Diverse Thoughts on the Lightly Enlightened, circa 17th Century France, Part III
This is the third part of an open-ended series1placeholder exploring currents of not-all-that-serious thought running through the Enlightenment, such as those associated with Saint-Évremond and the Knight of Méré. It is modeled primarily but not exclusively on Pierre Bayle’s Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1683).
5. Diderot the Philosopher
In one of the many letters Denis Diderot wrote to his cherished Sophie Volland, he mentioned burlesque poetry, the feelings it evoked and the impossibility of translation:
“I am reading an Italian burlesque poem that makes me cry alternatively with pain and with pleasure; and then, it is written throughout with a facility, a gentleness, a fineness! and preambles to make one’s head spin.
The desire sometimes takes hold of me to translate portions of it, but there is no way; all its delicate flowers wilt in my hands. These authors who charm so powerfully our ennuis, who steal [ravissent] us from ourselves, to whom Nature put in the hand a magic wand with which no sooner have they touched us that we forget the ills of life, that shadows leave our soul, and that we are reconciled with existence, are to be placed among the benefactors of human kind [genre humain]” (V. 1 172).
My discerning reader, you might have been frustrated with my last Thought, so focused on burlesque poetry and yet so bereft of examples. Diderot was not an honest man by libertine standards–he was “the philosopher” to friends and neighbours–, yet he had a remarkable sensitivity to their values. He charmingly expressed, even in translation, why I shied away from such translations.
One of the challenges with putting 17th Century libertine thought in a philosophical context is that philosophy, like science, was a rather broad and vague notion at the time. The Knight of Méré, a libertine among libertines and central figure in these Thoughts, was called a “philosopher” by a favoured epistolary sparring partner, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (Boudhors XXXIII). He was no more or less a philosopher than Charles Dassoucy’s burlesque adventures were, as he claimed, an example “not only of the science of the world, but the science of Heaven, the science of science.s” (32) That is to say, it may very well have been true in certain respects when the words were written, but is decidedly unhelpful as I am writing these words now.
A second challenge is competing notions of honesty, above all the one presented in Nicolas Ferat’s very popular The Honest Man, that would lead us in a stultifying direction. Ferat’s book was effectively a “how to succeed at court for dummies” or “how to make dumb and be influenced by your prince” or… Libertine thought, as fundamentally social and limited to people with the means and opportunity for a certain level of education, was partially dependent on courts, salons and the like. Studies comparing the libertine “always please” and the courtesan “always please your prince” are valuable. Given the monopoly Jesuits had on education, it is also valuable to study how the sect worked to co-opt the notion for their own ends.
Our ends are to explore lighter currents of enlightenment thought. While sometimes politically weighty, it would be a stretch to consider the honest ends of the prince and the priest as even lightly enlightened. On the opposite end of the spectrum, figures we habitually see as serious philosophers today tended to be polymaths for whom philosophy was but one somewhat equivocal facet of their work. In comparison, the 17th Century “clan” of mathematicians/geometricians (Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz, Descartes, Pascal, etc.) seems to have been better defined. To put it another way, when Rousseau wrote in the mid-18th Century that he was not a philosopher, his words were far more meaningful, so had a greater impact, than they would have a century earlier.
The point is not to be exactly exact. The scale could be tipped by adding English philosophers like Hobbes into the mix. One could quibble about Leibniz, who was active well into the 18th Century. Meditation and experimentation could be set as a not-overly-anachronistic measure for philosophy and science. Or we can borrow someone from the 18th Century like, say, Diderot. He was a clear, self-identified philosopher, even if much of what he did was not philosophy, and had obvious connections to 17th Century libertine thought, whether he considered it libertine or not. Beyond that, he held a notion of honest man that is far more helpful than the Ferat version for teasing out the more philosophically interesting characteristics folks like Méré and Évremond put in.
In Thought 2, Diderot’s The Dream of d’Alembert was key in introducing the libertine concept of “light and profound.” However, Diderot would not have seen the concept as libertine. Continuing with his letters to Sophie Volland, let us get a sense of how he used the word.
