; Anne-Marie Cocula, “Le Parlement de Bordeaux au milieu du XVIe siècle,” Étienne de La Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Champion, 2004), 421–36. Nepotism proved such a problem that in one case brought before Parlement by Bordeaux’s mayor, 54 out of the body’s 111 members were asked to recuse themselves because they were related to him, Arrêt dated 9 December 1559, Archives Historiques du Département de la Gironde 19 (1879), 468–72.

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Charles de Figon’s farsighted schematic of royal administration borrows the shape of a tree from traditional family genealogies in order to depict the arborescent offices and their ramified hierarchies as one would successive generations of children.8 This state of affairs makes the term “public office” very nearly a misnomer. It also means that when La Boétie considered the position he wished to attain, he would have had to consider promotion not only in terms of qualifications, but, also, in terms of family alliances. Indeed, he had already advantageously positioned himself by marrying Marguerite de Carles in 1554, sister of Pierre de Carles, president of one of the Chambers of Bordeaux’s Parlement, who himself married the sister of Arnaud de Ferron, head councilor in the First Inquest Chamber.9 What did La Boétie see in Montaigne? Perhaps most immediately, an extension of these connections that would reinforce his ambition to climb to the top of the city’s elite. Montaigne could take for granted nearly all the advantages that the orphaned La Boétie yearned to acquire. Heir to a solid patrimony, beneficiary of an influential family legacy, and with a lord’s status comfortably within grasp, Montaigne wore his privilege with neglect. Keen to elude his father’s aspirations, Montaigne may have fascinated La Boétie all the more. Étienne labored under too much ambition and worked too many long hours to possess the social graces of his friend. What he never fully comprehended was that Montaigne’s ease with colleagues stemmed in large measure from not caring overly much for a professional career in the first place. The shrug, the sleepy smile, and a winning equanimity may merely have reflected Montaigne’s slightly embarrassed boredom. Why Did Montaigne Become Friends with La Boétie? From where Montaigne stood, it was La Boétie who made things look easy. Too often away on business to witness the late hours of study by candlelight, Montaigne saw only the fruits of La Boétie’s labors: the polished writing, the ready etymology, the quote always at hand. No less a figure that Jules César Scaliger had praised La Boétie’s youthful talents in glowing terms.10 La Boétie’s consummate Greek, alone, was enough to make envious anyone who had listened from the sidelines, as Montaigne had, to Turnèbe’s notoriously difficult lectures on Greek.11 Only recently out of school, Montaigne eagerly purchased several of Turnèbe’s Greek editions; these, as well as his painstaking annotations in Greek to some of his early books, 8  Discours des Etats et Offices tant du gouvernement que de la justice et des finances (Paris: G. Auvray, 1579). 9  Anne-Marie Cocula, “De la présence à l’absence: Marguerite de La Boétie dans l’œuvre de Montaigne,” Montaigne Studies 8 (1996): 35–46. Another brother, François de Carles, served as the city’s mayor in 1560–1561. 10  Reinhold Dezeimeris, “Remarques et corrections d’Estienne La Boëtie sur le traité de Plutarque intitulé Eroticus,” Publications de la Société des Bibliophiles de Guyenne 1 (1868): 81–160, see 101–9. 11  John Lewis, Adrien Turnèbe (1512–1565): A Humanist Observed (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 57.

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bespeak deep scholarly aspirations that remained alive when he met La Boétie only a few years later.12 Although their friendship may quickly have outgrown these first spurs to affection, Montaigne and La Boétie both seemed initially to serve each other’s aspirations: each embodied a realized exemplar of the other’s ambitions. Most people do not make friends so much as fall in with fellows thanks to chance and shared circumstance. Suffering under a difficult schoolmaster, tasting first blood on the battle field, or assuaging resentment against colleagues and superiors often did more to create ties than did the imagined affinities retroactively celebrated through them. Montaigne never had done well with this sort of bonding, finding himself something of an outcast in his schooldays and, later in life, deliberately styling himself as an outsider. If Montaigne were to have a friend, then, he would have to make one on purpose. Despite proximity in age, profession, and education, he and La Boétie shared almost nothing. Even after La Boétie’s death, when Montaigne learned to apply himself more dutifully to his legal career, he never expressed the kind of enthusiasm for the magistrature that La Boétie had. He remained a middling member of Parlement, despite his impressive family connections, and never shared La Boétie’s aspiration to become President of one its chambers. The two kept different schedules at work, associated with different circles of colleagues, and regarded the law itself very differently.13 They even differed over the common classical culture that generally served to bring together legal professionals. La Boétie remained close to the ethicalrhetorical thinking of his teachers. His was a verbal universe not only by choice but by necessity; his precocious career had never afforded him the time, as Montaigne had enjoyed among Buchanan’s acolytes in Paris, to move away from his schooling and gain much perspective on its limitations. In his Will to Serve, La Boétie lauds learning as a guarantee against tyranny in a way that Montaigne in later years must have found naïve. Their differences in outlook emerge most clearly regarding the very writing that brought the two men together. Montaigne ended up agreeing with nearly none of the ideas La Boétie had expressed in the Will to Serve. If La Boétie’s diatribe can be summarized as blaming the fawning obedience practiced in Old Regime France on people’s own choice to submit themselves, Montaigne at times seems to suggest that obedience, consented to, could guarantee a certain sort of intellectual freedom.14 Obedience, one hastens to add, to institutions and the precedents they incarnated, rather than to the men who stood at their head. He posthumously styled La Boétie in just this way, “there never was a better citizen, or one more devoted to the tranquility of his country,” who sought “to obey and submit most religiously 12  Lewis, Turnèbe, 125, 167, 189–90; Alain Legros, “La main grecque de Montaigne,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 61, no. 2 (1999): 461–78. 13  On Montaigne’s break with his colleague’s interest in codifying customary law, Ullrich Langer, “Montaigne’s Customs,” Montaigne Studies 4, no. 1–2 (1992): 81–96. 14  Alain Legros, Montaigne, Essais I.56, “Des prières” (Geneva: Droz, 2003); André Tournon, “Route par ailleurs”: Le “nouveau langage” des Essais (Paris: Champion, 2006).

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to the laws under which he was born.”15 Language regarding La Boétie’s fealty to France’s monarch is notably absent. His divergences with La Boétie’s political thinking did not end with the Will to Serve. La Boétie had held fast to a one-faith conception of the realm, expressed in the catchphrase “one king, one law, one faith.” In late 1561, he penned a second political tract criticizing royal attempts to accommodate the reformed faith within the kingdom, just as Montaigne was coming under the thrall of L’Hôpital’s forwardlooking separation of the French state—and the patriotism owed it—from the nation’s troubled confessional conflicts. In “Of freedom of conscience,” Montaigne implicitly condemned the French monarchy for surrendering concessions to the Protestants. But he also expressed skepticism over its ability to impose one faith in the realm, which seems to run counter to the recommendations his friend set forth in his Memoir on the January Edict of Pacification. Montaigne’s later writings bear surprisingly little influence of La Boétie’s thinking. Given the decade or more that Montaigne enjoyed to digest his reading and reflect upon the words that his friend had left for posterity, one should perhaps not expect the traces to be blatant. It would be hard, however, to underestimate the influence La Boétie’s work exerted on Montaigne’s literary career. From the need he felt to conduct an ongoing argument with his dead friend over the viability of stoic philosophy to his discussion of sexuality in which hovered in the background La Boétie’s raillery of the younger Montaigne’s promiscuity, La Boétie seems have remained until the end the perennial reader over Montaigne’s shoulder.16 La Boétie’s influence over Montaigne is best measured not in Montaigne’s ideas but in the Essays’ style. The Will to Serve’s rhetorical fireworks must have dazzled the younger Montaigne, and he copied La Boétie’s favorite techniques making them into signature devices of his own Essays: preterition, citing writers only to undermine their authority, and obliquely underscoring a central argument by calling it a digression.17 One can even find vestiges of La Boétie in Montaigne’s occasional habit of describing his contemporaries’ behavior as if it belonged to the bizarre rites of some exotic race. La Boétie’s writing arched its eyebrows and its dominant rhetorical posture, summed up by Stephen Greenblatt as “a refusal to assent without surprise to all-too-familiar arrangements,” captures the skeptical mood of a number of chapters in the Essays.18 The two most consequent analogies that Montaigne will apply to his own writing arise out of images first applied, 15  “d’obeyr et de se soubmettre tres-religieusement aux loix sous lesquelles il estoit nay. Il ne fut jamais un meilleur citoyen, ny plus affectionné au repos de son païs” (I.28.194; 144). 16  “contre l’opinion de plusieurs, et mesme d’Estienne de La Boetie” (II.6.374; 270); “Mais tout ainsi comme à un autre je dirois à l’avanture: Mon amy, tu resves; l’amour, de ton temps, a peu de commerce avec la foy et la preud’hommie” (III.5.890; 679). 17  For the presence of these traits in La Boétie, Jean-Raymond Fanlo, “Les digressions nécessaires d’Étienne de La Boétie,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 8th ser., no. 7–8 (1997): 63–79. 18  “Anti-Dictator,” A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 223–8, see 225.

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in “Of friendship” to La Boétie, whose work was a “painting” and written as an “essay,” or trial. Passionate Friendship as Infrequent Association Beyond the wide-ranging ambitions that their friendship nourished, how did Montaigne and La Boétie interact with each other? On 28 November 1559, La Boétie took a house on rue de Rostaing, only three blocks away from Montaigne’s residence on rue de la Rousselle.19 The proximity of their domestic quarters suggests that the newfound friends could have sought each other out frequently and regularly. However, the reality of their professional duties belies any picture of the two men dining together on a regular and sustained basis. Neither resided in the city for the full year. Like most members of Parlement, they would have returned to country residences during the long harvest recess of Parlement, from 7 September to 11 November, during two weeks from Christmas to Epiphany, during two more weeks at Easter, and during one week at Pentecost—not to mention numerous feast days that offered shorter occasions on which to get away from Bordeaux. In addition, both men left the city while Parlement was in session on official missions that could last over extended periods. Montaigne departed for the Royal Court on 10 June 1559, and either returned there again in September, or remained in the north for over three months.20 He voyaged there at least once the following year, in the summer of 1560, and reports having been present in Toulouse to witness the Martin Guerre trial in September. Even at a brisk pace, the trip to Paris would have taken a week each way, and one supposes the expenses incurred in route would have encouraged a stay of at least a few weeks once in the capital.21 Montaigne absented himself during almost the entire 1561–1562 Parlement session, in other words, during what would have constituted the second-to-last year in which he and La Boétie could have enjoyed each other’s company.22  Archives Historiques de la Gironde 26 (1888–1889): 1856.  Lucien Braye, “Le premier voyage de Montaigne à Bar-le-Duc en 1559,” Bulletin de la Société des Lettres, Sciences et Arts de Bar-le-Duc (1938–1939): 184–6. 21  Montaigne speaks of such visits as a significant investment of family resources: “Un gentil-homme qui a trente cinq ans, il n’est pas temps qu’il face place à son fils qui en a vingt: il est luy-mesme au train de paroistre et aux voyages des guerres et en la court de son Prince; il a besoin de ses pieces, et en doit certainement faire part, mais telle part qu’il ne s’oublie pas pour autruy” (II.8.390; 282–3). 22  Floyd Gray, “Montaigne’s Friends,” French Studies 15, no. 3 (1961): 203–12, especially 207. A comparison of the records, and what scholars have made of them, shows considerable disagreement: Paul Bonnefon, “Les arrêts du Parlement de Bordeaux rendu au rapport d’Étienne de La Boétie, conseiller,” Archives Historiques de la Gironde 28 (1893): 121–43; Jean Plattard, “Séjours à la Cour,” Montaigne et son temps (Paris: Boivin, 1933), 82–5; Alexandre Nicolaï, “Les grandes dates de la vie de Montaigne,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 2nd ser., no. 13–14 (1948–1949): 24–66; Cocula, La Boétie, 94–5; Katherine Almquist, “Montaigne et la politique du Parlement de Bordeaux,” Montaigne politique, ed. Philippe Desan (Paris: Champion, 2006), 127–38. 19 20

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One must also factor in La Boétie’s missions away from Bordeaux. Hardly had Montaigne returned from court in 1560, when La Boétie left for five months to visit the capital and attend the Estates-General in Orléans from 13 December 1560 to 31 January 1561. He had barely returned before being dispatched again in March of 1561, a trip from which he came home only to miss Montaigne who had left to spend the spring at royal Court. Fall of that same year found La Boétie on mission in the region of Agen for two months. When he returned at the end of October, he could have only enjoyed several weeks with his friend before Montaigne headed off in mid-December 1561 for a second stay at Court, an absence that would last until May of the new year (“I am not an enemy to the bustle of courts; I have spent part of my life in them”23). In 1562, La Boétie must have executed similar missions, but he would not have missed Montaigne, for his friend was again at Court at least half the year, from June until November. In the early summer of 1563, during what were to prove the last months of his life, La Boétie did enjoy a few nearly uninterrupted months in the company of Montaigne. But in July, he visited his home region and Sarlat and returned ill to Bordeaux in early August. On Monday, 9 August 1563, he left to convalesce in the countryside just outside of Bordeaux for what would prove his last full week of life. One assumes that Montaigne would have sought to stay as close to his friend as much as possible, especially after learning on Tuesday morning that his friend’s health had worsened. But the familiar pattern of intermittent and interrupted meetings appears even during La Boétie’s last days.24 Montaigne had, in effect, counted on staying only Tuesday afternoon with his sick friend, but La Boétie’s wife managed to persuade him to spend the night. The next day, however, Montaigne returned to Bordeaux and did not visit La Boétie again until Thursday, when he found his friend in very grave condition. This did not keep him from returning to Bordeaux Friday for business. When he saw his friend again on Saturday, La Boétie had already dictated his last will. In all, the friends’ interruptions and frequent absences suggest a rhythm of intense interaction broken by considerable stretches when the two would have enjoyed little or no contact with each other. But one also needs to qualify further “intense interaction.” Even when both men would have been in Bordeaux, they seemed to have cleaved to different circles when at Parlement. Montaigne, as Katherine Almquist has demonstrated, spent most of his time with Léonard Alesme, Jean Rignac and Joseph de Alis, not La Boétie.25 Montaigne worked almost 23

 “je ne suis pas ennemy de l’agitation des cours; j’y ay passé partie de la vie” (III.3.823; 627). 24  Philippe Desan, “‘Ahaner pour partir’ ou les dernières paroles de La Boétie selon Montaigne,” Étienne de La Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Champion, 2004), 399–419. 25  Katherine Almquist, “Quatre arrêts du Parlement de Bordeaux, autographes inédits de Montaigne (mai 1566–août 1567),” Bulletin de la Société Internationale des Amis de Montaigne, 8th ser., no. 9–10 (1998): 13–38, and her entry “Magistrature,” in the Dictionnaire Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan, 2nd ed. (Paris: Champion, 2007), 714–17.

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exclusively under Alesme, President of the First Chamber and traditional upholder of Roman Law, whereas La Boétie preferred to associate with the Hellenist, Arnaud de Ferron, and with younger proponents of customary law, as well as cultivating contacts in the Grand’Chambre—no doubt with a view to promotion. Montaigne, himself, best summed up this state of affairs: “And if absence is pleasant or useful to him, it is much sweeter to me than his presence … In other days I made use and advantage of our separation. We filled and extended our possession of life better by separating.”26 Theirs was a friendship that may have been lived more through exchanged poems and letters than face to face; certainly it was lived more in the other’s absence than in his presence. A Friendship Largely Literary from the Start? We know Montaigne and La Boétie’s friendship only through relatively few and highly unreliable sources. First came La Boétie’s three Latin poems, only two of which deal substantially with Montaigne—and those principally with chiding him for engaging in adulterous affairs. The first self-consciously follows the model of a Horatian ode, the second a Horatian satire. To these materials, Montaigne added a carefully crafted letter on La Boétie’s death, four conventional dedication letters in his posthumous edition of La Boétie’s Works, and various remarks scattered in the Essays. Principal among them lie those appearing in “Of friendship,” already noted as the most expressive piece of writing in the Essays and perhaps, also, its most conservatively arranged, dividing social relations as it does into four categories, and then following these as one would a neat four-part outline. In this far-from-documentary record, their friendship naturally assumes a literary, sometimes extravagant quality. Most scholars have made too little, though, of the fact that Montaigne’s friendship with La Boétie must have already been elaborated largely in an epistolary format given the two men’s frequent trips away from Bordeaux. In light of the robe nobility’s fondness for self-consciously literary letter-writing,27 Montaigne and La Boétie’s friendship may well have proven ornately literate from the start. It is not surprising that Montaigne would continue to commemorate the friendship along these same well-worn tracks after the death of La Boétie in 1563. Not only may their epistolary friendship have conformed to reigning literary models, but much of what La Boétie and Montaigne had to talk about—given their different professional trajectories in Parlement—might have concerned 26

 “Et si l’absence lui est ou plaisante ou utile, elle m’est bien plus douce que sa presence … J’ay tiré autrefois usage de nostre esloignement et commodité. Nous remplissions mieux et estandions la possession de la vie en nous séparant” (III.9.977; 746). 27  See Warren Boutcher, “Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid? Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Lenadro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism,” Comparative Literature 52, no. 1 (2000): 11–52; Jean-Marc Chatelain, “Heros togatus: culture cicéronienne et gloire de la robe dans la France d’Henri IV,” Journal des Savants 2 (1991): 263–87; and my Montaigne’s Career (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 130–55.

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literary topics. For example, Jacques Amyot’s 1559 translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives coincided felicitously with their newly struck friendship, for La Boétie had just helped their senior colleague on the Bordeaux Parlement, Arnaud de Ferron, with a Latin translation and commentary of Plutarch’s Erotica, or Dialogue on Love.28 The dialogue bears a surprising number of parallels with “Of friendship,” unremarked to date.29 Plutarch divides relationships into four kinds—“natural,” “familial,” “social,” and “erotic”—close to Montaigne’s four-fold distinction of “natural, social, hospitable, erotic.”30 Erotic love is “vehement” and forceful compared to friendship, whereas “all things are only held in common” among those friends who “being in separate bodies, join their souls, fusing them together, neither wanting nor believing them to be two, but only one single soul,” compared to Montaigne’s “Everything actually being in common between them … and their relationship being that of one soul in two bodies.”31 These are commonplaces that appear in other works that Montaigne would have consulted. But Montaigne’s phrasing resembles the French translation Montaigne consulted by Jacques Amyot who had closely studied Ferron’s Latin translation and used La Boétie’s conjectural emendations to the original Greek.32 This makes it tempting to think that Montaigne had this work, dear to his departed friend, on his mind while writing “Of friendship.” Among La Boétie’s papers were two further translations of Plutarch into French, Advice to Bride and Groom and Consolation to His Wife. The three pieces by Plutarch that most attracted La Boétie, and their interrelated themes of sexuality, friendship, and marriage, found their counterpart in the triangular relationship the two men established around each other’s amorous involvements. Recall that La Boétie rebuked Montaigne for his profligacy in two Latin poems that urged him, out of friendship, to follow La Boétie’s example by entering matrimony. Montaigne repaid the favor by suggesting La Boétie’s marriage proved lukewarm. In introducing 29 love sonnets penned by his friend before marriage, Montaigne observed: 28  Arnaud de Ferron, Plutarchi Chaeronei Eroticus (Lyon: J. de Tournes, 1557), 80–92; Dezeimeris, “Remarques,” La Boétie’s notes are reprinted in Œuvres complètes d’Estienne de La Boétie, ed. Louis Desgraves, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1991), 2:238–48. 29  Notably absent in Pierre Villey, Les Sources et l’évolution des ‘Essais’ de Montaigne, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1933), and Isabelle Konstantinovic, Montaigne et Plutarque (Geneva: Droz, 1989). 30  “la naturelle … la parenté … la compagnie ou societé … l’amour,” Les Œuvres morales et meslees de Plutarque, trans. Jacques Amyot (Paris: M. Vascosan, 1572), 605v; cf. Montaigne, “naturelle, sociale, hospitaliere, venerienne” (I.28.184; 136). 31  “tous biens ne sont pas communs entre tous amis, ains entre ceulx qui estants separez de corps conjoignent leurs ames par force, et les fondent ensemble, ne voulans ny ne croyans pas que s’en soient deux, mais une seule,” Plutarch, Œuvres, 611v; “Tout estant par effect commun entre eux, volontez, pensemens, jugemens, biens, femmes, enfans, honneur et vie, et leur convenance n’estant qu’un’ame en deux corps” (I.28.190; 141). 32  Dezeimeris, “Remarques,” 123.

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The others [printed earlier in the posthumous Works] were written later for his wife when he was suing for her hand, and they already smack of a certain marital coolness. And I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.33

Moreover, these interrelated themes of sexuality, friendship, and marriage reappear in three interconnected essays of Montaigne’s own, “Of friendship,” “Of moderation,” and “On some verses of Virgil,” which successively explore and redefine friendship, matrimony, and sexuality. As “marital coolness” already suggests above, Montaigne tended to disaggregate sex, marriage, and friendship into distinct and generally incompatible relationships, whereas La Boétie, following Plutarch, urged the integration of friendship—and of sexual pleasure—within marriage.34 More precisely, if La Boétie wishes to introduce friendship into marriage, Montaigne seems to want instead to introduce marriage into their friendship. Plutarch, in La Boétie’s translation, defined marriage thus: “husband and wife mingle and blend their bodies, their goods, their friends, and their servants, the ones among the others.”35 For “blend,” La Boétie used confus, a term that reappears in Montaigne’s “complete fusion [confusion] of our wills.”36 For “mingle,” meslé: Montaigne uses this to speak of “that confusion of ownership [ce meslange de biens]” in friendship. Finally, Montaigne uses both terms together, as La Boétie had: “In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle [meslent] and blend [confondent] with each other.”37 Throughout “Of friendship,” Montaigne draws upon a near-mystical, religious register that at times seems indebted to the sacramental language of matrimony. Their friendship comprises a “sacred bond,” he savors “the embrace of so tight and durable a knot,” and they are impelled toward each other through “some ordinance from heaven.”38 He uses dilection, from Paul’s diligere in the Bible, for 33

 “Les autres furent faits depuis, comme il estoit à la poursuite de son mariage, en faveur de sa femme, et sentent desjà je ne sçay quelle froideur maritale. Et moy je suis de ceux qui tiennent que la poesie ne rid point ailleurs, comme elle faict en un subject folatre et desreglé” (I.29.196; 145); for more on Montaigne and La Boétie’s reciprocal sexual criticisms, see my “Montaigne’s Nudes: The Lost Tower Paintings Rediscovered,” in Meaning and Its Objects: Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance France, ed. Margaret J. Burland, Andrea W. Tarnowski, and David P. LaGuardia, Yale French Studies 110 (2006): 122–33. 34  Schachter, Voluntary Servitude, 158–82. 35  “entre le mary et femme leurs corps, leurs biens, leurs amis, leurs domestiques, soient mesles et confus l’un parmy l’autre” (Œuvres complètes d’Estienne de La Boétie, ed. Louis Desgraves, 2 vols. [Bordeaux: William Blake, 1991], 2:21). 36  “cette confusion si pleine de nos volontez” (I.28.190; 141). 37  “En l’amitié dequoy je parle, elles se meslent et confondent l’une en l’autre, d’un melange si universel” (I.28.188; 139) and (I.28.185; 136). 38  “cette saincte couture … l’estreinte d’un neud si pressé et si durable,” “quelque ordonnance du ciel” (I.28.186, 188; 138, 139); Frame translates étreinte as “strain.”

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the only time in the Essays to describe his covenant brotherhood with La Boétie.39 True friendship is a “mystery,” a “miracle” even.40 La Boétie, as well, had used the Latin foedus, or covenant, to describe both marriage and his friendship with Montaigne.41 Finally, Montaigne’s insistence on the singularity and exclusivity of perfect friendship seems to transpose onto friendship the stipulation of monogamy. The Strength of Weak Ties In short, Montaigne and La Boétie’s union reflected ideas about friendship as much as it did an actual relationship. Even before Montaigne began to memorialize their bond, the two men were enacting a well-elaborated ideal common among their peers. For Montaigne’s borrowings from betrothal language and sacral imagery prove exactly what one would expect from the kind of passionate, exclusive friendship Alan Bray described in cases of “wedded” friends.42 Despite Montaigne’s claim about the rarity of their friendship—its like appearing barely “once in three centuries”43—he and La Boétie would have enjoyed a number of close-at-hand examples upon which to model their exemplary companionship. Two of Montaigne’s teachers and personal tutors, Nicolas de Grouchy and Guillaume Guerente, had formed an inseparable pair.44 Adult, Montaigne could have looked to his Parisian colleague, Antoine de Loisel, and his eternal traveling companion, Pierre Pithou. Whatever one might conjecture about these “odd couples” today, in the sixteenth century they were universally acclaimed as paragons of devoted friendship and a celebration of “manliness.”45 Such, however, establishes not the end point but a jumping-off spot for analysis. Bray himself hinted that such idealized forms of friendship might arise as a way to alleviate very real tensions: “a man’s honor could be at stake in the manner in which the obligations of friendship were made and called upon. The stance of a generous altruism, of an inward affectionate friend, was a tactful rhetoric that helped to negotiate those dangers.”46 Rather than stop short at the recognition of the ideal, then, one needs also to ponder what practical role such an unequivocal  (I.28.185; 136); Frame translates dilection as “affection.”  “ce mystere” (I.28.189, 191; 140, 142). 41  Katherine Kong, Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, “Gallica,” 2010), 191–233, especially 209–10. 42  Bray, The Friend, 16, 25, 82–102. 43  “c’est beaucoup si la fortune y arrive une fois en trois siecles” (I.28.184; 136). 44  Jacques Auguste de Thou, Historiarum sui temporis (Paris: A. & H. Drouart, 1607, 1609), trans. l’abbé P.-F. Guyot-Desfontaines et al.; Histoire universelle de Jacques Auguste De Thou, 16 vols. (London [Paris]: [n.pr.], 1734), 3:419; 6:535–6. 45  Bray, The Friend, 168; Ferguson allows more room for the institution of wedded friendship to serve erotic ends, Queer (Re)Readings, 231–3. Valerie Traub discusses the ambiguities of Bray’s position on this question more generally, “Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Making of History,” A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 339–65. 46  Bray, The Friend, 76. 39 40

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and extreme notion of friendship played in the broad range of social relations of Montaigne’s day. Montaigne detaches friendship from its proper end, traditionally understood to lie in each friend’s admiration of the other’s virtue, and inculcation of that virtue—this was certainly how La Boétie understood it in his Latin poems to Montaigne.47 Instead, Montaigne would have friendship’s purpose lie uniquely and exclusively in its own exercise. Indeed, he seems at pains in “Of friendship” to deny any possible function or utility to perfect friendship. Against Montaigne’s division of utilitarian relationships from pure, disinterested friendship, one can nevertheless ask what might have been the use of passionate friendship. Bray suggested that one answer to this question lay in how wedded friendship allowed partners to disavow the conventions of patronage and ties of dependence that had brought them together in the first place, thus letting them transform a utilitarian relationship into an affective one. Such a response reads passionate friendship a bit too close to how its own idealism would have us do—as an overcoming of the kinds of self-interestedness that drove other, lesser relationships. If, instead, one examines how passionate friendship functioned across a wider field of social relations—from the vantage of those relations—other possibilities emerge. The enduring value of Bray’s work lies in his suggestion that pre-modern subjects possessed a richer vocabulary for describing social relationships and wielded more varied, more compelling means for building ties than we do today. These are not limited to covenant friendships like Montaigne and La Boétie’s but encompass godparenthood, nourri ensemble kinship, adoptive alliances, frérèches, affrèrement, and many more, ritually elaborated types of bonds—of which only marriage survives today in any substantial form.48 But, seen from another perspective, the kind of perfect friendship celebrated by Montaigne could prove deeply impoverishing. It is this somewhat bleaker prospect I wish to examine at present. For all its literary idealism, Montaigne’s articulation of his friendship with La Boétie responded to a specific type of sociability exercised among and between the two men’s immediate peers. Obliged to maintain a wide range of clientage relations with various professional colleagues, ecclesiastical representatives, and aristocratic patrons, as well as innumerable retainers, members of Parlement had to avail themselves of what Mark Granovetter has called in recent times the “strength 47  In his fundamental study of Renaissance ideals of friendship, Ullrich Langer traces Montaigne’s concerted efforts to remove any end to friendship, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 164–76. 48  On the nourri ensemble relation in particular, see Michelle Miller, Material Friendship: Service and Amity in Early Modern French Literature (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2008). On frérèches and affrèrements, see Allan A. Tulchin, “Same-Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of the Affrèrement,” The Journal of Modern History 79, no. 3 (2007): 613–47. I thank Gary Ferguson for pointing me toward this last reference.

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of weak ties.”49 Using elementary notions of network theory, Granovetter pioneered social network analysis by observing that passing acquaintances are far less likely to know one another than one’s close friends. Distant colleagues and casual friends thus prove exponentially more likely to link one to new and wider networks. Socalled weak social ties serve to connect one to different social groups: “individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends.”50 Considerable differences separate Montaigne’s clientage circles from the professional business networks Granovetter studied. As Granovetter sees it, information exchange is central to social networks and the very definition of a professional milieu itself.51 In place of this somewhat single-minded focus, one would need to examine an entire range of affective responses sometimes gathered under the notion of “favor” in Montaigne’s time. The vague sense of goodwill or half-remembered debt that could be re-activated in time of need constituted a necessary ingredient not only of success among his peers, but, on occasion, of survival. The wider and more diverse this sowing of loose affective bonds, the more effectively invested proved one’s social capital, especially in a time when most “business” was conducted through personal relations and as a personal relationship. Further, in addition to so-called weak ties, Montaigne and his peers mobilized impressive extended family ties, as we have already seen. For the purposes of his argument, Granovetter assumes a modern nuclear family that he assimilates into the limited set of strong ties. Extended families, however, accomplish some of the same work as Granovetter’s weak ties, but they obviously fail his main criterion, for extended family members do, in fact, know one another. They seem a midpoint between strong ties (friends) and weak ones (acquaintances) that Granovetter’s theory has difficulty accounting for. They are expandable, but not as readily as weak ties, nor are the duties owed them as collapsible. So, Montaigne’s social world proved more complex than Granovetter’s model will allow and defies the sort of computational simplicity that has made network theory so popular in the first place. Nevertheless, one can still apply part of the underlying argument about weak ties to Montaigne’s case. The threat to healthy social networks, as Granovetter conceives them, lies not in the kind of exclusive friendship that Montaigne and his peers idealized. Rather, danger comes from tightly knit coteries which risk absorbing nearly all of one’s social energies. 49  Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80. 50  Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–33, see 202. 51  “The macroscopic side of this communications argument is that social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent. New ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavors will be handicapped, and subgroups separated by race, ethnicity, geography, or other characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus vivendi,” Granovetter, “Strength Revisited,” 202. Reformulation of these terms more adequate to the French sixteenth century can be found in Miller, Material Friendship (2008).

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To the extent that early modern extended families operated like coteries, the duties they demand put an even higher premium on one’s social time. Did the ideal of perfect friendship not serve precisely to focus one’s affective needs around one person, channeling them so as to avoid too many close friends each entitled to ask for attention and to expect a fairly high degree of commitment? Montaigne, himself, seems keenly concerned not to extend such obligations to more than one person, no more than monarchy could be shared between more than one king, “the friendship that possesses the soul and rules it with absolute sovereignty cannot possibly be double.”52 In fact, as we saw in the friendship with La Boétie, however intense the emotional bond, the relationship hardly made undue demands upon Montaigne’s time. Each man’s long absences on missions, combined with the way they segregated their friendship from their professional lives by keeping to distinctly different circles while at Parlement, ensured that they enjoyed the time to nurse the kinds of professional relationships whose utility and self-interestedness Montaigne admits only too lucidly in “Of friendship.”53 Thus the singular, exclusive friendship painted so vividly by Montaigne stood not as an alternative to those looser relations, so much as to an alternative to the closely linked group—that handful of close friends who encouraged over-investment within a narrow circle, thus jeopardizing its members’ effectiveness in the larger field of social relations. After La Boétie: Exclusivity as an End in Itself If Montaigne and La Boétie’s friendship may have fit comfortably within the social economy of a professional milieu, the ways in which Montaigne continued to make use of their relationship after La Boétie died move beyond both Granovetter’s weak-tie model and Bray’s historical description of wedded friendship. At first, divergence seems minimal: Montaigne’s posthumous publication of his friend’s surviving works and elegiac account of La Boétie’s last moments in 1571 conformed well enough to memorial practices and the dictates of literary patronage. But “Of friendship” clearly exceeds the archetype of covenant friendship. Against what we know to be the wide-spread popularity of such pairings, Montaigne insists on the incomparable nature of La Boétie and his relationship: “among men of today you 52  “cette amitié qui possede l’ame et la regente en toute souveraineté, il est impossible qu’elle soit double” (I.28.191; 141). 53  Relationships in which he nevertheless engaged, witness the way in which he dispensed with two such “weak ties” after they had served his purposes, Jean Balsamo, “Montaigne, Cyprien de Poyferré et les sonnets de La Boétie,” Étienne de la Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin. Actes du Colloque International, Duke University, 26–28 mars 1999, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Champion, 2004), 365–84, and “Montaigne, Charles d’Estissac et le sieur du Hautoy,” Sans autre guide: Mélanges de littérature française de la Renaissance offerts à Marcel Tetel, ed. Philippe Desan et al. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 117–28.

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see no trace of it in practice.”54 Although he does initially seem to allow classical comparisons, he ultimately rejects them: “the very discourses that antiquity has left us on this subject seem to me weak in comparison with the feeling I have.” “Our friendship has no other model than itself, and can be compared only with itself”; La Boétie and he not only share their “whole will” and an identical “soul,” they are “indivisible.”55 Incredibly, given how often he defers to his readers’ better judgment, Montaigne even excludes his audience from a full understanding of such a relationship, let alone participation in it. “I should like to talk to people who have experienced what I tell,” he admits, expressing “experience” here through the verb essayer, central to how he wants himself and others to relate to his book. “But knowing how far from common usage and how rare such a friendship is, I do not expect to find any good judge of it.”56 The antisocial consequences of Montaigne’s insistence on exclusivity end up placing “Of friendship” outside the pale of the Essays insofar as this chapter imposes a limit on readers rather than welcoming them with a shared confidence or encouraging them with an amicable challenge. Interestingly, one of the few moments in which Montaigne appears to adopt La Boétie’s radical rejection of servitude— “service” was the category by which contemporaries perceived nearly every social relationship, from amorous to political—comes when he rebuffs the reader at the open of his work, warning them that he has “no thought of serving you.”57 The result of these emphatic claims can only be to exclude others. This friendship is too rare, too extraordinary, and simply too tight to admit anyone else. For to duplicate such a friendship would be to destroy its singularity and thus, according to Montaigne, its very essence. Montaigne loved nothing more than taking a perfectly reasonable idea and stretching it just past its logical limit. But here the exercise hardly proved speculative: in transforming the conditional and pragmatic exclusivity of perfect friendship into a self-standing absolute, he blocked efforts by all others to engage him in a similar relationship insofar as he now asserted their inability to ever measure up to La Boétie. At Arm’s Length: Acquaintances in Retirement With La Boétie dead in 1563, Montaigne found himself free according to Bray’s paradigm to enter into another covenant friendship. After the end of his political career in 1584, and amidst deteriorating health, he would have had little reason, 54

 “entre nos hommes il ne s’en voit aucune trace en usage” (I.28.184; 136).  “Cette-ci n’a point d’autre idée que d’elle-même et ne se peut rapporter qu’à soi,” “En l’amitié dequoy je parle, [nos âmes] se meslent et confondent l’une en l’autre, d’un melange si universel,” “toute ma volonté … dans la sienne,” “indivisible,” “Car le discours mesmes que l’antiquité nous a laissés sur ce sujet me semblent lâches au prix du sentiment que j’en ai” (I.28.188, 191, 192; 139, 141, 143). 56  (I.28.192; 143). 57  “nulle consideration de ton service” (3; 2). 55

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in keeping with Granovetter’s model, to limit himself to one friend; he could have indulged, for example, the kind of tight-knit coterie his professional life had once discouraged. He chose neither option, preferring instead to adhere to the principle of absolute exclusivity elaborated in “Of friendship.” In place of any male friend, perfect or even merely close, Montaigne elected a number of inferior relationships of the sort he had explicitly denounced in “Of friendship”: unequal mentoring roles, family ties, and mere acquaintances. In retirement, Montaigne liked to warm himself against the fire of youth, surrounding himself with men many years his junior. Florimond de Ræmond, who purchased Montaigne’s seat and succeeded him in Parlement, was seven years younger; Pierre de Brach, 14 years; Pierre Charron, eight; Guillaume du Bartas, 11; Geoffroy de La Chassaigne, the younger, 17; and Geoffroy de Malvyn, 12—not to mention Montaigne’s youngest brother, Bertrand de Mattecolom, of whom Montaigne seems to have been quite fond, and who was 17 years his junior. One imagines conversations that alighted on these younger men’s ambitions and their troubles, toward which Montaigne could adopt a bemused, avuncular detachment that resembled the tone he was coming more and more often to assume in the Essays. Conversely, Montaigne does not seem to have appreciated such advice from men his own age. Étienne Pasquier, not quite four years Montaigne’s senior, considered himself Montaigne’s friend, and he may have lodged Montaigne in his home during Montaigne’s later visits to Paris.58 Pasquier had begun his own literary career a quarter century before Montaigne had, and this no doubt explains why he felt comfortable in offering, along with his admiration, a few pointers on Montaigne’s diction, regretting in particular several Gascon regionalisms that he hoped Montaigne would remove from subsequent editions. Pasquier seems offended that Montaigne ignored these counsels and concludes, somewhat uncharitably, “although he pretended to hold himself in low esteem, I never read an author who held a better opinion of himself.”59 With Montaigne’s younger associates, advice flowed from him to them. He apparently showed Ræmond, for example, his essays as early as 1575, five years before they were published.60 De Brach spoke warmly of receiving from

58  Michel Simonin, “Françoise (de La Chassaigne) et (son?) Michel: Du ménage chez Montaigne,” La Poétique des passions à la Renaissance. Mélanges Françoise Charpentier, ed. François Lecercle and Simone Perrier (Paris: Champion, 2001), 155–70; Catherine Magnien, “Étienne Pasquier ‘familier’ de Montaigne?” Montaigne Studies 13 (2001): 277–313. 59  “pendant qu’il faict contenance de se desdaigner, je ne leu jamais autheur qui s’estimast tant que luy” (letter to Claude Pellejay, c. 1602, Choix de lettres sur la littérature, la langue et la traduction, ed. D[orothy] Thickett [Geneva: Droz, 1956], 46). 60  Ræmond affirmed that Montaigne’s “premiers essais furent l’an 1575,” Alan M. Boase, “Montaigne annoté par Florimond de Ræmond,” Revue du Seizième Siècle 15 (1928): 241.

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Montaigne encouragement for his early efforts to write.61 Charron may have received the same while visiting Montaigne, if one can construe Montaigne’s gift to him of Bernardino Ochino’s controversial Catechism as an incentive to begin what would prove a successful career in religious polemic.62 De Brach idealized literary gatherings in Montaigne’s chateau in a poem depicting a bucolic symposium between himself, Ræmond, du Bartas, and Jacques Peletier du Mans, the Pléiade poet who lived for several months with Montaigne “in the midst of a large household and with as many visitors as anywhere.”63 These younger associates responded eagerly to Montaigne’s literary promptings. This can be seen especially clearly in the case of Malvyn who imitated Montaigne’s modesty in a letter dated 1585, “I do not doubt that it is due to my shortcomings that I cannot get along …; yet it is my nature, which loves sweet indolence and the freedom of a peaceful life, that distracts me from all other undertakings except that of serving myself and this vain leisure which entirely preoccupies me.” Again, in 1595: “I am not however so inconsiderate as to recognize what my shoulders can bear … More than any other man, I flee the troubles of work, which makes me fear any new undertaking.”64 But the most startling of these epistolary borrowings 61

 De Brach, “Montaigne, tu me dis que ce temps misérable / À mes vers produira un fertile argument,” “À Michel de Montaigne, conseiller en la cour” (Œuvres poétiques, ed. Reinhold Dezeimeris, 2 vols. [Paris: A. Aubry, 1861–62; Geneva: Slatkine, 1969], 2:153). 62  Charron inscribes the book, “Charron, ex dono dicti domini de Montaigne, in suo castello, 2 julii, anno 1586” (BN, D 2812 rés.), quoted in Michel Adam, Études sur Pierre Charron (Talence: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1991), 226. Pointing to the paucity of other documentation, Gray questions the familiarity of the two men (1964), 45–6. 63  De Brach used models found in Ausonius and Martial’s epigrams, “Convy,” Poemes (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1576), 146v–8v; “au milieu d’une famille peuplée et maison des plus fréquentées” (III.3.823; 625) and “Jacques Peletier vivant chez moy…” (I.21.100, note 21; Frame does not give this variant, 71). 64  “Je ne doute point que ce ne soit en partie mon insuffisance qui ne me permet de me pouvoir bien maintenir avec eus; si est-ce que mon naturel, qui aime la douceur paresseuse et la liberté d’une vie paisible, fait que je me distrais volontiers de toute autre consideration pour servir à moi-mesme et à ceste vaine langueur dont je suis tout occupé,” “Je ne suis pas toutefois si inconsideré que je ne me recognoisse bien ce que mes espaules peuvent porter … Plus que homme au monde je suis refuyant du travail, qui me fait craindre tout nouveau dessein” (Ms. Delpit 203v–204r, 201v, quoted in Paul Courteault, Geoffroy de Malvyn, magistrat et humaniste bordelais [1545?–1617]: Étude biographique et littéraire, suivie de harangues, poésies et lettres inédites [Paris: Champion, 1907; Geneva: Slatkine, 1981], 12, 110). Malvyn received a dedication from the young du Bartas in 1574, La Muse chrestienne (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1574); he held numerous literary exchanges with de Brach; in all, seven sonnets are dedicated to the trio, Malvyn, Ræmond, or de Brach. For de Brach and Malvyn’s reciprocal dedications, de Brach, Poemes, 131v–4v, ed. Reinhold Dezeimeris, Œuvres poétiques, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Aubry, 1861–1862; Geneva: Slatkine, 1969), 1:214–26, 290, 2:xliv, 1, 38–9, 137–44, 199–204. For Ræmond, De la couronne du soldat (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1594) and see the letters between the two reproduced in Courteault, Malvyn, 194–8.

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occurs in a letter to his own brother, 2 December 1584, “I, who lack learning and eloquence, know how to love better than to speak, which is why I present my affection to you naked, simple, and without paint. Nevertheless, I hope it will be no less pleasant to you than if I portrayed it to you with graces that were not my own, but borrowed ones.”65 Malvyn nevertheless did borrow these “graces,” lifting his images out of the Essays, including the famous preface: “I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion … I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.”66 That within four years of their publication, Montaigne’s style of self-presentation should have worked its way into the fabric of private exchanges shows the surprising appeal of his “intimate” relation to his readers. This attitude would continue to ricochet between private expression and public performance, making sincerity—something one might have presumed in personal settings—a character trait worthy of admiration, and hence suspect, a hall of mirrors that Montaigne had foreseen all too well in the Essays. But on the subject of these men’s borrowings, dedications, and emulation—which suggest rich and earnest interaction with Montaigne—Montaigne proved exceedingly circumspect. At best, he alludes to personal contact in only the most general terms, and often with a bicameral heart. For example, although he calls “admonitions and corrections … one of the chief duties of friendship,” he will admit elsewhere that when “Certain of my friends have sometimes undertaken to call me on the carpet and lecture me … a service which, to a well-formed soul, surpasses all the services of friendship,” he prefers to keep his own counsel, “to speak of it now in all conscience, I have often found in their reproach or praise such false measure that I would hardly have erred to err rather than to do good in their fashion.”67 Worse, Montaigne admits to being distracted in company, “you will find that you are most absent from your friend when he is in your company; his presence relaxes your attention and gives your thoughts liberty to absent themselves at any time and for any reason.”68 These men all nevertheless publicized their relationship with Montaigne. Montaigne—in a far more copious and capacious work—did not mention them. 65  “moi, qui ay faute de sçavoir et de bien dire, sçai bien aimer et non dire, qui est cause que je vous la represente toujours nue, simple et sans aucune couleur. Si est-ce que je veus bien croire qu’elle ne vous sera moins agreable que si je vous la monstrois avec quelques graces qui ne fussent pas miennes et qui fussent empruntées” (Ms. Delpit 202v–203r, Courteault, Malvyn, 174). 66  “Je veus qu’on m’y voie en ma façon simple, naturelle et ordinaire … je t’asseure que je m’y fusse tres-volontiers peint tout entier, et tout nud” (3; 2). 67  “advertissements et corrections, qui est un des premiers offices d’amitié” (I.28.185a; 136); “Tels de mes amis ont par fois entreprins de me chapitrer et mercurializer … un office qui, à une ame bien faicte … surpasse tous les offices de l’amitié … à en parler à cette heure en conscience, j’ay souvent trouvé en leurs reproches et louanges tant de fauce mesure que je n’eusse guere failly de faillir plus tost que de bien faire à leur mode” (III.2.807; 613). 68  “vous trouverez que vous estes lors plus absent de vostre amy quand il vous est present: son assistance relache vostre attention et donne liberté à vostre pensée de s’absenter à toute heure pour toute occasion” (III.9.975; 745).

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Perfect Friend Spurned: Justus Lipsius The circle of his friends, indeed, at this time was extensive and various, far beyond what has been generally imagined. To trace his acquaintance with each particular person, if it could be done, would be a task, of which the labor would not be repaid by the advantage. But exceptions are to be made…. —James Boswell, Life of Johnson

Montaigne famously addressed the reader of his Essays as, potentially, a new friend: “Besides this profit that I derive from writing about myself, I hope for this other advantage, that if my humors happen to please and suit some worthy man before I die, he will try to meet me.”69 Indeed, Montaigne presents himself as so eager to enter into friendship that “If by such good signs I knew of a man who was suited to me, truly I would go very far to find him; for the sweetness of harmonious and agreeable company cannot be bought too dearly, in my opinion. Oh, a friend!”70 Much of the Essays’ subsequent fortunes owe something to the sense that, in reading Montaigne’s book, one is responding to this call for companionship. But the idea that the Essays might attract a friend proved no imaginary literary device nor conveniently farfetched hope on Montaigne’s part. For at least one person did contact Montaigne upon reading the Essays. He was, moreover, an extremely capable reader, already an accomplished scholar of the classics, and, like Montaigne, deeply interested in the revived fortunes of stoicism. Unlike de Brach, Ræmond, and the others, he was a front-rank Latinist and a highly talented author in his own right. His accomplishments as a child prodigy were already legendary; in short, here, finally, was La Boétie’s equal. True, Justus Lipsius was 14 years Montaigne’s junior, but so was de Brach. In the early 1580s, the full flower of Lipsius’s celebrity still lay ahead, but Montaigne clearly enjoyed playing mentor to his younger friends. The Essays’ apotheosis, too, lay in the future, but the longer, bolder essays that Montaigne had now begun for the third volume bespeak not only his newfound confidence as a writer, but, also, considerable literary ambition. It seems that Montaigne should have experienced no trouble playing a writerly older brother to the mercurial, ambitious Lipsius. Further, Lipsius was championing a trend toward Silver Age Latin, or Tacitean, prose, and, in his laconic, clipped writing, Montaigne could have found a neoLatin sibling for his own French style.71 69  “Outre ce profit que je tire d’escrire de moy, j’en espere cet autre que, s’il advient que mes humeurs plaisent et accordent à quelque honneste homme avant que je meure, il recherchera de nous joindre” (III.9.981; 749–50). 70  “Si à si bonnes enseignes je sçavois quelqu’un qui me fut propre, certes je l’irois trouver bien loing; car la douceur d’une sortable et agreable compaignie ne se peut assez acheter à mon gré. O un amy! Combien est vraye cette ancienne sentence, que l’usage en est plus necessaire et plus doux que des elemens de l’eau et du feu” (III.9.981; 750). 71  Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans, with John M. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1989), 7–44, 167–202. On Lipsius in general, I have taken inspiration

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Finally, Lipsius possessed perhaps the most important attribute that qualified him to take up the mantle of friendship vacated so many years previous by La Boétie. He lived many hundreds of leagues distant, so there was little chance that mutual idealization would flounder upon the shoals of everyday familiarity. Here was an eminently cultivated, perfectly placed, eagerly willing younger man with whom to nurture another intense, “perfect” epistolary friendship. Administrative duties as mayor had greatly preoccupied Montaigne, of course, but even as he shuffled off the distraction of four years at the head of Bordeaux’s government, he might have welcomed the opportunity to draw upon the hardwon lessons of practical experience in face of the more bookish understanding of politics rehearsed by his young, enthusiastic correspondent. Lipsius’s wandering between Protestant and Catholic allegiances, criticized as opportunistic by some, might even have struck Montaigne as a laudatory aptitude for adaptation, or, in the very least, a conditional loyalty congenial to his own nuanced and heavily qualified views on political and religious affiliation. Montaigne and Lipsius shared interests, favorite authors, even dispositions. The two men shared so much to talk about, in fact, that the surviving letters cannot help but disappoint. Perhaps there was too much to talk about. Perhaps this was, in the end, what made Montaigne uncomfortable at the idea of engaging in a friendship with Lipsius. Lipsius was seeking more than literary mentoring from Montaigne—he was looking for recognition on something like an equal footing. In fact, he seems to have hoped to establish a public literary friendship much along the same lines as the one Montaigne had created with La Boétie, as Warren Boutcher has observed.72 To this effect, he wrote Montaigne, “I know you without having met you, through your mind and your writing … I know of no one in Europe who holds on these matters sentiments that lie more close to my own.”73 Lipsius announced his forthcoming Politica at the same time as he reminded Montaigne of having publicly praised the Essays, “I esteem you highly as, in a word, I have described you publicly.” Finally, the request: “O, that I might enjoy a reader like you! Write me honestly—as the candid man you are—what you think of [my Politica].”74 If Lipsius proffered a public literary friendship to Montaigne, Montaigne seems to have done everything he could quietly to disassociate himself and his from Anthony Grafton’s “Portrait of Justus Lipsius,” Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 227–43. 72  See his sixth chapter, “Caring for Fortunes,” The School of Montaigne: Enfranchising the Reader-Writer in Early Modern Europe, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2015. 73  Letter to Montaigne, 30 August (1587?): “Diu est cùm te noui: nec noui: à mente et scriptis … in Europa non invêni, qui in talibus sensu mecum magis consentiente” (Justus Lipsius, “Trois lettres de Lipse à Montaigne [1587?–1589],” ed. Michel Magnien, Montaigne Studies 16 [2004]: 103–11, see 106). 74  Letters 15 April 1588: “ego te talem censeo, qualem publicè descripsi uno verbo”; and 17 September 1589: “O tui similis mihi lector sit! et tu iudicium tuum liberè, et ut vi res, scribe” (Lipsius, “Trois lettres,” 108, 111).

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Essays from Lipsius, as Michel Magnien has suggested.75 Above all, Montaigne backed away from Lipsius’s beloved Politica. Beginning with the first chapter of his new book of essays, “Of the useful and the honorable,” Montaigne waves away Lipsius’s influential endorsement of raison d’état as “this pretext of reason.”76 Lipsius presented this hardboiled political thinking to late sixteenth-century readers via Tacitus, a Tacitus he had read from the vantage point of Machiavelli; Montaigne distances himself from Machiavelli, and when he talks about Tacitus, fails to mention Lipsius.77 Everywhere, Montaigne dismisses the watchword of Lipsius’s political outlook, “prudence”: “It is unwise (imprudence) to think that human wisdom (prudence) can fill the role of Fortune. And vain is the undertaking of him who presumes to embrace both causes and consequences and to lead by the hand the progress of his affair—vain especially in the deliberations of war.”78 This reads like criticism of Lipsius’s entire project, and a following quote that Montaigne later lifted from the Politica seems to confirm Lipsius discretely as his intended target. In one passage in particular, Montaigne deliberately sets himself at odds with this would-be friend. Lipsius opened the military books of his Politica responding to an objection: how can a scholar like himself hope to address practical questions of warfare? His defense is that he simply “borrows the wisdom of others”: For what is there here of mine? … Therefore I will boldly march forward with a settled pace, and will as it were out of the gardens of ancient Authors, gather the flowers of sentences, and will weave and plait them in the garlands of these Chapters; which if it be well done, and with judgment, no man will blame me.79

But Montaigne does respond with blame against such a lattice-work of quotations and borrowings:

 Michel Magnien, “Montaigne et Juste Lipse: une double méprise?” Juste Lipse (1547–1606) en son temps: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 1994, ed. Christian Mouchel (Paris: Champion, 1996), 423–52, and “Aut sapiens, aut peregrinator: Montaigne vs. Lipse,” Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 68 (1998): 209–32. 76  “ce pretexte de raison” (III.1.803; 610). 77  Magnien, “Montaigne et Juste Lipse,” 451–2. 78  “C’est imprudence d’estimer que l’humaine prudence puisse remplir le rolle de la fortune. Et vaine est l’entreprise de celuy qui presume d’embrasser et causes et consequences, et mener par la main le progrez de son faict; vaine sur tout aux deliberations guerrieres” (III.8.934; 713). 79  “… eorum à quibus iam diu mutuor et sumo. Quid enim hîc meum? … Itaque pergam audacter nec vacillante pede, in incepto: et ex veterum scriptorum velut hortis Sententiarum flores legam, et intexam in has Capitum corollas. Quòd si probè et judicio à me fiet, nemo damnet” (Politicorum sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex [Leiden: Plantin, 1589], [Paris: L. Delas, 1594], 87v, 88v, trans. William Jones, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine [London: R. Field, for W. Ponsonby, 1594], 124, 126). 75

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Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France Even so someone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other peoples flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them … But I do not intend that they should cover and hide me; that is the opposite of my design, I who wish to make a show only of what is my own … These concoctions of commonplaces, by means of which so many men husband their study, are hardly useful except for commonplace subjects.80

Quotes borrowed from Lipsius often appear in contexts nearly diametrically opposed to the Neostoical spirit in which Lipsius had first used them.81 Montaigne’s love of restless movement and his hymn to travel in “Of vanity” counters Lipsius’s dogged insistence on immobility and fixed residence in his De constantia.82 Conversely, when he used Lipsius’s De amphitheatro in “Of coaches” in a spirit that lay closer to Lipsius’s own intent, Montaigne neglected to name Lipsius or his debt to him. Montaigne explicitly mentioned Lipsius in passing only twice in the essays—something short of the dedication or more lengthy citation Lipsius had sought. Distancing himself from writing built on quoting others’ works, Montaigne proclaims, “I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better. This does not apply to compilations that are published as compilations … as does Lipsius in the learned and laborious web of his Politics.”83 “Learned,” or docte, hardly counts as a positive term in the Essays, and certainly not in the context of Montaigne’s attack on formal education in “Of the education of children.” As for “laborious web,” the image simply sounds off-putting. The same diffidence mars Montaigne’s second reference to Lipsius deep in the middle of his “Apology for Raymond Sebond”: How I wish that while I am alive, either some other man or Justus Lipsius, the most learned man we have left, with a most polished and judicious mind, truly akin to my Turnebus, might compile into a register, according to their divisions and classes, as honestly and carefully as we can understand hem, the opinions of

80  “Comme quelqu’un pourroit dire de moy que j’ay seulement faict icy un amas de fleurs estrangeres, n’y ayant fourny du mien que le filet à les lier … Mais je n’entends pas qu’ils me couvrent, et qu’ils me cachent: c’est le rebours de mon dessein, qui ne veux faire montre que du mien … Ces pastissages de lieux communs, dequoy tant de gents mesnagent leur estude, ne servent guere qu’à subjects communs” (III.12.1055, 1056; 808). 81  For example, II.3.355; 255 and III.9.984; 753. 82  Magnien, “Aut sapiens, aut peregrinator,” and Paul J. Smith, “Montaigne, Juste Lipse et l’art du voyage,” Romanic Review 94, no. 1–2 (2004): 73–91. 83  “Je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d’autant plus me dire. Cecy ne touche pas des centons qui se publient pour centons: et j’en ay veu de tres-ingenieux en mon temps, entre autres un, sous le nom de Capilupus, outre les anciens. Ce sont des esprits qui se font voir et par ailleurs et par là, comme Lipsius en ce docte et laborieux tissu de ses Politiques” (I.26.148; 108); and the excellent analysis by Magnien, “Montaigne et Juste Lipse,” 439–40.

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ancient philosophy on the subject of our being and our conduct … What a fine and useful work that would be!84

Comparison to Turnèbe stands as high praise coming from Montaigne, but, at the same time, one notes the reappearance of “learned” (savant), the identification of Lipsius as a compiler rather than an author in his own right, and the offhand way of introducing “some other author or Justus Lipsius.” As a matter of fact, Lipsius had already begun gathering materials for just such a work—the Fax historica that he later abandoned.85 If Lipsius had informed Montaigne of as much in one of their letters now lost, Montaigne’s “praise” would take on a bit of an edge, resembling more advice scolding Lipsius not on whether, but on how to compose such a work. This appears most clearly in a latent criticism by which Montaigne requests an “honestly” (sincerement) fashioned work from a mind “most polished” like that of Lipsius. “Sincerely” was understood at the time through a presumed Latin etymology, sine cera, as signifying something without wax, what had not then been “polished”—precisely the kind of work the polished mind of Lipsius would have been least suited to. Praising him for a work he had not written—and perhaps would have been incapable of writing—while passing silently over the ones he did, seems disingenuous. This was surely meant more to bury than to praise Lipsius. One wonders what Lipsius would have thought in encountering these passing slights, subtle digs, and faint words of praise as he read the new edition of the Essays. How would he have considered Montaigne’s complaint that he would have gladly engaged in a public literary correspondence had he enjoyed anyone worthy of writing letters to?86 One cannot answer these questions with any certainty, but Lipsius’s own subsequent silence on the subject of Montaigne seems 84  “Combien je desire que, pendant que je vis, ou quelque autre, ou Justus Lipsius, le plus sçavant homme qui nous reste, d’un esprit tres-poly et judicieux, vrayement germain à mon Turnebus, eust et la volonté, et la santé, et assez de repos pour ramasser en un registre, selon leurs divisions et leurs classes, sincerement et curieusement, autant que nous y pouvons voir, les opinions de l’ancienne philosophie sur le subject de nostre estre et de noz meurs, leurs controverses, le credit et suitte des pars, l’application de la vie des autheurs et sectateurs à leurs preceptes és accidens memorables et exemplaires. Le bel ouvrage et utile que ce seroit” (II.12.578; 436). 85  In 1605, he writes that he had been preparing materials for 25 years, “institueram Facem Historicam, tum et Ritualium libros scribere et in eos congerere quidquid esset in moribus ritibusque priscis obscurum … et materiem ab annis xxv iam paraveram” (quoted in Jan Papy, “An Antiquarian Scholar between Text and Image? Justus Lipsius, Humanist Education, and the Visualization of Ancient Rome,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35 [2004]: 97–131, see 101, note 16); see, also, Marc Laurens and Jan Papy, “The Grandeur That Was Rome: Lipsius’s variaties op een oud thema,” Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) en het Plantijnse Huis, ed. R. Dusoir et al. (Antwerp: Museum Plantin-Moretus, 1997), 129–37. 86  “Et eusse pris plus volontiers cette forme à publier mes verves, si j’eusse eu à qui parler. Il me falloit, comme je l’ay eu autrefois, un certain commerce, qui m’attirait, qui me soutînt et soulevât” (I.40.252; 185–6).

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rather eloquent. He later admitted to an acquaintance that he had kept only a “few” letters from Montaigne, others he had passed on to a friend; if he can find in them anything interesting, he promises, he will convey it. But despite publishing this promise, he said nothing more about them.87 On 4 February 1593, de Brach wrote Lipsius asking him to send verse to inscribe on a funeral monument being planned for Montaigne.88 Lipsius never responded. The Company of Women At home in his family chateau during retirement, Montaigne found himself surrounded by women. His mother, who outlived him, continued to reside there among the many servants who had taken orders from her long before they had had to listen to her son.89 Two of Montaigne’s sisters also lived at the chateau, as did his daughter and her governess, his wife and a relative in her charge—the baron Savignac’s sister—as well as their retinues.90 One of the most touching, if fleeting, glimpses that the Essays provides of how Montaigne spent his time at the chateau shows him playing cards with his daughter and wife, “I handle the cards and keep score for a couple of pennies just as for double doubloons; when winning and losing, against my wife and daughter, is indifferent to me, just as when playing for keeps.”91 Given that the professional milieus in which Montaigne had worked were exclusively male, women might seem to escape the kinds of social calculus Granovetter outlines. But noblewomen such as the five to whom Montaigne dedicated individual chapters of his work, could wield great influence, particularly in the aristocratic settings in which Montaigne exercised the latter part of his political career. There, would he have needed to maintain multiple weak ties? Conversely, would he have perceived a need to establish a counterbalancing perfect female friend? 87

 Letter to Remacle Roberti, 5 April 1595: “Litteræ eius … paucae … Siquid tamen dignum lectione tua aut aliorum reperero, videbis” (in La Première Réception des ‘Essais’ de Montaigne (1580–1640), ed. Olivier Millet [Paris: Champion, 1995], 131); Magnien, “Montaigne et Juste Lipse,” 430, 452. 88  Reinhold Dezeimeris, “Recherches sur la vie de Pierre de Brach,” in Œuvres poétiques, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Aubry, 1861–1862; Geneva: Slatkine, 1969), 1:lxxii–iv. 89  Françoise Charpentier, “L’absente des Essais: Quelques questions autour de l’essai II: 8, De l’affection des pères aux enfans,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 6th ser., no. 17–18 (1984): 7–16. 90  For the governess (III.5.856; 651); for Savignac’s sister, Le Livre de raison de Montaigne, ed. Jean Marchand (Paris: Arts Graphiques, 1948), 244. The first sister did not marry until 28 September 1579; the second until 2 September 1581. On Montaigne’s good relations with his wife, see the archival evidence unearthed by Simonin, “Françoise (de La Chassaigne)” (2001), 155–70. 91  “Je manie les chartes pour les doubles et tien compte, comme pour les doubles doublons, lors que le gaigner et le perdre contre ma femme et ma fille m’est indifferent, comme lors qu’il y va de bon” (I.23.110–11; 79).

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Better known than the chateau’s female society was the friendship that Montaigne struck up in his last years with a young woman whom he made his “covenant daughter,” nearly 30 years after having been made La Boétie’s “covenant brother.”92 He met Marie de Gournay during his last visit to Paris in the early summer of 1588 and grew to trust her enough to commit himself during the following months to her care in Picardy. There, he let her take by dictation four additions he made to the Essays, when he found his hands too swollen from complications from urinary infections to write for himself. He grew so fond of her as to offer her a diamond ring inscribed with a double “M,” which the scrupulous Gournay decided to return to his daughter upon her death.93 The company of youth can seem a compliment at the end of life, but Gournay’s effusive adulation made Montaigne uncomfortable even by her own admission. As a highly educated woman struggling to establish a literary career in an age that regarded neither role very highly, she may have found permission to write by hitching her fortunes to Montaigne’s. It might have seemed to many, perhaps even to Montaigne himself, that Gournay needed him more than he did her. But, although history has tended to treat Gournay as a sort of accessory after the fact, Montaigne would depend on her far more than he might have guessed. His affection could not have been better placed. Montaigne’s editor, Abel L’Angelier wished to forestall competitors by undertaking a new edition of the Essays, but he was not especially keen to labor over the minutiae of Montaigne’s revisions—over six thousand changes to punctuation alone.94 Only someone afflicted with a writer’s fussiness on a par with Montaigne’s own could have compiled a fair copy from the unwieldy notes and then guided it successfully through press. As it was, the thousands of modifications to punctuation never made it into print. Almost a third of Montaigne’s book nearly did not. In all, Gournay helped put 22 subsequent editions into the hands of Montaigne’s posthumous readers. As importantly, perhaps, she championed her mentor’s writings against critics and to everyone who would listen over the succeeding half century. She was the first reader to transform Montaigne into an institution. Whether her ardent defense helped or hurt readers’ perception of Montaigne mattered less than the fact that she kept his name topical in the day’s literary debates during what might otherwise have been a very difficult patch in the Essays’ fortunes. Montaigne’s language grew archaic even more quickly that he had imagined; his regional Gasconisms continued to offend the ears of readers 92

 “C’est, à la vérité, un beau nom et plein de dilection que le nom de frere, et à cette cause en fismes nous, luy et moy, nostre alliance” (I.28.185; 136). 93  “le diamant en poincte qu’il me donna qui porte le chiffre d’une double m m en un anneau” (Catherine Martin, “Le premier testament de Marie de Gournay,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 67, no. 3 [2005]: 653–8, see 654). Men often exchanged rings and precious stones as tokens of “perfect friendship” (Bray, The Friend, 162–4). 94  André Tournon, “‘Mouches en lait’: l’inscription des lectures,” Lire les Essais de Montaigne: Actes du colloque de Glasgow 1997, ed. Noël Peacock and James J. Supple (Paris: Champion, 2001), 75–88.

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far less favorably predisposed than had been his colleague Étienne Pasquier, who had already complained loudly of them.95 The project of speaking of oneself irritated a good segment of the public on through Pascal and beyond. The book could, in effect, have suffered the fate of so many of those written by Montaigne’s contemporaries, prematurely jettisoned from libraries and reading lists in the name of Malherbe’s language reforms. Thanks to Gournay, the Essays made its way into the Grand Siècle. When she at last bade farewell to their “orphan,” as she called the book, she no longer needed to worry about its success. It had now become the favorite bedside book of countless admirers who found in Montaigne a confidant and an archetype for their own burgeoning sense of self. At the end of “Of presumptuousness,” there appeared in early posthumous editions of the Essays this praise for Marie de Gournay: I have taken pleasure in making public in several places the hopes I have for Marie de Gournay le Jars, my covenant daughter, whom I love indeed more than a daughter of my own, and cherish in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of my being. She is the only person I still think about in the world. If youthful promise means anything, her soul will some day be capable of the finest things, among others of perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain. The sincerity and firmness of her character are already sufficient, her affection for me more than superabundant, and such, in short, that it leaves nothing to be desired, unless that her apprehension about my end, in view of my fifty-five years when I met her, would not torment her so cruelly. The judgment she made of the first Essays, she a woman, and in this age, and so young, and alone in her district, and the remarkable eagerness with which she loved me and wanted my friendship for a long time, simply through the esteem she formed for me before she had seen me, is a phenomenon very worthy of consideration.96

Traditionally, scholars tended to write these lines off as a forgery inserted by Gournay herself in an effort at self-promotion, and they took her later deletion 95

 Letter to Claude Pellejay, c. 1602, ed. Thickett (1956), 45.  “J’ay pris plaisir à publier en plusieurs lieux, l’esperance que j’ay de Marie de Gournay le Jars ma fille d’alliance : et certes aymée de moy beaucoup plus que paternellement, et enveloppée en ma retraitte et solitude, comme l’une des meilleures parties de mon propre estre. Je ne regarde plus qu’elle au monde. Si l’adolescence peut donner presage, cette ame sera quelque jour capable des plus belles choses, et entre autres de la perfection de cette tressaincte amitié, où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores : la sincerité et la solidité de ses moeurs, y sont desja battantes, son affection vers moy plus que sur-abondante : et telle en somme qu’il n’y a rien à souhaiter, sinon que l’apprehension qu’elle a de ma fin, par les cinquante et cinq ans ausquels elle m’a rencontré, la travaillast moins cruellement. Le jugement qu’elle fit des premiers Essays, et femme, et en ce siecle, et si jeune, et seule en son quartier, et la vehemence fameuse dont elle m’ayma et me desira long temps sur la seule estime qu’elle en print de moy, avant m’avoir veu, c’est un accident de tres-digne consideration” (II.17.661; 502). 96

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of the passage as a sign of repentant embarrassment. Since then, readers have begun to take Gournay more seriously and appreciate the monumental service she performed in shepherding the Essays’ posthumous fortunes. But one can conceive other scenarios. Had Montaigne expressed these sentiments in a personal letter to Gournay, the implicitly public character of epistolary practice at the time might have justified their retrospective inclusion by her in the Essays. In any event, the passage bears all the hallmarks of Montaigne’s understanding of friendship as he described it with La Boétie: the celebration of “youthful promise,” the inclusion of the other in one’s very “being,” the formation of esteem through literary “judgment” and the “esteem” it engenders a “long time” before meeting the other person, the “making public” of a “covenant” relation that, brought to “perfection,” attains a “sacred” status. These lines constituted exactly the kind of laudatory mention that Justus Lipsius had been after, and which Montaigne never awarded him—nor any other man after La Boétie.97 Note even here, however, that Montaigne refrains from naming their relationship a perfect friendship, preferring instead to reserve “perfection” in friendship as a future capacity that Gournay might one day exercise with another. *** O my friends, there is no friend.98

Perfect friendship could not “possibly be double,” it was “indivisible,” “the most singular and unified of all things.”99 One could almost say that its point for Montaigne lay precisely in this singularity. Perfect friends possessed each other completely, “everything actually being in common between them—wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives, children, honor, and life.”100 But one made a perfect friend only once, and once this achieved, one never again needed to invest one’s feelings so completely, to open oneself so unreservedly, nor oblige oneself so thoroughly and without limit to another man. “Of friendship,” with its conventional organization and uncharacteristic idealism, stands as an anomaly in the Essays. But beneath the idealism and the conventionality lies an entirely pessimistic and nearly misanthropic vision of human relations. Disputes over inheritance will turn father against son. Brothers are bound to become rivals. Women are incapable of friendship. Homosexuality only thrives between unequals. Love is a frantic pursuit after what flees us. 97

 Jean Balsamo, “‘Ma fortune ne m’en a fait voir nul’: Montaigne et les grands hommes de son temps,” Travaux de Littérature 18 (2005): 139–55. 98  “O mes amis, il n’y a nul amy” (I.28.190; 140), on the history of this catchphrase, see Langer, Perfect Friendship, 15–20. 99  “indivisible,” “il est impossible qu’elle soit double,” “la chose la plus une et unie” (I.28.191; 141–2). 100  “Tout estant par effect commun entre eux, volontez, pensemens, jugemens, biens, femmes, enfans, honneur et vie” (I.28.190; 141).

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Attraction is doomed to evaporate after sexual gratification. Marriage is a prison. What others call sociability prove merely relations of self-interest, and no one, not a single person living save Montaigne has ever felt true friendship…. It would be harder to find at the time a darker assessment of the human potential for goodness outside of Calvin. The chapter’s hyperbolic claims for the friendship with La Boétie logically foreclose similar opportunities for others, and Montaigne’s explicit exclusion of his audience from such a relationship runs counter to the practices of reader-sociability that dominate elsewhere in the book. Elsewhere, happily, Montaigne retracts many of his condemnations of human society. But “Of friendship” refuses to let itself be assimilated to readers’ experience. As we cross the Essays’ threshold, an unsettling question must therefore confront us: are we to become a latter-day Gournay or, rather, another neglected Lipsius? Will we be welcomed or merely suffered? Will we begin a new friendship, or, like the chateau’s many luckless visitors, slowly come to detect behind the proffered smile a cold wall of forbearance? Among the many richer ends accomplished by the ideal of perfect friendship that Montaigne so alluringly advertised lay a distressingly mundane purpose. Holding out the ideal of a perfect friend allowed him to hold at arm’s length real friends—the kind of companions who might make demands, need help, and want time, or who could disappoint, irritate, and occasionally bore. Yet, such men obstinately believed that they, too, were capable of attaining friendship. They were the flesh-and-blood friends who came calling at Montaigne’s doorstep, eager to converse with this self-proclaimed apostle of friendship and expecting to find a warmer reception.

Chapter 3

The Power to Correct: Beating Men in Service Friendship Michelle Miller

Eager to understand friendship’s present bill of health in modern culture, scholars have sought to better know its past, to assess how certain kinds of amity have fared in specific past environments.1 Perhaps prompted by Foucault, these histories have often been framed in terms of loss, with scholars frequently concurring that friendship in the West seems to become, from the end of antiquity onward, gradually less public, less expressive, and less acceptably part of ethical and political life. With these frameworks established, though by no means uncontested, the study of friendship has in many ways become oriented toward the ferreting out of causes. When and where do we see harm to friendship as a (public, affective, etc.) social form? What forces can we find as historical culprits for its supposed fading? As a group of transformations that brought Europe into modernity, the civilizing process as described by Norbert Elias can attract us as a suspect.2 Concerned with the rise of absolutism, the transformation of noble warriors into courtiers, and the expansive influence of shame in the Western psyche, the civilizing process can easily seem a kind of slow trauma, an historical unfolding which surely changed the expression of friendly affects and the range of tasks that were available for friends to perform. One of the insights of Alan Bray’s The Friend is that early modern families relied heavily on friends, and this is probably in part because undeveloped states and markets left families with so much to do. The civilizing process also matters as a theory of historical transformation in which gender is at stake. Female-hosted salons have been studied as sites in which women shaped new tastes and modes of exchange.3 Beyond these specific  See Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), Jeffrey Merrick, “Male Friendship in Pre-revolutionary France,” GLQ 10 (2004): 407–32, Jeffrey Masten, “Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship,” GLQ 10 (2004): 367–84, and Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Thanks to George Hoffmann, Peggy McCracken, Katherine Ibbett, and the volume editors for their input on this essay. 2  The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, NY: Urizen Books, 1978). 3  See Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), and Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 1

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cultural arenas, the changes Elias describes have more frequently been understood as transformations driven by politics, entities writ large and gendered male—the monarchy, the emergent state. Either way, the transmission of civility is a process whose grounding in repetitive chains of behavior makes it intimately tied to the construction of gender, and gender within friendships. In particular, the content of masculinity found itself subject to redefinition as part of the civilizing process, and social competition between both friends and enemies clearly played a role in determining which behaviors would win out as forms of dominant masculinity, and which courtly figures would be understood as their exemplars.4 This essay examines a nexus of friendships between the valet-poet Clément Marot, his sovereign and master, François I, several of François’s female relatives, and a rival poet, François Sagon, to see what these figures reveal about gender in (early modern male) friendship. Tracing Marot’s interaction with both superiors and subordinates, I note that secure masculinity is tied importantly to status, and that Marot seeks it by imitating those whom he admires, and by whom he is punished. As we shall see, stable, civil maleness emerges through sanctioned forms of violence and the use of female intermediaries. By presenting civility, violence, and friendship as mutually intertwined, I avoid linear claims about a possible “rise” of civility tied to a “decline” of friendship.5 Instead, I show that Marot savors the sociability of group violence even as he embraces civility, figuring himself as an agent in François’s expansion of the state, and as a self-appointed corrector eager to police manners and punish robin presumption. Without suggesting that the relationship between friendship and civil correction is by any means exclusive to France, France’s early and strong expansion of the state provides a good backdrop for studying how the two phenomena can enable one another. Aggressive but not always secure within his male friendships, Marot represents in his poems a range of ties that allow us to observe complex interplays between gender, status, and amity. Writing at the French court primarily in the 1520s and 1530s, Marot entertained relations of particular proximity with king François I, 4  I borrow these insights, as well as Bourdieu’s concept of dominant and dominated masculinities, from Lewis C. Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 7–11. 5  One might address this complexity in other ways as well, for example, by pointing out how political and urban centralization brought into being the very audiences before whom public expressions of amical favor assumed meaning, or by noting that it was through the need to assert more arbitrary, absolute power that sovereigns like Henri III began using spectacular friendship with a dependent few as a weapon against overweening, long-favored families. See Nicolas Le Roux, La Faveur du roi: Mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2000); Katherine Crawford, “Love, Sodomy, and Scandal: Controlling the Sexual Reputation of Henri III,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (2003): 513–42; and Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 147–8.

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with François’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre, and with a royal Valois cousin living in Italy, Renée de France. Specifically, Marot held a post as a valet de chambre to François, another as secretary to Marguerite, and was also employed by Renée during his Italian exile.6 Beyond his service, Marot also emphasized his spiritual closeness to the two Valois women, with whom he shared Protestant sympathies. Unfortunately, these religious leanings simultaneously strained his relations with the more orthodox François. As concerned the Catholic king, Marot defined his relationship to him partly through non-ressemblant but reciprocal forms of affection and exchange.7 Marot’s poems also define his closeness to his patrons through factors such as a shared love of writing, a common court culture, and the valet’s past history of protection. However, as I will show, Marot further enhances these ties through his violent correction of enemies he construes as shared. Celebrating belligerence as a kind of amical jollity to be enjoyed with others, especially with persons of higher status, Marot also stretches our very definition of friendship by accepting, even evoking profit in, perhaps the worst thing we can imagine receiving from a friend: a wrenching physical beating. Such violence presents a dark side of friendship, and as we work our way toward this episode in Marot’s life and work, we will try to understand what such struggle brings to friendship. Conversely, and with a different tone, I will also submit that we should brighten our view of correction. Now most readily understood negatively as the elimination of a problem, correction as we find it in Marot (and fellow sixteenth-century writers) connotes a more positive ideal. This perspective parallels the role of correction within print culture, where corrected, printed texts were promoted as superior to manuscript, and print shop correctors, whose work was demanding and erudite, believed they were not just excising mistakes, but also giving texts new enrichment.8 Keeping this  See Gérard Defaux, Introduction, Clément Marot, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1990), 1:LVII, LXXXII, and CXXVIII for the terms of these positions. 7  Marot draws at one point on Aesop’s fable of the lion and the rat to theorize how he can be François’s friend despite their yawning gap in status, “Epistre à son amy Lyon,” in Œuvres poétiques, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1990), 1:92–4. All citations of Marot’s poetry refer to this edition unless otherwise noted. Francis Goyet crucially identifies François I as a second addressee/referent for the “lion friend” in the poem, suggesting that Marot is chiding François for his captivity at Pavia and his need to be ransomed by the French people. This teasing helps establish Marot as someone who corrects his royal friend and is not merely corrected by him. See “Rhétorique et littérature: le ‘lieu commun’ à la Renaissance, sive de grandiloquentia,” dissertation (thèse d’État), Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1993, 440–44. Thanks to Ullrich Langer for signaling this source. 8  For more on print correctors, their status vis-à-vis authors of higher status, and the imbrication of textual editing within friendship, and see Anthony Grafton, “Printers’ Correctors and the Publication of Classical Texts,” in Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as 6

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parallel example in mind may prepare an understanding of how social correction, violent or otherwise, could come across as something productive, and thus have a place in a (somewhat) healthy model of friendship, one not utterly divorced from the pursuit of virtue and self-improvement more readily associated with Renaissance friendship. From Service to Correction To understand why the image of Marot as a corrector could possibly matter for our larger understanding of what the civilizing process and friendship had to do with one another, it is worthwhile to explore how the poet makes a corrective, civilizing role emerge as a basic extension of his service. The poet’s roles as a valet de chambre and secretary were common to others; in a world where nobles frequently gave out semi-honorific service posts to their friends as a means of supporting them financially and structuring personal closeness, it is important to understand what one could do and attempt with such roles, and what they implied in terms of gender. Even beyond the eventual functions he takes on, Marot stakes a claim to civility and the civilizing process. Having grown up in royal circles during his father’s glory days as a court poet and gentleman of the royal wardrobe, Marot in his writings underscores his steeping in elite culture, famously highlighting the court as the “schoolmistress” which gives him credentials and personal polish.9 For Elias, courts are key sites for the reshaping of manners, hence Marot’s foregrounding of his courtly education is important. However, the civilizing process is not reducible to the production of courtoisie, since the aristocracy did not simply dictate civility. New codes of manners were also importantly shaped by educated, non-courtly bourgeois, and Marot evokes his approval of this Revelation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 141–55. For an example of “se corriger” as a positive ideal, see Montaigne, essay 1.26, “Qu’on luy face entendre que de confesser la faute qu’il descouvrira en son propre discours, encore qu’elle ne soit aperceue que par luy, c’est un effet de jugement et de sincerité, qui sont les principales parties qu’il cherche; que l’opiniatrer et contester sont qualitez communes, plus apparentes aux plus basses ames; que se raviser et se corriger, abandonner un mauvais party sur le cours de son ardeur, ce sont qualitez rares, fortes et philosophiques” (Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and V[erdun]-L[ouis] Saulnier [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999], 155). Thanks to George Hoffmann for suggesting this idea. 9  All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. See the “maistresse d’escole” passage in “Au tresvertueux prince, Françoys, Daulphin de France” (2:117), as well as a dizain in which Marot declares he was “noblement nourry” (2:349). Such claims reinforce Marot’s appropriateness as a royal friend, situating Marot as a friend who is “a loaf of the same dough” even if he is not a noble-born gentleman servant. See Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 10.

