Diverse Thoughts on the Lightly Enlightened, circa 17th Century France, Part V
This is the fifth part of a series 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).
9. Mlle. de Scudéry’s Mixed Company
If you have been following along, my observant reader, you will have noticed that a 17th Century Frenchwoman’s words have made their way into these Thoughts, several Thoughts back. You might have been surprised that the woman was not Mlle. de Scudéry, the contemporary model of honesty for some of the libertines at the centre of our explorations. That she was not Mme. de Sévigné or Mme. La Fayette, both arguably better known and no less spiritual pillars of polite society from the period, might have left you hesitating whether to furrow or raise your brow.
There is no lengthy explanation for the choice. These Thoughts are Diverse, not thorough and comprehensive. They take a page from the very currents of thought they explore, currents that favoured agreeable reflection and conversation to the sort of exhaustive study and meditation having the “villain effect” of ruining one’s sociability (Évremond 651). How could I possibly not favour Mme. Deshoulière, an honest woman who wrote collections of verse under the title Diverse Reflections?
Then, at the end of our last Thought, we were finally graced with the words of Mlle. de Scudéry. Even so, there was perhaps a feeling of dissatisfaction. The words were but a reaction to the first part of Blaise Pascal et al.’s Les Provinciales, included as an anonymous aside to the second part. Yet the book based on the book of and on the society ostensibly of interest to us is philosopher Victor Cousin’s 1858 French Society in the 17th Century, according to the Grand Cyrus of Mlle. de Scudèry. According to Cousin, Grand Cyrus contained “the most accurate, the most complete, as well as the most agreeable description we have of this sanctuary of good company of the 17th Century” (V. 1 245).
Why ostensibly? While lightly enlightened currents ran deeply through this world, there was much more to the world than the currents. It was more fruitful to focus on a point of contact between Pascal’s exhaustive study and the sanctuary of polite sociability. This allowed us to clearly see that reflection in service of living an agreeable life and meditation that tended to get in the way of such a life were not a dichotomy. They had the same elements; it was simply a question of context-sensitive balance and moderation. Though Pascal’s work was on the meditation side, it was at least at the beginning agreeable and informative.
Taking a step back from the content, Les Provinciales was a group effort published anonymously. Pascal was later given most of the credit for writing most of it. Despite Cousin attributing the Grand Cyrus to Mlle. de Scudéry in his title, the novel was written in collaboration with, and was put out under the name of, her brother Georges. Cousin did note the collaboration in his book but still gave Mlle credit for the “best part” (Rathery 49). Even in her lifetime, there was recognition of her initially underappreciated contributions. At the same time, Cousin’s take was the pendulum swinging too far in her favour. The only major work that was unambiguously hers until vicissitudes of life separated her from her brother sometime later was the sanctuary itself; her Saturday salon.
Cousin described the siblings as polar opposites, “the sister being as modest as he was vain, and of a humour as gentle and easygoing as his was boastful and quarrelsome” (4). At first glance, they conformed to gender roles not exactly unique to 17th Century France. Since the beginning of these Thoughts, it has been fairly clear the libertine ideal was gendered at least to an extent. Mlle. de Scudéry’s agreeable humour, and the “great stock of spirit or of merit” that underpinned it, was the ideal in a nutshell. Still, simply indicating that she was the model of honesty did not mean that all the relevant characteristics were gendered. Reality was far more nuanced, as it has tended to be throughout our wanderings.
First, we have to revisit the word “libertine.” As biographer Rathery pointed out, Mlle. de Scudéry “painted [in the chapter Against those who speak unseriously about religion] those men that one called at the time libertines, but she refused to admit that there could be women without religion” (135). In a letter where she railed against rumours about her friend M. de Pellison’s lack of piety that spread following his death, she blamed “the libertine or Huguenot and envious rabble” (357). Rathery himself, writing in the latter half of the 19th Century, preferred “Epicurean” as a more neutral term (468).
We saw in the last Thought that libertines were not particularly unserious about religion or atheistic. They were skeptical about humanity’s capacity to grasp religious truths and put off by the absurdities and superstitions that passed as truths. For many, this very skepticism led to faith and Providence playing a central role in their worldview, all the while making them unserious in regards to those who acted and spoke in the name of religion.
Taking the non-pejorative sense of preferring liberty above other considerations, the most significant example of Mlle. de Scudéry’s libertine nature was at odds with what was expected of a lady. “I preferred three times in my life liberty over wealth,” was her explanation for why she had not married, a choice she admitted was not “prudent” (Sa Vie 330). Mme. Deshoulière, on the other hand, was married at fourteen and still ended up enjoying a great deal of liberty vis à vis her much older husband. A military man who found himself on the losing side of a variety of adventures and conflicts, he alas did not offer much in the way of wealth or prudence (VIII-XI).