First, though, why the letters versus, say, Rameau’s Nephew, which was basically a dialogue between a philosopher and a libertine? The latter was coloured by the overarching question of whether it would be better to be mediocre but good or a genius but personally detestable. Because the letters were not thematically limited, they are a treasure trove of how Diderot saw the world, including his thinking behind The Dream. They were also part of a long-running conversation with an intelligent woman–thus the name “Sophie,” used by Diderot in lieu of Volland’s real name, Louise-Henriette–, though the only letters that remain are Diderot’s. As the sphere we are exploring held such conversations in high esteem, yet women’s words have been conspicuously absent in these Thoughts thus far, this seems somehow appropriate.
“I pardon the father his libertine lifestyle, but I would not be able to pardon his hypocrisy; the dreadful beast that it is! And then this child, who looks to understand the turpitude of his father and who reveals it, shocks me still more strongly than his [the father’s] vile morality” (V. 1 272).
“But the satyr will not look for her long; because he is more inconsistent than he is libertine. The ram who grazes on the grass that grows around his hut is not more libertine; the wind troubling the leaves of ivy covering it is less uncertain” (V. 1 144).
“This lunch, I believe that I already mentioned it, was an ambush I would have fallen into except for one of the happenstances of this country. I was supposed to have found myself one-on-one with Mme de Coaslin. That was revealed by la Guimare who knew it, and who confided it to a libertine in his society who warned me. Oh the beautiful country where a libertine takes a philosopher by the hand, and where the duchess is only separated from the girl by a common intermediary who often tells the girl that of which he leaves the duchess ignorant!” (V. 2 208).
The use is familiar to modern sensibilities because it came after the pejorative turn. Libertines were no longer characterized in the literal and neutral sense of endeavouring to live free from their society’s constraints and dogmatisms. Per Méré, the most negative general description on offer was that they were “disorderly” (Des Agrémens 31). A narrower range running between a satyr’s debauchery and a courtesan’s frivolous ignorance (see V. 2 61 for a longer description of the sort of society people the third example’s libertine was part of) had taken its place. Diderot thought less of other traits, such as hypocrisy and inconsistency, but that did not make the libertine any less morally bankrupt in his eyes.
Let us put the word aside and focus on the sense as we have seen it up until this point. Dassoucy, “Emperor of the Burlesque, […] first of the name,” (278) described his work as neither ideally beautiful nor horribly depressing, but rather an agreeable mix that used everything, both in style and substance, in its just measure and with a large dose of indulgence (Thought 4). This echoes Méré’s notion that words and actions should always please, not because they are always pleasurable in an abstract sense, but because they are agreeable in a manner and to the extent appropriate to a particular context (Thought 2). This is why, for Évremond, the poetry of the Ancients, which did not sufficiently take into account an ever-changing human nature, could not always please (Thought 3). The approach was not one that sought to go beyond the human condition, as Pascal counseled. It was to take us sufficiently out of ourselves so we would not dwell on our condition but not so far as to be “contrary to the usage of life” (Thought 1).
Diderot’s description of burlesque poetry above touches on all these points. The poetry was agreeable in both pain and pleasure. It was fine and gentle throughout. It let us forget the ills of life to the point not of escaping our condition but of reconciling us with our existence. And this, while not being explicitly virtuous, was enough to be a broad benefit to people.
Turning to The Dream, the work is brought up three times in the letters:
“I believe I have already mentioned that I wrote a Dialogue between d’Alembert and me. In rereading it, the fantasy took me to write a second one, and I did it. The conversation is between d’Alembert, who dreams, Bordeu, and d’Alembert’s friend, Mlle d’Espinasse. I titled it The Dream of d’Alembert. It is not possible to be more profound and crazier. I added after that five or six pages capable of raising my lover’s hair; also she will never see them. But what will very much surprise you, there is not a word of religion, and not a single dishonest word. After that I challenge you to figure what it could be” (V. 2 224).