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through his translation of three colloquies by Erasmus. These colloquies advance ideals of bourgeois virtue and non-elite lay culture, thus expressing the poet’s sympathy for cultural forces which were putting pressure on (among other things) noble excess.10 Biographical details such as these help us recognize Marot as a precariously poised social hybrid, a non-noble who was nonetheless profoundly schooled in elite life, and a finessed and preened supra-bourgeois who could nonetheless appreciate the behavioro-cultural programme that Erasmus had in mind for all classes. From a gender standpoint, Marot’s hybrid social status gave him access to prestigious male friends who would have been off limits to a less polished roturier; however, it also put his masculinity at risk in such contexts. As Alan Bray has noted, the lack of shared noble status between male friends in Renaissance England was a factor that could—in combination with others—overturn constructions of respectable male friendship, and replace them with a charge of sodomy. While status difference alone was not enough to emasculate the subordinate friend or call his propriety into question, Bray and others have noted that the rise of humanistic culture made it increasingly common for nobles to have (and need) these kinds of non-noble servants—secretaries, intendants, and poets in addition to (or rather than) the noble-born squires, pageboys, and gentilshommes that had traditionally made up great households’ honor guard of companionate servants.11 In cases where noble birth was not shared, the social tone of service was less certain, and Marot clearly finds himself in this dilemma. It is tempting to see effects of this uncertain hybrid status in Marot’s shifting poetic persona. Select parts of the poet’s self-presentation allow us to see him as mild and unassuming. In numerous poems to social superiors, and a few to social equals, he emphasizes his smallness, even his docility and need, and his humble, faithful pleasure at being close to his royal masters.12 Moreover, L’Adolescence clémentine, the collection of poetry for which he became most known, and which he privileged in the crucial 1538 edition of his works, emphasized a youthful persona, someone who was still learning rather than teaching, immature rather than authoritative. However, other elements of Marot’s self-presentation greatly depart from this mildness. One does not have to look far beyond gentle Clément to find marauding Marot the social critic, poetic master, self-righteous believer, and

10  “The Abbot and the Learned Lady,” “The Girl with No Interest in Marriage,” and “The Repentent Girl.” Craig Thompson notes that Erasmus “contrasts Magdalia [the ‘Learned Lady’] with ‘court ladies.’” See The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 218. 11  See Bray, “Homosexuality,” 12, and Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 88. 12  See for example, Marot’s self-presentation as “Vostre humble serf Clément” (1:327, line 4), a “Petit Tailleur” (1:296, line 35), a “Brebis” (1:328, line 14), or as a loyal servant who feels punished when he cannot “voir vostre Royalle face” (2:319, line 10).

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sexual castigator. Attacking men, women, Catholics, and robe nobles, this is the Marot most readily accessible in “L’Enfer” and the “Blason du laid tétin.”13 However, assertive high-handedness does not necessarily denote a different hierarchical position than that staked out by the mild Clément. To the contrary, and as I have suggested elsewhere, many of Marot’s bossy complaints voiced to the king—his condemnation of Sorbonne theologians and corrupt judges in the Châtelet—are spoken from a premise of lowness. Suggesting that his vulnerability has allowed him to experience France’s villains firsthand, Marot presents himself as a qualified corrector because of what he has lived in humble, unseemly contexts, of which service is a part.14 Reshaped and textualized by Marot, these rough and tumble contexts become a grounds for affirming a robust but managed masculinity, one that pushes both violence and defenselessness into the background as the poet anchors his male self in gently audacious acts of writing. While acknowledging his vulnerability and thanking the king for protection and rescue, Marot also uses his tales of hard knocks to speak his own mind. Staging himself as simultaneously persecuted, protected, and independent, Marot thanks the king and highlights the prestige of their bond, but also steps apart from the sovereign, slipping in playful advice based on harsh life experience. Marot’s early poetic epistle “Au Roy [pour avoir été dérobé],” expresses such empowering correction from a lowly position. Here, we see Marot taking up a civilizing role within and to the profit of his royal friendship. Specifically, Marot drops hints to the king about persons and institutions needing better royal oversight, while effectively speaking from the standpoint of a servant. Presenting his message to François as something that he has learned from his lively “Gascon valet” while also stressing his own role as a necessiteux on the royal payroll, Marot makes his critique of corrupt treasury officials and quackish royal doctors emerge from within protected and non-threatening roles of domestic service.15 Moreover, insofar as the poet mimics his robustly masculine Gascon valet—said to be good at sports and a favorite with ladies of the night—Marot makes the address empowering from the standpoint of gender, despite its focus on lowly roles. 13  Poems such as “D’Ung qu’on appeloit Frere Lubin” (1:112) or “A Pierre Martel” (2:309) also give a good sense of this derogatory, aggressive verse. Marot’s hostile misogyny is tempered in examples such as his praise of the erudite Jehanne Gaillarde (1:143), whom he favorably compares to Christine de Pisan. 14  While service, especially royal service, is something that Marot also plays up to enhance his prestige, he also exploits its humbler meanings, sometimes more than was typical for the era. See my dissertation, “Material Friendship: Service and Amity in Early Modern French Literature” (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2008), 15–21. 15  Said to steal the poet’s money (itself a gift from the king), the valet prompts a more general lesson about mismanagement of the king’s funds. Portrayed as a loveable rascal, the servant provides a behavioral model for Marot, and hence he appears in the poem most fully as a valet. Although the poem plays with the converse situation, staging the valet as a clothing-stealing Marot impersonator, in truth, it is much more appropriate to speak of Marot as a stand-in and mouthpiece for his (imaginary) servant.

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While readers may remember this poem primarily as a witty trifle, its humor and explicit self-humbling in fact smooth the transmission of earnest advice from a real-world subordinate to the king. A message of this caliber appears in another well-known poem, the Ferrara epistle. Here, while Marot begs the king for sanctions against corrupt magistrates and the spiteful Sorbonne, he again positions himself as François’s servant, and importantly, as someone whose enemies he shares with the king. Fearfully explaining that many “corruptible judges” are after him, and that “the ignorant Sorbonne” “wishes me harm,” Marot skillfully combines a position of victimization with one of attack.16 He positions his foes as shared with François: “they wish you great harm,” “the ignorant Sorbonne … is against / The noble trilingual Academy / That you founded,” creating appeal for himself as both a whistle-blower and a partner in suffering.17 This is a form of “enemy sharing” about which I will say more later. In these poems, Marot targets members of the lettered, increasingly powerful robe nobility: treasurers, doctors, judges. While “civilizing” can seem a detached, monolithic process, and one that has been studied above all with respect to the military nobility, Marot’s pot-shots at robins nonetheless make considerable sense in these terms. It is worth recalling that for Elias, “civilizing” was not just a taming of sword nobles, but an intensification of pressure and competition across all social ranks. Increased geographic contact and socio-economic interdependency made non-peer classes more aware of each other, and subsequently more eager to distinguish themselves and to police the ambitious gestures of other groups. For Marot, the robe nobility was the upstart group that threatened most—that most needed civilizing—and that posed the greatest threat to himself, his king, and their friendship. Clearly, insofar as Marot shared both talents and ambitions with the very same robins he was reproaching, he had much to gain from thinning down the pool of his rivals, reducing his competition for royal influence. In addition to this social explanation, there were gains to be made from correction. Humanly, and psychosocially, what does Marot seem to get out of this experience? And how do episodes of correction fit into the waxing and waning of Marot’s relationship with François? Correction as an Activity of Friendship One possible—and quintessential—early modern fear that Marot scrupulously avoided stoking was that his acts of correction were really only a prelude to manipulating the king and grasping personal undeserved power. Importantly, Marot prevents such fears from ever clouding readers’ understanding of his corrective gestures, partly by flashing reassuring credentials that elevate him above the status 16

 “juges corrompables,” “l’ignorante Sorbonne” “me veult … mal” (1:80–86, lines 6 and 40). 17  “grand mal te veulent,” “l’ignorante Sorbonne … est … ennemye / De la trilingue, & noble Academie / Qu’as erigée” (2:81–2, lines 54 and 40–43).

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of the average roturier, but also by affirming a politico-relational model in which François remains squarely in charge. As it becomes legible across a number of poems, Marot’s corrective impulse is not one in which he strives to dominate the king, but one in which he craves to act on the sovereign’s behalf, in his company, and alongside high-born friends both male and female. For Marot, correction thus figures as an activity of friendship because it affirms his belonging to an in-group. At the same time, correction also acts as a restorative tonic to friendship undone. This meltdown and restoration emerge around a central episode in Marot’s biography, his religious exile to Italy shortly after François’s crackdown on Protestants in 1534. Widely believed to sympathize with these “heretics,” whom François had just ordered arrested, Marot left France for Ferrara to avoid being thrown in jail himself. Severing his proximity to the king, and casting his status as a royal servant into doubt, the poet’s exile posed the gravest possible threats to his preferment by the king. Formerly high on the horse, Marot the Protestant exile could only address the monarch half-cringing in letters. Moreover, insofar as leaving France meant potentially relinquishing the enabling charges and patronage he had received from François, departure stripped the poet of much of his prestige, leaving him decidedly less fit for royal male friendship. In many ways, then, the exile to Italy should be understood as a simultaneous blow to Marot’s status, his friendship, and implicitly, his gender. As a disempowered nonnoble, he held even fewer claims to secure masculinity within royal friendship. Following and even during the exile, correction enters this picture as an act through which Marot recovers. Reaching out to his friend by correcting an enemy he posits as common between them, Marot renews shaky ties with the king through an attack on a third party. Defending the royal family and bolstering his masculinity through celebratory aggression, Marot clambers back into favor. We see this take place across the span of a literary quarrel, one in which Marot’s social status was attacked. To understand how correction could revamp that status, restore a friendship, and act out several of the conflicts central to the civilizing process, it is worth exploring this querelle in some detail. The quarrel began, at least in print, through the efforts of François Sagon, a Rouennais poet and secretary to a clergyman allied with the Sorbonne theologians against whom Marot liked to rail. In 1536, during Marot’s vulnerable exile, Sagon wrote a diatribe against the valet poet entitled Le Coup d’essay, which he published and presented to the king while a colleague supplicated to obtain Marot’s household charge.18 When Marot rallied, re-obtained the king’s favor, returned from Italy, and wrote back, he did so in a way that simultaneously intensified his critical role, and yet clarified it as something amically embedded and empowering of the nobility rather than self-motivated. Already in a critique published the same year as Le Coup d’essay, Sagon had lambasted Marot not so much as an egomaniac or a usurper, but as someone with deep class hostilities who was challenging the corrective authority of 18  Philippe Desan, “Le Feuilleton illustré Marot-Sagon,” in La Génération Marot, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 355.

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robe institutions. “I am astonished that you do not die from shame,” Sagon wrote to Marot, “At daring thus to rebuke the manners / Of men that one sees, on the basis of civil custom / Govern kings, people, castles, and towns.”19 For Sagon, the problem was not per se that the poet was correcting others, but that he was trying to limit the power of traditional, non-royal authorities to do likewise. While presenting his remarks primarily as a kindly overture to the king, Sagon also expressed a fundamental disagreement with Marot (and perhaps with François) about the nature of lettered corrective institutions and their relation to royal power. In this polemic, Sagon claims that judicial bodies and the Sorbonne served the king’s greater glory, while Marot had affirmed them as harmful and restrictive, impeding royal projects and challenging François’s authority.20 In his remarks, Sagon seeks to have Marot punished for harming auxiliaries to the crown, whereas Marot suggests that his intent had been to correct these same institutions on François’s behalf. Which came first, Marot’s aggression toward robe nobles, or his perception that such attacks might be useful to the king, is impossible to say. What remains clear is that the two poets appear in the querelle vying for some of the same corrective powers and justifying their deeds within overtures of friendly service. In replying to Sagon, Marot affirmed his initial, pro-royal position, as well as his intent to correct as a proxy. His poetic response to his attacker foregrounds this relationality in a number of ways. Launching his riposte in the latter half of 1537, after he had returned from exile and been re-established as a royal valet, Marot also chose a title and a narrative voice that explicitly figured him as a servant. His polemic read: “Marot’s valet against Sagon. Frippelippes, secretary of Clément Marot to François de Sagon, secretary of the abbot of Saint-Evroul.”21 Here, Marot takes up the voice of Frippelippes, his own fictive valet, through whom he satirizes and punishes Sagon.22 Echoing but also departing from “Au Roy [pour avoir été dérobé]” in his use of a servant alter-ego, Marot brings François into the picture and celebrates his recovery of that tie. By casting the poem’s author as a servant working for somebody else, Marot recalls his own service to the monarch, thus 19

 “Je m’esbahy que de honte ne meurs / D’aoser ainsi vituperer les meurs / D’hommes qu’on voit par coustumes civiles / Gouverner roys, peuples chasteaulx & villes” (“Response Par Françoys de Sagon Secretaire de l’Abbé de sainct Ebvroul, à l’Epistre premiere dudict Clement Marot au Roy,” 1536, reprinted in Œuvres de Clément Marot [The Hague, P. Gosse and J. Neaulme, 1731], 4:387). Sagon also reproaches Marot for Lutheran beliefs, uncharitable behavior, and displeasing the king with his writing. 20  For example, Sagon claims that Marot’s attacks on magistrates were “De crime esgal à leze majesté” (383). 21  “Le Valet de Marot contre Sagon. Frippelippes, secrétaire de Clément Marot, à Françoys de Sagon, secrétaire de l’abbé de Sainct Evroul.” 22  2:140–48. This choice of a servant persona then pushed Sagon to reply as “Mathieu de Boutigni, page de Monsieur Sagon.” Later in the querelle, both poets continued writing from within these servant personas. Despite numerous service-related insults exchanged in this context, these satires did not prevent Marot, Sagon, and other participants in the querelle from continuing to foreground (in print) their real-world service roles. It seems clear from other querelle texts that readers discerned the true authors of these works.

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evoking François by analogy. In addition, when Frippelippes remarks within the poem that Sagon and his cronies would never be fit “to enter the bedchamber of the King” the poem reminds the reader that Marot had recovered this role, and was once again the king’s intimate.23 The epistle’s correction of Sagon thus begins to take shape as a joint endeavor, a rollicking act of satire which Marot is undertaking not on his own, but in the service and allusive company of someone else. This hinted-at presence, a master or mistress, assumes particular importance in portions of the pamphlet in which Frippelippes’s correction of Sagon gives way to physical violence. For example, a title-page engraving that kicks off the poem-pamphlet depicts a monkey on a rope held by a sturdy but elegant adult male about to beat him with a stick.24 Referring most immediately to a play on words contained in the poem, whereby Marot transforms “Sagon” into “Sagouin,” or “monkey,” the engraving figures Sagon as a wild beast in need of correction and training by the valet Frippelippes.25 Evoking Marot’s “civilizing” impulse in the most explicit terms, the image also situates Frippelippes in an act of service, a commission. Presumably, of course, the valet is not training this expensive pet for himself, but is doing it for his master, making the monkey docile and entertaining for social superiors.26 When we settle into the poem itself, Frippelippes’s larger correctives likewise suggestively emerge as service for a Valois master, or perhaps for several. Flamboyantly taming Sagon with reproaches about his poetry, criticism about his boldness, and teasing about everything from venereal disease to poor knowledge of the king, Frippelippes works himself up to a moment of climax, a before-oureyes beating. Laying into Sagon with sound-effect punches, the valet alter-ego crows “Bang on the eye, bang on the snout, / Bang on the back of the apish lout!”27 While this violence is consistently mingled with humor—the poem suggests that Sagon farts while he is struck—comedy is not the only force that makes 23  “pour entrer en chambre de Roy” (2:152, line 52). The lexical similarity of “Frippelippes” to words implying knavish theft (like “fripon”) also would have reminded readers of Marot’s (imaginary) clothes-stealing valet from the earlier poem, in which he expresses closeness to the king. 24  In the engraving, the valet’s appearance counteracts negative stereotypes about servants—for example, his beard stresses his adult masculinity (see Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 93–145) and the slashed openings in his sleeves and pant legs make visible underclothes intended to emphasize personal cleanliness (see Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800, trans. Allan Cameron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 25  The poem also develops monkeys’ association with mimicry. 26  This kind of imagery returns later in the Deffense de Sagon contre Clement Marot, where Marot and his companions figure in a birdcage while Boutigny, the pageboy, trains them (presumably, again, for someone else). See Desan, “Le Feuilleton,” 363, 373. 27  Here I quote Donald Frame, who translates this passage when Montaigne quotes it in essay 2.18. The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 504. “Zon dessus l’oeil, zon sur le groin, / Zon sur le dos du Sagoyn” (2:146, lines 211–12).

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this violence pleasurable. Tellingly, Marot-as-Frippelippes situates the scene as something amical and shared, a beating that he had many times relished thinking about in the private domestic circle of a highborn Valois master. Clearly not a personal gesture of revenge, the verbal beating figures as the public realization of an intimate amical fantasy, one which draws him closer to that friend and her ingroup by following through on their shared wish. In Renée’s Kitchen Importantly, it is Renée de France, and not François, who appears as the explicit patron-overseer of these punches. A prominent supporter of the Reform, Renée, Duchess of Ferrara, was cousin to François and Marguerite, and was Marot’s patron-protector during his time in Italy, according him a position as secretary in her household, with an annual salary of 200 livres tournois.28 In the poem, she is invoked as a “good, wise, and benign” presence in whose kitchen Sagon’s beating was anticipated and rehearsed: “O how many times in her kitchen / Your back was wished for / As something we could soundly whip!”29 When the “bang, bang” punches appear later in the poem, they are thus effectively socked out in Renée’s name, with Marot going after Sagon in much the same way he effected earlier “civilizing” gestures for François, lashing out at an upstart robe noble, someone who challenged highborn authority and did not know his own place. That Marot should rebuff such a threat was indeed glorious for François, whose power fundamentally depended on subjects’ acknowledgment of his exclusive Valois blood, which Renée shared. In such a context, Marot could never be wrong in defending the monarch’s Valois cousin, striking down affronts to her standing. Such actions bolster the poet and help rehabilitate forms of leverage lost through disgrace. The most immediate prompt for positioning Renée as a sharer in Marot’s hostility toward Sagon is the latter’s own disrespect toward her in Le Coup d’essay and (Marot implies) in spoken conversation.30 In his attack, Sagon had suggested that if the royal bailiff could get hold of Marot, not even Renée would be able to protect him, thus publicly contesting her authority and giving Marot grounds to correct such upstart behavior. Although Marot partially exculpates Renée by suggesting, in parentheses, that “(perhaps)” she would have pardoned Sagon, the general intent of the passage is to make the imagined beating a shared and savored collective venture. Renée’s kitchen emerges as a warm group space, one in which the lowly servants of the Duchess eat, talk, and plot with Marot/Frippelippes, but 28

 Defaux, Introduction, 1:CXXVIII.  “O quantes foys en sa cuisine / Ton dos a esté souhaitté / Pour y estre bien fouetté!” (2:146, lines 202–4). 30  “Mais certes il [Marot] se deult gramment / De t’ouyr irreveramment / Parler d’une telle Princesse, / Que de Ferrare la Duchesse” (2:146, lines 197–200); see also Defaux’s endnote, 927–8. 29

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in which Renée is also implicitly included. Indeed, the kitchen (“cuisine”) aurally amplifies and extends the warm, cozy qualities that are attributed to Renée herself (“tant bonne, tant sage, & benigne,”) and the poem suggests that if the group can enjoy Sagon’s imagined beating, it is largely because of the protective authority and legitimizing moral wisdom of the Duchess, which helps the antagonists feel just and secure from retribution. In this sense, corrective violence becomes a point of exchange between masters and servants, with subordinates venturing violent service, but also receiving legitimating protection in return. Clearly, this imagined scene of female-hosted violence urges us to reflect on gender roles and how they joined with related forms of power to foster alliance. The social historian Jean-Pierre Gutton has noted the ways in which commissioned violence helped create intense sodalities between masters and servants in premodern households, but his chosen examples seem focused on men. Noting that liveried servants could function not only as bodyguards, but also as attack dogs, Gutton alludes to a machisto culture of male bonding, one in which proffered labors of violence secured favor from social superiors, as attested through violent nicknames (“Breaker,” “Faithless”) which hit-man servants lovingly received.31 What we find in Marot is the suggestion that a powerful, high-born woman might provide this protection just as well as a man, and that in this specific context of Protestant persecution and vulnerability, religious fellowship and political protection might matter more than gender solidarity. While I do not mean to suggest that gender does not matter in friendship more generally, it seems clear that in Marot’s exiled insecurity, he welcomed the idea of a safe, anti-Sagon ingroup, even if its leader needed to be (or be claimed as) a woman. On the other hand, the poem’s emphasis on proxies and its allusion to Marot as someone re-established in the king’s favor effectively evoke the monarch alongside or behind Renée as a desired but less easily mentioned patron of corrective violence. Does Renée then matter to Marot, or is the poet merely mentioning this Valois cousin to more fully ally himself with The Big Man? In other respects, Renée became much more to the poet than a mere royal intermediary, and the verse Marot wrote to her suggests a meaningful human and spiritual bond.32 However, in this specific polemical text, it is worth considering how the Duchess might also stand in for the more prestigious François, who would appear petty and vindictive if cast as an explicit co-attacker of Sagon, yet the idea of whom Marot would have almost certainly liked in such a role. Indeed, given the lively yet insecure feelings Marot conveys throughout his writing, the idea of male bonding through jocular violence seems quintessentially right for his work. Other early modern texts certainly savor this idea. Charles Sorel, for example, in his early seventeenthcentury novel, Francion, helps us imagine how a freer Marot might appear. 31  “Brisetout,” “Sans Fiance.” Domestiques et serviteurs dans la France de l’ancien régime (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1981), 20–21. 32  It is tempting to consider Renée as a woman triangulated between two male friends à la Eve Sedgwick; however, it is important to recognize that Marot entertained no romantic delusions with regard to the Duchess, and that he brokered much of his contact with her through Marguerite de Navarre and not through François.

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When the feisty Francion secures a position as a gentleman servant to a master named Clérante, he explains that: My typical activity was to punish stupidity, to deflate vanities, and to mock the ignorance of men. Men of the law, finance officials, and merchants passed every day through my hands, and you cannot imagine how much pleasure I took in beating blows on [magistrates’] black satin … if [my master] Clérante did something for which I believed he deserved to be corrected, my criticism was so gentle that it did not offend him at all, joined with the fact that this correction was done in private … I also behaved in a way that was not at all disagreeable to him … and anyone other than myself would not have succeeded as I did.33

Sorel’s hero Francion manages to succeed in his new service friendship by uniting himself and his master against a common enemy, the robe noble wearer of black satin magistrates’ clothes. Clérante, the noble master, signals approval of his servant’s aggression through enabling patronage, after which the two move on to enact sabotage in common, embarking on a host of adventures and shared pranks, including crashing a lower-class wedding, sleeping with the bride, and putting laxatives in guests’ food. It is a masculine romp that polices the men’s “gentle” conduct with each other, letting them affirm that they are capable of greater robustness when they choose, and allowing even cash-strapped Francion to feel good about his status.34 While Marot never ventures to correct his master with quite the same verve shown by Francion, and his gestures, even his fantasies, remain hampered by the real-world, circumstantial nature of his writing (i.e., François and Renée were real patrons, not characters in a novel), there is nonetheless a remarkable overlap of sympathies between the two texts, and it is easy to imagine that Marot would have been incomparably thrilled to ride off into the sunset for a lifetime of pranks with his master. Alternatively, to offer a less waggish example, one might turn to Montaigne. The essayist writes of a hypothetical exchange with his valet: [M]y valet could say to me ‘It cost you a hundred crowns twenty times last year to be ignorant and stubborn.’ I give a warm welcome to truth in whatever hand I find it, and cheerfully surrender to it and extend my conquered arms, from as far off as I see it approach. And provided they do not go about it with too imperious and magisterial a frown, I lend a hand to the criticism people make of 33

 “Mon coutumier exercice était de châtier les sottises, de rabaisser les vanités et de me moquer de l’ignorance des hommes. Les gens de justice, de finance et de trafic passaient journellement par mes mains, et vous ne vous sauriez imaginer combien je prenais de plaisir à bailler des coups de bâton sur le satin noir … si [mon maître] Clérante faisait quelque chose dont je croyais qu’il méritât d’être repris, ma censure était si douce qu’elle ne l’offensait aucunement, joint qu’elle ne se faisait qu’en secret … Je m’y comportais aussi d’une façon qui ne lui était point désagréable, et tout autre que moi n’y eût pas réussi de la sorte.” Histoire Comique de Francion, ed. Fausta Garavini (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 298. 34  See Seifert, Manning the Margins, 7.

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my writings, and have often changed them more out of civility than to improve them, loving to gratify and foster my critics’ freedom to admonish me by the ease with which I yield—yes, even at my own expense. However, it is certainly hard to induce the men of my time to do this. They have not the courage to correct because they have not the courage to suffer being corrected, and they always speak with dissimulation in one another’s presence.35

Here, although valet and master are imagined to be turned inward toward each other, rather than outward toward a shared enemy, it is clear that Montaigne presents his valet’s corrective remarks as something which would draw the two men together, creating possibilities for self-knowledge and reciprocity which the essayist has difficulty finding among other (presumably more equal and status-conscious) men. Appearing less anxious than the heroes in Francion, Montaigne genders these acts of correction as a show of masculine “courage,” reminding us that stereotypes about servants’ effeminacy should not restrict the relational and affective possibilities that we perceive to be available to Marot. In Montaigne’s schema, the valet and other frank (but not “imperious”) correctors are understood as anything but effeminate, emerging from combat brave and victorious, whereas the essayist allies himself with images of surrender. Nonetheless, despite this capitulation, Montaigne augments his power in the long run, allowing himself to express a magnanimous civility while also profiting (at times) from the content of the correction. Horst Hutter alights on this idea when he suggests that “in friendship, Self, by renouncing his power over Other, gains it; in enmity, Self, by striving for power over Other, loses it.”36 Despite Montaigne’s apparent self-humbling when he accepts the critique, he does not truly establish an equal status tie. This tendency for hierarchy to endure makes it all the more likely that Marot would have seen his efforts as something acceptable to François. But what of Sagon? If correction so clearly emerges as one of the “chief duties of friendship” in the work of Montaigne, Marot’s near contemporary, with whom is the censorious Frippelippes epistle really seeking alliance?37 Unlike earlier 35

 “mon valet me peut dire: Il vous costa, l’année passée, cent escus, à vingt fois, d’avoir esté ignorant et opiniastre. Je festoye et caresse la verité en quelque main que je la trouve, et m’y rends alaigrement, et luy tends mes armes vaincues, de loing que je la vois approcher. Et, pourveu qu’on n’y procede d’une troigne trop imperieuse et magistrale, je preste l’espaule aux reprehensions que l’on faict en mes escrits; et les ay souvent changez plus par raison de civilité que par raison d’amendement: aymant à gratifier et nourrir la liberté de m’advertir par la facilité de ceder; ouy, à mes despans. Toutefois il est certes malaisé d’y attirer les hommes de mon temps: ils n’ont pas le courage de corriger, par ce qu’ils n’ont pas le courage de souffrir à l’estre, et parlent tousjours avec dissimulation en presence les uns des autres” (3:924). The translation is Frame’s, The Complete Essays, 705. 36  Friendship as Politics: the Origins of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and Practice of Friendship (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), 12. Operating from different assumptions, Hutter generally emphasizes friendship as a bond between equals. 37  “… advertissements et corrections, qui est un des premiers offices d’amitié” (1.28.185; 136).

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works, where Marot does little to develop or acknowledge his resemblance to those whom he corrects, here, rivalry-recognition with the admonished target becomes personal and probing. In addressing Sagon, Marot engages a status equal who was his imitator as much as his antagonist, and toward whom he would have had good reason to feel attracted as well as repulsed.38 With bizarre sincerity, Sagon had borrowed a citation from Marot for the title of his polemic, as well as discernable elements of style.39 Le Coup d’essay, in other contexts, could have been read as a work of poetic homage. In turn, much of what Marot critiques in Sagon brings the two men into parallel courses, aligning their vulnerabilities and prompting them to ever more contact and exchange. Moreover, for Marot to position a social superior like Renée as symbolically “in on” this curious performance implicitly doubles the poem’s latent admiration for Sagon. It acknowledges how worthy he is of interest, how important and illicit he appears as an object of violence, insofar as he ought to deserve better treatment. However, insofar as this illicitness, this inappropriateness, is precisely what is being savored, the poem can hardly be said to signal indulgence. As Daniel Gil has suggested, the rise of humanism and the civilizing process create new perceptions of value for “universal” human subjects, but they also enable the pleasurable, perverse destruction of that value.40 Under intense pressure to secure favor, Marot becomes aware of how much he shares with his rival, yet he cannot or does not find a way to enjoy that awareness on its own terms. Mixing recognition with persecution, the poem signals the overthrow of peer alliance in favor of orchestrated antagonism; the renunciation of lateral solidarity in favor of affirmed and vertical noble power. Tough Love: Friendship amid Correction It is thus an interlocking set of superiors who figure as the beneficiaries of Marot’s corrective friendship. Relishing his masters’ protection, their prestige, and the premise of their company, the poet takes on rivals whom he is able to construct as shared, bolstering François’s authority and that of his royal family through attacks on overweening clergy and robe nobles. However, given Marot’s apparent 38

 The Frippelippes epistle also evokes many of Marot’s poetic colleagues and positions them on his side. In this sense, Marot expresses a desire for lateral as well as hierarchical support. The former made itself concretely, abundantly present throughout the querelle in the form of angry ripostes penned by Marot’s colleagues. 39  For example, Sagon’s bold attacks paired with timidity in offering the king “ce pauvre & petit don” (Le Coup d’essay, 377) seem profoundly derived from Marot. Philippe Desan has noted that rivalry and resemblance go to the heart of the querelle: “[o]n peut en effet avancer avec Georges Guiffrey que, si l’on va un peu plus au fond du débat, on voit d’un côté les valets de chambre du roi et, de l’autre, ceux qui ne le sont pas mais voudraient bien le devenir” (“Le Feuilleton,” 353). 40  Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xi–xii.

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recognition of his similarity to Sagon, one might also ask whether he perhaps felt a paradoxical resentment, anger that the king might allow someone so like his cherished poet to be so easily attacked. To what extent did Marot imply he could be friends with masters who might enjoy his homologue’s beating? The question becomes especially pressing when we recall that Marot was in fact himself beaten, and very much at François’s hands. His religious exile to Italy, which I have kept partly in the background, stemmed from a charge of heresy that could not be expiated without public flogging. While this kind of religious correction differs importantly from the policing of class we have seen until now, both stemmed (in part) from a common project of empowering the monarchy. Marot participated in this empowerment when he lambasted “anti-royal” judges and clerics, but he also became its victim when the ranks of French Protestants became simply too bold, and François felt the need to assert his power over them. Cutting even more deeply than the loss of status brought by exile, the flogging would have made Marot seem even more dubious as a fit object for secure male friendship with a king. Protestants’ vulnerability to seizure and corporeal punishment correlated directly to their status. While Calvinist nobles might be pressured through persuasion or loss of court favor, non-nobles could be jailed, exiled, or burned. A poet who could be stripped and publicly beaten was clearly set apart in a non-elite social group. Following his beating, Marot would have known that he had to make exceptional efforts to rehabilitate himself as a friend. Flogging humbled the poet’s body, set aside his special protection, and reduced him to the status of an ordinary subject being acted upon by the king. Marot’s beating is also tremendously important for our study insofar as we know that the poet was in direct touch with the royal family shortly prior to the event. He received from the king a special “sauf conduit” to help partially smooth his return, but obtained no exemption from the need to publicly abjure.41 Thus, when George Joseph tells us that Marot was whipped in Lyon before the door of the St. Jean Cathedral, stripped down to his undershirt, and made to listen to Psalms 51 (“Miserere mei”) and 67 (“Dominus miseratur”), we can understand this retribution as something carried out with the full knowledge and approval of his friend.42 Clearly, such deeds strain our willingness to even use a term such as friendship. It is hard to grasp the king’s lack of clemency, and even harder to understand how Marot, only a few short months later, could have sallied on in this cycle of violence, lashing out at Sagon with an imagined but still aggressive beating very like the one he so shamefully received. Daniel Gil, to return to his book  “le roi n’épargna pas au poète la cérémonie de l’abjuration” (C.A. Mayer, La Religion de Marot [Geneva: Droz, 1960], 35–7). See also Desan, 358. 42  “The force of the blows was measured according to the gravity of Marot’s offenses” (George Joseph, Clément Marot [Boston, MA: Twayne, 1985], 17–18). The whipping took place sometime between 14 and 31 December 1536. Marot also had to solemnly recant before the Cardinal de Tournon. Contemporaries such as Eustorg de Beaulieu speak of “Marot, qu’a batu / Rigueur, Rage, & Fureur a[i]gue” (cited in Mayer, La Religion, 35). Marot also alludes to the episode himself in “Les Adieux de Marot à la ville de Lyon,” where he speaks of himself as “Le petit chien… / Que devant toy [Lyon] on a batu” (2:132, lines 43–4). 41

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for a moment, suggests that in English Renaissance literature, savored violence against humanized, newly valued individuals figures as something fundamentally “asocial,” an asociability that goes diametrically against the spirit of civility. Is this how we should understand Marot? Do his experiences of civilizing and receiving blows in return ultimately steer him in an asocial direction? On multiple grounds, I would argue the contrary: namely, that the jocular, convivial spirit of the Frippelippes epistle already affirms the poet’s sociable impulse—his ardent desire to restore the royal friendship (and others) which he lost through exile. This impulse is also expressed by further poems which Marot wrote upon his return; in “Le Dieu Gard de Marot à la court,” for example, the poet begins by savoring “this grace/ Of once again seeing my lord’s face.”43 In short, the attacks on Sagon were more than acts of self-defense or cold platitudes defending the nobility. Insofar as these texts labor to defend Marot’s position with respect to the patron who just flogged him, to fight off a rival for a master whom it might be preferable to fear, such poems must have involved sorting through complex emotions, tamping down resentment in order to come across to readers as the valet who could seem to love his companionate master once more. In this respect, Marot’s poetic displays of sparkle and wit are not mere showing off, not pure self-promotion, but a show of strength from Marot as royal poet, the adjunct of the king. Patching over any rifts, and elbowing away an interloper he construes as disrespectful toward the very source of the monarch’s authority, Marot sets personal grudges aside and strengthens Team François. Moreover, one should entertain the possibility that Marot was in certain ways strengthened by amically accepting the beating and becoming an agent of still others like it. Montaigne, whose writings share with Marot’s an acceptance of free-speaking service, offers a distinctive reading of Frippelippes’s punches by suggesting that they are ultimately (or also) self-corrections, blows to Marot as well as to his rival. Quoting Marot’s “bang, bang” verses in a crucial passage of essay 2.18, “Du Démentir,” where he characterizes his own relationship to his book, Montaigne suggests that Marot’s “poetic lashes” are like his own admonishments to himself in the Essais, where he strives to reshape himself through writing: How many times, irritated by some action that civility and reason kept me from reproving openly, have I disgorged it here, not without ideas of instructing the public! And indeed, these poetic lashes— Bang in the eye, bang on the snout, Bang on the back of the apish lout! ~Marot —imprint themselves even better on paper than on living flesh.44 43

 “ceste grace / De veoir encore de mon seigneur la face” (2:133, lines 3–4).  “Quant de fois, estant marry de quelque action que la civilité et la raison me prohiboient de reprendre à descouvert, m’en suis je icy desgorgé, non sans dessein de publique instruction! Et si ces verges poétiques: Zon dessus l’œil, zon sur le groin, / Zon sur le dos du Sagoin! s’impriment encore mieux en papier qu’en la chair vifve” (II.18.665; 504). 44

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Reversing what seems the obvious outward bent of Marot’s polemic, Montaigne helps us perceive how much the attack on Sagon in fact makes sense as selfcorrection, latent self-civilizing that comes as part and parcel of defending the nobility (especially the monarch) when one is oneself still ruled by bourgeois ambition. Decrying Sagon’s unvarnished attempt at social climbing, Marot perhaps recognized that his own efforts were likewise condemnable. In mocking Sagon, he was also perhaps laughing at himself. Ultimately, the poet’s acceptance of correction as something fundamental to/ constituent of friendship invites us to revisit the positive meanings the act could portend. In addition, Marot’s verbal re-enactment of the beating allows him to reclaim much of what he lost in his own victimization. The masculinity that exile and flogging had diminished through loss of status is reasserted through force, a verbalized beating. More specifically, Marot takes on a kind of royal masculinity by repeating the punishment he received, presenting himself as the king’s righteous imitator and proxy. This claim is made partly through a female intermediary. Suggesting that he acts with the approval of the royal cousin Renée, Marot uses (or more properly, ventriloquizes) her legitimation to slide into a deed that mirrors the king’s own and grasps at the aura of its justice. Importantly, the ideology of Christian kingship deems that François must seem clement as well as zealous, and Marot cannot more overtly pursue Sagon in the monarch’s name without making the latter seem small and vindictive. Yet a more obviously clement female Valois, one who had herself been attacked, allows Marot to make this connection quite smoothly, accessing a claim of just punishment, and with it, royal masculinity and status. These maneuvers are dense in their details, but they perhaps offer a model of how gender works in (early modern male) friendship more generally. Shaped importantly by status, secure masculinity is something that Marot seeks by imitating those he admires and by whom he is punished. Such maleness traffics partly in violence, and also in the mobilization of women as go-betweens. Marot who deploys Renée (and in many other contexts, Marguerite de Navarre) to connect himself to François, expresses strength and fitness for prestigious male ties. Lastly, we see that gendered behaviors can move across groups of persons and social ranks through subtly shifting acts of repetition. Marot’s witty paper punches are not the same as the physical flogging authorized by François, nor do the replies of Sagon and his cohort exactly reproduce the “blows” they received, but all share elements in common. While we rarely understand satire as a social claim to masculinity, it seems clear that the Frippelippes epistle functions thus, and that the gestures of a more assertive French state had the potential to extend models of gender across social ranks, as Elias’s own work would lead us to expect. That Marot does recover an acceptable or even “royal” masculinity seems a boon to his friendship. While we do not know how François reacted to the attack on Sagon, he surely would have read it, and his continued patronage and closeness to Marot suggests that he did not find it prohibitive. Marot, in implying within the poem that he, and not Sagon, was fit to “enter the bedchamber of the King” clearly

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anticipated that the monarch would approve of his gesture.45 In this sense, then, the rewritten version of the beating establishes social relations in two directions. First, it connects Marot to François through a kind of homage; second, it seeks (if maliciously) to rehabilitate Sagon, to bring him back into an ordered community of ranks whose distinctions he was overstepping. Distasteful and frightening as it seems, beating is the specific vehicle for the maintenance of this social contact. Given what we have seen concerning civilizing correction as a reinforcement of male friendship, I would suggest we allow friendship and the civilizing process to sit in a complex relationship with each other, without attempting a linear narrative of modernity’s rise and friendship’s decline. In the example of François and Marot, civilizing correction—sometimes from the king, sometimes from his servant; sometimes of the friend, sometimes of outsiders—provides an activity of friendship and an object of exchange. Even before Marot is beaten, his teasing correction of the monarch and the latter’s wayward subjects helps give substance to their bond. While this union never assumes the proportions of Francion’s rollicking pranks with his master, his joyous blows on magistrates’ black satin robes, Marot nonetheless clearly taps the logic of shared class hostility as a grounds for friendly union. In such a model, the objects of exchange do not necessarily involve the body—they are not public caresses, life-sustaining food, or military protection, as in Alan Bray’s choice examples—but they do not allow for great distance, either. Correction implies, if not always physical proximity, at least a servant’s intimate knowledge of the master’s behavior, and the goings-on of his body politic. Proffered information and guidance about these things become a kind of gift, and one that seems to run with, rather than against, the grain of modernity. Ultimately, my wish to see compatibility between close friendship and civility fits the overall thrust of Bray’s The Friend insofar as that study insists on a vast temporal scope. The Friend argues that Enlightenment values of civil society that discouraged particular patronage and the kinds of exclusivity seen in early modern ties, may have nonetheless changed primarily the visibility of such bonds, leaving their substance still surprisingly intact even into the nineteenth century. This possibility depends, for Bray, on the persistence of a heterogeneous culture—pockets of “traditional religion” that push some moderns to live differently and contest the Enlightenment ideal. Heterogeneity would be equally important to the hypothetical endurance of ties resembling Marot’s. With no one out of line or at odds with the state, there would be no one to correct and no pretext for friendship. It is in a homogeneous culture that friendship would become the most impossible and strange.

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 Frippelippes epistle (2:141, line 52).

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Chapter 4

Redressing Ficino, Redeeming Desire: Symphorien Champier’s La nef des dames vertueuses Todd W. Reeser

Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies (La nef des dames vertueuses) (1503) is generally considered one of the earliest contributions to the pro-woman side of the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes. Rejecting the Aristotelian model of gender in which the female body is naturally inferior to the male body, Champier views men and women as complementary, blames men for many of society’s evils, and provides innumerable “praises” of women’s deeds and virtues from history and literature. Negative constructs of women, Champier explains in Book 1, result from men’s attempts to essentialize them based on a few isolated cases of bad women; he chides the misogynist reader that for every sin committed by a woman, “you will find a thousand committed by men.”1 Constance Jordan describes the thrust of the tract thus: “legally woman is man’s equal in most respects.”2 Republished in 1515 and 1531, the highly successful text attracted the attention of women, including Marguerite de Terrail, a noblewoman who requested his hand in marriage.3 The work of the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino strongly inflects Book 4 of La nef, which imports Ficinian Neoplatonism to France and to the French language and sets the stage for later representations of male-female love in which corporeal beauty leads to the higher forms.4 At times privileging  “tu en trouveras mille commis par hommes” (Symphorien Champier, La nef des dames vertueuses, ed. Judy Kem (Paris: Champion, 2007), 59. Further references to this text will be taken from this modern edition. As there is no published English translation of this text, all translations from this text are my own. All other translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2  Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 102. For another general introduction to the text, see chap. 6 in James B. Wadsworth, Lyons 1473–1503: The Beginnings of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1962). 3  See M.P. Allut, Etude biographique et bibliographique sur Symphorien Champier (Lyon: Nicolas Scheuring, 1859), 16. For an overview of Champier’s life, see Judy Kem, “Symphorien Champier,” in Sixteenth-Century French Writers, ed. Megan Conway, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 327 (Detroit, MI: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2006), 98–104. 4  There were, of course, earlier direct relations between Ficino and French thinkers, including Jean and Germain de Gonay. See André-Jean Festugière, La philosophie de 1

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the sexless soul over the sexed body, Champier buttresses his arguments about the equality of women and men made in Books 1 and 2, and sidesteps the question of gender inferiority/superiority altogether. In these ways, as Edouard Meylan notes about the text in an important article on French Renaissance Neoplatonism, “the link between Platonism and feminism is already noticeable.”5 As a consequence of his adaptation of Ficinian thought to pro-woman ends in Book 4 of his text, Champier faced an unavoidable and major problem: Ficino’s philosophy pertained almost entirely to male-male love and relationships.6 Champier sought to dispel the potentially homoerotic aspects of male-male love in his predecessor. Ficino expelled the physicality of male-male Platonic love from his philosophical system in the influential Commentarium in Convivium Platonis, De Amore (Commentary on Plato’s “Symposium” on Love) (1484) and Champier, following this cue, presented the Florentine as already cleansed of samesex sexuality. Still, Ficino’s philosophical system was largely based on male-male amor in which the line between chaste love and physical desire or eros remained a fluid one. The beauty of the male body could become erotic at any time. It is perhaps because of this instability that Champier asks at the end of his tract to be l’amour de Marsile Ficin et son influence sur la littérature française au XVIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1941), 63–4. But Champier, more than these thinkers, was responsible for popularizing Ficino in France and in French. As Festugière writes: “l’influence de Marsile Ficin dépassa bientôt ce cercle restreint d’hommes d’études: grâce à l’un d’eux elle allait pénétrer la société et la ravir” (64). Wadsworth calls the text “the first vernacular manifestation … of Ficinian Neoplatonism in France” (Lyons, 160). 5  “le rapprochement entre le platonisme et le féminisme y est déjà marqué” (Edouard F. Meyland, “L’Evolution de la notion d’amour platonique,” Humanisme et Renaissance 5 [1938]: 437). See also Giovanni Tracconaglia, Femminismo e platonismo in un libro raro del 1503: La nef des dames di Symphorien Champier (Lodi: Dell’Avo, 1922). 6  For a direct comparison of passages from the two thinkers, see Festugière, Philosophie, 67–73. See also Isidore Silver, “Plato and Ficino in the work of Symphorien Champier,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 55 (1993): 271–80. On Ficino and questions of same-sex male sexuality, see, for instance, Giovanni Dall’Orto, “‘Socratic Love’ as a Disguise for Same-Sex Love in the Italian Renaissance,” The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1989), 33–65; Sergius Kodera, “Renaissance Readings of the Myth of Aristophanes,” Quaderni d’italianistica 26, no. 1 (2005): 21–58; Armando Maggi, “On Kissing and Sighing: Renaissance Homoerotic Love from Ficino’s De Amore and Sopra Lo Amore to Cesare Trevisani’s L’impresa (1569),” Journal of Homosexuality 49, no. 3 (2005): 315–39; Marc D. Schachter, “Louis Le Roy’s Sympose de Platon and Three Other Renaissance Adaptations of Platonic Eros,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 406–39; Laura Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 161–3; chap. 3 in Katherine Crawford, The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the sexual context, see also André Chastel, “Eros Socraticus,” Art et Humanisme à Florence au Temps de Laurent le Magnifique (Paris: PUF, 1959), 289–98. My forthcoming book Setting Plato Straight treats the question of sexuality and Ficinian love at length.

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excused “if [he has] written anything in this book that is not Catholic.”7 For the most part, Champier avoids entering into the topic, not commenting directly on the homoerotics of Ficino or the Platonic tradition. He needs to retroactively fabricate what might anachronistically be termed a “heterosexual” Neoplatonism to employ it as a theoretical apparatus in support of women. Throughout the entirety of his tract, Champier assumes a consistent marriage-based form of heterosexuality to make his nature-centered arguments about male-female equality and to avoid classical topoi of male-male relations as inherently superior to those between men and women. Beyond the question of whether or not Champier successfully translates Ficinian affection or eroticism into something resembling heterosexuality lies a more vexed problem: love between men makes a conspicuous appearance in Book 4. While this section of the text purports to teach men and women how to love each other virtuously, providing copious advice and two stories exemplifying perfect love, Champier also includes a lengthy story illustrating “the power of one man’s love for another.”8 Based on Filippo Beroaldo the Elder’s Latin translation of story 10.8 from Boccaccio’s Decameron, this story recounts the adventures of Gisippus and Titus who are students together and “loved each other like brothers,”9 but are then divided and ultimately reunited at the end of the story. Commentary following the story evokes Plato’s Symposium by name, with the conclusion that “every man should love according to the presence of beauty.”10 The story and its classically Neoplatonic moral appear as strange aberrations within the overall context of the book, which aims to create male-female love and equality out of Ficinian love and desire. What I would like to do here, then, is to examine the function of this seeming gender contradiction. Champier evokes male-male love in a tract so pro-woman in orientation, I will suggest, as a kind of compromise position in which Ficinian love cannot be entirely disbanded but must be rendered as a form of brother-like love. Because Book 4 of Champier’s text is largely composed of a translation or a close reading of Ficino, what ultimately interests me, however, is his hermeneutic approach to the Platonic tradition. Champier obviously misappropriates Ficino when he disbands male-male love as the central type of affection and textually pairs male-male and female-male relations. I will first discuss how the story of malemale love demonstrates a specific approach to gender and sexuality in which gender relations are balanced and the potential for Neoplatonic homoerotics contained. Revamping homoerotics and marrying male-male and male-female love are two sides of the same coin that reinvents previous Neoplatonic gender constructs for a French-speaking audience. Then, I will turn to a very different story, a deeply moralistic narrative about female virtue that in my reading comments on how Champier has reread Ficino. If a female character corrects male-male love in the first story, in the second, a female figure named Lucilia provides Champier license to allegorize his suppression of male sexuality. With this coded cross-dressing, the text can function for two types of interpretive communities: learned readers in the 7

 “se aulcune chose ay escript en ce present livre qui ne soit catholique” (70).  “la vertu d’amour de l’homme à l’homme” (243). 9  “s’aymarent comme freres” (243). 10  “tout homme doit autant aimer comme il y a de beaulté” (246). 8

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know about Plato and Neoplatonism, and unschooled readers, for some of whom male sexuality may not be relevant in a pro-woman tract. My reading of Champier is prompted by an interest in the early modern reception of Plato and Platonism in France and Western Europe more broadly. La nef is a pivotal discursive moment in the movement of Platonism from Florence to France, as Ficinian Neoplatonism makes it way to Lyons via Champier.11 It is more specifically, as Katherine Crawford has discussed, crucial in the transmission of Platonic notions of gender and sexuality to France: Renaissance French texts tend to heterosexualize Plato’s erotic dialogues (especially the Symposium, Phaedrus, and the Lysis), that is to take them as pertaining to male-female love.12 In avoiding male-male homoerotics and creating male-female love, Champier sets the stage for later French writers’ appropriations of Neoplatonism. As an intellectual turning point in the period, Champier’s hermeneutic lens around gender leaves its mark not only on La nef, but also on the rest of sixteenth-century France. Titus, Gisippus, and their Sanitizing Sisters: Stories of Male-Male Love It is clear from the outset of the tale that the male-male love is not erotic, nor is it even coded as a chaste Ficinian form of love. First, the text predicates male-male love neither on beauty nor on the body, rejecting a major premise of Ficinian amor. A certain Roman father named Publius Quintus Fulvius had: a son with such a good mind and such sharp [beaulx] intelligence that he sent the youth to Athens to study philosophy and left him in the care of his friend named Chremes, who happily took him in. Along with his own son Gisippus, he sent the boy to a philosopher named Aristippus, who at that time was well known throughout Athens. The two youths loved each other like brothers and together performed equally well in all the same subjects. For three years they performed so well that the good Chremes was extremely pleased with their progress, desiring to see both of them move forward in their studies. Then, the poor man died and the boys mourned his death as if he had been father to both of them.13 11  According to Richard Cooper, however, Champier’s first trip to Italy was in 1506. See Richard Cooper, “Symphorien Champier e l’Italia,” in L’Aube de la Renaissance, ed. D. Cecchetti, L. Sozzi, and L. Terreaux (Geneva: Slatkine, 1991), 234. Champier’s first published work, Janua logicae et phisicae (1498) already shows a strong interest in Ficino. 12  According to Crawford, “[t]he emphasis on questions around desire used to undermine Neoplatonic homoerotics seeped intractably into presumptive heterosexuality” (Sexual Culture, 112). Her discussion also emphasizes the inability to remove “the queer presumptions that went into making it default to the heteronormal” (112). My reading of Champier in some ways extends Crawford’s briefer discussion, which is part of a study of a much larger textual trajectory in the Renaissance. 13  “ung filz d’ung moult bon esperit et beaulx entendement qu’il envoya en sa jeunesse à athenes estudier en philosophie et le recommanda forment à ung sien amy nommé chremès lequel il receut chez luy voulentiers et avec ung sien filz nommé gisippus et le bailla à ung philosophe nommé aristipus que en ce temps avoit grand bruit à athenes. Ces deux

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The Ficinian idea of the beautiful outside that inspires love appears here only in the expression “d’ung moult bon esperit et beaulx entendement” (literally, of a very good mind and beautiful intelligence). It is significant that his intelligence (“entendement”), not his body, is beautiful. Man’s intelligence helps him rise upwards toward God away from the body and the physical world, but here the body is assumed to be left behind already. In the introductory paragraph for Book 4, man’s understanding “must be directed upward to God, as the eye tends toward sunlight, and must both love and fear Him.”14 In the following paragraphs, ideal love is cast as “desire for beauty and decency,” and Champier remarks that beauty of the soul “is recognized by intelligence.”15 Consequently, the as-yet unnamed boy’s beautiful entendement in the story suggests that he is some mix of a male able to see the soul’s beauty inclined to God, and a male able to be desired for his own beauty, in this case not of body but of mind. Within the Neoplatonic schema, he falls in an indeterminate category, as both viewer of beauty and worthy of being admired as beautiful. In both cases, his “beaulx entendement” permits him to bypass any beauty of the male body in the first place and sidestep Ficinian notions of male beauty. This type of beauty is Champier’s own addition to the text: Filippo Beroaldo’s Latin version, upon which this French version is based, describes him as “gifted with a unique genius.”16 For Champier, some idea of beauty is necessary to permit the Ficinian scheme to begin to function properly, even though any possibility that the beauty of the male body inspire him to higher things is absent as there is no subject or object of the gaze. The lack of subject/object distinction between the two boys may explain why they resemble each other so closely: they manifest fraternal love (“s’aymarent comme frères”) and performed equally well in their studies (“ensemble prenoyent mesmes degretz et esgaulz”). With the boys coded as familial and thus in theory outside the realm of erotic desire, a version of the incest taboo disturbs any chance that the two boys studying in Athens under the philosopher Aristippus, known for his doctrine of pleasure, be coded as erotic juvenceaulx s’aymarent comme freres et ensemble prenoyent mesmes degretz et esgaulz et environ troys ans estudiarent si bien que le bon homme chremès y prenoit merveilleusement plaisir ayant autant de vouloir à l’ung que à l’autre puis mourut le bon homme et esgalement firent le deul ainsi que s’il eust esté pere à tous deux” (243). 14  “doit estre … incliné à dieu comme l’oeul est enclin à la lumiere du soleil et doit en luy avoir toute amour et crainte” (235). Champier’s entendement is a translation of Ficino’s mens, which God creates first before soul (anima) and body (materia). Ficino writes: “mens ad deum, quo ad lumen solis dirigitur oculus” or “intelligence is directed upward toward God as the eye is directed toward the sun” (Marsilio Ficino, Commentaire sur Le Banquet de Platon, De l’amour, trans. and ed. Pierre Laurens [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002], 13). All Latin passages from this text are from this edition. I have, however, consulted Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1985). 15  “desir de chose belle et honneste” (236); “se congnoist par l’entendement” (236). 16  “singulari ingenio preditum” (Philippo Beroaldo, Orationes Multifariae a Philippo Beroaldo [Bologna, 1500], 1r).

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or pederastic.17 With Titus’s father functioning as their joint father who took equal “pleasure” in seeing both of them perform well in their studies, paternal pleasure for the non-pederastic education of his two boys channels any potential eroticism through the medium of the (male) body. Because they function as brother-like, they follow the same cursus, as mutual love has the effect of spurring each of them on to a better education instead of to erotic love on the Neoplatonic ladder. To continue containing any potential anxiety of male-male love in this context, an object of desire incarnating female corporeal beauty enters the scene. Gisippus’s parents urge him to marry and “found him a very beautiful girl, an Athenian citizen of noble birth and great beauty, whom he consented to marry.”18 While the repetition of her beauty insists on the trait, what is lacking here, however, is her name. In Beroaldo’s Latin translation, we learn her name at this point in the narrative—Sophronia.19 Beroaldo presents her as “a girl who was a Greek citizen, striking in her amazing beauty,”20 the phrase that Champier renders as “beautiful” twice over. When Titus goes with his friend Gisippus to see Sophronia, her beauty overcomes him repetitively: “after he had seen the beauty of this girl and her sweet appearance, he was inflamed with such love that he burned because of her beauty.”21 At home, “once alone, he started to think about the beauty of the girl.”22 So often repeated as to become an empty signifier, Sophronia’s beauty—more than her femaleness per se—keeps any Ficinian male beauty and male desire for the male body out of the picture. The fear of one incest-like desire replaces another, as Titus’s attraction for Sophronia overwhelms the possibility of attraction between the two brother-like friends. As he worries about his desire and his relation with his friend, he comments that “he deserved death more than life when he was so taken by love of his friend’s soon-to-be wife, whom he should not desire any more than his own sister.”23 Titus’s desire for Sophronia transfers desire for his friend onto a suitable object, but it also expresses the queerness of this love. If the incest taboo creates the need for the love triangle in the first place, the expression of incest here exposes the impossible desire for incest between the two “brothers,” or more precisely, exposes the need to transfer that desire outside the family of brothers. This relationship functions as a classic triangle,  On Aristippus, see Erich Mannebach, ed., Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum fragmenta (Leiden: Brill, 1961). 18  “luy trouverent une moult belle fille, citoyenne d’athenes de grand lignée et merveilleuse beaulté où il se consentit” (243). 19  “Cui Sophroniae nomen erat” (Beroaldo, Orationes, 1r). 20  “puellam … civem atticam incredibili formositate conspicuam” (Beroaldo, Orationes, 1r). 21  “après qu’il eut contemplé la beaulté de ceste fille et le doulx maintien en fut enflammé de si grand amour qu’il brusloit de la beaulté de ceste fille” (243). 22  “commença à pencer tout seul à la beaulté de ceste fille” (243). 23  “la mort luy estoit bien plus meritée et condigne que la vie quant il estoit ainsi eprins de l’amour de la femme de son amy. Laquelle il ne devoit point plus desirer que sa seur” (244). 17

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with the unnamed woman serving as an object of desire that mediates desire between the two males. The text most clearly articulates the exchange of woman in a framework of stable male homosociality when Gisippus disparages women to his friend whom he fears losing: “Gisippus told him that he loved his friend’s life more than anyone else’s, and that he preferred to lose his wife rather than his friend, since it is easy to find another wife, but not another friend.”24 Thus, the men hatch a plan by which Gisippus will be replaced by Titus in his bedroom with the lights out, and will then ask Sophronia to marry him: “After having brought her home like a wife, with the intention to bed her, he turned down the light and found his friend Titus, who was nearby in his bed, and had him get up and go to bed in his place with his future wife Sophronia.”25 The woman/wife (femme) takes on a name only at this point in the translated text, later than in the original Latin, once she has served the purpose of creating the homosocial love triangle that can subsequently function without disturbance. Her name, meaning “self-control” in Greek, is evoked via the sexual act within the context of an unofficial marriage vow, but it is ultimately a sexual act that balances male-male love and male-female sexuality and that allows the men to maintain their self-control vis-à-vis relations of love and desire. In essence, there can be three named characters in the story only after marriage and sex stabilize all the sexed relations of love and desire. The two acts (sex and naming) are in a sense a double marriage as two previously separate couples join into a single, viable gender system. After the threesome overcomes a series of other obstacles separating them, the men end up living together in homosocial-heterosexual harmony. The last sentence gestures toward this merging of types of relationships through its potential ambiguity: “Then Titus praised his friend and gave him his sister for a wife. And the two of them remained together, living in the greatest love that they ever had.”26 The two men maintain their brotherly similarity to each other—and create more similarity—by their betrothal to each other’s sister, whether actual or metaphorical. But the conclusion of the story, which had been so precise about who is who, opens up a space for relationship ambiguity: the subject of the verb “remained” (demourarent) is not fully clear, as “the two of them” (tous deux) who live together suggests various possibilities. Who is living together in “amour”? Is it two couples or two people? Is it Titus and his wife? Gisippus and his wife? Titus and Gisippus? Or is it a question of two relations, or more generally, two types of relations? Interestingly, Beroaldo’s Latin original names the subjects and dispels any ambiguity about who is who: it is the two men who, grammatically speaking, 24

 “gisipus luy monstra qu’il aimoit mieulx sa vie que tout le monde et qu’il aimoit mieulx perdre sa femme que son amy, car facillement on peult trouver une aultre femme mais non point ung amy” (244). 25  “Puis l’avoir amenée en sa maison comme sa femme ainsi que l’on l’eut menée coucher il amortist toutes les lumieres et vint à son amy titus en son lit qu’estoit près du sien et le fit lever et aller coucher en son lieu avec sa femme sophronia” (244). 26  “Puis Titus fit feste à son compaignon et luy donna sa seur pour femme. Et demourarent tous deux ensemble vivans en plus grand amour qu’il n’avoyent jamais” (246).

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lived together: “he with Fulvia and Titus with Sophronia lived in the same home from day to day very happily for a very long time,” after which “mutual goodwill grows among them more and more.”27 Only then does he give his sister in marriage. Champier, on the other hand, retranslates the given man “with” (cum) a given woman to balance not the two named couples, but a mixed notion of male-male and female-male love. Yet again, the woman is not named, as she is in Beroaldo (Fulvia), because here she serves as a necessary object of exchange to create the final balance of the couples, and to correct any potential same-sex problems that womanless love might produce. The story’s sexual harmony eclipses the original text’s focus on citizenship and class. It is central to the story that Gisippus, because he loves his friend, agrees to become Roman. When the two friends are reunited in Beroaldo, before anything else Titus establishes common ownership of his wealth and possessions and gives his younger sister Fulvia as his bride so that his friend can become a Roman citizen.28 In Champier’s case, the sister does not just balance gender and correct potential same-sex problems; she also serves as unnamed economic object to make the men similar in terms of class and citizenship. The tale illustrates how male-male and male-female relations are complementary and together create economic fertility, not how one man can change economic status. They can all live together in such great love, as they never did before, because all of them have more wealth than ever in their relationship harmony. The paragraph following the tale, which functions as a textual commentary, likewise creates male-male plus male-female love as the ideal form of love. Though the story is not particularly Platonic in nature (it comes from Boccaccio after all), Champier returns back to Plato to comment on the role of body and soul in love: “Because love is a divine thing and all the ancient theologians praised it so much, we will provide some lessons from Plato in his book on love called The Symposium, which explains how every man should love in relation to the amount of beauty present.”29 Champier, seemingly citing Plato, instead cites Ficino’s three categories of love/beauty.30 When the body is beautiful and the soul is not, “we should love [the body] very little, as the shadow and image of beauty.”31 When the soul alone is beautiful, “one should love [the soul] passionately and firmly.”32 And when body and soul are both beautiful “we should love them perfectly, and this heavenly love 27  “ipse cum Fulvia; Titus cum Sophronia in eadem domo iucundissime diutissimeque vixerunt indies; magis ac magis gliscente inter ipsos mutua benevolentia; in matrimonium collocat” (Beroaldo, Orationes, k1v). 28  “omnes suos thesauros prediaque” (Beroaldo, Orationes, k1v). 29  “Pource que amour est une chose divine et que tous les theologiens antiques l’ont tant loué dirons aulcuns enseignemens selon platon en son livre d’amour nommé symposion disant que tout homme doit autant aimer comme il y a de beaulté” (246). 30  Ficino, Commentary, 42–3; Commentaire, 19, 21. 31  “nous le [le corps] devons aimer comme l’ombre et ymage de beaulté et legierement” (246). 32  “on la doit aimer et ardamment et fermement” (246).

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[we should love] passionately and firmly as something perfect in all ways.”33 The first category (beautiful body, not soul) pertains to Titus’s desire for Sophronia, whom the text repeatedly equates with beauty. This image of her beauty should, in the Neoplatonic scheme, lead to her soul (which should then lead to God). But because Sophronia remains on the level of beauty, antithetical to soul, pure image, the men are right, according to this commentary, to love her very little (legierement), even as her corporeal presence is necessary for two higher forms of love. The second category of the commentary—beautiful soul, not beautiful body—corresponds loosely to the relation between the two men. Because Champier is taking these categories directly from Ficino, the possibility that two men experience the beauty of the other man’s body is a distinct one (in Ficino it is normal in fact). But in this story, there is no reference to the beauty of the bodies of the men, the only references to the two friends’ beauty being to “understanding.” Champier’s text marks an important split between male desire for the male body and male desire for the female body. Evoking the Symposium by name here disassociates desire for the body from homoerotic love. It is not so much that the man does not gaze on the beauty of the man, however, as much as that the man does not have to. For he has an “intelligence” already beyond the realm of any image with another man. Whether the body is beautiful or not is not really relevant, then, as male-male love can be assumed to be beyond corporeality. Man does not have to gaze on man, as he does in Ficino, to ascend upwards. What, then, of the third perfect category (beauty of body and of soul)? Clearly, neither of the two relations in the tale fits this category. The male-female relations are not soulful, and the male-male relation is not corporeal. When Champier talks about “heavenly love … perfect in all ways” (pars), in my view he is talking about the combination of the two types of love, about perfect love as a combination of male-male and male-female love. The foursome living together in the greatest love allegorizes the perfect love of the commentary. In this sense, male desire for woman stands in for the body and male-male love for soul, while stable and perfect love is the mixture or the balance of the “parts” of these brands of homosociality and heterosexuality. In a larger sense, Champier is carving out an idealized balance model of gender and desire by which male-male and male-female love can and do simultaneously coexist—a new approach to sexed love absent from the Ficinian tradition which focused on expunging or purging the “contagion” of physical love from the Neoplatonic system of love. By citing Plato through Ficino, the configuration of gendered relationships responds to the anxieties related to malemale love and desire by allowing for male-male “love” as part of a larger model of gender relations. To include this love in a larger relationship schema is to sidestep the charge of excessive hermeneutic anachronism around the Neoplatonic philosophical system while at the same time avoiding male-male sexuality per se. By allowing men loving men to be part of perfect love, Champier is not being untrue to previous strands of Neoplatonism, even as he changes what male-male love means. But also, 33  “devons aimer parfaitement et de souvraine amour ardant et estable comme chose parfaite de toutes pars” (246).

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by including male love for women in ideal love’s definition, he avoids talking about sodomy or same-sex love at all, leaving it as an Italian problem and not importing it into his French Neoplatonic text. If Ficino purges sodomitical acts from Plato, Champier purges the very problem of sodomy from his text by mixing the sexes together. Through this story, Ficinian Neoplatonism enters early sixteenth-century France as partially true to the sex of its founding fathers while at the same time cleansed of the sexual problems with Plato that so plagued Ficino. Lucilia, or the Trouble with Texts Although Champier does not confront the problem of male-male sexual acts and eros head-on in La nef des dames vertueuses, textual remarks about expelling desire and physical love in a general sense could nonetheless reassure a potentially concerned reader that the text has solved the problem implicitly. The recurring allusions to sex and desire are thus unclear in terms of object choice, though Champier lifts many directly from Ficino: All of Greek, Roman, and Divine law indicates to men that they should avoid vice and shameful things, and follow decency, and since the beginning of the world, nothing else is indicated by laws except to follow virtue and flee vice.34 love moves in a direction opposite from sexual desire, which explains why erotic desire for the flesh cannot be called love.35 the term love should not be used for sensual pleasure, lust, or the sexual act.36

Despite Champier’s presumption of male-female love since the Creation (le commencement du monde), the laws in the first citation necessarily include Plato’s Laws, which explicitly condemn same-sex love.37 Champier later takes a hermeneutic approach that makes Plato say in Christian terms what he does not say about sexuality: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, and other philosophers said that love of the flesh is a kind of rage or madness which takes over false lovers night and 34  “Toute loix grecques et rommaines et divines ne demonstrent aux hommes fors que on evite les vices et choses deshonnestes et qu’on ensuive choses honnestes et depuis le commencement du monde non aultre chose monstre les loix sinon de ensuivir les vertus et fuyr les vices” (235). 35  “les mouvements de amour et de l’appetit charnel sont contraires pourquoy cest appetit charnel et venerée ne se peult dire amour” (236). 36  “[amour] ne se doit attribuer à volupté, lasciveté et operation venerée” (237). 37  See K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 15–67; Nick Pappas, “Was Plato Antigay?” The Gay and Lesbian Review (Sept.–Oct. 2002), 23–5. Champier cites Plato’s Laws in Book 2 on the “gouvernement de mariage.” See also Festugière, Philosophie, 66–7.

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day, and as long as bile burns within them, it leads them to hell … and Lysias, Thebanus, and Socrates in the Phaedrus explain the problems with this kind of love.38

Whereas Ficino had rejected male-male sexual acts, Champier groups all sexual acts—whatever their corporeal configuration—into a single, vague category that must be avoided (ceste amour). Should any reader care to wonder about male-male love, he or she can rest assured that any carnal concupiscence is to be rejected. Champier’s vagueness about object choice does not preclude the possibility of erotic ambiguity. Rather, at times, it tacitly acknowledges such ambiguity. In a letter that he wrote to his friend André Briau, Champier evokes Plato’s Symposium by name in a story of affectionate and reciprocal male-male love neither vicious nor sensual. He conjures a fantasy of amorous reciprocation as he imagines Cupid shooting his friend with an arrow.39 The love is never directly described as non-erotic, nor does he explain that Platonic love in the erotic dialogue is of a certain sexed genre. At one point in the letter, he writes, “the Platonic Academy never stops inciting us to love” (the “us” being doctors).40 But again, love is not explicitly coded as asexual or beyond erotic desire, and although Plato’s text is the reference cited, Champier does not discuss the way in which gender and object choice are being read.41 Champier’s approach to same-sex eroticism is somewhat more direct, though still ambiguous, in his Literarum humaniorum apologia (1516), which includes an apology for Plato in a chapter “De moribus Platonis quid senserint auctores christiani” (What Christian Authors Observed about the Customs of Plato).42 He begins by responding to Plato’s “adversaries” (aduersarii) who have attacked and slandered him: “Plato’s adversaries fault Plato above all for sensual pleasure, as well as for magic.”43 These detractors decry Plato as “intemperate” and “prone to obscene arts” and attack his custom/practice (mos).44 Champier defends Plato’s sensual pleasure (voluptas), and together with Platonic Christian thinkers purports 38

 “Socrates, platon, aristote, dyogenes et aultres philosophes ont dit que amour et concupiscence charnelle est une espece de anragment et fureur par laquelle les faulx amans nuit et jour sont en sollicitude et tant que la colere brusle les conduisans jusques au feu … et de ce lisias, thebanus et socrates in phedro demonstrent les inconveniens de ceste amour” (248). 39  In Champier, La nef, 222. For an English translation of the letter, see Champier, Le livre de vraye amour, ed. James B. Wadsworth (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1962), 47–50. 40  “In amorem … nos hortari non cessat achademia platonica” (224). 41  For more on the letter, see Wadsworth, Lyons, 156–60; Crawford, Sexual Culture, 117–18. 42  Published in Symphonia Platonis cum Aristotele: & Galeni cum Hippocrate D. Symphoriani Champerij (Paris: Josse Bade, 1516). I have slightly modified Latin quotes in which a “j” represents an “i.” 43  “aduersarii Platonis voluptatem imprimis & magiam Platoni obijciunt” (Symphonia, 155v). 44  “incontinentem … obscoenis deditum artibus … mos” (Symphonia, 155v).

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to “explain the life and practices of Plato through the works of Christians.”45 Adopting the approach of Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose, Champier assumes that Plato reveals the primacy of the soul over the contagion of the body. Yet while he focuses on Plato’s “mos” and “voluptas”—both terms commonly linked to same-sex sexuality in Ficino—and aims to show their correspondence to Catholic mores, he does not deny the same-sex desire in Plato, nor does he address on what basis Plato can be reread as fully anti-body.46 Consequently, Champier leaves it open as to whether the customs in question pertain to same-sex sexuality. On the one hand, he anachronistically rewrites sexuality; on the other hand there is enough room for maneuver that the Greek text can accommodate same-sex love. The remarks in La nef des dames vertueuses celebrating the chastity of ideal desire culminate in a story taken from one of Ficino’s letters about a girl named Lucilia. Appearing as a simple moralistic narrative, through the story Champier allegorizes sexual signification, commenting on both sexuality and his hermeneutic approach that rejects same-sex sexuality.47 The daughter of Phebus and Venus, Lucilia followed the orders of her father not to leave his side so as to avoid falling “into various illnesses.”48 But when the beginning of April came along, the beautiful Lucilia “began to stray from her father and little by little went out onto fields by meadows and streams” where she got caught up in the springtime flora and “consumed fruits like sweet apples, pears, cherries, plums, and other sweet fruits.”49 Her appetite turns from fruit to sex: “she forgets her father and goes away to villages and cities where she takes pleasure in the local youths.”50 As spring turns to hot summer, the flora and fruits wither; snakes and insects bite her. Falling ill, Lucilia returns to her father to ask forgiveness, which he grants. The stated moral of this story is to encourage “women to leave behind sensual pleasure and lascivious ornaments that are beautiful on the outside but under the shadow of beauty, hide eternal pain.”51 Modeled by Lucilia, these sensual pleasures (voluptés) 45

 “Platonisque vitam & mores ex operibus christianorum ostendamus” (Symphonia, 155v). 46  See also similar chapters on love in Champier, De triplici disciplina (Lyon: [n.pr.], 1508), in a section on Platonic philosophy, titled “De turpi amore apud Platonem.” Champier cites Plato with no reference to the problem in La nef des princes et des batailles de noblesse (Lyon: Guillaume Balsarin, 1502). See 23v; 44r; 6v. Socrates is also cited as an example of paternal love (66v). 47  For the text of Ficino’s letter that Champier adapts, see vol. 6 of The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1999), 21–2. For the Latin text, see Opera Omnia, vol. 1 (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), 848–9. 48  “en plusieurs maladies” (249). 49  “commença à soy eslongnier de son pere et de peu à peu alla sus les champs par prés et ruisseaulx” (249); “mengea les fruitz comme pommes doulces poyres cerises prunes et aultres doulx fruitaiges” (249). 50  “oubliant son pere et s’en allant par les cités et villes prenant ses plaisances avec ses juvenceaulx” (249). 51  “les dames à delaisser les voluptés et ornemens lascives qui sont beaulx par dehors et soubz ombre de beaulté est douleur eternelle” (250).

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include “shameful things” (choses deshonnestes) and her “erotic desire for the flesh” (appetit charnel et venerée), which she failed to control. If the overt moral of the story pertains to correcting adolescent girls’ (and by extension women’s) sexual excesses, on another level the story’s semantics suggests questions of sexual signification. The prodigal daughter personifies the unfaithful or loose same-sex elements of the Platonic textual tradition that Champier has reworked. When Lucila comes to her father to ask for forgiveness and help, she emphasizes her status as his work: “Oh father, have pity and forgive the girl that you brought into the world and without you will go to hell. You are the one who gives life and light to others. Please have pity, then, on your own work.”52 Textuality is also at play in the story when Champier first introduces Lucilia’s father Phebus as “the light of human life and author of life-giving medicine.”53 With Lucilia as the “work” of the paternal “author,” it is fitting that signs tagged as signs reveal her sickness: “she became very tired and fever began to overtake her, along with an intense thirst and upset stomach and hiccups accompanied by severe chest pain and difficulty breathing and a bad cough, which are signs of death.”54 These signs of bad conduct lead her to seek a cure from her father, the “author of life-giving medicine.” Her father teaches her to treat her sexual desire and acts as abstract and removable signs: “you must leave behind these lascivious and worldly clothes full of sensual pleasures. Oh, my girl, you need to know that under even a small bit of honey and sweetness lies a much larger amount of bitterness.”55 It may seem odd that the father advises his daughter to leave behind her clothing, since the issue is that she has left it behind too often. This recommendation makes more sense, however, if we consider that the “lascivious and worldly clothes” refer not to clothing, but rather suggest a misleading signifier without a signified. Lucilia should remove the signs of her promiscuity, represented as “text”iles. In this sense, she serves as a kind of “work,” as she describes herself, whose signs are beautiful on the outside but problematic on the inside. According to Champier’s moralistic description of the story, Lucilia’s soul can only be cured of disease if she changes her ways and leaves behind “her dresses, or lascivousness and worldly pleasure of the senses, and dons habits (habis) of humility and virtue.”56 The “habis” are new ones that the girl must take on as she rejects the old ones. But those dresses

52  “O pere! Veulle avoir pitié et misericorde de celle que tu as boutée au monde, laquelle sans toy ne peult vivre et va à perdition tu es celluy qui donne vie et lumiere aux estranges veulle avoir pitié plustost de ton oeuvre” (249, my emphasis). 53  “la lumiere de la vie des humains et aucteur de medicine vitale” (248). 54  “elle fut toute lasse et fievre la commença à prendre Avec une merveilleuse soifz et flux de ventre et ung singulte avec pleuresie et alaine estroicte et toux terrible qui sont signes de la mort” (249). 55  “il fault que tu delaisse ses abillemens lascives et mondains plains de voluptés. O fille veulle cognoistre que soubz ung peu de miel et doulceur il y a grand fiel” (250). 56  “ses robes, c’est lasciveté et volupté mondaine et se habille des habis d’humilité et vertus” (250).

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are not just clothing or habits, they are also lascivious ornaments.57 The whole story, as Champier had presented it earlier, aimed to show how “ornements” such as “harmless snakes and bitterness covered with honey” must be left behind since “under the grass lies venim and poisonous snakes that lead to hell.”58 In Platonic terms taken from the Symposium, Champier proposes the inverse of a Silenic or a Socratic reading representation, in which ugly or lascivious corporeal signs lead to the beautiful on the inside, to adopt instead an Alcibiades-like representation in which the beautiful male body suggests a lack of virtue on the inside.59 Champier dispenses with the beautiful body-sign that leads to divinity, or corporeal beauty that is transformed into God, in favor of an approach to signification in which the beautiful leads downward to hell. The signification that concerns Champier is specifically bound to his rereading the Ficinian-Platonic tradition. Signification is clearly a topic of interest for the author Champier who maintains Ficino’s Latin descriptor of Phoebus as “author of life-giving medicine,”60 and adds in references to signification in his French version of the story. Champier’s adds in the phrasings about Lucilia’s “signs of death” and about her as “work”—which are not in Ficino’s original text—and he emphasizes the clothing to be removed, which is much less prevalent in the Latin. Champier translates Ficino’s Lucilia into a hermeneutic cipher to illustrate how he has reread the Florentine, with Lucilia’s beauty a key aspect of her link to signification. In Platonic representation, the experience of corporeal beauty inspires the viewer to ascend beyond the realm of the physical. Lucilia incarnates beauty, yet she is unstable as a stepping stone toward the divine because: “This girl Lucilia, overflowing with beauty, started to stray from her father.’’61 Lucilia does not remain at the “right hand” (dextre) of Phebus, source of “light” and “author” of wellness, but follows her mother’s lead. If she begins as a beautiful sign, she is also a wandering sign, one that the paternal author cannot control. Lucilia’s sexual mutability, dependent on an idea of the uncontrollable nature of female sexuality that threatens to occur at any moment, embodies the worry that signs of physical sexuality might manifest themselves inappropriately. In a context in which the 57  Champier takes from Ficino the word “ornatus” to refer to the clothing. Ficino, Opera, 1:849. 58  “couleuvre et fiel couvert de miel; soubz l’erbe gist le venin et le serpent conduisant au gouffre infernal” (248). In his Commentary, Ficino employs ornamentum to refer to the physical world, as opposed to God, intelligence (mens), and soul (anima). One key characteristic of ornamentum is fragmentation: “mundus ornamentum significat ex multis compositum” or “‘World’ signifies an ornament composed of multiple parts” (Ficino, Commentaire, 11). 59  For a reading of the Renaissance reception of Platonic notions of the ugly outside of the Silenus as pertaining to hermeneutics, see my “Translation and the Antitheses of SameSex Sexuality in Leonardo Bruni,” Exemplaria 18, no. 1 (2006): 31–66. 60  “medicineae vitalis auctio” (Letters, 22); Ficino, Opera, 1:848. 61  “Ceste fille lucilia plaine d’une merveilleuse beaulté commença à soy eslongnier de son pere” (249).