The liberty was relative. Let us take Simone de Beauvoir as a point of comparison. One of the key events in her life was her first teaching job in Marseille.
“I already said that despite appearances my situation was entirely different from [Sartre’s]. Pass the agrégation, have a profession in hand, for him, that went without saying. Me, at the top of the steps of Marseille, I was dazzled [éblouit] with pleasure: it did not seem to me that I had been subject to my fate, but to have chosen it. The career in which Sartre saw his liberty founder had not ceased to represent for me a liberation” (549).
The posting forced her out of her Parisian bubble and offered a taste of independence she had yet to experience. Mlle. de Scudéry also left her Parisian bubble for a post in Marseille, only the position, governor of the fort Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, was her brother’s (Rathery 18). A couple years later, she did attempt to become a governess in a “very great house” to escape what Cousin termed the “tyrannical hand of her brother,” but without success (Sa vie 421). What sort of liberty was in the cards? That of living an agreeable life with what she was dealt.
As much as I would like to keep to our currents, sometimes a point or two about the broader world is vital. Georges de Scudéry was dubiously honoured with the directorship with the consent of none other than Cardinal de Richelieu, famous among other things for bringing Protestant strongholds like La Rochelle to heel. Religious tolerance in France that began with the 1598 Edict of Nantes was eaten away through the 17th Century, culminating in the edict’s official revocation in 1685. It was part of the drive to establish an absolute monarchy that bore fruit during Louis XIV’s reign (1643-1715).
The letter in which Mlle. de Scudéry railed against libertines (read: atheists) and Huguenots (French Calvanists) was dated 1693. Although her writing contributed to her financial independence later in life, it was mainly because it helped justify the attribution of more or less royal pensions. Such pensions could be revoked on a whim and the texts of the period seemed to reflect that (108).
Mlle. de Scudéry’s situation was by no means dire in the way that Dassoucy’s incarceration at the Vatican was (Thought 4). In many ways, her ability to adapt reflected an exquisite judgment (that was, like Dassoucy’s, satirized by Boileau among others). Her pandering to religious orthodoxy in Discourse on Glory (1671) and the Sun King in various poems nonetheless leads me to the hand she was dealt earlier, just as I favoured Dassoucy’s pre-Vatican words.
Libertines, including Mlle. de Scudéry, were not ignorant, but they only had a moderate amount of subject-specific knowledge. Their intelligence was primarily social and revealed itself in their ability to, as our Méré Knight put it, “always please” (Thought 2). The ideal was an appropriate balance of the “light and profound” across contexts. When they fell off the tightrope, borrowing words from Denis Diderot used to close Thought 6, they tended to be “the echo of stupidities that surround” them. This awkwardness was on full display in a letter Mlle. de Scudéry wrote from Marseille to her friend Mlle. de Chalais.
“But the real reason for which I wish it [to receive letters from her dear friend] with such fervour, is that I foresee well that I will have great need of this aid to soften the ennui of my exile. I naively admit to you that I do not have a mind so stupid to easily accustom myself to those who are, and that I do not have one strong enough or fulfilled enough to find within myself that which to satisfy me. I have stayed at a certain level of mediocrity that only serves to allow me to recognize what is bad, but not to overcome it” (Sa Vie 167).
Mlle. de Scudéry was forthright about being lightly enlightened and about the challenges that arose from such a wattage. She was bright enough to know she was surrounded by the sort of ignorance Diderot later decried and was repelled by it. Yet, she was stuck with it. In line with Méré and Évremond, the idea of moving beyond her condition championed by folks like Pascal (Thought 1) and Aristotle (Thought 7) did not appear to be a realistic option.
That left diversions or, as Évremond put it, to “go out as in beyond oneself” (Thought 1). Our Méré Knight dismissed the possibility of auto-diversions, which is to say developing agreeableness–also known as honesty–independently, in his Third Conversation.
“’But to come back to these Princes that one admires, and who rely only on themselves, I do not see that one can establish maxims with such rare examples.’
‘I would not be of the opinion any more than you,’ said the Knight, ‘that one can rest on them, and I believe that the surest way to make oneself an honest man, is to have recourse to honest people’” (44).
“Have recourse to honest people” was exactly what Mlle. de Scudéry was doing. In practice, this meant holding friendship in the highest regard, as Évremond’s did (Thought 7).
“I only reject however praise for my intelligence, and I boldly accept those that one gives for my heart and my friendship, because I am persuaded that it is an obligation of a reasonable person to have a heart like I have and to love their friends as I love mine” (Sa Vie 365).