“I wrote a Dialogue between d’Alembert and me: we chat rather gaily in it, and even rather clearly, despite the dryness and the obscurity of the subject. On this Dialogue, a second much longer one continues that serves to clarify the first: this one is entitled: The Dream of d’Alembert. The conversation is between: d’Alembert dreaming, Mlle D’Espinasse, d’Alembert’s friend, and the doctor Bordeux. If I had wanted to sacrifice the richness of the content and the nobleness of the tone, Democritus, Hippocrates and Leucippus would have been my characters; but the believability would have closed me into the tight limits of ancient philosophy, and I would have lost too much. That is of the highest extravagance, and at the same time the profoundest philosophy; There is a certain skill in having put my ideas in the mouth of a man who dreams; it is often necessary to give wisdom the air of madness, in order to give it an entrance; I like better that one says: ‘But that is not as insane as one would have believed,’ rather than to say: ‘Listen, here are very-wise things’” (V. 2 226).
“You recall perhaps this dialogue between d’Alembert and me. Well, I wrote a second one. It is very beautiful, it is very fine, far more varied and more profound than the first. This one is entitled: The Dream of D’Alembert. The conversion is between d’Alembert, Bordeux, and Mlle d’Espinasse. I had seen the thing in a much bigger scope. It was the dream of Democritus; and the characters, Democritus, Hippocritus and Leucippus, the mistress of Democritus; but it would have been necessary to contain it in the sphere of ancient philosophy, and I would have lost too much; I sacrificed the nobleness of the form to the richness of the content” (V. 2 271).
As is becoming typical with these Thoughts, the further we go, the more nuance we find. In The Dream, Mlle D’Espinasse wished that philosophical topics, such as “the eternity of matter and its properties, the distinction between two substances, the nature of man, and the production of animals,” were approached in ways that were “light and profound,” which is to say neither too abstract nor too obscure. She used as an example Fontenelle, a (non-pejorative) libertine writer who, like Leibniz, was active from the mid-17th Century to the mid-18th. We learned in Thought 1 that Fontenelle did not feel he succeeded in the task. The Dream, structured as a mix between a conversation and a fever dream, putting in play non-philosophers, and having the temerity to bring up someone as non-serious as Fontenelle, appears itself like an attempt at the light and profound. Yet Diderot saw it as a balance between the mad and the profound.
I would suggest that there are two forms of madness; the type that takes someone out of their human condition and the type that is part of that condition. When Évremond described Augustine-era poetry as sometimes “the language of the gods, sometimes it is the language of the mad,” he was arguing that, as beautiful as the verses may have been, they were largely divorced from humanity (“À M. Le maréchal de Créqui” 701). Diderot, while being inspired by ancient philosophy and recognizing its nobleness, saw that it did not fit his context and content. He purposefully chose contemporary characters and a scenario to match so everything would suit. As Dassoucy said, “Everything is good […], so long as it is well put in place, and that it is well applied” (275-6).
Diderot’s madness was more in line with Descartes’ version from his Meditations. In the first Meditation, sleeping and dreaming, along with a certain form of insanity, were raised as pertinent considerations precisely because they were part of the experience of being “a man”:
“Though this be true, I must nevertheless here consider that I am a man, and that, consequently, I am in the habit of sleeping, and representing to myself in dreams those same things, or even sometimes others less probable, which the insane think are presented to them in their waking moments.”
Using a particular aspect of being human, Diderot was able to introduce profound and potentially controversial topics out of place in most polite conversation while maintaining believability and relevance.
On the other side of mad versus light, Fontenelle’s dialogues cited in The Dream had moments of wild speculation; about life on the moon and other planets, for instance; mixed into the exposé of modern astronomical ideas. Cyrano de Bergerac, who at around the same time wrote lightly and profoundly about aeroliths in his Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun, went even further into the fantastical and allegorical when he imagined, among other orders, a sun-based sophisticated bird society. Both were vehicles for openly addressing Mlle d’Espinasse’s philosophical topics in ways neither abstract nor obscure, yet both could be considered to have gone around the bend. Exploring the fantastic in libertine thought is a subject for another time; it suffices for now to point out that the light and the mad can be perfectly compatible under certain circumstances. What is crucial is having the good judgment to know when those circumstances arise.