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Neoplatonic gender referent was not stable or fully established, Champier admits that his own text may also move away from his intent. Readers’ expectations about same-sex sexuality or Champier’s own inability to completely bar it from his prowoman text mean that men loving men might bring the message of the text too far afield. What, for instance, if the Gisippus/Titus story of love is misread? What if Ficino has not expunged the physicality of love from Plato after all? At the same time as the story expresses authorial anxiety, it reveals how the author—as Lucilia—has strayed from his fathers, the authors of the Neoplatonic tradition. Of the authors mentioned in this part of the text, the key father is of course Plato. When Champier refers to the Phaedrus to prove that Plato explains the problems with erotic love of the flesh (concupiscence charnelle), he himself wanders away from the original text. That people should flee physical love is not really the central lesson of the Phaedrus. Through the cipher of Lucilia, Champier admits that the signs he has created, his own oeuvre, can stray from their father, can subvert the intention of the author. This heterosexual “habit” created out of malecentered texts threatens to stray from his own woman-centered textual intentions at any moment. Lucilia’s problematic beauty may also be the absent beauty of the Neoplatonic male body that threatens the author’s hold on his text. Just as Lucilia should have changed her clothes to remain chaste and avoid the signs of sickness, Champier has already shed the “habits” of the Platonic text and avoided the contagion of same-sex male sexuality. Consequently, the forbidden fruits (“fruitz comme pommes”) that Lucilia desires reappear in Champier’s remarks as “the apples that grow around the pits of Sodom and Gomorrah, which are beautiful and sweet-smelling on the outside, but smelly and venomous on the inside.”62 The hermeneutic remains consistent from clothes to apples, but points us from female beauty to male beauty. Culturally, the image of the Apple of Sodom could (but does not necessarily) evoke male-male sodomy,63 as Sodom and Gomorrah did and did not refer to male-male sexuality in the period.64 But here, the apple stands in for a male body that figures as a seductive voice: “You will find that young men with a pleasant voice sing sweetly like a Siren and are beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are like the apples of Sodom.”65 The male body tempts the girls in the story. Similarly, Champier rejects the beautiful male body from his reading of Ficino to procure his own beautiful text devoid of the contagion of 62  “les pommes qui croissent autour des abismes de sodome et gomorre que par dehors sont beaulx et odoriferes dedens puans et venimeux” (252). 63  See for instance the description of the apple in Josephus’ Jewish War, where Sodom was “consumed by thunderbolts” because of the “impiety of its inhabitants.” For Josephus, the ashes of the interior of the fruit are vestiges of the ashes of the destroyed city. Josephus, The Jewish War: Books 3–4, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 299. 64  On the complicated relation between same-sex sexuality and Sodom, see Michael Carden, Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth (London: Equinox, 2004). 65  “Vous trouverés que ses juvenceaulx qui ont la voix plaisante chantent doulx comme la serene et sont beaulx par dehors mais dedens ressemblent les pommes” (252).

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same-sex sexuality. Avoiding the youth is to avoid the apple of Sodom that is the beautiful boy in the pederastic relation and a recurring problem in Ficino. While for Lucilia, avoiding lascivious clothes should prevent her from straying from male authorial control, for Champier avoiding the sweet-sounding boy moves him away from Plato and Ficino, but closer to his own new authorial notion of what (hetero)sexuality should mean in a French context. The potential anachronism of the absence of a hermeneutics of male-male sexuality is presumably contained within the realm of a story of female virtue. As the transformation of Lucilia illustrates how Champier rereads Plato by purging Ficino’s work of the temptation of male beauty, he goes on to enact that very hermeneutic in which the rereader of Plato has abandoned exterior signs of male-male love and sexuality. Champier evokes Plato within the realm of ideal female desire: Oh ladies, would that you be in love with true love, and do not be afraid of what Plato says when says that he who loves dies in himself and has life in another. For he lives in the person he loves and dies in himself when he leaves himself behind to serve the one he loves.66

Champier steps back a bit so as not to scare women away from loving in the face of his warnings not to be lascivious. The references to Plato suggest that women should imagine love as a kind of non-sexual, non-physical androgyne, or that love should be positioned as metaphysical. This approach to love is the opposite of Lucilia’s since divine love of this kind “makes one leave behind earthly pleasures of the senses,”67 a substitution for Lucilia who should leave behind her clothing full of earthly pleasures. If the ideal of love is not physical but metaphysical, not corporeal but acorporeal, it has also been shown to be not male-male but malefemale. The shedding of lascivious textiles parallels the leaving behind of malemale love here as this statement about love as death is a striking mistranslation and misappropriation of Pausanias’s speech in Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s “Symposium.” Ficino’s passage is as follows: But, oh my [male] friends, I entreat and beg you to give yourselves with all your strength to love, as something completely divine. Let you not be scared by what is often attributed to Plato on the subject of love: “That lover,” he said, “is a soul dead in its own body but alive in another body.”68 66

 “O dames veullez estre amoureuses de vraye amour et n’ayés peur de ce que dit platon quant il dit que celluy qui aime est mort en soymesmes et a vie en aultruy. Car il vit en la chose qu’il ayme et est mort en luy quant il se delaisse pour servir celluy qu’il ayme” (250). 67  “fait delaisser les voluptés terriennes” (251). 68  “Vos autem, o amici, hortor et obsecro, ut amorem, rem profecto diuinam, totis uiribus complextamini. Neque uos illud deterreat, quod de amante quodam Platonem dixisse ferunt. Ille, inquit, amator animus est proprio in corpore mortuus, in alieno corpore uiuens” (Ficino, Commentaire, 43).

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Ficino unambiguously focuses on male love as the vocative male friends (amici) are translated into women (dames). The Latin amator becomes “he who loves” in French (celluy qui aime)—a moderately faithful translation on its own that nonetheless lacks contextualization as all male without the “amici.” Champier transforms more than the male addressee however. For Ficino, the love in question is not physical love itself, as his commentary makes both the earthly and divine Venus “virtuous and worthy of praise.”69 Rather, Ficino asks the question: “What then does Pausanias disapprove of in love? I will tell you.”70 His response is twofold and in both cases, about men: “those who look for generation with women excessively or those who seek love with males/boys against the order of nature.”71 Expelling the threat of excessive sex with women and man-boy sodomy sets the stage for Pausanias’s exhortation to love (Exhortatio ad amorem), the title of the following chapter. For Ficino, then, the “lascivious ornaments” (ornemens lascives) that must be left behind in order to reach true love include male-male sodomy. Champier, in turn, abandons what he takes as the physical ornaments of Ficino’s text, the men “who seek love with males/boys against the order of nature,” in favor of female habits of humility and virtue. Other textual moments admit that potentially homoerotic love is replaced with other sexual configurations. Most blatantly, the story about men who love men, one of his three stories presented to illustrate the power of love, replaces another story with famously homoerotic undertones, that of Achilles and Patroclus. As Champier first presents his three stories of love, sex would appear to be the prime qualification for the selection of each story: As Plato explains in the Symposium, Phaedrus proposes that there are three types of love. The first is the love of a wife for her husband, like the lover of Alcestis who wanted to die for her husband Admetus. The second is the love of the husband for his wife, like that of Orpheus for his wife Eurydice. And the third is the love of a man for a man, like the love of Patroclus for Achilles, by which he shows that nothing makes men stronger than love. And I will illustrate these three types of love with three exemplary stories taken from Aulus Gellius, Plato, and Boccaccio. For they are very useful for women to learn the virtue and the power of love.72 69

 “honestus atque probandus” (41).  “Quid igitur in amore Pausanias improbat? Dicam equidem” (41). 71  “generationem preter modum cum feminis uel contra nature ordinem cum masculis prosequatur” (41). 72  “Phedrus ainsi que recite platon in Symposio met troys manieres d’amour. L’une dit estre l’amour de la femme au mari comme fut l’amour de alceste qui voulut mourir pour son mari Admetus. L’aultre est du mari à la femme comme l’amour de orpheus à sa femme euridices. Et la tierce est l’amour de l’homme à l’homme comme l’amour de patroclus à achiles là où il monstre qu’il n’est rien qui rende les hommes si fors que amour. Et de ses troys manieres d’amour je mettray troys exemples et histoires extraites de aulus gelius, platon et bocace. Pource qu’elles sont moult utiles aux dames pour sçavoir que c’est que la vertu d’amour et sa puissance” (237). For the origin of this passage, see Ficino, Commentaire, 19. 70

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The division into three clean sex-based categories suggests a male bias since the ultimate form of love is between two men whom love strengthens in a way that cannot take place when a woman is part of the equation. In addition, a woman can only enter the stories if she is married, or attached to a man, as the idea that a relation between two women exemplify virtue is unthinkable. The strength of love is closely related to the “usefulness” of love, its most important quality for Ficino. In his discussions of the usefulness of love (1.4; 7.16), love is the opposite of copulation and helps prevent it, and Socratic love is useful for keeping youth from being “corrupted by the contagion of the shameful,” serving as the “shepherd [who] protects his flock of lambs from the abyss and plague of false lovers, or wolves.”73 Like Socrates as redemptive and Christ-like figure, Champier’s three stories are textually useful because they keep boys from being seen as seduced by older men as they are in the ancient texts and because they replace Patroclus and Achilles with Gisippus and Titus, two males who clearly love women. But, Champier still cites Patroclus and Achilles from Ficino as examples of male love, only to transform them into Boccacio’s story of two friends. The evocation of a classic homoerotic couple and their subsequent transformation into a homosocial triangle is “useful” to the text as it calls attention to the fact that Champier has already rewritten male-male love. Champier’s stories are also useful for women. A number of textual moments related to virtue function as ways for men to “teach” women how to love properly: “[the stories] are very useful for helping women to understand the power and efficaciousness of love.”74 The maleness of virtue should wear off these stories and be transmitted to the woman reading who should be rescued from possible vice. The use to which Champier puts the stories changes from against pederasty (as with Socrates in the Ficino quotation above) to against potentially vicious women. The very concept of usefulness, then, is transferred from men to women. The woman-centered use of use, however, occludes the idea that pederasty was a problem in the first place as the assumption of female vice makes sodomitical vice disappear from the text, leaving the impression that it was never there. In a similar manner, Champier puts the Lucilia story to good use as it tells a typical story to girls and women to one audience and a coded story about the abandonment of male homoerotics to another. In the former case, women simply cover up for male trouble. In the latter case, women allow Champier to tell his story about hermeneutics and homoeroticism without approaching male-male eros directly. Lucilia, then, resembles Sophronia as she permits Champier to approach the problematic question of homoerotics without remaining between men.

 Ficino, Commentary, 172, 173. “[F]lagitiosorum contagione … corrumpatur” (247); “pastor, agnorum gregem a falsorum amantium ceu luporum uoragine ac peste tutatur” (247). 74  “elles sont moult utiles aux dames pour sçavoir que c’est que la vertu d’amour et sa puissance” (237). 73

Chapter 5

Translating Friendship in the Circle of Marguerite de Navarre: Plato’s Lysis and Lucian’s Toxaris Marc D. Schachter1

All who know what Friendship is say that it is nothing other than a mutual and voluntary accord contracted by virtue between two people to be united in charity and in a shared disposition towards all things, whatever they might be. It has this advantage over any degree of kinship or blood relation, namely that between kin there is usually not much friendship, indeed sometimes it is entirely banished therefrom, which it cannot be from between friends.2

An extensive corpus of translations of Latin and Greek works on friendship constituted one important vector for the dissemination of the classical heritage that informed the early modern rhetorics and rituals of friendship.3 The translators of these works not only made classical texts available to a wider reading public; they also often deployed the rhetoric of the friendship tradition itself when they dedicated their efforts to other men. Such is the case, for example, in three of the four published sixteenth-century French translations of Lucian’s Toxaris. Familiar topoi about similarity and shared virtue embellish the dedications to these volumes, characterizing the relationship between translator and dedicatee as one 1

 I would like to thank the editors of this volume for preternaturally astute feedback, David Schalkwyk for inspiring discussions about friendship in Plato’s Lysis and elsewhere, Constance Furey for helping me think theologically, and Lorenzo Calvelli for numerous suggestions. 2  “Tous ceus qui sçavent que c’est qu’Amitié, disent, Que ce n’est autre chose qu’un accord mutuel & volontaire contracté par la vertu, entre deus personnes, pour étre unis en charité en mesme affection en toutes choses quelles qu’elles soient: Elle a cét avantage par dessus tout degré de parantage & proximité, que le plus souvent entre parans n’y a pas beaucoup d’amitié, & en est quelquesfois du tout bânie; ce qu’elle ne peut étre d’entre amis” (Antoine de Laval, Desseins de professions nobles et publiques [Paris: chez la veuve Abel L’Angelier, 1613)], fol. 50v). 3  For a recent overview of the literature on friendship in early modernity as well as a rehearsal of relevant friendship commonplaces, see Daniel T. Lochman and Maritere López, “The Emergence of Discourses: Early Modern Friendship,” the introduction to Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 1–26.

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of ideal, reciprocal friendship.4 These translations thus both represented classical friendship discourse for contemporaries and constituted exemplary exercises in contemporary friendship practice.5 In this essay, I propose to consider a more anomalous situation: Renaissance translations of classical friendship texts that were dedicated to women. Given the near absence of women from the canonical Greco-Roman friendship tradition, that there were any such translations at all may come as a surprise. To my knowledge, there are exactly two, of which one was originally intended for a man. The first, a translation of Plato’s Lysis by Bonaventure des Périers (c. 1501–1544) probably dating to 1541 and published posthumously by Jean de Tournes in 1544, was dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549).6 The second, a translation of Lucian’s Toxaris by Jacques de Rozières, bears a dedication to Marguerite de France, daughter of Francis I of France (1494–1547) and thus Marguerite de Navarre’s niece. The dedication explains, however, that the translation had originally been prepared for Marguerite de France’s brother, Charles d’Orléans, who died before the text could be presented to him. Never published, it exists in a single manuscript dating to 1545 or 1546.7 4  In 1553, Jehan Millet de Saint Amour dedicated his Toxaris de Lucian (Paris: Nicolas Chrestien) to his “meilleur amy” Claude Renaut, writing that the cord that bound them together was “la ressemblance de bonnes mœurs” (sig. A6v). A decade later, in an anomalous case, Claude du Puy dedicated his Toxare ou De l’amitié (Anvers: Imprimerie de Æ. Diest, 1563) to a superior, “Monseigneur Antoine Perenot, Cardinal, & Archevesque de Maline” (sig. A2r). Du Puy wanted the text to remind the Cardinal of the deceased Prince Wolfgangue Prantner, “un de voz singuliers amys” (sig. A2r), in whose service he had met Perenot. In 1579, Blaise de Vigenère published his Trois dialogues de l’amitié (Paris, Nicolas Chesneau), comprising a long dedicatory epistle and translations of Plato’s Lysis, Cicero’s De amicitia and Lucian’s Toxaris. In the epistle, Vigenère describes how he and his friend Giovanni Andreossi shared “une Amitié ferme & indissoluble à jamais; comme estant establie sur la vertu, son principal & plus asseuré fondement sur tous autres” (sig. †2v). Finally, in his Desseins de professions nobles et publiques, first printed in 1605, Antoine de Laval dedicated a French Toxaris dating from the 1570s to his friend Loys Gilbert. The translation is preceded by a series of short essays on friendship rehearsing numerous commonplaces from the tradition. 5  For reflections on how published evocations of friendship between men could function either as social currency or as a form of advertising, see Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 54, and Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fiction of Women in Sixteenth Century England (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 126. I owe these citations to Allison Johnson, “The ‘Single Lyfe’ of Isabella Whitney: Love, Friendship, and the Single Women Writer” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 126. 6  The translation is the first work found in Bonaventure des Périers, Recueil des œuvres de feu Bonaventure des Periers (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1544). 7  The manuscript, entitled Dialogue de Lucian, is housed at Harvard University’s Houghton Library and can be found under the shelf mark MS Richardson 15. In Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1988), Christiane

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Although the rarity and unconventionality of translations of friendship texts dedicated to women warrant caution in drawing conclusions based on similarities between the paratexts that accompany them, suggestive differences do emerge when they are compared to those found in works dedicated to men. Neither Des Périers nor De Rozières used the rhetoric of the male friendship tradition to assert that virtue and similarity bound (female) dedicatee and (male) translator in a reciprocal relationship. Indeed, they do not even claim their dedicatees as friends. Gender and greatly differing social status provide an obvious explanation for these absences. Perhaps more unexpectedly, at least given the classical tradition they are drawing from, both translations’ paratexts depict relationships based not on conventional models of likeness or similarity but on proximity or consanguinity and on Christian faith. In an interpretive poem that functions as a commentary to his translation, Des Périers portrays an all-female divinely inspired community comprising neighbors, cousins, and sisters anticipating the “perfect friendship” (parfaicte Amytié) that is union with God while in a dedicatory epistle De Rozières invokes “the true and perfect friendship” (la vraye et parfaicte amytie) of Christian community and more particularly the love of Marguerite de France for her recently deceased brother, Charles d’Orléans. My analyses of these paratexts show how they challenge hegemonic proscriptions that police the borders of ideal friendship—elective friends rather than unchosen family, the pair over and against the many or even the few, male exclusivity rather than relationships between men and women or among women—while adapting classical works for a contemporary evangelical context. The Translations in Context A humanist best known today for a collection of novellas, Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis, and as the likely author of the banned Cymbalum mundi—a satire that attracted the ire of the Sorbonne and may have led to his exile from Marguerite de Navarre’s court—Des Périers probably translated the Lysis at the behest of the Queen, whom he served as a valet de chambre.8 As was common practice in France for the first half of the sixteenth century, he did not follow the original Greek but rather a Latin version, in this case that of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). Ficino’s translation was first printed in the 1480s in his Opera platonis with the title Lysis on Friendship (Lysis de Amicitia) and an accompanying “Argumentum,” which I will Lavergnat-Gagnière hypothesized that this translation might be the same as that found in ms. NAF 10371 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (351). I have compared the two versions and they are in fact different. 8  On Marguerite de Navarre’s patronage, see Barbara Stephenson, The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). For a succinct overview of Des Périers’s life and literary pursuits and an excellent bibliography, see Emily Thompson, “Bonaventure Des Périers,” in Sixteenth-Century French Writers, ed. Megan Conway (Detroit, MI: Thomson-Gale, 2006), 113–22.

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refer to here as a commentary, dedicated to Pietro de’ Medici.9 The French version, entitled Le Discours de la queste d’amytié, includes a title page announcing that it was “Sent to the Queen of Navarre” (Envoyé à la Royne de Navarre). The accompanying interpretive poem—entitled like the translation “Queste d’amytie” and likewise dedicated to the Queen—follows immediately after. De Rozières also based his translation on an earlier Latin version, that of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), but he went further than Des Périers, as we shall see below, by also adapting his model’s dedication for its new addressee. Erasmus’s Toxaris translation first appeared in a 1506 volume that resulted from collaboration with Thomas More. It included a selection of Lucian’s works translated by one or the other of the men as well as several of their own treatises. The volume as a whole functions as a testament not only to the humanist project of recuperating antiquity, involving the Christian critique of some elements of the classical tradition and the assimilation of others, but also to the friendships of men of letters.10 The Latin Toxaris translation was preceded by a dedicatory epistle “to the Reverend Father and Lord Richard, Bishop of Winchester,” also known as Richard Foxe.11 De Rozières dedicated his French version “To the Most High and most excellent Princess Madam Marguerite of France sole daughter of 9

 See Abel Lefranc, “Le platonisme et la littérature en France à l’époque de la Renaissance [1500–1600],” in Revue de l’histoire littéraire de la France 3, no. 1 (1896): 1–44; at 11. I draw the Latin of Ficino’s Lysis commentary and translation from Plato, Omnia divini Platonis opera, trans. Marsilio Ficino (Basel: In officina frobeniana, 1532), which I have compared with the princeps. In the later edition, the title of the dialogue is given as Lysis, vel de Amicitia. For a general overview of French translation practices in the period, see Glyn Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva: Droz, 1984). On translations of classical works in medieval and early modern France, see Paul Chavy, Traducteurs d’autrefois moyen âge et renaissance: dictionnaire des traducteurs et de la littérature traduite en ancien et moyen français (842–1600) (Paris: Champion; Geneva: Slatkine, 1988). Two more focused studies are Ruth Bunker, A Bibliographical Study of the Greek Works and Translations Published in France during the Renaissance: The Decade 1540–1550 (Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1939), and Albert-Marie Schmidt, “Traducteurs français de Platon (1536–1550),” in Études sur le XVIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1967), 17–44. Bunker observes that “[t]here is some question … as to the adequacy of Des Périers’s knowledge of the Greek tongue” (59). I demonstrate that Des Périers used Ficino’s Latin below. 10  On Erasmus and friendship, see Dominic Baker-Smith, “Erasmus and More: A Friendship Revisited,” Recusant History 30, no. 1 (2010): 7–25; Kathy Eden, “‘between Friends all is Common’: The Erasmian Adage and Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 3 (1998): 405–19; and Yvonne Charlier, Érasme et l’amitié: D’après sa correspondance (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1977). 11  “Reverendo Patri ac Domino Ricardo Episcopo Wintoviensis” (Erasmus, 48). I quote the Latin of Erasmus’s dedication to the Toxaris from Saturnalia … Toxaris … De astrologia (Basel: Johann Froben, 1521). As here, unless otherwise specified, original language quotations of translations and their paratexts in the notes accompanying English versions in the body of the chapter will be by translator’s name and page or folio number. References to the Greek of Plato’s Lysis will be by Stephanus number.

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the King.”12 A later addition in a different ink expanded the dedication to include the title “duchesse de Savoye,” which Marguerite would only receive upon her marriage to Emmanuel Philibert in 1559.13 Although the manuscript is undated, three details enable us to determine with some certainty that it was presented to Marguerite late in 1545 or early in 1546. First, De Rozières explains in the dedicatory epistle that he had originally intended to offer the translation to Marguerite de France’s brother, Charles d’Orleans, who had commissioned the work, before claiming that his death had made this impossible. (One could in fact dedicate a work to someone deceased.) Charles died on 9 September 1545, giving us the work’s terminus a quo. Second, two sheets containing the dedication to Marguerite are glued to narrow stubs left where the original leaves was carefully cut out, suggesting that the manuscript may very well have been ready for presentation to Charles at the time of his death. Third, the dedication identifies it as an “Estrene,” or a New Year’s gift (from Erasmus’s Latin “munuscula”). Although the death of Charles d’Orléans may have entailed the finding of a new dedicatee for De Rozières’s Toxaris translation, it does not explain the choice of dedicatee. Several other factors help explain how these translations of classical friendship texts about relationships between men came to be dedicated to women. Perhaps most important was Marguerite de Navarre’s cultivation of evangelical humanist projects, including in particular the translation of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts about love.14 In 1543, Antoine Héroët published a verse paraphrase of the myth of the origin of desire from Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium.15 Three years later, Jean de La Haye—like Des Périers a valet de chambre of Marguerite de Navarre—published a French version of Ficino’s entire Symposium commentary. Des Périers’s Queste de l’amytié was part of the same general project. Indeed, as I will argue below, the translation transforms the dialogue from a reflection on friendship into a meditation on love. These works continued a process of Christian adaptation begun by earlier humanists, Ficino and Erasmus prominent among them. Just as Ficino’s betterknown De amore, a commentary on the Symposium, construed Plato’s dialogue on love as a morally and theologically acceptable work, so too his Lysis commentary 12  “A Treshaulte et tresexcellente princesse Madame Marguerite de france fille unique du Roy” (De Rozières, fol. 4v). 13  See Jérome Pichon, Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu M. le Baron Jérome Pichon (Paris: Libraire Techener, 1897), item no. 1115, which offers the most detailed description of the manuscript. 14  See Abel Lefranc, “Marguerite de Navarre et le platonisme de la Renaissance,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 58, no. 1 (1897): 259–92, and Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister-Queen of Dissent: Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) and her Evangelical Network, 2 vols. (Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2009). 15  While Héroët dedicated his “Androgyne de Platon” to François I, Marguerite de Navarre seems to have inspired the translation. See Lefranc, “Le platonisme,” 14, and Loris Petris, “‘L’amour divin par celluy de ce monde.’ Platonisme et Évangélisme dans l’Androgyne d’Antoine Héroët” in Par élévation d’esprit: Antoine Héroët le poète, le prélat et son temps, ed. A. Gendre and L. Petris (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 179–208.

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defended the worth of the work it glossed. He wrote in it that Plato “rebukes those who waste themselves in love and under the guise of friendship are enslaved to shameful desire” and found that in the dialogue’s discussion of the “first friend” “our Plato’s devotion to God and his great religious faith amazingly shine forth.”16 Although Erasmus does not claim that the Toxaris is itself a religious text, he does use it to make an argument about Christianity. He writes that the dialogue demonstrates how friendship, barely practiced in his own day, was venerated among ancient barbarians even though it is only in Christ that its perfection can be found: “A kind of communion of men with each other such as that of the limbs of the body among themselves.”17 Thus both dialogues had already undergone a process of “accreditation” for Christian audiences that would be continued in their new paratextual materials. Another factor making these dialogues apt for their female dedicatees was probably the two texts’ eccentric relationship to the classical friendship canon they help form. Although women are almost entirely absent from them, neither text emphasizes the notion that ideal friendship can only exist between two (virtuous) men, as influential works by Aristotle and Cicero did. Moreover, the Toxaris is not a philosophical meditation and does not include highly developed and systematic accounts of friendship such as those found in the works of these other authors. Its influence (and pleasure) lies in its melodramatic stories of deeds and sacrifices inspired by friendship. The dialogue’s exemplary tales provide the occasion for two men who thought they were radically different—one a civilized Greek, the other an uncouth Scythian—to discover common ground in their peoples’ shared commitment to friendship. As for the Lysis, it is a philosophical dialogue, but many of the ideas it champions are difficult to reconcile with the commonplaces that would go on to form the core principles of the friendship canon. Ficino recognized this in his Lysis commentary, where he insisted that Plato was not proclaiming his own ideas in the dialogue—ideas Ficino takes to be entirely congruent with the later tradition—so much as responding to the theories of the Sophists. Two points in particular vexed Ficino: 1) Socrates’ general contention that like will not befriend like and 2) the more particular argument that the good man will not be friends with another good man because, being self-sufficient, he does not need a friend.18 A final detail deftly exploited by Des Périers was also crucial in adapting the Lysis for Marguerite de Navarre: Plato’s own provisional solution to the impasse produced by his insistence that “like does not like like.” Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates proposes a distinction between what is similar (ὅμοιος) and what is one’s own, proper to one, fitting, suitable (οἰκεῖος): 16

 “eos qui amore abutuntur, & sub amicitiæ specie turpi libidini serviunt, increpat” (Ficino, 119), “primum amicum” (Ficino, 127), “Platonis nostri pietas in deum, summaque religio mirifice fulget” (Ficino, 120). The “first friend” figures prominently in a crucial passage of the Lysis. I return to the concept and its treatment by Plato’s translators below. 17  “hominum inter ipsos talis quædam communio, qualis est membrorum inter se corporis” (Erasmus, 48). 18  Aristotle responds at length to such concerns in his Nicomachean Ethics (IX.9). I address Ficino’s own rebuttal below.

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O Lysis and Menexenus, if there is a difference between what we called Proper [Propre] and that which is Similar [Semblable], we have indeed discovered what it is to be a Friend. But if Proper and Similar are one and the same, consider that it is not a simple matter to reject and scour away the argument by which it was said that the Similar is useless to its Like: and that insofar as one is useless to another, can never be its friend.19

Des Périers’s “Propre” and “Semblable” here render Ficino’s “proprium” and “simile” which in turn translate Plato’s “οἰκεῖος” and “ὅμοιος.” The adjective “οἰκεῖος” has a wide semantic range. It can refer to household matters (as in “economics”) or to people of the same household or family. It can express the possession of objects belonging to a house or family or intimately to oneself or describe a relationship to one’s homeland. It can also mean more generally “fitting” or “suitable.” Despite Socrates’ provisional turn to οἰκεῖος as a potential way out of the morass created by his assertion that like will not like like, the dialogue ultimately remains mired in aporias. Just when Socrates is about to seek an older interlocutor with whom he might pursue the discussion, the youths’ pedagogues drunkenly announce that it is time for the boys to return home. The dialogue then abruptly ends with Socrates announcing how foolish the three friends—he includes himself with Lysis and Menexenus—are not to have been able to determine what a friend is. Nonetheless, the possibilities offered by what might be considered “Propre” rather than “Semblable” prove useful to Des Périers, who exploits the concept in his interpretive poem by advocating for a female spiritual friendship based on contiguity rather than similarity. Arguably, we find a similar dynamic in De Rozières’s dedication of the Toxaris with its focus on Marguerite de France’s recently deceased brother. These represent radical departures not only from the conventions of the general male friendship tradition, according to which the number of friends is severely restricted and relationships of blood are excluded because not chosen, but also from the immediate models offered by Ficino and Erasmus, as we shall shortly see. The Quest for Friendship: Love, Grace and Female Community Mediated by God In considering Des Périers’s Queste d’amytié and its accompanying interpretive poem, I will focus on three major issues. The first concerns the translation itself. Des Périers reconfigures the Lysis so that a dialogue about friendship becomes one 19

 “O Lysis, & Menexene, s’il y ha difference entre ce que nous disions Propre, & ce qui est Semblable, nous avons trouvé au vray que c’est qui est Amy. Mais si Propre et Semblable sont tous un, considerez que ce n’est chose aisee reieter & racler ce poinct par lequel il ha esté dict que le Pareil est inutile à son Semblable: & que en tant qu’il luy est inutile, iamais ne luy peult estre Amy” (39). For the Latin, see Ficino, 128. For the Greek and a less mediated English translation, see Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, trans. W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 222b.

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about love, and more specifically about a theologically suggestive version of love that construes God as the source and object of desire. The second consists of the accompanying poem and its more explicit unfolding of the theology motivating the translation. The third involves the divergence of Des Périers’s account of female love and community from the emphasis in Ficino’s commentary on a pair of male friends. To varying degrees, all three show Des Périers assimilating the Lysis to Marguerite de Navarre’s evangelical theology.20 Although Des Périers based his Lysis translation on that of Ficino, he took certain liberties with the text. For example, he expands one line from Homer’s Odyssey used by Plato to present the idea that similar things are attracted to one another into a short poem. Ficino’s Latin version offers “God always leads like to like.”21 In Des Périers’s version, this becomes “God always leads and directs / the Like to his Similar kind, / from which after many caresses / eternal Friendship is born, / and indeed He is so supportive / that from among more than a million, / by His helpful goodness, / Robin finds Marion.”22 As Ullrich Langer has noted, the mention of Robin and Marion updates the text for its sixteenth-century French audience by using characters familiar from the medieval literary tradition.23 Furthermore, the poem reorients the dialogue by introducing a “heterosexual” pair of lovers into the homosocial world of the Lysis. It may also make an oblique reference to Aristophanes’ myth of the origin of love from Plato’s Symposium, a possibility whose potential implications I address below. Two other programmatic translation choices have ramifications throughout the Lysis. One is Des Périers’s coinage of the terms “Amyaymé” and “Amyamoureux,” which I translate as “Beloved Friend” and “Loving Friend” respectively. Embodying an equivocation between friendship and love, these neologisms would not seem out of place in the spiritually inflected courtly literature of Marguerite de Navarre’s circle. They are used by Des Périers to translate a range of Latin expressions for friendship and love. The other sustained choice is his use of the phrase “for the love and with the goal of” (pour l’amour et à fin de) to translate several different Latin terms, in this case ones employed by Ficino’s Socrates to explain the reasons why a person becomes a friend to something or someone. Together, these choices allow Des Périers to insert love into the dialogue where there was none before. Ultimately, both are anchored by Socrates’ concept of the “first friend,” which Des Périers, like Ficino, takes to represent God, although with divergent results for their accounts of desire and friendship. 20  For a sustained account of Marguerite de Navarre’s theology, see Carol Thysell, The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 21  “Deus similem semper ducit ad similem” (Ficino, 125). For the Greek, see Homer, Odyssey 17.218. The expression also appears in Erasmus’s Adages 1.2.22. 22  “Tousjours Dieu mène & addresse / Le Pareil à son Semblable, / Dont apres mainte caresse / Naist Amytié perdurable: / Et si est tant favorable, / Qu’entre plus d’un million, / Par sa bonté secourable, / Robin trouve Marion” (Des Périers, 22). 23  Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 133.

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The words “Amyaymé” and “Amyamoureux” first appear in the following exchange where Socrates urges his adolescent interlocutor Hippothales to identify his favorite among the younger boys within the gymnasium: “But still, which one,” I said, “seems to you the most beautiful of those inside? Tell me, I beseech you, who is this Beloved Friend [Amyaymé]?” When I saw that he said nothing, I followed up in this way: “O son of Hieronymus, Hippothales my friend, it is superfluous for you to tell me whether you are in Loving Friendship [vous estes Amyamoureux] with someone or not, because I am convinced not only that you love, but that you are already well advanced in love. In all other pursuits I am only too crude and ignorant, but in the case of love I actually have this gift from God, namely that on first sight I know those who love.” He did not respond at all….24

Here, Des Périers’s French “Amyaymé” translates Ficino’s Latin “amatus” (beloved) while “vous estes Amyamoureux” translates “ames” (you love, in the subjunctive). The introduction of the neologisms in an explicitly erotic context is significant because subsequently the terms will mostly be used to translate words relating to friendship. In the Greek, the lexical shift away from love makes erotic desire a subcategory of friendship understood capaciously to relate to the attraction of things or people that are useful such as medicine, doctors, and knowledge.25 As a result of the vocabulary chosen by Des Périers, however, in his translation the forms of attachment considered do not leave the realm of love, or perhaps better remain suspended between friendship and love. The second crucial translation innovation appears in the following passage, which prepares the way for the eventual introduction of the concept of the “first friend”: 24  “Mais encores lequel, dis ie, vous semble beau leans? Dictes moy ie vous prie, qui est ce bel Amyaymé. Quand ie veis qu’il ne sonnoit mot, ie luy dis en ceste maniere, O filz de Hieronyme, Hippothales mon amy, il n’est ia besoign que vois me disiez si vous estes Amyamoureux de quelcun, ou non: car ie suis asseuré, que non seulement vous aymez, mais que vous estes bien avant en amours. En toutes autres besongnes ie ne suis que trop grossier & ignorant: mais en cas d’amour, i’ay bien ce don de Dieu, que de prime face ie congnois ceulx qui ayment. Il ne me respondit rien …” (Des Périers, 2–3). This passage demonstrates that Des Périers based his translation on that of Ficino. For example, when he writes that Hippothales “ne sonnoit mot” and “ne me respondit rien” he follows Ficino’s “obticuit” and “nihil respondit” (121) rather than the original Greek which has “he blushed” (204c; “ἠρυθρίασεν”) and then “he blushed even more” (“μᾶλλον ἠρυθρίασεν”). Another example: Des Périers’s “je congnois ceulx qui ayment” translates Ficino’s “amatores cognoscam” rather than the Greek “to be able to recognize the lover and the beloved” (“εἶναι γνῶναι ἐρῶντά τε καὶ ἐρώμενον”). On Ficino’s Lysis translation, see James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 313–14. 25  This is facilitated by the wide semantic range of the Greek word philos. A classic discussion can be found in Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes. 1. économie, parenté, société (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 335–53.

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[I asked] “if the friend is a friend of something, or not?” “Indeed it must be that he is the friend of something,” they replied. “Is it,” I said, “for the love and with the goal of nothing, or of something [pour l’amour et à fin de rien, ou de quelque chose]?” Menexenus: “For the love and with the goal of something [Pour l’amour & à fin de quelque chose].”26

Des Périers’s translation subtly shifts the emphasis of this passage by identifying the motivation for becoming a friend, which the Latin characterizes through a series of words expressing causality and purpose (gratia, propter, causa), as a matter of love (amour). Furthermore, Des Périers collapses an important distinction that is present in the Latin (and in the Greek). In Ficino’s version, a friend is a friend for two reasons, “alicuius causa, & propter aliquid” (because of one thing and for the sake of something else). The Latin, like the original Greek, offers both a motivating cause and a motivating goal for being a friend. For example, the doctor is a friend because you are sick and you want to be healthy.27 Des Périers’s formulation—“For the love and with the goal of something”—implies that the same “something” serves as both the motivation for and the goal in being a friend. These carefully deployed translation choices come together in the discussion of the “first friend.” After establishing that any given “Beloved Friend” is such “for the love and with the goal of another Beloved Friend,” Socrates asks: “Is it therefore necessary according to such reasoning that we come to some Goal and beginning [But & commencement] of Friendship, beyond which there is no other Beloved Friend, in such a way that every Friendship be related to a first and principal Friend [premier & principal Amy], for whose love and towards which goal all things that are Loved are Friends, and carry its name?” Lysis: “It is clearly so.” Socrates: “This is what I was talking about earlier when I said we must take care that the things that are Beloved Friends, for the love and sake of the true and only Loving Friend, do not deceive and delay us like phantoms and simulacra of it.”28 26

 “[Je demandai] si l’amy est amy de quelque chose, ou non? Il faut bien, dirent ilz, qu’il soit amy de quelque chose. Est ce, dis je, pour l’amour et à fin de rien, ou de quelque chose? MENEX. Pour l’amour & à fin de quelque chose” (Des Périers, 32). For the Latin, see Ficino, 127. 27  Gregory Vlastos offers a lucid explanation of the Greek: “When A loves B it is always for the sake of (ἕνεκά του) something, x, and because of something (διά τι), y, where x ranges over goods and y over ‘evils’ remedied by the appropriate values of x.” See “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato,” in Platonic Studies, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3–42; at 8n20. 28  “Amyaymé,” “pour l’amour & à fin de quelque autre Amyaymé,” “Or est il besoign que par tel discours nous venions à quelque But & commencement d’Amytie, oultre lequel il n’y ayt point d’autre Amyaymé, de sorte que toute Amytié soit rapportee à un premier & principal Amy, pour l’amour & à fin duquel toutes choses Aymee sont Amyes, & en portent le Nom. LYS. Il est necessaire voirement. SOCR. Voyla à quoy je disois, n’aqueres, qu’il nous failloit prendre garde, à celle fin que les choses qui sont Amyesaymees, pour l’amour & à fin du vray & seul Amyaymé, ne nous abusent & retardent comme phantosmes & semblances d’iceluy” (Des Périers, 34). For the Greek and Ficino’s Latin see 219c and 127, respectively.

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Des Périers’s phrase “premier & principal Amy” translates Ficino’s Latin “primum amicum” which in turn renders Plato’s Greek “πρῶτον φίλον.” Although arguably Plato did not intend for his account to have metaphysical implications—the “first friend” might merely be the ultimate utilitarian reason for becoming a friend, the prime mover in a metonymic chain of motivations—Ficino certainly construed it in religious terms in his Lysis commentary, as noted above.29 Even so, Ficino’s translation closely tracks the Greek and does not itself function to gloss his understanding of the passage. Des Périers, however, does substantially revise the sense of his source text. His “But & commencement” (Goal and beginning), which translates the single Latin word “principium,” introduces the same dual emphasis on telos and origin found in the lexeme “pour l’amour & à fin de.” Moreover, whereas in Ficino’s translation the “first friend” is merely the final motivation for friendship and the source of the name (he writes, “because of whom all other things that are called friends are friends”), Des Périers’s version underscores the function of the “first friend” both as the ultimate goal and the fundamental origin of love and as the pattern for it.30 Lying behind these alterations, I would submit, is a familiar Augustinian (and more broadly Neoplatonic) understanding of God as at once the source and the aim of love, and of the love of God as the model for other forms of desire. Des Périers’s Christian interpretation of the Lysis, which I have suggested is embedded in his translation, emerges with more clarity in the “Queste d’amytié.” The poem begins with an invocation to Marguerite de Navarre who is figured as a muse, moves on to describe the search for friendship in a lightly glossed skeletal outline of the argument of the Lysis, and concludes with a triumphant account of spiritually inspired friendship on earth and the perfect friendship offered by God in the afterlife. The conclusion in particular is a remarkable departure from the Lysis. Rather than offering the transcendental account of friendship we find in the poem, Plato’s dialogue ends precipitously having resolved nothing. Earlier moments in the “Queste d’amytié” also include some religiously inflected variations on its Platonic themes. It is to one of these that I now turn. After rejecting a series of possible sites where “Friendship” might be found, including the relationships of men who are either entirely good or entirely bad, Des Périers—in a move that tracks the development of the Lysis—addresses the case of the man who is neither good nor bad, what he refers to as the “Third” (Tiers) man. Following the introduction of this category of man, he establishes that the Good is also Beautiful and, in a crucial expansion to the Lysis, adds that Beauty “cannot but be loved: for its flowing grace passes into every heart that perceives it.”31 This incorporation of grace is the first step in a Christian revision of Socrates’ rehearsal of the possibility—ultimately rejected—that the desire for something good on the 29  On the significance of the “first friend” in the Lysis, see Vlastos, “Love in Plato,” 36–7. 30  “cuiusque gratia cætera omnia que sic dicuntur, sint amica” (Ficino, 127). 31  “Ne peult qu’aymee ne soit:/ Car sa grace,/ Coulant, passe/ En tout cueur qui l’appercoit” (Stanza 23). As here, references to Des Périers’s poem “Queste d’amytié” will be by stanza number.

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part of a man who is neither good nor bad might itself be predicated on something bad. It is because of his recognition of external grace, Des Périers suggests, that “this Third man has always been a Friend of the Good given the filth and ugliness of Evil, his great Enemy.” The emphasis on the repugnancy of the “Evil” in question as well as its figuration as a “great Enemy” are further Christianizing elements, as is the specific remedy offered. In moving toward an explanation of this remedy, Des Périers first paraphrases Socrates’ mundane observations that the sick man desires a doctor because of his illness in order to become healthy (Stanza 25) and that the ignorant man desires knowledge in order to become wiser (Stanza 26). In the next stanza, however, he diverges from Plato when he explains that it is “beautiful, fertile writings” which offer their “Loving Friends” a cure to the error and pain of ignorance. The subsequent stanza confirms that these “writings” are Scripture: “But when man is asleep and idle with ignorance at the great gate he is so stunned that on the earth he is good for nothing but being a frightful warning.”32 In the “Queste d’amytié,” ignorance of the Bible amounts to a spiritually perilous state and grace is required for salvation. It is worth remarking that the potential role of works in facilitating salvation, about which many evangelical Christians were highly skeptical, goes unmentioned.33 The poem’s account of salvation continues by describing the forms of love experienced as one moves toward the ultimate beloved and prime mover of friendship that is God. The discussion of the “seul Amyaymé” in Des Périers’s poem begins by establishing that the desire for this special friend is not dependent on loss (Stanza 31) and is “Not at all that so Cruel Desire of base men.” Instead, Des Périers introduces a different kind of desire through the personification “Disette” (Famine). Famine, Des Périers explains, “Always casts her eye to the Good that she had and she misses, Poor Thing, what she sees herself deprived of.”34 Des Périers does not explicitly explain how this loss differs from that caused by the other kind of desire discussed earlier in the poem. P.H. Nurse has proposed that her sense of privation is a reference to “the Platonic theory of Reminiscence.”35 32

 “Ce Tiers, donques, / Ne fut oncques / Sans estre du Bien Amy: / Veu l’ordure, / Et laidure / Du mal son grand Ennemy” (Stanza 24), “beaulx escripts plantureux” (Stanza 27), “Mais quand l’homme / Dort & chomme / D’ignorance au grand portail, / Tant s’atterre, / Que sur terre / Ne ser que d’espouventail” (Stanza 28). 33  On the dissemination of ideas about the importance of faith and doubts about the salvific potential of works, see Philip E. Hughes, Lefèvre: Pioneer of Ecclesiastical Renewal in France (Grand Rapids, MI: W.E. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1984), 69–100. 34  “Non point celle / Tant Cruelle / Envie qu’ont les chetifs” (Stanza 32), “Tousjours jette / L’œil vers le Bien qu’elle avoit: / Et regrette / La Povrette / Ce dont privee se voit” (Stanza 34). 35  P.H. Nurse, “Christian Platonism in the Poetry of Bonaventure Des Périers,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 19 (1957): 234–44; at 235. For a broad overview of the sources found in Des Périers’s poetry, see Lionello Sozzi, “Remarques sur la poésie religieuse de Des Périers,” in Études Seiziémistes: Offertes à Monsieur Le Professeur V.-L. Saulnier par plusieurs de ses anciens doctorants, ed. Verdun L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 205–22.

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Given Des Périers’s theological commitments in the “Queste d’amytié” and his practice of adapting classical concepts for a contemporary religious context, I would modify this suggestion and submit that it constitutes a Christian rescripting of the Platonic notion, now referring to the privation engendered by original sin and the fall of mankind. Des Périers suggests in an apostrophe to his addressee—presumably Marguerite de Navarre—that Disette has the true friendship that is the goal of the quest described in the poem (35). But what exactly does she have? Des Périers explains that Disette “has no solace but in loving” and is so ardent and faithful in her love “that she fears to be weak or to love only half-way.” The rare friendship she has and her unquenchable desire are coterminous; they will only be fully fulfilled after death in “perfect Friendship” with God. During her lifetime, however, the boundless desire for the “seul Amyaymé” inspires a loving community of women comprised of members determined by contiguity and consanguinity: “Her female neighbors, and female cousins, she holds very dear, so too her nearby full sisters who likewise love.”36 This confraternity—or, rather, consorority—must content Disette, at least provisionally, until her final union with God. The account of desire and of the community it engenders offered at the conclusion to the “Queste d’amytié” differs strikingly from that elaborated in Ficino’s Lysis commentary. Instead of emphasizing unending longing, Ficino writes that: Plato actually considers friendship to be a kind of habit drawn from a love of long duration. Because of this, love is incipient friendship. Friendship is actually old love, in which there remains much more pleasure than desire. From which it follows that he who desired in the past now takes pleasure. Accordingly, the ardor of present desire is not necessary for the habit of friendship, but it does require delight.37

In essence, Ficino claims that the desire that initially motivates friendship will eventually give way to enjoyment.38 This claim is consonant with his earlier proclamation, replete with Neoplatonic spiritual vocabulary, that friendship’s “goal is that from two souls a single one be purposefully made, from one will one life, 36

 “N’a reconfort que d’aymer” (Stanza 36), “Qu’elle ha craincte / D’estre Faincte, / Ou de n’aymer qu’a demy” (Stanza 37), “parfaicte Amytié” (Stanza 47), “Ses voysines, / Et cousines / Ha moult cheres, mesmement / Ses prochaines / Sœurs germaines, / Qui ayment pareillement” (Stanza 46). 37  “Plato vero amicitiam habitum quendam esse vult ex amore diuturno contractum. Quo sit ut amor sit exoriens amicitia. Amicitia vero inveteratus amor, in quo multo plus voluptatis quàm desiderii restat. Ex quo sequitur, ut qui cupierat, iam delectetur. Itaque amicitiæ habitus non necessario desiderii præsentis ardorem: sed delectationem exigit” (Ficino, 120). 38  This is a crucial part of Ficino’s response to Socrates’ argument (which Ficino thinks is actually only a Sophistic argument ventriloquized by Socrates) that the good man does not need friends. Ficino suggests that while the good man might not want for anything, and thus not experience desire predicated on lack, he can still enjoy the company of another.

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and finally the enjoyment of the single Numen and of the same Idea.”39 Whereas Des Périers explicitly rejects any link between the “Cruel Desire of base men” and Disette’s spiritual longing, describing instead a community of women mirroring God’s love during their lifetime and finding full satisfaction after death in union with the divine, in Ficino’s account, two men are initially drawn together by desire and subsequently take pleasure in spiritual ascent through mutual meditation. I propose that both forms of community—Ficino’s pair of male lovers/friends and Des Périers’s “neighbors,” “cousins,” and “full sisters”—derive from the concept of οἰκεῖος discussed by Socrates near the conclusion to the Lysis, but in radically different ways. Because oikeios does not require similarity as it is understood in the friendship doctrine outlined by Aristotle and Cicero, it gives Des Périers license to address kinship and community in his interpretive poem. By contrast, in his commentary on the Lysis Ficino uses oikeios to evoke a specific kind of similarity. He refers to the concept with the word “cognatio,” which literally means “born together” and thus also might seem to partake of the kind of kinship found in Des Périers’s “Queste d’amytié,” but he denotes something more particular, perhaps even more technical by it.40 According to Ficino, “cognatio means coming together in Idea, stars, genius, and a certain inclination of soul and body.”41 This definition is the key to Ficino’s response to Socrates’ claim that friendship cannot be based on similarity. Ficino writes that Plato “is not saying that similar things can in no way be made friends, but rather refuting the idea that simply any similarity you please would be sufficient to generate friendship.”42 What men must share rather than generic likeness is cognatio, a special kind of similarity lying at the origin of the desire for communion between them.43 While Ficino harnessed the concept of oikeios to his account of friendship and love between two men, Des Périers instead proposed a model of Christian love—perhaps of caritas—extending well beyond the like-minded male couple, 39  “finis est, ut è duobus animis unus voluntate fiat, ex una voluntate vita una, ac demum numinis unius eiusdemque ideæ fruitio” (Ficino, 119). Lying behind fruitio here may be Augustine’s distinction between enjoyment and use. See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson (New York, NY: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), I.4. 40  My suggestion that cognatio is meant to evoke οἰκεῖος is based in Ficino’s translation of the Lysis. Usually, he translates οἰκεῖος as “proprium.” In one crucial passage, however, Ficino’s translation also includes the word “cognatum” almost as a gloss to “proprium.” Socrates suggests to his interlocutors that it is that which belongs to one, that which is fitting or appropriate (221e; τοῦ οἰκείου) that might be the object of love, friendship and desire (221e; ὅ τε ἔρως καὶ ἡ φιλία καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία). In this instance, “τοῦ οἰκείου” becomes “Of that therefore which is proper and kindred” (128; “Eius igitur quod proprium, & cognatum est”). 41  “Cognatio convenientiam in idea: sydere: genio et quadam anime: corporisque affectione significat” (Ficino, 119). 42  “non dictum esse similia nullo modo amica fieri, imò negatum quod simpliciter quælibet similitudo ad amicitiam procreandam sufficiat” (Ficino, 120). 43  “Principium quo communionis huius desiderium excitatur: cognatio est” (Ficino, 119).

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although curiously limited by contiguity or proximity as well as gender. Indeed, in addition to not subscribing to the strictures of male friendship, Des Périers’s language seems carefully calibrated to echo and implicitly refute the rhetoric of accounts of Christian marriage as well. It instead opens toward other, less exclusive forms of community. When he writes that “Her female neighbors and female cousins she holds very dear, so too her nearby full sisters who likewise love” before turning to the account of dyadic union with God, Des Périers may reference Juan Luis Vives’s influential contemporary account of the great intimacy meant to be shared by a husband and wife: “Among citizens, our special friends are dearer to us; and among these, our kinsfolk are more beloved; and of those joined by blood, none is closer than the wife….”44 Des Périers has, however, omitted marriage and indeed any kind of terrestrial dyadic union from his discussion. Similarly, Des Périers’s expression “Sœurs germaines,” or “full Sisters,” may echo Augustine’s description in De bono coniugali of marriage as “a true [germana] union of friendship.”45 The Latin adjective “germanus” refers to brothers and sisters with the same parents—in his 1544 Dictionarium latinogallicum, Robert Estienne first defines “germanus” as “Engendré de mesme germe” (Engendered by the same seed)—and by extension it can also mean genuine, real, true.46 Whereas Augustine uses “germanus” figuratively to connote the closeness of marriage, Des Périers employs the French cognate to describe a relationship of consanguinity, namely sisterhood, although the relationship itself seems meant to be taken metaphorically. (Marguerite de Navarre did not have any sisters.) Crucially, he has also made the word plural. If in his celebration of dyadic friendship between men Ficino used oikeios to solve one problem (why like won’t like like), Des Périers employed the concept to solve another problem, namely an overemphasis on desire or friendship in terrestrial couples, by extending the kinds of relationships named by friendship. Des Périers’s description of the final union with God also implicitly rejects singular human attachments. He writes “So, the Bell, seeing that she possesses but half [la moytié] of herself, is content to wait for her perfect Friendship.”47 This use of the expression “la moytié” may evoke the Aristophanic myth of the origin of  Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 329. For an account of how Vives and some other contemporary humanists including Erasmus incorporated ideas about similitude and friendship into marriage, which Des Périers strikingly avoids, see Constance Furey, “Bound by Likeness: Vives and Erasmus on Friendship and Marriage,” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 29–43. 45  “amicalis quædam et germana coniunctio” (Augustine, De bono coniugali and De sanctu virginitate, ed. P.G. Walsh [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], section I). 46  Robert Estienne, Dictionarium latinogallicum (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1544), s.v. “germanus.” 47  “Or, la Belle, Voyant qu’elle / N’a de soy que la moytié, / Se contente, / Soubs l’attente / De sa parfaicte Amytié” (Stanza 47). 44

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desire from Plato’s Symposium.48 The brief poem about Robin and Marion that Des Périers inserted into his Lysis translation discussed above may also have alluded to the myth by discussing the quest to find one’s “semblable.” It is also implicitly brought into play early in the translation when Hippothales asks Socrates to explain “how a Lover can acquire the good grace of his Beloved part [sa partie Aymee].”49 Here, too, the reference is absent from the Latin, in which Hippothales asks “by what means can someone … win over those he loves.”50 The move from Hippothales’ mundane concern for erotic conquest to the spiritual conclusion of the “Queste d’amytié,” perhaps linked by references to the Symposium, resonates with Marguerite de Navarre’s critique of the ways in which earthly attachments can interfere with one’s devotion to God in works such as Le Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, La Navire, and Les Prisons.51 Socrates expresses a similar concern during his discussion of the “first friend” quoted above. Moreover, the “good grace,” or consent, Hippothales would like to know how to win from his beloved is replaced in the “Queste d’amytié” by the “grace” present in every heart that recognizes it. This revision reminds the reader that God is the proper object of desire while perhaps subtly questioning the role of works in salvation—there is nothing fallen man can do to win God’s grace. Once again, we find Plato’s ideas revised in the service of a theological program. As an ensemble, these variations offer a particular Christian vision in which grace and biblical inspiration are the keys to salvation and where singular earthly attachments must be attenuated. Whether by virtue of personal conviction or astute completion of his commission, Des Périers produced a French Lysis that sets forth a version of friendship closely attuned to the evangelical beliefs of Marguerite de Navarre. It is also a version of friendship that differs markedly from the canonical accounts according to which friends are always male, always alike, and only come in pairs. De Rozières Rededicates Lucian’s Toxaris My analysis of De Rozières’s Toxaris considers how he adapted for a new addressee the dedicatory epistle Erasmus penned for his own translation of the dialogue. The French version of the epistle mostly follows the Latin. De Rozières reproduces a discussion of gift-giving at the outset of the dedication as well as subsequent praise of the addressee’s preference for letters over riches nearly word for word. Minor changes adapt these passages for their new addressee. For example, Erasmus’s  See, for example, Antoine Heroët’s translation of the Aristophanic myth in his La Parfaicte amye … Avec plusieurs aultres compositions dudict Autheur (Lyon: Estienne Dolet, 1543), 70–79, in which we find repeated reference to “moytiés” seeking each other out. 49  “comment un Amant peult acquerir la bonne grace de sa partie Aymee” (Des Périers, 7). 50  “qua ratione quis … conciliare sibi quos amet, possit” (Ficino, 123). 51  See Paula Sommers, Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent (Geneva: Droz, 1989), 13–14. 48

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description of the difficulty of choosing an appropriate gift to give “to such a patron [patronum], to so powerful a friend” becomes “To so exalted and magnanimous a Princess as yourself.”52 De Rozières does not name Marguerite his friend, which is not surprising, but he also avoids translating “patronum” (protector, defender, patron), perhaps because this was not in fact the relationship he had with her. More substantial changes alter the implications of a discussion of Christian friendship in two ways, one with potential religious implications and the other attenuating the Latin letter’s evocations of reciprocity. De Rozières writes that “there is Nothing more Christian than the true and perfect friendship that is to live and die with god.”53 While the first part of the phrase follows the Latin fairly closely, the final words differ suggestively from the original. Erasmus wrote that “there is nothing more Christian than true and perfect friendship, than to die with Christ, than to live in Christ.”54 The reversion in Erasmus from dying with Christ to living in Christ points to the resurrection. The French avoids any such allusion by progressing instead from life to death. While this change might reflect scruples about the recent demise of Marguerite de France’s brother, it could also betray reformation doubts about the possibility of certainty in one’s justification. Moreover, replacing “Christ” with “God” avoids the potential allusion to imitatio Christi, perhaps in deference to evangelical scruples about not privileging works over faith. These changes therefore might reflect the evangelical religious climate around Marguerite de France although they are by no means conclusive. The second change in the discussion of Christian friendship concerns how De Rozières embeds it in the epistle. In the original, Erasmus explains that he has decided to dedicate the Toxaris translation to the bishop because of the man’s love of letters before moving directly into an account of friendship in antiquity and under Christianity. He next observes that there is both pleasure and utility to be taken from Lucian’s representation of the different habits of speech in the two interlocutors in the Toxaris: while the Greek Mnesippus is “courteous, refined and pleasing,” the Scythian Toxaris is “plain, disordered, rough, persistent, uncultivated and aggressive.” De Rozières moves the Latin sentence introducing the discussion of the differences between the Scythian and the Greek so that it instead prefaces the account of friendship in the dialogue. He does not include the passage contrasting Mnesippus and Toxaris at all. While these alterations might reflect a change in emphasis away from the pleasures offered by erudition, they also undo one of the clever rhetorical devices Erasmus uses to bind himself to his august patron across a substantial difference in status. When Erasmus concludes the epistle by asking the “great Bishop” to accept the “new year’s gift of your poor client,” he subtly echoes his earlier description of the contrasting interlocutors 52  “ad tantum patronum, ad tam potentem amicum” (Erasmus, 48), “A tant haulte et magnanime princesse comme vous” (De Rozières, fol. 3v). 53  “n’estre Rien plus chrestien que la vraye et parfaicte amytie comme vivre & mourir avec dieu” (De Rozières, fol. 4r). 54  “nihil aliud sit Christianismus, quam vera perfectaque amicitia, quam cum mori Christo, quam vivere in Christo” (Erasmus, 48).

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in the dialogue.55 Rather than emphasizing that friendship brings together people who are entirely alike, the original letter anticipates the dialogue it introduces by figuring friendship as something that unites people across difference.56 The French version concludes otherwise. Instead of calling attention to forms of reciprocity between translator and dedicatee, De Rozières invokes an intermediary when he asks Marguerite to accept the gift of the translation “for the love of the one who ordered me to compose it.”57 And whereas Erasmus concludes by describing a final exchange—he asks his patron to accept the gift of the dialogue and expresses his hope that Richard will continue “to love, furnish and shelter” him—De Rozières states his wish that God keep Marguerite “in joyfull happiness and prosperous good fortune” and suggests that his gift should serve as a “perpetual witness of the service and good deeds I owe you for my entire life.”58 In De Rozières’s letter, something—perhaps both social status and gender—prohibits the deployment of the power of friendship to bridge difference, while this is precisely the use Erasmus seeks to make of it in the original epistle. While Erasmus does not deny the difference of status between himself and Bishop Richard Foxe, this difference does not keep him from naming the man his friend—as well as his patron. In contrast, De Rozières’s letter to Marguerite de France describes a non-reciprocal circuit of exchange: Charles d’Orléans requested the translation that De Rozières now presents to the Princess. Rather than asking for anything in return, he proclaims only his intent to continue to serve her. Furthermore, the appeal asking her to accept the gift mentions her deceased brother and more specifically her love for him. de Rozières’s reworking of Erasmus’s dedication to his Toxaris translation had replaced an emphasis on affinity or similarity with a focus on kinship. Rather than communities of men joined through friendship based on similarities of faith or of learning which overcome other forms of difference, as in the case of Erasmus’s dedicatory epistle, in De Rozières’s letter to Marguerite de France connection is ultimately a matter not of an elective affinity but of blood, not of chosen friendship but of familial love. Conclusion In the context of a discussion of Plato’s Lysis, Jacques Derrida writes—with some provisos—that “the central question” of his book Politics of Friendship “would be that of a friendship without hearth, of a philía without oikeiótês.”59 What the 55

 “comis, facetus, festius,” “simplex, incondita, aspera, sædula, fera, fortis,” “amplissime Præsul,” “clientuli tui strenulam” (Erasmus, 48). 56  See Charlier, Érasme et l’amitié, 43–4. 57  “pour lamour de celluy qui me lavoit commandé faire” (De Rozières, fol. 4v). 58  “amare, ornare, juvare” (Erasmus, 48), “en felicite heureuse et prospere fortune,” “perpetuel tesmoing du service que vous doibtz et beaulx faire toute ma vie” (De Rozières, fol. 4v). 59  Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 154–5.

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paratextual matter to the translations dedicated to women discussed above offers is instead oikeiótês without homoiotês, kinship (metaphoric or literal) without likeness. For Derrida, the turn from oikeiótês would be a turn toward alterity and difference. Ficino’s desire to constrain the meaning of oikeiótês to a particular kind of similarity is instructive in this regard. For him, oikeiótês is the kind of homoiotês that counts in friendship, affinity within likeness. Whether or not this use of oikeiótês to circumvent Socrates’ insistence that “the Similar is useless to its Like: and that insofar as one is useless to another, can never be its friend” is in the spirit of the Lysis, for Des Périers, oikeiótês instead opened onto multiple ruptures in the friendship tradition: a community of many rather than the paradigmatic couple Ficino remained wedded to, one of women rather than men joined by contiguity and (metaphoric?) kinship instead of likeness. Intriguingly, these are some of the openings out from a sometimes claustrophobic friendship discourse most avidly sought by Derrida in Politics of Friendship. Another, perhaps the most crucial, would be friendship between men and women. Does the love between Marguerite de France and her deceased brother Charles d’Orléans—joined by yet another kind of oikeiótês—count as such a friendship? Ultimately, none of these relationships is adequate to the enticing promise of the radically hospitable friendship Derrida desires. For one thing, the models of friendship celebrated by Des Périers and De Rozières are explicitly Christian and draw on conventional accounts of communities joined in Christ or God. Nonetheless, that a modified set of exclusions governs them points to the malleability of a friendship discourse too often considered static and monolithic. We saw above not only classical texts mobilized in the service of Christian society but also—and more intriguingly—how the paratextual materials dedicated to women transformed both the ancient tradition and their much more proximate Christian precursors. Des Périers turned from the all-male homoerotic sphere of Plato’s Lysis and from Ficino’s couple of men together contemplating God to a group of women also triangulated by God and equally homosocial. His compound expressions “amyamoureux” and “amyaymé” trouble the distinction between friendship and love. Perhaps this ambivalence and a concern for propriety conditioned his exclusion of men from the consorority he described at the conclusion to the “Queste d’amytié,” although Marguerite de Navarre did not herself hesitate to confront the problem of relationships between men and women directly in her Heptaméron. While sexual difference is accommodated by De Rozières’s dedicatory epistle, instead of Des Périers’s presumably metaphoric sisterhood he hails a literal relationship of brother and sister. Furthermore, this familial version of oikeiótês has replaced the friendship by which Erasmus characterized (and perhaps cultivated) his relationship with Bishop Foxe across a substantial difference of status (and De Rozières is relegated to the position of a courtier). It is clear from the lives and letters of both Marguerite de Navarre and Marguerite de France that they understood their community of friends and interlocutors to extend more widely than the limited imagination of these paratextual materials, materials dedicated to them by men whose very attempts to curry favor also

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enacted restrictions.60 But insofar as these restrictions do not always submit to the austere discipline of a limited range of proscriptive classical texts, they point to the flexibility of the friendship tradition and its ability to accommodate some of the exclusions at times said to be constitutive of it. Moreover, they show how some of the foundational texts of the tradition should, like friendship itself, not be viewed as unchanging Platonic ideals, but rather as susceptible to transformation through motivated interpretation, translation and glossing.

60  In addition to the bibliography cited above, see Patricia Francis Cholakian and Rouben Charles Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006).

Chapter 6

From Reception to Assassination: French Negotiations of “Platonic Love” Katherine Crawford

In a letter to Alamanno Donato, Marsilio Ficino used the phrase “amore Platonico.”1 As Paul Kristeller notes, this is the source of the notion of Platonic love, articulated by Ficino: “… we begin meanwhile to love each other, so that apparently we have realized and perfected in ourselves that Idea of true love which Plato formulates in his work. From this Platonic love therefore a Platonic friendship arises….”2 This is a lovely concept, and one that remains, in various bastardized forms, in relatively common usage. But it was not actually very Platonic, and French reactions to Plato and Ficino’s Neoplatonism reveal much unease about the boundaries of love and friendship. Platonic ideas about friendship produced something of a stumbling block for those humanists who first endeavored to understand it. From its early introduction in France by Symphorien Champier to the Neoplatonic inflections in Montaigne to efforts by humanists to assimilate Plato’s dialogues Lysis and The Symposium into the canon, friendship opened unsettling ambiguities in Renaissance France. Because humanism and politics were closely linked, these ambiguities shaped not just the reception of Plato, but also royal policy and court strategy. Humanists served the king, helped articulate his policies, and conveyed the royal image to the world beyond the court. Humanist and royal interest in Plato converged: Plato was the spokesman for social structures understood as constituting the good life, and he offered the prospect of social harmony under the auspices of wise, well-educated philosopher-kings. It was, we shall see, an attractive vision, but when the king, Henri III (r. 1574–1589) attempted to deploy Neoplatonic friendship as a political tool for managing sectarian conflict, critics drew from a range of damning interpretations abundant in humanist commentary on Plato to volley back at the monarchy. Ambiguity around the implications of male-male friendship did not create the violence and disruption that eventually led to Henri’s assassination, but the politically fraught environment could not sustain Ficino’s buoyant optimism. Among the social structures of interest to Plato and his humanist advocates was friendship, and thus this story begins with Ficino and his assertions on behalf  Marsilio Ficino, Epistolae Marsilii Ficini Florentini (Nuremberg: Antonio Koberger, 1497), bk. 2, letter 76. 2  Paul O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1943), 286. 1

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of “amore Platonico.” As the most vocal proponent of Plato as a force for positive good—Ficino envisioned reinvigorating Christian theology with Plato—Ficino’s Neoplatonism entered French culture rather fulsomely, if not always entirely comfortably. Ficino’s letters, dialogues, and commentaries circulated extensively, while Italian Neoplatonists such as Leone Ebreo, Mario Equicola, and Pietro Bembo were available in Italian and French, often in multiple editions.3 French Neoplatonism, I have argued elsewhere, wrestled mightily with the corporeal implications of Neoplatonic notions of love. Although corporeal desire threatened to undermine Neoplatonic ethics, the impulse to utilize Neoplatonism to revitalize Christianity remained strong.4 These conflicting imperatives are evident from the earliest efforts to bring Neoplatonism to France. The physician Symphorien Champier (1472?–1539) was among the first French humanists to advocate Ficino’s Neoplatonism. The ambiguities of Neoplatonic friendship are already evident in the prefatory letter of the presentation copy, which he addresses to his friend, the physician André Briau. Champier tells a story to explain his intense attachment to Briau. In the midst of meditating on Plato’s Symposium and musing about “to whom especially I might direct my love,” Cupid shot him.5 After listening to Cupid boast about his triumphs over even the king of the gods, Champier watches as Cupid shoots Briau as well. Champier dampens the homoerotic images of men piercing other men by retreating into the language of procreation.6 Nevertheless, he emphasizes that Cupid is the god of love, referring to “amore” rather than “amicitia” throughout.7 3  See Leone Hebreo [Léon Hébreu; Judah Abrabanel], Dialoghi di amore (Venice: Aldo, 1545), and in French: Léon Hébreu, Philosophie d’amour de M. Leon Hebreu (Lyon: Guillaume Rouille et Thibauld Payen, 1551). Perhaps begun as early as 1502. The Pontus de Tyard translation, De l’amour (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1551) has been reprinted in a modern edition. Mario Equicola, Les six livres de Mario Equicola d’Alveto, trans. Gabriel Chappuys Tourangeay (Paris: Jean Housé, 1584) with subsequent editions in 1589 and 1598; Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani di messer Pietro Bembo (Venice: Aldo Romano, 1505); in French as Les azolains de Monseigneur Bembo, trans. Jehan Martin (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, pour luy et G. Corrozet, 1545), reprinted in 1555 and 1572. 4  Katherine Crawford, The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Ch. 3. 5  The letter was appended to the 1503 version of Champier’s La nef des dames vertueuses. For an accessible version of the letter, see Symphorien Champier, Le Livre de vraye amour, intro. and ed. James B. Wadsworth (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1962), 43–50. The ruminating on love appears on p. 43. For a modern edition of the complete text, see Symphorien Champier, La nef des dames vertueuses, ed. Judy Kem (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007). 6  “Vis quidam generandi genderande pulchritudinis, intelligendi vero potentia contemplande illius habet desiderium” (Champier, Vraye amour, 47). 7  “… in animi trutina in quem potissimum amorem meum converterem” (Champier, Vraye amour, 43). For more on Champier’s struggles with Ficino, see Katherine Crawford, “Marsilio Ficino, Neoplatonism, and the Problem of Sex,” Renaissance and Reformation; Renaissance et réforme 28, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 3–35.

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Part of Champier’s struggle over the boundaries of friendship stems from the multiple lineages he was negotiating. He blends Platonic elements with ideas of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca with respect to friendship. Aristotle’s presumptions about gender hierarchy produced the assumption that only men could engage in true friendship, making equality between men (Champier’s professional and personal links to Briau, for instance) a crucial prerequisite to friendship. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle deliberately circumscribes friendship (philia) by arguing that it comes in three kinds. Philia can be based on utility (or benefit), pleasure, or goodness. Aristotle understands utility and pleasure as largely accidental, while goodness is intentional and perfect, not least because it entails utility and pleasure.8 Mutuality is essential for Aristotle, and the association of philia with long-standing Greek notions of hospitality (going back at least to Homeric philein) forms the core of Aristotelian ethics of friendship.9 Ullrich Langer analyzes early modern, specifically French, iterations of Aristotelian friendship, expanding on Aristotle’s originary formulations by recalling the major interventions of the medieval Aristotelian commentators such as Aquinas, Ockham, and Peter Lombard. Langer’s aim is to explore the ethical issues associated with notions of perfect friendship in literature.10 Langer understands Aristotle in a largely apolitical sphere, which accords with the analyses of Laurie Shannon and Daniel Gordon, both of whom argue that friendship allows for the suspension of hierarchy within a space of equality.11 Plato proffered a more exteriorized, social ethics of friendship that could speak to political circumstances and social structures, as exemplified in the construction and content of the early dialogue, Lysis. In it, Socrates attempts to define love and friendship, to distinguish between reciprocal and non-reciprocal friendship, and to account for the causes of love. Socrates takes on the model in which an older lover (erastēs) pursues unreciprocated sexual love (eros) directed at a “boy” or young man with whom he is in love (erṓmenos). Philia (friendship) is supposed to be different from eros in that eros presumes a sexual component that philia does not. Plato illustrates the sexual connotations of eros in his description of the relationship of Hippothales to the young Lysis, which he  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, NY: Modern Library, 2001), VIII, chs. 3–8, 13 (1156b–1159b, 1162b–1163b). 9  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX, ch. 1 (1164a–b). 10  Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994). For a general account of friendship from Plato to the Middle Ages, see Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1994). 11  Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 8

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sets against the friendship based on reciprocity (philia) between Lysis and another young man, Menexenus. The distinction between philia and eros collapses, however, because Socrates conflates the reciprocity of philia with the utility of eros. Philia is all about wanting to make someone happy, Socrates submits, but utility by means of knowledge and education can also make someone happy, such as in the relation of the erastēs and the erṓmenos. Although Socrates rhetorically distinguishes between reciprocal and non-reciprocal friendship, Plato uses both active and passive forms of philos, making reciprocity (and thus the relationship at hand) difficult to identify.12 In a passage that not only defies the commonplace that “amity is equality” but that also flouts etymology, Plato has Socrates insist that men who are “alike” cannot be in a reciprocal relationship because “alike” means identical, rather than similar in some respects and therefore with the capacity for reciprocity. Eventually, Socrates decides that desire is the cause of love, which does little to clarify philia’s difference from friendship. In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates leads the conversation with a purpose that emerges convincingly in the final lines. In this instance, it seems that he starts out with a clearly defined agenda and gives up at the end. Or rather, Plato gives up and leaves the erotics of friendship to the edges of his more elaborate dialogues on love, Phaedrus and The Symposium. In Plato’s larger corpus, philia (friendship/love) is both distinct and indistinguishable from eros (love with a sexual component). On the one hand, Plato makes some division in that Lysis treats philia while Phaedrus and The Symposium focus on eros. On the other hand, the erotic tensions in Lysis are undeniable.13 Plato sets up the dialogue to explore friendship in order for Socrates to teach Hippothales how to mentor the object of his love, the boy Lysis. Hippothales is the erastēs, the older, sexually active partner (eron) in a male homosexual relationship. Lysis is thus the paidika, the younger, sexually passive beloved (erṓmenos). Hippothales has not yet consummated his love, but his aspirations stand in contrast with the reciprocal, non-sexual philia exemplified in the relationship between Lysis and Menexenus. Although Plato’s Socrates is unable to define philia persuasively, two consistent components of Platonic friendship do emerge: educative philia is the proper mode between the erastēs and the erṓmenos; and friendship has reciprocal obligations that may or may not be equal, depending on the quality of the friendship. Unlike the internalized ethics of Aristotelian friendship, the Platonic notion of friendship has inescapably public elements. Both educative philia and the erastēs/erṓmenos relationship are understood as visibly exemplifying and supporting hierarchical social order.

 Plato, Lysis, trans. and intro. Donald Watt in Early Socratic Dialogues, ed. Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin, 2005), 122–3. 13  See also the discussion in Naomi Reshotko, “Plato’s Lysis: A Socratic Treatise on Desire and Attraction,” Apeiron 30, no. 1 (1997): 1–18, and David Bolotin, Plato’s Dialogues on Friendship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). 12

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Grappling with Plato For French humanists, negotiating the ambiguities of Plato’s text and the public implications of his model of friendship proved difficult. Humanists calculated that editions of ancient texts would appeal to a patron, potential patron, or larger reading audience. But humanists also hedged their bets. Given the difficulties of Platonic friendship, softening the problematic bits and framing through commentary were crucial strategies. Collectively, humanist responses made Platonic friendship more visible, but also more potentially incendiary. One set of strategic choices is apparent in the first translation of the Lysis, which appeared as Le Discours de la Queste d’Amytié dict Lysis de Platon (1544) by Bonaventure des Périers.14 A member of the household of Marguerite de Navarre, Des Périers’s work reflects Plato’s appeal for members of Marguerite’s circle.15 As Marc Schachter reveals in his essay in this volume, Marguerite sought to invigorate Christianity by encouraging intellectual engagement with Neoplatonism. Des Périers did not seem especially troubled by the complicated derivations of friendship and their failings, but his text betrays much anxiety about the articulation of friendship as erotic. In his efforts to efface the homoerotic content, Des Périers made subtle but crucial changes to the dialogue. Where the original said, “If you’ve any further advice to give, do tell me what a man ought to say and do to endear himself to his boy,” Des Périers opted for: “… how a lover can gain the favor of his beloved [sa partie aymée].” The deliberate use of the French feminine “sa partie” steers the reader away from the homosocial identification, as does its depersonalization.16 Where Plato describes Lysis as “rather handsome and good,” Dés Periers prefers, “seemed to be good and honorable [honneste].”17 The choice of “honneste,” a term associated with sexual probity, at once evokes sexuality and denies it by asserting Lysis’ virtuous status. Plato has Socrates ruminate, “It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘There, Hippothales, that’s how to talk to one’s boy, making him humble and unaffected, not, as you do, making him conceited and spoiled.’” Des Périers’s version reads instead like a child-rearing manual, once again eliding the gendered “boy” with the vaguer “children”: “The way you talk to children, Hippothales, is by correcting and chastening them, not  Bonaventure des Périers, Recueil des oeuvres de feu Bonaventure Des Periers (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1544). Citations from the relatively modern edition: Bonaventure des Périers, Oeuvres françoises de Bonaventure Des Periers, ed. Louis Lacour, 2 vols. (Paris: P. Jannet, 1856). 15  On the workings of Marguerite and her circle, see for instance Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, ed. Dora E. Polachek (Amherst, MA: Hestia Press, 1993). For Marguerite’s links to Neoplatonism, see Abel Lefranc, Marguerite de Navarre et le platonisme de la Renaissance (Paris: n.p., 1897). 16  “… comment un amant peut acquerir la bonne grace de sa partie aymée” (Plato, Lysis, 206c; Des Périers, Oeuvres françoises, 1:12). 17   “sembloit estre bon et honneste” (Plato, Lysis, 207a; Des Périers, Oeuvres françoises, 1:13). 14

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by praise and flattery.”18 Elsewhere, Des Périers simply rewrites uncomfortable bits. At one point, Plato quotes Homer saying, “God always brings like to like.” Plato indicates that the reference is to male friends whose intimacy is based on similarity of age and virtue. Des Périers avoids any suggestion of homoeroticism by superseding Homer’s verse with a proverb about Robin and Marion, who were famous in French medieval literature as (heterosexual) lovers.19 In another instance, Plato has Ctesippus teasing Hippothales: “Now isn’t it ridiculous that a man who is a lover and thinks of virtually nothing but the boy he’s in love with should have nothing original to say …?” Des Périers frames the matter in the direction of social decorum: “… a child would surely feel ashamed to have [such feelings].”20 Throughout, “enfant” replaces “boy,” “honest” replaces “handsome,” and boys are not friends with men. Despite Ficino’s “amore Platonico,” it seems that sexless friendship between men had to be sculpted out of the larger body of Plato’s thought. Where Des Périers resorted to bowdlerization, a second translation of Lysis by Blaise de Vigenère attended more faithfully to Plato’s original text, but only after Vigenère went to great lengths to justify and explain his decision to publish the dialogue. Vigenère (1523–1596), a crytographer and secrétaire du roi for Henri III, seems to have had an agenda shaped by the political circumstances of his generation. A member of the royal Académie du Palais renowned for its Classical interests, Vigenère lambasts would-be-humanists who offer epitomes of ancient texts.21 Such works are mutilations, he insists; only complete, accurate versions of the ancient greats are worth printing.22 Plato’s dialogues, whatever their faults, Vigenère continues, are like the Doric order in architecture, serving as the support for all that comes after. Plato can help readers distinguish true friends from false ones, which Vigenère understands as the basis for social order. Writing in the midst of the Wars of Religion—the first armed conflict was in 1562, and brief periods of peace had been punctuated by increasing bloodshed ever since—Vigenère makes a pitch for friendship as a solution to civil war: “Friendship also symbolizes peace, 18

 “Voyla les propos, Hippothales, que l’on doit tenir aux enfans en les reprenant et rebaissant, non pas les louer et flatter” (Plato, Lysis, 210e; Des Périers, Oeuvres françoises, 1:20). 19  Plato, Lysis, 214a with the quotation from Homer, The Odyssey, XVII, 218. Des Périers, Oeuvres françoises, 1:27. Louis-Jean-Nicolas Monmerqué and Francisque Michel identify the proverb in Théatre français au moyen âge, publié d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du roi (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1842) as originating from “l’ancien jeu de Robin et Marion.” See pp. 28, 669. 20  “… sont telz que certes un enfant auroit honte de les tenir” (Plato, Lysis, 205b–c; Des Périers, Oeuvres françoises, 1:10). 21  For the ancient influences and themes more broadly, see Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute/University of London, 1947). 22  Blaise de Vigenère, Trois dialogues de l’amitié: le Lysis de Platon, et le Laelius de Ciceron … et le Toxaris de Lucian (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1579), unpaginated preface. The preface is 14 pages long. Some folios are numbers, and there is one signature.

