This was the goût moderne, the “modern taste” developed by, among others, Vincent Voiture, Madeleine de Scudéry, Mme de Lafayette, and Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. The eighteenth century witnessed a growing distaste for the goût moderne as the fluffy mannerism of a self-absorbed aristocratic society. Diderot and other philosophes equated its modernity with decadence; national rebirth required something quite different, an uplifting literature of high moral seriousness. Over the last several decades literary scholarship has taken exception to the self-righteousness of this verdict.2 Two interlinked themes have emerged: that the goût moderne was modern in a far more positive sense than its eighteenth-century critics allowed, and that women—or more precisely, the women of le monde—played the central role in forming it and endowing it with cultural authority. In the French monarchy, Mlle de Scudéry has one of her characters observe in a conversational essay on “politeness” (politesse), the conversation of women is more “free” (libre) than in republics.3 Scudéry’s Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653) and Lafayette’s Zaïde (1669–1671) and La princesse de Clèves (1678) were founding texts in the history of the modern novel. Women’s presence as listeners and readers was essential to the formation of a worldly literary culture and the fledgling literary public that emerged around it. Stylistic experiments in constituting a new relation between author and reader—a shift from the rhetorical imposition of authority to a more reciprocal intersubjectivity—simulated the reciprocity expected in the “sociable equality” of polite conversation, of which women were the acknowledged masters. If aesthetic judgment was not individualized in the modern sense, it nonetheless gave more play to the “free” subjectivity with which women, unencumbered by learned rules, seemed especially endowed.
The goût moderne confronts us, however, with a deep paradox that we have not taken sufficiently into account. It is all too obvious that leisure was the way of life of the French old-regime aristocracy. It is so obvious, in fact, that we rarely plumb the alterity with which that way of life confronts us. We observe seventeenth-century polite culture from our side of a great social and cultural divide. One of the defining assumptions of modernity is that labor, and especially intellectual labor in various kinds of professional work, is a vital route to personal and social self-validation. When we speak of labor that is dehumanizing, it is with the certainty that labor ought to confer moral dignity, and indeed that it is essential to the realization of human potentialities. The certainty owes its centrality in modern culture to a concatenation of social and intellectual changes, some of them already underway in the late seventeenth century. One thinks of the Protestant and particularly Calvinist ideal of the calling, the Jansenist recognition of the need for the motive power of self-interest in human societies, and John Locke’s ethical thought.4 The norm of utility in assigning personal worth—of social “usefulness” through labor—is one of the enduring legacies of the Enlightenment, and it has been powerfully reiterated, if also impoverished, in our current saturation in an ideology of immediate market utility. Modern advertising insinuates that disciplined labor is not only materially rewarding, but also emotionally satisfying and even liberating. Enthusiasts of contemporary crime novels and television series will agree, I think, that the detectives, so obsessed by their work that they have little or no personal life, are emblematic of this ethos. Only in work do they find the meaning they cannot do without.
Most pertinent for our purposes, the work ethos permeates the pursuit of equality in modern feminism; among the essential human rights owed to women is the right to equal access to labor and its rewards. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, approved at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, claimed for women equal rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and women’s exclusion from most intellectual labor surely figured in its denunciation of men for endeavoring “in every way that (they) could to destroy woman’s selfconfidence in her powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” Feminists regularly appeal to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, because it makes no distinction between men and women in stating that “everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”
In the light of these lineages of modernity, the norms of le monde and its literary culture were profoundly un-modern. The preeminence of this world rested on a perceived incompatibility between the socially validating freedom of play and the socially invalidating constraints of labor. In the spaces of polite sociability, labor was taboo. Women were the emblems and guardians of a social aesthetic of play that scorned utility, and that required that the performance of intelligence appear to be effortless, untainted by the concentrated and sustained effort that the term “labor” evoked. Hence the paradox of a profoundly unmodern modernity in which gender and status norms were so tightly interwoven as to be barely distinguishable. The paradox reminds us pointedly that, just as perceptions of social institutions and practices are refracted through the lens of gender distinctions, so too gender distinctions are refracted through the lens of status imperatives.5
To avoid presentism in studying seventeenth-century mondanité, I have made the social and cultural logic of un-modern modernity central to my reading of its texts. That is essential to understanding another paradox: that gender and status norms fused to set strict boundaries for women’s performance of intelligence even as they made female thought and speech exemplary for men aspiring to polite cultivation. Awareness of this duality has been implicit, and sometimes explicit, to two rich scholarly traditions, and my agenda here is largely to synthesize them in an effort to grasp the ways in which seventeenth-century French discourses contributed to perceiving and valuing male and female performances of intelligence. The first tradition is one that intellectual historians have not sufficiently engaged: the large and growing corpus of literary scholarship on the texts produced by the sociable and literary culture of le monde. The second tradition can be broadly described as the historical sociology of knowledge. Beginning in late nineteenth-century German sociology, and flourishing today in scholarship in which sociology and cultural anthropology meet, it is indispensable to positioning our texts within structural and normative wholes.
Aisance and Labor
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac’s Oeuvres diverses, published in 1644, included an imagined “conversation” (entretien) with Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, the daughter of a prominent Roman family and the wife of a royal councilor of state. More than a quarter century earlier the marquise had withdrawn from the court of Louis XIII, which she found tiresome and crude. In delicate health after bearing seven children, she preferred not to make the social rounds in Paris. Instead she created a kind of court that brought Parisian high society to her. She herself designed a new hôtel, begun in 1618, with high-ceilinged reception rooms leading into each other and a smaller chamber, known as the ruelle, where she received her guests reclining on her bed. The room was painted blue rather than the usual red or tan, with a matching décor, and the atmosphere was at once elegantly luxuriant and intimate, projecting aristocratic grandeur but offering a retreat from the demands of public life. This “Blue Room” became the fabled archetype for the salons of old-regime France.6
Balzac’s Lettres, published in 1624, used the discursive latitude of the epistolary genre to conduct a high-spirited and mischievous discussion of a wide range of subjects, including politics. The book was a literary triumph in le monde, “so much in vogue,” one of Balzac’s adversaries observed, “that for a long time one has not seen such a small book make such a grand name.”7 In the ensuing querelle about Balzac’s prose among men of letters a central issue was the relative value of tradition and modernity, imitation of the ancients and innovation. Balzac’s critics among the learned attacked his unrestrained ornamental exuberance and his impertinent tone for perverting ancient Greek and Latin rhetoric. His defenders haled him for endowing authorship with an unprecedented free subjectivity.8
Balzac had had high ambitions