Diderot, it seems to me, was not just sympathetic to the sort of libertine thought we have been exploring; he was a part of the “light and profound” tradition. The double duty “light” plays, as both lightweight and enlightened, obliges us to continue using the expression. It may be helpful nonetheless to quote a slightly different version Évremond used in describing the work of fellow 17th Century libertine Pierre Bayle:
“But I find Bayle admirable,
Who as profound as agreeable,
Puts me in a state to choose
Instruction, or pleasure”2placeholder (“Lettre à M. des Maizeaux” 762).
This conclusion sets up our next Thought, where the philosopher and the libertine diverge not in name but in worldview. As Diderot is perhaps best known these days for his encyclopedia, a final note. The encyclopedia was an attempt to generalize specialist knowledge, so one might be tempted to lump it in with the light and profound. It was not profound, but summary. It was also not light in a broad and nuanced sense. Quite the opposite, it was a burden he was stuck with to put food on his family’s table. It kept him from pursuing the agreable.
“In eight or ten days, I will therefore see the end of this enterprise [the encyclopedia] that has occupied me for twenty years, that has not made my fortune, far from it, that has exposed me many times to having to leave my country or lose my liberty, and that has consumed a life that I could have made more useful and more glorious. The sacrifice of talents to need would not be so common if it was only oneself in question; one would decide rather to drink water, to eat crumbs and follow one’s genius in an attic; but for a wife, for children, what will one not do? If I was to make a show of myself, I would not tell them: I worked thirty years for you; but I would say: I renounced for you these thirty years my natural vocation, I preferred doing, contrary to my taste, that which was useful for you rather than that which would have been agreeable to me: That is my true obligation to you and of which you do not think” (V. 2 52-3).
6. Diderot, Évremond and A Delicate Morality
In my last Thought, I argued that Denis Diderot was an appropriate philosopher to explore some ways modern philosophy and 17th Century French libertine thought diverged. While adverse to the libertine label, he was effectively part of the “light and profound” current that characterized the thought. This allows us to isolate to a certain extent the philosophical variable. Given the variety on both sides and the uncertain line between them, we can only take this contrast so far. So, let us start by a quote from a letter to Sophie Volland and go as far as it takes us.
“No, dear friend, nature did not make us bad; it is a bad education, a bad example, a bad legislation that corrupts us. If there is an error there, at least I am quite content to find it at the bottom of my heart, and I would be rather annoyed if experience or reflection ever disabused me; what would I become? It would be necessary to live alone, or believe oneself ceaselessly surrounded by bad people; neither the first nor the second suits me” (V. 1 181-2).
Yes, dear reader, Diderot was of the opinion that human nature was basically good. We can place his position on the moral map not too far from amoral and quite a distance from immoral. Then, just like with the other positions, we can build ourselves a city with laws and institutions appropriate for reinforcing, modifying or repressing our nature. Once we are done, excepting ongoing routine maintenance, we will have a good society for as long as it lasts, however “good” might be defined.
The particular city is of little importance here. What is, is that he believed human nature to be basically something specific. “Basically” does not mean wholly or exclusively, but generally and elementarily.
“And then turning my head the other way and grumbling, but however loud enough so he can hear it, that it is one of the greatest absurdities that can pass through the head of a man, that there are exclusive states of virtue, and that there would remain not a single good quality in someone, man or woman, who lacked one of them” (V. 2 115).
Borrowing some Rawlsian language, there would be enough commonality for an overlapping consensus. The commonality would be naturally good but potentially corrupted by human inventions.
As we saw in Thought 2, Lord Évremond, one of our central libertines, believed that “it is to honour too much human nature, to give it uniformity.” Only, for him, this lack of uniformity, or exclusivity, was to the point where one could not even say that people were by nature generally good. By nature, people suffered and died, they had the potential to be happy, and they were social creatures. Beyond that, “men are shifting and varied; a mix of good and bad parts” (“L’Intérêt dans les personnes tout à fait corrompues” 695). Despite this, Évremond did not believe in an ethical free-for-all.