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and consequently, enmity, war. Friendship is the cause of all good, tranquility, and felicity.”23 In keeping with his hope that friendship can nurture peace, Vigenère celebrates the “benign friendship” [benigne Amitié] between Achilles and Patroclus in contrast with the “more illegitimate love” [Amour plus illegitime] of Paris for Helen. Friendship is about virtue; love is about lust. Vigenère’s logic seems to be that illegitimate love is proved by war; war proves love illegitimate; therefore friendship is good and peaceful. This does not seem terribly troublesome, but Plato’s advocacy of male-male friendship made Vigenère nervous. Although Vigenère prefaces other dialogues in the volume by Cicero and Lucian with separate prologues, they consist of brief paragraphs, and neither author requires an apology or justification in advance. Vigenère’s struggles indicate that properly bounded friendship within a Neoplatonic frame was not easily conveyed.24 It is telling that Loys Le Roy (1510?–1577), the professor of Greek appointed to the Collège Royal in 1572, avoided the Lysis altogether. Le Roy translated and commented extensively on The Republic, Timaeus, Phaedo, and Symposium, but remarks only briefly on friendship and does so by insisting on the chaste nature of the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus.25 Associated by profession and patronage with the monarchy, Vigenère and Le Roy attempted, albeit weakly, to frame Platonic friendship as a positive good. The Huguenot minister and historiographer of France Jean de Serres (1540?–1598) opted for rejection. He. translated all of Plato from Greek into Latin, supplementing the translation with marginal comments on points of information and his own opinions about Plato’s philosophy. Serres has been called an “antiNeoplatonist,” and one can read his marginalia as an attempt to discredit the 23  “L’amitié au reste symbolise à la paix; & par consequent l’inimitié à la guerre. L’Amitié est la cause de tout bien, repos & felicité” (Vigenère, Trois dialogues de l’amitié). Among the many accounts of the Wars of Religion, particularly helpful with respect to the quality and dynamics of escalating sectarian violence are Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610), preface Pierre Chaunu, intro. Denis Richet (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990); and Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991). 24  Other aspects of Plato’s thought were also problematic. On 4 November 1544, the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris pronounced Plato heretical for denying the immortality of the soul. See Plato, Deux dialogues de Platon. Scavoir est: l’ung intitulé Axiochu … Ung aultre intitulé Hipparchus: qui est de la Connoytise de l’Homme touchant la Lucratifve in Le Second enfer d’Estienne Dolet (Paris: Tastu pour Techener, 1830), 15. Dolet’s text was originally printed in Lyon in 1544. Dolet was executed as a relapsed heretic on 3 August 1546. Plato was not Dolet’s only fault, but publishing these dialogues did not help. 25  Loys Le Roy, Le Sympose de Platon, ou de l’amour et de beauté traduit de grec en françois, avec trois livres de commentaires, extraictz de toute philosophie (Paris: Jehan Longis & Robert le Mangnyer, 1558), fol. 16r. For Le Roy’s larger corpus, see La République (Paris: n.p., 1600); Le Timée de Platon, traittant de la nature du monde et de l’homme et de ce qui concerne universellement tant l’âme que le corps des deux (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1581); Le Phedon de Platon, traittant de l’immortalité de l’âme (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1581).

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Neoplatonic accretions to Plato.26 Serres does not hold back. In his description of the argument of the dialogue, Serres repudiates any positive characterization of Hippothales’ love for Lysis: “True and genuine friendship, however is prudently separated from mistaken friendship, which is the filthy and indeed unclean love of boys.”27 For Serres, the key to the dialogue lies in recognizing true (asexual) friendship from false (sexual) relationships. Lysis and Menexenus fulfill the criteria of appropriate age similarity, utility, and necessity, while Serres finds all other forms of friendship discussed by Plato spurious at best. Serres suggests that the problems with the dialogue come from Plato’s failure to understand that the age-divergent model could not fulfill the criteria of true friendship based on mutual utility. Serres asserts that friendship between Hippothales and Lysis is not acceptable because it is immodest.28 The comparison between the two types of friendship, Serres insists, favors the relationship between Lysis and Menexenus, not between Lysis and Hippothales. The former is appropriate and chaste; the latter is “false,” “shameful,” and “foolish.”29 Pure friendship is between the boys, Serres insists, because purity entails reciprocity on non-sexual terms.30 Serres understands Plato and follows the argument of the dialogue closely; he simply thinks Plato is wrong on a number of points, of which the idea that any male friendship is sexual is just one.31 Set as he is on undermining claims that Plato’s ethics are compatible with Christianity, Serres does not elaborate an alternative to Plato’s definition of friendship, but is content to point out Platonic errors. Friendship on an agestratified, homoerotic, sexual basis is irretrievably an error for Serres. The carefully constructed blind alleys, evasions, and indignant refusals around Platonic and Neoplatonic notions of friendship articulated the awkward interface between humanists interested in appropriating the wisdom of antiquity and what they happened to find when they actually read ancient texts such as Lysis. The vocabulary of criticism and the awareness of the complexities around friendship only multiplied when humanists attempted to articulate distinctions that had eluded Plato. Uneasiness about Neoplatonic friendship was liable to seep into any expression of friendly intimacy between men, including the friendship that is now upheld—all too uncritically, as George Hoffman reveals in his contribution to 26  Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 10 vols. (London: Routledge, 1998), 1:441. 27  “Falsam autem amicitiam, qualis est spurcus ille atque impurus puerorum amor, verè & prudenter discriminat à vera & germana amicitia” (Plato, Platonis opera quae extant omnium, trans. [to Latin] Jean de Serres, 3 vols. [Paris: H. Estienne, 1578], 2:202). 28  Plato, Platonis, 2:207, 210. Elsewhere, Serres condemns Hippothales for having an “impure and insane love” (impuri illius & insani amoris, [204]). 29  “Falsa,” “inhonestus,” and “ineptus” (Plato, Platonis, 2:203). The marginal note on 207 goes on to identify four components of true friendship in ways that exclude the agestratified, sexualized version represented by Hippothales. 30  “… ostendit Requiri mutuam illam in amicitiam consensionem” (Plato, Platonis, 2:212). 31  Serres recognizes, for instance, that Plato’s insistence on comprehensive similarity for friendship is not logical. See Plato, Platonis, 2:214–15.

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this volume—as the epitome of “Renaissance friendship”: Michel de Montaigne’s friendship with Étienne de la Boétie. Montaigne asserts the purity of friendship: As soon as it [physical desire] enters the boundaries of friendship, that is to say harmony of wills, it grows faint and languid. Enjoyment destroys it, as having a fleshly end, subject to satiety. Friendship on the contrary, is enjoyed according as it is desired; it is bred, nourished, and increased only in enjoyment, since it is spiritual, and the soul grows refined in practice.32

Paradoxically, though Montaigne proscribes desire from friendship, enjoyment marks both sated desire and the continued integrity of friendship. The difference between friends who cross the sexual line—something Montaigne explicitly denounces—and friends who keep their relationship pristine is one of degree rather than kind. Montaigne describes friendship as marked by “settled warmth, all gentleness and smoothness.” Friendship is without the emotional or physical extremes of physical desire.33 Like Plato’s Socrates in Lysis, Montaigne walks a rather thin line. Montaigne eschews the ecstatic visions of divine love, but he expresses his attachment to La Boétie in a way that retains the notion of the union of lovers: “In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”34 If not quite divinely inspired mystic union, friendship has the physical effect of reducing the prolix Montaigne to near speechlessness. Montaigne might seem to have less at stake than Des Périers (who was writing for a patron) or Vigenère (who was employed by the monarchy), but Montaigne’s  Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 137. “Aussitôt qu’il entre aux termes de l’amitié, c’est-à-dire en la convenance des volontés, il s’évanouit et s’alanguit. La jouissance le perd, comme ayant la fin corporelle et sujette à satiété. L’amitié au rebours est jouie à mesure qu’elle est désirée, ne s’élève, se nourit ni ne prend accroissance qu’en la jouissance, comme étant spirituelle et l’âme s’affinant par l’usage” (Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. André Tournon, 3 vols. [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Éditions, 1998], 1:314–15). 33  Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” 137. On sex in male-male friendship: “And that other, licentious Greek love is justly abhorred by our morality” (138). “Et cette autre licence Grecque est justement abhorée par nos moeurs” (Essais, 1:316). 34  Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” 139. “En l’amitié de quoi je parle, elles se mêlent et confondent l’une et l’autre, d’un mélange si universel qu’elles effacent et ne retrouvent plus la couture qui les a jointes. Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant: parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” (Essais, I: 318). For the Neoplatonic ecstasy of love in Castiglione, see The Book of the Courtier, trans. and intro. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 343. Montaigne invokes Castiglione on 214 and 485. The Courtier was popular in France, as documented in Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 32

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comments on friendship were risky nonetheless. Like the other humanists who wrestled with Platonic friendship, Montaigne ultimately revealed the tendency for friendship to exceed any attempts to delimit it. Moreover, Montaigne and the other Platonic interlocutors contributed to the archive of uneasy ideas about friendship, the public context of which took on significant political implications. The Hazards of Friendship But even though humanists had reservations, friendship in the Platonic mode had much to recommend it. The social utility of Platonic friendship in which age and status hierarchy could be imagined as transcendent and reciprocal offered Henri III possibilities when he organized royal patronage. The third son of Henri II (d. 1559) and Catherine de’ Medici, Henri inherited a kingdom divided by profound tensions between Catholics and Protestants and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Attempts to settle the religious conflict by promoting toleration through legislation (the earliest effort in this vein was the 1562 Edict of Toleration) were ineffectual. Because of the monarchy’s chronic and sizable debt, the king could not impose peace on the warring factions militarily.35 Sectarian violence, most spectacularly on the occasion of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres (beginning 24 August 1572), only exacerbated the divisions.36 Under these difficult circumstances, Henri III relied on friendship in public, Platonic terms.37 His friends protected him; he rewarded them. Most controversially, Henri and his friends professed their mutual love, and on this point, Henri proved vulnerable to the ambiguities that had consistently plagued accounts of Platonic friendship. Henri chose his friends largely from minor noble families, and his attachments to them were both profound and very public. Among those prominent at the beginning of the reign were Charles de Balsac, baron de Dunes, Henri Hébrard de Saint-Sulpice, and Jacques de Lévis-Caylus (or Quélus). These three were part of a shifting group Henri called “his troop” that included François d’Espinay de Saint-Luc, François d’O, Paul de Stuer de Caussade, sieur de Saint-Mégrin, Louis de Maugiron, and Guy d’Arces, baron de Livarot. Several of Henri’s friends had accompanied him to Poland after he was elected king on 16 May 1573. The “troop” benefited for themselves and their families from association with the king, collecting titles, honors, and seigneuries in abundance.38  On the failure of the monarchy militarily, see James B. Wood, The King’s Army: Warfare, Soldiers and Society during the Wars of Religion in France, 1562–1576 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 36  On the massacres, see for instance Arlette Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy: les mystères d’un crime d’État, 24 août 1572 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 37  Denis Crouzet, La nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy: un rêve perdu de la Renaissance (Paris: Fayard, 1994), indicates the prevalence of Neoplatonic ideas at the late Valois court. 38  Nicolas Le Roux, La faveur du roi: mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois (Seyssel : Champ Vallon, 2001), 210–33. 35

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Choosing advisors and even intimates was not necessarily a problem: kings needed people they could trust. Henri’s choices, however, did not reassure those who expected the king to lead in a decisive, masterful manner.39 Sheltered from contact with anyone outside his circle, Henri allowed his public displays of friendship to come in for criticism. Hostile observers condemned the “troop,” opting to refer to Henri’s friends by the far more derogatory term “mignons.” The mignons were dismissed as too young (most were about the same age as Henri), inexperienced, and insignificant for the honors Henri showered on them. Most damningly, critics latched onto the notion that the king selected them merely because he liked them. Henri’s affection for his “troop” proved politically explosive in part because of the uneasy associations attached to Platonic love. Much has been made of the mignons, about whom accusations of sodomitical intimacy with the king appeared quickly and remained available at moments of stress until the king’s death and, indeed, long after it.40 Not surprisingly, several texts directed at Henri reveal an attempt to describe the relationship between the king and his male favorites as exceeding the limits of Platonic notions of pure friendship. Critics utilized Platonic language about friendship that had been developed by humanists in the employ of the monarchy and nurtured in the royal court against the king.41 Among the striking elements in the condemnations of Henri are the rejection of Platonic inequality between friends and the assertion of the failure of educative philia. Because Platonic philia was not distinct from eros, critics were able to collapse the positive possibilities of friendship, leaving only sodomitical residue. 39  On Henri’s self-presentation, see Katherine Crawford, “Love, Sodomy, and Scandal: Controlling the Sexual Reputation of Henry III,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12, no. 4 (October 2003): 513–42. Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), has taken exception to my argument. I do not suggest it is the only reading of Henri’s actions, but I maintain it is a plausible one. 40  See David Teasley, “The Charge of Sodomy as a Political Weapon in Early Modern France: The Case of Henry III in Catholic League Polemic, 1585–1589,” The Maryland Historian 18, no. 1 (1987): 17–30. See also Keith Cameron, Henri III: Maligned or Malignant King? (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1978); David Potter, “Kingship in the Wars of Religion: The Reputation of Henri III of France,” European History Quarterly 25 (1995): 485–528; David A. Bell, “Unmasking a King: The Political Uses of Popular Literature Under the French Catholic League, 1588–89,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 3 (1989): 371–86; Guy Poirier, L’homosexualité dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996), 107–61; and Joseph Cady, “The ‘Masculine Love’ of the ‘Princes of Sodom’ ‘Practising the Art of Ganymede’ at Henri III’s Court: The Homosexuality of Henri III and his Mignons in Pierre de L’Éstoile’s Mémoires-Journaux,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 123–54. 41  Protestants had charged Henri and his entourage with debauchery and sodomy as early as 1572. See [Nicolas Barnaud?], Le réveille-matin des François: et de leurs voisins. Composé par Eusebe Philadelphe, cosmopolite, enforme de dialogues, 2 vols. (Paris: EDHIS, 1977), 2:130. Reprint of 1574 edition.

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The progression of this critical frame is apparent in the express disapproval of Henri’s relationships with his favorites. The complaints about the mignons documented by Pierre de L’Estoile reflect the growing concerns about Henri’s friendships. Early in his reign, Henri’s mignons accompanied him on visits to Paris, where their luxurious self-display—a deliberate attempt by Henri to demonstrate the material value of love for the king—aggravated the Parisians from whom Henri was seeking funds to fight the Protestants.42 Tension around the mignons continued throughout 1577, and then on 27 April 1578, Henri’s favorites dueled with the favorites of Henri’s brother, François, duc d’Anjou. Henri’s side got the worst of it, with two leading members of the “troop,” Quélus and Maugiron, mortally injured and several of the others badly wounded. Henri’s actions after the duel struck contemporaries as extreme, particularly in terms of the friendships Henri celebrated. As L’Estoile comments, “The king bore a marvelous love for Maugiron and him [Quélus], because he kissed the two dead men, had their heads clipped and their blond hair taken away and stored, removed from Quélus’s ears the pendants he had previously presented to him and attached with his own hands … These and similar actions (in truth, unworthy of the great and generous king he was) caused this prince to be held in deepening contempt….”43 With his emphasis on the unusual (“marvelous”) quality of the king’s affection, L’Estoile highlights the recognition of unequal status that marked Henri’s relationship with his favorites. The king is the distraught survivor of the beautiful young man, and Henri’s actions mirrored the physical intimacy of friendship of the sort highlighted in Platonic dialogues such as Lysis. L’Estoile was relatively restrained in his expression of discomfort about Henri’s behavior. The critical commentary about the king turned Platonic ambiguity into political animosity about Henri’s friendships. In his extended study of Henri’s patronage practices, Nicolas Le Roux has argued that the events of 1578 enabled the king to install new friends around him.44 Instead of the large  Pierre de L’Éstoile, Mémoires-Journaux de Pierre de L’Éstoile, ed. G. Brunet et al., 12 vols. (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1875–1896), 1:142–9. See Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 220–35, on fashion and excess connotations around the mignons. 43  “… le Roy portoit à Maugiron et à lui une merveilleuse amitié, car il les baisa tous deux morts, fist tondre leurs testes et emporter et serrer leurs blonds cheveux, osta à Quélus les pendans de ses aureilles, qui lui-même auparavant lui avoit donnés et attachés de sa propre main … Telles et semblables façons de faire (indignes à la verité d’un grand Roy et magnanime comme il estoit) causèrent peu à peu le mespris de ce Prince …” (L’Éstoile, Mémoires-Journaux, 1:244). Henri was less extreme but similarly affected by the death of a more peripheral mignon, Gaz. See Jean de Serres, Recueil des choses memorables avenues en France sous le regne de Henri II, François II, Charles IX, Henri III, et Henri IV. Depuis l’an M.D.XLVII jusque au commencement de l’an M.D.XCVII, 2nd ed. (n.p., 1598), 560. 44  Le Roux, La faveur du roi. See also Xavier Le Person, “Practiques” et “Practiqueurs”: la vie politique à la fin du règne de Henri III, 1584–1589, preface Denis Crouzet (Geneva: Droz, 2002), for Henri’s court in the final years of his reign. 42

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“troop,” Henri picked Jean-Louis Nogaret de La Valette, created duc d’Épernon, and Anne de Batarnay de Joyeuse, created duc de Joyeuse. Access to the king went through Épernon and Joyeuse, and Henri used the two to protect his own political middle ground: He sent Épernon to negotiate with the Protestants and their leader, Henri de Bourbon, king of Navarre, while Joyeuse was designated to oppose the Protestants, especially on the battlefield. Henri made his attachment clear in requiring all patronage to flow through the two “archmignons.” In addition to arranging for Joyeuse to marry his wife’s half-sister in a very lavish, public wedding in 1581, the king privately articulated his attachment to Joyeuse with some intensity: “I love him more than my self.”45 The division of labor collapsed when Joyeuse was killed at the battle of Coutras on 20 October 1587. With Joyeuse dead, the exterior reciprocity Henri was able to signal in his relationships lost balance. Reduced to a single favorite, Henri was vulnerable to charges of privileging Épernon to the detriment of the greater social good. This accounts for why Protestants were so vitriolic toward Épernon despite his record as their advocate with the king. The die-hard Huguenot Agrippa d’Aubigné called Épernon “a sodomite atheist, a pimp,” and included him among the “effeminate monsters” with whom Henri surrounded himself.46 Catholics were even more vicious because of Épernon’s role. Committed Catholics, many of whom had joined or were sympathetic to the Catholic League, were dedicated to preventing a Protestant from succeeding to the throne and discrediting any policies that seemed to favor the Protestants. League critics often elided sodomy, Protestantism, and friendship in their attacks. Jean Boucher especially made much of the dangers of Platonic forms of friendship. A member of the faculty of the Sorbonne and a founding member of the Parisian leadership of the League, Boucher was also a renowned rabble-rousing preacher as curate of St. Benoît.47 His Histoire tragique et memorable de Pierre de Gaverston propagated many of 45  BN ms fr 3349, fol. 21r. (Henri to madame Du Bouchayge): “je l’ayme plus que moy mesmes.” Among the contemporary accounts of the marriage, see L’Éstoile, MémoiresJournaux, 2:22–3; Pierre de Ronsard, “Épithalame de monseigneur de Joyeuse, admiral de France,” Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 2:297–9; Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx, Le Balet Comique, 1581. A Facsimile with an Introduction, ed. Margaret M. McGowan (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), and BN ms fr. 26170, fols. 106r–7v. For accounts of the festivities, see Frances Yates, “Poésie et musique dans les ‘Magnificences’ au mariage du Duc de Joyeuse,” in Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1954), 241–63; Jacques Lavaud, “Les noces de Joyeuse,” Humanisme et Renaissance 2, no. 1 (1935): 44–52; and Margaret McGowan, “1581: The Spectacle of Power,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 243–8. 46  “Un sodomite athee, un maquereau”; “monstres effeminez” (Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques, “Princes,” vv. 868, 667, in Œuvres, ed. Henri Weber, Jacques Bailbé, and Marguerite Soulié [Paris: Gallimard, 1969], 74, 69). 47  Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 131.

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the accusations made about the relationship between Henri and Épernon.48 The customary epistolary introduction describes stumbling on the story of “Pierre de Gaverston” (Piers Gaveston, consistently misspelled), whose life, Boucher notes, parallels Épernon’s. Both are Gascons and favorites of (lousy) kings.49 The story itself is instructive, Boucher announces, and he proceeds to retell it. Like Épernon, Gaverston began as an obscure minor noble. In 1297, he entered the service of Edward I, where he and the future Edward II became friends. Almost immediately, there were bad signs: “As for Gaverston, no matter how much he tried to make a good show of loving this young prince in return, he actually loved the gifts he received from him even more….”50 Boucher’s choice to reject exclusive reciprocity between Edward and Gaveston marks his refusal of Henri’s insistence on philia as determinant of his friendships. Boucher methodically moves toward tainting Edward/Henri with a sexualized erastēs/erṓmenos relationship instead. Edward I tries to separate the young men, but fails, and when Edward II succeeds to the throne, Gaveston receives the king’s favor to the point of making the leading nobles uncomfortable. Boucher traces mounting criticism of the favorite, his escalating greed, and attempts by the king to evade banishing his friend. Shifting the parallel slightly, Boucher recounts Edward arranging to marry Gaveston into the royal family, mirroring Henri III’s arrangements that married Joyeuse into the royal household.51 When Edward marries Isabeau of France, the king ignores her and continues to love Gaveston in public contexts.52 Henri III had conspicuously failed to father any children, and Boucher is not subtle in his suggestion that the king’s friendships interfered with his conjugal duties. Boucher gradually escalates his critique of the friendship between Edward/Henri and Gaveston/Épernon. At first, Gaveston renders the king effeminate (“he renders the heart of the king effeminate”), then he causes the king to fail to remain “honneste,” and only after Gaveston is murdered (according to Edward) or executed lawfully (according to the nobles), does Edward find his way to the marital bed to do his duty with Isabeau. Boucher recounts Gaveston’s death as a barely veiled threat against Épernon.53 And it is not the only one. Boucher subverts the happy ending he has constructed around the marriage bed by adding a coda that suggests the attractions of male friendship may overwhelm Henri. Boucher notes that Hugues le Despenser succeeded Gaveston in Edward’s affections “to the same honors and wickedness. 48  Jean Boucher, Histoire tragique et memorable de Pierre de Gaverston, Gentilhomme Gascon, jadis mignon d’Edoüard 2. Roy d’Angleterre; tirée des Chroniques de Thomas Valsingham, et tournée de Latin en François ([Paris?]: n.p., 1588). 49  Boucher, Histoire de Gaverston, sig. Aiir–Aiiiv. 50  “Quand à Gaverston combien qu’il feist bonne mine & belle contenance d’aymer reciproquement ce jeune Prince, il aymoit toutesfois plus les presens qu’il en recevoit …” (Boucher, Histoire de Gaverston, 2). 51  Boucher, Histoire de Gaverston, 18. 52  Gaveston is “le mieux reçeu, plus caressé, & regardé de meilleur œil …” (Boucher, Histoire de Gaverston, 7). 53  “il effemine … le coeur du Roy” (Boucher, Histoire de Gaverston, 19).

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For he reignited the fire that had by no means been extinguished.” After causing a new falling out between Edward and his queen, Despenser was decapitated, which Boucher emphasizes is the appropriate end for such a favorite.54 Forced to abdicate, Edward II was murdered by agents of his wife and her lover.55 Not one for ambiguity, the League preacher warns that an excess of friendship led in Despenser’s case to a sorry end: “For out of loathing for his sodomy, they cut off the shameful parts….”56 Until the actual use of “sodomie,” Boucher maintained the presumption that the friendship—Platonically constructed between unequals and educative in structure—was only implicitly erotic. But the explicit charge of sodomy between Edward and his favorite(s) moved the language of friendship into new and far more volatile realms. The fury against Épernon rose to new heights after the murders of the head of the Catholic League, Henri, duc de Guise and his brother, Louis II Cardinal de Guise on Henri III’s orders on 23 December 1588. The king’s opponents insisted on fusing friendship and sodomy as markers of the king’s moral depravity and thus, explanatory of the Guise murders. Pierre Matthieu’s play, La Guisiade, featured representatives of the clergy, nobility, and third estates, along with Catherine de’ Medici, Épernon, and Guise remonstrating with Henri, who is gradually but inevitably persuaded by Épernon.57 The radical Catholic polemicist Charles Pinselet accused Épernon and Henri of combining to achieve the Guise murders because of their corrupt desire for each other.58 Plato’s transcendent take on the language of true friendship did not stand a chance in the face of sectarian hate. Henri’s relationship with Épernon crossed the line between the sodomite and the friend that Platonic philosophy left so blurry. The proximity of friendship to sodomy in Henri’s philosophical universe, combined with his relationships that suspiciously resembled the unequal erastēs/erṓmenos form of friendship that Plato articulated, made Henri vulnerable. Devotion to Platonic friendship did not cause Henri III’s problems, which culminated in his assassination on 1 August 1589 and death the next day. Yet it must also be recognized that the cultural climate of apprehension about the meanings 54  “aux mesmes honneurs & malice. Car il ralluma le feu aucunement esteint” (Boucher, Histoire de Gaverston, 41). 55  Although he never mentions it, Boucher may have been familiar with the story that Edward was killed by means of a hot poker in the anus, a story that had been in circulation since 1352, 25 years after Edward’s death. 56  “Car en detestation de sa sodomie, on luy couppa les parties honteuses …” (Boucher, Histoire de Gaverston, 51). 57  Pierre Matthieu, La Guisiade (Lyon: Jacques Roussin, 1589). It is unclear if this was performed as a play, but it was published as a cheap pamphlet in multiple editions. 58  Charles Pinselet, Le martyre des deux frères … Par Henry de Valois à la face des Estats dernierement assemblez à Bloys in L. Cimber and F. Danjou, eds., Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France depuis Louis XI jusqu’à Louis XVIII, 27 vols. (Paris: Beauvais, 1834–1840), ser. 1, 12: 57–107. Henri is described as a sodomite (75), and is called “denatured” (106) and effeminate (66, 80, 95). The original pamphlet was published in 1589.

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of male friendship did not help him when he chose to make political claims that mirrored Platonic notions of philia in his relationships. “Platonic love” understood as chaste and asexual competed in the cultural imagination with an erotics founded on assertions of hierarchy and reciprocity in friendship. The susceptibility of “Platonic love” to sexualized (mis)readings enabled the Aristotelian model of friendship as bounded and non-hierarchical to prevail. In political terms, French kings never again allowed male friendships to determine their public identities. Even Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643), the next (and only) king of France who was assumed to be sexually more interested in his male favorites than in his wife, conspicuously fulfilled his procreative duty. The sexual liabilities of every other king of France to the end of the ancien régime involved women rather than men.59 Idealized male love—amore Platonico—indelibly shaped the friendship in French intellectual and political life as at once an exemplary possibility and a dangerous prospect.

59  See for instance Thomas E. Kaiser, “Louis le Bien-Aimé and the Rhetoric of the Royal Body,” in From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Kathryn Norberg and Sara Melzer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 131–61, for Louis XV’s political troubles because of the women in his life. I have argued that Henri III’s successor, Henri IV, deliberately presented himself as a heterosexual rake in part to distinguish himself from his predecessor. See “The Politics of Promiscuity: Masculinity and Heroic Representation at the Court of Henry IV,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 2: “French History in the Visual Sphere” (Spring, 2003): 225–52. Louis XVI chose to have no mistresses, which only got him in trouble because he was married to Marie-Antoinette. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

Chapter 7

Friends of Friends: Intellectual and Literary Sociability in the Age of Richelieu Robert A. Schneider

In early modern Europe, the Republic of Letters was, in the words of Anthony Grafton, “a new kind of virtual community: one sustained not by immediate, direct contact and conversation so much as by a decades-long effort of writing and rewriting.”1 Comprising an eclectic range of gens de lettres and savants, some highly trained scholars, many true amateurs, it fostered comity and cooperation across a continent fragmented by war, competing confessions, and linguistic differences. In a sense, it constituted an alternative space—elite, civilized, pacific, learned, and virtual—to the contested, certainly less rarefied, geography Europeans actually inhabited in this fractious period. And it has been celebrated as a model of social relations both affective and intellectual—a community of savants and scholars who, while dispersed far and wide, were also often friends. Recent writings have certainly demonstrated the importance of the Republic of Letters in the intellectual and cultural life of Europe from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. And with the current interest among today’s historians in transnational connections, the concept offers a way to enliven and broaden intellectual and literary history by recovering the cosmopolitan circles in which writers and scholars often traveled, if only virtually. It was not, however, the only vehicle for the social organization of intellectual and literary life. Indeed, the Republic of Letters, despite its appeal and usefulness, ought not to distract us from the actual communities of gens de lettres that also flourished (communities, to be sure, that counted among its members many who were also citizens of this “virtual community”). In fact, when we turn to Paris in the first part of the seventeenth century, which I will do in what follows, we see an intellectual and literary world that, in terms of social relations and interactions, was quite real—largely face-toface, enduring and, I will argue, constitutive of some of the most important new cultural trends that marked the period. These Parisian gens de lettres inhabited a hothouse of cross-cutting and overlapping relationships that defined them as a generational cohort of “friends of friends.” 1

 Anthony Grafton, “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters,” Republic of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 2009): 10, http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/sketch-map-lost-continent-republic-letters, accessed 1 July 2014.

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One way to understand this cohort is to appreciate that its members by and large shared certain values and experiences. For one, they were born in the period just following the end of the French Wars of Religion, a traumatic experience that instructed them in the cost of confessional conflict and fostered a consensus, shared by a wide range of French elites, in the necessity and virtues of strong, if not necessarily “absolute,” monarchical authority. And they came of age during the reign of the first two Bourbons, Henri IV and Louis XIII, when their country underwent a political renewal with cultural manifestations in which many of them participated. Related to this is another commonality: for the most part, these gens de lettres were committed to the linguistic and cultural cause of French as a language that could equal Greek and Latin and rival Italian in its expressive possibilities. Although there were, to be sure, dissenters among them, they were largely disciples of the poet François de Malherbe and fellow travelers of the writer Jean-Baptiste Guez de Balzac, who were instrumental in launching the movement to establish the superiority of French, and consequently French literature. A third shared value is more relevant to the theme of his volume. This was the embrace of the ethos of otium cum dignitate, an ethos that vaunted the virtues of a life of cultivated retirement. Celebrated by a range of writers in Antiquity and the Renaissance, the leisurely life of otium was detached from the cares and burdens of public life or negotium; it was cultivated in spaces protected or removed from the wider world; and it served as a marker of the select few who comprised a true aristocracy of the mind or spirit. The attainment of higher spiritual, intellectual, and emotional goals, including friendship, depended on the privilege and peace that was both the condition and cause of otium.2  Bernard Beugnot, Le discours de la retraite au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996); Peter Burke, “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 146 (Feb. 1995): 136–50; Juliette Cherbuliez, The Place of Exile: Leisure Literature and the Limits of Absolutism (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005); Marc Fumaroli, “Académie, Arcadie, Parnasse: Trois lieux allégoriques du loisir lettre,” in Ecole du silence (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 23–48; Alain Génetiot, Poétique du loisir mondain, De Voiture à la Fontaine (Paris: Champion, 1997); Le Loisir lettré à l’âge classique, ed. Marc Fumaroli, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, and Emmanuel Bury (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Fumaroli, “Otium, Convivium, Sermo: La Conversation comme ‘lieu commun’ des lettres,” in Le Loisir lettré, 30–51; Beugnot, “Loisir, Retraite, Solitude: De l’espace privé à la littérature,” in Le Loisir lettré, 173–95; Génetiot, “Otium Literatum et poésie mondaine en France de 1625 à 1655,” in Le Loisir lettré, 213–31; Virginia Krause, “Montaigne’s Art of Idleness,” Viator 31 (2000): 45–60; Krause, Idle Pursuits: Literature and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003); Brian Vickers, ed., Arbeit, Musse, Meditation: Betrachtungen zur “Vita activa” und “Vita Contemplativa” (Zurich: Verlag der Fachvereine, 1985), especially the essay by Paul Kristeller, “The Active and Contemplative Life in Renaissance Humanism,” 133–52; Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Domna C. Stanton, “The Ideal of ‘repos’ in Seventeenth-Century French Literature,” L’Esprit Créateur XV, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1975): 79–104. 2

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For very good reasons, this ethos is more in evidence starting in the latter part of the sixteenth century than in earlier times. To be sure, a constant concern in writings from the Ancients through the Renaissance was the question: Could one lead a virtuous life amidst the pressures, burdens, compromises and other moral challenges of public life, or could virtue only be cultivated either in solitude or in the company of the like-minded and similarly inclined few? While perennial, however, the urgency of this question was sharpest in those junctures when social turbulence, or moral depravity, or cynicism, or political fractiousness, or other difficult circumstances rendered public life more than usually threatening or uncongenial to the virtuous man. Thus, Cicero and Seneca extolled the life of cultivated leisure precisely when they were both at odds with the current political developments in Rome. Similarly, the refuge of otium was central in the anti-courtier discourse that traverses the entire early modern period, as was the counsel to withdraw from the burdens and dangers of the world proffered by Montaigne, Lipsius and other humanists writing in the shadow of a Europe in the throes of the Wars of Religion. Care must be taken: though celebration of otium usually accompanied a morally compromised social or political context, it was often framed as an edifying, privileged choice, not merely a refuge in a fallen world.3 There is ample evidence, however, particularly in the enormous popularity of Neostoicism across Western Europe in the latter part of the sixteenth century, that seeking refuge from a world racked by civil and religious conflict was at first a tactic of self-preservation—and then transformed into an ideal, as a strategy to pursue the good life.4 Lipsius, the major exponent of Neostoicism, fashioned his philosophy in the midst of the bitter sectarian conflict in the Low Countries; his book, De constantia, consists of a dialogue on the subject of what a virtuous man should do in the face of disastrous circumstances, ending with a rhapsodic endorsement of the garden as a both a metaphorical and real place of retreat (quoting here from the 1594 English translation): “So soone as I put my foote within that place, I bid all vile and servile cares abandon me, and lifting up my head as upright as I may, I contemne the delights of the prophane people, & the great vanitie of humane affaires. Yea I seem to shake off all things in mee that is 3

 As Constance Furey has demonstrated, this ideal embodied some of the highest scholarly and spiritual ambitions of humanists, as they imagined themselves members of a truly Christian Republic of Letters. Constance Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 4  Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Peter Miller, “Hercules at the Crossroads in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Neo-Stoicism between Aristocratic and Commercial Society,” in République des Lettres, République des Arts: Mélanges offerts à Marc Fumaroli de l’Académie française, ed. Christian Mouchel and Colette Nativel (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 168–92.

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humaine, and to be rapt up on high upon the fiery chariot of wisdome.” In this space, his mind is impregnable to the fomenters of civil and religious warfare: “Doest thou thinke when I am there that I take any care what the Frenchmen or Spaniards are in practising?”5 As a metaphor, Lipsius’s “garden”—itself an ancient trope—found an echo in myriad texts in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, from the pastoral retreat of Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, a best-seller of the period, to Guez de Balzac’s ancestral country home in Charente as the figurative background in his writings, to the many references to rural promenades in contemporary dialogues. But “retreat” was not merely metaphorical, nor was it primarily rustic. Indeed, when we turn to Paris in the generations immediately following the Wars of Religion, we find a pronounced movement on the part of elites and gens de lettres alike into essentially private forms of association and sociability that transformed the cityscape and defined the cultural history of the period. These were informal, not institutional, private as opposed to public, voluntary rather than kin-based, and nonproductive or non-utilitarian in the sense that they were defined in terms of leisure, entertainment, literary pastimes, conversation, and in general the genteel, civilized activities associated with the Ciceronian phrase otium cum dignitate. In these years there was a remarkable blossoming of associations, conventicles, societies, and other groups, most of a literary or erudite nature. The private academy and the salon are perhaps the best-known sorts of these, but it is really the number of such groups that should be emphasized at this point. By one count there were over 30 identifiable associations of writers and savants (some including aristocrats) active between 1610 and 1648 in Paris alone. They ranged from such well-known, and well-established institutions as the Dupuy brothers’ (Jacques and Pierre) cabinet, Théophraste Renaudot’s Bureau d’adresse, and Marin Mersenne’s academy, to smaller, often ephemeral salons and informal associations consisting of a handful of writers, their friends and patrons. The Rambouillet hotel rivaled the Dupuys’ library in size, importance and influence, although as a salon gathering both men and women devoted to mondain literary matters, it occupied a different sphere from the erudite world of the Dupuy and their associates. Others formed around a particularly charismatic or forceful writer, like François de Malherbe, Théophile de Viau, Marie de Gournay. Still others comprised the entourages of princes or great aristocrats, such as Henri II de Montmorency, Jean-François Paul de Gondi (the future Cardinal de Retz), François de Faudoas, comte de Belin, and the king’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans. Some were regular meetings of gens de lettres or scholars; others took the form of country outings. Beyond the Hôtel de Rambouillet, several well-established salons devoted their efforts to cultivating pleasant conversation, serving as a  Two Bookes of Constancie Written in Latine by Justus Lipsius, Englished by Sir John Stradling, ed. Rudolf Kirk (first edition, 1595; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1939), 136. Published in French as Deux livres de la Constance de Juste Lipsius. Mis en françois par de Nuysement (Leiden: n.p., 1584). 5

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“public” for up-and-coming and established writers alike. In short, never before, and certainly not again until the Enlightenment, was Parisian intellectual and cultural sociability so rich and varied.6 Table 7.1

Groups, Associations, and Academies, circa 1620–1648 Salons

Rambouillet Sablé D’Auchy Des Loges Liancourt Scudéry

Literary

Conrart Théophile de Viau Malherbe Coëffeteau Illustres Bergers Piat Maucours (Académie des puristes) Antoine Brun Auger de Mauléon, seigneur de Granier François Chauveau Colletet Marolles Marie de Gournay D’Alabray-Le Pailleur Du Ryer Saint-Amant Pinchesne

Mersenne L’académie Le Pailleur Bourdelot circle Président de Mesmes Dupuy Cabinet La Mothe le Vayer Guy Patin Gabriel Naudé Renaudot’s Bureau d’Adresse Nicolas Bourbon Jerome Bignon

Entourages of Patrons Duc d’Orléans Montmorency Cramail Belin Retz Harcourt Séguier

As disparate and different as these associations were, several common features defined them as self-consciously removed from public life, or as spaces, indeed, of otium. Most obviously, they were detached from such official, institutional, or corporate venues as the University, the Bar, the Church or the Royal Court, thus 6  Josephine de Boer, “Men’s Literary Circles in Paris, 1610–1660,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association (1939): 730–80; Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organization in Seventeenth-Century France (1934; New York, NY: Russell and Russell, 1967); Antoine Adam, Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, 5 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), vol. 1; Wendy Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Simone Mazauric, Savoir et philosophie à Paris dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997); Précis de littérature française du XVIIe siècle, ed. Jean Mesnard (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990); Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in SeventeenthCentury France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain: Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique (Paris: Minuit, 1985).

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marking them as informal, private associations.7 They had no “official” existence, no corporate status, no public presence in the ceremonial display that still marked city life. They were also exclusive, but with an informal selection process—often dictated by the discernment of a salonnière or the collective judgment of men of letters—not determined by status, title, or other formally recognized or preestablished criteria. As well, they were defined by a certain ethos—not only elitism and exclusivity, but also the observance of discretion and even secrecy: Valentin Conrart’s group, which gathered a dozen or so writers who would become the core membership of the Académie française, promoted dissimulation in its motto, “Cache ta vie.” And Mme de Rambouillet’s salon as well as the Dupuy cabinet carefully monitored the kind of talk and conversation that transpired in their precincts, admonishing habitués to observe the tacit understandings concerning the boundaries of discussion—which subjects were taboo and which could be discussed only in hushed tones or coded language. This guarded, somewhat secretive, or at least self-consciously “insider” ambience was underscored in some cases by the use of nicknames for habitués. The savants who gravitated around François de La Mothe le Vayer within the confines of the Dupuy cabinet were each identified by their alternative, Greek sobriquets. Henri de Lorrain, the count of Harcourt, maintained a household of writers known as “Confraternity of Monosyllables,” its members endowed with familiar names: Harcourt himself was “le Rond,” Faret, “le Vieux” and Saint-Amant, “le Gros.”8 The Illustres bergers gathered a group of poets who lived up to their name by meeting in a rural setting on the banks of the Seine on the outskirts of Paris. Followers of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, they styled themselves as “shepherds” complete with pastoral names. Frequently, these alternative names surfaced in published texts, such as Balzac’s letters or those in the Recueil de lettres nouvelles (1627), in which correspondents are addressed or referred to as Belinde, Cloris, Philandre, and the like. In Chapelain’s letters to Balzac, he refers to La Mothe le Vayer as Monsieur Tubero, the name the skeptic philosopher adopted in his dialogues.9 The guardedness and restrictiveness of these gatherings suggest intimacy, pleasant or at least polite conversation, and friendship. Here it is essential to note what was obvious to contemporaries: one of the privileges of otium was the pleasure of friendship. The company of friends was part and parcel of that “dignitate” which elevated otium above mere leisure or, worse, sloth. As Seneca wrote in “On Tranquility,” an oft cited text in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “In private homes, in public spectacles, at dinner parties, let [the wise man] play the part of the good companion, the loyal friend, the temperate 7  This jibes with Christian Jouhaud’s point about the “delocalized” aspect of literary culture in this period. Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature: Histoire d’un paradoxe (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). 8  Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 2:236. 9  Likewise, on at least one occasion, Chapelain calls Saint-Amant, “le Vieux” (May 1638; Lettres de Jean Chapelain, ed. Tamizey de Larroque, 2 vols. [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880–1882], 1:237).

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fellow diner. He has been deprived of his responsibilities as a citizen: let him undertake those of a human being.” “[N]othing delights the mind more than the happiness of faithful friendship,” he adds.10 As several scholars have noted, the late sixteenth century witnessed a turn away from Aristotle’s model of perfect friendship as the basis for citizenship. The city, compromised by civil conflict and the burdens of negotium, was no longer the site for relations that depended upon honesty, virtue and reason. Rather, these values could only be realized in the civil conversation and friendship that flourished in those spaces removed from the cityrepublic, spaces inhabited not by “citizens” but by the like-minded few. Hence, the conflation of withdrawal and friendship; indeed, the consolation of friends was often seen as a compensation for the injuries and disappointments suffered in the wider vistas of court, city, or other worldly affairs.11 In a letter published in the Recueil of 1627, Jean de Silhon, an apologist for Richelieu and a devout enemy of philosophical skepticism, consoled a noble friend for his lack of success at court in terms that echo the contemporary impatience with the Aristotelian conception of friendship. “There is no disinterested friendship,” he writes. “And that vision of pure desires that Aristotle and Cicero present to us, and of which they allege to have examples, is only a painting designed to please, and one of the pretty fables that made up the happiness of the golden age.”12 Another contributor to the same collection asserts “that we live only for those whom we passionately love, of which the number is very small,” adding, “moreover, that we write for very few people who know each other.”13 In this view, interestingly, literature and friendship are conjoined as well. Accordingly, the descriptions left by habitués of Parisian gatherings often make a point of the intimate relationships that flourished within their privileged confines, conveying the sense that, whatever else they were up to, the pleasure of friendship was their real purpose. One of La Mothe le Vayer’s published dialogues, Mémorial de quelques conférences avec des personnes studieuses, begins with a several pages addressed “Au Lecteur,” which meditate upon Paris as a venue for leisurely pastimes, especially of a learned nature. After noting the various gardens and public spaces, he singles out the “beautiful and curious cabinets that are not  Quoted in Morford, Stoics and Neostoics, 214.  Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Peter Miller, “Conversation and Friendship in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (March 2001): 1–31; Hélène Merlin-Kajman, L’Excentricité académique: Littérature, institution, société (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001), 54–7. 12  “On n’y connoit pont d’amitié sans interest et cette pure vision des volontés telle qu’Aristote et Ciceron nous la figurent et dont ils nous allèguent des exemples, n’est qu’une peinture faicte à plaisir, et une de ces belles fables qui composent la felicité du siècle d’or” (Recueil de lettres nouvelles [Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1627], 1:431). 13  “Comme nous ne vivons que pour les personnes que nous aymons avec passion, dont le nombre est bien petit, de mesme n’escrivions nous que pour fort peu de gens qui s’y cognoissent” (Recueil de lettres nouvelles, 2:19). 10 11

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few in number in Paris.” These “réduits,” he calls them, are “places where learned men can assemble, whether for the pleasure they find in seeing one another, or in order to exchange ideas … with those whose judgment they respect.”14 In his De la lecture des vieux romans, Jean Chapelain provides a portrait of several members of the intellectual entourage of Paul de Gondi (the future Cardinal de Retz). It is a leisurely scene of friends at ease with one another, casually interacting in a manner that evokes in part a gentleman’s club, in part a college dormitory. At the start of the dialogue Chapelain is alone, contently reading some Arthurian tales, when Gilles Ménage barges into the room and, in the nicest sort of way, basically upbraids him for reading such trash. Thus begins a dialogue that amounts to an exercise of literary criticism—Chapelain’s defense of the moral and literary worth of these medieval stories. But it was hardly an unintended consequence that the reader also appreciates the civility and intimacy that characterized this milieu.15 The argument in this essay follows a logic that sees friendship as inseparable from the context or conditions that made it possible—just as it was viewed by contemporaries. And in the seventeenth century, this context was the privileged confines of leisurely sociability, or otium. This is not say that friendships could not flourish outside this sort of environment. Rather, I would like to make a modest methodological point. Given the difficulty, if not impossibility, of retrieving the emotional or affective lives of people in past times, we have little recourse but to follow a process of inference. And here the inferential path will proceed from a collection of documented social contexts, which, by the nature of the sociability they fostered, gave rise to relationships we can, with a fair degree of certainty, qualify as “friendships.” Moreover, I hope that by reconstructing these relationships I can show that ties of friendship among gens de lettres were a constitutive element in the emergence of a literary “field.” In his now classic study, Naissance de l’écrivain, for example, Alain Viala provides a remarkable analysis of the various determinants that promoted the emergence of “literature” in the period, but his account neglects otium cum dignitate—the ethos of withdrawal and a self-conscious embrace of the consolations of private life, including friendship.16 In contrast, Christian Jouhaud has emphasized the “delocalized” aspect of the new literary discourse as well as contemporary men of letters, who lacked a rootedness in traditional bastions of intellectual and cultural life, such as the University, the Magistracy, the Church, and were, consequently, in need of the legitimacy that could be conferred by the crown.17 But if unaffiliated with official bodies, did 14   “… quantité de beaux et curieux cabinets, qui ne sont pas en petit nombre dans Paris …” “… plusieurs endroits, où les hommes sçavans se rendent, soit pour le plaisir qu’ils trouvent de s’y voir, soit pour se communiquer les pensées dont ils ne veulent faire estat, qu’autant qu’elles seront approuvées par ceux dont ils respectent le jugement” (François de La Mothe le Vayer, Mémorial de quelques conférences avec des personnes studieuses [Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1669], 9–10). Despite the publication date, internal evidence suggests that this text represents gatherings that took place in either the late 1630s or early 1640s. 15  De la lecture des vieux romans, ed. Jean-Pierre Cavaillé (Paris: Zanzibar, 1999). 16  Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain. 17  Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature.

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this mean that they lacked other, perhaps compensating, associations? In Powerful Connections, Peter Shoemaker reveals how patronage provided men of letters with a “locale” that Jouhaud saw as missing from their situation.18 While hardly denying the importance of the vertical ties between aristocrats and hommes de lettres, this essay will suggest that the associations among writers were equally crucial. In those ties nurtured by a remarkably vibrant associative life, writers reinforced their identities as careerists in the rather novel cursus of “literature,” finding mutual protection and support as they defended the literary positions they staked out. What mattered was not only the extent of those ties, providing a proof of strength in numbers, but also, presumably, the affective intensity of those relationships, which offered both a source and model for the literary discourse they were engaged in fashioning. A good place to start is with what has been described as the two “poles” of intellectual and literary Paris in this period: the salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet and the library or cabinet of Pierre and Jacques Dupuy.19 But these institutions, which were, in fact, quite large and somewhat complex, gathering scores of savants, gens de lettres, noblemen and ladies and visiting dignitaries in their midst, were not themselves conducive to fostering the relationships one might qualify as friendships. Within their confines, however, smaller subgroups emerged, evidence of the social bonding of an intimate nature. In the Dupuy circle, a group formed around La Mothe le Vayer, known to some as the “Tetrade,” composed of Gabriel Naudé, Elie Diodati, Guy Patin, and, at some point, Pierre Gassendi. These savants sometimes went on rural retreats, excursions that apparently attracted some suspicion.20 In a well-known letter, Patin defends their outings as entirely proper, conceding that the one they are about to undertake “will be a debauch, but a philosophical one.” He writes: “M. Naudé … intimate friend of Gassendi, as he is of mine, has arranged for all three of us to go and sup and sleep at his home at Gentilly next Sunday, provided it will only be the three of us … A year ago I made this voyage to Gentilly with M. Naudé, I alone with him. There were no other witnesses, and there should not have been. We spoke most freely about everything, without scandalizing a soul.”21 Clearly, there was a fraternal aspect to these outings, strongly suggesting that the ties between these  Shoemaker, Powerful Connections.  A point made by both Jouhaud (Les pouvoirs de la littérature, 195) and Peter Miller (Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century [London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000], 68). 20  René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du dix-septième siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943). 21  “M. Naudé, intime ami de M. Gassendy, comme il est le mien, nous a engagez pour dimanche prochain, à aller souper et coucher, nous trois en sa maison de Gentilly….” “Je fis l’an passé, moi seul avec lui, tête-à-tête ; il n’y avait point de témoins, aussi n’y an faloitil point : nous y parlâmes fort librement de tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalisé.” Lettres de Gui Patin, ed. Paul Triaire (Paris: Champion, 1907), 1:616–17; see also Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1960), 88; and de Boer, “Men’s Literary Circles,” 759. 18 19

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savants were as much social as intellectual. A similar bonding was evident in the salon. Like the Dupuys’, the salon seems to have been a rather complex society, hardly a cozy community of disaffected courtiers. But within its confines there were at least two recognized camps endowed with strong bonds of solidarity. One, known as the “corps,” included the poet Vincent Voiture, the marquis de Pisani (Mme de Rambouillet’s son), and the counts of Guiche and Vaillac. They were opposed by the “anti-corps,” composed of the Marquis de Montausier, Arnauld de Corbeville, Jean Chapelain, Antoine Godeau, Valentin Conrart and, by virtue of their association with them, the self-exiled Guez de Balzac. Madame de Rambouillet seems to have favored the corps, while her daughter Julie sided with their rivals. With several warriors among them, the corps embraced the spirit of galanterie and, despite the presence of Voiture, was less concerned with literary matters, or at least took a rather casual, less critical or judgmental view of literature than their opponents. The anti-corps, indeed, remained faithful to the teachings of Malherbe, and attempted to impose stricter rules for judging literature than members of the corps, which gave rise to several “quarrels” within the confines of the salon.22 As these few examples suggest, groups of this sort were governed by principles or orientations that marked them as solidarities of like-minded savants and gens de lettres whose cohesion was a factor in the dynamics of the intellectual and literary life of the period. Distinctive is not only the proliferation of such circles, gatherings, and academies but also the way in which writers circulated among these groups, suggestive of cultural accumulation; as they processed through this particular cursus they educated themselves in the emerging literary fashions, publicized their own literary prowess, and, in the process, established ties with other gens de lettres. Let us look at this social aspect of the careers of two writers over the space of a generation, from roughly 1620 to 1648, noting not only their various affiliations, but also their several compagnons de route. The first is Guillaume Colletet (1598–1659), a prolific poet who was among the first members of the Académie française as well as one of the five authors who formed Richelieu’s literary kitchen cabinet. In addition to his many poems, he published several learned treatises on poetic theory and also accumulated a vast archive on the history of French poetry. In the course of his career we find him circulating through a number of groups. In the 1620s, perhaps even earlier, he was part of the circle of young writers around Théophile de Viau, the great “libertine” poet, who died shortly after his release from prison in 1626. Other boon companions of the beleaguered writer were SaintAmant, Godeau, Nicolas Frénicle, and the Luillier brothers (Claude and François), who were both associated with the Dupuy cabinet. About the same time, Colletet could be found in the private academy of Nicolas Bourbon, which flourished 22  Génetiot, Poétique du loisir mondain, 121; Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 1:492; Adam, Histoire de la littérature française, 1:269n10; Œuvres de Voiture, ed. M.A. Ubicini, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1855) 1:293.

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between 1620 and 1644.23 Bourbon was an accomplished scholar of Latin and Greek.24 His academy, like the Dupuy cabinet, was a center of erudition rather than a nursery of new literary trends. Colletet, however, was not entirely of this camp, despite this affiliation; his association with Théophile would seem to indicate an aversion for “pedants.” Like many of his generation, he ultimately identified with the mondain literary movement. Although he was critical of Malherbe’s socalled doctrine, he did join the handful of devotees who crammed into Malherbe’s small room each evening to hear the master propound his views, where he rubbed shoulders with future stalwarts of the literary establishment: Chapelain, Voiture, Faret, Conrart. On the other hand, he was not within Conrart’s “circle”—that germ of the French Academy and a gathering, largely, of Malherbians. Indeed, his literary loyalties remained interestingly skewed, for he was a leading member of the Illustres bergers, mentioned above, a collection of poets who, despite the emerging dominance of Malherbe, avowed an abiding respect for Ronsard. Likewise, his place among the gens de lettres who met in the home of Marie de Gournay allied him with the writer probably most identified with the opposition to modern literary styles; it was a group that included Malleville, the Ogier brothers, Claude L’Estoille, and Boisrobert. Colletet was also among the young gens de lettres who gravitated around the well-known orator from Besançon, Antoine Brun, a group that included Frénicle, Boissat, Faret, and Malleville. Starting in 1632 Colletet animated his own private academy in the confines of his extensive library, which was apparently well stocked with the help of his friend Gabriel Naudé. Several of the “Illustres bergers” were usually in attendance; they were joined by Naudé, Saint-Amant, Faret, Marolles, and Tristan L’Hermite. Although not known as a playwright, Colletet is mentioned as having a place in the ranks of a group of young dramatists meeting around 1628, who took it upon themselves to contest the supremacy of the prolific older author, Alexandre Hardy. Pierre Du Ryer, who would be better known as a translator, was the leader of this small group that included Frénicle, Rotrou and Mareschal. Colletet furthermore frequented the so-called “Académie des puristes,” also known by the name of Piat Maucours (named for the proprietor of the pension in which they met) which, while concerned with rendering French poetic diction regular and “modern,” were not necessarily followers of Malherbe. It is likely that Colletet joined the entourage of gens de lettres attached to Chancellor Séguier, which met from 1633 to 1643, for he is 23  Adam, Histoire, 1:286. Among the other members were François Guyet, a wellknown érudit, Adrien de Valois, the historiographer, Charles Garnier, a court poet, Gilles Ménage, an important savant and author of Origine de la langue française, Naudé, Balzac, Chapelain, and François Ogier, who wrote in defense of Balzac during the controversy over his Lettres. 24  Guy Patin, who was also a habitué of the group, gives the impression their discussions sometimes touched upon sensitive topics, especially with regards to the Jesuits, for he advised Bourbon’s son to burn the records of their meetings: de Boer, “Men’s Literary Circles,” 738. See Paul Pellisson-Fontanier and Pierre Joseph Thoulier d’Olivet, Histoire de l’Académie française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1858): 1:245–6, on Bourbon and his “academy.”

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mentioned as a translator of a work by Séguier’s grandfather, which was edited by a known attendee. Finally, Colletet definitely figured among the select few, including Patin, Gassendi, Diodati and other so-called libertins, who were invited to Naudé’s country home.25 Colletet’s march through the thicket of Parisian sociability shows a man of varied tastes and associations. While he certainly ranks as an establishment “insider,” given his proximity to Richelieu, he still maintained ties with a range of gens de lettres and savants, some outside the literary mainstream. In this sense he was, in fact, typical; for, like most other writers and savants, he cultivated ties running along two axes—both the vertical link to the Cardinal, or to some other “grand,” and his horizontal associations with his “friends” in the many subgroups that made up the literary culture of the early seventeenth century. The second example is Michel de Marolles (1600–1681), a man of letters who travelled in somewhat different circles from Colletet, though their paths crossed at several points in the circuitry of Parisian literary life. An abbot with ties to the Jesuits and a client of the powerful Nevers clan, Marolles was a tireless scholar and a prolific translator of ancient and Christian texts. He was close to Marie de Gournay, Montaigne’s “adoptive” daughter, which would seem to mark him as a bearer of the humanist tradition and not a partisan of linguistic reform. Nevertheless, Marolles still considered himself a “purist” in the context of literary matters; as he writes in his Mémoires about the activities of the Piat Maucours group, “Beyond the language and ways of speaking, we also examined the economy of the pieces, and each of us tried to write some on the subjects that were proposed.”26 According to his Mémoires, he at least occasionally frequented the Dupuy cabinet, having been invited to attend in 1646. He was a more dependable member of La Mothe le Vayer’s circle; in La Mothe le Vayer’s Mémorial, his sobriquet is “Marulle.”27 Later in the 1640s he could be found among the érudits, including Naudé, Gassendi, Diodati, La Mothe le Vayer, Charles Sorel and the Minime monk Mersenne, hosted by Guy Patin in his well-appointed library. While not associated directly with Malherbe, Marolles did attend the sessions animated by Nicolas Coëffeteau, an important figure in the movement to reform the French language. He associated with notable Malherbians elsewhere, however. For example, he was a habitué of the private academy of François Chauveau, a high 25  For the information in this paragraph, see de Boer, “Men’s Literary Circles”; Adam, Histoire; Maurice Cauchié, “Les Eglogues de Nicolas Frénicle et le groupe littéraire des ‘illustres bergers,’” Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie et d’Histoire Générale de la Civilisation (April 1942): 115–33; Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 1:712–20; Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, le XVIIe siècle (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1996), 301–12. 26   “Outre les mots & les façons de parler, nous examinions encore l’oeconomie des pieces, & chacun de nous essayoit d’en faire quelqu’une sur les sujets qui estoient proposez” (Michel de Marolles, Mémoires de Michel de Marolles, 2 vols. [Paris: A. de Sommaville, 1656–1657], 1:41). 27  René Pintard, La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Etudes de bibliographie et de critique suives de textes inédits de Guy Patin (Paris: Boivin, 1943), 29.

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officer, who received writers and artists at his home starting in 1628, including Chapelain, Giry, and Philippe Habert.28 Marolles and Colletet, despite the different paths they travelled, knew each other, possibly quite well, for Marolles was responsible for introducing Colletet into the Piat Maucours circle. And Marolles was also a member of Colletet’s own group. He is said to have frequented Séguier’s academy, which met between 1633 and 1643, in the company of Daniel de Priézac, an érudit and devout apologist for Richelieu, the Habert brothers, La Chambre, Cerisy, Esprit, and others. Finally, he belonged to a host of gens de lettres who met at the home of Paul de Gondi, the future Cardinal de Retz: Saint-Amant, Scarron, Ménage, Chapelain, Adrien and Henri de Valois (both historiographes de France), Voiture, Gomberville, Sarasin, and Gassendi. Colletet and Marolles belonged to separate literary and intellectual camps, yet their various associations, at times overlapping, offer a corrective to the view that the line dividing savants from mondain writers was fixed or impermeable. Colletet, while a member of the first generation of the French academy and despite his proximity to Richelieu, bore the mark of his earlier affiliation with Théophile as well as his more recent association with the Illustres bergers, who kept the flame of Ronsard alive in the age of Malherbe. Marolles kept company with savants as well as Marie de Gournay, placing him on the outskirts of mondain literary culture. But he also rubbed shoulders in several groups with writers such as Chapelain, Voiture, Saint-Amant, Gomberville, and Colletet: academicians committed to the linguistic and literary reforms set in motion by Malherbe and others. To get a better sense of the ties that bound gens de lettres in this period, let us look into the ranks of two particular groups. Taking Conrart’s circle and the Illustres bergers as examples of contemporary literary sociability has several advantages: they both flourished at approximately the same time, between 1629 and 1634; they were both rather small, offering as well evidence of close personal ties; and the names of their members are both known and certain. The coterie of literary men who met at Valentin Conrart’s townhouse is the better known, largely because its “discovery” by Richelieu led to the founding of the Académie française, but also because many of them became leading figures in the literary movement that came to be known as classicism (or sometimes preclassicism). There were nine in attendance: Conrart, Chapelain, Godeau, Louis Giry, Gombauld, Philippe Habert, his brother Germain Habert (abbé de Cerisy, or Serisy), Claude Malleville, and Jacques de Serizay (sometimes Cerisay). Conrart was the son of a Protestant financier, a member of a family with extensive ties in 28

 De Boer, “Men’s Literary Cirles,” 748; this group continued even after Chauveau lost his home and died; it was continued under the auspices of his son. On Marolles, see especially his Mémoires, an important source on the literary and intellectual life of the period, as well as Adam, Histoire, 1:339–40; Roger Zuber, Les belles infidèles et la formation du goût classique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1968), 102–3, 125–6, 137–9, and passim.

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the mercantile and financial world that extended throughout Europe. As a young man, he purchased for himself the office of secrétaire du roi, which not only provided a passage upward into the royal officialdom but also gave him access to the lucrative financial dealings of the crown. His next step was to transform himself into a man of letters. This took some doing, as Conrart, unlike virtually all of his peers, lacked an education in a collège and consequently was entirely ignorant of Latin. Nevertheless, he ultimately achieved prominence in the literary establishment and the recognition of his contemporaries, largely through his sponsorship of literary projects, such as a series of translations of classical texts into French, his aid and protection of writers, as well as his refined taste and judgment. Clearly, his hosting of a circle of men of letters at his townhouse was a crucial step in this direction. Virtually the only source on this gathering is Paul Pellisson’s 1653 account of the history of the French Academy, written by a man whose relationship to the literary establishment associated with Richelieu and his successors, Mazarin and Colbert, was, at best, ambiguous.29 In the early 1650s, however, this friend of Conrart was knocking on the doors of the royal institution, and his account of its early history is colored by his desire to flatter the group with an idyllic narrative of its origins. Indeed, his Histoire de l’Académie française constructs an idealized image of literary friends peacefully enjoying the pleasures of otium cum dignitate before the heavy hand of Richelieu’s patronage turned them into an official body with assigned duties.30 Conrart’s circle was a gathering of “personal friends,” who had, in fact, been present at the signing of his marriage contract. Pellisson emphasizes the casual, friendly nature of their meetings, conducted like “ordinary visits”: “they freely exchanged opinions, and their conferences were followed sometimes by a stroll, sometimes by dining together.” Sessions took on the air of a study group; when a new work by a member was brought to the attention of the circle, it was discussed not with “compliments and flattery” but rather “honestly and robustly” down to the “smallest fault.” Looking back on their séances, he writes, they remembered wistfully the “innocence and complete liberty of those first days, without fuss [“bruit”] and ceremony, and without any rules other than those of friendship, they savored together all that a society of wits

29  Histoire de l’Académie Françoise par Messieurs Pellisson et D’Olivet, 2 vols. (Paris, 1743). This edition contains Pellisson’s original text with notes added by d’Olivet in the eighteenth century. Pellisson was a client of the superintendant Fouquet, whose dramatic fall from power in 1661 was something of a coup d’état in the political and cultural history of the seventeenth century. Pellisson would be imprisoned in the Bastille after his patron’s arrest and trial, although after his release in 1666 he managed to regain the crown’s favor. See especially Marc Fumaroli, The Poet and the King: Jean de la Fontaine and his Century, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); Adam, Histoire, vol. 1; and Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, 981–2. 30  But see Jouhaud’s skeptical remarks on Pellisson’s account of the group’s “golden age” (Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs, 13–14).

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and a life of reason has that is sweetest and most charming.”31 It was, in short, a “golden age.” This circle of friends, however, had other features beyond the warmth of friendship holding it together. There were, for one thing, previous ties uniting them. Godeau was Conrart’s older cousin; and he, the Habert brothers, and Malleville were all members of the Illustres bergers. Ogier was a Protestant nobleman, whose relationship to Conrart probably stemmed from their common roots in this tight-knit religious community. Chapelain’s father had been the notary for Conrart’s father and his father-in-law. Giry was a translator who benefited from Conrart’s sponsorship in publishing his work. In fact, Conrart’s wealth and independence made him into a kind of Maecenas of his circle—part peer and friend, part patron. As well, most of the members of his circle were secretaries to noblemen, which has prompted Nicolas Schapira to surmise, in his study of Conrart, that the coterie served “to constitute a basis for solidarity and the sharing of information for personnel who, in order to perform their duties successfully, had to keep well-informed.”32 Finally, this group was clearly in the “purist” literary and language camp, partisans of Malherbe’s so-called doctrine, enemies of anything that smacked of that most dreaded of seventeenth-century traits—pedantry. There was, as just noted, some overlap between Conrart’s circle and the Illustres bergers: Godeau, the Habert brothers, and Malleville were members of both. The others members were Colletet, Cotignon de la Charnaye (a poet and playwright), Nicolas Frénicle (a minor poet), Louis Maudit (a lawyer and a poet), Nicolas Richelet (an érudit and editor of Ronsard’s works), Frederic Morel (a professor of Greek and Latin), Guillaume Lusson (a noble patron of men of letters), and J.-C. de Villeneuve (a poet in service to Gaston d’Orléans). These “shepherds” started gathering a few years before the Conrart group, and in several ways they were much more diverse in their literary and linguistic orientations. Frénicle and Colletet had just been implicated in the trial of Théophile; though not prosecuted they were still publicly compromised by their friendship with the controversial “libertine” poet. It may have been, then, that their entry into this group was a self-conscious move to distance themselves from this tainted association.33 For the Illustres bergers, 31  “Là ils s’entretenoient familièrement, comme ils eussent fait en une visite ordinaire, & de toute sorte de choses, d’affaires, de nouvelles, de belles lettres. Que si quelqu’un de la compagnie avoit fait un ouvrage, comme il arrivoit souvent, il le communiquoit volontiers à tous les autres, qui lui en disoient librement leur avis.” “… que quand ils parlent encore aujourd’hui de ce temps-là, & de l’Académie, ils en parlent comme d’un âge d’or, durant lequel avec toute l’innocence, & toute la liberté des premiers siècles, sans bruit, & sans pompe, & sans autre loix que celles de l’amitié, ils goûtoient ensemble tout ce que la société des esprits, & la vie raisonnable, ont de plus doux & de plus charmant” (Pellisson and d’Olivet, Histoire, 13). 32  “de constituer un cadre de solidarité et d’échange d’informations pour un personnel qui, pour bien remplir ses fonctions, se devait d’être bien informé.” Nicolas Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres au XVIIe siècle: Valentin Conrart, une histoire sociale (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2003), 77. 33  On this see Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres, 63–5.

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whatever else they embodied, were innocence personified: celebrating pastoral pleasures, they reveled in expressions of chaste love à l’Astrée. But they were also interestingly nostalgic in their literary tastes, and, accordingly, somewhat out of step with mainstream trends. Although Malherbe apparently joined their gatherings in the last year of his life, an important feature of their annual rites was the celebration of the birthday of Ronsard, the leading light of the constellation of court poets in the sixteenth century, who embodied precisely the erudition and esotericism that the early seventeenth-century “moderns” were attempting to discard. In keeping with the pastoral orientation of the group they conferred suitable nicknames on one another: Colletet was “Cerilas,” Ogier, “Arcas,” Frénicle, “Aminte,” Malleville, “Damon,” Maudit, “Melinte,” Villeneuve, “Tarcis,” and Godeau, “Ergante.”34 Addressing each other with the familiar “tu,” they regularly fled the city, repairing to Colletet’s country home on the banks of the Seine, where they enjoyed festive meals and extended promenades. In virtually every respect, then, from their changed identities to their rustic excursions and playful pastimes that characterized their gatherings, the Illustres bergers seem to embody that experience of “communitas” which the anthropologist Victor Turner, following Van Gennep, made famous as creating an alternative experience to the quotidian demands of normal “structured” life in a liminal space where crucial social solidarities can be formed.35 To get a sense now of the quantitative dimension of the ties I have been documenting, as well as to gain a better appreciation of the patterns and meanings of these relationships, let us look at the “friends” of several gens de lettres of the period. My choice is limited to a sample of seven. We have already learned something of the ties accumulated by two of them: Colletet and Marolles, whose trajectories across the landscape of early seventeenth-century literary and intellectual culture illustrate the intensity and variety of contemporary Parisian associational life. The others are Jean Chapelain, Valentin Conrart, François de La Mothe le Vayer, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, and Marie de Gournay, all wellestablished in literary and savant circles though, importantly, not all “authors.” For Conrart and Peiresc never published. Their influence, however, was no less consequential, largely because of the network of “friends” they cultivated and served. But the beneficial side of friendship was clearly something that characterized many such relationships. Chapelain, though prolific as a critic and published writer, was tireless as a sponsor, advisor, and protector of his fellow writers, as is evident in his letters. Conrart has been described as occupying a position “halfway between Maecenas and writer.”36 An idealized or abstract notion of friendship might hold that service contaminates its supposed disinterestedness, bringing it uncomfortably close to patronage, especially when the favors are exercised in 34

 Cauchié, “Les Eglogues de Nicolas Frénicle,” passim.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing, 1968); Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London, 1960); Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), chap. 4. See also Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1980). 36  Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres, 97. 35

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one direction. But this assumes an impossibly pure understanding of the relations between friends: when has friendship ever been insulated from requests for help, favors, special treatment, or access to third parties? It also ignores the Senecan prescription that “beneficence” was at the heart of friendship. Alluding to Seneca’s De beneficiis throughout his biography of Peiresc, the philosopher Gassendi asserted that as nothing won friends “so much as Beneficence and friendly Offices; it is no wonder that he had so many, so good and so illustrious, all the world over.”37 But service or patronage was not a pronounced element in all of these circles. From his Mémoires, there is no evidence that Marolles regularly provided favors or performed services for his friends. La Mothe le Vayer spent much of his career in search of powerful patrons, having little means at his disposal to offer support to others. Indeed, the decisive factor in these different relationships was probably the disparity of wealth and position. Conrart, a financier and secrétaire du roi, was independently wealthy. By the early 1630s, Chapelain had secured the material and political backing of Richelieu, to which he could add the patronage of the prominent Longueville family, which he used to establish himself as a leading cultural broker. Peiresc was also a man of independent means who also leveraged his wide contacts and impeccable reputation in the highest circles in Paris, Rome, Padua and throughout the “Republic of Letters” in order to serve a whole host of savants. Colletet, while not wealthy, possessed a country home, which he made available to his fellow “shepherds” on a regular basis.38 Different modes of interaction characterized these clusters of friends. Not all were face-to-face relationships; most indeed were complemented by the exchange of letters, a highly prized form of literary expression in this period. Peiresc’s network was largely epistolary; his friends were situated largely outside the Parisian literary and intellectual circles, scattered far and wide, markedly more so than the other writers examined. This reflects, in part, the fact that, after some youthful travels, he remained in Provence, cultivating his friendships through his extensive correspondence, although his hospitality was as legendary as his other expressions 37

 Quoted by Peter Miller, “The ‘Man of Learning’ Defended: Seventeenth-Century Biographies of Scholars and an Early Modern Ideal of Excellence,” in Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (Cambridge, 2000), 44. 38  On Chapelain, see primarily his two volumes of letters (Lettres de Jean Chapelain); Georges Collas, Jean Chapelain, 1595–1674 (Paris: Perrin, 1912); and Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature, 97–150. Peter Miller’s study, Peiresc’s Europe, is a splendid introduction to this man of letters. For a fuller view, see Lettres de Peiresc aux Frères Dupuy, ed. Tamizey de Larroque, 7 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1888–1898); and Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, trans. W. Rand (London, 1657). For Conrart, Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres. For Gournay, Marjorie Henry Isley, A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay, Her Life and Work (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), and Michèle Fogel, Marie de Gournay: Itinéraires d’une femme savante (Paris: Fayard, 2004). The fundamental source on La Mothe le Vayer continues to be Pintard, Le libertinage érudit, 127–46, 505–38. More recently, see Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Dis/simulations: religion, morale et politique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2002).

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of generosity, for he welcomed a stream of savants as they made their way from Northern Europe to the Italian peninsula. Chapelain also conducted many of his relationships through letters, especially his friendship with Balzac, who after 1630 kept his distance from Paris; and many of his friends, like those of Peiresc, are also situated beyond the tighter circle of Parisian gens de lettres. But Chapelain was also assiduous in “showing up” in important venues, such as the Rambouillet salon and other groups. Conrart as well maintained many of his contacts through letters which often were a means of conducting business as well as affirming friendships; this “professional of letters,” a man who never published, was probably more instrumental than anyone else in his day in getting others published, including his friends.39 La Mothe le Vayer’s “friends” emerge as characters in his various publications, which suggest a performative element to this little tribe of “libertines.” Like other contemporary texts, his dialogues both “publicize” the existence of this exclusive coterie while endowing it with the allure of an in-group of members whose identities are known only to cognoscenti. While not a benefactor in any material sense, Marolles was generous in his praise and moral support to a remarkably wide range of gens de lettres across the lines of literary fashion, intellectual orientation, institutions, religion, and even gender (Marie de Gournay); of the seven, he is probably the most catholic in his friendships. Occasionally his Mémoires read like a celebrity autobiography—endless namedropping in an attempt to prove he knew everyone. Not a patron or benefactor, Marie de Gournay more likely looked to her friends for protection or support in a literary world where she was isolated not only because of her gender but also because of her somewhat unfashionable views on language and literature. There were thus different dynamics operating in these groups of friends; in some a principle figure acted something like a “big man;” in others the ties that bound were more equal. These seven gens de lettres also represent a range of intellectual and literary perspectives. In one sense we can situate them in one of the two camps, “mondain” and erudite, that divided writers and intellectuals. Chapelain, Conrart and Colletet identified with the new, post-Malherbian trends; although, as noted, Colletet’s relationship to this camp was somewhat ambivalent. Marolles, Peiresc, La Mothe le Vayer, and Gournay aligned themselves in opposition to the fashionable literary trends. As we have seen with the individual trajectories of Marolles and Colletet, however, this supposed division is belied by many cross-cutting associations, for several figures were clearly comfortable in both camps. The world of actual literary and intellectual sociability in early seventeenth-century Paris was much more fluid than the ideal boundaries of taste and doctrine would lead one to believe. Still, if there is one thing apparent from these clustering of “friends” it is how the ties among the mondain writers are, one might say, over-determined: reinforced and reaffirmed by overlapping relationships. Certain figures comprised the core of contemporary literary life. In large part, though certainly not exclusively, these are the gens de lettres who contributed the modern or mondain literary movement.  Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres, passim.

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Many were also the members of the first generation of the Académie française. It was these types who circulated most widely, or at least most strategically, among their fellow gens de lettres. On the other hand, Peiresc’s friends were mostly excluded from this Parisian network. This is a contrast that conforms to the difference between a European-wide Republic of Letters, with its members linked only through the highly mediated contacts of letters exchanged across distances separated not only by geography but also national boundaries and confessional differences; and a close-knit community of mondain writers, almost all located in Paris, who routinely interacted face-to-face in a variety of venues. To what extent was “making it” in the new literary field dependent on literary achievement, and to what extent on these ties? How much were these ties a result, and how much a cause, of their success? In fact, we know that in notable cases—Conrart, Voiture, Peiresc—the route of publication was studiously avoided, putting a premium on personal ties and interactions as the font of advancement. Interestingly, however, perhaps the most important writers and intellectuals of the period—at least from the perspective of posterity—are remarkable in this context for their remove from—not rootedness in—the world of Parisian sociability. In different ways, Descartes, Corneille, and Guez de Balzac remained aloof from this thicket of associations. Hardly bereft of ties of friendship, as even a cursory glance at the correspondence of Descartes and Balzac at least will show, they nevertheless did not demonstrate an inclination for sociability like the lesser lights among their contemporaries. It may be, indeed, that this reluctance to mix was related to their intellectual and literary ambitions: unlike their peers, whose aspirations were attuned to how they were received on the Parisian scene, these three luminaries may have had loftier notions of success which prompted them to look upon local approbation with disdain. In any case, then as now, friendship, and whom one knows, could count for much but not for everything. Several observations might be drawn from these findings. The first builds on the hardly novel view that Richelieu created the Académie française out of a concern for the potential independence of the burgeoning ranks of men of letters, many of whom he knew personally and whose activities he tracked with the keen interest of a man deeply attracted to a literary vocation. His concern was in part with the way powerful grands, like Gaston and Montmorency, had added to their luster and cultural clout by establishing orbits of writers in their household entourages. And, as Hélène Merlin-Kajman has recently argued, it was also likely aggravated by the spectacular “quarrels” that had marked the 1620s, most notably those stemming from the persecution of Théophile and the publication of Balzac’s letters. In her view, the academy was founded in part in order to channel these contentious energies into an official body that could serve to adjudicate these quarrels with the “bienséance” often lacking in the public disputes between “particulars.”40 To this, then, we should add that the Cardinal’s concern was surely also with the dense ties among writers in spaces well beyond the purview of the court or the surveillance of his agents. It was not simply the gatherings in Conrart’s townhouse that attracted  Merlin-Kajman, L’Excentricité académique.

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his intrusive curiosity, but the fact that this “circle” had counterparts all over the city, with its habitués circulating in and out of them, creating a miniature “republic of letters” right under his imperious nose. The second observation relates to a more general issue having to do with the emergence of what is seen to be the defining ethos of the period—the ideal of civility and, in particular, the French variation known as “honnêteté.” In recent years, a view has gained prominence that sees this ideal emerging, not in the royal court (Elias), nor in a “bourgeois” public sphere (Habermas), but rather in the fundamentally aristocratic denizen of the salon where, despite its elite profile, notions of equality, comity and unfettered expression flourished, creating a kind of counter-culture to the hierarchical, constrained, and highly mannered model of self-expression fostered at court. Argued with remarkable analytical skill and erudition by Daniel Gordon in Citizens without Sovereignty, this view is most appropriate for the eighteenth century, but it has implications for the whole Old Regime.41 And it has attracted its share of critics, who remind us that the salon was wedded to notions of hierarchy and deference as much as the royal court; or who point out that Gordon’s book is exclusively based on texts expressing often selfserving ideals rather than actual social practices.42 For my part, Gordon’s insights have more relevance than these critics would admit—that is, if we allow for certain important adjustments in the terms of analysis. Rather than look at the elite milieu of the salon, for example, as the crucible of civility, I would suggest that this ethos was embodied primarily by gens de lettres who, to be sure, strove to inspire and edify their largely aristocratic patrons and protectors with its values, but who, in the first instance, fashioned the honnête homme in their own image. A quintessentially social philosophy, which eschewed anything remotely related to pedantry, professionalism, or excesses of any sort, especially intellectual, honnêteté was a type of philosophy nevertheless, derived from an deep appreciation of the ancients, especially Aristotle and Cicero. Schooled in humanism, men of letters saw these and other ancient philosophers not as dialecticians, expounders of lifeless verities relegated to dusty tomes, but rather as models for living.43 For Pierre Bardin, a first generation academician whose  See also Dena Goodman, Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 42  Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005), and “The Kingdom of Politesse: Salons and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Republic of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics and the Arts 1, no. 1 (1 May 2009); Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres, chap. 4. 43  The literature on honnêteté is vast. See, among other works, Maurice Magendie, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté en France au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1925); Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse. L’invention de l’honnête homme (Paris: PUF, 1996); Domna Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A study of the Honnête Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1980); Jacques Revel, “The 41

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Le Lycée is one of the founding texts of honnêteté, the first honnête homme was Socrates—the inquisitive, playful, frank, utterly human philosopher, whose delight in conversing with his friends is palpable on every page of Plato’s dialogues.44 In the Age of Richelieu, where could men of letters imagine themselves as Socrates’ disciples if not in the Ciceronian space of otium cum dignitate? There they could be friends among friends. The case of Marie de Gournay is worth revisiting, for it both affirms this claim while representing an exception that suggests a rule. By and large, her friends are all “insiders,” that is, men with multiple ties to other writers and savants. While she might have been singular both because of her gender and her views on language and literature, she was hardly isolated: her friends were among the rising stars of the literary establishment. And for good reason: she was a formidable figure, courted by Richelieu and even considered a rival by Jean Chapelain.45 In the new literary culture, she was indeed exceptional as the only woman with a public identity not linked to a salon or a salonnière herself. Does Marie de Gournay’s exceptional status allow us to assert a rule? That is, does her circle of “friends” suggest that other women of this literary milieu were excluded from these relationships? Virtually all accounts about the salon represent interactions between the sexes as light and playful, with badinage and an element of risqué often characteristic of the conversation. But intimacy does not necessarily mean friendship. In fact, I would suggest that men of letters cultivated a particular genre of self-presentation and interaction which managed to sanction and encourage intimacy with women while at the same time excluding them from the fold of friendship. This was known as “galanterie,” a term that, while not as well-known or wide-spread as “honnêteté,” was meant to identify, like it, a sophisticated, civilized mode of being agreeable in polite company. The difference between honnêteté and galanterie, of course, was that the latter was usually understood as governing men’s behavior toward women. Marked by artful, ritualized comportment, galanterie, was cultivated in the mixed company of men and women, especially the salon. And while its terms were reputedly dictated by the sensitivities and demands of the presiding salonnière, it still played upon a gender distinction where men and women were on fundamentally different levels. The “grammar of amatory behavior”46 was at the heart of aristocratic selffashioning in the seventeenth century, as old chivalric traditions were dusted off and refurbished with new literary forms and more sophisticated and demanding behavioral standards. For all its relevance to such new venues for sociability, then, Uses of Civility,” in A History of Private Life, ed. Roger Chartier, vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Lewis C. Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 44  Le Lyceé du Sr. Bardin, ou en plusieurs promenades il est traité des connoissances, des actions, et des plaisirs d’un Honneste Homme (Paris: J. Camusat, 1632), 295. 45  Fogel, Marie de Gournay, 278. 46  Stanton, Aristocrat as Art, 137.