“because in a word, Miss, I am only amiable because I know how to love my friends in a tender and disinterested manner, which distinguishes me from many others; I boldly boast about this good quality” (399).
At the same time, she found a pleasant sort of pleasure in challenging interactions. A major frustration that arose from the social obligations the governorship imposed on both siblings was that most people in Marseille did not speak French. Instead of being irritated, Mlle. de Scudéry had the sort of character to be amused by it.
“But what is rare is that, of all of this great number of women, there are not more than six or seven who speak French; which makes for such an amusing conversation that, if I could paint the scene for you, it would make you laugh. I have however the advantage that I understand Provençal rather well, and thus it does not stop me from conversing with them, but in a manner so amusing that you would have to see it to understand” (161).
Diversions, as we have seen (Thought 3), were not diverting to the point of total isolation from condition or context. They were a mix of finding the agreeable in the world and making the world more agreeable as far as our limited abilities allowed. Mlle. de Scudéry was in a position and had the sort of nature to accomplish both, building up her sanctuary to surround herself with honest people and keeping herself afloat with good humour outside it. Importantly, she was more inclined to pleasures that enlightened than those, available to Beauvoir, that dazzled (376).
None of this clearly answers the gender question. Being delicate, agreeable, easygoing, accommodating and so on was primarily the domain of women. Actively creating the sort of milieu in which one wants to live, making conscious choices to avoid being dependent and preferring friendship to romantic love not so much. Our Méré Knight took great pains to establish equality: “that which I say of an honest man, must also be understood of an honest woman” (Des Agréments 31. See also: 21, 24, 26; De l’Esprit 65). Yet Mlle. de Scudéry did not believe that an honest woman could always please.
“’The most honest women in the world,’ she says, ‘when they are assembled together in great numbers, almost never say anything worthwhile, and bore each other more than if they were alone […] On the contrary, there is je ne sais quoi, that I do not know how to express, that makes it that an honest man creates more joyfulness and diversion for a company of ladies, that the most likeable women on earth would be able to do’” (Conversations t. II, 770-887).
This was in part due to the fact that men had more opportunities to learn and experience the world. Refined judgment regarding what was agreeable relied on such things, after all. However, since Évremond and Méré were of the opinion that pleasant commerce needed to include women, it would be more accurate to say that the libertine ideal was one of mixed company and everyone argued for it in one way or another. That salons like Mlle. de Scudéry’s managed to include men and women tied together only by the bonds of friendship without unduly shocking the sensibilities of the day was no minor accomplishment.
10. A Burlesque Interlude
Libertines, we have noted, were either part of polite society or closely linked to it (Thought 6). Since Mlle. de Scudéry was part of society, let us spend a moment with Paul Scarron’s comedy troupe. Scarron was a playwright and the first purveyor of fine burlesque. His novel, The Comical Romance, was a semi-autobiographical tale in the same vein as Dassoucy’s Burlesque Adventures of M. Dassoucy from Thought 4. While Dassoucy followed the trials and tribulations of a wandering minstrel and his pages, Scarron described those of a troupe.
The troupe had been invited to perform at the country manor of Baron de Sigognac in northwestern France not far from Le Mans. One of the comediennes fell ill. We join her and her daughter at the end of her convalescence.
“My Mother was sick for more than two months and finally she was getting better, after having received from the Baron de Sigognac signs of generosity and kindness that did not match the reputation he had in the area of being the biggest tyrant that had ever been feared in a country where most gentlemen make an effort at being one” (205).
In our last Thought, Victor Cousin noted that Mlle. de Scudéry lived under the “tyrannical hand of her brother.” Mlle. de Scudéry herself would, as far as I can tell, never have used such words. Their use here was a reflection both of the expressive freedoms of movements like burlesque and of how obvious the mistreatment of people by nobles was.
When our comedienne was well enough to take her leave, “not being able to decently stay longer in the manor,” she informed the Baron and asked for the final favour of helping her prepare for the journey to “retir[e] to her Father’s house in Marseille.” In response, she was visited by the local abbot and seemed to relapse as a result of their conversation.