As the honest person was the moral ideal for Diderot and in the libertine writing we have been focusing on, let us use it to help us understand the implications of these differing notions of human nature. Starting with Diderot:
“People have a strange opinion of virtue; they believe that it is at their disposal, and that one becomes an honest man in a day. They keep their dirty laundry as long as they have villanies to do, and they do them all their life, because one does not abandon a habit of vice like a shirt” (V. 1 66).
“When a legislator passes a law, what happens? It creates a situation where fifty bad people break it and ten honest people follow it. The ten honest people are a little bit better; and human kind merits a little bit more blame and praise. To give morals [mœurs] to a people, it is to augment their energy for good and for bad; it is to encourage, if I am permitted to put it this way, great crimes and great virtues” (V. 1 141).
First, honesty was being virtuous in a very broad sense. Diderot did not pick out or prioritize particular ones. Second, while people may have been naturally good, they were not naturally honest. At the same time, people did not become honest because of the laws and institutions they lived under. Honesty, like dishonesty, was a habit developed over time and could be assisted or hindered by society.
For Évremond, “I do not find that sciences touch honest people in particular, excepting morality, politics and an understanding of belles-lettres,” Ethics was a sort of “reason” used “to teach you to govern your passions” (“Jugement sur les sciences, où peut s’appliquer un honnête homme” 663). Neither reason nor moral notions were invariable and honesty was caught up in their transformations:
“I know that reason was given to us for regulating our morals; but the harsh and austere reason of yesterday has been civilized with time; it conserves almost nothing today of its former rigidity. It was necessary for it to be austere to establish laws that could stop affronts and violence; it has softened to introduce honesty in the commerce of men, it has become delicate and curious in the search for pleasures, in order to make life as agreeable as it had endeavoured to make it safe and honest. Thus, sir, it is necessary to forget the time when it was enough to be severe in order to be believed virtuous; because politeness, gallantry, the voluptuous science, are presently part of merit” (“L’Intérêt dans les personnes tout à fait corrompues” 691).
Here, honesty seems to have been both a characteristic of the pre-agreeable austere moral order and the general term for the softened delicate version. This is the only passage I have come across where Évremond used the word for both; everywhere else it was limited to the latter sense. At the risk of reading too much into it, I suspect he was aware of common usage and consciously, though habitually, used the word as a libertine term of art.
In the second understanding, honesty was both narrower and wider than Diderot’s version. It excluded hard principles and included normativity we would not tend to categorize as moral, but rather as matters of taste or decorum. My first impression was that only the inclusions were unique. Libertines were either part of polite society or, as tutors, lawyers, librarians, entertainers, and so on, served it. Even if it sometimes set them up to be scapegoats during moral panics, elevating the reasoning, commerce and pleasures of that society to moral significance served many of their interests.
The Enlightenment is generally known for a sort of universal humanism. Montaigne set a standard for inclusivity, using examples of other peoples both ancient and modern to demonstrate just how barbarous and cruel his fellow countrymen were during the wars of religion. His “Cannibals” was especially remarkable in this regard. Despite him being a major inspiration for 17th Century libertines, raising the importance of society gave them grounds to be exclusive. Fontenelle, in the series of dialogues Diderot considered to be a good example of the light and profound, provides a not-so-subtle example:
“’Me?’ I replied, ‘I do not at all believe that there are men on the moon. Look how much the face of Nature is different between here and China; other faces, other looks, other mores, and almost other principles of reasoning. From here to the moon, the change must be even more considerable. When one goes toward certain newly discovered lands, the habitants that one finds are barely human; they are animals with human faces, still sometimes rather imperfect, and almost without any human reason. Whoever would push on all the way to the moon, assuredly it would not be men that they would find’” (1219).