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the ethos of galanterie essentially preserved traditional gender roles—male seducer and female object of affection—roles that were hardly conducive to friendship.47 This, in turn, might suggest two further conclusions. The first sends us back to the case of Gournay as an instructive counter-example. Unlike other women prominent in the world of letters, her rich friendship network composed of prominent men of letters facilitated a dynamic of self-promotion across a gamut of venues, both real and discursive. She was, in short, remarkably adept, energetic, and deft at maintaining her profile on the literary scene, insistent that she be appreciated as an author and not taken merely for a salon-bound hostess of other writers. While there are only shreds of evidence indicating that she actually frequented one or more salons, it is clear that her identity was not linked to a single institution or gathering. For the salonnière, however, this linkage was defining. For all their importance, such women were restricted in their mobility, bound to the institution that endowed them with their cultural power.48 I have argued that such sociability constituted an important element of the mondain literary culture taking shape in the first half of the seventeenth century. In this respect, the salonnière was denied an opportunity to engage in this aspect of cultural accumulation. She could “receive” but she did not “frequent.” In this context, it is worth pointing out that one of the notable qualities of the honnête homme is the ability to move easily and with aplomb in many different milieus—to negotiate a range of circumstances unfazed, honorably, and with both his self-possession and virtue in tact. Bardin writes at length on the varied moral challenges that will confront his young student as he moves from venue to venue in the course of his life, especially the court and battlefield, the one as fraught with danger as the other. “In the necessity of living in the company of men,” he advises, “it is appropriate that he show himself pliant before some, and unbending before others, and, absolute master of his disposition he must know how to present himself in accordance to the humors of those with whom his situation requires him to live….” (Bardin adds the important qualification that this pertains to “indifferent situations.”)49 “Someone with a well formed character,” Faret writes, “knows how to adjust to every encounter and, as was said of Alcibiades,  There is a burgeoning literature on galanterie: see Stanton, Aristocrat as Art, 28–9, 51–2, 137–8; Viala, “Les Signes Galants: A Historical Reevaluation of Galanterie,” Yale French Studies (Exploring the Conversible World), ed. Elena Russo, 92 (1997): 11–29; Noémie Hepp, “La Galanterie,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Seuil, 1992) III, 2:745–83; Génetiot, Poétique du loisir mondain; Seifert, Manning, 86–7 and passim. 48  Erica Harth, “The Salon Woman goes Public … or Does She?” in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 179–93. 49  “Dans la necessité de vivre en la compagnie des hommes, il est à propos qu’il flechisse devant les uns et qu’il se roidisse contre les autres, et maistre absolu de son Genie, il le doit sçavoir manier selon l’humeur de ceux avec qui sa condition l’oblige de vivre, pourveu que ce soit en choses indifferentes” (Le Lycée, 438). 47

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is so accommodating and does everything in a certain way such that he seems to have a particular inclination [for it] … There are no humors too extreme that he cannot live with without contesting, nor so bizarre that he cannot find a way of sympathizing with.”50 For the honnête femme, on the other hand, as contemporary texts on this theme reveal, the expectation that mobility will characterize her life is entirely absent. Indeed, from other sources and experiences we can conclude that a defining feature of women’s lives in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was precisely a lack of mobility and a forced withdrawal from public life.51 And this points to the fundamental gender inequality that characterized Ancien Régime literary culture, which, from the limited perspective of the cosseted and privileged confines of the salon, has recently been celebrated for a very different set of values. Finally, then, this might lead us to reconsider why French men of letters in this period seemed willing to be corralled into the official body of the Académie française, a body that in many ways threatened to disrupt the literary culture of otium and friendship that flourished in Conrart’s gathering and its many counterparts. To be sure, they hardly had a choice, given Richelieu’s heavy-handed intervention. But writers may have had more incentive than is usually thought. The new academy was not only exclusively male in its membership; its statutes formally banned women from its ranks. This might not seem surprising, given the general misogyny of the period, except for the fact that women routinely participated in the academic assemblies at court in the sixteenth century.52 More than excluding women, the new academy was defined in explicitly masculine terms. In his brief for the new institution, Faret expressed the hope that it would rescue his fellow hommes de lettres from “idleness, leading unconsciously to evil things and effeminate cares which cause them to rebuff honest and industrious exercises whose beauty they 50  “Un esprit bien fait s’ajuste à tout ce qu’il rencontre et comme on disoit d’Alcibiade, il est si accommodant et fait toutes choses d’une certaine sorte, qu’il a une particuliere inclination à chacune de celles qu’on luy voit faire … Il n’y a point d’humeurs si extravagantes, avec qui il ne puisse vivre sans brouillerie, ni si bijarres, avec qui il ne trouve le moyen de compatir” (Faret, L’Honnête homme, 139). 51  For a model study that demonstrates these trends in religious and urban contexts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Munich, see Ulrich Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 52  Apparently the admission of two prominent woman writers, Antoinette Deshoulières and Madeleine Scudéry, into the company of immortals was discussed. In the sixteenth century there had been no such prohibition. See Timothy Murray, “1634, 13 March. The Académie Française, Created by Cardinal Richelieu, Holds Its First Meeting,” in The New Literary History of France, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1998), 269. Agrippa D’Aubigné notes that two women, Madame de Retz and Madame de Lignerolles, not only attended the sessions of Henri III’s Académie du Palais, but also conducted a learned debate before the assembled, while the English ambassador remarked on the presence of “several ladies” in the company. See Frances Yates, French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947) 32–3.

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no longer consider except with horror or contempt.”53 What could Faret have been referring to other than the otium of the salon, where the disadvantage of female domesticity fostered a hothouse of cultural experimentation, where confinement bred refinement? Richelieu, of course, was hardly disposed for the new academy to be anything than a masculine bastion of letters; his assumption was that “the best thoughts of women are almost always bad … they are led by their passions, which normally take the place of reason in their minds.”54 But even Chapelain and Balzac, who otherwise enjoyed the favor of women and the company of the salon, also expressed some misgivings about the powerful role certain women played in the world of letters. They have become “savants or judges of knowledge, such that one can not consider oneself successful unless one appeals to their taste and accommodates their abilities,” acknowledges Chapelain in a letter to Balzac. However, when it comes to “serious matters,” he declares, “we must have enough courage to stand up to the judgments of these new sort of ‘long robes,’ … and think about posterity, which is not subject to the weaknesses of the times and which, sooner or later, renders to each what it deserves.”55 To Antoine Godeau, another frequenter of the Rambouillet salon, he confided: “ “I know from experience that in the company you find yourself in one cannot do as one pleases … its orders are absolute, if not to say tyrannical.”56 Throughout their careers these writers voiced anxiety about ceding too much critical power to semi-educated elites, chief among them women, who presumed to exercise their judgment without “doctrine,” guided solely by the baseless standard of taste.57 To this we might add their unease with the otium embodied in the salon, where retreat was associated with forced 53  “De cette oisiveté ils se laissent après aller insensiblement à l’estude des choses mauvaises, & à des soins effeminez qui les rebutent de ces honnestes & laborieux exercices, dont ils ne considerent plus la beauté qu’avec horreur ou mespris.” Faret, Projet de l’Académie pour servir de Préface à ses Status, ed. Jean Rousselet (Saint Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 1983), 28–9. 54  Quoted in Timothy Reiss, The Meaning of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 109. 55  “… nos femmes sont devenues ou savantes ou juges de sçavoir, de sorte qu’on ne peut estre estimé habille que quand on flatte leur goust, et que l’on s’accomode à leur portée. Mais il faut avoir assés de coeur pour mespriser les jugemens de ces sortes de longues robbes aux matières solides, et regarder la sage postérité, qui n’est point sujette aux foiblesses de chacque siècle, et qui tost ou tard rend à chacun ce qui lui appartient.” He adds, however, that he does not mean to include in this critique “nos deux heroines,” referring to Madame de Rambouillet and her daughter Julie. (Lettres de Chapelain, 6 February 1638; 1:381). 56  “Je sçay par experience qu’en la compagnie où vous estes on ne peut disposer de soy … ses orders sont absolus, pour ne pas dire tyranniques …” (Lettres de Chapelain, September 1634; 1:80). 57  For a good illustration of Chapelain and Balzac’s impatience with the salon habitués’ lack of informed judgment—in their eyes, at least—see the quarrel that broke out over the virtues of Ariosto’s Suppositi, where the two gens de lettres bemoan the tendency for noblemen and ladies, along with their supporter Voiture, to rely merely upon “taste” rather than “doctrine” in fashioning their judgments. (Lettres de Chapelain, 1:396, 402–5, 408).

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confinement, and the prerogative to withdraw from public life might be taken for an “effeminate” condition of powerlessness. For all the risk of “servitude” critics claimed it represented, entry into the new academy was at least not an act of self-emasculation. Rather, in the eyes of these men of letters, it possessed an impeccably virile profile, freed from the taint of female sociability and the embarrassing judgment of women.58 But rescued from the otium of the salon, incorporated into an official body, could they still be “friends of friends?”

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 For a recent formulation of the view that monarchical “absolutism” was viewed by contemporaries as a means of freeing them from the “servitude” of “particulars,” see Ziad Elmarsafy, Freedom, Slavery and Absolutism: Corneille, Pascal, Racine (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003).

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Chapter 8

Making Friends, Practicing Equality: The Correspondence of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia Rebecca M. Wilkin

“Your affectionate friend in your service”: so Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine signed each of the 26 extant letters she penned to René Descartes from 1642 to 1650. Biographers create character sketches from their letters, vulgarizing Cartesian philosophy by humanizing its author.1 Philosophers mine their correspondence for answers about problems in Descartes’s philosophy—and in recent years, especially, to identify Elisabeth’s credentials as a philosopher.2 Both take pains to assert that the philosopher and the princess were not romantically involved, yet overlook one of the most remarkable features of their correspondence: the construction of a friendship between a woman and a man. “[R]ecorded friendships between men and women,” writes Anthony J. La 1  I thank the anonymous reader, Marshall Brown, Jennifer Cavalli, Kirsten Christensen, Susan Gaylard, Donald Gilbert-Santamaría, Diane Kelley, Virginia Krause, Kimberly Lynn, Benjamin Schmidt, Lewis Seifert, Troy Storfjell, and Geoffrey Turnovsky for reading and commenting on drafts of this chapter. Léon Petit and Gustave Cohen claim that Descartes and Elisabeth were amorously involved, in Descartes et la princesse Elisabeth: roman d’amour vécu (Paris: Nizet, 1969) and Ecrivains français en Hollande dans la première moitié du dix-septième siècle (Paris: Champion, 1920). Marguerite Néel criticizes Cohen’s psychologizing approach in Descartes et la princesse Elisabeth (Paris: Elzévir, 1943), but speculates in similar terms about the philosopher’s paternal affection for the princess (24, 33). Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu, author of Une liaison philosophique: Du thérapeutique entre Descartes et la princesse Elisabeth de Bohême (Paris: Stock, 2012) is a practicing psychologist who extends the interpretive style of Cohen and Néel with the psychoanalytical concepts of trauma and therapy. The friendship occupies its own chapter in nearly all of the many biographies of Descartes, and of Elisabeth, of which there have been none in English since Elisabeth Godfrey’s A Sister of Prince Rupert: Elisabeth Princess Palatine and Abbess of Herford (New York, NY: John Lane Co., 1909). In German, see Helge bei der Wieden, ed., Elisabeth von der Pfalz, Äbtissin von Herford, 1618–1680: Eine Biographie in Einzeldarstellungen, Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, vol. 245 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2008). Charles Adam devotes a chapter to Elisabeth in Descartes: ses amitiés féminines (Paris: Boivin, 1937). 2  See especially Lisa Shapiro, “Volume Editor’s Introduction,” The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, ed. and trans. Lisa Shapiro (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 36–51.

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Vopa, offer privileged insight into the evolving “meaning of equality” and are “essential to reconstructing both the possibilities for female emancipation and the constraints on it.”3 In what follows, I unpack two different strategies for achieving the equality that early moderns recognized either as the condition of friendship or as its consequence. I use these friend-making strategies to reveal Elisabeth’s philosophical allegiances, and I show that practices of equality in friendship have implications for the shape of gender equality within a larger polity. In theory, friendship was “a male prerogative and pleasure” in early modern Europe.4 The dominant moral philosophical paradigms of the early seventeenth century excluded women. Aristotle only considered the possibility of cross-gender friendship within marriage, a relation characterized by inequality and utility.5 True friends, brought together by the pursuit of virtue, were men. Neostoics, whose message of self-control and obedience to the state became the “religion of educated men” in the aftermath of the wars of religion, feminized passion, making the rational friendships sought by the sage a uniquely masculine pursuit.6 Only in spiritual milieux promoting a counter-cultural ethos modeled on the ideals of early Christianity were cross-gender friendships recognized and celebrated. Aspiring female saints and their male spiritual guides could rely on a long tradition of cross-gender friendships for inspiration and authorization, beginning in the fourth century with Saint Jerome and his associate Paola. For those who sought to be transformed through God’s love, friendship with a member of the opposite sex, “was a place in which … the person, ordinarily safely contained … in a discreet self, could be vaulted into sudden vulnerability”—a vulnerability productive of union with God.7 Spiritually transformative friendships between women and men 3  Anthony J. La Vopa, “A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel’s Enlightenment,” The Historical Journal 52, no. 3 (2009): 717–38, 736–7. 4  Dale Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 13. 5  Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 8.11.4 (495) and 8.12.7 (504). He does allow that the friendship of husband and wife “may also be based on virtue” (504). 6  Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 37. On actual friendships between Neostoics, see Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), especially chapters 2 and 3. On the masculinism of Neostoicism, see Rebecca Wilkin, Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 97–139. Marc Schachter warns against overstating women’s exclusion from friendship in Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 164. 7  Wendy M. Wright, Bond of Perfection: Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985), 204. Jodi Bilinkoff speculates that “the potential to achieve a meaningful, even intense, connection with a member of the opposite sex” may have motivated some to pursue a religious vocation in Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1540–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 76.

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resonated beyond the monastic context. Michelangelo, the self-professed amico of Vittoria Colonna, valued her friendship for bringing him closer to Christ.8 And the broad appeal of François de Sales’s works to laywomen was what drew his celebrated friend, Jeanne de Chantal, to him in the first place.9 The correspondence of Descartes and Elisabeth was remarkable specifically because it constructed a philosophical friendship between a man and a woman. Philosophy differs from religion in its commitment to rationality.10 A philosophical friendship entails the pursuit of wisdom and virtue rather than union with God; it aspires to contentment in this life rather than eternal beatitude. However, philosophy shares with religion the ambition to transform its practitioners. For the ancients, philosophy was none other than the art of living; this is why biographies of famous philosophers were such important references.11 The expectation that any philosophy worth its salt should teach one how to live a more virtuous, happier life was alive and well in the seventeenth century; it animates nearly all of Elisabeth’s questions for Descartes. The closest precedent for a philosophical friendship between a man and a woman that I am aware of was that of Peter Abelard and his pupil, Héloïse. Héloïse and Abelard participated in the rich theological discussions of love and other human relationships that flourished in the twelfth century, albeit in a private epistolary aside. Héloïse synthesized Ciceronian friendship with the deliberate “dilection” celebrated in the Song of Songs to explain in what way she was his amica.12 In response, Abelard calls Héloïse “the only disciple of philosophy among all the young women of our age” and praises her for discussing “the rules of friendship so subtly that you seem not to have read Tully [i.e., Cicero] but to have 8  See Constance M. Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118–27. 9  Wright, Bond of Perfection, 135. 10  Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5–6. 11  See Peter Sellars, The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2009), 15–32. While Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers is the obvious reference here, seventeenth-century philosophers had their biographers as well. Samuel Sorbière prefaced his edition of Pierre Gassendi’s Opera omnia (1658) with a biography, and the second half of the seventeenth century saw no less than four biographies of Descartes, in Latin, English, and French. See Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, eds, Biographies of Descartes, vol. 3, Descartes in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 10 vols. Adrien Baillet begins his Vie de Monsieur Descartes (1691) with an account of Descartes’s health regimen. 12  Constant Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 16–19. Plato admitted women to his academy; women could have enrolled in any of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, but friendship is not a feature of the recorded history of these interactions (Nussbaum, Therapy, 54). Montaigne (or Marie de Gournay?) noted Gournay’s potential for friendship: “cette ame sera quelque jour capable … de cette trèssaincte amitié où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores” (Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and V[erdun]-L[ouis] Saulnier [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965], II.17.661). See Hoffmann, 58–9.

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given those precepts to Tully himself!”13 Still, Descartes and Elisabeth would have avoided evoking this exchange even if they had had access to it—Abelard’s betterknown retrospective reinterpretation of the relationship, the Historia calamitatum, told of lust overcome by repentance. Because there was no philosophical sanction or direct exemplar for a philosophical friendship between a woman and a man, the creative character of all friend-making is particularly evident in the correspondence of Elisabeth and Descartes. Descartes, as behooved his status as famous philosopher, drew from the stoic base that shaped all moral philosophical discourse in the first half of the seventeenth century. Yet whereas Neostoics had striven to ennoble political pragmatism by masculinizing it, Descartes hewed to the gender neutrality of Hellenistic Stoicism.14 Through the stoic notion of an elite cadre of friends so perfect as to be interchangeable, he paradoxically underscores Elisabeth’s singularity. He distinguishes Elisabeth by insisting on her conformity to a model that none other, in his experience, had yet attained. In this way, he acknowledges a unique friendship all the while overlooking what made it unique: the gender of his friend. For her part, the princess artfully attributes to her non-noble correspondent a service role that, metaphorically construed, allows her in turn to style herself as his pupil. She hails Descartes as the “doctor of [her] soul”—in other words, her guide to the art of living that the ancients called philosophy. But she also imagines Descartes as a medical doctor—that is, as a subservient member of court personnel whose remedies are rarely effective. Elisabeth may not have articulated “a fully developed philosophical position” in her letters,15 but they certainly provide evidence of her philosophical allegiances. Elisabeth’s assessment of Descartes’s stoical therapy reveals unmistakable skeptical affinities. “Friendship is equality,” went the ancient adage.16 The letters of Descartes and Elisabeth exemplify a practice of equality, characterized by a balancing and counterbalancing of equalizing gestures. “It is of utmost importance in friendship,” according to Cicero, “that superior and inferior should stand on an equality,” so that friends who are in some way superior—through their virtue, intellect, rank, or fortune—should not only “lower themselves” to be on a par with their more modestly endowed friends, but also endeavor to “lift [them] up.”17 This equalizing dynamic distinguishes friendship, an exclusively masculine bond, from the static  Abelard, Letter 50, cited in Mews, Lost Love Letters, 231.  For Stoics, status and appearance and gender are external to the person whose essence is reason (Nussbaum, Therapy, 334). 15  Margaret Atherton, “Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia” in Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 10. 16  Erasmus traces the proverb to the quasi-legendary Pythagoras. Desiderius Erasmus, Adages, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, ann. R.A.B. Mynors, Collected Works of Erasmus, vols. 31–35 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 31:29–30. 17  “Sed maximum est in amicitia superiorem parem esse inferiori … Quam ob rem, ut ei, qui superiores sunt, submittere se debent in amicitia, sic quodam modo inferiors extollere” (Cicero, De senectute, de amicitia, de divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953], 19.69–20.72 [178–81]). 13 14

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equality required by marriage, the only socially recognized bond between men and women. Equality, says Antoine Furetière in his 1697 Dictionnaire universel, means “parity, exact resemblance.” Thus “an equal marriage, is one that is made between people of the same rank, wealth, or birth.” But equality can also be “that which makes equal in quantity, in quality.” For example, “Friendship requires some equality: but it is more an equality that it makes itself, than an equality that it finds [already] there.”18 While parity in marriage is socially predetermined and further establishes inequality throughout the social fabric—inequalities of wealth and rank, but also of gender as a result of property and inheritance laws—, in friendship, the content of equality is created by the two friends. Descartes’s stoical friend-making gestures equate equality with sameness, yet he delimits the content of equality to include only considerations of virtue and knowledge. His strategy for befriending Elisabeth is consistent with later Cartesian theorizations of gender equality based on mind/body dualism: whatever bodily differences exist between men and women are not differences that matter; what matters is their similar mental and moral capacity. In contrast, Elisabeth’s understanding of friendship encompasses difference rather than marginalizing it. Elisabeth characterizes her femininity as an insurmountable obstacle to sameness that persists within a relation of equality. In other words, she disaggregates the equality of the relation—friendship—from the parity of the friends. Her notion of friendship as a social bond within which individuals are on equal footing notwithstanding their differences provides an interesting parallel to contemporary contractarian thought. Descartes: The Friend as Sage Descartes had left France partly to avoid social obligations, but he did cultivate amicable relations by correspondence and in person in Holland. The Minim priest Marin Mersenne received (and redistributed) a hefty fraction of Descartes’s letters. A mathematician in his own right, Mersenne mediated a network of savants. For Descartes, Mersenne solicited objections to the Meditationes de prima philosophia and arranged for publication of the whole (1641). Alphonse de Pollot (Palloti), a Calvinist from the Piedmont via Geneva, was serving Prince Frederick Henry of Orange as a gentleman-in-waiting when he arranged to introduce Descartes to the exiled court of the Queen of Bohemia at The Hague.19 Constantijn Huygens, a distinguished man of letters and secretary to the Stadtholder, had assisted 18

 “EGAL, ALE. Adj. Terme relatif. … Un mariage égal, est celui qui se fait entre des gens de pareille condition, en biens, en naissance … EGALITE, f.f. Parité, exacte ressemblance; juste proportion entre les choses, ou les personnes; ce qui rend égal en quantité, en qualité. Il y a entre ces deux lignes de l’égalité. Entre ces deux personnes il y a égalité d’âge, de condition. L’amitié a besoin de quelque égalité: mais c’est plutôt d’une égalité qu’elle se fait elle-même, qu’un d’une égalité qu’elle y trouve” (Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire Universel, 3 vols. [Rotterdam: Arnout & Reinier Leers, 1690]). 19  Godfrey, A Sister, 86.

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Descartes in the publication of his first work, Discours de la méthode and its attendant essays, and introduced him to two Catholic priests in Haarlem, whose companionship Descartes enjoyed during the cold winter evenings. In Augustijn Bloemaert’s well-appointed home, the philosopher listened to Johan Albert Ban’s harpsichord compositions and probably admired Bloemaert’s extensive collection of paintings, which eventually included Descartes’s likeness.20 Unfortunately, no letters exist between Descartes and his valet, de Gillot; after many long years in his service, de Gillot went on to become a teacher of mathematics in Leiden.21 Had Descartes served as a mentor to his valet? To his disciple Claude Clerselier, the philosopher confided regarding his “dangerous engagement” with a servant woman—evidence of great trust. 22 The trustworthy Clerselier also served as literary executor of his papers after his death. We should not forget, finally, Pierre Chanut, Clerselier’s brother-in-law. He was the French ambassador to Sweden who arranged for Descartes’s voyage there, hosted him upon his arrival, suffered from pneumonia alongside him, and wrote to Elisabeth to inform her that although he had recovered, her friend had not.23 Though not lacking in friends, Descartes could boast few friendly bonds among his intellectual peers. The Objections to his Meditations provide a cast list of this cohort. Antoine Arnauld, author of the fourth set of objections, was the most sympathetic to Descartes’s project. But it was the authors of the third and fifth objections, Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi respectively, whom contemporaries identified as Descartes’s peers. Samuel Sorbière, a French Calvinist who lived in Holland from 1642 to 1650, overlapping for most of that time with Descartes, considered these two along with Descartes to constitute “the Triumvirate of Philosophers of this century.”24 As the translator of Hobbes’s De cive from Latin to French (Amsterdam, 1649), and as the editor of Gassendi’s 20  Bloemaert commissioned Frans Hals to paint Descartes before his departure to Sweden according to Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 144–8, 53, 172. 21  Godfrey, A Sister, 97. 22  Cited in Charles Adam, Descartes: ses amitiés féminines, 89. He is referring to Helena Jans, with whom he fathered Francine; she died at the age of five. Jans subsequently married an innkeeper with a dowry from Descartes. Russell Shorto, Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict of Faith and Reason (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2008), 253. 23  On his friendship with Clerselier and Chanut, see Descartes, Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3:376. I indicate all subsequent references to this edition by “CSM.” French citations come from Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols., ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1964–76), indicated by “AT”: in this case, AT 5:353. 24  “Il est l’un de ces trois qui compose dans l’estime que j’en fais le Triumvirat des Philosophes de ce siecle … Hobbes, Gassendi, & Descartes sont trois personnes que nous pouvons opposer à tous ceux dont l’Italie & la Grece se glorifient” (Samuel Sorbière, “Epistre dédicatoire,” in Thomas Hobbes, Éléments philosophiques du citoyen. Traicté politique où les fondemens de la Société civile sont découverts, traduicts en François par un de ses amis, trans. Samuel Sorbière [Amsterdam: Jean Blaeu, 1649], n.p.).

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Disquisitio metaphysica (Amsterdam, 1644), which contained not only the fifth objections to Descartes’s Meditations but also Gassendi’s Instantiae, a blow-byblow critique of Descartes’s entire system, Sorbière was hardly unbiased. But his opinion was widespread. Elisabeth testifies to Gassendi’s reputation upon receiving his objections, along with the French translation of Descartes’s Meditations in December 1647. Sadly, the triumvirate’s encounter over Descartes’s Meditations proved to be a colossal non-meeting of minds. She comments, “M. Gassendi, who has such a reputation for knowledge, made, after the Englishman, the least reasonable objections of all.”25 As for “the Englishman,” Descartes commented to an unknown interlocutor in 1643, “All I can say about the book De cive is that I believe its author to be the person who wrote the Third Objections against my Meditations, and that I find him much more astute in moral philosophy than in metaphysics or physics.”26 Indicative of Hobbes’s reputation in France, even among Cartesians, Clerselier owned a copy of one of the first editions of De cive, published in Paris (where Hobbes had fled from England) in 1642.27 Among the lesser lights of his adopted homeland, Descartes made more enemies than friends. Marten Schoock branded the Frenchman as an enthusiast in Admiranda Methodus Novae Philosophiae in Renati Des Cartes (1643). Gijsbert Voet—incidentally the professor of Elisabeth’s scholastically learned friend, Anna Maria van Schuurman—saw to it that his philosophy was banned from Utrecht University. Jakob Reefsen (alias “Jacobus Revius”) led the charge at Leiden. Turning the black legend against its promoters, Descartes complains to Elisabeth that these Calvinist theologians wanted to subject him to “an inquisition more severe than that in Spain ever was.”28 And then there was Hendrik de Roy. At first a promising disciple, “Regius” jeopardized Descartes’s reputation by surrounding fantastical interpretations of his philosophy with unwelcome professions of friendship.29 25  The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, ed. and trans. Lisa Shapiro (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 167, henceforth indicated as “SH”: “Le sieur Gasendus qui est en la plus grande réputation pour son savoir, a fait, après l’Anglais [Thomas Hobbes], des objections moins raisonnables que tous les autres” (AT 5:97). 26  CSM 3:230–31; “Tout ce que je puis dire du livre de Cive, est que je juge que son autheur est le mesme que celuy qui a fait les troisiemes objections contre mes Meditations, & que je le trouve beaucoup plus habile en Morale qu’en Metaphysique ny en Physique” (AT 4:67). 27  The copy of Thomas Hobbes, Elementorum philosophiae section tertia de cive (Paris, 1642) owned by la Bibliothèque nationale de France sports a manuscript annotation on the title page: “Ce livre appartient a Monr Clerselier.” 28  SH 161; “une inquisition plus sévère que ne fut jamais celle d’Espagne” (AT 5:18). On representations of the Spanish Inquisition in the Dutch Republic, see Benjamin Schmidt, Innocents Abroad: The Dutch Imagination in the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 29  SH 157; AT 4:626. On Regius’s works and their reception, see Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 13–19. On Descartes’s break with Regius, see

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Elisabeth emerged luminous from this discouraging tableau by her intelligence, good faith, and modesty. A calculation of hers “entirely similar to the one I proposed in my Geometry”30 causes Descartes’s admiration to overflow into a letter he writes her in November 1643: “Experience has taught me that most minds who have the facility to understand the reasoning of metaphysics are not able to understand that of algebra, and reciprocally that those who easily understand the latter are ordinarily incapable of other sorts of reasoning. I see no one but your Highness for whom all things are equally easy.”31 Descartes subsequently dedicated his Principia philosophiae (1644) to her, a tribute that she identifies as “the public testimony which you give me of your friendship and approval.”32 In that dedication, Descartes describes Elisabeth as “incomparable.”33 Incomparable but recognizable, she incarnates generosity, a concept that Descartes adapts, through their fruitful exchange, from a stoical base: “I consider your Highness to be the most noble and the most upstanding [relevée] soul I know,” he tells her in a letter of 18 May 1645.34 Stoic ideals inform Descartes’s representation of their friendship. Great souls—of which she is one and he, implicitly, another—“seeing their friends under some great affliction … feel compassion at the friend’s ill fortune and do everything possible to deliver the friend from it, and they do not fear even exposing themselves to death to this end if it is necessary.” Far from selfless, friendship is an opportunity for self-perfection, for a satisfied conscience outweighs friendship’s costs. The conscience of noble souls “tells them that they fulfill their duty [with respect to their friends] and that this is what makes an action praiseworthy and virtuous. This testimony makes them happier than the sadness caused by compassion afflicts them.”35 Compassion here is not a vulnerability to squash, as it would be for the Verbeek 52–60. Verbeek points out that Petrus Wassanaer, in the letter to Descartes with which he introduced Regius’s Brevis Explicatio Mentis Humanae, criticized Descartes for being a tyrant rather than a friend; dissent was allowable in friendship, presumably because a friend could accept that he was not infallible—not so Descartes (59). 30  Shapiro explains Elisabeth’s calculation, “Introduction,” 38. 31  SH 78; “L’expérience m’avait fait connaître que la plupart des esprits qui ont de la facilité à entendre les raisonnements de la métaphysique, ne peuvent pas concevoir ceux de l’algèbre, et réciproquement, que ceux qui comprennent aisément ceux-ci sont d’ordinaire incapables des autres et je ne vois que celui de Votre Altesse, auquel toutes les choses sont également faciles” (AT 4:45). 32  SH 83; “Le témoignage public que vous me faites de votre amitié et de votre approbation” (AT 4:131). 33  CSM 1:192; AT 8a:4. 34  SH 88; “je considère Votre Altesse comme ayant l’âme la plus noble et la plus relevée que je connaisse” (AT 4:203). 35  SH 87–8, emended by the anonymous reader of the manuscript; “Ces plus grandes âmes dont je parle ont de la satisfaction, en elles-mêmes, de toutes les choses qui leur arrivent, même des plus fâcheuses et insupportables … ainsi, voyant leurs amis en quelque grande affliction, elles compatissent à leur mal, et font tout leur possible pour les en délivrer, et ne craignent pas même de s’exposer à la mort pour ce sujet, s’il en est besoin. Mais, cependant le témoignage que leur donne leur conscience, de ce qu’elles s’acquittent

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Stoics, but rather a motive for noble action. Nevertheless, the self-centered character of Descartes’s approach to friendship develops from the humility fundamental to stoic therapy, which begins with the admission of one’s inability to control anything but one’s own emotional state.36 In keeping with an ethics in which virtue is none other than “a firm and constant will to execute all that we judge to be the best and to employ all the force of our understanding to judge well,”37 all we can aspire to do in friendship—as in life more generally—is to base our actions on the purest motives and best knowledge. Under such circumstances, being a good friend is its own reward, irrespective of the actual outcome of our friendly actions. The impersonality of Descartes’s account of friendship is striking, and it too reveals Stoic roots. “Close in that to that which characterizes the generous man according to Descartes,” writes Jean-Claude Fraisse, the stoic sage “attributes worth only to that which he knows to be identical in all, and supposes in others the same firmness of soul of which he is capable.”38 In stoic friendship, friends are interchangeable; what makes a sage friend-worthy is identical from one to the next. That is why, according to Seneca, the sage “will never be without a friend; it is in his power to replace [a lost friend] as quickly as possible. In the same way as Phidias, if he loses a statue, will make another right away, the sage, artist in friendship, puts another friend in the place of the lost one.”39 Should the sage note a discrepancy between two potential friends, he will choose the wiser and more virtuous one, regardless of the past experiences he might share with the other.40 Elisabeth espouses these rational criteria in her second letter to Descartes, when she compares his dualism to the materialist theses that she had previously favored: “I entertain these sentiments [i.e., materialism] only as friends whom I do not intend to keep.”41 On the one hand, Descartes’s correspondent is “incomparable,” and he cherishes her letters like the miser hoards gold.42 On the other hand, she is equal en cela de leur devoir, et font une action louable et vertueuse, les rend plus heureuses, que toute la tristesse, que leur donne la compassion ne les afflige” (AT 4:203). See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 9.8.9–10 (555). 36  Philippe Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 86. 37  SH 104–5; “il est besoin de suivre la vertu, c’est-à-dire d’avoir une volonté ferme et constante d’exécuter tout ce que nous jugerons être le meilleur, et d’employer toute la force de notre entendement à en bien juger” (AT 4:277). 38  “Proche en cela de ce qui caractérisa l’homme ‘généreux’ selon Descartes, il n’attribue de valeur qu’à ce qui est identique en tous, et suppose chez autrui la même fermeté d’âme dont il est capable” (Jean-Claude Fraisse, Philia: La notion d’amitié dans la philosophie antique [Paris: Vrin, 1974], 366). 39  Seneca, “On philosophy and friendship,” in Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship, ed. Michael Pakaluk (Indianapolis, IL: Hackett Publishing Co., 1991), 120. 40  Cicero says that seniority matters in friendship in De amicitia 19.67. 41  SH 68; “je n’entretiens ces sentiments que comme des amis que je ne crois point conserver” (AT 3:685). 42  SH 67; “j’en userai comme les avares font de leurs trésors” (AT 3:668).

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to any other sage in her wisdom and virtue. In this way, Descartes distinguishes Elisabeth as a friend without peer, without actually calling her his friend. Elisabeth’s superior rank precluded Descartes from naming their friendship expressly. Frederick V’s claim to the throne of Bohemia lasted only long enough to ignite the Thirty Years War and lose the Battle of White Mountain in 1620,43 but the Palatinate, to which he had a hereditary claim as Elector, was one of the most important German principalities. Elisabeth’s mother was a Stuart of the highest possible standing: the daughter and sister of James I and Charles I of England. Descartes was a commoner. To identify Elisabeth as his friend would have entailed a self-promotion of presumptuous proportions, precisely because friendship describes a relation of equality. Descartes explains as much to Chanut: the custom of our speech and the courtesy of good manners does not allow us to tell those whose condition is far above ours that we love them; we may say only that we respect, honour, esteem them, and that we have zeal and devotion for their service. I think that the reason for this is that friendship between human beings [l’amitié d’homme à homme] makes those in whom it is reciprocated in some way equal to each other, and so if, while trying to make oneself loved by some great person, one said that one loved him he might think that one was treating him as an equal and so doing him wrong.44

The “customs of speech” that precluded expressing friendly feelings “man to [socially superior] man” also made it awkward for men to articulate amical sentiments to women. At court and in salons, “friendship” between men and women was synonymous with galanterie.45 There was much room for insinuation in Descartes’s case, as both correspondents were notoriously single. The bachelor Descartes was the age Elisabeth’s father would have been had the Winter King not perished of pestilential fever in 1632. The philosopher’s lack of attachment, together with his itinerancy, led to dark insinuations among his detractors. At the age of fifteen, Elisabeth had refused her sole marriage prospect—the hand of King Władysław IV of Poland—out of Calvinist conviction.46 Willem van Honthorst

43

 Did Descartes fight in the battle under the opposing aegis of Maximilian of Bavaria? Answers vary: Godfrey, A Sister, 89; Carola Oman, The Winter Queen: Elisabeth of Bohemia [1938] (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 380; Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 105. 44  CSM 3:310; “l’amitié d’homme à homme rend égaux en quelque façon ceux en qui elle est réciproque; et ainsi que, pendant que l’on tâche à se faire aimer de quelque grand, si on lui disait qu’on l’aime, il pourrait penser qu’on le traite d’égal, et qu’on lui fait tort” (AT 4:610). 45  As, for example, in Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre, a topography of amorous involvement ranging from “new friendship” to “constant friendship,” published in her 10-volume novel Clélie in 1656. 46  Pope Urban VIII would not approve the marriage unless Elisabeth converted to Catholicism, so Władysław did not pursue negotiations.

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(1594–1666) painted her in the guise of the virginal huntress Diana—the patron “saint” of unmarried women a couple years before she first wrote to Descartes.47 The philosopher’s recourse to a stoic model of friendship was a clever rhetorical move. He implicitly—and respectfully—expressed his friendship to a person of the highest rank by talking about friends in the third person. He moreover circumvented the ambiguity between friendship and galanterie by ignoring Elisabeth’s femininity and elevating her above all other potential friends; she fulfills better than anyone else the universal, but so rarely attained, criteria of an ideal reserved for men. There is no reason to suspect that his friendly rhetoric was insincere. Granted, neither Descartes nor Elisabeth had any illusions about what he could accomplish for her, and her causes for grief were many. The sacrifice of his life could not have prevented her brother Frederick-Henry from drowning, her father from dying of pestilential fever, her brother Philip from murdering the French suitor of their mother, her brother Edward from converting to Catholicism to marry Anne of Gonzaga, much less her uncle, Charles I, from being beheaded by his own people in England.48 Nevertheless, when the opportunity arose to fulfill his duty as her friend, he took action. By March 1649, Descartes was feeling pressured to accept Queen Christina’s invitation to come to Stockholm to instruct her in his philosophy. The offer was attractive in some ways: things were becoming uncomfortable in Holland, and the Swedish sovereign was wealthy.49 But Sweden was a desert compared to the effervescent Dutch Republic, and accepting the patronage of a sovereign would severely curtail his freedom.50 To Elisabeth, moreover, Descartes worries that a departure could cast doubt on the sincerity of his friendship for she to whom he has already “so publicly declared his zeal and devotion.” Recall his comment to Chanut that “the courtesy of good manners” dictates that one can only express love to persons of higher rank in terms of “zeal and devotion for their service”: assuring the Princess that she has “as much power over [him] as if [he] had been all [his] life her servant,” Descartes “very humbly begs” her to redefine the nature of his service to her.51 Could he not act as her ambassador? “Since there 47  Elise Goodman in The Cultivated Woman: Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century France (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008) comments on the anti-marital stance of French aristocratic women painted as the virgin huntress: Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, duchesse de Chevreuse (215–16). 48  Beatrice H. Zedler recounts these misfortunes in “The Three Princesses,” Hypatia 4, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 28–63. 49  Elisabeth’s family was so indebted to creditors that her mother could not leave the country. Godfrey, A Sister, 199–200. 50  Descartes expresses his reticence to Chanut (AT 5.326–9; CSM 3.370–71) and to Elisabeth: “Cette grande ardeur qu’elle a pour la connaissance des lettres, l’incite surtout maintenant à cultiver la langue grecque, et à ramasser beaucoup de livres anciens; mais peut-être que cela changera” (AT 5:430; SH 180). 51  SH 179; “J’ai déjà si publiquement déclaré le zèle et la dévotion que j’ai à votre service qu’on aurait plus de sujet d’avoir mauvaise opinion de moi, si on remarquait que je fusse indifférent en ce qui vous touche, que l’on aura, si on voit que je recherche avec soin

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are so few people in the rest of the world who are so suited [to conversing with one another], it would not be awkward for your Highness to start a very close friendship with her. Beyond the contentment of mind that you would have from it, this could be desirable for diverse reasons.”52 Specifically, a friendship between the women might enable Elisabeth to recover the land and prestige lost by the Elector Palatine in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), thanks to which Sweden consolidated its territory to become the most powerful Protestant nation.53 Descartes removed himself from the orbit of the “Star of the North” to join the “Minerva of the North” in October 1649. Unfortunately for Elisabeth, he failed to broker a robust friendship between the women.54 And as fate would have it, his diplomatic endeavor did entail the kind of self-sacrifice that “noble souls do not hesitate to undertake for their friends.” Christina “killed him in twelve weeks,” states Carola Oman.55 Critics have not been kind to Christina. The most powerful Protestant sovereign after the Thirty Years’ War, she abdicated her throne to convert to Catholicism only 22 years after her father died fighting the Hapsburgs. Historians highlight the inconsistency of her intellectual and confessional commitments.56 Biographers emphasize her ambiguous sexuality, rehearsed in seventeenth-century pamphlet campaigns and glamorized by Greta Garbo in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina (1933).57 Neither in wisdom, nor in virtue, les occasions de m’acquitter de mon devoir. Ainsi je supplie très humblement Votre Altesse de me faire tant de faveur, que de m’instruire de tout ce en quoi elle jugera que je lui puis rendre service, à elle ou aux siens, et de s’assurer qu’elle a sur moi autant de pouvoir que si j’avais été toute ma vie son domestique” (AT 5:330). 52  SH 164; “Il me semble que vous seriez dignes de la conversation l’une de l’autre; et qu’il y en a si peu au reste du monde qui en soi digne, qu’il ne serait pas malaisé à Votre Altesse de lier une fort étroite amitié avec elle, et qu’outre le contentement d’esprit que vous en auriez, cela pourrait être à désirer pour diverses considérations” (AT 5:59–60). 53  The women were related by marriage. Elisabeth’s paternal aunt (and namesake), Elisabeth Palatine, married Christina’s maternal uncle, George William I of Brandenburg. But Descartes had evidence of Christina’s reticence to befriend Elisabeth prior to leaving. “Elle me remercie, en termes exprès du traité des Passions; mais elle ne fait aucune mention des lettres auxquelles il était joint, et l’on ne me mande rien du tout de ce pays-là qui touche Votre Altesse. De quoi je ne puis deviner autre choses, sinon que, les condition de la paix d’Allemagne n’étant pas si avantageuses à votre maison qu’elles auraient pu être, ceux qui ont contribué à cela sont en doute si vous ne leur en voulez point de mal, et se retiennent, pour ce sujet, de vous témoigner de l’amitié” (AT 5:283; SH 177). 54  According to Godfrey, “it was the interest of France to prevent the Elector Palatine from regaining the power and prestige of his predecessors and the intrigues of French diplomatists won over Sweden rather to induce the Elector to accept poor terms than to help him to gain better” (A Sister, 205). 55  Oman, Winter Queen, 383. 56  Susanna Akerman provides a millenarian context for Christina’s conversion in Queen Christina and her Circle: The Transformation of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: Brill, 1991). 57  See for instance Veronica Buckley, Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2005).

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in other words, has the Queen-crowned-King of Sweden enjoyed the reputation of a sage. One would never know it from reading Descartes’s only extant letter to Elisabeth from Sweden: I have so far had the honor of seeing the queen only twice, but it seems that I already know her well enough to dare to say that she has no less merit and more virtue than her reputation assigns her. With the generosity and majesty that shine in all her actions, one sees a gentleness and a goodness that oblige all who love virtue and who have the honor to approach her to be entirely devoted to her service. One of the first things she asked of me was whether I had news of you, and I did not hesitate to tell her what I thought of your Highness. For remarking the force of her mind, I did not fear that this would arouse any jealousy in her, just as I am sure that your Highness feels none when I write her freely of my feelings about this queen.58

Descartes remained loyal both to Elisabeth and to a vision of friendship in which “a sage is the friend of all other sages without knowing them.”59 In the forum of self-perfection that is friendship, jealousy has no place, knowledge and virtue are the only qualifications that matter, and all sages—equally endowed in these qualifications—are welcome to participate, regardless of their gender. Elisabeth: The Friend as Physician For Descartes, an individual’s striving for virtue and knowledge made friendship possible, and friendship in turn advanced the quest for self-perfection by providing opportunities to exercise wisdom and virtue. This practice of equality emphasizes the sameness of the two friends, albeit by privileging certain qualities for comparison (virtue, wisdom), while excluding others (gender, rank). Elisabeth, in contrast, privileges gender and rank as differences that are instrumental to the reciprocity of friendship. Although the dynamic of balancing and counterbalancing recalls Cicero’s characterization of friendship, I will argue that the princess’ difference-friendly practice of equality emerges from the scales of the skeptic. Elisabeth’s siblings called her “La Grecque,” a sobriquet that honors her philosophical engagement as much as her linguistic skill. All of the children of 58  SH 180; “Je n’ai encore eu l’honneur de voir la Reine que deux fois; mais il me semble la connaître déjà assez pour oser dire qu’elle n’a pas moins de mérite et a plus de vertu que la renommée lui en attribue. Avec la générosité et la majesté qui éclatent en toutes ses actions, on y voit une douceur et une bonté, qui obligent tous ceux qui aiment la vertu et qui ont l’honneur d’approcher d’elle, d’être entièrement dévoués à son service. Une des premières choses qu’elle m’a demandées a été si je savais de vos nouvelles, et je n’ai pas feint de lui dire d’abord ce que je pensais de Votre Altesse; car, remarquant la force de son esprit, je n’ai pas craint que cela lui donnât aucune jalousie, comme je m’assure aussi que Votre Altesse n’en saurait avoir, de ce que je lui écris librement mes sentiments sur cette Reine” (AT 5:429–30). 59  “Le sage est l’ami de tous les autres sages sans les connaître” (Fraisse, Philia, 368).

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Frederick V and the Queen of Hearts studied Greek and Latin at the Princenhofer in Leiden and spoke three modern languages (their native German, adoptive Dutch, and French, the language of continental courts60), but only the Princess Palatine inclined toward philosophy. The late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century saw revivals of almost all of the Hellenistic schools. As Descartes adapted the Stoic moral philosophy popularized at the turn of the century by Justus Lipsius, Gassendi was exploring Epicurean alternatives to scholasticism, and Sorbière, besides translating the work of Hobbes and Gassendi, also translated the handbook of skeptics, Sextus Empicirus’ Hypotyposes into French (it was not published).61 These rival schools bequeathed a common metaphor to the early modern period: that of the philosopher-physician. This metaphor underscored the philosopher’s responsibility for transforming the lives of his students: just as the physician cured the diseased body, so the philosopher cured the diseased soul.62 Elisabeth uses this ancient metaphor in her very first letter to Descartes, when she qualifies her ignorance as a malady which Descartes as her soul-doctor will remedy: “Knowing that you are the best doctor for my soul, I expose to you quite freely the weaknesses of its speculations, and hope that in observing the Hippocratic Oath, you will supply me with remedies without making them public.”63 Before addressing Elisabeth’s “ignorance,” it is crucial to note that the medical relationship that she envisions with Descartes is literal as well as metaphorical. “She spares him not a single boo-boo,” scoffs Charles Adam.64 In effect, from 1643 to August 1646, she writes to Descartes from The Hague about a problem with her stomach (ulcer?), une fièvre lente, a dry cough, and melancholy. From August 1646 to August 1648, Elisabeth and a younger sister went to Berlin, where her family had first fled from Heidelberg when she was but a child, to reside with their aunt, the dowager Electress of Brandenburg. A doting family and a more propitious climate conspire to banish her woes: “Since … everything around me is quite agreeable and the country air does not disagree with my complexion, I find myself in a state where I can practice your lessons concerning gaiety.” And from 60

 Their English mother and German father had corresponded in French before their marriage. 61  Sorbière addressed a translation of Gassendi’s explanation of Epicurus to Elisabeth 3 June 1652. Providing an interesting contrast to Descartes’s gender-neutral strategy, Sorbière’s praise of Elisabeth is entirely focused on her gender: she is a learned woman among a host of learned women, ancient and modern; women’s brains are softer and thus more receptive than men’s. Samuel Sorbière, Lettres et discours de M. de Sorbière sur diverses matières curieuses (Paris: François Clousier, 1660), 69–74. 62  Nussbaum, Therapy, 27. 63  SH 62; “Vous connaissant le meilleur médecin pour la mienne [mon âme], je vous découvre si librement les faiblesses de cette spéculation et espère qu’observant le serment d’Hippocrate, vous y apporterez des remèdes, sans les publier; ce que je vous prie de faire, comme de souffrir ces importunité de Votre affectionnée amie à vous servir, Elisabeth” (AT 3:662). 64  “Elisabeth ne lui fait pas grâce de ses moindres bobos” (Adam, Descartes et ses amitiés féminines, 112).

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Crossen (Krosno Odrzanskie by its present Polish name), she writes: “The estate of the electress is in a place that does not suit my complexion badly, two degrees closer to the sun than Berlin, surrounded by the River Oder and a land that is extremely fertile.” 65 The air is so pure in the Eastern extremity of the Holy Roman Empire that doctors would hardly be needed were it not for “the great dirtiness of the commoners and the nobility.”66 Yet in November 1646, and February and April 1647, between discussions of Machiavelli’s The Prince and of Descartes’s troubles with the mutinous Regius, Elisabeth writes to Descartes with a prognosis on her fingers, which had been swollen with some sort of liquid that required purging.67 In June 1648, she explains that she hasn’t written because the barber surgeon cut a nerve in her right arm when he bled her.68 And in August 1648, she tells of an unbearably itchy rash afflicting the whole body, except the face.69 The confidences that Adam viewed as indiscreet on Elisabeth’s part were a permutation of what Alan Bray calls “the gift of the friend’s body.”70 Through about the first half of the seventeenth century, the expression of bodily intimacy was fundamental to friend-making between men. Bray gives the example of a letter written by Elisabeth’s maternal grandfather, James I of England to his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham. Even while ordering an investigation into Buckingham’s conduct, James addresses Buckingham as his “sweet wife and child” and expresses his desire to marry him on the Eucharist. The marriage of sworn brothers, sealed with a kiss, entailed a public declaration of enduring friendship and mutual obligation before the Christian community and through the Eucharist, Christ’s gift of his body to mankind.71 With her reports on impetigo, severed 65  SH 162; “Le douaire de Madame l’Electrice est en une situation qui ne revient pas mal à ma complexion, de deux degrés plus proche du soleil que Berlin” (AT 5:47). 66  SH 163; “[Si ce] n’était la grande saleté de la commune et de la noblesse, je crois qu’il en aurait moins besoin que peuple du monde, puisque l’air y est fort pur” (AT 5:49). 67  SH 151, 155, 159; AT 4:579, 618, 630. 68  SH 170; AT 5:195. 69  SH 174; AT 5:226. 70  Desmond Clark describes an “artificially constructed balance, between a princess in need of instruction and a philosopher in need of a patron” in Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 261. While he sees Elisabeth’s bodily confidences as the fruit of friendship, I understand them to be the motor of friendship, providing a pretext for exchange and structuring safe roles for each correspondent. The epistolary representation of illness deserves more attention both in terms of Bray’s work and in terms of Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process—by which notions of decorum proscribed sex and scatology from conversation in seventeenth-century Europe. 71  Buckingham persuaded James to enter the war that Elisabeth’s father had provoked when he accepted the nomination by the Bohemian Protestant Estates to be King of Bohemia, a post already occupied by the Jesuit-friendly Ferdinand of Styria. James had never approved of his Calvinist son-in-law’s obstructionist posture with respect to Habsburg absolutism, and had steadfastly refused to embroil his kingdom in a messy international conflict that had all the appearances of a new war of religion. Spanish ambassadors aiming to avert England’s support of Protestant interests in the Holy Roman Empire represented to James that Buckingham, in encouraging a reversal of policy in the Holy Roman Empire, was

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nerves, and the like, Elisabeth continues her grandfather’s body-talk to mediate friendship between two people of unequal rank, except that whereas the men whose friendships Bray investigates offer bodies confident in their masculinity, Elisabeth repeatedly presents Descartes with a female body that suffers. Descartes avoided the ambiguity lurking in friendship between a young woman and an itinerant middle-aged bachelor by imagining her as a genderless sage. Elisabeth paradoxically sanitizes their friendship by foregrounding her body. Her demand for expert medical advice relegates the philosopher to the servile role of a court doctor beholden to her aristocratic patronage. Cast in this service role, Descartes can safely profess obedience, devotion, and zeal to his female patron, for court physicians operated within clear hierarchies. André du Laurens, as premier médecin du roi, spent his nights reading Amadis de Gaule to the insomniac Henry IV—a task that revealed both his intimacy with the vert gallant but also his subservience to him. Accordingly, Elisabeth did not hold physicians in high regard. She never mentions a single doctor by name and indeed often refers to them as an importunate group of bumblers, while mocking commoners who regard the physician as an oracle: “the people here have an extraordinary faith in his profession.”72 Thus at the same time as it establishes an acceptable relationship between a man and a woman, Elisabeth’s gift of her ill body—a body that is gendered but not sexualized—underscores the exceptionality of her friendship for Descartes: I assure you that the doctors, who saw me every day and examined all the symptoms of my illness, did not is so doing find its cause, or order such helpful remedies, as you have done from afar. Even if they had been smart enough to suspect the part that my mind plays in the disorder of the body, I would not have had the frankness to admit it to them at all. But to you, Monsieur, I do it without scruple, assuring myself that such a naïve recounting of my faults would not in the least destroy the place I have in your friendship, but would confirm it all the more, because you will see from it that the friendship is necessary to me.73

James concretized his friendship for the Duke of Buckingham by marrying him. Analogously, Elisabeth “confirms” her friendship for Descartes through confidences regarding her mind’s disordering of her body—a phenomenon that a philosopher is better equipped to address than real physicians. feeding him bad advice. Buckingham was a traitor, they argued, poised to profit personally from his the major misstep his master was about to make. James’s letter was meant as much to discourage those who hoped to profit from Buckingham’s fall as to reassure him. See Bray, The Friend, 96–103. 72  SH 163; “Le peuple d’ici a une croyance extraordinaire en sa profession” (AT 5:49). 73  SH 88; “Je vous assure que les médecins, qui me virent tous les jours et examinèrent tous les symptômes de mon mal, n’en ont pas trouvé la cause, ni ordonné de remèdes si salutaires que vous avez fait de loin. Quand ils eurent été assez savants pour se douter de la part que mon esprit avait au désordre du corps, je n’aurais point eu la franchise de le leur avouer. Mais à vous, Monsieur, je le fais sans scrupule, m’assurant qu’un récit si naïf de mes défauts ne m’ôtera point la part que j’ai en votre amitié, mais me la confirmera d’autant plus, puisque vous y verrez qu’elle m’est nécessaire” (AT 4:207–8).

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Just as Elisabeth acknowledged Descartes’s dedication to her in the Principles of Philosophy as a “public” (though not explicit) testimony of his friendship for her, Descartes recognizes and responds to Elisabeth’s friendship strategy by showing his full acceptance of the role she has assigned to him. On 18 May 1645, after learning of her most recent illness from Pollot, he hastens to assure her of his care: “Even though I am not a doctor, the honor that your Highness gave me last summer of wanting to know my opinion regarding another indisposition that she then had, makes me hope that the liberty I take [in commenting on a new indisposition] will not be disagreeable to her.”74 It is further in this letter that the philosopher expresses his views on friendship (analyzed above) and identifies the princess as a superlative soul. He accepts the hierarchy Elisabeth has devised to mediate their friendship, while at the same time projecting back to her his Stoic friendship strategy. The coexistence of the two models of friendship in one letter shows the rhetorical character of both; the friends strive for the same outcome through means appropriate to each. Elisabeth’s distinction of Descartes as the only “doctor” who understands the part of the soul in the body’s disorder brings us back to her “ignorance”—the malady for which she seeks a cure as of her very first letter to Descartes. Elisabeth adhered to mechanism, the idea that matter in motion should explain the causes of natural phenomena, rather than relying on the final causes of scholastic philosophers. But she inclined toward a materialist mechanism; that is, she was prepared to count the mind as a material entity—a stance rejected by Gassendi as well as by Descartes.75 Her first letters ask Descartes to explain his dualism; he viewed the mind as immaterial, which was convenient for demonstrating his adherence to certain doctrines (the immortality of the soul, for instance), but not for explaining, in mechanist terms, the interaction of mind and body. How could thought connect with extension? Descartes responded that there was no rational means by which to know this. The union of the mind and body, he said, was something known intuitively as a result of our experience as embodied minds. Elisabeth agreed with Descartes that the interdependence of mind and body could be known by experience. She just did not see how his dualist metaphysics could explain that experience. Apologizing for her “weak mind” and “stupidity,” in her second letter of 20 June 1643, she notes that “it is [nevertheless] very difficult to understand that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and the custom of reasoning well, can lose all of this by some vapors, and that, being able to subsist without the body, and having nothing in common with it, the soul is so governed by it.”76 The independent status that Descartes attributes to the soul 74

 SH 86; “bien que je ne sois pas médecin, l’honneur que Notre Altesse me fit, l’été passé, de vouloir savoir mon opinion, touchant une autre indisposition qu’elle avait pour lors, me fait espérer que ma liberté ne lui sera pas désagréable” (AT 4:201). 75  See Shapiro, “Introduction,” 41. 76  SH 67-68; “Il est pourtant très difficile à comprendre qu’une âme, comme vous l’avez décrite, après avoir eu la faculté et l’habitude de bien raisonner, peut perdre tout cela pour quelques vapeurs, et que, pouvant subsister sans le corps et n’ayant rien de commun avec lui, elle en soit tellement régie” (AT 3:684–5).

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does not accord with her materialist notion of the mind, nor does it resonate with her own lived experience. Elisabeth asks Descartes to cure her stupidity; in terms of the medical metaphor, she aspires to understand the teachings of her master. However, that therapy is complicated by the fact that the ignorance for which she seeks a cure is in part caused by the very symptoms that Descartes’s dualism does not adequately explain. In May 1645, she tells Descartes that she is subject to vapors (which as we saw above allow the body to “govern” the soul). How can she hope to understand Cartesian dualism when her own mind is so often overrun by her body’s afflictions? Just as the body discombobulates the mind, the afflictions of the soul wreak havoc on the body. For people such as she who get little exercise, she remarks, it doesn’t take long for an oppressed heart to irritate the spleen and for the spleen to infect the rest of the body with its vapors.77 There were constant worries in The Hague for the exiled House of Bohemia. Elisabeth explains that her body absorbs the shock caused by troubling events and continues to reverberate long after her mind has moved on.78 Descartes’s task is therefore not just to persuade her of the validity of dualism—i.e., to cure her of a misperception and to persuade her to think as he does. To do so, he must first provide a therapy for the disorders that result from the union of the mind and the body. It is here that we see Elisabeth bringing Descartes back to the Hellenistic schools’ holistic notion of philosophy as a total therapy—one that encompasses the whole person, mind and body. At the same time as Elisabeth seeks Descartes’s advice, she warns him that one factor in particular conspires to thwart his good counsel: “Know thus that I have a body imbued with a large part of the weaknesses of my sex, so that it is affected very easily by [se ressent des] the afflictions of the soul and has none of the strength to bring itself back into line [de se remettre avec elle], as it is of a temperament subject to obstructions and resting in an air which contributes strongly to this.”79 The reflexive “se ressentir de”—literally, the body “feels within itself” the afflictions of the soul—is an elliptical verbal construct that skirts what remains at issue: how exactly does the mind affect the body? Do its afflictions act directly on the body 77  SH 89; “[A]ux personnes qui ne peuvent point faire beaucoup d’exercice, il ne faut point une longue oppression de cœur parla tristesse, pour opiler la rate et infecter le reste du corps par ses vapeurs” (AT 4:208). 78  SH 93; “Il y quelque chose de surprenant dans les malheurs, quoi que prévus, dont je ne suis maîtresse qu’après un certain temps, auquel mon corps se désordonne si fort, qu’il me faut plusieurs mois pour le remettre, qui ne se passent guère sans quelque nouveau sujet de trouble” (AT 4:234). 79  SH 88; “Sachez donc que j’ai le corps imbu d’une grande partie des faiblesses de mon sexe, qui se ressent très facilement des afflictions de l’âme, et n’a point la force de se remettre avec elle, étant d’un tempérament sujet aux obstructions et demeurant en un air qui y contribue fort” (AT 4:208). The causes that Elisabeth evokes for her vapors do not point to suffocation de matrice, a malady supposedly caused by unquenched sexual desire, as portrayed in Jan Steen’s contemporary genre paintings. See Laurinda Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 131–67.

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or does the body “mirror” the soul’s afflictions in occult fashion? Similarly, she remarks that her body lacks strength “to put itself back together [with soul],” so that extreme union results paradoxically in disunion. Does her will fail to contain the mind’s disorder, which spills over, stimulating the chain of corporeal reactions and poisoning the body? Or does her body experience an immune system failure of sorts? Whatever the mechanism behind the body’s waywardness, it is exacerbated by the “weaknesses” of the female sex. At the very least, Elisabeth blames her female body for intensifying the ill effects of environmental factors such as lack of exercise and poor air quality on her mental health. Following Héloïse, who regrets her “unkempt words,”80 and Teresa of Avila, who deplores her “wretchedness,”81 Elisabeth deploys what Alison Weber calls a “rhetoric of femininity:” she “exploited certain stereotypes about women’s character and language … [in] a pattern of linguistic choice motivated by deliberate strategies and constrained by social roles.”82 Teresa wrote of her intimate experience of God under the suspicious eye of inquisitors and consequently worked to reassure her male readers of her inferiority to them. Elisabeth writes from a position of relative power. In accordance with Cicero’s equalizing view of friendship, her emphasis on feminine weakness compensates for her social superiority to Descartes. I argued with respect to Descartes’s stoic picture of friendship that rhetoric is not antithetical to sincerity, and indeed that we can understand his departure to Sweden as an enactment of the ideal of friendship that he expresses to Elisabeth. With regard to Elisabeth’s rhetoric of femininity, I wish to emphasize a different point: namely, that rhetoric can have philosophical content. Elisabeth’s rhetoric of femininity displays philosophical integrity as well as accomplishing a practical purpose (mediating friendship). In the stoic version of the medical metaphor, the doctor trains the patient to heal herself, and thus to become equal in knowledge and virtue to her teacher.83 Elisabeth’s stubbornly female body, so resistant to being cured by her soul,84 signals the irreducibility of her “stupidity.” It signifies the impossibility of her transformation to become equal to (i.e., the same as) her philosopher friend in knowledge and virtue. Just as there is no way Descartes can change her body, there is no way he can overcome her “ignorance”—i.e., change her mind. In this way, her femininity, which she presents as an obstacle, also provides cover for her convictions. Her gender difference, in other words, protects the integrity of her philosophical difference.  Mews, Lost Love Letters, 231.  Teresa of Avila, cited in Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 14. 82  Weber, Teresa of Avila, 11, 15. 83  Epicurus in contrast played the savior, delivered his philosophy in catechistic form, and did not encourage critical thinking. See Nussbaum, Therapy, 341, 118–30. 84  Note that Elisabeth’s psychosomatic self-diagnosis invites Descartes’s efforts to “guérir le corps avec l’âme,” as she puts it (AT 4:208; SH 89). On the difference between the therapy Descartes prescribes—involving channeling the passions—and Neostoic suppression of the passions, see Erec Koch, The Aesthetic Body, 62–4. 80 81

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We have already encountered Descartes’s disciples: Regius, temporarily, and Clerselier, his posthumous apologist. Discipleship similarly characterized the intellectual life of Anna Maria van Schuurman; she abandoned Voet and their common master Aristotle to follow the heretic mystical misfit Jean de Labadie (Elisabeth would eventually provide safe haven to them as Abbess of Herford). In contrast, there is no evidence that Elisabeth “converted” to Cartesianism. Recall that she referred to her materialist theses as friends she suspends temporarily to allow Descartes the chance to make his case: “Since you have undertaken to instruct me, I entertain these sentiments [i.e., her formerly held materialism] only as friends which I do not intend to keep, assuring myself that you will explicate the nature of an immaterial substance and the manner of its actions and passions in the body, just as well as you have all the other things that you have wanted to teach.”85 This open-minded, but cautious attitude typified skeptical thinking of the period. Sorbière’s Skeptical discourse on the passage of chyle and on the movement of the heart provides a particularly interesting parallel. In it, Sorbière presents the objections of Gassendi (“our common friend”—he addresses the discourse to the physician Abraham du Prat) to William Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood. Skepticism in this friendly context serves not to debunk knowledge, but to reinforce it: “I would like the champions of Harvey to give me a solution to the difficulties … that prevent me from embracing an opinion towards which I lean very much, and that I would like to see solidly established.” Sorbière opposes the “learned ignorance” of the skeptic to the “deep meditations” and “metaphysical thoughts of our new dogmatists”—i.e., to the solitary Descartes’s “subtle reveries.”86 “Learned ignorance” that pushes a friend to solidify a claim toward which one is already well-disposed aptly describes Elisabeth’s attitude toward Descartes. She warns him of the consequences should he fail to answer her questions: “I will lose hope of finding certitude in anything in the world if you, who alone have kept me from being a skeptic, do not answer that to which my first reasoning carried me.”87 85

 SH 68; “Depuis que vous avez entrepris de m’instruire, je n’entretiens ces sentiments que comme des amis que je ne crois point conserver, m’assurant que vous m’expliquerez aussi bien la nature d’une substance immatérielle et la manière de ses actions et passions dans le corps, que toutes les autres choses que vous avez voulu enseigner” (AT 3:685). 86  “Je voudrois bien que les sectateurs d’Harvaeus me donnassent la solution de [ces difficultés] … qui m’empeschent d’embrasser une opinion vers laquelle je panche beaucoup, & laquelle je souhaitterois solidement establie … je connois l’estime que vous faictes de la docte ignorance [… plus que] les profondes meditations, & [… les] pensees metaphysiques de nos nouveaux dogmatiques”; Gassendi is not “un de ces solitaires qui passent des annees au bord de la mer” engaged in “des subtiles resveries” (Samuel Sorbière, Discours sceptique sur le passage du chyle et sur le mouvement du cœur [Leiden: Jean Maire, 1648], 139–42). See Lorenzo Bianchi, “Sorbière’s Scepticism: Between Absolutism and Naturalism,” in The Return of Scepticism from Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle, ed. Gianni Paganini (Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2003), 267–82. 87  SH 72; “Je désespérerai de trouver de la certitude en chose du monde, si vous ne m’en donnez, qui m’avez seul empêchée d’être sceptique, à quoi mon premier raisonnement me portait” (AT 4:2–3).

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To judge by a letter she wrote at the beginning of negotiations for her position as coadjudtrix of the Protestant Abbey of Herford, incertitude was something that she learned to live with, rather than overcome: “Solomon gave a good rule when he said we should be neither wise nor righteous overmuch, for he knew that we have not all the power to keep the bridle on our understanding, still less accommodate it to circumstances that we may not bring ourselves into difficulties.”88 These fideist musings may indicate a certain maturing of philosophical inquiry, but not a turn away from it. In the correspondence, Elisabeth’s skeptical leanings are especially noticeable when she talks about friendship. Remember that Descartes emphasized the virtuous disposition that shapes friendly action, rather than the outcome of the action. Seemingly in response to that, Elisabeth weighs the good will that informs his cures more heavily than their efficacy. That is, even if the philosopher’s prescriptions were ineffective, his counsel worked in ways he did not intend: “Your letters, when they do not teach me, always serve me as the antidote to melancholy, turning my mind from the disagreeable objects that come to it every day to the happiness that I possess in the friendship of a person of your merit.”89 And again: “I value joy and health as much as you do, although I prefer your friendship as much as virtue. For it is from your friendship that I draw joy and health.”90 Countering Descartes’s stoical valuation of friendship as an opportunity for self-perfection, she values friendship for its outcome: “joy and health.”91 Elisabeth’s assessment of friendship harks back to Epicurus, for whom friendship was therapeutic in and of itself. Epicurus and his entourage realized the happiness to which they aspired above all in the affection they shared with one another and in the assurance that they could count on each other.92 But Elisabeth’s preference for an accidental therapy (friendship) over an intentional one (medical advice) also recalls a skeptical parable. Sextus Empiricus writes in his Hypotyposes (translated, I recall, by Sorbière) an allegory about Apelles, a painter who got frustrated trying to represent the lather of a horse. Try as he might, he could not capture the frothy lightness of lather with his brush. Exasperated, he threw a sponge at his work. Lo and behold, the sponge made an impression that  Cited in Oman, Winter Queen, 289.  SH 93; “Vos lettres me servent toujours d’antidote contre la mélancolie, quand elles ne m’enseigneraient pas, détournant mon esprit des objets désagréables qui lui surviennent tous les jours, pour lui faire contempler le bonheur que je possède dans l’amitié d’une personne de votre mérite” (AT 4:233). 90  SH 154; “J’estime la joie et la santé autant que vous le faites, quoique j’y préfère votre amitié aussi bien que la vertu, puisque c’est de principalement de celle-là que je tiens l’une et l’autre” (AT 4:617). 91  Note the similarity to Sorbière’s opinion of physicians: “Je les considere comme des amis sçavans, & de l’entretien desquels je reçois plus de plaisir, que je n’attends de soulagement de leurs remedes. Et certes j’ay souvent éprouvé que ce plaisir là estoit luy mesme un excellent remede” (Lettres et discours, 66). 92  André-Jean Festugière, Epicure et ses dieux (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1946), 69. 88 89

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looked exactly like the lather of an exerted horse. The moral of the story is that tranquility happens at the moment when we finally throw in the towel, when we give up on straining and striving, and we suspend judgment.93 Just as the painter achieves the elusive effect thanks to an impulsive gesture, the patient throws the physician’s cures to the wind, reveling in the residue of friendship they leave behind. Your remedies don’t work, Elisabeth tells Descartes, but your friendship is good for my health; I get better despite your best efforts, not because of them. Hapless physician yet happy friend, Descartes cured Elisabeth by accident. Whereas Descartes created equality by selecting which aspects of the two friends would be compared for parity, Elisabeth declines the sameness presupposed by stoic friendship. Instead, she achieves equality by emphasizing their counterbalancing inequalities—of gender and rank most explicitly—through the double metaphor of the physician. As the physician of her soul, Descartes is her teacher. As the physician of her body, he is her servant. Elisabeth feminizes the trope of the gift of the friend’s body by medicalizing it. While the physician’s remedies bear little fruit, his patient underscores the therapeutic value of his friendship for her. Descartes abstracts gender difference by characterizing Elisabeth as a sage, but that difference is the very grounds for friendship in Elisabeth’s rhetoric. Where the exchange of women’s sexualized bodies typically serves to bond male friends,94 in Elisabeth’s letters, a female body in need of medical attention mediates a friendship between a man and a woman. She offers her diseased body for treatment, a “gift” that creates a demand for reciprocity. And yet, Elisabeth’s feeble (female) body, even as it mediates the friendship, resists the philosopher’s efforts to transform her—to make her “equal.” Her recalcitrant femininity reveals a skeptical ethic, in which weakness provides the paradoxical grounds for strength.95 Whereas Cartesian egalitarianism overlooks the body to find parity in the mind, in Elisabeth’s letters the assertion of bodily difference opens a space for philosophical plurality in which adherents of opposing ideas face off in a relation of equality. In Elisabeth’s letters to Descartes, the feeble-minded, feeble-bodied woman shares the page with the skeptical, learnedly ignorant peer who prods her dogmatist friend to work harder to get his story straight. Given that Descartes  Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10–11. 94  “Between friends all is common” is the first proverb that Erasmus analyzes in the Adages. On Erasmus’s use of this proverb, see Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 3. Montaigne mentions women explicitly in “De l’amitié”: “Tout estant par effect commun entre eux, volontez, pensemens, jugemens, biens, femmes, enfans, honneur et vie, … ils ne se peuvent ny prester, ny donner rien” (Essais, I.28.190, my emphasis). 95  We see this in Montaigne’s Essays frequently, for instance in I.27, “C’est folie de rapporter le vray et le faux à notre suffisance,” in which he reframes the alleged gullibility of women and children as a kind of wisdom. 93

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cogitated the cogito precisely to undercut the excuses that skeptics found for not putting faith in human reason, and given that Gassendi and Sorbière defined their learnedly ignorant enterprise in opposition to his cogitated certitudes, it is amazing to see Elisabeth extending skeptical open-mindedness toward Descartesthe-dogmatist and to see him obliging. One need only read Gassendi’s objections to the Meditations and Descartes’s reply to them to appreciate how opposing philosophical positions mapped onto personal enmity. Gassendi sarcastically apostrophizes Descartes as “O Mind.” Descartes replies even more nastily, addressing Gassendi as “O Flesh.” The sterility of this exchange is striking compared to the fertility of the correspondence of the Princess Palatine and the French philosopher that led the latter not only to author the Passions of the Soul (which Sorbière rated as a highly enjoyable “novel”), but also to address ethics, which he had not yet done. It seems that just as friendship with a member of the opposite sex in the religious context created vulnerabilities productive of spiritual advancement, the dynamic counter-balancing of differences in Elisabeth’s friendship with Descartes fostered the flourishing of knowledge. Echoing the medical honorific with which Elisabeth interpellates Descartes, Erec Koch calls their friendship “therapeutic.” I take him to mean that the friendship was therapeutic not just for Elisabeth, but also for the fractious forum that was the Republic of Letters: “The correspondence results in a chiastic exchange, symbolically between psyche and body, reason and passion, that promises a new wholeness, a new unity that would reconcile contrarieties.”96 Equality in the Polity Laurie Shannon characterizes Renaissance friendship as a “volitional polity” that appealed to lettered men as a source of individual sovereignty in the face of “the hierarchal difference of degree” so determinant in their society.97 Descartes and Elisabeth, both exiles in the Dutch Republic—as a voluntary expatriate and a political refugee, respectively—had every reason to seek out a “volitional polity” in which they could pursue self-betterment through a greater sense of individual sovereignty.98 Descartes’s and Elisabeth’s respective practices of equality had implications for the larger polity, insofar as they help reconstruct contemporary “possibilities for female emancipation and … constraints on it.”99 While Descartes’s stoic rhetoric of friendship shares with the gender egalitarianism of  Erec Koch, The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 49. 97  Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press), 225. 98  I owe this thought to Jessica Lewis, author of a paper on Descartes and Elisabeth entitled “Europeans in Exile” that she wrote for my International Honors 112 course in the Spring semester of 2010 at Pacific Lutheran University. 99  La Vopa, “A New Intellectual History?” 736–7. 96

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Cartesian pro(to)-feminist discourse a conception of equality as the attainment of sameness, Elisabeth’s skeptically derived equality makes difference instrumental to an egalitarian polity, much like Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy.100 Descartes established equality with his friend Elisabeth by ignoring her gender in favor of knowledge and virtue. It was after all Elisabeth’s gender that Descartes was carefully circumventing, not his own, and his dutiful blindness to her femininity paradoxically underscores her gender’s awkward relation to the supposedly universal qualities that he celebrates in her. In characterizing her femininity as an obstacle to understanding, Elisabeth simply underscores what is implicit in Descartes’s gender-neutral friend-making strategy: one gender is more gendered than the other and therefore has a harder row to hoe along the path to sagehood. Stoics imputed the seeds of knowledge and virtue to all humans, but these seeds may or may not develop over time. Anyone can become a sage, but not everyone does. There is a tension between potential and achievement, egalitarianism, and elitism. This tension weakens the most important argument for gender equality in the seventeenth century. In On the Equality of the Sexes (1673), François Poulain de la Barre endeavored to prove the equality of women and men by recourse to the virtue ethics espoused by Descartes in his letters to Elisabeth. Poulain argues that since mind and body are distinct substances (the claim that did not persuade Elisabeth), sex difference is irrelevant. “The mind has no sex,” Poulain argues, in the same way that Descartes implied to Elisabeth that the friend has no sex. Yet Poulain’s argument involves proving the premise he argues from: women are naturally equal to men; therefore, they should have the same educational opportunities as men … so that they can attain equality with men. Poulain ultimately makes equality (sameness) contingent upon education, which becomes an end in itself—similar to self-perfection in Descartes’s view of friendship. Descartes frames equality as an achievement, and likewise, Poulain construes gender equality as women’s attainment of the learning possessed by men. Although society presumably is responsible for making this education equally available, the burden of attaining equality ultimately rests on individual selves.101 100

 Shapiro is the first, to my knowledge, to ask what Elisabeth’s political philosophy might be and to place her thought in a contractarian framework. Shapiro focuses on Elisabeth’s objections to Descartes’s account of virtue—resolving to actually do what one judges to be best—in terms of Hobbes’s concern to reconcile competing interests. Elisabeth wants to know how Descartes contends with contradictory opinions regarding what is best. Shapiro describes contractarian theory as outcome-oriented and contrasts it to Descartes’s emphasis on intention in his ethics. See Shapiro, “Introduction,” 44–9, 34. 101  Poulain draws on Hobbes to argue that the social contract entailed an inexplicable usurpation of power of one sex over the other—a coup d’état of men over women. See Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 176–9. However, the solution that Poulain argues for (education) does not solve the problem of the competition for power that he reveals as the root of gender inequality.

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Elisabeth indicated initial enthusiasm for the project of self-perfection when she appealed to Descartes as a physician of her soul. Not only was the metaphor ubiquitous in the Hellenistic philosophy then enjoying a revival in the Dutch Republic and elsewhere in Europe; it moreover mapped onto a familiar division of labor in terms of gender. Though Elisabeth was Calvinist, she could not have ignored that female penitents referred to their male spiritual guides as soul doctors. Yet this is the extent of her investment in Descartes’s stoic construal of their friendship. Elisabeth signals the difference of her approach to friendship by doubling the figurative doctor with a literal (and subservient) twin. In responding to this job description, Descartes attends to her body’s infirmities, offering prescriptions that his socially superior patron felt free to disregard. Elisabeth insists on the incurability of her female body; more than inconvenient evidence militating against Descartes’s dualist metaphysics, or revealing a sexist bias therein, her irreducible femaleness functions as a synecdoche for her individuality. There is no getting around her femininity, and this insurmountable “problem” creates a space for her distinct philosophical views—for her adherence, as Shapiro shows, to a materialist mechanism that both Descartes and Gassendi rejected. Elisabeth’s subjection to the vagaries of her body—her inability to overcome her female feebleness—paradoxically fortifies her integrity, independence, and individuality as a philosopher. I have no indication that Elisabeth was familiar with Thomas Hobbes’s work beyond his responses to Descartes’s Meditations. It would be surprising if she hadn’t read De cive, given her manifest interest in politics (she suggested to Descartes that they read Machiavelli’s The Prince), given Hobbes’s reputation as Descartes’s philosophical peer, and given the ready availability of Hobbes’s work in the Dutch Republic. Regardless, the “volitional polity” that Elisabeth constructs with Descartes shares with Hobbes’s account of political association an emphasis on individuality and plurality within a relation of equality. Hobbes did not assume that people could or should strive to conform to an ideal. To the contrary, in the Leviathan, he argues for equality despite difference—by recourse to skeptical argumentation: Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he.