“Finally, after having me close the room’s door, she told me, crying even more than she had already, that the abbot had informed her that the Baron de Sigognac was madly in love with her and, further, had assured her that he held her in such a high esteem that he would only dare have her told of his love at the same time as an offer to marry her. In finishing, her sighs and sobs seemed to suffocate her. I asked her once more what was wrong. ‘What, my daughter,’ she replied, ‘have I not told you enough for you to see that I am the unhappiest person in the world?’ I told her that it was not such a great tragedy for a Comedienne to become a woman of condition. ‘Ha! Poor child,’ she responded, ‘you speak like a young girl without experience! If he deceived the good abbot in order to mislead me, if he has no intention of marrying me, like he wants to make me believe, what sort of violence must I not fear from a man entirely enslaved to his passions? and if he truly wants to marry me and I consent, what sort of misery would my world become once his fantasy passes? And how much would he hate me, if he regretted one day having loved me? No, no, my girl, good fortune has not come to find me like you think; but a horrible calamity, after having taken from me a Husband who loved me and who I loved, wants to give me another by force who will perhaps hate me and oblige me to hate him’” (205-7).
Libertines were well aware of the repercussions of great passions, such as, in Mme. Deshoulières’ words, the “Disdain that follows a declining love: of the rose only the thorn remains” (À Mlle. D*** 119). They understood the power dynamics and tyrannies among people, perpetrated primarily by men. Many also recognized those of humanity over the natural world.
| “Heaven put, in creating men,
Other beings under their laws. It is not to flatter us, we are their tyrants rather than their kings” |
“Le Ciel mit, en formant les hommes,
Les autres êtres sous leurs lois. A ne nous point flatter, nous sommes Leurs tyrans plutôt que leurs rois” (Le Ruisseau 101). |
The comedienne’s daughter rationalized away Baron de Sigognac’s habitual effrontery and brutality to keep her fantasy alive. As her mother observed, she lacked the experience to have good judgment.
“the obliging and respectful manners with which the least tender of all men had always used with us seemed to me to bode well and especially the lack of boldness he had in declaring his passion to a woman whose profession did not always inspire respect” (207).
Discussing Mlle. de Scudéry, mocked by satirists of her day for her “preciousness,” we might take her sanctuary as another sort of fantasy (Rathery 86). We might take Évremond’s words from Thought 6 that “affronts and violence” were problems of the past as a sign he was out of touch with broader society. While it would not do to be overly critical, it is worth keeping in mind that even among libertines both were shielded in a way those “whose profession did not always inspire respect” were not.
11. Mlle. de Scudéry and Intelligence
Our Méré Knight began his discourse On the Mind (De l’Esprit) by gently chastising the lady to whom the piece was addressed for demeaning her own intelligence in the name of modesty. He imagined her replying, “if I had so much intelligence, those who saw me would have said something, and no one, excepting you, who only thinks of pleasing me, has yet to notice” (58). The passage gives the impression that women’s intelligence was underappreciated and being seen as a bel esprit, so long as it was merited, would have been a good thing.
How do we reconcile the impression with Mlle. de Scudéry’s reaction to compliments on, among other qualities, her wit: “I only reject however praise for my intelligence” (Sa Vie 365)? She was not adverse to approval in general and did not go out of her way to appear dim, yet consistently avoided acclaim for her brightness regardless of how well founded it was. Mme. Deshoulières, in poetic advice given to a young lady of her acquaintance, gave some reasons why.
| “You want to become learned:
Alas! to the bel esprit do you know the aversions? This name formerly so beautiful, so revered by all, Has nothing more, my lovely Amarante, Neither honourable nor sweet.
As soon as, by common voice, With this odious title one finds oneself burdened, Of all the virtues not one will be lacked, Suffices for one to elevate you to bel esprit, To not be entitled to the least fortune” |
“Vous voulez devenir savante:
Hélas! du bel esprit savez-vous les dégouts? Ce nom jadis si beau, si révéré de tous, N’a plus rien, aimable Amarante, Ni d’honorable, ni de doux.
Sitôt que, par la voix commune, De ce titre odieux on se trouve chargé, De toutes les vertus n’en manquât-il une, Suffit qu’en bel esprit on vous ait érigé, Pour ne pouvoir prétendre à la moindre fortune” (Épitre Chagrine 64). |
“Fortune” was found in attaining the good and, in a literal application of being too clever for one’s own good, a bel esprit was antithetical to a bon esprit. The poem went on to describe a variety of ways life as a bel esprit was insufferable, from being marked for malicious criticism to the unrelenting expectation to perform on command. Méré himself saw the downside: “to be well in the world, it is not necessary to have anything exquisite: that can even be harmful in many encounters, because when one excels, it always happens that one outshines many people and that as a result one attracts envy” (Des Agrémens 33). This was a challenge for all honest people, but was particularly so for women. Mlle. de Scudéry described such an unfortunate creature during her time in Marseille.
