As the aesthetic emphasis on appearance suggests, there was something illusory, perhaps even self-deluding, about this taboo on labor. In fact the play of honnêteté—the exclusive concern with giving pleasure, the care to avoid shocking or wounding others, the repression of any instinct to dominate—required a relentless exercise of self-discipline.36 “How much art,” La Bruyère observed in his Characters, “to return to nature! How much time, rules, attention and work to dance with the same liberty and the grace as one knows how to walk, to sing as one speaks, to speak and express oneself as one thinks.”37 The art might be considered an antirhetorical rhetoric—one that could not be learned in “the schools,” but nonetheless had to be mastered. However noble his birth, the individual had to acquire the requisite self-discipline through long practice. It is striking, however, that the interpreters of honnêteté—Scudéry, Méré, and many others—insisted that the art of conversation could not be mastered by reading books. However important reading was in supplying a point of departure for conversation, and in providing the language of “judgment,” it had to remain a “diversion.” Otherwise one’s speech would betray, in Méré’s phrase, “the smell of study.”38 One could learn the art only as an apprentice to one of its masters, within the permeable but self-sufficient space of polite conversation. The social aesthetic needed nothing—not even print—that could be acquired in the world of labor outside it.
At its deepest level, the honnête performance of intelligence can be understood as the social exhibition of a dimension of selfhood. In his study of western European thinking about “the self” since the seventeenth century, Jerrold Seigel has identified a “relational” dimension in which the self “arises from social and cultural interaction, the common connections and involvements that give us collective identities and shared orientations and values, making us people able to use a specific language or idiom and marking us with its particular styles of description, categorization, and expression.”39 The worldly sociability prescribed in the discourse of honnêteté might be described as hyperrelational. In his L’honneste femme, first published from 1632 to 1636, the Franciscan priest Jacques du Bosc, in the tradition of Francis de Sales, sought to keep anchored in Christian ethics women’s obligation to devote themselves to pleasing others, and to diverting themselves, in leisured sociability. Contrary to conventional wisdom that only men could be honnête, he argued that women could be paragons of honnêteté. Du Bosc assured women that a measured worldliness, with no taint of libertinism, was entirely compatible with being a devout Christian. The virtue enabled by God’s grace provides “an interior joy” that does not make one “too melancholy” for “conversation.” Quite the contrary; it is the Christian virtue of charity that “gives us the qualities that render a person amiable in conversation.” “It is necessary, first,” Du Bosc wrote, “to put virtue in the will; after that, knowledge (la science) in the mind (esprit); and finally, gentleness in the countenance.”40 But in the ensuing articulation of the code of politeness little serious attention was given to Du Bosc’s effort to fuse a devoutness infused with divine grace and worldly self-fashioning. In the worldly ethos of constant “diversion,” there was little room for the meditative tradition of solitary prayer, much less for the asceticism, of Jansenist women at Port-Royal and the followers of Mme Guyon’s mysticism of utter abandonment of the self in surrender to the divine will.41
Nor was there anything of modern authenticity about the social aesthetic; any impulse to make transparent the depths of one’s inner self had to give way to what Simmel called “freedom in bondage.” More to the point here, honnêteté rejected what Seigel calls the “reflective” dimension of selfhood, which makes inwardness—introspective self-examination—the route to one’s consciousness of one’s self as “an active agent of its own realization,” often in opposition to social expectations.42 Honnêteté was openly hostile to the most rigorous tradition of intellectual labor inherited from the ancients: the Stoic tradition of askesis, the struggle for self-command at the rational core of human nature, the inner self, in the solitude of intense and repeated meditation. Since the late sixteenth century there had been a neo-Stoic strain in French philosophy, but it was obviously at odds with the feminizing of worldly culture, and particularly with its ideal of aisance. Neo-Stoicism kept virtue manly, as a labor of rational self-control, contrasted with the enslaving imagination that the term “effeminacy” evoked.43 Honnêteté preferred the joys of sociability; to enter solitude by choice, and to try to plumb the inner self, seemed unnatural and futile. In his effort to graft polite learning onto modern urbanity, Balzac dismissed the Stoic idolization of the “reasonable and judicious” sage. The sage was not really meditating; he was in fact merely just “still” or “sleeping” (dormant).44 Several decades later, in an essay on “pleasures,” Saint-Évremond reported to a friend on how he was spending his time in the country. He sought constant diversion, not “profound” truths, not having any desire for “overly long and serious commerce with [himself].” “Solitude,” he went on, has the effect of imprinting on us “je ne sais quel sad and somber (funeste) air by the ordinary thought of our condition.… To live happily, it is necessary to reflect little on life, but to go out often, as it were, outside of oneself.”45
The discourse of honnêteté was no exception to the fact that collective selfimaginings are positional. Its claim to honor used several social referents as foils, defining itself as what they were not. Though honnête sociability was not informal by modern standards, it was clearly a relief from the rigid hierarchical protocol that Louis XIV instituted at court. But as at the highest levels of le monde the Parisian gentleman was also by necessity a courtier, dependent on royal patronage and vulnerable to royal reprisals, caution had to be exercised when it came to the court. Even Méré, who found the court pompous and intellectually vacuous, took pains not to challenge its social and cultural supremacy too blatantly. The discourse of honnêteté was less circumspect in fashioning its other foils, which were representations of exclusively male corporate cultures, identified above all by their control of public knowledge and their uses of public speech. There was the “eloquence” of the law courts, a formal and elaborate oratory, based on classical models, that contrasted sharply with the unstudied ease and simple grace of salon speech.46 And there was the pulpit, another platform for male eloquence. By contrasting itself with these worlds, the discourse of honnêteté asserted its aesthetic superiority over male-controlled forms of expertise and the training in Latinity on which they were founded. It staked its claim to unique value by casting a critical and bemused eye on the rhetorical performances, sometimes ridiculed as “harangues” aimed to intimidate, with which men exercised public authority and ultimately wielded public power.
It is above all in the figure of the “pedant” that we hear the voice of women distinguishing the art of conversation from exclusively male speech. The pervasive caricatures of “pedantry” in the discourse of honnêteté echoed Montaigne’s contemptuous views on that subject, recorded in an essay he wrote sometime in the 1570s; but they also marked a shift in gender values in aristocratic culture in the intervening century or so. Montaigne had ended “Of Pedantry” by observing that “the pursuit of knowledge makes men’s hearts soft and effeminate more than it makes them strong and warlike.”47 In keeping with this view, he extolled the art of “conversation” as a “quarrelsome” exercise in “strong, manly fellowship” that “delights in the sharpness and vigor of its intercourse, as does love in bites and scratches that draw blood.”48 In the contempt for pedantry