Amidst a vast hodgepodge of differently endowed people, Hobbes admits no standard by which to assess the validity of men’s beliefs about themselves. All we have to go on are perceptions, which are distorted simply as a matter of perspective: “For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance.” Hobbes resolves these contradictory perceptions by

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transcending them—suspending judgment, skeptic-style, in the face of competing claims. Harking back to a long line of skeptical jabs at the vanity of man’s knowledge, he ironizes about how alike men are in their pretensions: “But this proveth rather than men are in that point equal, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man in contented with his share.”102 Hobbes facetiously alludes to Descartes’s equally facetious statement of the universality of “good sense” in the opening line of his Discourse on method: “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more if it than they possess.”103 Ironically appropriating a tongue-in-cheek comment, Hobbes underscores the distance between the Frenchman’s stoic egalitarianism and his own skeptical egalitarianism. In the Leviathan, there is no sage to emulate, there are no seeds of wisdom and virtue to cultivate, and no equality to attain. Equality already is, manifest in the similarity of men’s conflicting pretensions, as well, more optimistically, as in the “equality of hope in attaining of our Ends.”104 For the skeptic, difference is instrumental to achieving equipollence, the balance that leads to tranquility. For Hobbes, difference establishes equality. For Elisabeth, difference ensures reciprocity in friendship and the felicity that follows. Elisabeth’s notion of friendship is not explicitly contractual. Her practice of friendship nonetheless resembles the social contract in three ways. First, participants abide by common limitations. Hobbes’s contractees lay down their “right to all” (pillage, rape, and plunder), while Elisabeth and Descartes commit to “the custom of our speech and the courtesy of good manners.” Second, in both polities, participants are motivated by an expected outcome: individuals “sign” the social contract because it ensures peace; Elisabeth practices friendship because it brings her happiness. Finally, in both Hobbes’s Leviathan and Elisabeth’s notion of friendship, equality is assumed, not achieved, and is manifest not in the conformity of the content of individuals but in their equal freedom within the polity—in Hobbes’s construct, the freedom to pursue felicity; in Elisabeth’s letters, the freedom to advance one’s own ideas. In leveraging gender difference to create a polity that allows for plurality and produces an individually beneficial outcome, Elisabeth invites us to imagine a gender egalitarianism more concerned with the equal freedoms of men and women within the polity than with the sameness of abilities as a condition of admittance to the polity.105 Elisabeth and Descartes created something unprecedented in their correspondence: a philosophical friendship between a woman and a man. They built  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 183–4.  CMS 1:111; “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée: car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose, n’ont point coutume d’en désirer plus qu’ils en ont” (AT 6:2). 104  Hobbes, Leviathan, 184. 105  I am pursuing this line of thought in an article on Gabrielle Suchon’s Traité de la morale et de la politique (1693). 102 103

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this friendship through distinct, but complementary practices of equality. These practices of equality map onto broader patterns in contemporary thought. Notably, they shed light on the political limitations of Cartesian pro(to)-feminism and gesture to ways in which contractarian political philosophy might support gender egalitarianism. To be sure, the friendship of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, was, like Elisabeth herself, “incomparable”—contingent upon unique individuals and circumstances. Yet insofar as their practices of equality had implications for the larger polity, their friendship undoubtedly bears comparing to subsequent friendships between men and women—and likely served as a model to them. Elisabeth refused Chanut’s request to publish her letters, which went missing for two centuries.106 Clerselier nevertheless foregrounded Descartes’s letters to Elisabeth in the very first volume he published of the philosopher’s correspondence, only six years after his death. In the preface, he enlists Elisabeth as a friend of Descartes’s embattled philosophy: “That which is written for princesses … should not fear to be exposed to public Censure.”107 I suspect that the public was struck first and foremost by the simple, yet extraordinary fact that she was his friend.

106

 They were found in the Rosendael castle near Arnhem in the 1870s. LouisAlexandre Foucher de Careil published them in Descartes, la Princesse Elisabeth, et la Reine Christine, d’après des lettres inédites (Paris and Amsterdam: Germer-Baillière and Muller, 1879). 107  “Ce qui s’écrit pour des Princesses … ne doit pas craindre d’estre mis à la Censure publique” (Claude Clerselier, “Préface,” in René Descartes, Lettres de Mr Descartes où sont traittées les plus belles questions de la morale, de la physique, de la médecine & des mathématiques, ed. Claude Clerselier [Paris: Henry le Gras, 1657], n.p.).

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Chapter 9

The Gendered Self and Friendship in Action among the Port-Royal Nuns Daniella Kostroun1

In 1609, Abbess Angélique Arnauld initiated her reform of the convent PortRoyal-des-Champs by locking her family out of the cloister. Known as the “revolt of the wicket gate” (journée du guichet), this episode is one of the most famous family dramas in French history. Angélique was seventeen years old at the time, and her parents responded angrily to her actions out of fear that she was rebelling against them under the influence of itinerant Capuchin monks. Her father suspected these monks of wanting to take control of the convent thinking it would make a “good farm” for them.2 But as it turns out, Angélique was not interested in submitting to Capuchin monks any more than to her father. Instead, she wanted to return Port-Royal, an ancient convent founded in 1215, to its original Cistercian heritage by instituting a strict observance of the Benedictine Rule. In achieving this goal, Angélique became one of France’s most remarkable reformers of the seventeenth century. Angélique’s reform efforts took place across five decades and, in the process, encountered considerable opposition and controversy. The most famous of these controversies was that involving Jansenism, which has come to overshadow Angélique’s reform efforts to the point that Port-Royal is no longer known for being a reformed Benedictine convent as much as it is known for being the institutional center of Jansenism. The legacy of Jansenism, a contested heresy that emerged in France in the 1640s, makes it difficult to trace Angélique’s work as a reformer because of the way the religious polemicists at the time generated multiple layers of myth and confusion around Port-Royal. The task is further complicated because the nuns could not speak to or write about the theological and political controversies that affected them directly. Instead, they had to find alternative rhetorical strategies for expressing their views because of the Pauline Interdictions.3 This is the term given to the Church traditions prohibiting women from learning about, discussing, or teaching theological matters based on the 1  The author would like to thank Mita Choudhury, Eric Saak, and Rebecca Wilkin for feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2  Jacqueline-Marie Angélique de Ste.-Madeleine Arnauld, Relation de la Mère Angélique Arnauld, Jean Lesaulnier, ed., Chroniques de Port-Royal 42 (1992): 18. 3  Daniella Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism, Jansenism: Louis XIV and the PortRoyal Nuns (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12–13.

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writings of Saint Paul.4 One way in which the Port-Royal nuns navigated the obstacles they faced was to employ early modern friendship tropes to explore, communicate, and justify their ideas about monastic reform. These tropes changed according to time and circumstances. This essay examines the evolution in friendship tropes used by Angélique and other nuns in their writings across three episodes of conflict. The first episode involved Angélique’s efforts to leave Port-Royal to join the Visitation nuns, an order founded by Jeanne de Chantal and Francis de Sales in 1610. The second episode involved Angélique’s search for an effective spiritual director once she realized that she would never be able to leave Port-Royal. She eventually found the confessor she was seeking in Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, the abbé de Saint-Cyran (henceforth referred to in this text as Saint-Cyran). The third episode involved the nuns’ resistance to accusations of Jansenism following Richelieu’s arrest of Saint-Cyran in 1638. The evolution of friendship tropes across these three episodes in the nuns’ writings highlight how these tropes provided the nuns with important tools through which they were able to forge their identities as Benedictine nuns, navigate the obstacles that they faced in their reform efforts, and shape their legacy as Catholic reformers. Method and the Challenges of Studying Monastic Friendship Exploring friendship tropes in the Port-Royal nuns’writings presents a methodological challenge involving monasticism and the interpretation of sources. In his study of medieval monasticism, Brian Patrick McGuire describes how the monastic tradition of Western Europe began to take form through the efforts of fourth-century Church Fathers. These men sought to reconcile classical philosophies of friendship, which treated friendships as natural and the foundation of healthy communities, with the asceticism of early Christian hermits, who eschewed friendship and community as obstacles for accessing the divine.5 Once friendship and community became accepted features of monasticism, they created a situation in which the prescriptions for ideal friendships within monastic orders became identical to the institution, or “rules of the game.” This creates a methodological challenge for the study of monastic authors because as McGuire states: “There are philosophies of friendship and there are lived experiences of friendship. Both are conveyed to us in literary terms, and all of these—literature, philosophy, and life—are interdependent.” McGuire points to the difficulty in separating peoples’ friendships as they were actually lived and experienced from their descriptions of them in writing because monastic authors consciously described their friendships in ways that reflected and upheld their philosophies of friendship. To speak of friendships otherwise would be tantamount to breaking the monastic rules that they vowed to obey. On the one hand, monastic authors’ intentional portrayal of their actions according to their friendship theories facilitates the study of friendship because one  Kostroun, Feminism, 10–11.  Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), xxix–xliii. 4 5

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can simply read accounts of interpersonal relationships for the theories espoused by the authors. On the other hand, for those seeking the “real” human relationships within these institutions, which no doubt became messy and complicated at times, this overlap poses great difficulties. McGuire observes that the habit of describing friendships according to philosophical categories and literary tropes among monastic authors renders their texts silent on other possible relationships, such as the possibility of homosexual relations among monks. This silence, in turn, leaves any attempt to find such relationships in male communities to the realm of educated supposition, and vulnerable to charges of anachronism.6 This chapter does not seek to uncover a “real” lived experience for the Port-Royal nuns beyond the literary depictions of their relationships. Instead, it focuses on the authors’ discourses to explore how these women conceptualized friendships as Benedictine nuns. As mentioned, these discourses changed over time because of the obstacles and challenges they faced in their reform efforts. While some of these obstacles were situational, such as in the case of the Jansenist controversy, others were more fundamental. One such fundamental challenge was the patriarchal structure inherent to the Benedictine Rule itself. This rule became the most frequently adopted rule by monastic founders and reformers in Western Europe by the ninth century.7 The rule attributed to St. Benedict had posited monasteries as schools for laymen that were governed by abbots/headmasters as a way to reconcile the conflict between Eastern asceticism and the Hellenistic value for friendships in the Roman world.8 As McGuire explains: Friendship and community had been seen in the Aristotelian world as complementary; while in the monastic Christianity of the early centuries they could be looked upon as rivals. The solution of Benedict, to make the abbot the almighty father figure who made certain that monks carried out the work of God, could easily make special bonds among the monks into a disciplinary matter.9

The Benedictine solution was to make the abbot a male head of household with the authority to monitor friendships within the community. This solution, which subordinated friendship to obedience to the abbot, had grounding in scripture where Jesus says “You are my friends if you do what I command” (John 15:14). The rule posited the abbot as Christ’s representative in the monastery.10 He gave the commands and the other monks obeyed.  McGuire, Friendship, xlix–l.  F. Ellen Weaver, The Evolution of the Reform of Port-Royal: From the Rule of Citeaux to Jansenism (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1978), 40–41. 8  The question of who wrote the Benedictine Rule is examined in Francis Clark, The “Gregorian” Dialogues and the Origins of Benedictine Monasticism (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2003). 9  McGuire, Friendship, xli–xlii. 10  The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. and trans. Anthony Meisel and M.L. del Mastro (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 48. For her ties to the Strict Observance movement see Kostroun, Feminism, 21. 6 7

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This patriarchal model posed a problem for women since the Pauline Interdictions defined women as obedient by nature. How could abbesses lead communities of women as patriarchs as spelled out by the rule? Abbesses struggled with this dilemma for centuries.11 The various strategies and accommodations developed by women and their male advisors led to a proliferation of adaptations of the Benedictine Rule for women. In spite of efforts, such as that of Etienne Poncher, the bishop of Paris in 1608, to create a standard rule for women,12 the question of how Benedictine abbesses should govern was still open for debate when Angélique began to reform Port-Royal. It was particularly debatable for Angélique, because, in wanting to establish a strict observance of the Benedictine Rule, she immediately rejected all existing accommodations for women since they contained significant changes and alterations to the definitive text.13 Rather than relying on a pre-existing adaptation of the rule for women, Angélique and her fellow nuns sought to develop their own adaptation, one that adhered as closely to the original Benedictine Rule as possible. The task of adapting the rule for women at Port-Royal was a long process, one that spanned several decades and took shape in response to the specific people, events and circumstances that the nuns encountered. This process means that if we want to understand friendship at Port-Royal through the lens of its Benedictine heritage, we cannot simply draw up a list of friendship philosophies from the monastic rule and then look for these philosophies in the nuns’ writings. Instead, we must look at how the nuns deployed friendship theories in their writings over time. As we shall see, they used a variety of friendship tropes to explore, refine, and justify their unique interpretation of the rule. Friendship and Uncertainty over the Benedictine Rule Forty years after the journée du guichet, several of the Port-Royal nuns began writing down their memories of Angélique’s reform. The project to collect these chronicles, or relations was spearheaded by Angélique’s niece and PortRoyal’s primary “mythographer” Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly, who finished compiling and editing them in 1672.14 The chronicles remained in manuscript until they were published in Utrecht in 1742. Commonly known as the “Mémoires d’Utrecht,” these chronicles have provided an important source base for biographies and histories of the convent ever since.15  Thomas Carr Jr., Voix des abbesses du Grand Siècle: La prédication au féminin à Port-Royal (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2006), 36–53. 12  Carr Jr., Voix, 45. 13  See Angélique’s letter to M. Féron, archdeacon of Chartres, cited below. 14  F. Ellen Weaver, “Angélique de Saint-Jean: Abbesse et ‘mythographe’ de PortRoyal,” Chroniques de Port-Royal 34 (1985): 93–108. 15  Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly, ed., Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port Royal et à la vie de la Révérende Mère Marie Angélique de Sainte Magdeleine Arnauld, réformatrice de ce monastère, 3 vols. (Utrecht, 1742), henceforth cited as Mémoires 11

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The first relation within this compilation is a narrative of Angélique’s reform by Angélique de Saint-Jean who wrote it to serve as an introduction to the collection by highlighting common themes across the chronicles and by indicating which ones contained details about certain episodes in Angélique’s life.16 This introductory relation describes Angélique as a model reformer, one who inspired her nuns to follow her in embracing a strict observance of the Benedictine Rule by practicing the virtues of humility and poverty at the expense of her own health and comfort.17 The narrative explains how God had moved Angélique on the journée du guichet in a way that did such violence to her own human inclinations that it nearly killed her.18 It also testified to how Angélique’s selfless and charitable acts, which she performed out of a divinely inspired love and concern for their souls, similarly moved them to follow her example in spite of themselves.19 Although describing events taking place in the period 1591–1638, this relation reflected the attitudes and experiences of the nuns in 1672, the date when the Angélique de Saint-Jean finished collating and editing the chronicles. By this time, the nuns had already formalized their identity as Benedictine nuns by composing, editing, and publishing their interpretation of the rule in a set of constitutions.20 When we read the relation for the nuns’ friendship philosophy, we see clear references in their descriptions of Angélique’s reform to the friendship philosophy of the Benedictine rule, which posited Christ as the model friend and the abbot as Christ’s proxy within the community. These accounts betray no ambivalence in the nuns’ minds over Angélique’s ability to lead them by practicing Christ-like humility and charity. In fact, the memoirs’ straightforward account of Angélique’s leadership masks the arduous process she went through before she felt able to embrace her identity as a Benedictine abbess. We find evidence of this struggle in other sources, such as the letters that Angélique wrote during the early decades of her reform. For instance, in 1627, when she was working with Sébastien Zamet, the bishop of Langres to establish a new order for women—the Institute of the Holy Sacrament— they decided that the best rule for this institute would be the Carmelite Rule. In a letter to their agent in Rome who was helping them get papal permission for the institute, Angélique explained why she did not want to use the Benedictine Rule: d’Utrecht. For details on the history and location of the nuns’ manuscripts in archives see F. Ellen Weaver, “Histories and Historians of Port Royal,” in The Divine Drama in History and Liturgy: Essays Presented to Horton Davies on his Retirement from Princeton University, ed. John E. Booty (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984): 45–61. 16  Angélique de Saint-Jean, Relation ou Histoire suivie de la vie de la Mere Marie Angélique Arnauld depuis son entrée à Port-Royal des Champs, jusqu’à l’établissement de Port-Royal de Paris, in Mémoires d’Utrecht, vol. 1. 17  Mémoires d’Utrecht, 1:32. 18  Mémoires d’Utrecht, 1:48. 19  Mémoires d’Utrecht, 1:54. 20  Weaver, The Evolution of the Reform, 125–7.

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Truthfully, my father, this rule is worthy of great veneration, but it was never written for nuns. One might reply that there has been a great number of flourishing Benedictine convents, which is true. But it is also true that these convents were only Benedictine in name … For they each had their own individual rules so different from those of Saint Benedict, that hardly any connection can be observed between them; that is the case of the seven nunneries in this diocese … and in an infinite number of others where they use the rule of M. Poncher, bishop of Paris. This rule has almost nothing in it of the rule of Saint Benedict, because the rule of Saint Benedict is inappropriate for nuns down to nearly every chapter.21

It is not clear how long Angélique had harbored doubts about the Benedictine Rule. However, her letters to Jeanne de Chantal reveal that she had wanted to leave Port-Royal as early as 1620 to join Chantal’s order of Visitation nuns, and that her ambivalence toward the Benedictine Rule was one of her reasons for wanting to leave. By 1620, Angélique had already spent a decade trying to reform PortRoyal to the best of her ability with the help of the various monks and priests who visited Port-Royal.22 The Cistercian leadership, impressed by her reform at Port-Royal, commissioned her to take over the administration of Maubuisson, another Cistercian convent, in the hopes that she could improve conditions there.23 Under the control of women from the d’Estrées family, Maubuisson had become notorious as a site for immoral behavior.24 The task of reforming Maubuisson was not an easy one for Angélique. At one point the brothers of the abbess ran her out of the convent with their swords.25 It was during this trying time that Angélique met François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, the founders of the Visitation Order and began corresponding with them.26 Unfortunately, only three of Angélique’s letters to Jeanne de Chantal have survived. These letters differ from her niece’s hagiographic memoirs in striking ways. Whereas the memoirs describe Angélique as a model abbess, Angélique harped on her faults and infidelities in her letters. Rather than portraying herself 21

 “Véritablement, mon Père, cette règle est digne de grande vénération, mais elle ne fût jamais écrite pour des filles. Sur quoi l’on dira qu’il y a eu très grande quantité de monastères Bénédictines très florissants, ce qui est vray. Mais il est vray aussi que tous ces monastères n’avoient que le nom de Bénédictine … Car au reste, elles avoient des règles particulières si différentes de celles de Saint Benoit, qu’on ne connait pas qu’elles ayent aucun rapport, ce qui se voit aux sept monastères qui sont en ce diocèse … et infinis d’autres, où elles ont la règle de M. Poncher, evêque de Paris, qui n’a presque rien de la règle de Saint Benoit, laquelle aussi presque à chaque chapitre se trouve impropre aux filles” (Angélique Arnauld to M. Féron, 25 March 1627; cited in Louis Prunel, Sébastien Zamet: Evêque-duc de Langres, pair de France, 1588–1655 [Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1912], 222–3). All translations are my own. 22  Arnauld, Relation, 21–4. 23  Arnauld, Relation, 39. 24  Geneviève Reynes, Couvents de femmes: La vie des religieuses cloîtrées dans la France des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 92. 25  Kostroun, Feminism, 26. 26  Louis Cognet, Mère Angélique et St. François de Sales (Paris: Sulliver, 1951).

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as motivated by divine love, she attributed her actions to hypocrisy and lack of piety. She described how she let her mind wander during sermons even though she appeared to be paying attention. She admitted that she refused food in ways that gave the appearance of self-denial when, in fact, she was actually avoiding things that she did not like to eat. During mealtimes (when the nuns were supposed to eat in silence and listen to a reader) she talked incessantly about the news or other silly subjects. When it was her turn to do the reading, she delivered the text in a mocking or impatient tone.27 It is tempting to read Angélique’s candid descriptions of her behavior and emotions in these letters as more spontaneous and “authentic” than the descriptions contained in the hagiographic memoirs. However, such spontaneity was a literary norm for female aristocratic letter-writers at the time. It reflected her skill as an artless writer and placed her firmly within her elite social milieu in France.28 Upon closer inspection, we see that these letters were as intentional as the memoirs in the sense that Angélique crafted them to make an argument about her relationship with the Benedictine Rule. She wrote these letters when she was engaged in a power struggle for control over Maubuisson. This conflict eventually caused the Cistercians to remove Angélique from Maubuisson and to install Mme de Soissons, a woman from a more prominent noble family as Maubuisson’s abbess to ward off the challenge from the d’Estrées clan. Angélique never described these events in her letters to Jeanne de Chantal. Instead, she sought Jeanne de Chantal’s help to extricate herself from this difficult situation by arguing that it was impossible for her to forge virtuous and fulfilling relationships under the Benedictine Rule. Discussions about her “acquaintances,” “friends,” and “enemies” were the way she conveyed to Jeanne de Chantal the hopelessness she felt in her situation and her desire to escape by joining the Visitation order. In her first letter, Angélique stressed how she failed as abbess to love her nuns charitably and equally according to the Benedictine Rule. She described how she snapped at them and ignored them: I often go about looking despondent, and since I last wrote to you, I have lost my patience with my sisters on several occasions, and have reprimanded them bitterly … [with regard to their spiritual devotions]. I do not talk to them at all, because I cannot find the opportunity, since I am always wasting time. Once, I quit leading them in prayer halfway through out of frivolity and lack of devotion.29 27

 Angélique Arnauld to Jeanne de Chantal [September] 1620. Jacqueline-Marie Angélique Arnauld, Lettres de la Mère Angélique Arnauld, 3 vols. (Utrecht, 1752), reprint with introduction by Jean Lesaulnier (Paris: Phénix Editions, 2003), 1:3–4. 28  Michèle Longino Farrell, Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 15–17. 29  “Je fais souvent une mine bien chagrine; et depuis que je ne vous ai écrit, je me suis souvent impatientée contre mes Soeurs, et les ai reprises aigrement … Je ne parle point du tout à mes Soeurs, ne trouvant point de tems, parce que j’en perds. J’ai quitté une fois l’Oraison à demi faite par légèreté et indévotion …” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:3–4).

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She explained that she did not have time to tend to her nuns because she had involved herself in several petty and unpleasant relationships with the monks who served the nuns as confessors and directors: When I listen to these monks, they tell me nothing but silly things, and if I do not respond to them in kind, they say that I am giving them the cold shoulder, that they do not recognize me anymore, that I have time only for bishops, etc. … Thus have I made a thousand acquaintances from which I cannot extricate myself. The other day, I shared with one of these people my disapproval of some others whom I knew my acquaintances did not appreciate, and I did that to flatter them. 30

By saying she had created a “thousand” acquaintances from which she could not “remove” herself, she described these relationships as a trap, one that morally compromised her since she found herself behaving uncharitably. Angélique argued that her concern for worldly matters had put her in this difficult situation and had created enemies for her: “… I remain preoccupied with human matters. I am caught up in a tiresome affair, and I have a whole bunch of enemies.”31 She also knew that her inability to avoid these worldly concerns harmed her nuns because scandals “bring disorder and extreme angst to my poor sisters.”32 Angélique emphasized her failure to forge virtuous relationships. She presented herself as a failed abbess who could not imitate Christ as the model friend because she was too busy engaging in petty cabals with monks. In her second letter to Jeanne de Chantal, she continued to list her faults.33 Then, in her final letter, Angélique made the case that she would be a better nun if she could leave the Cistercian order—and by extension the Benedictine Rule—and live with the Visitation nuns, who follow the Rule of St. Augustine under a set of constitutions composed by François de Sales. She began this letter by describing how she had received letters from the superior of the Feuillant nuns (the Feuillants were an order of Benedictine nuns that had grown out of the Cistercian order) expressing her desire to be Angélique’s friend. Angélique explained that her brother Antoine Arnauld d’Andilly had initiated the contact with this superior: “My brother loves this good sister passionately, and he wants her to love me and me to love her, and I think that he would very much like for me to go live 30  “quand je les [les religieux] écoute, ils ne me disent que des niaiseries, et si je ne réponds pas de même qu’eux on dit que je fais la froide, qu’on ne me connoît plus, que je ne fais plus cas que des Evêques, etc … Ainsi j’ai fait mille connoissances dont je ne me puis defaire. L’autre jour je fis paroître à une de ces personnes que j’en meprisois d’autres que je savois qu’ils n’estimoient pas et cela par flatterie” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:5). 31  “j’ai toujours du respect humain. Je suis embarrassée dans une fâcheuse affaire, et j’ai tout plein d’ennemis” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:5). 32  “apportent des désordres et d’extrêmes incommodités à mes pauvres soeurs” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:6). 33  She admits to speaking about “affaires d’Etat” three times and showing off a letter she wrote out of vanity (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:8–10).

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with her.”34 In spite of her brother’s recommendation and her own esteem for this nun, Angélique confessed that she felt nothing but burdened by her gestures of friendship and the prospect of joining the Feuillants: “I feel absolutely no calling from God for that.”35 Angélique did not enjoy her friendship with the Feuillant nun because she did not want to join her order. In contrast, Angélique stressed that if she lived with the Visitation nuns, her personal feelings toward other people would not matter: I have thought deeply [about joining the Feuillantines] and the Visitation too. I worry only that I will never see you nor Monsignor [François de Sales] there, that you will both die before me, and that our dear Mistress, whom I love so much, will die as well. I imagine that our sister who went by “Petit” in the world, and whom I greatly dislike, will become my Superior. Yet this possibility does not put me off at all, as it would not prevent me from observing the rule and the Constitutions.36

Angélique implied that her ability to transcend personal likes and dislikes depended upon the rule under which she lived. She underscored the importance of the rule by stating at the end of her letter that she could be an improved, humble nun by living under a better rule: “I would nonetheless point out in all gentleness that your rule was made by the greatest doctor of the Holy Church [St. Augustine] and that your Constitutions by a great and saintly bishop [François de Sales], and as a result that they cannot not be good; so I listen to them with humility.”37 In asserting the superiority of the rules and constitutions governing the Visitation nuns over those governing Benedictine convents, Angélique was taking sides in a contemporary debate between the regular and secular clergy over which type of clergy was best suited to implement Catholic reform.38 Both St. Augustine and François de Sales, the authors of the rule and constitutions governing the Visitation nuns, were bishops. By insisting that she could obey their rules better than those administered 34

 “Mon frère (Antoine Arnauld d’Andilly) aime passionnément cette bonne fille, et il veut qu’elle m’aime et que je l’aime, et je pense qu’il voudroit bien que j’allasse avec elle” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:11). 35  “ses lettres me sont si fort à charge”; “Dieu ne m’y appelle point du tout” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:11). 36  “j’y ai pensé profondement et a la Visitation aussi. Je fais état tout au pis que je ne vous y verrai jamais, ni Monseigneur [François de Sales], que vous mourrez tout deux bien avant moi et que notre chere Maîtresse que j’aime très fort mourra aussi. Je m’imagine que notre Soeur qui s’appelloit Petit au monde, et qui me deplaît fort, sera ma Superieure, et cela ne me peut dégoûter, puisque cela n’empêcheroit pas que je ne gardasse la règle, et les Constitutions” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:12). 37  “Je dis pourtant tout doucement que votre règle a été faite par le plus grand Docteur de la Sainte Eglise [St. Augustine] et vos Constitutions par un grand et saint Eveque [François de Sales], qu’elles ne peuvent donc qu’être bonnes; puis je les écoute avec humilité” (Arnauld, Lettres, 1:13). 38  Antoine Adam, Du mysticisme à la révolte: Les jansénistes du XVII siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 27.

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by Benedictine monks, Angélique was arguing that the secular clergy was better qualified than religious clergy to direct women. Stressing her inability to forge virtuous friendships in the absence of an effective rule aligned Angélique’s letters with common attitudes about women’s friendships in the early modern period. In her study of female friendship in Renaissance texts, Laurie Shannon observes that prevailing assumptions regarding women’s “weak constitution” led writers to present them as “vulnerable to random external forces” and thus incapable of performing the friendship role.39 Assuming women’s natural fickleness and unreliability, Renaissance writers stressed the importance of marriage for women. These authors saw marriage as comparable to a form of government, in which the wife was subject. Regarding marriage, Shannon notes: “Incapable of forming a friendship relation of equality and stable self-presence, monstrous in a position of superiority or rule, weak and wavering woman—logically—can only be offered a role of subordinate obedience.”40 Angélique applied these assumptions about women and their need for governance to herself by stressing that she could only behave virtuously if living under the right monastic rule. Her solution was not to change her human nature—which, in accordance with Augustine she assumed to be corrupt—but to change the form of government to which she was subject. She argued that once subjected to an effective rule, she would be able to forge virtuous friendships. In this way, her letters upheld the early modern assumption that women needed to obey wise men in order to act virtuously. Angélique’s letters to Jeanne de Chantal contradict the nuns’ hagiographical memoirs, especially in their descriptions of her hypocrisy and moral failures as an abbess. Yet, in spite of these differences, both sets of texts focus on the relationship between the monastic rule and the quality of her friendships. In the letters, Angélique argued that she could not form virtuous friendships under the direction of monks and the Benedictine Rule. Several years later, after she decided to embrace her obedience to the Benedictine Rule, the nuns described Angélique as a model friend, one who successfully reformed her convent by imitating Christ’s self-sacrifice for others. When we compare these two sets of sources, a question emerges: what caused Angélique to change her mind about Port-Royal and the Benedictine Rule? Why did she eventually embrace them? Angélique and Saint-Cyran: Soul Mates Angélique chronicled her journey toward acceptance of the Benedictine Rule in an autobiographical memoir describing her quest for a male spiritual friend, or “soul mate.” In a study of female penitents and their confessors, Jodi Bilinkoff describes these spiritual friendships as unique to the contemplative, celibate life and argues 39  Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 59. 40  Shannon, Sovereign, 60.

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that they may have provided a “powerful incentive” for people to remain Catholic in the Counter-Reformation period: Since the early centuries of the faith Christians had acknowledged that the contemplative, celibate life held the possibility—perhaps the only culturally sanctioned possibility—for a man and woman to have a deep, mutually satisfying relationship outside procreative purposes, a celibate but otherwise intimate friendship may have struck many as a more attractive option. With the advent of printing in the late fifteenth century and the increased availability of hagiographical texts, this tradition became more widely known to a larger audience than ever before … The potential to achieve a meaningful, even intense, connection with a member of the opposite sex may well have served as a powerful incentive for people to remain within the Catholic fold and even consider a religious vocation.41

This type of friendship was linked to the contemplative life and a desire to imitate the lives of saints from the early Church. Bilinkoff surveyed 42 female life narratives from Spain, Spanish America, France, New France, Portugal, and Italy from the period 1450–1750 to see how men and women described these spiritual friendships.42 She identified five elements that were common to these narratives, which were remarkably formularyic: 1) “longing and looking [for a good confessor],” 2) “finding [a good confessor],” 3) “connecting, body and soul,” 4) “parting,” and 5) “communion.”43 Bilinkoff did not include Angélique’s autobiography in her study and perhaps with good reason. Angélique’s text, composed in the winter of 1655 and compiled with the other nuns’ memoirs in the Mémoires d’Utrecht,44 adhered to this common pattern only for two themes: “longing and looking” and “finding.” As we shall see, Angélique either revised or remained silent on the themes of “connecting,” “parting,” and “communion.” Most of Angélique’s text focused on the theme of “longing and looking.”45 She began her memoir by describing the worldly motivations behind her family’s decision to make her an abbess at Port-Royal. They had lied about her age on the petitions sent to Rome requesting her appointment to that office, saying that she was eighteen when she was only ten, and then installed her in the convent against her will.46 She stressed how much she disliked being a nun and then described 41  Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 77. 42  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 7. 43  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 8. 44  Angélique de Saint-Jean described the circumstances under which Angélique composed her memoir in “Avertissement par une Religieuse de Port-Royal” (Mémoires d’Utrecht, 1:10). 45  This theme dominated 50 out of the 64 pages, or 78%, of the Lesaulnier edition that I used. 46  Arnauld, Relation, 11.

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how she considered leaving Port-Royal knowing that her authority there was not legitimate because of her young age.47 Her plan was thwarted by a severe illness during which her parents cared for her with so much affection and attention that she returned to Port-Royal determined not to disappoint them.48 Soon thereafter, she had a religious awakening inspired by a sermon delivered by Father Basile, an itinerant Capuchin monk.49 She decided to reform Port-Royal according to the Benedictine Rule and worked to convince the other nuns in the house to support her plan.50 After overcoming the resistance she faced from among the nuns (most notably, there were two nuns who did not want to put all of their possessions in common),51 she turned to the matter of the cloister. She described how cloistering Port-Royal was the most difficult task because it concerned those living outside of the convent, particularly her mother and father who, typical of their social rank, “did not want to submit to that law.”52 After describing her father’s anger, sadness, and eventual acceptance of her decision to enforce the cloister on the journée du guichet,53 Angélique recounted how her search for a confessor began in earnest. She realized that the monks who had been sent by the Cistercian order to direct her thus far were as young, ignorant, and inexperienced as she was.54 But news of her reform spread, and she learned valuable lessons from various priests and monks who began visiting Port-Royal out of curiosity.55 It was not until she met François de Sales, however, that she found a confessor to whom she wanted to “reveal her conscience.”56 She described how she “opened her heart” to him in letters in which she described her pain at never finding a confessor who could inspire her full confidence and to whose direction she could fully submit. She told him that she had been selecting the advice she received from the various confessors according to her own thoughts and desires to the point that she feared she was, in effect, directing herself.57 She solicited his help to  Arnauld, Relation, 14.  Arnauld, Relation, 15. 49  Arnauld, Relation, 16. 50  Arnauld, Relation, 19–20. 51  Arnauld, Relation, 20. 52  “La grande difficulté était pour établir la clôture, ayant affaire pour cela aux séculiers, et surtout à mon père et à ma mère, qui ne voulaient, en façon du monde, subir cette loi” (Arnauld, Relation, 20). 53  “Et je lui refusai la porte, dont il fut si en colère qu’il s’en voulait retourner à l’heure même, m’assurant qu’il ne me verrait de sa vie, et qu’il avait une extrême douleur de voir qu’on me pervertissait l’esprit, et qu’il me recommandait au moins d’être sage. J’eus une telle douleur que je pensai étouffer, ce qui le toucha tant qu’il s’apaisa” (Arnauld, Relation, 20). 54  Arnauld, Relation, 20. 55  Arnauld, Relation, 21–4. 56  “Si j’avais eu un grand désir de le voir, sa vue m’en donna un plus grand de lui communiquer ma conscience” (Arnauld, Relation, 41). 57  Arnauld, Relation, 41. 47 48

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arrange her transfer from Port-Royal to the Visitation order,58 but de Sales soon left France for Geneva, and Angélique was never able to leave Port-Royal. Had he remained in France, she claimed, she would have “benefitted greatly from his holy conduct.”59 Instead, she noted, she solicited his advice through letters until the time of his death.60 In the end, Angélique described her relationship with François de Sales as unfulfilled because of the distance between them and because he died while she was still floundering as an abbess. A few years after de Sales’s death, Angélique met Sebastien Zamet and began partnering with him to found the Institute of the Holy Sacrament. Angélique described her enthusiasm for the project; she believed that she had found in Zamet “a man full of zeal, of mortification, and of true devotion.”61 The Institute also provided her with an opportunity to remove PortRoyal from the jurisdiction of Cistercian monks by relocating the nuns to a house in Paris and placing them under the jurisdiction of the new archbishop of Paris.62 Angélique’s enthusiasm for the project quickly waned, however, after she and Zamet began disagreeing over the administration of the Institute. Although they had agreed to put the institute under the same rule as that governing the Carmelites in Paris, they quarreled once Zamet began imitating the Carmelites in other ways, such as putting writing desks in the nuns’ individual cells and decorating the altar with flowers, fancy fabrics, and perfumes.63 Angélique objected “on top of all of that” to the “extraordinary austerities” he allowed the nuns to practice such as “fasts of bread and water, dreadful mortification, and the most humiliating acts of penitence in the world.”64 The damage caused by their differences became irreparable once a group of theologians from the Sorbonne accused the Institute of promoting heresy in an episode known as the “Secret Chaplet Affair.”65 When the Sorbonne theologians began to attack the Institute, Zamet asked Saint-Cyran, a talented priest, theologian, and polemicist to defend the Institute. Zamet also had him take over the spiritual direction of the nuns when he traveled to the diocese of Langres to take care of business there.66 In Zamet’s absence, SaintCyran began delivering a series of speeches in the Institute’s parlor outlining a  Arnauld, Relation, 42.  Arnauld, Relation, 42. 60  Arnauld, Relation, 43. 61  “[Zamet] me parut un homme tout plein de zèle, de mortification, et de vraie dévotion” (Arnauld, Relation, 48). 62  Arnauld, Relation, 50–52. Kostroun, Feminism, 30 n58. 63  Arnauld, Relation, 53. 64  “Avec tout cela, des austérités extraordinaires, des jeûnes au pain et à l’eau, des disciplines terribles, des pénitences les plus humiliantes du monde” (Arnauld, Relation, 53). 65  Arnauld, Relation, 58. Angélique only mentions the affair as a “persecution” in her Mémoires. For a fuller account of the controversy see Jean Orcibal, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, Abbé de Saint Cyran et son temps, 1581–1638 (Paris: Libraire Vrin, 1947), 305–34; and Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Le Chapelet secret de Mère Agnès Arnauld,” XVIIe Siècle 70 (1991): 77–86. 66  Arnauld, Relation, 58–9. 58 59

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penitential system that he called “renewals” and had developed based on his study of early Church fathers.67 Saint-Cyran had his penitents begin their renewals by giving a full confession to him. He then directed them to pursue a state of genuine, internal contrition for their sins by retreating from the world and abstaining from communion.68 Only after they reported experiencing a deep, genuine remorse for their sins, did Saint-Cyran advise his followers to take communion and to return to their daily lives.69 It was upon describing Saint-Cyran’s arrival at the Institute that Angélique’s narrative shifted from the “longing and looking” theme to the theme of “finding” a good confessor. Angélique described “finding” Saint-Cyran in ways similar to those found in the narratives of other nuns’ lives. As Bilinkoff notes: “Given the years of hope, desire, and effort that so many women and priests put into having a meaningful relationship with a like-minded individual, we should not be surprised at the outpouring of emotion when they finally encountered such a person.”70 Angélique highlighted the emotional intensity of “finding” Saint-Cyran by describing how the lessons he taught in the convent parlor filled her with misery and anxiety. She explained that he made her acutely aware of her own moral failings: God instilled in me such affection for [the virtues taught by Saint-Cyran] that I lived and breathed only to find a way to put them into practice. Even though my will to search for the means to pursue this first moment of grace held firm in the depths of my heart, my wretchedness, my fickleness, and the lack of true assistance that I had received to prepare me for it made me commit grave mistakes and infidelities. The remorse these caused me tormented my conscience with anguish.71

She felt such anguish about her own failings in comparison to his virtues, that at first, she feared confessing to Saint-Cyran: “Thus did I fear what in fact I loved and desired: the strong, holy, righteous and enlightened direction of this servant of God.”72 She described a period of emotional and psychological pain as her corrupt human nature continued to pull her away from him, knowing that once under his direction, he would subject her to God’s will: “I regarded [his direction] as the  Jean Orcibal, La spiritualité de Saint-Cyran avec ses écrits de piété inédits (Paris: Vrin, 1962), 121–2. 68  Orcibal, La spiritualité, 123–4. 69  Orcibal, La spiritualité, 125–9. 70  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 81–2. 71  “Dieu me donna tant d’affection pour ces vertus que je ne respirais que de trouver le moyen de les pouvoir pratiquer. Mais ma misère, ma légèreté, le peu de vraie assistance que j’avais eue pour correspondre à cette première grâce—quoique ma volonté soit demeurée ferme au fond de mon coeur pour chercher les moyens de la suivre,—m’ont fait commettre de très grandes fautes et infidélités, dont j’avais très souvent des remords de conscience qui me mettaient en d’extrêmes angoisses” (Arnauld, Relation, 59). 72  “Je craignais donc ce qu’en effet j’aimais et désirais, qui était la forte, sainte, droite et éclairée conduite de ce serviteur de Dieu” (Arnauld, Relation, 59–60). 67

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death of my will, of my discernment and of my own senses, which I had for the most part protected up until that time.”73 After this period of pain and a few failed attempts at approaching him, she finally met with him for confession. At the beginning of their first meeting, she thought she was not going to be able to go through with it: “Words failed me, and it seemed impossible to articulate what I could barely make out.”74 She left this initial meeting asking him to pray for her to find a way to serve God. When she met with him the second time, she wrote, “I believe that through his prayers, he obtained the grace I needed to overcome my extreme reluctance to confess, because I did so without much difficulty.”75 Angélique described this second confession as a joyful and cathartic experience, one that reduced her to tears: “Never had I experienced as much pleasure from fun and laughter as I did then from crying.”76 By describing how hard it was for her to confess to Saint-Cyran in the first place, Angélique structured her narrative so that her confession became the moment of anticipated climax for her readers. Bilinkoff notes that in most autobiographical narratives, the process of “finding” a male soul mate leads to a description of “connecting” with him: “These accounts of providential meetings serve as preludes to narratives of relationships that lasted for years, even decades, and describe the crafting of remarkable personal bonds.”77 At this point, Angélique’s narrative deviates from the typical pattern. Rather than focusing on her connection to Saint-Cyran, she immediately cuts off her description of the intense feelings he generated in her to describe her feeling of connection to her fellow nuns: Never had I experienced as much pleasure from fun and laughter as I did then from crying. I should not say this, as my task is to record matters relating to the conduct and providence of God on this house. And in terms of that, I will say that all of our sisters, excepting two, experienced the same disposition of penitence and joy. The union of our hearts was so tight that despite perfect silence, it almost seemed as though one could hear our sisters speaking with one another to affirm each other in our desire for religious perfection.78 73  “je la [sa conduite] regardais comme la mort de ma volonté, de mon discernement et de mon propre sens, dont j’avais jusqu’alors conservé la plus grande partie” (Arnauld, Relation, 60). 74  “la parole m’était interdite, et il me semblait impossible de prononcer ce que je voyais avec tant de peine” (Arnauld, Relation, 60). 75  “Je crois qu’il m’obtint par ses prières la grâce de surmonter mon extrême répugnance à me confesser, l’ayant fait sans grande peine” (Arnauld, Relation, 61). 76  “Jamais je n’avais eu tant de plaisir à me divertir et à rire que j’en avais à pleurer” (Arnauld, Relation, 61). 77  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 85. 78  “… Je ne dois point dire ceci, n’écrivant que ce qui concerne la conduite et la Providence de Dieu sur cette maison. Et pour cela je dirai que toutes nos soeurs, à l’exception de deux, étaient en la même disposition de pénitence et de joie. C’était une union si étroite de tous nos coeurs que, dans un silence très exact, il semblait que nos soeurs s’entreparlaient pour s’entreconfirmer dans le désir de la perfection religieuse” (Arnauld, Relation, 61).

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By writing, “I should not say this” after describing her feelings of release and joy upon “finding” Saint-Cyran, Angélique indicated that this relationship was beside the point. What mattered was the complete unity she felt with the other nuns. In other words, she replaced the theme of “connecting” with her confessor with a description of “connecting” with her community. Thus, Angélique revised the standard “soul mate” narrative to posit unity with her fellow nuns as the objective of her quest to find a good confessor. Bilinkoff notes that most female accounts of “finding” a confessor are couched in “powerful and eroticized language … a language strongly reminiscent of the literature of romance.”79 Both male and female authors frequently applied discourses and metaphors of physical care and contact with one another to describe their intense spiritual friendships as they proceeded onto the themes of “connection,” “parting,” and “communion” in their narratives.80 There is no trace of this physical or sensory language in Angélique’s narrative. By suddenly turning the focus of her memoir from her relationship with her male confessors to that with her nuns, Angélique simultaneously removed the male confessor as the object of her “longing and looking” and rejected all appeals to the physical senses to describe her spiritual development.81 After her confession to Saint-Cyran, the remainder of Angélique’s memoir focused exclusively on the nuns’ relationships with each other and with other women. Angélique’s first step after her confession was to leave the Institute of the Holy Sacrament to return to Port-Royal. She took with her those nuns loyal to Saint-Cyran and convinced her sister, Agnès Arnauld—who had been her coadjutor at Port-Royal ever since she had left for Maubuisson—to accept SaintCyran as their new confessor.82 She ended her memoir by recounting a conflict between the Port-Royal nuns and Mme de Pontcarré, a patron who maintained an apartment at Port-Royal and was fostering schism among the nuns.83 Pontcarré became disgruntled after Saint-Cyran replaced Zamet as the nuns’ confessor and complained to the archbishop of Paris. In the last sentence of the memoir, Angélique stated that Richelieu imprisoned Saint-Cyran at Vincennes shortly after the archbishop informed Richelieu of Pontcarré’s complaints about him.84 Although Angélique wrote this memoir several years after Saint-Cyran’s release from prison and death, she made no effort to address the theme of “parting.” An even more significant omission was her complete silence on the theme of “communion.” Bilinkoff notes that the sacrament of the Eucharist was “central to these dramas of spiritual and emotional connection” and that women typically  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 82.  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 86. 81  Saint-Cyran taught the nuns to mistrust all corporeal signs, metaphors, and experiences in their pursuit of religious perfection. This mistrust of sensory experience derived from St. Augustine (Orcibal, La spiritualité, 70–72). 82  Arnauld, Relation, 63–71. 83  Arnauld, Relation, 70–74. 84  Arnauld, Relation, 74. 79 80

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described key developments in their spiritual friendships taking place just before, during, or after communion. 85 Descriptions of communion were particularly significant because they situated narratives of spiritual friendship into a wider debate at the time over how frequently people should take communion. On the one hand, there were those who advocated frequent, daily communion on the grounds that this would increase holiness. On the other hand, there were those who argued against daily communion because it increased opportunities for sexual temptation between priests and women.86 In Angélique’s case, we know from other sources that she delayed taking communion for five months after her confession to Saint-Cyran.87 After Angélique relinquished Zamet as her confessor, he composed a memoir describing Saint-Cyran as a false prophet who had misled Angélique into error.88 Zamet described Angélique’s extreme abstinence from communion as an example of Saint-Cyran’s dangerous influence over her.89 In contrast, by avoiding the topic of communion in her autobiography, Angélique avoided the most controversial aspect of Saint-Cyran’s penitential system. After comparing Angélique’s narrative of her “soul mate” relationship with Saint-Cyran with more typical narratives of the time, we see that Angélique credited him for her acceptance of the Benedictine Rule. He freed her not only from Zamet’s unbearable direction at the Institute of the Holy Sacrament, but also from her habit of picking and choosing male confessors according to her own personal preference. Her narrative stressed that it was Saint-Cyran’s message, and not his person, that inspired her to religious perfection. The spiritual friendship she experienced was an act of grace, one that transcended her as an individual to encompass her community of nuns. In this way, she deployed the traditional “soul mate” friendship trope that linked heterosexual friendships and monastic reform, but in a way that downgraded the heterosexual friendship between male confessor and female penitent to the level of mere catalyst for the more significant friendships among the nuns. Although Angélique credited Saint-Cyran in her memoir for her new acceptance of Port-Royal and the Benedictine Rule, she never explained how she reconciled the male bias of the rule with the Pauline Interdictions preventing women from preaching or teaching in the Church. However, we know from other sources that  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 92.  Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 94. 87  Angélique wrote elsewhere, “Pour la Sainte Communion, je confesse que j’ai été depuis Pâques jusqu’à l’Assomption de la Saint Vierge sans m’en approcher” (JacquelineMarie Angélique de Ste.-Madeleine Arnauld, Relation de la conduite que M. Zamet Evêque de Langres a tenue à l’égard du Monastere de Port-Royal, de la Maison du S. Sacrement, de M. l’Abbé de S. Cyran, et de la Mere Marie Angélique, pour servir d’éclaircissement et de reponse à un Memoir de ce Prelat, in Mémoires d’Utrecht, 1:478). 88  See my analysis of this memoir in Kostroun, Feminism, 34–8. Richelieu used the memoir to justify his arrest of Saint-Cyran. See Orcibal, Jean Duvergier, 564. 89  Kostroun, Feminism, 35. 85 86

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shortly after Saint-Cyran went to prison, he embarked on a project to read the complete works of Bernard of Clairvaux (circa 1090–1153), the primary architect of the Cistercian order. He found in Bernard’s writings “the perfect synthesis of the monastic and Augustinian traditions.”90 This synthesis led him to believe that the monastic life should serve as a model for all Christian converts.91 For instance, in his Considérations pour la fête de saint Benoît, he wrote “Saint Benedict’s person appeared as a new apostle and his rule, as another gospel—in other words, as explanation and clarification of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”92 Saint-Cyran’s insights from Bernard of Clairvaux—which focused on the Benedictine Rule’s accessibility to all (and not just to an elite), its compatibility with the teachings of Augustine, and its proximity to the gospel—no doubt helped Angélique change her perception of the rule. His insights helped her to disassociate the Benedictine Rule from her negative experiences with Benedictine monks and nuns, and to focus instead on its inherent, Christian mission. By tracing its origins directly back to the gospel, and synthesizing it with other Church fathers, SaintCyran paved the way for Angélique to adapt the Benedictine Rule for women. He saw the rule less as a manual for male abbots to lead as fathers, and more as a general affirmation that those who obeyed the monastic rule would become instruments of God.93 By positing the Benedictine Rule as another version of the gospel, Saint-Cyran allowed for the monastic life to serve as a model for the devout life. Tom Carr Jr.’s study of Angélique’s speeches at Port-Royal confirms that she embraced this notion of Port-Royal as a model convent. He explains that every female order in Counter-Reformation France had an active apostolate. At Port-Royal, the nuns saw their mission as promoting monastic life through a disciplined observance of the Benedictine Rule.94 Angélique’s niece and successor as abbess, Angélique de Saint-Jean described this apostolate in maternal terms by declaring that as “brides of Christ” the nuns’ purpose was to “multiply the number of his children.”95 Persecution and Friendship Triangles at Port-Royal In the year 1640, while Saint-Cyran was still in prison, a French printer issued an edition of Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus, a posthumous and controversial work on Augustine’s theories of human sin and the grace necessary to overcome it. Three years later in the winter of 1642–1643, Saint-Cyran’s critics began accusing him  Simon Icard, Port-Royal et saint Bernard de Clairvaux (1608–1709) (Paris: Champion, 2010), 256. 91  Icard, Port-Royal, 263. 92  “Saint Benoit a paru en sa personne comme un apôtre nouveau et sa Règle comme un autre évangile, ou pour mieux dire comme une explication et un éclaircissement de celui de Jesus-Christ” (Icard, Port-Royal, 263–4). 93  Orcibal, La spiritualité, 62–5. 94  Carr Jr., Voix des abbesses, 63–4. 95  Carr Jr., Voix des abbesses, 64. 90

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of spreading a new heresy called Jansenism.96 These critics knew that Saint-Cyran had been a lifelong friend of Jansen’s and that the two had studied the ancient, patristic texts together.97 Saint-Cyran’s critics also republished Zamet’s memoir in order to present Angélique’s long separation from communion as an example of Jansenism in action.98 Antoine Arnauld, Angélique’s brother and a doctor of the Sorbonne, responded to these attacks with treatises in defense of Jansen’s theology and Saint-Cyran’s penitential theories. Thus began the polemical exchange over Jansenism, an exchange that grew in intensity and scope over the next century. 99 By the end of the decade, the religious polemics over Jansenism began to take on a political valence.100 When Mazarin succeeded Richelieu as Anne of Austria’s chief minister, he did not want to get as involved as his predecessor in these religious controversies and remained indifferent to Jansenism, in spite of Anne of Austria’s efforts to convince him that this new heresy posed a threat to the monarchy.101 Mazarin’s attitude changed in 1653, however, once his ambassador in Rome informed him that Jansen’s most ardent supporters were also supporters of his nemesis, the frondeur the Cardinal de Retz.102 From then on, Mazarin sought to rid France of Jansenism. His solution involved commissioning the bishops of France to identify all members of the clergy, male and female, who harbored Jansenist sympathies within their dioceses. To identify the Jansenist clergy, the bishops were to send out pastoral letters ordering all clergy to sign statements affirming their faithful adherence to a set of papal bulls that condemned the heretical tenets found in Jansen’s writings. The state then would discipline anyone who refused to sign the formulary by seizing fiscal responsibility for the income generated by his or her benefices.103 Although Mazarin failed to implement this plan before his death, Louis XIV launched it as part of his declaration of personal rule in 1661.104 When the PortRoyal nuns refused to sign the anti-Jansenist statement unconditionally, they activated a controversy known as the “formulary crisis.”105 This crisis, which started with the nuns and a couple of bishops who refused to obey the king’s  Kostroun, Feminism, 40–41.  Saint-Cyran and Jansen were classmates at the University of Louvain from 1602–1604. Later, the two spent a five-year retreat (1611–1616) in a villa at Camp-de-Prats, an estate owned by one of Saint-Cyran’s relatives that was situated in the outskirts of his hometown, Bayonne. Here, they embarked on a study of the ancient Church literature by rejecting scholastic methods and applying instead the humanist techniques that they had learned from their professor at Louvain, Justus Lipsius. After studying for 12–15 hours a day, they would relax by playing a game of badminton. See Orcibal, Jean Duvergier, 139–48. 98  Kostroun, Feminism, 43. 99  Kostroun, Feminism, 41–2. 100  Kostroun, Feminism, 78–80. 101  Kostroun, Feminism, 73. 102  Kostroun, Feminism, 85–6. 103  Kostroun, Feminism, 100–102, 107. 104  Kostroun, Feminism, 107–8. 105  Kostroun, Feminism, 112–40. 96 97

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orders to issue pastoral letters against Jansen, soon developed into a much larger controversy over the rights to self-governance among French bishops and the limits to royal and papal authority in matters involving the French Church.106 The formulary crisis, during which the archbishop of Paris or his representatives visited Port-Royal several times to coerce the nuns into signing the statement against Jansen, created the conditions for a new friendship trope to emerge within the Port-Royal texts: the triangle between friends and a tyrant. Laurie Shannon stresses the ubiquity of this trope in Renaissance texts: “Representations of friendship rarely fail to include a monarch in the wings. This is Renaissance friendships’ early modern signature. Strewn across friendship materials one finds countless juxtapositionings of the befriended subject and the sovereign.”107 This triangulation between friends and the monarch found its precedents in classical stories such as Damon and Pythias and Orestes and Pylades.108 In the Christian tradition, the Biblical precedent for this triangulation was the friendship between David and Jonathan that endured in spite of Saul’s attempts to kill David.109 Whether classical or biblical in origin, the trope of friendship in the face of tyranny was gendered male. Early modern thinkers explained the male bias by emphasizing the sameness between male friends.110 This male sameness was contrasted against women, who were viewed as lacking sufficient fortitude to overcome their self to identify with another.111 When an exception was made for women, it was in the context of what Shannon calls “associative female chastity.”112 This trope was frequently deployed in texts paying homage to Queen Elizabeth I and typically alluded to the story of Diana and her coterie of virgins as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: In this narrative, Diana is discovered by Actaeon in a sacred, enclosed, or withdrawn realm, while also populating that space with a plural female company, a voluntary “band.” … In this pluralized form, female chastity takes on the morally ambitious, volitional character of idealized male friendship.113

In other words, the only instances in which writers granted women the ability to form virtuous friendships equivalent to those between men was when they were virgins, when they banded together in groups, and when they located themselves in sacred, secluded spaces. Consequently, it was under these circumstances that we find the common trope of the triangulation between friends and tyrant in the case of women.  Kostroun, Feminism, 183–7.  Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 8. 108  Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 8. 109  McGuire, Friendship, xvii–xviii. 110  Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 17–23. 111  Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 54–7. 112  Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 57. 113  Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 82. 106

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The Port-Royal nuns found their models for female associative chastity in the writings and examples set by the fourth-century Church fathers. Men such as Augustine of Hippo, St. Jerome, and John Chrysostom, all helped to found monasteries for women at the same time that they came under attack in religious controversies. Of particular interest was John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople. His friendship with Olympias—a noblewoman who founded a monastery for women—was an ancient example of the “soul mate” relationship between confessor and female penitent.114 When he came under attack for promoting an ascetic Christianity by civil authorities, the nuns in the convent founded by Olympias loyally defended him. His critics tried to discredit him by launching misogynistic attacks denouncing his close relationship with morally weak women. His supporters responded by comparing his female friends to the heroic virgins of the apocryphal acts.115 These early precedents inspired the Port-Royal women, who drew parallels between the life of Chrysostom and Jansen. They paid special homage to Chrysostom by having his portrait hung in the convent, and, after the crown started persecuting Port-Royal for Jansenism, many of them adopted the names of heroic virgins (Agnès, Thecla, Sincletica) upon their profession as nuns.116 The trope of female associative chastity permeated the written record that the nuns generated for the period 1661–1664 in a set of reports commonly referred to as their “persecution journals.”117 The nuns began writing these reports when Louis XIV ordered the removal of the young girls from the convent in 1661 and later compiled them in a journal.118 The reports offered their intended public a rare insider’s view of the normally hidden recesses of the convent and were written in a dramatic, theatrical style that allowed readers to follow the nuns’ conversations, witness their emotions, and track their physical movement within the cloister. Among the most compelling scenes in these journals were the nuns’ descriptions of their meetings with hostile clerics sent by the king to extract their signatures to the formulary. In these scenes, the nuns juxtaposed the purity of their observance of the Benedictine Rule against the tyranny of the male clerics who had invaded their sacred space. A prime example of this rhetorical strategy can be found in the reports describing the nuns’ interrogations by the archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Péréfixe in 1664.119 In these reports, the nuns portrayed Péréfixe as using threats and intimidation to pressure the nuns to sign the formulary.120 The nuns 114  Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations (New York, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1979). 115  Clark, Jerome, 127–8. 116  See list of nuns’ names under the profession dates of 1654 and 1661 in Appendix II of Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, ed. Jean Lesaulnier and Antony McKenna (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 1039–51. 117  Weaver, The Evolution, 127–8. 118  Weaver, The Evolution, 128. 119  Daniella Kostroun, “A Formula for Disobedience: Jansenism, Gender, and the Feminist Paradox,” Journal of Modern History 75 (2003): 483–522. 120  Kostroun, “A Formula,” 518–19.

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resisted him by insisting on their innocence and by appealing to his reason through pointed questions. These reports evoke Socratic dialogues in the sense that the nuns professed ignorance on the subject of Jansen, and yet through a series of reasonable questions (that cause the archbishop to contradict himself and lose his temper) reveal the truth of Jansen’s innocence. They reveal this truth not by saying it outright, but by contrasting their rational arguments against the inconsistent claims and emotional outbursts of the archbishop.121 In addition to the individual interviews, the journals included scenes where the nuns met as a group with the archbishop of Paris and/or his representatives to discuss the formulary. For instance, the nuns described how on 14 June 1664, Archbishop Péréfixe along with Michel Chamillard, the vicar of Saint-Nicholasdu-Chardonnet, assembled the nuns in the chapter room to address the entire community. There, Péréfixe delivered a speech describing the nuns as “prejudiced, biased, stubborn, stuck in their own opinions, and incapable of listening to advice given them.”122 He also accused the nuns of defending the position of male Jansenists, whom he claimed were making distinctions about the Church’s right to demand obedience in matters of faith versus that over matters of fact only to serve as a backhanded way to undermine the faith.123 The nuns then described how they took turns to plead their innocence. One sister, Marguerite Angélique assured him “in good faith and in tears” that the nuns “would never resist [the Church’s right to demand obedience in matters of faith].”124 To Sister Marguerite, the archbishop responded: “What do you mean to say? That you will not resist it? I think you will … Nuns such as you should not be bothering with anything other than prostrating themselves before the Crucifix and obeying their superiors.”125 Angélique de Saint-Jean then spoke up, saying that the nuns only wanted to respect the Pauline Interdictions: “We ask only to be allowed to uphold the silence that St. Paul ordered people of our sex to maintain in the Church.”126 To this comment Chamillard responded: “There is such a thing as a bad silence.”127 The journal described several such exchanges between the assembled nuns and the male clerics. Finally, when there was a pause in the debate, one of the nuns, Flavie Perdreau, approached the archbishop, kneeled before him, and spoke softly 121

 Kostroun, “A Formula,” 502–6.  “J’ai trouvé des personnes préoccupées, prévenuës, entêtés, attachées à leur propres sens, incapables d’écouter les avis qu’on leur donne” (Divers actes, lettres et relations des religieuses de Port-Royal du Saint Sacrement, touchant la persécution et les violences qui leur ont été faites au sujet de la signature du Formulaire [n.p.,1724], 33). 123  For details on this distinction, see Kostroun, Feminism, 94. 124  “[Ma Soeur Marguerine Angélique lui dit bonnement et en pleurant] Monseigneur, je vous assure que nous ne le défendrons jamais” (Divers actes, 38). 125  “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez dire, vous ne le défendrez jamais? Je pense qu’oui … Des filles comme vous ne devroient avoir autre chose à faire qu’à se prosterner aux pieds du Crucifix et à obéïr à leurs supérieurs” (Divers actes, 38). 126  “Nous demandons seulement qu’il nous soit permis de demeurer dans le silence que S. Paul a ordonné aux personnes de notre sexe de garder dans l’Eglise” (Divers actes, 39). 127  “Il y a un mauvais silence” (Divers actes, 39). 122

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into his ear.128 After Péréfixe exchanged whispers with Flavie for about fifteen minutes, he stood up and summoned Chamillard to his side and said out loud to the group: Sir … you know that I am sincere and have no ulterior motives in this affair … My sister told me that the people who come to see these nuns tell them that if it were up to them they would not sign [the formulary] but they do so anyway, one to preserve a benefice, another to keep his Priory, another his Abbey … And after all that, these women would convince me that they never see these people!129

At this point in the narrative, the nuns included another common theme that Shannon identified in early modern texts: the inevitable hostility that developed among women when confined by a tyrannical regime.130 In this scene, Flavie was a traitor to her fellow nuns by exposing them as hypocrites.131 At the same time that the nuns presented themselves as a band of virgins defending truth against the archbishop, they also portrayed the schism that developed among them. This was not a paradox for them because they saw this schism as a natural by-product of Péréfixe’s tyranny. Flavie’s betrayal was, in Janus-faced fashion, as much a mark of their innocence as was their associative chastity. The friendship trope juxtaposing tyranny with female associative chastity—along with its companion trope of infighting among women—emerged in the Port-Royal nuns’ writings shortly after Angélique’s acceptance and unreserved commitment to the Benedictine Rule. This new trope marked a third stage in the evolution of the nuns’ relationship to the rule. Under persecution, the nuns no longer sought to embrace and spread their adherence to the Benedictine Rule, they sought to defend it as divine truth. Division and Destruction Flavie’s alleged betrayal of her community was the product of a debate among the nuns over how to sign the formulary.132 While most nuns signed the formulary with restrictive clauses attached, Flavie, along with 12 other nuns, signed it without restriction. Disagreement over these signatures was such that the two groups of nuns permanently split into two separate communities (one group lived  “lui parler tout bas à l’oreille” (Divers actes, 40).  “Monsieur … vous sçavez si je suis sincere et si j’ai part en cette affaire. … Ma Soeur m’a dit que les personnes qui les viennent voir, leur disent que par eux-mêmes ils ne voudroient pas signer, mais qu’ils le font, l’un pour conserver son Benefice, l’autre son Prieuré, l’autre son Abbaye … Après cela elles me persuaderont qu’elles ne voyent pas ces gens-là” (Divers actes, 40). 130  Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 84. 131  Flavie’s betrayal was a theme that the nuns developed more fully in other memoirs. See Jean Orcibal, Port-Royal entre le miracle et l’obéissance: Flavie Passart et Angélique de Saint-Jean (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1957). 132  Kostroun, Feminism, 119–24. 128 129

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at Port-Royal des Champs and the other at Port-Royal de Paris).133 Although officially separated through papal bulls and letters patent issued by the Parisian Parlement in 1669, the conflict continued for decades between the convents as both initiated legal challenges to the division of Port-Royal’s property.134 These quarrels eventually led to the Port-Royal des Champs’s demise in 1709. When the pope ordered silence on the Jansenist debates in 1669, Louis XIV dropped his efforts to discipline the Jansenist nuns at Port-Royal des Champs for their religion and instead sought to suppress them by putting them under the authority of the abbess of Port-Royal de Paris. The nuns at Champs resisted this plan for reunification with the nuns at Paris through a series of complex lawsuits designed to delay reunification for the imaginable future.135 In 1709, Louis XIV impatiently ordered troops to disband the community at Port-Royal des Champs by lettres de cachet. He sent the nuns from Port-Royal des Champs to live in different convents, where they spent the remainder of their lives in exile.136 The woman leading Port-Royal des Champs at the time of its destruction was Prioress Claude Louise des Sainte-Anastasie Dumesnil. When Dumesnil learned of the king’s plans to disband them she wrote to one of her friends not to worry because the nuns were at peace with this decision.137 In fact, she expressed relief that the convent was to be destroyed by force. In the weeks preceding the final destruction, the Archbishop of Paris had pressured her to subject her community to the authority of the abbess of Port-Royal de Paris by offering her various compromise solutions.138 Viewing his offers as attempts to lull or seduce her into abandoning the rigorous obedience to the Benedictine Rule at Port-Royal des Champs, she refused.139 When Louis XIV’s troops arrived to escort her nuns from the convent, she had the satisfaction of knowing that this time, her band of virgins had stood firm against the tyrant. The only way he was able to penetrate the secret, sacred space of the convent was by force. Like the virgins of the apocryphal acts, the Port-Royal nuns did not waver in their defense of the truth. They embraced martyrdom instead. Port-Royal’s Legacy Friendship tropes provided the nuns with important tools through which they explored, developed, and then defended their identity as Benedictine Nuns. The tropes they adopted changed over the century according to their needs  Kostroun, Feminism, 163–4.  Kostroun, Feminism, 190–93, 232. 135  Kostroun, Feminism, 228–37. 136  Kostroun, Feminism, 237. 137  Daniella Kostroun, “La Mère Louise-Anastasie Dumesnil et Mademoiselle de Joncoux, dernières gardiennes de la réforme de Port-Royal,” Ruine et Survie de Port-Royal (1679–1713), Chroniques de Port-Royal 62 (2012): 107. 138  Kostroun, “La Mère Louise,” 111–12. 139  Kostroun, “La Mère Louise,” 112. 133

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and circumstances. The tropes were typical for the time and were gendered female in ways that assumed women’s inferiority and that recognized chastity as a heroic virtue. Although the nuns never questioned the underlying misogyny in these tropes, they nonetheless used them effectively to legitimate their claims, to give authority to their ventures, and to discredit their opponents. In the centuries following Port-Royal’s destruction, friendship tropes have remained important for maintaining the convent’s memory. In the eighteenth century, the trope of female associative chastity remained a powerful one for Jansen’s apologists. In 1713, four years after Port-Royal’s destruction, the publication of the anti-Jansenist Bull Unigenitus reignited the theological debates over Jansenism. Under the Regency government, the newspapers and pamphlets debating the bull and its implications for the traditional liberties of the French Church multiplied. These debates were further fueled by the series of miracles at in the cemetery of St. Médard, which fascinated the population and brought the Jansenist debates to the attention of a broad and economically diverse segment of the Parisian population.140 During this period, a small group of dedicated clerics, theologians, laymen and women, risked arrest and imprisonment to publish, and circulate the first printed editions of the nuns’ and solitaires’ writings. These men and women described themselves as “friends of the truth.” Although most of these people had a personal attachment to Port-Royal as friends and family to the former nuns, they did not call themselves friends of the convent. Instead, they called themselves friends of “truth” to emphasize their belief the nuns had sacrificed the convent and had martyred themselves for the truth about divine grace.141 The efforts of these “friends of the truth” motivated many men and women to oppose Unigenitus. Evidence suggests that the trope of female associative chastity in opposition to tyranny was meaningful to the French reading public and helped to shape their attitudes about the Jansenist debates. Inventories of libraries showed that many people purchased books about the Port-Royal nuns. Among these books were printed editions of the nuns’ memoirs letters, and persecution journals, as well as three separate multi-volume histories of Port-Royal.142 Printed legal briefs, letters by eighteenth-century nuns, and articles in the Jansenist newspaper Les Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques reveal that over 800 nuns resisted the bull Unigenitus in ways similar to the Port-Royal nuns.143 These same sources along with police records also reveal that many laywomen risked arrest and imprisonment by 140  B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 141  Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la nation: Le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). 142  Nicholas Lyon-Caen, La boîte à Perrette: Le jansénisme parisien au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2010), 57–60. 143  Françoise de Noirfontaine, Croire, souffrir et résister: Lettres des religieuses opposantes de la Bulle Unigenitus addressées aux évêques Charles-Joachim Colbert de Croissy et Jean Soanen, 1720–1740 (Paris: Nolin, 2009), 21. See also Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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printing and distributing banned pro-Jansenist literature. One Provençal nobleman reported in his diary in 1754 how the priest sent to administer his mother her last rites declared that she must denounce her attachment to Jansenism in order to receive the sacraments. His mother, Madame de Gueidan, agreed to profess her loyalty to the Church but refused to support Unigenitus by stating “I know nothing of that, I am no theologian.”144 After the priest and her son tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to submit, they pretended to leave the room. At this point, the nobleman wrote in his diary: We heard Honnorade, the chambermaid, who was standing behind the bed curtain, now holding my mother on her cushions and saying to my mother and to her sister, “What temptations; they are worse than the Devil, but I was sprinkling a lot of holy water over you, to keep you from giving in.”145

The deathbed scene of Madame de Gueidan suggests that the trope of female associative chastity against male tyranny was attractive to women, and may have inspired them to support one another as they defended Jansenism. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and the outbreak of revolution, the Jansenist polemics subsided and lost their urgency. With the dissipation of these polemics, the trope of female association against tyranny lost its relevance. Jansenist supporters no longer called themselves “friends of the truth.” Instead, those who identified with the former movement formed a society named the Society of Saint Augustine. The goal of this group was to restore the Church after the devastation wreaked by the French Revolution. The funds that they once used to publish polemical works now went toward schools and charitable organizations.146 As for Port-Royal, the emphasis was no longer on the nuns’ resistance to tyranny, but on Angélique’s reform efforts. The most famous example of this new interest in her reform is the work of Sainte-Beuve who sought in Port-Royal a model for reconciling Catholic traditions with advancements in reason and knowledge: In its fundamental spirit, in that of the great Angélique (as she was called) and of Saint-Cyran, [Port-Royal] was, to put it precisely, a type of reform in France, a deliberate attempt to return to the holiness of the primitive Church without rupturing unity … a formal design to repair and to reconcile science, intelligence and grace.147 144  Mme de Gueidan’s response repeated those given by the Port-Royal nuns to Péréfixe when he commanded them to sign the formulary unconditionally in 1664. See Kostroun, “A Formula,” 513–14. 145  Quoted in Sarah Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 180–81. I want to thank Sarah Maza for bringing this passage to my attention. 146  François Gazier, “Les Sociétés Port-Royalistes du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours,” Chroniques de Port-Royal 1, no. 1 (1950): 5–6. 147  “Dans son esprit fondamental, dans celui de la grande Angélique (comme on disait) et de Saint-Cyran, il fut à la lettre une espèce de réforme en France, une tentative

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Port-Royal was no longer the symbol of a single truth. Instead, it provided a model for successfully synthesizing the traditions of the past with the present. This synthesis involved a gendered division of labor in which the nuns upheld tradition with the help of divine, eternal grace, and the men pursued advancements in science and scholarship. This view of Port-Royal led Sainte-Beuve to assume that Angélique’s identity as a Benedictine nun fell into place from the moment of the journée du guichet. His narrative did not allow for an account of her spiritual development over time, and, by extension, any awareness of her complex use of friendship tropes. Consequently, he failed to acknowledge the special significance she placed on “finding” Saint-Cyran. Instead, he described her meeting with him thus: “She found again in [Saint-Cyran] this image of true devotion and of the religious life, which had never left her from the moment she had heard the sermon of Father Basile twenty-seven years earlier. For her, these two luminous moments joined into one.”148 Her discovery of Saint-Cyran as a “soul mate” was not something notable. Rather, Sainte-Beuve put her meeting with Saint-Cyran on par with her meeting with Basile, a 16-year-old itinerant Capuchin priest whom she expelled from Port-Royal shortly after his arrival upon discovering that he was “extremely unruly” and had caused “serious disorders” among nuns in other convents.149 In order to stress the timelessness of divine grace operating on Angélique, Sainte-Beuve reduced her two very different encounters with Basile and Saint-Cyran into one experience. Sainte-Beuve’s portrayal of Port-Royal as a synthesis of past traditions with intellectual and scientific progress, reveals its debt to the trope of female associative chastity by associating the Port-Royal nuns with divine truth. However, to argue that Port-Royal successfully reconciled the past with its present, SainteBeuve had to downplay this friendship trope because of its association with the Jansenist conflict, which arguably raised doubts about how successfully PortRoyal reconciled ancient Church traditions with its own time period. He does this by dividing the Port-Royal nuns into two generations in which the first was represented by Angélique Arnauld, and the second by Angélique de Saint-Jean, Jacqueline Pascal, Christine Briquet and others. After praising Angélique for her successful reform, he criticized the second generation of nuns for getting involved in theological quarrels and behaving like the précieuses of the salons.150 Thus, he distanced his narrative of Port-Royal from the Jansenist debates and female associative chastity by discrediting the second generation of nuns and by identifying Port-Royal with Angélique alone. expresse de retour à la sainteté de la primitive Église sans rompre l’unité … un dessein formel de réparer et de maintenir la science, l’intelligence, et la Grâce” (Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, 3 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1954–1955], 1:96–7). 148  “elle retrouvait en [Saint-Cyran] cette image de véritable dévotion et de vie religieuse, qui ne l’avait pas quittée dès le moment du sermon du Père Basile, il y avait vingt-sept ans. Pour elle, ces deux instants lumineux se rejoignaient” (Sainte-Beuve, PortRoyal, 1:353). 149  Arnauld, Relation, 20–21. 150  Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, 2:648–9.

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This process of erasing or obscuring from our view the variety of female friendship tropes in Port-Royal’s history went hand-in-hand with a secularizing of the convent’s legacy. Sainte-Beuve quoted M. Royer-Collard, the descendent of a Jansenist family, in his preface to stress the importance of his study: “The person who does not know Port-Royal does not know humanity!”151 What is striking is not that Royer-Collard sees Port-Royal as a symbol of universal truth, but that he defines the truth in secular terms. Instead of associating Port-Royal with divine truths, he associates it with universal truths about humanity. This tendency toward humanizing the convent’s legacy crystalized in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1950, members of families that traced their lineages to the original “friends of the truth” teamed up with university professors and public intellectuals to found the “Société des Amis de Port-Royal.” In forming this new society of “friends,” these founders attached new symbolic meaning to the convent. In the introductory article to the inaugural issue of the journal Chroniques de Port-Royal (which sought to promote scientific studies of the convent and Jansenism), François Gazier described how the private families and societies controlling the Port-Royal archives had increasingly made these texts available to the public. These groups also pooled resources to purchase the ruins of the convent and open them up to visitors. He added that, at the same time that these private groups opened up the archives and ruins to the wider world, this world had increasingly come to Port-Royal to find itself: Thus have we witnessed since the beginning of our century Port-Royal opening itself more and more to a public brought up in all persuasions and creeds … Conversely, the cultivated public of France and from abroad are always drawn in great numbers towards Port-Royal, where they discover more and more an essential element of a French cultural heritage, and even one that is universal.152

Hence, at the very moment that a society emerged describing itself as “friends” of Port-Royal, the convent moved into a new level of abstraction where, in addition to becoming an object of scientific study, it also came to embody elements of a universal and human cultural heritage. While these developments have guaranteed Port-Royal’s place in the Pantheon of national “realms of memory,”153 they have come at the expense of our knowledge of the nuns’ agency, their struggles, and the friendship tropes they used to make sense of them. To the extent that modern scholars have considered the 151

 “Qui ne connaît pas Port-Royal, ne connaît pas l’humanité!” (Sainte-Beuve, Sainte-Beuve, 105). 152  “Aussi bien, dès le début de notre siècle, voit-on Port-Royal s’ouvrir de plus en plus largement au public cultivé de tout opinion et de toute croyance … En sens inverse, le public cultivé de France et de l’étranger vient toujours très nombreux vers Port-Royal dans lequel il voit de plus en plus un élément essentiel du patrimoine culturel français et même universel” (Gazier, Les Sociétés Port-Royalistes, 7). 153  Catherine Maire, “Port Royal: La fracture janséniste,” Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 3:471–529.

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nuns and female friendships, it has been in an effort to rehabilitate them from their reputation for Jansenist austerity. This was the goal behind Cécile Gazier’s Les belles amies de Port-Royal (1930)—a collection of biographies of Port-Royal’s female lay and noble friends in the seventeenth century. In the preface, Gazier writes: “We know especially about Port-Royal’s severity; we speak often of, and even exaggerate, its rigor, austerity, and even its inhumanity; and in the rare case when people are open to recognize a positive aspect … it hardly occurs to any of them to seek out its likeable side.”154 Although Gazier’s goal is to rehabilitate the convent’s reputation as “likeable”—a rather dubious goal within the realm of academic scholarship (as well as one that today raises negative stereotypes about women’s preoccupations with interpersonal relationships at the expense of their pursuit of scientific knowledge)—her focus on female friendships nonetheless reminds us that assumptions about the nuns’ Jansenism has prevented modern scholars from exploring their history. However, once we set aside the question of Jansenism, we see how the Port-Royal women developed their own institutional identity in a male-dominated Church and invested themselves with authority by drawing on traditional female friendship tropes. They used these tropes to think through their dilemmas and to pattern their agency. In recognizing their agency and strategies, we not only discover the forgotten aspects of their history, but also how they laid the foundation for Port-Royal to become a symbol of the universal human values that are a cherished part of France’s cultural heritage.

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 “On connaît surtout de Port-Royal le côté sévère; on parle surtout, et parfois avec exagération, de ses rigueurs, des ses austérités, de son inhumanité même; et si l’on s’accorde à lui reconnaître un aspect estimable … il ne vient guère à l’idée de personne de lui chercher un aspect aimable” (Cécile Gazier, Les belles amies de Port-Royal [Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1930], v).