While it is true he needed to reject the possibility of lunar life as human so as to not run afoul of religious authorities, the form of his argument shows how dehumanizing one could be based on appearance, culture and particular forms of reason. One does not have to go so far afield to find “animals with human faces,” however. Mme Antoinette Deshoulières, whose salon rivaled Mme Scudéry’s, expressed in her Diverse Reflections how those within polite society who gamed excessively lost both honesty and humanity:
“Pleasures are bitter as soon as one abuses them:
It is good to gamble a little,
But the game must only amuse us.
A player, it is commonly admitted,
has nothing human but the appearance;
And moreover it is not as easy as one thinks to be a very honest man and be a player who bets big.
The desire to win that night and day occupies
Is a dangerous prod,
Often, though the mind, though the heart are good,
One begins a dupe,
One finishes a knave”3placeholder (XIV 1419).
Going back a couple steps and to Évremond, the libertine idea of human nature included the possibility of happiness. Happiness was framed as pleasure: “Nature brings all men to look for their pleasures.” While virtue, which is to say honesty, was based on this nature, it was not identical to it. It was a skill to be developed and practiced; effectively a habit. Merit was relative to the state of societal development, which was in part reflected in the sorts of laws appropriate for the land. Over time, refined values replaced the coarse ones needed “to stop affronts and violence.” An honest person would ultimately be the sort of person with capacities like the following:
“One could therefore not have too much skill in managing one’s pleasures; still even the most knowing has difficulty savouring them. A long preparation takes from us the surprise, takes from us that which is the most lively; if we do not take any care, we will take them at the wrong moment, in a disorder enemy to politesse, enemy of truly delicate tastes” (“Sur les plaisirs, à M. le comte D’Olonne” 658).
There does not seem to be a necessary connection between refinement and the narrowing of humanity. People did not stop being “a mix of good and bad parts,” just as they did not stop suffering and dying. Some of them climbed up something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, though that cannot be the whole story. Libertines did not exactly dominate polite society. Relative to philosophers, Diderot characterized society as ignorant and frivolous.
“The project was that of the antiphilosophical clique. The philosophical clique is odious to society people, because society people are ignorant and frivolous, and because a philosopher notices it; because they cannot doubt the disdain that he must have of them, and because they have the awareness that they merit it” (V. 2 61).
Libertines were not ignorant. As was pointed out especially in Thoughts 3 and 4, quite a lot of knowledge, reflection and experience was required to develop sufficient judgment to speak and act agreeably in a range of contexts. They were, however, prone to frivolousness, in part because endlessly meditating on the big questions was usually not the most agreeable way to spend what little time one had. They cared little for philosophers who were poor company and overly critical.
A philosopher like Diderot tended to dismiss the frivolous as trivial, unimportant. An average courtesan would limit moral reflection to paying lip service to their Jesuit confessor. The libertine moral shift viewed frivolity with an appropriate seriousness. Mme. Deshoulières took gambling, a common society pastime, and remarked how it was good insofar as it was agreeable and bad when excessive. Her use of “honest man” and “knave” indicated that the judgment was not just normative but concerned moral character.
This parallels how gambling was a pleasant context for discussing complex mathematical probabilities, as seen in Thought 0. Abstract mathematics and morality were tedious and pointless, but both in the service of life were not only accepted but encouraged. Ethics was different, though, because as society-specific considerations took on moral weight, judgment of people outside or at odds with that society became increasingly skewed.
It was not just the considerations, but how they were considered. Reason was a human characteristic and “reason was given to us for regulating our morals.” Instead of seeing the attribute as a global trait, there were “different principles of reason,” “harsh and austere reason” and “civilized” reason. A lack of society-specific moral reasoning could lead to the conclusion that some people, whether gambling addicts or non-European indigenous, were not fully human.
The conclusion does not follow from the libertine notion of human nature. If we look at Diderot’s ideas from the beginning of this Thought, it is clear he was not sure if his position on people’s basic goodness was in error. He posited it largely because of his temperament–he was not the amoral Rousseau, for instance, who was perfectly content eschewing the commerce of men for that of plants. He was also not a libertine, who would have observed that people were all over the map. They were social and had many other qualities, but that was ethically neither here nor there.