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Chapter 10

The Marquise de Sablé and Her Friends: Men and Women between the Convent and the World Lewis C. Seifert

“Can men and women be friends? We have been asking ourselves that question for a long time, and the answer is usually no,” says William Deresiewicz in a New York Times op-ed piece.1 In contemporary popular culture at least, “heterosexual people of the opposite sex may claim to be just friends … but count on it—wink, wink, nudge, nudge—something else is going on.” The skepticism with which male-female friendships are viewed in our day is remarkably consistent with a widely accepted opinion in early modern Europe: sexual desire is an obstacle to women and men being friends. Or, put another way, (heterosexual) men and women can only ever establish a relationship when sexual desire is involved, and that relationship is then something other than what is ordinarily considered to be “friendship.” Of course, the context for this logic is predictably different today than it was in early modern Europe. Today, according to Deresiewicz, the problem is our culture’s discomfort with acknowledging that love can exist in relationships other than those based on kinship or romance.2 But in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe (and indeed earlier), the problem of friendship between women and men was primarily one of moral danger. About the “amitiés folastres” (foolish friendships) or “amourettes” (flirtations) between people who have no intention of marrying, for instance, François de Sales warns that carnal sin is the nearly inevitable although unintentional outcome: “the hearts of men and women are taken, and entwined with one another in vain and foolish affection … And although these foolish love affairs usually end in carnal pleasure and vile lusts, such is not the original intention of those who practice them.”3 1  William Deresiewicz, “A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?” The New York Times, 7 April 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/opinion/sunday/a-man-a-woman-justfriends.html?pagewanted=all. 2  “We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand” (Deresiewicz, “A Man”). 3  François de Sales, Philothea or An Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. John C. Reville (Charlotte, NC: Saint Benedict Press, 2010), 174 (translation modified); “les cœurs des hommes et des femmes demeurent pris et engagés et entrelacés les uns avec les autres en vaines et folles affections … Et bien que ces sottes amours vont ordinairement

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De Sales’s “flirtations” have as their antithesis “true friendships,” which involve the exchange of “true virtues.”4 As foreign as de Sales’s categories might seem today, they nonetheless opened a space for the sorts of friendships between men and women that our own culture has difficulty acknowledging. Rather than proscribe mixed-gender friendships altogether, as many other Christian moralists did in the period, he instead provided a religious justification for seventeenth-century salon culture, predicated on freely chosen male-female friendships.5 In his influential Introduction à la vie dévote (Introduction to the Devout Life, first edition, 1609), de Sales asserts that for lay women, it is not only permissible but indeed necessary to have “private friendships” so as to navigate the perilous waters of le monde.6 Among the examples he cites to buttress his claim are numerous male-female friendships: Christ’s friendships with Martha and Mary Magdalene, Saint Peter’s with Saint Petronella, Saint Paul’s with Saint Thecla, or Saint Ambrose’s with Saint Monica.7 Such friendships, based on virtue but also mutual affinities, serve a higher purpose than worldly pleasure. This does not mean that they are without risks; in fact quite the opposite is the case, for even a “sacred friendship” between a man and a woman can all too easily devolve into “foolish love,” then “sensual love,” and then finally “carnal love.”8 But de Sales girds his addressee, Philothée, with the spiritual arms necessary to combat that danger, urging her to use her own selfknowledge, seconded with prayer and meditation, to know when and how to avoid or renounce certain male friendships that would lead to sin.9 In giving women the means to navigate friendships with men, de Sales is no doubt inspired by the model of the male confessor-female penitent relationship, which ran counter to misogynist

fondre et s’asbimer en des charnalités et lascivetés fort vilaines, si est ce que ce ne n’est pas le premier dessein de ceux qui les exercent …” (François de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, ed. Charles Florisoone, 2 vols. [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961], 2:42). 4  By contrast are “false friendships”: “Friendship arising from the mere gratification of the senses is utterly gross and unworthy of that name, as is that arising from vain and superficial merits which also depend upon the senses only” (de Sales, Philothea, 173); “l’amitié fondee sur la communication des playsirs sensuels est toute grossiere, et indigne du nom d’amitié comme aussi celle qui est fondee sur des vertus frivolves et vaines, parce que ces vertus dependent aussi des sens” (de Sales, Introduction, 2:40–41). 5  On the influence of François de Sales on salon culture, see Marc Fumaroli, “L’empire des femmes, ou l’esprit de joie,” in La diplomatie de l’esprit: de Montaigne à La Fontaine, by Marc Fumaroli (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 321–39. 6  “Those who are professed religious do not require private friendships; but those who are in the world need them, to aid and succor one another in the many evils and dangers which they encounter” (de Sales, Philothea, 178); “ceux qui sont es Religions n’ont pas besoin des amitiés particulières, mais ceux qui sont au monde en ont necessité pour s’asseurer et secourir les uns les autres, parmi tant de mauvais passages qu’il leur faut franchir” (de Sales, Introduction, 2:48). 7  Philothea, 178–9; Introduction, 2:48–9. 8  Philothea, 180; Introduction, 2:50. 9  Philothea, 183–5; Introduction, 2:52–6.

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prejudices against the very possibility of women being friends with men.10 His ideal of a “holy and sacred friendship” between the sexes seeks to contain the difficulties presented by (hetero)sexual desire while recognizing in women an agency they were ordinarily denied both by the Church and the classical friendship tradition.11 To define his ideal of friendship, de Sales draws a stark contrast between “sacred friendship” (l’amitié sacrée), which is ultimately directed toward God, and “worldly friendship” (l’amitié mondaine), which is grounded instead in earthly pleasure.12 His admonitions notwithstanding—and in spite of his role in providing a rationale for salon culture—what de Sales describes as “worldly friendship” became the predominant mode of interaction between the sexes in most salons of seventeenth-century France. Indeed, de Sales may have been targeting incipient forms of galanterie, an ideal for male and female sociability borrowed loosely from courtly love, when he railed against the perils of “worldly” (or “false”) friendship: causing those who share it to totter in their purity and devotion, and leading them to affected, wanton, and immoderate glances, sensual compliments, inordinate sighs, little complaints of not being loved, slight furtive and enticing looks, gallantries, kisses, and unusual familiarities and favors, the certain and indubitable presages of an approaching ruin of chastity.13

The amorous glances, compliments, sighs, and complaints targeted by de Sales were part and parcel of the light-hearted “galant” exchanges that guided the relations between women and men in polite circles. Such exchanges were premised on a relationship in which mixed-gender interaction was equated with a ludic and (usually) sublimated erotic quest with men assuming a submissive stance toward women.14 Over and beyond its erotic pretext, when viewed from the perspective 10

 On the relationship between male confessors and female penitents in early modern Europe, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 11  A long philosophical tradition that considered women to be men’s intellectual inferiors, making them incapable of the companionship idealized by Montaigne, for instance. See “De l’amitié” in Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), 1:186–7. 12  Worldly friendships lead to a host of evils, including carnal pleasure, insults, calumny, jealousy, even madness whereas sacred friendships, which are always honorable, civil, and amiable, lead to a union of spirits that mirrors heavenly friendships to come (see de Sales, Philothea, 181; Introduction, 2:51). 13  De Sales, Philothea, 181 (translation modified); “… qui fait chanceler la personne en la chasteté et devotion, la portant a des regards affectés, mignards et immorderés, a des caresses sensuelles, a des souspirs desordonnés, a des petites plaintes de n’estre pas aymee, a des petites, mais recherchees, mais attrayantes contenances, galanterie, poursuitte des baysers, et autres privautés et faveurs inciviles, presages certains et indubitables d’une prochaine ruine de l’honnesteté” (de Sales, Introduction, 2:51). 14  I have argued elsewhere that, appearances to the contrary, the pretense of male subservience in galanterie by no means disempowered men. See Lewis C. Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 86–91.

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of friendship, galanterie left women and men in asymmetrical positions, with men adopting a stance of feigned subservience to women. In de Sales’s ideal of sacred friendship, men and women were ostensibly more equal or symmetrical partners on a spiritual journey, rather than subjects and objects, respectively, in an erotic quest. Love between men and women in spiritual friendship is marked by reciprocity, as was the case of Saint Ambrose, “who had no common love for St. Monica on account of her rare and excellent virtues, and … she in turn cherished him as an Angel of God.”15 In early modern France, however, not all mixed-gender friendships fit so neatly into the spiritual vs. worldly/galant dichotomy. How women and men were able to justify and practice friendships that were situated between these two antithetical ideals, especially in the salon setting, is the topic I will consider through the case of the Marquise de Sablé. She hewed more closely than most salon women to de Sales’s ideal of “spiritual” friendship, but she remained faithful to several facets of the “worldly” ideal as well. Attempting to reconcile what for de Sales are incompatible models, Sablé endowed mixed-gender friendship with affective, intellectual, and discursive dimensions unforeseen by the worldly, galant ideal in particular. Through her salon and her correspondence, she brought the religious and the worldly spheres into contact, allowing women and men to experience the responsibilities and pleasures of friendship on the margins of the spiritual realm. With her hybrid spiritual-worldly friendships, I will argue, the Marquise opened the possibility of conceiving worldly friendships between women and men without the erotic tension they require in galanterie. *** Madeleine de Souvré, Marquise de Sablé (1599–1678), is perhaps best known for her friendship with La Rochefoucauld and her role in the composition of his Maximes.16 But her place in the cultural and intellectual life of her time was far richer than this one moment, thanks especially to her wide range of friends and acquaintances. After active participation in the salon life of the pre-Fronde era (including those of the Marquise de Rambouillet, Madeleine de Scudéry, and the Duchesse de Montpensier), Sablé ostensibly retired from the “world” (le monde)  De Sales, Philothea, 179; “qui aymoit uniquement sainte Monique, pour les rares vertus qu’il voyoit en elle, et … elle reciproquement le cherissoit comme un Ange de Dieu” (de Sales, Introduction, 2:49). 16  The most extensive biographies of Sablé, both of which contain a wealth of primary documents, are Victor Cousin, Madame de Sablé: nouvelles études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Didier et cie, 1865), and Nicola Ivanoff, La Marquise de Sablé et son salon (Paris: Les Presses modernes, 1927). See also Jean Lafond, “Madame de Sablé et son salon,” in L’Homme et son image: morales et littérature de Montaigne à Mandeville (Paris: Champion, 1996), 249–65; Jean Lesaulnier, “Conversations chez Madame de Sablé,” in Images de Port-Royal (Paris: Nolin, 2002), 179–93; “Sablé, Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de,” in Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, ed. Jean Lesaulnier and Antony McKenna (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 897–9. 15

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and was particularly instrumental in the dissemination of Jansenism among the polite society of the 1640s and 1650s, jokingly called one of the “foundresses of Jansenism.”17 So, it is not altogether surprising that she chose to build a lodging within the walls of the Abbey of Port-Royal de Paris, where she resided more or less continuously from 1656 until her death in 1678. Less predictable, given her spatial and spiritual proximity to Port-Royal, were the very diverse cast of characters who attended her salon and/or corresponded with her. Besides prominent Jansenist men and women (such as Antoine Arnauld, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, Jean Domat, Jacques Esprit, Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal; and the PortRoyal nuns Agnès and Angélique Arnauld and Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly), Sablé also received and/or corresponded with numerous other women (both religious and lay: Marie-Magdeleine de Vignerod, Duchesse d’Aiguillon; Charlotte Saumaise de Chazon, Comtesse de Brégy; Marie-Madeleine-Gabrielle de Rochechouart-Montemart, Abbesse de Fontevrault; Anne de Rohan, Princesse de Guéméné; Jeanne de Schomberg, Duchesse de Liancourt; Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, Duchesse de Longueville, Anne Doni d’Attichy, Comtesse de Maure; Marie de Hautefort, Duchesse de Schomberg; Catherine-Françoise de Bretagne d’Avaugour, dite Mlle de Vertus, among many others), men of other religious affiliations (including Jesuits such as Dominique Bouhours and René Rapin, “molinists” such as Charles d’Escoubleau, Marquis de Sourdis, and Louis de Rochechouart, Comte de Maure; the Protestant doctor, Antoine Menjot), but also prominent members of the intellectual and social elite (such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre; Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de Méré; and La Rochefoucauld), and members of court (including none other than Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe d’Orléans).18 Although she was closer to some more than others, even with her best friends she did not see herself as forming an exclusive couple, unlike what is required in the classical masculine friendship tradition.19 Indeed, some of her friendships were experienced in small groups (for instance, with Esprit and La Rochefoucauld; or with Arnauld d’Andilly and the Duchesse de Longueville). Remarkable for the extensive acquaintances she maintained throughout her life, Sablé’s experiences with both spiritual and worldly spheres were not entirely unprecedented and should be understood within the phenomenon of mid-life 17

 “Fondatrices du jansénisme”: this appellation is attributed to La Rochefoucauld by René Rapin for the role Sablé and the Princesse de Guéméné played in the composition of the polemical text De la Fréquente communion, written by Antoine Arnauld in 1643. See René Rapin, Mémoires du P. René Rapin de la Compagnie de Jésus sur L’Eglise et la société, la cour, la ville et le jansénisme, 1644–1669, ed. Léon Aubineau (Paris: Gaume Frères et J. Duprey, 1865), 1:31. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 18  Jean Lesaulnier puts Sablé’s friends (salon habitués and correspondents) into three categories, by chronology: those she knew before retiring to Port-Royal; those she knew at and through Port-Royal; and those with no connection to Port-Royal whom she met after retiring there. See Jean Lesaulnier, “Conversations,” 179. 19  On this requirement of the traditional early modern friendship tradition, see Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 55–6.

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“conversion,” or reaffirmation of faith, by prominent aristocratic women.20 Often provoked by a traumatic event (in Sablé’s case, the death of her estranged husband in 1640), these conversions led many prominent women to renounce “worldly” activities and devote themselves to religious piety. Women such as the Princesse de Guéméné, the Duchesse de Montbazon, the Duchesse de Longueville, all followed this trajectory, and Port-Royal benefitted considerably from the influence of such “converted” women on church and court officials.21 But for Sablé—in contrast to her friend the Duchesse de Longueville, in particular—turning to piety did not mean renouncing all the pleasures le monde had to offer, especially worldly friendships. The marquise was herself ambivalent about her relationship to the “world”: “A grace is required to leave the world,” she is said to have quipped, “none is required to hate it”;22 and the very layout of her corps de logis she had built within the walls of Port-Royal, with one door opening onto the street and another onto the nuns’ chapel, neatly captures how she placed herself, spatially, at the confluence of these perspectives, maintaining friendships with people from both secular and religious walks of life. Sablé’s balancing act has fascinated observers going back to the seventeenth century. Jean Chapelain notes that the marquise “is penitent, but is still reasonable, and her devotion has not snuffed out her love of company.”23 The Abbé Nicolas d’Ailly, the editor of her posthumously published Maximes, goes even further to present her dual orientation toward spiritual and worldly matters as a veritable talent: “so much had she found that perfect union of all the virtues of civil society with Christian virtues that she was respected as much by the Solitaires as by people of the world (le monde).”24 But until recently, historians and critics have taken a far harsher view of her attempts to maintain her ties to the “world” while devoting herself to piety, portraying them as weakness, indecisiveness, or eccentricity (notably her fear of death and her supposed gourmandise).25 Unlike so many of these 20  See La conversion au XVIIe siècle: actes du XIIe Colloque de Marseille (janvier 1982) (Marseille: Centre méridional de rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle, 1983). 21  Cécile Gazier, Les belles amies de Port-Royal (Paris: Perrin, 1930). 22  “Il faut une grâce pour quitter le monde, il n’en faut point pour le haïr” (quoted in Lafond, “Madame de Sablé et son salon,” 263). This quote was originally relayed by Sainte-Beuve in his monumental Port-Royal (1837–1859). 23  “elle est pénitente, mais ne laisse pas d’estre raisonnable, et sa dévotion n’a pas estouffé l’amour de la société” (quoted in Lafond, “Madame de Sablé et son salon,” 251). 24  “elle auoit si bien trouué cette parfaite union de toutes les vertus de la société ciuile auec les vertus crêtiennes qu’elle êtoit également respectée des Solitaires et des gens du monde” (Madeleine de Souvré marquise de Sablé, Maximes de Mme de Sablé [1678], ed. D. Jouaust [Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1870], 6). 25  In the nineteenth century, Cousin and especially Sainte-Beuve deliver negative judgments of the Marquise, concentrating on her perceived eccentricities. In the early twentieth century, Gazier and Ivanoff, although less negative overall, continue to put an excessive focus on these aspects, as do even more recent critics such as F. Ellen Weaver (“Cloister and Salon in Seventeenth-Century Paris: Introduction to a Study in Women’s History,” in Beyond Androcentrism: New Essays on Women and Religion, ed. Rita M. Gross [Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977], 159–80) and Benedetta Craveri (The Age of Conversation, trans.

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interpretations, my purpose here is not to concentrate on the colorful biographical details of Sablé and her salon, but instead to examine how she and her friends wrote about and experienced friendship. Negotiating between two worldviews left the Marquise and many of her friends in an uneasy position, to be sure, but it also allowed them to reconceive the dynamics of mixed-gender friendship. Madame de Sablé and Theories of Friendship On at least two occasions, Sablé composed a series of maxims on friendship that demonstrate her keen interest in the topic, as well as a desire to carve out a conceptual space of her own.26 As her correspondence shows, Sablé conceived and penned these maxims in response to her friends La Rochefoucauld and Jacques Esprit, who were highly skeptical about the very possibility of friendship.27 Typical of this line of thought is La Rochefoucauld’s maxim 83: “What men have called friendship is merely social contact, consideration for another’s interests, and exchange of favors; in fact, it is simply a transaction in which self-love always expects to gain something.”28 For La Rochefoucauld, as for Esprit, friendship is Teresa Waugh [New York Review Books, 2005], 97–135). The studies by John Conley (The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002]) and Jean Lafond (“Madame de Sablé et son salon”) concentrate less on biographical details and more on her contributions to literature and Port-Royal. 26  These are found in a text given the title “De l’amitié” (“On Friendship”), likely composed around 1661, but not published until the nineteenth century. (“De l’Amitié,” in Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales et Réflexions diverses, ed. Laurence Plazenet, by François de La Rochefoucauld [Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002], 687–8), and in her “Maximes,” posthumously published in 1678 by the Abbé d’Ailly (“Maximes,” ed. André-Alain Morello, in Moralistes du XVIIe siècle: de Pibrac à Dufresny, ed. Jean Lafond [Paris: Bouquins, 1992], 243–55). Literary influences on these texts include Gracián and Montaigne. See G. Hough, “Gracián’s Oracula Manual and the Maxims of Mme de Sablé,” Hispanic Review IV (1936): 68–72, and Christian Wentzlaff-Eggebert, “Montaigne, Gracián, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère et les Maximes de Madame de Sablé,” in Le Langage littéraire au XVIIe siècle: De la rhétorique à la littérature, ed. Christian Wentzlaff-Eggebert (Tübingen: Narr, 1991), 181–93. 27  See the allusion to a disagreement between Sablé and La Rochefoucauld on the topic of friendship in letters between the Marquise and Arnauld d’Andilly (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 609–11n91). Sablé explains she had accused La Rochefoucauld of lacking in “heart” (cœur) in his depictions of friendship, which had caused a rift between them. Allusions to this dispute also occur in correspondence between the Marquise and La Rochefoucauld himself. 28  François de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections, ed. and trans. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 27; “Ce que les hommes ont nommé amitié n’est qu’une société, qu’un ménagement réciproque d’intérêts et qu’un échange de bons offices. Ce n’est, enfin, qu’un commerce où l’amour-propre se propose toujours quelque chose à gagner” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 145).

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one of the most salient “disguised vices” through which self-love (amour-propre) manifests itself. Contrary to the lofty ideals it implicitly connotes, “amitié” in fact denotes far baser motivations, for selfless actions are impossible. As Esprit says, “[man] is so attached and so devoted to himself that every time he comes out of himself to assist his friends with their most pressing needs, he returns to himself by some secret means.”29 Like her two friends, Sablé, too, takes a dim view of friendship overall, sharing their rejection of the Stoic underpinnings of the early modern (masculine) friendship ideal, which presupposes both self-love and selfmastery.30 But unlike her two friends, she is intent on qualifying their blanket generalizations (e.g., La Rochefoucauld’s use of the restrictive “merely” [“ne … que”] and Esprit’s adverb “every time” [“toutes les fois”]).31 “The love one has for oneself is almost always the rule for all our friendships,” she states at the beginning of maxim 46 (emphasis added).32 And her maxim 77 reads: “Social contact, and even the friendship of most men is nothing but a transaction that only lasts as long as the need” (emphasis added).33 In her nuanced pessimism, Sablé goes so far as to admit that, despite their limitations, “friendships” unworthy of the name can nonetheless be useful: “Although most friendships found in society (dans le monde) are not worthy of the word ‘friendship,’ one can however use it according to one’s needs for a transaction that is without a sure basis and about which one is ordinarily deceived” (emphasis added; maxim 78).34 The effect of the marquise’s nuance is not only to recognize explicitly that “true” friendship exists—unlike the (at best) ambiguous positions of La Rochefoucauld and Esprit on this point35—but also to acknowledge a pragmatism about the far more prevalent “false” iterations of what is commonly thought to be friendship. For even if they are uncertain in nature and prone to deceit, such friendships may still be useful. By explicitly drawing out exceptions to her condemnation of friendship, Sablé situates herself in a different position toward readers than does La Rochefoucauld. 29  “[L’homme] est si attaché et si dévoué à lui-même, que toutes les fois qu’il en sort pour assister ses amis dans leurs plus pressents besoins, il revient à lui par quelque secrète voie” (Jacques Esprit, La fausseté des vertus humaines, preface by Pascal Quignard [Paris: Aubier, 1996], 130). 30  See the discussion of this point in Shannon, Sovereign Amity. 31  This stance is found throughout her Maximes, as John Conley has shown. See The Suspicion of Virtue, 20–44. 32  “L’amour qu’on a pour soi-même est quasi toujours la règle de toutes nos amitiés” (“Maximes,” 251). 33  “La société, et même l’amitié de la plupart des hommes, n’est qu’un commerce qui ne dure qu’autant que le besoin” (“Maximes,” 254). 34  “Quoique la plupart des amitiés qui se trouvent dans le monde ne méritent point le nom d’amitié, on peut pourtant en user selon les besoins comme d’un commerce qui n’a point de fonds certain, et sur lequel on est ordinairement trompé” (“Maximes,” 255). 35  See Jean-Charles Darmon, “La Rochefoucauld en mouvement: Vicissitudes de l’amitié et genèse d’un discours moral,” in Poétique de la pensée: Etudes sur l’âge classique et le siècle philosophique en hommage à Jean Dagen, ed. Béatrice Guion et al. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 322–40.

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Sylvie Requemora argues that the author of the Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales posits his text as a sort of “trap” that is only escaped by readers who are capable of overcoming their self-love.36 Although they are never acknowledged per se, those who are part of a happy few, such as Jacques Esprit or Sablé herself, are able to derive the true moral essence of friendship from the resolutely negative images presented in the Maximes. Those who are not part of the “happy few” are incapable of this clairvoyance and thus put themselves in the position of confirming, unwittingly, the critique of self-love throughout La Rochefoucauld’s work. For Sablé, by contrast, the “happy few” are explicitly recognized as such, prompting readers to recognize this distinction and then decide outright whether or not their friendships are motivated by self-love. As Jean Lafond has observed, Sablé adopts a more overtly pedagogical tone than does La Rochefoucauld, which, he believes, “too often ruins her style.”37 I would stress instead that this outlook affords readers a greater accessibility if not to friendship itself, at least to reflection upon it. One could say, then, that Sablé is friendlier to her readers than is her friend La Rochefoucauld. But Sablé’s perspective on friendship is motivated by a different vision of virtue than either Esprit’s or La Rochefoucauld’s, even as she shares their “Augustinian” perspective, which sets out to unmask virtue as vices disguised by self-love.38 Sablé certainly agrees that what pass for virtues are more often than not vices, but unlike La Rochefoucauld she still affirms virtue as an ideal, making explicit what is at best implicit for him.39 This is especially true when it comes to friendship. About his maxim 427 (“Most friends make us lose our taste for friendship, and most pious people make us lose our taste for piety”40), the marquise tells him: “when friendships aren’t built on virtue, so many things 36  Sylvie Requemora, “L’amitié,” Dix-septième siècle  51e année, no.  208, 4 (octobre–décembre 1999): 726. 37  Lafond, “Madame de Sablé et son salon,” 214. 38  For a discussion of the Augustinianism of the three friends, see the commentary by Laurence Plazenet in La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 11–46, 569–75. On Sablé’s “moderate” Jansenism, see Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue, 20–44. Whether or not La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes should be interpreted as “Augustinian” is a matter of considerable debate. See the excellent discussion in Michael Moriarty, Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 368–75. 39  Jean Lafond, La Rochefoucauld: Augustinisme et littérature (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), 158. See also Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue, 39. Michael Moriarty argues that for La Rochefoucauld all generalizations carry built-in exceptions, even though his maxims only occasionally point these out (see Moriarty, Disguised Vices, 361–3, 366). Still, many seventeenth-century readers, including Sablé, do not perceive these exceptions in the Maximes. 40  La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims, 117; “La plupart des amis dégoûtent de l’amitié et la plupart des dévots dégoûtent de la dévotion” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 186).

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destroy them that one almost always has reason to be weary of them.”41 In her short treatise on the subject, Sablé makes this positive sense of virtue as the conceptual keystone of her definition: “Friendship is a type of Virtue that can only be built on the esteem of the people one loves, that is to say, on the qualities of the soul, such as faithfulness, generosity, and discretion, and on the good qualities of the mind.”42 Making explicit its positive qualities, Sablé holds firm to a notion of virtue that is difficult to reconcile with La Rochefoucauld’s. Even when critiquing “false” friendship, she proceeds from the assumption that virtuous friendships indeed exist: “Friendships that are not founded on virtue and that concern nothing but self-interest or pleasure do not deserve the word ‘friendship’. It is not that the good deeds and pleasures received reciprocally by friends are not the consequence and effect of friendship, but they must never be the cause for it.”43 Sablé here echoes the Aristotelian model by making virtue the source for the good deeds and earthly pleasures one receives from friendship. Yet virtue in her model, in spite of its ties to earthly ends (notably, pleasure), might also suggest a spiritual element, although the genre of the maxim, which avoids overt theological discussion, makes this difficult to determine. By its vagueness, Sablé’s conception of “true” (i.e., virtuous) friendship would seem to be compatible with both spiritual and worldly friendship at the same time, and this is certainly implied in her maxim 78 (“Although most friendships found in society [dans le monde] do not deserve the word ‘friendship’…”). If most worldly friendships are not what they appear to be—i.e., are not really friendship at all—some of them nonetheless are; and the designation “in society” could refer by its restriction to those friendships that are not worldly but spiritual, friendships that are not covered by Sablé’s critique (and are thus virtuous?). Although it is never explicitly mentioned, spiritual virtue, I would argue, is never far from the worldly friendship she endeavors to define and refine.44 41

 “Quand les amitiés ne sont point fondées sur la vertu, il y a tant de choses qui les détruisent que l’on a quasi toujours des sujets de s’en lasser” (Letter to La Rochefoucauld, August 1675; La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 659). 42  “L’amitié est une espèce de Vertu qui ne peut être fondée que sur l’estime des personnes que l’on aime, c’est-à-dire sur les qualités de l’âme, comme sur la fidélité, la générosité et la discrétion, et sur les bonnes qualités de l’esprit” (“De l’Amitié,” 687). 43  “Les amitiés qui ne sont point établies sur la vertu et qui ne regardent que l’Intérêt ou le plaisir ne méritent point le nom d’amitié. Ce n’est pas que les bienfaits et les plaisirs que l’on reçoit réciproquement des amis ne soient des suites et des effets de l’amitié, mais ils n’en doivent jamais être la cause” (“De l’Amitié,” 688) 44  In a letter to the Marquise (15 February 1661), Mère Angélique Arnauld argues that spiritual friendship (“la charité”) is the “glorification and perfection” (“le rehaussement et la perfection”) of ordinary friendship (“l’amitié”), a view the Marquise had argued against in earlier (now lost) correspondence (see Edouard de Barthélemy, Les amis de la marquise de Sablé: Recueil des lettres des principaux habitués de son salon [Paris: E. Dentu, 1865], 126). From this evidence, it appears that the distinction between spiritual and worldly friendship is indeed one she reflected upon. At once worldly and spiritual,

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If Sablé is (mostly) silent about spiritual virtue, she is likewise about mixedgender friendship. But here too silence is misleading, for implicit in worldly friendship, as de Sales makes clear, is the potential for amical relations between the sexes. She addresses those relations in a roundabout fashion that contrasts sharply with La Rochefoucauld’s traditional misogyny about women and friendship. In letter of 2 August 1675, he sends the marquise 15 maxims that would be added to his last edition, including what would become maxim 440: “The reason why most women are little affected by friendship is that it seems insipid when they have felt love.”45 The marquise had nothing to say about this particular maxim, even though she commented on nine of the others. While it is impossible to know why she was silent about it,46 other statements she makes do not concur with it. The logic of La Rochefoucauld’s pronouncement is based on an understanding of friendship as part of an aristocratic masculine ethos in the tradition of Aristotle or Cicero.47 As such, women are necessarily unfit for the companionship that ultimately is the foundation of the (patriarchal) state. Even though Sablé never refutes this assumption outright, she does undermine the aristocratic privilege that La Rochefoucauld seeks to uphold. Toward the end of her short text “De l’Amitié,” for instance, one finds a maxim that at first blush has little to do with the topic at hand: “Those who are foolish enough to be proud of themselves simply because of the nobility of their blood have scorn for what made them noble, since it was only the virtue of their ancestors that made for the nobility of their blood.”48 This critique of aristocratic hubris underscores the centrality of virtue, the sine qua non of friendship, but it also throws into question La Rochefoucauld’s aristocratic ideal. For, the corollary here, as in many of Sablé’s Maximes (1678), is the notion Sablé’s defense of virtue contrasts with a stunning denunciation of spiritual friendship by La Rochefoucauld in an early manuscript version of his Maximes: “L’amitié la plus sainte et la plus sacrée n’est qu’un trafic où nous croyons toujours gagner quelque chose” (Liancourt manuscript, no. 22; La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 303). Revisions to this maxim drop the qualifiers “la plus sainte et la plus sacrée” (maxim 83), and it is not unreasonable to speculate that the Marquise had something to do with this change. 45  La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims, 119 (translation modified); “Ce qui fait que la plupart des femmes sont peu touchées de l’amitié, c’est qu’elle est fade quand on a senti de l’amour” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 188). 46  Sylvie Requemora speculates that Sablé either agreed with La Rochefoucauld or felt personally slighted by this maxim (“L’amitié,” 711). It is also possible that the maxim, applying only to “most women,” implicitly exempted the Marquise. Moreover, in the same letter to her, La Rochefoucauld asks the Marquise to share her opinions about the maxims with the Abbesse de Fontevrault, who would be visiting her soon (Letter 71, 2 August 1675, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 657). It is at least conceivable that Sablé transmitted her opinion orally rather than in writing. 47  Requemora, “L’amitié,” 711–13. 48  “Ceux qui sont assez sots pour se priser seulement par la noblesse de leur sang, méprisent ce qui les a rendus nobles, puisque ce n’est que la vertu de leurs ancêtres qui a fait la noblesse de leur sang” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 688). This maxim also appears in Sablé’s Maximes (no. 72).

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that virtue is open to others besides the aristocracy. “The bonds of virtue must be stronger than those of blood, a man of goodness being closer to a man of goodness by the similarity of their morals than the son is to the father by the similarity of faces,” she says in her maxim 30.49 If the “bonds of virtue,” demonstrated by actions, should be stronger than bloodlines, then aristocratic privilege cannot be the basis of society and, specifically, of friendship. Nowhere does Sablé state or imply that friends must be of equal social standing, and her insistence on virtue above all else in friendship leaves open the real possibility that friends can be of unequal rank. Equal status and sameness (in anything but virtue, at least) are absent from her ideal; and so, from here it is only one step to conclude that friends can also be of different genders. The marquise also lays the groundwork for mixed-gender friendship by countering (albeit indirectly) La Rochefoucauld’s claim in maxim 440 that women cannot be friends because they are enamored of love. For Sablé, friendship is reciprocal and is a choice, whereas love is neither of those things. “Friendship must be reciprocal because in friendship one cannot love, as is the case in love, without being loved,” she states in “De l’Amitié.”50 And reiterating her position, she adds, “the word ‘friendship’ must not be given to natural inclinations, because they depend neither on our will nor on our choice.”51 Sablé draws a clear distinction between friendship and love, whereas La Rochefoucauld often blurs the boundary.52 The Marquise’s definitions work to dispel the semantic ambiguity that had long surrounded the French word “amitié,” which until the eighteenth century could also refer to an erotic or love relationship.53 Insisting on a semantic difference between “amitié” (friendship) and “amour” (love) also allowed her to resist the widely held assumption that “friendship” between women and men inevitably leads to erotic love, that friendship between the sexes is ultimately untenable. This position was clearly staked out by none other than her friend Jacques Esprit in the chapter of his La fausseté des vertus humaines on friendship, where he explains that the most saintly men of the day disapprove of having women as friends: 49

 “Les liens de la vertu doivent être plus étroits que ceux du sang, l’homme de bien étant plus proche de l’homme de bien par la ressemblance des mœurs que le fils ne l’est de son père par la ressemblance du visage” (“Maximes,” 249). 50  “Il faut … que l’amitié soit réciproque, parce que dans l’amitié l’on ne peut aimer, comme dans l’amour, sans être aimé” (“De l’Amitié,” 688). 51  Sablé, “De l’Amitié,” 688. A debate about “amour d’inclination” (love by inclination) and “amour de connaissance” (love by acquaintance) had occurred in her salon. See the correspondence from the Marquis de Sourdis in Barthélemy, Les amis, 304. 52  As in maxim 441: “Dans l’amitié comme dans l’amour, on est souvent plus heureux par les choses qu’on ignore que par celle que l’on sait.” See also maxims 72, 370, and 473. Even when his maxims point out a difference between love and friendship, the juxtaposition of the two terms implies a homology. 53  See Requemora, “L’amitié,” 693. See also one of Furetière’s definitions for “amitié”: “On le dit encore en matiere d’amour. Cette femme a fait une nouvelle amitié. cet homme a quitté son ancienne amitié, sa premiere maistresse” (Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, reprint, 1690 [Marsanne: Redon, 1999], CD-ROM]).

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believing that a man who devotes himself to a woman and who woos her, no matter how upright he is in his morals, must rightly fear that his devotion is not some secret ambition. If she is physically attractive, he must fear that it might be an unrecognized love of the sort of those that are nourished by wooing and trust. If we were to see what is hidden in the depths of the heart, we would find in that of the wisest and most pious of men even more surprising feelings.54

Esprit’s position here, which rejects the guarded optimism of François de Sales, would seem to be contradicted by his own close friendship with the Marquise, except that he, like La Rochefoucauld, doubtless considered his own clairvoyance about the perils of amour-propre to be a shield against the dangers of “unrecognized” love. Whatever the case, Esprit endorses the view that friendship with women is a slippery slope, that such friendships cannot be cordoned off from love, no matter how well intentioned or righteous a man might be. If Sablé never directly confronts this idea, throughout her maxims she assumes a gender-neutral universal stance (unlike La Rochefoucauld and Esprit) such that the firewall she erects between friendship and love makes voluntary and reciprocal amical relations, not immune to erotic desire, a real possibility for women and men. By refraining from critiques or prescriptions aimed at one gender or the other, she assumes a genderneutral egalitarianism. But when considering who might be friends, she allows us to conclude that differences of rank or gender are not the obstacles they are often thought to be. For all its apparent pessimism, then, Sablé’s conception of friendship is in a dialectical relationship with those of La Rochefoucauld and Esprit, testing the limits of their—and her own—Augustinian worldview and making a virtue at once spiritual and worldly the sole determination for choosing one’s friends. Negotiating Spiritual and Worldly Friendships Sablé’s writing on friendship cannot be divorced from her lived experience of friendship, something Arnauld d’Andilly tells her when praising her text “De l’Amitié”: “no matter how great your judgment and your mind, they have much less of a part in it than your heart. One must feel those things to be able to think and speak about them….”55 To feel friendship—to show one’s heart is attuned to it—one must necessarily have experienced friendship, and Sablé enjoyed a wide reputation as a devoted friend. “No one has ever been as attentive to one’s friends,” 54

 “… croyant qu’un homme qui s’attache à une femme et qui lui dévoue ses soins, quelque réglé qu’il soit dans ses moeurs, doit justement craindre que son attachement ne soit quelque secrète ambition ; si elle est bien faite, que ce ne soit un amour inconnu du nombre de ceux qui se nourrissent de soins et de confiance. Si l’on voyait ce qui est caché dans les replis du coeur, on trouverait dans celui des plus sages et des plus pieux des sentiments bien plus surprenants” (Esprit, La fausseté des vertus humaines, 145–6). 55  “quelque grands que soient votre jugement et votre esprit, ils y ont beaucoup moins de part que votre cœur. Il faut sentir ces choses-là pour les pouvoir penser et les pouvoir dire …” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 610).

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says René Rapin of the Marquise.56 The Abbé d’Ailly concurs, noting: “she had a court of numerous distinguished people of all ages and both sexes who always left her place happier and as if enchanted for having seen her.”57 Devoted to her friends, the Marquise inspired devotion from them, assembling a diverse network of people both in her apartment at the Abbey of Port-Royal de Paris and through her prolific correspondence, the discursive extension of her salon. D’Ailly’s allusion to the “distinguished people” she counted as friends underscores her openness to diversity among them, something she demonstrates in her writings on friendship, as we have seen. That she maintained this extensive network of friends is all the more notable given that the motivation for retiring to Port-Royal was to leave the “world” in order to devote herself to spiritual matters. Unlike other aristocratic women who retired there, such as the Princesse de Guéméné, or the Duchesse de Longueville, the Marquise strove for a middle path, one where she could maintain ties to her friends in the “world” while living within the walls of the convent. Occupying both spheres—the worldly and the spiritual—was not always easy. The nuns of Port-Royal were not eager to grant her access to the convent, and Sablé was obliged to agree to strict rules while living there (such as keeping her shutters closed when receiving guests lest they catch sight of the nuns, and vice versa).58 Her attempts to straddle the two spheres even provoked the suspicions of civil authorities, who resented the assistance she had provided to the nuns during the crisis of the Formulaire and ordered that the door of her apartment opening onto the convent chapel be walled up, to her great consternation.59 After the schism that provoked the departure of the nuns who had refused to sign the Formulaire in 1665, the Marquise elected to stay in Paris with the nuns who had signed the document, rather than retreat to the Port-Royal des Champs monastery in the Chevreuse valley, as did her friend the Duchesse de Longueville. This latter site represented the sort of complete break with the world that Sablé was unable to make. Ostensibly motivated by health concerns (Port-Royal des Champs was surrounded by marshes), the Marquise chose to remain in Paris. Instead of trivializing this decision as an effect of her alleged hypochondria, as most critics have done, it is important to recognize how much she struggled with it. “If, as is reasonable, I were able to resolve to no longer worry about the bad air and persuade myself that any place is good enough to die in, what consolation I would have to live among such people! In truth, I believe the best thing I could do is to leave everything behind and go there,” she writes to Renaud de Sévigné, one of the  “Jamais personne n’a été plus régulière à ses amis” (Rapin, Mémoires du P. René Rapin de la Compagnie de Jésus sur L’Eglise et la société, la cour, la ville et le jansénisme, 1644–1669, 1:174). 57  “elle avoit une cour nombreuse de personnes choisies de tout âge et de tout sexe, qui ne sortoient jamais d’auprés d’elle que plus heureux et comme charmez de l’avoir veûë” (Sablé, Maximes de Mme de Sablé [1678], 4). 58  Ivanoff, La Marquise de Sablé, 66–7. 59  Ivanoff, La Marquise de Sablé, 69–70. 56

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Solitaires (and uncle of Madame de Sévigné), in 1669.60 After he exhorts her to do penance for staying in Paris and to separate herself from all that connected her to le monde, she implores him to pray for her, exclaiming: “I hate the world, I flee it; pray that I might hate myself as much and that I might think on nothing other than my salvation.”61 More than a decade earlier, her inability to leave Paris had been a topic of discussion with Abbess Angélique Arnauld, who, writing from Port-Royal des Champs, proposes what amounts to retiring there without actually doing so: I am always delighted when you tell me you have a strong desire to come die with us in the wilderness (au désert), even though it is impossible for you to do so. But I love this desire no less, because I know that it comes from the bottom of your heart and that God put it there. Although he perhaps does not want it to be realized materially, my very dear sister, he still wants it to produce a greater detachment from and scorn for the world, where you see so much corruption, malice, and scorn for God.62

If the epistolary exchange with Renaud de Sévigné is any measure, the solution proposed by Angélique Arnauld is not one that came easily for her. But it is one that is tailored to Sablé’s two desires: to be at Port-Royal des Champs, away from le monde, and to be at Port-Royal de Paris, in proximity to le monde. In sum, Angélique argues that it is possible for her to be in two places at the same time, by retreating to an interior space where she detaches herself from the “world” even as she remains physically in that same “world.” In aspiring to that solution, the Marquise’s spiritual friendships were crucial. Primarily through her extensive correspondence, Sablé had numerous friends, both women and men, from whom she sought spiritual counsel,63 and her correspondence with these friends allowed her to enact, in writing, something of the retreat she 60  “… si je pouvois, comme il est raisonnable, me déterminer à ne me soucier plus du méchant air, et me persuader que tout lieu est bon pour mourir, quelle consolation n’auroisje pas de vivre parmi de telles personnes! En vérité, je crois que je ne pourrois mieux faire que de tout quitter et de m’en aller là” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 228). 61  “Je hais le monde, je le fuis; priez afin que je me haïsse autant moi-même, et que je ne songe plus qu’à mon salut” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 230). 62  “ Je suis toujours bien aise quand vous me dites que vous avez un grand désir de venir mourir avec nous au désert, quoiqu’il vous soit impossible de l’accomplir. Mais je ne laisse d’aimer ce désir, parce que je sais qu’il est au fond de votre cœur, et que Dieu l’y a mis. Quoique peut-être il n’en veuille pas l’accomplissement matériellement, il veut toujours, ma très-chère sœur, qu’il produise un plus grand détachement et mépris pour le monde, où vous voyez tant de corruption, de malice, et de mépris pour Dieu” (Lettre DCCCXVII, 27 January 1656, Marie-Angélique de Sainte Madeleine Arnauld, Lettres de la Révérende Mère Marie-Angélique Arnauld, 3 vols. (Utrecht: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1742–1744), 3:170–71). 63  Among these were women: Angélique Arnauld, Agnès Arnauld, the Abbesse de Fontevrault, the Princesse de Guéméné, the Duchesse de Longueville, the Comtesse de Maure, Mademoiselle de Vertus; and men: Antoine Arnauld, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, Renaud de Sévigné, Antoine Singlin.

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desired but was unable to undertake physically. The epistolary exchange, standing in for the friend’s physical absence, gives a discursive presence to her interior retreat, itself a simulacrum of the (impossible) physical retreat. To be sure, the Marquise was hardly alone in using correspondence to maintain her spiritual friendships; but Sablé is reputed to have often preferred epistolary exchanges to encounters in person, even before moving to Port-Royal.64 Since her correspondence with these friends takes the form of “billets,” informal missives without the conventionally ceremonial formulae (a genre she is credited with inventing65), it carries a (more) direct expressive function, closer to conversational speech, that further likens the epistolary exchange to physical interaction. To effect the interior retreat that simulates the physical one, the Marquise relies on spiritual friendships maintained especially within an epistolary space that seeks to fill the void of physical absence. But just as an interior retreat does not seem to satisfy completely Sablé’s desire for a physical retreat, it is unclear how readily epistolary presence fills the void of physical absence. She frequently puts her correspondents in the position of having to excuse themselves for not responding quickly enough, suggesting that epistolary presence was a fleeting phenomenon at best. Her spiritual friendships were predicated on an elusive presence that necessitated a continual stream of letters, buttressing an interior retreat that never quite filled the void of an impossible physical retreat. Among Sablé’s spiritual friendships, some were more and others were less spiritual in tenor, but none were exclusively so, judging from the epistolary evidence at least. Alongside discussions of devotional matters were allusions to illnesses, visits by friends and relatives, the Marquise’s cooking, among many other mundane topics (in both senses of the word). For the Port-Royal nuns among her friends, the intrusion of the worldly risked putting them at odds with their pledge to renounce “human friendships” in favor of “charity,” or spiritual friendship. For instance, meditating on Christ’s death to himself and to the world, Jacqueline Pascal, a nun at Port-Royal, concludes: “That teaches me not only to die to that which only touches on my person, but also to all the concerns of flesh and blood and of human friendship, that is to say, to forget all that does not concern the salvation of my friends, and no longer to preoccupy myself with their temporal affairs.”66 Such a lofty goal was difficult to attain even among the 64

 Several contemporaneous sources claim that she and her friend, the Comtesse de Maure, exchanged billets while living in the same apartment so as to avoid illness. See, for instance, Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, ed. Antoine Adam, 2 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1960), 1:520. 65  Both Gilles Ménage and the Duchesse de Montpensier credit her with this. See Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 1:1152n1. 66  “Cela m’apprend à ne pas mourir seulement à ce qui ne touche que ma personne, mais aussi à tous les intérêts de la chair et du sang et de l’amitié humaine, c’est-à-dire à oublier tout ce qui ne regarde point le salut de mes amis, et ne plus m’empresser dans leurs affaires temporelles” (quoted in Agnès Cousson, L’Ecriture de soi: Lettres et récits autobiographiques des religieuses de Port-Royal. Angélique et Agnès Arnauld, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly, Jacqueline Pascal, Lumière Classique, 94 [Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012], 77).

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nuns themselves, concludes Agnès Cousson, but it was made even more difficult when corresponding with lay women such as the Marquise, who resist shedding all the trappings of epistolary politesse, which the nuns associated with worldliness and self-love.67 Many letters reveal what appears to be a human affection, beyond any spiritual affinity, that existed between Sablé and the nuns, as does this fairly typical passage in a letter from Angélique Arnauld: I am very pleased to hear that you are well. May God preserve your health, my dear one, and the friendship you have honored me with for so many years and proof of which you give me every day by feeding me. I do not see your bread without tenderness of heart for the goodness of your own, which deigns to take this care. I thank you for it with great humility.68

As innocuous as the good wishes for health and the thanks for a loaf of bread may appear, they demonstrate how untenable the stringent requirements for spiritual friendship really are, especially for the Marquise, who freely passes from spiritual to secular concerns in letters with the nuns and other women, in contrast to most of her letters about spiritual matters exchanged with men.69 Beyond content, Sablé is also unable to dispense with worldly rhetorical conventions in her correspondence with spiritual friends. In response to Sablé’s complaints about her laconic style, Angélique explains: “We are ignorant of the refinement of the Court, which covers over so much deception, and our uncouth manners take away from the luster and attraction of our true friendship.”70 Rejecting courtly manners, Angélique defends the nuns’ friendship for the Marquise, insisting: “if you could see my feelings, you would not find in them the dryness you complain of, which comes from my awkwardness and not from my heart.”71 Angélique’s reply is a rebuke of the worldly expectations that Sablé brings to their friendship, according to which feelings must be put into words, which necessarily obey social conventions (such as “the refinement of the Court”). Angélique’s brother, Antoine Arnauld, tells Sablé that the friendship practiced at Port-Royal is unlike its counterpart in polite society: “You will find elsewhere more meticulousness about the little gestures that maintain the appearances of friendship;  Cousson, L’Écriture de soi, 207.  “Je me réjouis de ce qu’on me dit toujours que vous vous portez bien. Dieu vous conserve votre santé, ma très-chère, et l’amitié dont vous m’avez honorée depuis tant d’années, et dont vous me donnez tous les jours des preuves en me nourrissant. Je ne vois point votre pain sans attendrissement de cœur de la bonté du vôtre, qui daigne prendre ce soin; je vous en remercie très humblement” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 199). 69  Cousson notes this same difference between the letters of the Port-Royal nuns sent to men and to women (Cousson, L’Écriture de soi, 207). 70  “Nous ignorons la délicatesse de la Cour qui couvre tant de fintise [sic] et nostre grossiereté ôte le lustre et l’agrement de nostre véritable amitié” (letter from Angélique Arnauld, 16 April 1661, Barthélemy, Les amis, 131). 71  “si vous les [mes sentimens] pouviez voir, vous n’y trouvereiez point la sécheresse dont vous vous plegnés, qui vient de ma lourdise et non pas de mon cœur” (Barthélemy, Les amis, 131). 67 68

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but I am certain that you will find nowhere else than at Port-Royal the true essence of friendship….”72 The observations made by both Angélique and Antoine point to a distinction that Sablé seems unwilling to make. For her, the outward forms of friendship, necessarily determined by worldly conventions, cannot be set aside; they are inextricably bound up with the “true essence” of friendship. Spiritual (or virtuous) essence and worldly forms are not incompatible, but complementary. From this premise, Sablé sought to recast not only spiritual friendship, but also worldly friendship, especially that between women and men. As I have already shown, the galanterie that was the predominant model for friendships in seventeenth-century salon circles was incompatible with the ideal of spiritual friendship between women and men endorsed by François de Sales. And for those, such as Jacques Esprit, who were opposed to mixed-gender friendship under any circumstance, the specter of galanterie was itself proof of its perniciousness. Sablé’s position on galanterie shifted, predictably, after her conversion in 1640. In her younger days, she was seen by her contemporaries as a proponent of this doctrine. According to Madame de Motteville: She was persuaded that men could, without blame, have tender feelings for women, that the desire to please them caused them to do the greatest and most beautiful of actions, made them intelligent and inspired in them generosity and all sorts of virtues; but on the other than that women, who were the ornament of society and who were destined to be served and adored, could only accept their signs of respect.73

By contrast, a letter to Sablé from Jacques Esprit points to a dramatically different view of galanterie: Madame, You have given me an uncommon joy by showing me you understand that acceptable gallantries for men are sinful in the eyes of God, that one can offend one’s conscience without tarnishing one’s glory and that the filth of the heart is often compatible with the integrity of the body: this great and important truth is known to very few people, but it would doubtless be to everyone if sin had not surrounded humankind in its darkness.74 72

 “Vous trouverez ailleurs plus d’exactitude dans de petits soins qui entretiennent les dehors de l’amitié; mais je suis assuré que vous ne trouverez nulle part ailleurs, tant qu’à Port-Royal, le vrai dedans de l’amitié …” (quoted in Gazier, Les belles amies, 49). 73  “elle étoit persaudée que les hommes pouvoient sans crime avoir des sentiments tendres pour les femmes, que le désir de leur plaire les portoit aux plus grandes et aux plus belles actions, leur donnoit de l’esprit et leur inspiroit de la libéralité et toutes sortes de vertus; mais que, d’un autre côté, les femmes, qui étoient l’ornement du monde et qui étoient faites pour être servies et adorées, ne devoient souffrir que leurs respects” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 14). 74  “Madame, Vous m’avez donné une joye extraordinaire, en me faisant voir que vous comprenez que les gallenteries sages devant les hommes sont tres criminelles aux yeux de Dieu, qu’on peut blesser sa conscience sans flétrir sa gloire et que la souillure du coeur est souvent compatible avec l’integrité du corps: cette grande et importante verité est conneue

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Unsurprising given her conversion and subsequent retreat to Port-Royal, this change does not translate into a complete rejection of galanterie. Although most of her male friends address her with respectful deference, devoid of anything approaching galanterie, a few of her most assiduous habitués, such as the Abbé de la Victoire, the Marquis de Sourdis, and even La Rochefoucauld, adopt the playful amourous posture typical of galant exchanges.75 Owing to the destruction of most of her letters, it is impossible to know with certainty to what extent she did or did not play the role of the beloved in the galant scheme. But if it is highly probable, as the above letter from Esprit suggests, that she renounces “acceptable gallantries” with men, it is also true that she holds on to the authority women were supposed to exert over men in that ethos.76 Many of her male friends were eager to share their works with her, seeking her judgment before publication; and from all appearances, she fulfills that role with relish. Besides La Rochefoucauld, to whom I will return in a moment, Antoine Arnauld, Arnauld d’Andilly, Cureau de la Chambre, Esprit, Nicole, the Marquis de Sourdis, Gaspard de Tende, among others, all consult the Marquise on their works in progress on linguistic, literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific topics. “You will oblige us by sending us your thoughts about it, when you have seen it,” Antoine Arnauld tells her when sending a prefatory discourse for the Logique de Port-Royal, “for we only want to have people like you stand in judgment of it.”77 If Sablé is the ideal “judge” of the Logique, it is because she is widely admired for her clear reasoning and her linguistic acumen, both of which she supposedly exemplified “naturally” and without effort, as stipulated by galanterie. “Her reasoning was so solid and so free of all that ordinarily troubles others that, far from being influenced by individual opinions, she esteemed virtue and good things everywhere she found them, in people and in books,” says the Abbé d’Ailly of her de fort peu de personnes, mais elle le seroit sans doute de tout le monde si le peché n’avoit couvert de ses tenebres le genre humain” (quoted in Ivanoff, La Marquise de Sablé, 134). 75  Abbé de la Victoire tells her, lightheartedly: “Il ne peut arriver de mauvaise intelligence entre nous qui ne tienne du divorce; car, ne vous ayant pas épousée pour vous donner un meilleur parti, je n’ai pas laissé de me faire dans le cœur un mariage clandestin avec vous qui durera éternellement” (Barthélemy, Les amis, 339). And La Rochefoucauld lightens the tone of an otherwise emotionally charged letter to the Marquise by declaring: “… l’amitié que j’ai pour vous a toujours ressemblé à de l’amour” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 611n91). 76  Several critics have asserted that the age of the Marquise was a factor in her renunciation of galanterie. Although she was 57 by the time she retired to Port-Royal, this advanced age (for the period) did not preclude engagement with galanterie. Madeleine de Scudéry was in her early 50s at the heyday of her salon when her male friends were lavishing amorously coded galant compliments on her. Galanterie was a ludic sociable practice that should not be conflated with youthful love. 77  “Vous nous obligerez de nous en mander votre sentiment, quand vous l’aurez vu. Car ce ne sont que des personnes comme vous que nous voulons en avoir pour juges” (letter, 19 April 1660, quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 349–50).

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intellectual capacities.78 Of her authority in matters linguistic, Gaspard de Tende, author of a treatise on translation, tells her: The masters of our language consult you about their doubts, make you the arbiter of their conflicts and defer to your decisions. Indeed, you are the one person in the world who knows best all the laws and rules of discourse, who knows best how to express with grace and elegance your feelings and your thoughts, who knows best how to use those beautiful patterns of speech that are so ingenious, so captivating, and so naturally French.79

Although this sort of praise of salon women was not unusual at the time, more so was the reciprocity that existed between Sablé and her closest male friends. Not only did she follow their work with keen interest, but they too were eager to read her writings, over and beyond the seriousness with which they considered her opinion of their work. In a tit-for-tat exchange, the Marquis de Sourdis sends her a “piece of writing, after which you will doubtless not object to send me the maxims.”80 Arnauld d’Andilly too presses her to send him her maxims: “Is it possible that you ask me if I will be pleased to see those maxims, which can only be excellent, or to put it better admirable, since judgment will have no less part in them than intelligence … So send them to me, I beg of you, as soon as you possibly can.”81 After reading her commentary on the dangers of theater, he urges her to continue writing: “you could not spend a few hours of your days any better than in writing such things since it would be almost impossible for them not to make an impression on reasonable people and thus for God to be very pleased by the happiness you would procure them by disabusing them of the false opinions that the looseness of morals has introduced.”82 Even if the texts sent to 78

 “Elle avoit une raison si droite et tellement dégagée de tout ce qui trouble ordinairement les autres, que, bien loin d’être prévenue par des opinions particulières, elle estimoit la vertu et les bonnes choses partout où elle les trouvoit, dans les personnes et dans les livres” (Maximes de Mme de Sablé [1678], 7). 79  “les maîtres de notre langue vous consultent dans leurs doutes, vous font arbitre de leurs différends et se soumettent à vos décisions. En effet, vous êtes la personne du monde qui savez le mieux toutes les lois et toutes les règles du discours, qui savez le mieux exprimer avec grâce et netteté vos sentiments et vos pensées, qui savez le mieux employer ces belles formes de parler si ingénieuses, si charmantes et si naturellement françoises” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 346). This passage is taken from Tende’s dedicatory epistle to the Marquise. 80  “escrit, après lequel vous ne ferez sans doute nulle difficulté de m’envoyer les maximes” (Barthélemy, Les amis, 306). 81  “Est-il possible que vous me demandiez si je serai bien aise de voir ces maximes, qui ne peuvent être qu’excellentes, ou pour mieux dire admirables, puisque le jugement n’y aura pas moins de part que l’esprit ... Envoyez-les-moi donc, je vous supplie, le plus tôt que vous pourrez …”(quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 357). 82  “Vous ne pourriez mieux employer quelques heures de vos journées qu’à écrire des choses semblables, puisqu’il seroit presque impossible qu’elles ne fissent impression sur les personnes raisonnables, et qu’ainsi Dieu n’eût très-agréable le bonheur que vous leur

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her by her male friends far outnumbered her own, and even if she likely never intended to publish hers (in spite of d’Andilly’s implicit encouragement to do so), the reciprocity of a two-way exchange puts her in a position to exert authority over men, as the galant scheme dictates, but also to submit her work to their authority and to take an active role in their projects. If this, too, is not entirely without parallel (Scudéry and La Sablière had similarly reciprocal relationships with the men in their salons, for instance), the relationship Sablé established with her male friendships did not rely on the playfully amorous pretext of galanterie. Retaining the authority granted by this code—with men submitting to her judgment and lavishing her with praise—she created a space for intellectual exchange devoid of erotic tension and the inverted (but mythic) asymmetry it implied.83 Between Spirituality and Worldliness: Women Read La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes The most famous episode of Sablé’s salon, the composition of what would come to be known as La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, illustrates how she had created a dynamic, outside the realm of galanterie and on the margins of the spiritual, that enabled her to assume the role of a counselor who admonishes and corrects, one of the chief duties of the friend in classical and religious traditions.84 Beginning in procureriez en les détrompant des fausses opinions que le relâchement a introduites …” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 358). 83  Although love was not the pretext for Sablé’s interaction with her male friends, it was still a theme of discussion, as it was in many seventeenth-century salons. But unlike most of those settings, reflection on this passion was approached from a distance, without the premise that better understanding would lead to better practice. Her friend and salon habitué the Marquis de Sourdis turned to this topic on several occasions, contesting the Marquise’s preference for “amour d’inclination” (he defended the notion of “amour de connaissance”) and writing several seemingly galant texts about love that were likely circulated among members of her salon (“Pourquoy l’amour est peint les yeux bandez, nud et enfant,” “Questions d’amour,” and likely as well, the “Discours sur les passions de l’amour,” often erroneously attributed to Pascal). But love was only one of many topics Sourdis broached with Sablé, including scientific experiments, theology, and moral philosophy. See his letters to Sablé in Barthélemy, Les amis, 302–16. And by no means was it the chief preoccupation of her salon or her correspondence. As a topic in La Rochefoucauld’s and her own maxims, love is portrayed in a highly negative light, as deceitful, ephemeral, and above all motivated by amour-propre (see maxims 68 and 69, for instance). Such a perspective was hardly in line with the Neo-Petrarchan topoi recycled by galant texts appreciated by members of most other salons. Most important is the suspicion this perspective cast on love, making it a topic for the group’s moralist project, instead of a model for sociable interaction among women and men. 84  See, for instance, Cicero: “We should venture … to give advice freely; for in friendship the influence of friends who advise wisely may be of great value. Such admonition should be given frankly, and even sharply, if the occasion demands severity, and when given should be obeyed” (Marcus Tullius Cicero, De amicitia [On Friendship], trans.

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1657, a year after Sablé’s retreat to Port-Royal, she began writing and discussing maxims with Esprit and La Rochefoucauld. At first, from all appearances, this was a collective activity: maxims were shared, critiqued, and rewritten by all three friends. But fairly quickly La Rochefoucauld began to supervise their efforts and, eventually, to assert his ownership of the collection, even as he acknowledged the contributions of Sablé in particular. “Here is another maxim I’m sending you to add to the others,” he writes in 1661. “I beg of you to send me your opinion of the last ones I sent you. You can’t disapprove of all of them, for many of them are yours.”85 And indeed, the Marquise recognizes them: “I’ve just read the great maxims. Mine are so well disguised by the arrangement of the words that I can praise them as if they didn’t come from me.”86 Beyond sharing her own maxims and especially critiquing his, Sablé’s collaboration with La Rochefoucauld extended to serving as a literary agent of sorts, sending out his maxims to friends and acquaintances and soliciting their opinions.87 The letters she received reveal a lack of consensus about the spiritual and worldly interpretations of the Duke’s collection. Women were especially ambivalent, acknowledging its worldly qualities (wit and style) while reacting with shock and dismay at the attack on virtues. “Ah, Madame! what corruption of mind and heart one must have to be capable of imagining all that!” exclaimed Madame de Lafayette after a first reading.88 For her part, Madame de Schomberg objects that “after reading this piece, one remains persuaded that there is neither vice nor virtue in anything and that one is obliged to do everything one does in life … you be the judge after that of how dangerous these maxims are.”89 But almost immediately thereafter she goes on to admit that “some of them enchant me,”90 Benjamin E. Smith [New York, NY: The Century Co., 1901], 70–71). Shannon provides an illuminating analysis of this duty in relation to the “likeness” prescribed for friends in the Renaissance (see Sovereign Amity, 49–50). 85  “Voici encore une maxime que je vous envoie pour joindre aux autres. Je vous supplie de me mander votre sentiment des dernières que je vous ai envoyées. Vous ne les pouvez pas désapprouver toutes, car il y en a beaucoup de vous” (Letter 33, early 1661, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 617). 86  “Je viens de lire les grandes maximes. Les miennes y sont si bien déguisées par l’agencement des paroles que je les puis louer comme si elles ne venaient pas de moi” (Letter 64, early 1661, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 617–18). It is unclear why Sablé calls the maxims she has read “les grandes maximes.” 87  See Laurence Plazenet’s commentary in La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 569–75. 88  “Ha, Madame! quelle corruption il faut avoir dans l’esprit et dans le cœur pour être capable d’imaginer tout cela!” (Letter 31, 1660 or 1661, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 616.) 89  “Après la lecture de cet Écrit, l’on demeure persuadé qu’il n’y a ni vice ni vertu à rien, et que l’on fait nécessairement toutes les actions de la vie … vous jugez de là combien ces maximes sont dangereuses” (Letter 53, 1663, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 635). 90  “il y en a qui me charment” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 636).

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expressing her admiration for several specific maxims because, she says, “those ways of speaking please me since they distinguish an honnête homme who writes for his diversion and as he speaks from people who make a profession of it.”91 For Madame de Schomberg as for many women readers, the Maximes are appealing for their formal worldliness (e.g., the “natural” style of an honnête homme), but reprehensible for what they perceive to be their moral and thus spiritual implications. Letters from the men Sablé consulted do not, on the whole, evince this tension since they engage specifically with (what they perceive to be) the theological and philosophical dimensions of the Maximes, explained as a portrait of corrupt human nature without God and a response to Stoicism.92 Lacking formal training in these fields, women were less able to draw out such implications, as Susan Read Baker notes.93 But as arbiters of good taste in polite society, women were crucial for the success of the Maximes, and their reservations were thus a serious obstacle. There can be no doubt that Sablé played a key role behind the scenes in helping her friend to address the concerns of his female reading public. La Rochefoucauld was aware of the influence Sablé had on her friends, such as the comtesse de Maure, and he asked her to defend him: “I’d always thought that Madame the Comtesse de Maure would condemn the intent of the maxims and that she would come out on the side of the truth of the virtues. It’s up to you, Madame, to defend me, please, since I believe all that you believe about them.”94 But, his avowal to the contrary, Sablé’s beliefs did not align so neatly with her friend’s, as we have seen, and at one critical moment she does not hesitate to remind him that others feel likewise. Charged with writing an anonymous review for the Journal des Savants, the Marquise sent the Duke a draft with a strongly worded paragraph that summarizes Madame de Schomberg’s objections and that precedes a description of the praise other readers had given.95 In the letter that accompanies her text, she admits that he will likely not publish the paragraph in question, but she gives it to him anyway, explaining: 91  “ces modes-là de parler me plaisent parce que cela distingue bien un honnête homme qui écrit pour son plaisir et comme il parle d’avec les gens qui en font métier” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 637). 92  See letters 55, 59, 60, and 61 in La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 638–9, 641–5. 93  Susan Read Baker, “The Reception of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1659–1665): A Question of Gender?” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 13, no. 24 (1986): 72. 94  “J’avais toujours cru que Madame la Comtesse de Maure condamnerait l’intention des sentences et qu’elle se déclarerait pour la vérité des vertus. C’est à vous, Madame, à me justifier, s’il vous plaît, puisque j’en crois tout ce que vous en croyez” (Letter 24, 5 December 1660, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 608). 95  “Les uns croient que c’est outrager les hommes que d’en faire une si terrible peinture et que l’auteur n’en a pu prendre l’original qu’en lui-même. Ils disent qu’il est dangereux de mettre de telles pensées au jour et qu’ayant si bien montré qu’on ne fait jamais de bonnes actions que par de mauvais principes, on ne se mettra plus en peine de chercher la vertu, puisqu’il est impossible de l’avoir, si ce n’est en idée” (Letter 66, 19 February 1665, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 650).

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I’m sending you what I was able to pull out of my head to put in the Journal. I put in the part that is so unpleasant for you so as to help you overcome the shame of having to publish the Preface without cutting anything from it. I wasn’t afraid to put it in because I am certain you won’t have it printed, even if the rest were to please you.96

Reasoning that the critical paragraph will give La Rochefoucauld the opportunity to do something he should have done with the preface of the first edition of the Maximes97—to cut a passage that displeased him—the Marquise adopts a slightly mocking posture that allows her to relay serious criticisms. As she predicted, La Rochefoucauld had the review published without the offending paragraph, saving himself from a second “shame.” But the criticisms were not entirely lost on the moralist: in subsequent editions of the text, he added more qualifiers to his maxims, but also “laicized” them by suppressing the preface and the first maxim, which had delineated a clear Christian, even Augustinian intent.98 By eliminating the explicit religious frame and providing (some) exceptions to his condemnation of virtues, La Rochefoucauld brought his collection closer to the expectations of his inaugural female readers, providing them the possibility of reconciling their worldly and religious interpretations. But what he may have gained by moving toward women’s religious expectations, he later lost by adding several misogynist maxims to the final (fourth and fifth) editions of the Maximes, thus moving away from their worldly expectations.99 There is no trace of Sablé’s reaction to these maxims in her remaining letters,100 but at least one woman in the Duke’s circle of friends, Marie-Éléonore de  “Je vous envoie ce que j’ai pu tirer de ma tête pour mettre dans le Journal. J’y ai mis cet endroit qui vous est si sensible, afin que cela vous fasse surmonter la mauvaise honte qui vous fit donner au public la préface sans y rien retrancher et je n’ai pas craint de le mettre, parce que je suis assurée que vous ne le ferez pas imprimer, quand même le reste vous plairait” (Letter 66, 19 February 1665, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 651). 97  This preface is in fact the “Discours sur les réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales” by Henri de La Chapelle-Bessé, which La Rochefoucauld had asked him to write. Unhappy with this “Discours” but unwilling to ask for modifications, he dropped it from the four subsequent editions. See Letter 40, 12 July 1664, François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes suivies des Réflexions diverses, du Portrait de La Rochefoucauld par lui-même et des Remarques de Christine de Suède sur les Maximes, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier, 1999), 579–80. 98  See Moriarty, Disguised Vices, 367, 372–3. 99  These include maxims 362, 364, 367, and 368, all of which were sent to Madame de Rohan (see La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Truchet], 584–6). 100  Of course, the correspondence between Sablé and La Rochefoucauld gives us but a glimpse of exchanges that occurred more often in person. About the seeming lack of a reaction from the moralist’s female friends to his misogynist maxims, Baker notes that “it seems likely that earlier female readers (before Mme de Rohan in 1671–1674) did not criticize La Rochefoucauld’s misogyny because they encountered few overt traces of it in their manuscript copies. A quick perusal of misogynist maxims added to the collection after 1664 indicates the inclusion of eighteen” (Baker, “The Reception of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes,” 74). 96

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Rohan, Abbesse de Malnoue, does not hesitate to tell him: “you have understood men’s hearts far better than women’s,” objecting to his assumption that “their temperament is the cause of all their virtue, since one would have to conclude from this that their reason would be entirely useless for them.”101 Rohan goes on to argue that women are able to master their passions, in spite of their temperament, better even than men, because social pressures (bienséance and shame) force them to do so.102 After offering praise for other maxims, she returns at the end of her letter to his treatment of women, pleading with him to be mindful of the exceptions to his generalizations: It seems to me that Madame de Lafayette and I deserve from you a bit better opinion about the Sex [i.e., women] in general. You will only do for us what we do on your behalf, since, in spite of the faults of a million men, we pay homage to your individual merit, and you alone make us believe all the most advantageous things one can say about your Sex.103

It is unclear whether Rohan was among Sablé’s friends, but she extends to La Rochefoucauld’s portrait of women the same critique of overgeneralizations used by the Marquise and the women in her circle. Like Sablé, Rohan seeks to maintain a friendship with him premised on an equitable exchange between the sexes—where the exceptions to generalizations and the qualities of each gender are given their due. Both women conceived of their friendship with La Rochefoucauld as one outside the bounds of galanterie, where women and men could engage in open sharing of ideas, where women could assume an intellectual authority on par with men’s, and where female friends could be counselors to their male friends. That La Rochefoucauld did not comply with Rohan’s request should not obscure the fact that women he counted as friends contested at least parts of his moral philosophy, something he himself invited them to do. The discursive space created by Sablé, incorporating both spiritual and worldly values, afforded women a role La Rochefoucauld seems unwilling to give them in his Maximes, but a role they played nonetheless.

101  “Vous avez encore mieux pénétré [le cœur] des hommes que celui des femmes … leur tempérament [des femmes] fait toute leur vertu, puisqu’il faudrait conclure de là que leur raison leur serait entièrement inutile” (Lettre 67, between 1671 and 1674, La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 651–2). On misogyny in—and the gendered reception of—the Maximes, see Baker, “The Reception of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes.” 102  La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 652. 103  “il me semble que Mme de Lafayette et moi méritons bien que vous ayez un peu meilleure opinion du Sexe en général. Vous ne ferez que nous rendre ce que nous faisons en votre faveur, puisque, malgré les défauts d’un million d’hommes, nous rendons justice à votre mérite particulier et que vous seul nous faites croire tout ce qu’on peut dire de plus avantageux pour votre Sexe” (La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Plazenet], 653).

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*** Of all Sablé’s male friends, Arnauld d’Andilly was among her closest. The bond they shared was deepened by the persecution of Port-Royal, when the Marquise defended his actions on behalf of his daughter and sister, both nuns at the convent.104 In addition to a spiritual dimension, their friendship encompassed worldly preoccupations, as we have seen, and a deep human affection, as Arnauld d’Andilly makes clear in a letter dated 29 January 1665, when he responds to the Marquise’s reproaches about his epistolary silence by pointing to the exceptionality of their mutual understanding: since you only condemn the silence of the heart, you will doubtless forgive this outward silence that does not keep me from speaking to you in the way that is most pleasing to you and that is only found in the truest of friendships. And so, what could I tell you about so many things that the spoken word could hardly convey and that I do not need to explain to have you understand my feelings since no one knows them better than you?105

At the end of this same letter, he reiterates the depth of the bond that unites them: I didn’t intend to tell you so much about all that, but you have witnessed so often how my heart opens up when I talk to you that you will not be surprised to see that I cannot keep myself from pouring my feelings into yours. And what would I not tell you if I were to find myself with you and the person who, when you two are together, does me, as you do, the favor and the compliment of remembering me.106

An uncommon union of hearts and minds, the friendship depicted by d’Andilly recalls the rhetoric of the classical masculine friendship tradition, with its emphasis on a single soul in two bodies (e.g., Cicero’s alter idem). Sablé’s perfect understanding of d’Andilly’s feelings and the involuntary union of his heart with hers makes their friendship one of the presumably rare “truest of friendships.”  See Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 359–61.  “comme ce n’est que le silence du cœur que vous condamnez, vous pardonnez bien sans doute ce silence extérieur qui n’empêche pas que je ne vous parle de la manière qui vous est la plus agréable, et qui ne se rencontre que dans les véritables amitiés. Aussi bien que vous pourrois-je dire sur tant de sujets auxquels la vive voix pourroit suffire à peine, et dont il n’est point besoin que je m’explique pour vous faire savoir mes sentiments, puisque personne ne les connoît mieux que vous?” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 361). 106  “Je ne pensois pas vous en tant dire, mais vous avez si souvent éprouvé de quelle sorte mon cœur s’ouvre lorsque je vous parle, que vous ne serez pas surprise de voir que je ne puisse m’empêcher de répandre ainsi mes sentiments dans le vôtre; et que ne vous dirois-je donc point si je me trouvois en tiers avec vous et la personne qui, lorsque vous êtes ensemble, me fait, comme vous, la faveur et la justice de se souvenir de moi” (quoted in Cousin, Madame de Sablé, 362). According to Cousin, the third party mentioned here is likely the Duchesse de Longueville. 104 105

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But no matter how profound, their friendship is not be confused with erotic love, something the well-appointed reference to a third friend (likely the Duchesse de Longueville) serves to make clear. Sablé’s friendship with d’Andilly, shared with the third friend, bespeaks a reciprocity that would not have been possible by relying on gendered roles in galanterie. United through common spiritual values in the defense of Port-Royal, Sablé and d’Andilly do not make gender difference the keystone to their relationship. Their spiritual friendship allows for a more reciprocal, even egalitarian relationship that extended into the non-spiritual realm. Of course, not all of Sablé’s friendships evoked the deep affection found in her epistolary exchanges with Arnauld d’Andilly. But after her retreat to Port-Royal, all of them, in spite of their differences, existed on a continuum between the spiritual and the worldly ideal. In a broader context, these friendships can be viewed as part of the evolving relationship of the sacred to the secular in early modern France. As Daniel Gordon has argued, seventeenth-century sociability, which necessarily implied friendship, was a crucial step toward the Enlightenment’s redirection of faith away from the transcendent and toward society itself.107 Gordon contends that writers such as Morvan de Bellegarde “welded the idea of [sociability] onto the idea of the holy,”108 taking a step closer toward this sacralization of society. At the point of convergence between the sacred and the secular, the amical ties between Sablé and her friends demonstrate how this incipient sacralization of society opened up new forms of engagement between men and women, gesturing beyond both galanterie and spirituality. In this sense, Sablé’s salon can be said to prefigure later bonds between men and women who eschew both romance and spirituality in the pursuit of the work and pleasures of friendship. In the next century, for instance, the amical ties between philosophes and salonnières follow this path.109 But the increasing secularization of society did not necessarily bring with it a greater acceptance of mixed-gender friendships. And if we fast-forward to the present, our culture’s reluctance to explicitly acknowledge friendships between men and women is all the more striking because they are so prevalent. As one chapter in a longer story that remains to be told, the Marquise de Sablé’s example leaves us with more questions than answers. And no doubt the most pressing is how our predominantly secular culture can integrate male-female friendships into the range of human relationships it holds to be valid and worthwhile.

 See Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 118–26. 108  Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty, 126. 109  See Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Even critiques of Goodman’s account do not dispute that mixed-gender friendships were the backbone of Enlightenment salon culture (see, for instance, Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle [Paris: Fayard, 2005]). 107

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Chapter 11

From My Lips to Yours: Friendship, Confidentiality, and Gender in Early Modern France Peter Shoemaker

Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion lies not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar this would be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him…. —Maurice Blanchot, Friendship

In the unfinished manuscript of his L’amitié à la Renaissance, the late historian Michel Rey devotes a handful of suggestive pages to the ethics of la parole amicale, the words that friends exchange with one another. In early modern culture, he argues, such exchanges offered the promise of the most elusive kind of knowledge—the intimate understanding of self and other. By shedding the masks imposed by social commerce and sharing their innermost secrets, friends entered into a specular relationship in which the merging of identities led paradoxically to self-discovery. In a double movement, the other became familiar at the same time that the self became other, and thus a potential object of knowledge.1 Rey briefly traces the fortunes of this ideal, from the Renaissance to the baroque era of Balthasar Gracián, when the knowledge gleaned from friendships increasingly became an instrument of social and political power, rather than an end in itself. 1  Michel Rey, L’amitié à la Renaissance: Italie, France, Angleterre, 1450–1650 (San Dominico: European University Institute, 1999), 179–86. One of the most eloquent descriptions of this dynamic can be found in Montaigne’s description of his friendship with La Boétie in “De l’amitié.” The two knew each other, Montaigne writes, “to the depths of their entrails” (“au fin fond des entrailles”). See Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and V[erdun]-L[ouis] Saulnier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), 190.

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In this essay, I propose to revise and expand Rey’s insights in two ways. First, following period usage, I will examine the discourse of “confidence” (confidence or confiance) in a range of French sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 While maintaining, as a heuristic device, Rey’s contrast between the expressive and instrumental conceptions of la parole amicale, I will argue that the distinction was often blurred. The ethics of confidentiality, I will suggest, occupied a nebulous borderland between private and public, sentiment and the law. The second part of my argument will deal with the question of gender. The discourse of confidentiality, like the discourse of friendship, often relies implicitly, if not explicitly, upon the assumption that the parties are male. This assumption was not universal, however. There was an important counter-discourse, primarily expressed in literary works, that questioned the masculinist subtext of confidentiality while strategically redeploying its ethical framework. I will examine the treatment of confidentiality and its complex relationship to publicity in two early modern women authors: Marguerite de Navarre and Madeleine de Scudéry. The Confidential Imagination In his essay “Sur l’amitié,” Charles de Saint-Évremond (1610–1703) places confidence at the heart of friendship. He begins with an account of the constraints and pressures of civil life, and the feelings of frustration and reticence that they engender in individuals.3 Those who live on the public stage, especially, long to heed the voice of nature, to surrender to their inclinations, and to open their hearts to true friends: Do you need loyal counsel? Who can give it to you but a friend? To whom will you confide your secrets, to whom will you open your heart, to whom will you discover your soul, if not to a friend? What a burden it would be to turn in on oneself, to have only oneself as confidant in one’s affairs and pleasures.4

Saint-Évremond picks up a number of commonplaces from an established “friendship tradition.” Following Francis Bacon, for instance, he writes of the public shame attached to certain passions, the almost physical discomfort that one endures when one is forced to bottle them up, and the pleasurable volupté (sensual delight) that is experienced when one is able to share them with a 2  These sources, we shall see, establish an intimate connection between the two senses of confidence—the trust that one places in another and the act of sharing intimate personal information. 3  See Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 114. 4  “Avez-vous besoin de conseils fidéles, qui peut vous les donner qu’un Ami? A qui confier vos secrets, à qui ouvrir vôtre Cœur, à qui découvrir vôtre Ame qu’à un Ami? Et quelle gêne seroit-ce d’étre tout resserré en soi-même, de n’avoir que soi pour confident de ses affaires et de ses plaisirs” (Charles de Saint-Évremond, Œuvres en prose [Paris: Didier, 1969], 4:311; my translation).

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trusted friend.5 (In “Of Friendship,” Bacon compares the unveiling of the heart to the use of medicinals to dilate other organs such as the liver, the spleen, the lungs, and the brain for the evacuation of waste matter.6) He similarly echoes Bacon when he comments on the solitude of princes who, for lack of true friends, are forced to unburden their souls to favorites, often compromising their authority. Finally, Saint-Évremond comments suggestively on the prevalence of confidants in literature, noting that they are not merely literary devices, but rather that they testify to a human need to give voice to certain kinds of inner experience. When we give verbal expression to experience, he notes, the nature of the experience itself changes: “worries become less burdensome, pleasures more intense, all troubles diminish.”7 Indeed, when there is no one there to listen, poets adopt the expedient of talking to the wind, to streams, to trees, and to other inanimate objects.8 The conception of confidence described by Saint-Évremond is closely related to the ideal of sinceritas that John Martin has identified as one of the Renaissance’s legacies to modern culture. Spurred by humanism and the Protestant Reformation, the understanding of human nature shifted from an emphasis on the human being’s kinship with God in the exercise of reason toward a focus on the passions and their individualized expression. Martin’s visual metaphor for this ideal is the image of the “proffered heart,” drawn from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593). Ripa represents sincerity as a woman holding out her heart in her hands for all to see (see Figure 11.1).9 Modern theorists, such as philosopher Laurence Thomas and sociologist Alan Silver, have argued that the experience of confidence is central to the psychology of friendship.10 Following Kant, they see friendship as the purest form of the social act, of entering into communion with another human being. In Kant, we achieve this communion not through the performance of moral obligations—for the obligations that we owe to a friend are no different from those that we would owe to any human being—but through self-disclosure.11 Apart from the workaday constraints of social life, the protected space of friendship allows the individual to flourish independently of the evaluations of others and the norms of society.  Saint-Évremond, Œuvres en prose, 4:312.  Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 81. The medical discourse of confidence can be traced back to Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. See Plutarch, Moralia I, trans. Frank Cole Babbit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). 7  “les inquietudes se rendent plus legeres, les plaisirs redoublent, toutes les peines diminuent” (Saint-Évremond, Œuvres en prose, 4:311; my translation). 8  Bacon had commented that “a Man were better relate himselfe to a Statua, or Picture, than to suffer his Thoughts to passe in smother” (Essayes, 82). 9  John Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Palgrave: Houndmills, 2004), 104. 10  Alan Silver, “Friendship and Trust as Moral Ideas,” European Journal of Sociology 30 (1989): 275; Laurence Thomas, “Friendship,” Synthese 72 (1987): 227. 11  Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Lewis Infield (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1963), 205–6. 5 6

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Figure 11.1 “Sincerity.” From Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, or Moral Emblems (London, Benjamin Motte: 1709).

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We should be cautious, however, not to seek a transhistorical “essence” of confidence. Generally, in a Kantian and post-Kantian context, confidence is divorced from the realm of ethical obligation. Indeed this is essential to the nature of confidence: only when the element of obligation has been removed can two individuals freely express themselves to one another. In the early modern context, however, it is impossible to make a sharp distinction between confidence-asdisclosure and normative ethical and social obligation. In contrast to later accounts of friendship, which tend to eschew “special duties” toward friends, many early modern sources acknowledge the quasi-legal, practical dimension of the relationship. While they frequently evoke the ideals of disinterested friendship or total self-revealing sincerity, they also hint at a more complicated and ambivalent landscape, in which friendships shade into business partnerships, political cabals, and patronage networks. Marks of intimacy between friends, for example, were not merely the exterior expression of a pre-existing, private sentiment. Especially between two men of differing rank, they could also be ostentatious signs of what the English called “countenance,” or favor.12 In his Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), Dominique Bouhours describes how confidence could function as a kind of countenance: “when we reveal to someone what another has confided to us,” he writes, “we let him know that we possess credit, and that we are asked for our opinion.”13 Secrets, here, are social currency—the tangible signs of one’s social and political capital, one’s proximity to power. And of course it goes without saying that early modern confidence had other instrumental functions in the rough and tumble of the grand monde as well. In a culture without the institutions characteristic of civil society (a free press, transparent government institutions, etc.), word of mouth was a particularly important mechanism for exchanging information. Especially at court, timely access to secrets and other information could provide a significant strategic advantage.14 Given its social importance, it should not be surprising that confidence had its own special code of conduct. Although early modern sources differ in some respects regarding this code, certain leitmotivs run through the entire literature. In particular, the ethics of confidentiality in early modern France closely follows the customary duties regarding dépôts (or deposits).15 In his Traité des depots (1782), the jurist Jean Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy specifies the specific nature 12  Rey, L’amitié, 52–3; Silver, “Friendship,” 280; Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 280. 13  “en declarant à une personne ce qu’une autre nous a confié, nous luy faisons entendre que l’on a creance en nous; que l’on nous estime, & que l’on nous consulte” (Dominique Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène [Paris: Sébastien Mabre-Cramois, 1671], 159–60; my translation). 14  On secrecy in early modern Europe, see Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009). 15  Felicity Baker, “Remarques sur la notion du dépôt,” Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 37 (1966–1968): 57–83.

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of a dépôt: a dépositaire agrees to receive something from a déposant and hold it in safekeeping until such time as it can be returned to the latter.16 One of the distinguishing characteristics of this kind of contract was gratuity. French jurisprudence recognized the existence of charitable contracts (contrats de bienfaisance), legally binding agreements in which the weight of obligation fell solely on one party. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition generally required that both parties benefit from a contract (this is known as “mutual consideration”), the consent of the contracting parties was sufficient in the Roman tradition followed in France. Thus, while the dépositaire could demand that he receive compensation for expenses incurred in the safekeeping of a dépôt, he could neither demand payment for his services nor use it for his own benefit.17 Any profit accrued had to be returned to the déposant. Legally, in essence, it was as if the object were not in the possession of the dépositaire. This is an important concept and explains some of the specific legal principles attached to the dépôt, such as the fact that it could not be repossessed in a saisie of the possessions of a dépositaire.18 The other distinguishing feature of the dépôt was the explicit clause (“loi précise”) that imposed secrecy on the dépositaire.19 Even if a dépôt was stolen property, the dépositaire was expected to maintain the anonymity of the déposant when returning the property to its rightful owner. Aublet de Maubuy insists on the universal opprobrium attached to those who violate the “sacred law” of the dépôt and deplores the increasing tolerance for breaches of faith in his own time, a sure mark of the “corruption des mœurs” of a society.20 He notes that the famous courtesan Ninon de Lenclos loyally kept a dépôt for her lover Jean Herault de Gourville long after their relationship had ended. She reportedly commented that “I only did what a trollop would. To misuse a confidence or repudiate a deposit is something as horrible, in my eyes, as if I had murdered you in order to take your purse, even though I might have done it with impunity.”21 The dépôt represents a kind of limit of the law, a place where formal legal principle and informal private conduct intersect. Legal sources such as Aublet de Maubuy and Samuel von Pufendorf typically assume that the dépôt involves tangible property, but in his Traité de l’amitié (1703), Louis de Sacy extends the principle to the exchange of secrets. What is a secret, he reasons, other than something that we entrust for safekeeping to another? It follows that a secret is a 16  Jean Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy, Traité des dépôts nécessaires, judiciaires (Paris: L. Cellot, 1782), 1. 17  Aublet de Maubuy, Traité, 25. 18  Aublet de Maubuy, Traité, 111–13. 19  Aublet de Maubuy, Traité, 27. 20  Aublet de Maubuy, Traité, 27, 40, 121–2. 21  “je n’ai fait que ce que doit faire même un catin. Abuser de la confiance, nier un dépôt est quelque chose à mes yeux d’aussi horrible, que si j’eusse été vous assassiner pour m’emparer de votre bourse, quoique j’aurois pu le faire plus impunément” (Aublet de Maubuy, Traité, 38; my translation).

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dépôt and that a confidant is duty-bound to make no personal use of the secrets in his/her keeping.22 In a suggestive analogy, Sacy compares the confidant to a strongbox: his/her duty is to hold a confidence in safekeeping and only “open” himself or herself to the person who possesses the key (the confiding friend): “The dépositaire should hold in the manner of strongbox: his only function is storage. He must not open except for the one who has the key. Anyone else who wants access must break in.”23 It is significant that Sacy insists that respecting the sanctity of confidence is a matter of “public law” and not “private interest.”24 In contrast to Kant, he does not situate confidence outside of the world of civil society, with its obligations and duties. Rather it is a foundational element of the social order, which depends on trust and credit among individuals. An enigmatic drawing by Francisco Goya, entitled La confianza (c. 1797–1798), gives visual expression to Sacy’s notion of a human lockbox. This drawing depicts two figures, each of whom is inserting a key into one of the many locks covering the other’s body (see Figure 11.2). Here we have a stark counterpoint to Ripa’s sinceritas iconography: the self is a hiding place full of secret, locked compartments. Goya seems to suggest that we are all constantly walking around with the confidences of others hidden away inside of us. The flip side of sincerity is thus the distrust and reticence that are required to keep confidences. The notion of confidence as dépôt is a commonplace of the early modern literature on the subject. In his 1671 Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, for instance, Dominique Bouhours writes that: “we are masters of our own secrets, but we are not masters of those of others. These are deposits that we are not at liberty to do with as we please.”25 And François de La Rochefoucauld distinguishes between sincerity and confidence in a réflexion on confiance, effectively providing a gloss on the Ripa and Goya images: Although sincerity and confidence are related, they are nonetheless different in several respects. Sincerity is an opening of the heart that shows us as we really are; it is a love of truth, a reluctance to disguise oneself, a desire to compensate for our faults, and even to minimize them by taking credit for acknowledging them. Confidence does not leave us so much freedom. Its rules are more stringent, it demands more prudence and restraint, and we are not always free 22

 “Je viole le dépôt, si j’en use. Nulle occasion, nul prétexte ne peut m’en donner le droit” (Louis de Sacy, Traité de l’amité [Paris: J. Barbou, 1724], 142; my translation). 23  “Le dépositaire doit posséder à la maniere du coffre, tout son office est de renfermer. Il ne doit s’ouvrir que pour celui qui a la clef; il faut que tout autre qui veut y fouiller le brise” (Sacy, Traité, 142; my translation). 24  Sacy, Traité, 169. Confidence has its limits. Most notably, one has prior obligations to God, country, and family that limit its scope (122, 133). The balance between keeping faith in confidence and fulfilling obligations toward the state is a recurrent theme during the period. For an extreme position that places friendship above even reason of state, see Montaigne, Essais, I.28.191. 25  “nous sommes maistres de nos propres secrets; mais nous ne sommes pas maistres de ceux d’autruy: ce sont des deposts dont nous ne pouvons pas disposer” (Bouhours, Entretiens, 177; my translation).

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Figure 11.2 Francisco Goya (1746–1828). La confianza. Sanguine wash with red chalk on paper. Museo Nacional del Prado.

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to do as we wish. It is not simply a matter of us, and our interests are mixed up with the interests of others. It requires a great deal of tact not to reveal the secrets of others when we open ourselves up, and to resist the temptation of increasing the value of what we are offering by giving away what does not belong to us.26

Sincerity is an opening of the heart, a complete and unequivocal gift of the self, motivated by love of truth and the pursuit of virtue. Confiance is something altogether more limited, since it is not just a matter of us and our own concerns, but rather of our relationships with others. It requires a great deal of discretion to reveal our own secrets without revealing those of others, with which they are inevitably entangled. The crucial insight here is that there is always something social about confiance/confidence that necessarily limits the possibility of total disclosure. Balthasar Gracián makes a similar point in his Oracle (1647), when he enjoins that “Let no one be entirely in your confidence nor you in his” and asserts that “the closest intimacy allows for exceptions.” We never completely reveal ourselves to a single person; rather the revelation of the self is distributed across our manifold relationships with others. We reveal one thing to one person, another thing to another, strategically: “hence you eventually disclose everything and withhold everything by making a distinction between individual members of your circle.”27 La Rochefoucauld and Gracián question whether total disclosure is possible when the self is caught in a complex web of obligations and social entanglements. Confiance, they suggest, depends on a carefully honed sense of tact and a healthy respect for distance. Gender and Confidence Scholars have often noted that traditional friendship, from antiquity through the early modern period, was a largely masculine affair, excluding women.28 Sacy contrasts the freedom of friendship with both the pressures of public life and the obligations of marriage: 26

 “Bien que la sincérité et la confiance aient du rapport, elles sont néanmoins différentes en plusieurs choses: la sincérité est une ouverture de coeur, qui nous montre tels que nous sommes; c’est un amour de la vérité, une répugnance à se déguiser, un désir de se dédommager de ses défauts, et de les diminuer même par le mérite de les avouer. La confiance ne nous laisse pas tant de liberté, ses règles sont plus étroites, elle demande plus de prudence et de retenue, et nous ne sommes pas toujours libres d’en disposer: il ne s’agit pas de nous uniquement, et nos intérêts sont mêlés d’ordinaire avec les intérêts des autres. Elle a besoin d’une grande justesse pour ne livrer pas nos amis en nous livrant nous-mêmes, et pour ne faire pas des présents de leur bien dans la vue d’augmenter le prix de ce que nous donnons” (François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1995], 186; my translation). 27  Balthasar Gracián, The Oracle: A Manual of the Art of Discretion, trans. L. B. Walton (New York, NY: Dutton, 1962), 248–9. 28  Jeffrey Merrick, “Male Friendship in Prerevolutionary France,” GLQ 10, no. 3 (2004): 407–32; Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 114; Judy Greene, “The Work of Friendship,” GLQ 10, no. 3 (2004): 319–37.

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Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France When it is necessary to appear in public, they [men] will follow established usage without hesitation. They will adjust their discourses and their actions to social appearances. But when it comes to choosing a friend, they will base their decision upon interior qualities, which alone are worthy of consideration. In marriage, one must consider [the spouses’ social and economic] positions: these have important implications, especially when it comes to children. Marriage is an estate where one cannot, with impunity, disregard financial matters. Empire is foreign to friendship.29

Public life and marriage are both portrayed, here, as incompatible with the ideals of friendship, which require that matters of social convention, rank, and selfinterest be set aside, so that the two parties can be on equal footing. Only then can there be a genuine harmony between inner feeling and outer expression. The sharing of confidences, moreover, was an important aspect of the “business” of early modern masculine friendship—the pooling of information, the trafficking in influence, the testing of alliances, and so on. The model for many of the French treatises on sociability during this period was Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation (1554), which was written by a male secretary for other male secretaries who had a professional responsibility for the management of secrets.30 Other treatises were written for male courtiers and focused on campaigns to gain the favor of the prince.31 And of course it was an oft-repeated stereotype that women could not keep secrets. Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde (1698) is particularly harsh toward the female sex: Ardelise’s impatience to leave your company comes solely from her itch to divulge your secrets, which she reveals everywhere to the first comer. She is a little like those who have caught fire, or who have something burning in their hand: they shake it off as soon as they can.32

Although the itch to reveal secrets is not unique to women for Bellegarde or his contemporaries, indiscretion is consistently seen in terms of a femininity that 29  “Quand il faudra représenter en public, ils suivront sans affectation les usages établis. Ils ajusteront leurs discours & leurs démarches à tout ce qui environne les hommes; mais dès qu’il s’agira de faire choix d’un ami, il ne se régleront que sur les qualités interieures, à qui seules il appartient d’en décider. Dans le mariage on doit mesurer les conditions; elles influent sur ses suites & sur ses charges, & particulièrement sur l’établissement des enfants. C’est un engagement où l’on ne peut guere mépriser impunément la fortune. L’amitié ne reconnoit point l’empire” (Sacy, Traité, 58–9; my translation). 30  Stefano Guazzo, La civile conversation (Lyon: Jean Beraut, 1580). 31  See, for example, Nicolas Faret, L’Honnête homme (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970). 32  “[L]’impatience où [Ardelise] est de vous quitter, ne vient que de la demangeaison qu’elle a de divulguer vôtre affaire, qu’elle raconte d’un bout à l’autre au premier-venu; elle ressemble en quelque maniere à ceux à qui il est tombé du feu, ou quelque chose de brûlant sur la main, ils le secoüent le plûtôt qu’ils peuvent” (Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde, Réflexions sur la politesse des mœurs [Paris: Guignard, 1698], 25–6; my translation).

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threatens the integrity of friendship. The repeated references to liquids, fountains, basins, and barrels in the texts of the period point to the feminine “leakiness” associated with confidence. Thus in his Entretiens, Bouhours writes that “As soon as something has passed through one’s mouth, it spreads like water from a fountain, which goes from one basin down to the next”33 and Jacques Esprit compares unfaithful confidants to “cracked vessels that leak as soon as you fill them.”34 Finally, Aublet de Maubuy notes that married women were legally under the authority of their husbands and thus not competent to receive or make dépôts on their own account, except in the case of wills.35 The practical applicability of the law of the dépôt to the case of verbal confidences is unclear, and it seems highly implausible that any such prohibition could be enforced. It is nonetheless significant that married women were theoretically incompetent to act on their own behalf in the matter of dépôts, which served to frame the ethics of confidentiality. Some male authors do provide a more balanced account. Bouhours, for instance, provides contrasting views on female discretion through the two speakers in his dialogue. Eugène provides the standard misogynistic account of female gossip, commenting that “they are almost all like echoes, which repeat what you say to them.”36 Ariste, by contrast, insists that not all women lack discretion. Indeed, considerations of modesty and virtue have greater weight for them than for men, fostering reserve and secrecy. Moreover (and here his reasons are less charitable), women are by their nature deceptive and secretive. Finally, he notes that it is easier for women to keep secrets since they have less of a role to play in the “commerce du monde.”37 More significantly, there is a counter-tradition of works written by women that reframe the terms of the ethics of confidence. Some of the more probing explorations of gender and confidence are not found in moral literature, but rather fiction. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1558) contains a number of stories that upend gender expectations regarding confidence. Indeed, the three most psychologically developed stories in the collection—novella X (Floride et Amadour), novella XXI (Rolandine), and novella LXX (Marguerite’s version of the Châtelaine de Vergy)—all deal with confidence and gender. Novella LXX picks up the medieval tale of the secret love of the Châtelaine de Vergy (“dame du Verger” in Marguerite’s version) and her male lover. As in previous versions, the story revolves around a series of indiscretions. The gentleman-lover reveals his secret amorous liaison to his duke in order to prove 33

 “Dés qu’une chose a passé par plus d’une bouche, elle se répand à peu prés comme l’eau des cascades, qui va de bassin en bassin” (Bouhours, Entretiens, 183; my translation). 34  “vaisseaux felés qui s’enfuyent à mesure qu’on les remplit” (Jacques Esprit, La fausseté des vertus humaines [Paris: G. Desprez, 1678], 186–7; my translation). 35  Aublet de Maubuy, Traité, 446–8. 36  “elles sont presque toutes de la nature des echos, qui redisent tout ce qu’on leur dit” (Bouhours, Entretiens, 159; my translation). 37  Bouhours, Entretiens, 162.

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that he does not harbor dishonorable intentions toward the duke’s wife. The duke, in turn, informs his wife, who is concealing a secret passion for the gentleman. These revelations, coupled with the wife’s own indiscretion to the Châtelaine herself at a fête, shatter the delicate relationship between the two lovers and lead to the Châtelaine’s death. Her last words, before she expires, express a shift from confidence in men to confidence in God: “excuse the fault that an excess of love has made me commit, for I have perfect confidence in You alone.”38 The suicide of the gentleman quickly follows, and the duchess is duly punished for her indiscretion by her husband, who kills her. The reader, however, is left wondering whether she is any more guilty than the duke. Indeed each of the three has broken a solemn oath to protect a confidence and each of these breaches takes place within the context of a different kind of relationship: courtly love, in the case of the gentleman, who reveals his lady’s identity; friendship, in the case of the duke, who betrays the gentleman’s secret; and marriage, in the case of the duchess, who violates what we might call “conjugal privilege.” And yet the duchess is punished, while the duke goes on to effectively repeat his indiscretion by retelling the story to his assembled court. There is a revealing discrepancy, moreover, between the punishment meted out in the novella and the judgments expressed in the frame tale. The lesson that the female devisants take away from the story is unambiguous: beware of bestowing your affection on men, and if you do, keep your affairs secret. The focus of blame is thus shifted from the duchess to men generally, who are faithless and cannot believe that an amorous woman might remain chaste: “men are so mischievous that they cannot believe that a great love can be accompanied by virtue.”39 This last point highlights one of the particularities of Marguerite’s version of the tale: the Châtelaine keeps her sexual virtue. Both novella X and novella XXI pick up the theme of the abuse of confidence and in both cases it is again men who are at fault. In novella X, Amadour falls in love with Floride, who is above his social station. In order to get close to her, he courts and marries her confidante Aventurade and becomes “l’homme de confiance” of Floride’s mother, managing the most delicate of her household affairs. These actions prove to be the preliminaries in a campaign to gain the confidence of Floride herself. In a long interview with her, Amadour confesses his love, but insists that he neither wants to marry her nor do anything that would tarnish her virtue and thus make her less worthy of being loved. All he desires, he insists, is her “amour” and “fiance.”40 Despite Floride’s hesitations, Amadour manages to gradually win her confidence, consoling her when she winds up in a loveless marriage with the duc de Cardonne. When Floride is finally prepared to accept Amadour as “sûr et parfait ami,” Aventurade unexpectedly dies. Floride tries to console Amadour, but he takes advantage of the opportunity to attempt 38

 “excusez la faute que trop d’amour m’a fait faire; car en vous seul j’ai ma parfaicte confiance” (Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron [Paris: Flammarion, 1982], 481). 39  “la malice des hommes est telle, que jamais [ils] ne pensent que grande amour soit joincte à honnêteté” (Navarre, Heptaméron, 485; my translation). 40  Navarre, Heptaméron, 103–4.

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to seduce, and then rape, her. In novella X, confidence thus appears as a slippery slope, vulnerable to the insistent pressures of desire. Like the Châtelaine, Floride ultimately opts to take Christ, who has delivered her from her passion, as her “husband and friend.” Finally, novella XXI tells the story of Rolandine, whose father is unwilling to let her marry. Deciding to take charge of her own fate, she enters into a secret, chaste marriage with a bastard. The substance of their relationship is essentially verbal, consisting primarily in the consolation that they take in each other’s company. Although they are forbidden to meet, they find occasions to talk, whether through the neighboring windows on a courtyard, or in church under the pretext of going to confession. The fact that churches and chapels are one of their favored places to meet is undoubtedly not a coincidence. While there might seem to be something sacrilegious about hiding their relationship under the cloak of religion, the frame narrator is hardly censorious; instead, the cluster of positive values associated with confession—an open heart, consolation, etc.—seems to color their relationship. As a number of critics have noted, Marguerite uses this story to explore the notion of a marriage based on perfect friendship between a man and a woman.41 Rolandine’s relationship with the bastard is both a marriage of choice and a marriage without consummation, rooted in the ideal of confidence, of finding someone to whom, in adversity, you can reveal your innermost thoughts. Throughout the novella, the sanctuary of friendship is compared favorably with the court of public opinion associated with others, most notably the queen. These others are constantly trying to transform the private relationship between Rolandine and the bastard into public discourse, by spying on them, putting together the shreds of a ripped up love letter, and so on. As in novella LXX, Marguerite thus sets up a contrast between modes of communication: the private, intimate communication between friends and the circulation of sensational news in the court. Ultimately the bastard is unfaithful, but Rolandine remains true to her ideal of friendship and maintains her confidence in God to the end.42 Novella XXI thus echoes the Novellas X and LXX: confidence is proposed as the basis of the most profound and respectable feelings between men and women, including marriage, but it is revealed to be an impossible ideal. The fault, however, does not lie with a female incapacity for discretion or true friendship, but rather with the men who betray, manipulate, or simply tire of the rigorous ethos of confidence. To quote Ullrich Langer, “Marguerite de Navarre has reworked in women’s favor a tradition that seemed to say that only men are capable of the generous virtue which characterizes perfect friendship.”43 All three novellas suggest that the ideals and aspirations associated with confidence (transparency, trust, release from anxiety, etc.) cannot ultimately be realized in the imperfect world of men, but rather only in union with God.  See, for example, Langer, Perfect Friendship, 128.  Navarre, Heptaméron, 219–22. 43  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 142. See also Reinier Leushuis, “Mariage et ‘honnête amitié’ dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre: des idéaux ecclésiastique et aristocratique à l’agapè du dialogue humaniste,” French Forum 28, no. 1 (2003): 29–56. 41 42

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Confidence as an Allegory of Publication in Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène Whereas Marguerite despairs of the possibility of a durable friendship between a woman and a man, Madeleine de Scudéry makes mondain male-female sociability the foundation of her literary production. Confidence is a central theme in a number of Scudéry’s writings, including her novels Artamène (1649–1653) and Clélie (1654–1660), as well as several of her stand-alone conversations. In a conversation entitled “De la confiance,” published in her Nouvelles conversations de morale (1688), the characters hew closely to the “friendship tradition” by presenting confidence as one of the primary consolations of friendship: But how is it possible to live, Timarette continued, without having confidence in someone? I’d rather die. Indeed, when I share my afflictions with a friend, I receive some consolation, even if she says nothing. And if I have experienced some pleasure, I recall it and experience it more intensely when I converse with her.44

In their discussions of confiance, Scudéry’s characters often take care to maintain what we today might call gender-neutral language: “But a man of good breeding, continued Périnte, and a woman with good sense will not share the secrets that have been entrusted to them with people for whom they have affection.”45 Man and woman: the ethos of confidence embraces both sexes, though as we shall see the duties are distributed unevenly. In the “Histoire et conversation de l’amitié” (1686), the speakers debate whether members of the opposite sex can really share confidences. Alcionide suggests that a lady might well prefer a female friend, because “there are a hundred little things that one can’t tell a male friend.”46 Belinde’s response is that a genuinely virtuous woman would not have “criminal secrets” that she would be unable to share with a man. Indeed she suggests that there may in fact be an advantage to confiding in a male confidant: amongst themselves, women can be competitive, as they aspire to the same kinds of excellence (beauty, virtue, etc.), and this makes candor difficult. Male interlocutors present no such problem. Scudéry’s conversations are dialogical in nature and they often leave questions such as these in suspense, without providing a definitive answer.47 44

 “Mais quel moyen de vivre, reprît Timarette, sans avoir confiance en quelqu’un? J’aimerois autant mourir; en effet, quand je dis ce qui m’afflige à une amie, j’en reçois de la consolation, quand mesme elle ne parleroit point; & si j’ay eû quelque plaisir, je le rappelle & le redouble en m’en entrenant avec elle” (Madeleine de Scudéry, Nouvelles conversations de morale [Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1688], 2:644; my translation). 45  “Mais un honneste homme, reprît Périnthe, & une femme qui aura l’esprit bien fait ne livreront pas les secrets qu’on leur aura confiez, aux personnes pour qui ils auront de l’amour” (Scudéry, Nouvelles conversations, 645–6; my translation). 46  “il y a cent petites choses qu’on ne dit pas à un Amy” (Madeleine de Scudéry, La morale du monde ou conversations [Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1686], 1:194; my translation). 47  On the genre of the conversation, see Delphine Denis, La muse galante: poétique de la conversation dans l’œuvre de Madeleine de Scudéry (Paris: Champion, 2000).

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Nonetheless, the thrust of her work, taken as a whole, is to open up the “friendship tradition,” and more specifically confidence, to a broader range of associations, including female-female friendships and female-male friendships.48 In the “Histoire de Sapho,” an episode from Artamène, Scudéry develops the theme of female-male confidence in directions that have important implications for how we think about female publication during the period. Sapho’s tale is a parable of female writing, with the protagonist of the story evoking en abyme Scudéry herself, who often used the pseudonym “Sapho.” One of its primary themes is the difficulty faced by women who choose to write and publish. A noble lady, Sapho bitterly reflects, loses part of her nobility when she writes.49 In a culture committed to the principle that overt learning does not suit the female sex, women who write books become public curiosities and objects of rumor and ridicule as “learned maids” (“filles savantes”). Scudéry does not, of course, reject female learning as such; rather she is suggesting that women should wear their learning nonchalantly, with a certain grace. The trick is to deploy the fruits of learning—wit, sparkling conversation, etc.—without the least hint of pedantry. One of Sapho’s greatest frustrations is therefore that she is often talked about in the same breath as her rival Damophile, who flaunts her learning and takes credit for works written by a male acquaintance. Sapho takes the opposite tack, disguising the authorship of her published writings behind the names of male confidants.50 She thus fends off the unwelcome curiosity of the public, which is constantly seeking to spy upon her literary production. The full truth of Sapho’s authorship is reserved for her closest friends. The narrator of the “Histoire de Sapho” is Démocède, the brother of Cydnon, Scudéry’s confidante. Démocède is thus lucky enough to be allowed to see what Sapho writes and he marvels at the beauty and elegance of her art, on the one hand, and her modesty and unwillingness to take credit, on the other.51 It is of course a favorite technique of Scudéry and, more generally, the heroic literature of the period to have a confidante tell a hero’s or heroine’s story.52 By putting the flattering portraits of heroes and heroines in the mouths of third parties, novelists avoid the problem of having characters breach the canons of modesty by singing their own praise. In the “Histoire de Sapho,” the effect of this device is to present the truths of the human heart and of literary creation as secrets to which only Démocède’s listeners and the reader are privy. Sapho thus defines a confidential space where female writing is able to flourish because the diffusion of literary works is restricted to a select few and because the identity of the author is concealed behind the name of a male friend.  Langer, Perfect Friendship, 177.  “[Elle] perd la moitié de sa noblesse” (Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2005], 475). For ease of reference, I will refer to this abridged edition. 50  Scudéry, Artamène, 478–9. 51  Scudéry, Artamène, 468. 52  As René Godenne points out, the vast majority of Scudéry’s “histoires” are related by confidants. See René Godenne, Les romans de Mademoiselle de Scudéry (Geneva: Droz, 1983), 97n1. 48 49

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Even when a friend has been admitted into Sapho’s confidence, however, there is still the possibility of additional layers of reserve and reticence. One of the central episodes in the story occurs when Phaon, who is in love with Sapho and wracked by jealousy, seeks to uncover her feelings with regard to him by carefully subjecting every line of her poetry to close scrutiny, like a kind of amorous detective. Digging through her papers, he discovers a love poem in which the identity of the man for whom she has tender feelings is replaced by three asterisks (“***”). The asterisks, here, represent the last line of defense against unwanted intrusion into matters of the heart, one that Phaon is unable to penetrate. While jealousy blinds Phaon to the fact that his name fits perfectly into the meter of the poem, its effect on his rival Tisandre is to foster lucidity. When Phaon accidentally lets the poem drop during a boating excursion, Tisandre immediately guesses the name of the object of Sapho’s affections and inscribes it on the tablet. He is discreet enough, however, to keep the information to himself. Sapho responds to this turn of events with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she is mortified that her passion has been inadvertently published. On the other hand, she has tender feelings for Phaon and desires to relieve his jealous suffering. Ultimately the solution involves a chain of confidences in which Sapho conveys a vague reassurance to Phaon via Cydnon and her brother Démocède. This sets the stage for reconciliation in which “in the end, they told each other everything, and made such a sincere exchange of their most secret thoughts that everything that was in Sapho’s mind entered into Phaon’s and everything that was in Phaon’s mid passed into Sapho’s.”53 This male/female-relationship-as-confidence echoes Novella LXXI of the Heptaméron and anticipates Sapho’s eventual decision to leave Lesbos and pursue a chaste relationship with Phaon outside of marriage in the utopian pays des Nouveaux Sauromates, where the law courts punish faithless lovers. This entire episode can be understood as an allegory of publication. On the one side, there is Phaon’s insatiable jealously, which drives him to seek out everything that Sapho has written in order to uncover the truth of her heart. In this respect, Phaon is not fundamentally different from the public, whose interest in Sapho’s writing derives from a kind of voyeuristic curiosity. Both seek a univocal “key” that will unlock the mystery of Sapho’s heart.54 On the other side, there is Sapho, who seeks to regulate and control the flow of information through a network of close confidants who act to maintain a margin of privacy around her. A similar dynamic applies to Sapho’s story itself within the framework of the novel. 53

 “[Ils] se dirent, à la fin, toutes choses, et firent un échange si sincère de leurs plus secrètes pensées qu’on peut dire que tout ce qui était dans l’esprit de Sapho passa dans celui celui de Phaon et que tout ce qui était dans celui de Phaon passa dans celui de Sapho” (Scudéry, Artamène, 563; my translation). 54  On Scudéry’s use of keys, see René Godenne, “Pour une seconde remise en cause des clés supposées des romans de Mademoiselle de Scudéry,” Littératures Classiques 54 (2005): 247–55. See also Mathilde Bombart and Marc Escola, “Clés et usages des clés,” Littératures Classiques 54 (2005): 5–26.

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As we have already observed, the reader’s knowledge of Sapho’s thoughts and experiences come to him/her by way of Démocède and Cydnon (her confidante and Démocède’s sister).55 Some of this information reaches Démocède in something roughly like “real time,” within hours or days after Cydnon’s exchanges with Sapho. Much of the information, however, is delayed. Démocède mentions at one point that he learned “everything that he did not know about [Sapho’s] life”56 after Sapho’s departure from Lesbos to pursue a relationship outside of marriage with Phaon in the pays des Nouveaux Sauromates. Other information comes from other confidants, but the pattern stays the same: Phaon learns, and then communicates, the details of Sapho’s story long after she has left Lesbos, never to return again. The question of timing is crucial here. As we noted before, Sapho is anxious to protect her privacy, to avoid becoming an object of public discourse except on her own terms. It is thus significant that many of the events of her story are not known by the narrator at the moment that they happen, but rather much later. Before her departure for the pays des Nouveaux Sauromates, Sapho leaves a kind of testament, to be opened after one month. Wills and testaments are among the most powerfully charged issues in the ethics of confidence, and indeed of friendship in general. Theorists from Montaigne to Derrida have identified the true test of friendship as not what we do when our friends are with us, but rather how we honor their memories in death.57 The information that filters back to Démocède via Cydnon and other confidants can similarly be seen as a kind of literary testament, a way of sharing her story with a group of close friends (and the reader) on Sapho’s terms. Here, Sapho is not exactly dead, but she is effectively “dead to the world” and indeed the inhabitants of Lesbos speculate that she has met her demise. This staggered release of information to a limited audience—akin to what media professionals today call a “controlled leak”—represents a radical alternative to the fantasy of the univocal “key,” which offers the promise of a simple one-to-one correspondence between text and world that would reveal the secrets of the heart once and for all.58 The use of confidants within Scudéry’s novels, in particular to delay/control publication, parallels the collaborative practices of composition and publishing in the seventeenth century.59 Much of Scudéry’s writing was a product of a process of collaboration and reworking that involved, to various degrees, her entire social circle. Male acquaintances, including her brother Georges de Scudéry  Scudéry, Artamène, 518, 526, 535.  “tout ce que je ne savais pas de sa vie” (Scudéry, Artamène, 466; my translation). 57  Jacques Derrida, “The Politics of Friendship,” Journal of Philosophy 85, no. 11 (1988): 632–44. 58  The question of keys and confidants is raised in Scudéry’s subsequent novel, Clélie, when Amilcar disguises his own story as a third-person narrative (“Histoire d’Artaxandre”). See Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, histoire romaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 216–17. 59  On authorship, collaboration, anonymity, and pseudonymity during this period, see Nathalie Grande, Stratégies de romancières: de ‘Clélie’ à ‘La princesse de Clèves’ (Paris: Champion, 1999), 283–92, and Delphine Denis, La parnasse galante: institution d’une catégorie littéraire au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2001). 55 56

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(whose name appeared on her novels) and her close friends Paul Pellisson and Jean-François Sarasin, served as confidants, intermediaries between herself and her various publics—whether the exclusive inner circle/salon of the samedis (Scudéry’s salon) or a broader reading public.60 Scudéry’s contemporary, Mademoiselle de Montpensier similarly depended upon the talents of her secretary Jean Regnault de Segrais, who assumed a variety of roles from collaborator to publishing agent. In assuming these roles, male confidants assumed the ethical responsibilities traditionally associated with confidence, which demanded that they put aside their own self-interest and safeguard the material that was put in their trust until the time came to release it in a controlled manner. The focus of confidence, here, is not so much on the idea of secrecy, per se, as on entrusting others with one’s business. The 1798 Dictionnaire de l’Académie hints at this aspect of confidence in its definition of an homme de confiance: “We call a man upon whom we can count in our most secret affairs an homme de confiance. [Example:] ‘To have a personne de confiance speak about some affair or another.’”61 An homme de confiance is not merely someone who keeps secrets, he is also someone whom you have speak (faire parler) on your behalf.62 Scudéry’s case differs from Sapho’s in that the former was widely known to have written her novels: her authorship was an “open secret,” so to speak. Nonetheless, the use of male proxies and collaborators who spoke on her behalf allowed her to hold back at the same time that she put forth, to take credit for her work while maintaining the posture of the enlightened amateur. Entrusted to a confidant, the literary work retained the aura of the ruelle, of an exclusive group of friends. It was not a public speech act, but rather a private or semi-private one. Epilogue: A Literature of Confidence? Many of the issues that I have broached in this essay resurface in other works of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have dealt elsewhere with the complex status of confidence in the Princesse de Clèves, whose aveu dramatizes the reader’s problematical access to the intimate world of marriage.63 The Princesse  On Pellisson’s work on the Chroniques des samedis, see Myriam Maître, “Les escortes mondaines de la publication,” De la publication entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. Christian Jouhaud and Alain Viala (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 249–65. 61  “On appelle Homme de confiance, L’homme qu’on emploie ordinairement dans les affaires les plus délicates et les plus secrètes … Faire parler de quelque affaire par une personne de confiance” (Dictionnaire de l’Académie française [Paris: J. J. Smits, 1798]; my translation). 62  Nicolas Schapira, in his recent study of Valentin Conrart, has shown how a man of letters could construct his literary reputation not by writing original works, but rather by preparing texts entrusted to him in confidence for various sorts of publication. See Nicolas Schapira, Un professionnel des lettres au XVIIe siècle (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2003). 63  Peter Shoemaker, “Lafayette’s Confidence Game: Plausibility and Private Confession in La Princesse de Cleves and Zaide,” French Forum 27, no. 1 (2002): 45–58. 60

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de Clèves, however, is not a unique case: the theme of a wife confiding her passion for another man to her husband is a recurrent topic in other fictional narratives of the 1670s, 1680s, and beyond.64 As for the technical questions regarding narrative craft raised by the use of confidants, they resurface in the preferred genres of the eighteenth century, including the pseudo-memoir and the epistolary novel.65 This confidence tradition arguably reaches a point of crisis in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. From the two Discours to the Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, by way of La Nouvelle Héloïse and Les Confessions, we encounter an almost pathological obsession with themes that are by now familiar: a wife revealing her adulterous passion to her husband, the fantasy of a chaste confidential relationship between members of the opposite sex, the betrayal of secrets, the desire to use confidential channels to control publication, the appeal to the reader as confidant, the ultimate recourse to confidence in God, etc. Rousseau, of course, is an exceptional case, and his preoccupation with these questions is arguably a symptom of his discomfort with late eighteenth-century civil society, with its emerging public sphere and emphasis on easy sociability. Kant’s position is more typical: as we have seen, he has little room for an ethics of confidentiality in his conception of civil society, relegating it instead to the private sphere (as a form of consolation). The increasing shift to an anonymous public forms arguably finds its ultimate literary expression in the nineteenth-century novel, which generally eschews confidants in favor of impersonal, anonymous (and often ostensibly “objective” and “omniscient”) narrators. Reacting against the excesses of critical theory, Thomas Pavel has recently proposed that we return to the notion of the work of literature as a highly personal, intimate gesture, like “a confidence from a parent or a friend.”66 His point is that literary communication requires a certain generosity and receptivity: as readers we are entrusted with the sense of the work. Early modern French narrative, I have argued, is particularly attuned to this aspect of literature: texts such as the Heptaméron, Artamène, and the Princesse de Clèves seek to engage readers not as anonymous consumers or as impersonal critics, but rather in personal terms.

64  See, for instance, Marie-Catherine de Villedieu’s “Histoire de Bellegarde” in Les désordres de l’amour (1676), the anonymous “La vertu malheureuse” in the Mercure galant (1678), François Callières’s “Le mari confident avec sa femme” in Nouvelles amoureuses et galantes (1678), Du Plaisir’s Duchesse d’Estramène (1682), and Catherine Bernard’s “Le comte d’Amboise” (1689), to name but a few. The motif is picked up in the eighteenth century, most notably by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Nouvelle Héloïse. 65  For the use of confidants in drama, see Valerie Worth-Stylianou, Confidential Strategies: The Evolving Role of the “Confident” in French Tragic Drama (1635–1677) (Geneva: Droz, 1999). 66  Thomas Pavel, Comment écouter la littérature (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 39.

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Index Note: Page numbers in bold type indicate illustrations. Abelard, Peter 163–4 absolutism 21, 23, 46, 61, 62n5, 136, 158, 159n58, 175n71 Académie des puristes (Piat Maucours) 139, 145–7 Académie française 21–3, 140, 144, 147–8, 153, 157, 159 Achilles 19, 97–8, 125 aggression 8, 17–18, 61–79 AIDS 3, 5 alliances 15n75, 33, 34n6, 35, 44, 57n92, 58n96, 72, 74–5, 256 Almquist, Katherine 31n1, 33n5, 38n22, 39 amour-propre (self-love) 226, 227, 231, 239n83 Anderson, Penelope 8n42, 14 aristocracy ethos of 64, 136, 155, 229–30 friendship and 229–30 patronage and 44, 138, 143, 154, 176 women of 10n45, 56, 171n47, 176, 195, 224, 232 Aristophanes 103, 106, 113 Aristotle, on friendship 6, 7, 14, 15, 20, 27, 104, 112, 121, 122, 134, 141, 154, 162, 169n35, 229 Arnauld, Agnès 204, 223, 233n63 Arnauld, Angélique Benedictine Rule and 191–8 friends of Jeanne de Chantal 194–8 Saint-Cyran 13, 190, 201–7, 215 Sales 200–206 Zamet 193, 201 friendship tropes and 25–6, 190–91, 208–9, 211, 213–17, 228n44 journée du guichet and 189, 192, 193, 200, 215

and reform of Maubuisson 194–5 of Port-Royal 189, 193, 200 Sablé and 223, 233, 235–6 Arnauld d’Andilly, Angélique de SaintJean 192–3, 206, 215, 223 Arnauld d’Andilly, Antoine 166, 196, 207, 223, 233n63, 235, 237 Arnauld d’Andilly, Robert 223, 225n27, 231, 233n63, 235–8, 244–5 Aublet de Maubuy, Jean Zorobabel 251–2, 257 Augustine of Hippo, Aurelius 92, 109, 113, 209, 214 on corrupt human nature 7, 198, 206, 227, 231, 242 Rule of Saint 26, 196–7, 206 Augustinianism 227, 242 authority of husbands 12, 257 royal 69, 71, 77, 208, 249 of women 10, 200, 217, 237–9, 243 Bacon, Francis 248–9 Balzac, Jean-Baptiste Guez de 136, 138, 140, 144, 145n23, 152–3, 158 Bardin, Pierre, Le Lycée 154–6 Benedict, Rule of Saint 191–2, 209, 211–12 Beroaldo the Elder, Filippo 83, 85, 87–8 Bilinkoff, Jodi 13n60, 162n7, 198–9, 202–5, 221n10 Blanchot, Maurice 247 Boccaccio 19, 83, 88, 97–8 body diseased 174–9, 182, 185 female 8, 24, 81, 89, 176–9, 182, 185 of friend 4, 41–2, 79, 175–6, 182 male 81–2, 85–6, 89, 94–5 soul/mind and/vs. 19, 41, 82, 84–5, 88–9, 92, 96, 112, 165, 176–9, 183–4, 199 Boswell, James 51

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Boucher, Jean 131–3 Bouhours, Dominique 251, 253, 257 Bourbon, Nicolas 139, 144–5, 149 Boutcher, Warren 40n27, 52 Bray, Alan 3–4, 14, 16–17, 31, 43–4, 46–7, 61, 79, 100n5, 251n12 Briau, André 91, 120 brothers friends as 2n6, 19, 51, 83–7 as rivals 59 wedded 3, 16, 43, 44, 46, 57, 175 Carr Jr., Thomas 192n11, 206 Castiglione, Baldassare 18, 127n34 Catholic League 11, 129n40, 131, 133 Catholic Reformation 9, 12, 13, 190, 197, 199, 214 Champier, Symphorien Ficino and 83–5, 88–90, 94–7 on friendship 81–98, 119–21 Literarum humaniorum apologia 91 on male-male love 90–92, 95–8 Neoplatonism and 7, 18–20, 81–98, 119–21 as physician 91, 120 Plato and 90–97, 120–21 querelle des femmes and 18–19, 81–2 The Ship of Virtuous Ladies and 18–19, 81–98, 120–21 Chanut, Pierre 166, 170, 171, 187 Chapelain, Jean 140n9, 142, 144–5, 149–52, 155, 158 charity in friendship 99, 112, 193, 195, 228n44, 234 vs. friendship 2, 26 Charles d’Orléans 100, 101, 103, 116, 117 Charron, Pierre 48–9 chastity 26, 92, 95, 178n79, 208–9, 211, 213–15, 221 Chauveau, François 146–7 Christ abbot as 191, 193 as friend 28, 104, 115, 163, 193, 196, 220, 234, 259 Christianity early 13, 162, 190–91, 199 evangelical 19–20, 26, 101, 103, 106, 110, 112–15, 123 Plato and, see Neoplatonism

Christina of Sweden 171–3 Chrysostom, John 13, 209 Cicero, Marcus Tullius on friendship 6, 15, 16, 104, 112, 121, 125, 137, 141, 154, 163–5, 169n40, 173, 179, 229, 239n84, 244 on otium 138, 155 civility as manners 64, 170–71, 186 Republic of Letters and 135 retreat and 138, 141–2 salon and 154–5 state-building and 18, 62 violence and 77, 79 civilizing process 17–18, 24, 61–2, 64, 66–8, 71, 75, 78, 79, 175n70 Clark, Elizabeth 13, 209n114 Clerselier, Claude 166, 167, 180, 187 Coëffeteau, Nicolas 139, 146 collaboration 8–9, 13, 27–8, 102, 240, 263–4 Colletet, Guillaume 22–3, 139, 144–7, 149–52 academies and 144–5, 147 Gournay and 145 Illustres bergers and 145, 147, 149–50 Richelieu and 146 Théophile de Viau and 144–5, 147, 149, 151 community friendship as 20, 101, 105–6, 111–13, 117, 204–5 friendship vs. 2, 29n106, 190–91 confession 7, 202–5, 259, 265 confessors 13, 26–7, 190, 196, 198–200, 202–5, 209, 220 confidants 263–4 confidence (confiance) dépôts and 251–3 friendship and 8, 27–8, 175–6, 247–65 gender and 28, 175–6, 255–9, 261–4 Kant on 251, 265 publication and 262–4 readers and 28, 47, 265 women writers and 28, 263–4 Conley, John 225n25, 226n31, 227n38 Conrart, Valentin Académie française and 140, 145, 147–8 circle of 139, 140, 145, 148–9 confidence and 264n62

Index friendship and 149, 152 as patron 149–50 vs. publication 153 Rambouillet and 144 as secrétaire du roi 151 consent 36, 114, 252 contract dépôt as 252 friendship as 99, 186, 252 marriage as 12, 148 social 12, 184n101, 186 contractarianism 24, 165, 184n100, 187 conversation 18, 48, 71, 122, 135, 136n2, 138, 140, 141, 155, 172n52, 175n70, 209, 247, 256, 261 correction in friendship 17–20, 24, 27, 50, 62–79, 123, 239 of friendship 83, 88 self- 77–8 textual 63 correspondence, see epistolarity courtiers 18, 61, 117, 137, 144, 256 courtly love 9–11, 20, 221, 258 Crawford, Katherine ix, 6, 20, 82n6, 84, 120n7, 129n39 credit 19, 251, 253 d’Ailly, Abbé Nicolas 224, 232, 237–8 daughter covenant 57–8, 146 prodigal 19, 92–3 de Brach, Pierre 32, 48–9, 51, 56 dedications as gifts 20, 23, 40, 49n64, 50, 54, 99, 100n4, 102, 114–16, 166n24 to women 9, 12, 17–20, 56, 100–105, 114–17, 168, 177, 238n79 dépôts 251–3 Deresiewicz, William 2n7, 219 De Rozières, Jacques Marguerite de France and 20, 24, 100–103, 105, 114–17 Toxaris (translation) 20, 100–103, 105, 114–17 Derrida, Jacques Politics of Friendship 116–17, 263 de Sales, François, see Sales, François de Descartes, René Chanut and 166, 170, 171, 187

295

Clerselier and 166, 167, 180, 187 Discourse on Method 166, 186 as doctor 24, 164, 174–8, 182–5 dualism of 8, 24, 165, 177–8, 185 Elisabeth of Bohemia and 161–88 enemies of 167, 175, 180, 183 friends of 165–7, 170–71, 180, 187 on friendship 165–73, 183–4 mechanism of 177, 185 Passions of the Soul 183 Principles of Philosophy 168, 177 stoicism of 24, 164–5, 168–9, 171, 174, 177, 179, 181–6 desire erotic 2, 4–6, 11, 28, 82, 84–96, 103–4, 106–7, 109–14, 120, 122, 133, 178n79, 219, 221, 231, 259 for friendship 202 vs. friendship 127, 141 Despenser, Hugues le 132–3 Des Périers, Bonaventure vs. Ficino 106–7, 111–13, 117 Marguerite de Navarre and 100–106, 109, 111, 113–14, 117, 123 vs. Plato 110, 114 Queste d’amytié (Lysis translation) 19–20, 100–108, 116, 123–4, 127 “Queste d’amytié” (poem) 109–14; as valet de chambre 101, 103 Diana 26, 171, 208 dissimulation 25, 74, 140 doctor, see physician Dupuy, Jacques and Pierre, cabinet of 138–40, 143–6 Du Ryer, Pierre 139, 145 Edict of Nantes 11, 21–2 education of boys 36, 54, 86, 148, 158 mondain 9, 64, 144, 158 Plato on 6, 122, 129, 133 of women 2, 57, 158, 184 Edward II 132–3 Elias, Norbert 17, 61–2, 64, 67, 78, 154 Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine as Abbess of Herford 180–81 Descartes and 161–88 vs. dualism 8, 24, 177–8, 185 family of 170–75

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femininity of 8, 24, 165, 171, 179, 182, 184–5 on friendship 165, 173–83 “ignorance” of 174, 177–80, 182 materialism of 169, 177–8, 180, 185 mechanism of 177, 185 non-marriage of 170–71 as patron 175n70, 176, 185 sickness of 174–9, 182, 185 skepticism of 24, 164, 173–4, 180–86 Elmarsafy, Ziad 23, 159n58 Enlightenment 79, 135, 139, 245 Épernon, Jean-Louis Nogaret de La Valette, duc d’ 131–3 epistolarity between worldly and spiritual spheres 222–3, 232–5 friendship and 13, 24, 27, 52, 151–2, 161, 163–5, 175, 183, 186–7, 194, 228n44, 232–5, 244–5 gender and 8n41, 13, 24, 161, 163–5, 183, 186–7, 244–5 vs. presence 15, 25, 40, 151–3, 234, 242n100 as public 13, 55, 59, 140 as record of literary production 225, 242 Republic of Letters and 153 equality in friendship 6, 9, 24–5, 121–2, 162, 164–5, 170, 173, 182–7, 198 gender 12, 19, 82–3, 165, 182–7 spaces of 23, 121, 154 see also friends, as same; inequality Erasmus, Desiderius Adages 7, 182n94 Colloquies 65 Toxaris (translation) 20, 102–5, 113n44, 114–17, 164n16 erastēs (Amyamoureux) 106–7, 121–2, 132–3 erṓmenos (Amyaymé) 106–7, 121–2, 132–3 eros 6, 21, 82, 90, 98, 121–2, 129; see also homoeroticism Esprit, Jacques on confidants 257 on friendship 225–7 on galanterie 236–7

La Rochefoucauld and Sablé and 27, 240 on women as friends 230–31, 257 exemplarity crisis of 4, 134 emulation and 4, 41, 43, 62, 193, 209 friends and 14, 16n80, 17, 36, 43, 98, 134, 141, 164, 209, 220 narrative 97, 98, 104 exile 18, 63, 68–9, 76–8, 101, 144, 165, 178, 183, 212 faith 101, 104, 116, 210, 224, 245 works of 110n33, 115, 116 Faret, Nicolas 10, 140, 145, 156–8, 256n31 fathers 19, 33–5, 59, 64, 84, 86, 92–3, 95, 149, 166n22, 170–72, 174n60, 175n71, 189, 191, 200, 230, 259 Ferguson, Gary 4n19, 5, 14n66, 31n1, 43n45, 44n48, 62n5, 129n39 Ficino, Marsilio on beauty 84–5, 88–9, 95–6 Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love 81–2, 85, 88–9, 96–8, 103 in France, see Neoplatonism Letters 92, 94 vs. lust 89–92, 97–8 Lysis on Friendship (translation) 19–20, 101–9, 111–13, 117, 120–21 male-male love and 18–20, 82–4, 89, 96–8, 107, 112, 117 Pietro de’ Medici and 102 “Platonic friendship” of 119–20, 124 Foucault, Michel 5, 61 Foxe, Lord Richard, Bishop of Winchester 20, 102, 116–17 Fraisse, Jean-Claude 169 François I as friend of Marot 66–72, 78–9 vs. Protestants 63, 68, 76 state-building and 18, 62 freedom of expression 21, 74, 77, 143, 148, 173, 174, 239n84, 251, 253 friendship and 16, 47, 220, 255 intellectual 36, 171, 186, 237 in retreat 23, 49 from women’s influence 23, 159 French language, reform of 136, 145–7

Index French literature 136, 144 Frénicle, Nicolas 144–5, 149–50 friend body of 4, 41–2, 79, 175–6, 182 as confidant 247–65 God as 15, 20, 28, 101, 104, 106–11 patron as 63, 68, 78–9, 115–16, 149–50, 175n70, 251 sovereign as 18, 128–34, 208; see also François I; Henri III friends age of 16, 48, 124, 126, 128–9, 170 brothers as 2n6, 19, 51, 83–7 neighbors as 101, 112, 113 as pair 43, 101, 104, 106, 112–14, 117 as same 16, 24, 99, 101, 112, 113, 117, 165, 173, 179, 182, 184, 186, 230; see also Aristotle; equality; friendship, perfect sisters as 17, 26, 101, 111–13, 116–17 wedded 3, 16, 43, 44, 46, 57, 175 friendship aggression in, see aggression aristocracy and, see aristocracy benefits of 1, 13, 14 between men 2–3, 4–5, 7, 8, 11–12, 17–18, 19, 20–23, 26, 31–56, 62, 64–71, 75–9, 83, 84–90, 97–8, 104–5, 112–14, 119–34, 135–59, 162, 164–7, 175, 176, 180, 190–91, 206–8, 226, 229, 255–7 between men and women 9–14, 19–20, 24, 26–8, 101, 117, 138, 155–9, 170–87, 199–206, 219–25, 229–31, 236, 239–43, 245, 255–9 canon 5, 7, 18, 19, 21, 31, 100, 104, 114, 119 charity and, see charity community and, see community confidence and, see confidence creativity of 5–8, 164 decline of 2–3, 14, 16–17, 62, 79 difference in, see friends, age of; gender; inequality; rank galanterie and, see galanterie gender and, see gender historiography of 2–6, 9–11, 13–14, 17, 19, 25, 28–9, 31–2, 44, 61–2, 65, 72, 79, 99–100, 106, 116–17,

297 121, 135, 142–3, 154, 161–2, 169, 175–6, 183, 190–91, 198–9, 203–4, 208, 245, 247–8, 255, 259; see also Anderson; Bilinkoff; Blanchot; Bray; Clark; Derrida; Ferguson; Foucault; Fraisse; Furey; Gil; Gordon; Habermas; Hutson; Hutter; Jaeger; Kristeller; Lilti; McGuire; Montaigne, “Of friendship,” queer approaches to; queer studies; Rey; Shannon; Silver kinship and, see kinship; see also brothers; sisters literature and, see literature love and, see love marriage and, see marriage monastic 25, 190–92 mourning in 3, 16, 84, 263 Neoplatonic, see Neoplatonism perfect 3–4, 6, 10, 12, 14–17, 18, 20, 26, 31, 43, 44, 46, 47–8, 51–2, 56–7, 59–60, 101, 109, 111, 113, 115, 121, 141, 164, 173, 181, 259 as philia, see philia philosophical 24, 163–4, 186–7 Plato and, see Neoplatonism; Plato presence in, see presence public 17, 32, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58–9, 62n5, 100n5, 122–3, 128–9, 132, 149, 153, 168, 171, 175, 177 rank and, see rank reciprocity in, see reciprocity rhetoric of, see rhetoric self and, see self sexuality and, see eros; heterosexuality; homoeroticism; homosexuality; love; Neoplatonism; Plato; sexuality; sodomy sociology of 1–2, 16, 25n101, 45, 139n6, 219, 249; see also Deresiewicz; Granovetter; Pahl; Silver sodomy and, see homoeroticism; homosexuality; Neoplatonism; Plato; sodomy spiritual 9, 13–14, 24, 26–7, 105, 109, 111–12, 114, 162–3, 183, 185, 189–217, 221–2, 228, 229, 231–9, 245

298

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tyranny and, see tyranny utility of, see utility virtue in, see virtue Furey, Constance 13n59, 99n1, 113n44, 137n3, 163n8 galanterie age and 237n76 danger of 221–2, 236 as/vs. friendship 10, 13, 27, 170–71, 221–2, 236–7, 239, 243, 245 gender roles in 155–6, 221–2, 236–7, 239, 245 vs. honnêteté 155 salons and 10–11, 13, 24, 26–7, 144, 155–6, 144, 170 see also Sablé, on galanterie; Sales, vs. galanterie Gassendi, Pierre 143, 146, 147, 151, 163n11, 166–7, 174, 177, 180, 183, 185 Gaston, duc d’Orléans 138, 139, 149, 153 Gaveston, Piers 132–3 gender civilizing process and 61–2 confidence and 28, 175–6, 255–9, 261–4 correction and 74 difference 20, 24, 81–2, 101, 155, 173, 176, 179, 182, 184–6, 231, 245 equality 12, 19, 82–3, 165, 182–7 as friendship criterion 72, 113, 116, 121, 152, 164, 173, 184 friendship, cross-, see friendship, between men and women galanterie and 155–6, 221–2, 236–7, 239, 245 hierarchy 121 ideals 6, 89, 95, 155, 164 inequality 157, 162 negotiated in friendship 8, 24, 62, 78, 184 neutrality 176, 231 norms 4–5, 78, 83–4, 87–8, 155–6, 185, 208, 213, 215, 245 service and 64–6, 68, 72 social capital and 22, 156 generosity 13, 43, 130, 152, 168–9, 173, 228, 236, 259, 265 gift-giving 19, 20, 49, 66n15, 79, 103, 114–16, 132, 175–6, 182, 255

Gil, Daniel 75–7 Gisippus and Titus 83–90, 95, 98 God beauty as 85, 89, 94 confidence in 258–9, 265 desire and 106, 107, 109–10, 112, 114, 124, 233 as perfect friend 15, 20, 28, 101, 106, 109–11, 115, 221 service to 202, 203 union with 101, 111, 113, 162–3, 179, 259 Godeau, Antoine 144, 149, 150, 158 Gordon, Daniel 23, 121, 154, 245 Gournay, Marie le Jars de De l’égalité des hommes et des femmes 25 as editor of Montaigne’s Essays 57–9 literary field and 138, 139, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152 Marolles and 146, 147, 152 Montaigne and 17, 32, 57–60, 163n12 vs. salon women 155–6 Goya, Francisco 253, 254 grace 20, 109–10, 114, 202–6, 213–15, 224 Gracián, Balthasar 247, 255 Granovetter, Mark 1n4, 16, 43–6, 48, 56 Guazzo, Stefano 256 Guise, Henri duc de 133 Guise, Louis II Cardinal de 133 Habermas, Jürgen 23, 154 Harcourt, Henri de Lorrain, comte d’ 139–40 Héloïse 163–4, 179 Henri II 128 Henri II de Montmorency 138, 153 Henri III 11, 21, 62n5, 119, 124, 128–34, 157n52 Henri IV (Henri de Navarre) 10n45, 131, 134n59, 136, 176 heresy 11, 68, 76, 125n24, 180, 189, 201, 207 heterosexuality 12, 19, 26, 83–4, 87, 89, 95, 106, 124, 134n59, 205, 219 heterosociality 9–12, 24; see also galanterie; salons hierarchy homoeroticism and 128, 134 Plato on 6, 121, 122 social 17, 21, 35, 66, 74, 154, 176–7, 183

Index Hippothales 107, 114, 121–6 Hobbes, Thomas 12, 24, 166–7, 174, 184–6 Hoffmann, George ix, 6, 14–17, 25, 28, 29n106, 61n1, 64n8, 126–7 homoeroticism 2, 4, 6, 7, 11–12, 19–20, 81–98, 112–13, 117, 119–34 homosexuality 59, 122, 191 homosociality 6, 11, 19, 20, 87, 89, 98, 106, 117, 123 honnêteté 10, 22, 154–7, 241 hospitality 41, 117, 121, 151 humanists antiquity and 3, 53–4, 102, 126 Aristotelian friendship and 6, 15, 154 correction and 18 evangelical 99–118 homosociality of 19–20, 98 humans according to 75, 249 vs. medieval friendship 2, 15 nobility and 65 patristic texts and 207n97 patrons and 100–106, 123, 125; see also Marguerite de France; Marguerite de Navarre; patronage Platonic friendship and 6–7, 19–21, 81–134 politics and 119, 128–9 Republic of Letters and 15 Wars of Religion and 124–5, 128, 137 see also Champier; De Rozières; Des Périers; Erasmus; Ficino; La Boétie; Lipsius; Neoplatonism; Vigenère Hutson, Lorna 19, 20, 100n5 Hutter, Horst 15n69, 74 idleness, see otium ignorance 67, 73, 107, 110, 174, 177–80, 183, 200, 210, 235 Illustres bergers 140, 145, 147, 149–50 imitation 49, 75, 62, 78 of Christ 115, 196, 198, 199 of famous friends 4, 13 inequality economic 1, 9 in friendship 1, 9, 18, 48, 129–30, 176, 230 gender 157, 162 of rank 18, 59, 129–30, 133, 176, 230

299 sodomy and 129–30, 133 see also friends, age of; equality; gender; rank

Jaeger, Stephen 5n21, 9–11 James I 170, 175–6 Jansen, Cornelius 7n37, 26, 206–10 Jansenism 189, 207, 209, 213–14, 217, 223, 227n38, 232 Jeanne de Chantal 2, 26, 163, 190, 194–6, 198 Jerome 13, 92, 162, 209 Jouhaud, Christian 21–2, 140n7, 142–3, 148n30 Journal des Savants 241–2 Kant, Immanuel 249, 251, 253, 265 kinship friendship and 17, 44, 56, 105, 112, 116–17 friendship vs. 99, 219 see also brothers; sisters knowledge desire for 107, 110, 122 faith and 214 friendship and 24, 165, 169, 173, 179, 183–4 of other 79, 247 and power 18, 247 self- 7, 74, 220, 247 skepticism and 180, 186 utility of 122 women and 158, 217 see also wisdom Koch, Erec 183 Kostroun, Daniella ix, 13, 25–7 Kristeller, Paul 119 La Boétie, Étienne de as Montaigne’s friend 5, 14–17, 32–47, 51, 52, 57, 59, 60, 127, 247n1 as translator of Plutarch 41–2 The Will to Serve 23, 32, 33n5, 36–7, 47 Lafayette, Marie Pioche de la Vergne, marquise de 243 Lafond, Jean 225n25, 227 La Mothe le Vayer, François de 140–43, 146, 150–52 Langer, Ullrich 3–6, 16, 28, 36n13, 44n47, 59n98, 63n7, 106, 121, 259

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La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de collaboration and 239–40 on friendship 225–31 Maximes Christian meanings of 242 friendship in 225–31 misogyny in 229, 242–3 reception of, by women 239–43 Sablé’s promotion of 241–3 Sablé and 225n27, 237n75 on sincerity 253–5 on women as friends 229 La Vopa, Anthony J. 25, 161–2 League, Catholic, see Catholic League leisure, see otium Lenclos, Ninon de 252 Le Roux, Nicolas 130–31 Le Roy, Louis (Loys) 125 L’Estoile, Pierre de 130–31 letters, see epistolarity libertinage 11, 144, 146, 149, 152 Lilti, Antoine 10n46, 22, 245n109 Lipsius, Justus De amphitheatro 54 De constantia 54, 137 Montaigne and 51–6, 59–60 Politica 52–3 literary field 142, 144–6, 148, 152, 155 Longueville, Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, duchesse de 224, 232, 245 Louis XIII 134 Louis XIV 26, 207, 209, 212 love confidence and 257–8, 262 ennobling 9–10, 11 friendship and 6, 7n37, 15, 20, 27, 41, 106–7, 112–13, 117, 119–28, 219–20, 230–31, 239n83, 245 spiritual 12, 195, 222 see also courtly love; eros; heterosexuality; homoeroticism; homosexuality; Neoplatonism; philia; Plato Lucian, Toxaris 99–100, 102, 104, 114–16 Lucilia 92–8 Lysis, see Plato McGuire, Brian Patrick 2–3, 11, 13, 25, 28, 29n106, 190–91

Machiavelli, Niccolò 53, 175, 185 Malherbe, François de 136, 138, 144–7, 149–50, 152 Malvyn, Geoffroy de 48–50 Marguerite de France 20, 24, 100–103, 105, 115–17 Marguerite de Navarre circle of 26, 101, 106, 123 on confidence 8, 28, 248, 257–9 Des Périers and 19, 100–106, 109, 111, 113–14, 123 evangelism of 19, 26, 103, 106, 114, 123 friends of 117 on friendship 257–9 Heptaméron 8, 28, 117, 248, 257–9 Marot and 62–3, 72n32, 78 as patron 19, 100–106, 109, 123 Marolles, Michel de 22, 139, 145–7, 150–52 Académie des puristes and 146 Gournay and 147, 152 Mémoires 146, 152 Marot, Clément aggression of 8, 18, 24, 62–3, 68–73, 75–9 correction and 18, 24, 62–79 François I and 8, 62–3, 66–73, 75–9 as Frippelippes 69–71, 74 masculinity of 8, 18, 65–8, 78–9 as Protestant 18, 63, 68, 72, 76 Renée de France and 18, 19, 63, 71–3, 75 vs. robe nobility 67–9 as roturier 65, 68 as royal poet 8, 62, 64–5, 68, 76–7 vs. Sagon 62, 68–72, 74–9 as secretary 63–4, 71 as valet de chambre 18, 62–4, 66, 69, 77 marriage 2, 8, 12, 14, 16, 42, 162n5, 165, 198, 259, 262–3, 265 companionate 12–13 as constraint 60, 255–6 as contract 12, 43, 148 friendship in 12, 42, 113, 162, 259 in friendship 16, 42–3, 175 vs. friendship 17, 20, 41–2, 113, 255–6 Martin, John 249 masculinity Académie française and 23, 157–8

Index civilizing process and 62 confidentiality and 248 friendship and 5, 6, 8, 18, 27, 31, 68, 73, 162, 164, 176, 223, 226, 229, 244, 255, 256 rank and 65–6, 68, 74, 78, 229 self and 8, 66 stoicism and 24, 164 Maugiron, Louis de 128, 130 Maure, Anne Doni d’Attichy, comtesse de 223, 241 Mazarin, Jules 148, 207 Medici, Catherine de’ 128, 133 medicine, see physician melancholy 174, 181 men as friends with men, see friendship, between men as friends with women, see friendship, between men and women Ménage, Gilles 142, 145n23 Menexenus 105, 108, 122, 126 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène 153 Mersenne, Marin 138–9, 146, 165 mignons 128–34 Miller, Michelle ix, 8, 17–19, 24, 31n1, 44n48 Montaigne, Michel de Bordeaux and 15, 33–6, 38–41, 44–6, 48, 52 on correction 74, 77 Essays “Apology for Raymond Sebond” 54 “Of coaches” 54 “Of freedom of conscience” 37 “Of friendship” 5, 6, 14–17, 29n106, 31–2, 38, 40–42, 44, 46–8, 50, 59–60, 182n94, 221n11, 247n1, 253n24 queer approaches to 5, 14, 31n1 “Of moderation” 42 “Of presumptuousness” 17n82, 58–9, 163n12 “Of vanity” 50–51 “On some verses of Virgil” 42 readers of 16, 47, 60 style of 37–8 female family members of 17, 56

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friends of Charron 48–9 de Brach 32, 48–9, 51, 56 Gournay 17, 32, 57–60, 163n12 La Boétie 5, 14–17, 32–47, 51–2, 57, 59–60, 127, 247n1 Lipsius 51–6, 59–60 Malvyn 48–50 Pasquier 32, 48, 58 Peletier du Mans 49 Ræmond 32, 48–9, 51 on friendship exclusivity of 16, 29n106, 31, 46–7 as marriage 16, 42–3 women as incapable of 16–17, 59 literary friendships of 15, 25, 40–43, 52 otium and 137, 146 politics of 36–7 Montpensier, Marie de Bourbon, duchesse de 12, 171n47, 222, 234n65, 264 Morvan de Bellegarde, Jean-Baptiste 245, 256–7 Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de 12, 236 mysticism 8, 127, 180 Naudé, Gabriel 143, 145, 146 Navarre, Marguerite de, see Marguerite de Navarre Neoplatonism as Christian 109, 111, 120, 123 critique of 125–6 in France 6, 81, 83–4, 89–90, 96, 119–34 friendship vs. love in 119–28 male love in 84–9 Neostoicism, see stoicism novel 28, 72, 170n45, 183, 260–65 Ogier, François 145, 149, 150 Olympias 13, 209 otium 23, 49, 110, 136–42, 148–9, 155, 157–9 Ovid 26, 208 Pascal, Jacqueline 234 Pasquier, Étienne 21, 48, 58 passions 158, 180, 183, 243, 248–9 Patin, Guy 139, 143, 145n24, 146

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Patroclus 19, 97–8, 125 patronage constraint of 23, 148, 157, 171 friendship in 63, 68, 78, 79, 115–16, 149–50, 175n70, 251 friendship vs. 44, 152 humanism and 123, 125 literary field and 139, 143, 149, 151, 154 royal 21, 23, 125, 128, 130, 131, 148, 171 see also protection; women, as patrons Paula 13, 162 Pauline interdictions 189–90, 192, 210 Pavel, Thomas 265 peace 21, 124–5, 128, 186 pederasty 86, 96, 98 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 150–53 Pellisson, Paul 148, 264 Péréfixe, Archbishop Hardouin 209–11 philia 6, 21, 116, 121–2, 129, 132, 134 philosophy honnêteté as 154 moral 8, 27, 162–4, 167, 174, 239n83, 243 political 184, 187 as therapy 22, 164, 169, 178, 179n84, 181 physician 24, 66–7, 91, 93–4, 107–8, 110, 120, 164, 173–7, 179–80, 181n91, 182, 185, 223 Plato Christian interpretations of, see Neoplatonism on eros vs. philia 122 as father figure 93–5 in France, see Neoplatonism on friendship 121–2 honnêteté and 155 Laws 90 Lysis 84, 100, 104–9, 116–17, 121–2, 123–7, 130 male-male love and 82, 90–92, 97, 107, 117, 121–2 Phaedrus 84, 91, 95, 122 Symposium 82–4, 88–9, 91–7, 103, 106, 114, 122 Plutarch 41–2, 249n6 Port-Royal Formulaire crisis and 207–11, 232

friendship at 192, 198, 208–9, 211 Louis XIV and 26, 207, 209, 212 nuns of 189–90, 207–12 Sainte-Beuve on 214–16 “Société des Amis de” 216 universality of 216–17 Port-Royal de Paris, Abbey of 212, 223, 224, 232 Port-Royal des Champs 189, 211–12, 233 Poulain de la Barre, François 12, 25, 184 Princesse de Clèves, La 264–5 protection by friends 143, 152 by patron 63, 66, 71–2, 75, 76, 79, 115, 148, 150 Protestant Reformation 3, 12, 18, 37, 71–2, 76, 219, 249 publication friends and 27, 46, 165, 187, 242, 264n62 non- 150, 152–3, 174, 187, 239 women and 9, 13, 28, 187, 213, 239, 261–4 queer studies 4–5, 14 Quélus (Jacques de Lévis-Caylus) 128, 130 querelle des femmes 18–19, 81–2 Ræmond, Florimond de 32, 48–9, 51 Rambouillet, Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de, salon of 138–40, 143–4, 152, 158 rank (social) in friendship difference of 6, 18, 20, 24, 67, 79, 116, 165, 170–71, 173, 176, 182, 230–31, 251 masculinity and 78 rivalry within 67, 79 readers as confidants 265 as friend 16, 51, 60 spurned 16, 47 women 98 reciprocity, in friendship 6, 9, 20, 21, 100, 115–16, 122, 126, 131, 132, 134, 173, 182, 186, 222, 238, 239, 245 Reeser, Todd ix, 7, 18–20 Regius, Henricus (Hendrik de Roy) 167, 175, 180

Index Renaudot, Théophraste 138–9 Renée de France, Duchess of Ferrara 18, 19, 63, 71–3, 75 Republic of Letters 15, 135, 151, 153–4, 183 Requemora, Sylvie 227, 229n46 retreat 22, 23, 27, 137, 138, 141, 143, 158–9, 232–4 Retz, Jean-François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de 138, 139, 142, 147, 207 Rey, Michel 3, 7, 247–8 rhetoric 24–5, 37, 109, 113, 171, 177, 179, 183–4, 199, 209, 235, 244 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de 141, 147 Académie française and 148, 151, 153–5, 157–8 Saint-Cyran and 190, 207 Ricoeur, Paul 14n66, 25n103 Ripa, Cesare 249, 250, 253 robe nobility 50, 66, 67, 71, 73, 75 Robin (Hood) and Marion 106, 114, 124 Rohan, Marie-Éléonore de, abbesse de Malnoue: 242n99, 242–3 Rozières, Jacques de; see De Rozières, Jacques Sablé, Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Arnauld d’Andilly (Robert) and 225n27, 231, 238–9, 244–5 between worldly and spiritual spheres 222–3, 231–9, 245 egalitarianism of 231 Formulaire crisis and 232 friends of 223 on friendship 225–31 on galanterie 236–7, 239 La Rochefoucauld and 225–31, 239–43 on love 239n83 male-female friendships and 222, 230, 236–7 Maximes 226n31, 238, 239n83, 240 Port-Royal de Paris and 223, 224, 232, 233–6 Port-Royal des Champs and 233 readers and 226–7 spiritual friendships of 231–9, 244–5 on virtue 227–31 Sacy, Louis de 252–3, 255–6

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Sagon, François 62, 68–72, 74–9 Saint-Amant, Marc-Antoine Girard de 139, 140, 144, 145, 147 Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de 13, 190, 198–207, 215 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 214–15, 224 Sales, François de Arnauld (Angélique) and 194, 200, 201 on friendship 2, 12, 219–22, 229, 231, 236 vs. galanterie 221–2 Introduction to the Devout Life 13 Jeanne de Chantal and 26, 163 Order of the Visitation and 26, 190, 197 rule of St. Augustine and 196 salons civilizing process and 61 galanterie in 10–11, 13, 24, 26–7, 155–6, 170 Gournay vs. 155–6 (hetero)sociability of 9, 12, 21–3, 155–9, 221, 239 honnêteté in 10, 22, 154–6 literary field and 138–40, 144 otium in 158–9 Sales and 221 spiritual friendship and 26, 236 writers and 10, 13, 21 see also Rambouillet; Sablé salvation 110, 114, 115 Schachter, Marc ix, 5, 6–7, 8, 19–20, 123, 162n6 Schapira, Nicolas 149, 264n62 Schneider, Robert ix, 15, 21–3, 27 Schomberg, Marie de Hautefort, duchesse de 240–41 Schuurman, Anna Maria van 167, 180 Scudéry, Georges de 139, 263–4 Scudéry, Madeleine de Académie française and 157n52 Artamène 260–64 Clélie 260 on confidence 260–64 galanterie and 237n76 “Histoire de Sapho” 28, 261–4 Nouvelles conversations de morale 260 publication and 9 Sablé and 222

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secrecy 28, 140, 251–3 secretary (secrétaire) 64, 71, 124, 148, 149, 151, 165, 256, 264 Séguier, Pierre 139, 145, 147 Seifert, Lewis x, 9, 13–14, 26–7, 99n1 self confidence and 255 -control 87, 162 -correction 76–8 creation of 7–8, 26, 28, 58, 74, 247 -improvement 18, 64, 77–8, 173, 181, 183–5 -mastery 226 -presentation 50, 75, 130 -promotion 156, 170 secrets and 253 -sufficiency 104 self-love, see amour-propre Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 121, 137, 140, 149, 151, 169 Serres, Jean de 125–6 Sévigné, Renaud de 232–3 Sextus Empiricus 174, 181–2 sexuality friendship and 4–5, 6, 8, 9–11, 12 Montaigne on 37, 41–2 see also eros; heterosexuality; homoeroticism; homosexuality; love; sodomy Shannon, Laurie 121, 183, 198, 208, 211, 239n84 Shapiro, Lisa 184n100, 185 Shoemaker, Peter x, 8–9, 27–8, 143 Silver, Alan 25n101, 249 sincerity 25, 50, 55, 58, 64n8, 75, 171, 179, 211, 249–51, 253, 255, 262 sisters, as friends 17, 26, 101, 111–13, 116–17 skepticism 24, 31, 140–41, 164, 173–4, 180–86 sociability 60, 62, 77, 245, 260 salons and 12, 21–3, 135–59 see also civility; civilizing process; galanterie; honnêteté; salons Socrates Champier on 91, 92n46, 98 Des Périers on 105, 107, 108, 114 Ficino on 104, 106, 108, 111n38, 112n40, 117, 121, 122, 123, 127

as honnête homme 155 in Plato 6, 121, 122, 123, 127 Sodom and Gomorrah 95–6 sodomy Boucher on 131, 133 Champier and 90, 95–8 Ficino on 97 male friendship and 2–3, 11–12, 18, 65, 90, 95, 97, 131, 133 Sorbière, Samuel 163n11, 166–7, 174, 180, 181, 183 Sorbonne, La 66, 67, 68, 69, 101, 201, 207 Sorel, Charles 146 Le Francion 72–4 soul Champier on 82, 85, 88–9, 92, 93 Descartes on 174, 177 Ficino on 111, 112 of friends 41, 42, 47 Plato on 19 spiritual director 190, 198–9 state-building, see civility Stoicism Christianity vs. 241 Descartes and 24, 164–5, 168–9, 171, 174, 177, 179, 181–6 friendship and 7–8, 13, 22, 24, 162, 164, 168–9, 171, 182, 226 gender and 24, 162, 164, 184 Montaigne and 37, 51, 54 Sablé and 241 wars of religion and 137, 162 taste 10, 16, 61, 146, 148, 150, 152, 158, 241 Teresa of Avila 3, 24, 179 Thomas, Laurence 249 Titus, see Gisippus translation 19–20, 41, 83, 96–7, 99–118, 124–5, 148 Turnèbe, Adrien 35, 55 Turner, Victor 150 tyranny, friendship and 26, 168n29, 208–14 utility, of friendship 14, 18, 20, 44, 46, 105, 107, 109, 115, 121, 122, 126, 128, 162, 226 valet de chambre 64, 101, 103

Index Viala, Alain 142 Viau, Théophile de 11, 138–9, 144–5, 147, 149, 153 Vigenère, Blaise de 21, 100n4, 124–5, 127 virility, see masculinity virtue Descartes on 169, 184n100 friends’ cultivation of 6, 8, 14, 22, 24, 44, 64, 162–5, 173, 179, 228 friendship and 27, 44, 99, 101, 124, 170, 172–3, 181, 184, 220, 227–8, 230, 259 honnêteté and 156 love and 83, 97, 98, 258 masculinity of 6, 8, 11, 98, 184, 259 nobility and 229–30 otium and 137 public life vs. 137, 141 vs. sexuality 2, 5n21, 9, 11, 83, 90, 93, 96, 123, 125, 213, 258, 137, 227–31 sincerity and 255 spiritual 228–9, 231 teaching of 179 women and 81, 83, 96, 98, 172–3, 198, 213, 227, 243, 257, 259, 260 virtues Christian 224 condemnation of 240–42 in friendship 220–22 in men 236 practice of 193, 202

305 as vices 227 worldly 224, 231, 259

Wars of Religion 22, 125n23, 136–8, 162 Weber, Alison 24, 179 Wilkin, Rebecca x, 8, 9, 13, 24–7, 31n1, 99n1, 189n1 wisdom 53, 72, 126, 182n95 in friendship 163, 173 stoicism and 138, 170, 172–3, 186 women academies and 157 as authors 9, 156, 248, 261–4 confidence and 256–9, 261–4 as friends with men 9–14, 19–20, 26–7, 101, 117, 138, 155–9, 170–87, 199–206, 219–25, 230–31, 239–43, 245, 255–9 as friends with women 101, 111, 198, 208–9, 212–17, 219–25, 230–31, 239–43, 245 as incapable of friendship 16, 28, 59, 198, 208, 255–9 as mediators of male friendship 19, 71–2, 19, 78, 87, 98, 182n94 as patrons, see Christina of Sweden; Elisabeth of Bohemia; Marguerite de France; Marguerite de Navarre; Renée de France taste and 158 Zamet, Sébastien 193, 201, 204–5, 207