Nothing all that much did follow from the libertine notion of human nature. This allowed them to focus on the importance of being pleasant, which may not have been particularly virtuous according to many conceptions of virtue but could still carry a great deal of merit. It also meant they were able to be nuanced in their reflections on all sorts of activities, from experimental science to those considered by many at the time to be sinful. On the other hand, it meant their place in society was ambivalent. They both rejected the superficiality of and were reliant on a society characterized by its ignorance. What if the most agreeable action in a given context was to embrace this benightedness?
The immediate reply–our Méré Knight took the time to differentiate between a humble Socratic ignorance and a boastful courtesan version–would be that ignorance could not be agreeable (De l’Ésprit 65). That is built into Évremond’s “One could therefore not have too much skill in managing one’s pleasures.” We have seen this in previous Thoughts. Balancing the light and profound was difficult and required a great deal of science. Dassoucy said as much with respect to fine burlesque (Thought 4). Fontenelle thought his series of dialogues failed to find the agreeable equilibrium and had little confidence he would ever have the capacity to succeed (Thought 1).
Under this understanding, the most salient difference between the philosopher and the libertine is that the light and profound was pretty much all the latter had. An observation Diderot made about a friend of the Volland family, Mlle Boileau, would be an apt description of a 17th Century libertine in the midst of polite society whose balancing act faltered.
“It is rather singular that with intelligence, taste, finesse, sensitivity, spirit, honesty, sense, reason, judgment even, this girl has pretty much only borrowed ideas and that, being able to say an infinite number of good things about her personally, she is perpetually the echo of stupidities that surround her” (V. 2 61).
To be continued? As it happens, my first impressions were off the mark. While thoughtfulness about the lighter side of normativity was a key component of libertine thought, many agreeably honest folks had interesting things to say about weightier virtues like justice…
Works Cited
Boudhors, Charles H. Introduction. Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de Méré. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Charles-H. Boudhors, Fernand Roche, 1930.
Coypeau, Charles, sieur Dassoucy. Aventures Burlesques de Dassoucy. Paris, Garnier Frères, 1876.
Descartes, René. Meditation on First Philosophy. Trans. John Veitch, 1901.
Deshoulières, Antoinette. Réflexions Diverses. Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
Diderot, Denis. Lettres à Sophie Volland. Ed. André Babelon, V. 1, Gallimard, 1938.
—. Lettres à Sophie Volland. Ed. André Babelon, V. 2, Gallimard, 1938.
Diderot, Denis, et al. Le rêve de D’Alembert. Œuvres Philosophiques. Ed. Michel Delon et al., Gallimard, 2010.
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer de. Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
Gombaud, Antoine, Chevalier de Méré. De l’Ésprit. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Charles-H. Boudhors, Fernand Roche, 1930.
—. Des Agrémens. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Charles-H. Boudhors, Fernand Roche, 1930.
Marguetel de Saint-Denis, Charles, Lord of Saint-Évremond. “Jugement sur les sciences, où peut s’appliquer un honnête homme.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Lettre à M. des Maizeaux.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “L’Intérêt dans les personnes tout à fait corrompues.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
—. “Sur les plaisirs, à M. le comte D’Olonne.” Libertins Du XVIIe Siècle. Ed. Jacques Prévot V. 2, Gallimard, 2004.
Montaigne, Michel de. Essais, exemplaire de Bordeaux. 1595.
“Mais je trouve Bayle admirable,
Qui profond autant qu’agréable,
Me met en état de choisir
L’instruction, ou le plaisir.”
“Les plaisirs sont amers d’abord qu’on en abuse:
Il est bon de jouer un peu,
Mais il faut seulement que le jeu nous amuse.
Un joueur, d’un commun aveu,
N’à rien d’humain que l’apparence;
Et d’ailleurs il n’est pas si facile qu’on pense
D’être fort honnête homme et de jouer gros jeu.
Le désir de gagner qui nuit et jour occupe
Est un dangereux aiguillon,
Souvent, quoique l’esprit, quoique le cœur soit bon,
On commence par être dupe,
On finit par être fripon.”