“Suffer, if you please, this historical comparison from a person who would not have written it to you, if she was only fifty leagues closer to Paris, but who thinks to have the right to talk to you in this manner in a city where a beautiful and young damsel, who in her ordinary conversations, often cites, if I recall correctly, Trismegistus, Zoroaster and other similar gentlemen with whom I am not acquainted. Seriously, it is unfortunate that the person of whom I speak was not raised in the world, being certain that she has one of the most beautiful natures of a woman that I have ever remarked in any provincial woman. She is, as I have already told you, beautiful, young and has a radiant complexion; she speaks French as if she was born in Paris, and she is naturally very eloquent; she understands Spanish, Italian, Latin and even Greek; she is very easygoing, very courteous, and from a good house. At the same time, because she does not have the art to hide a part of the treasures she possesses from people who do not understand her, they take for glass and for copper gold and diamonds; and the injustice that one does to her here is so great that I dare not see her often, out of fear of becoming a target of public hate” (Sa Vie 168).
I imagine the “put on your own oxygen mask before helping others” airplane instructions. Mlle de Scudéry had to think first of maintaining her own reputation, without which she would not have been able to be of service to the people around her. While she could not often see the young lady in question, a Mlle. Diodée, she did see her. She offered her friendship and helped her learn “the art to hide a part of the treasures she possesses.”
The issue was not Mlle. Diodée’s erudition as such, it was her lack of judgment concerning the sort of company where broaching “Trismegistus, Zoroaster and other similar gentlemen” would not result in opprobrium. While Méré argued that such topics “can even be harmful in many encounters,” among “true friends” they would not be (Des Agrémens 33). Libertines, with their focus on friendship as the highest virtue (Thought 7), provided a friendly environment for all sorts of topics.
That does not mean Trismegistus would have been broadly appropriate. It means that bringing up such an obscure figure would have been met with indulgence, not hatred or envy. Libertines would nonetheless gently nudge the person in a more sociable direction. Méré’s description of time spent with a mathematician generally taken to be Blaise Pascal is a case in point.
“I took a trip with D.D.R. who speaks with a just and profound sense, and who I find to be very good company. M.M. who you know, and who pleases all the Court, was in the party; and because it was more a promenade than a voyage: our only thought was to enjoy ourselves, and we talked about everything. L.D.D.R. has a mathematical mind, and so as to not get bored en route, he brought along a middle-aged man, who was then not all that well known, but who has since become well spoken of. It was a great Mathematician, who only knew that. These sciences do not provide the agreeability of the world, and this man who knew not about taste, nor sentiment, did not let that stop him from getting mixed up in all that we were saying, but he almost always surprised us, and often made us laugh. He admired the intelligence and the eloquence of M. du Vair, and the witty remarks of Lieutenant Criminal d’O; we thought nothing less than of disabusing him: at the same time we spoke to him in good faith. Two or three days having passed in that manner, he came to mistrust somewhat his opinions, and no longer did anything but listen, or ask questions, in order to enlighten himself about the subjects that presented themselves, he had tablets that he would pull out from time to time, on which he put some observation or other. It was quite remarkable, that before we had arrived at P. he said almost nothing that was not good, and that we would not have wanted to say, and no lie it was catching up from quite a distance. Also speaking truthfully, the joy that he showed us for having taken on a whole other intelligence was so visible that I do not believe one could feel a greater one; he let us know it in a way obscure and mysterious” (De l’Esprit 87).
First, profound topics like mathematics were not avoided, they just needed to be discussed in an enjoyable, rather than pedantic, manner. Second, general knowledge and the ability to agreeably converse about “everything” was preferred over narrow specialization. Third, although laughing at the silliness that came out of someone’s mouth was part of the dynamic, it was not mean or patronizing. Good faith was key, and everyone coming out of the experience feeling a pleasant sort of pleasure the desired outcome. Finally, this sociable intelligence was a form of intelligence; it was no less enlightened for being light.
Virginia Woolf’s comparison of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë in A Room of One’s Own strikes me as a helpful framing of the difference between a Mlle. de Scudéry and a Mlle. Diodée, as well as of the place of libertine thought in the broader Enlightenment.
“If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not.”
Woolf concluded that “[Austen’s] gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë.” As a result, Austen’s writing did not suffer from her constraints, while Brontë’s did. On a certain level, libertines were libertines because they were the square pegs in a society of round holes. At the same time, Mlle. de Scudéry’s work, both written and oral, did not seem heavily impacted by the narrowness of her situation. The bitterness that dripped from much of Mme. Deshoulière’s poetry, as in the quote above, shows that she was less lucky but not entirely unlucky in the lottery of life. Those like Mlle. Diodéé who ended up the target of “public hate” drew the low card.
One of the recurring themes of these Thoughts is fatalism. Libertines did not believe humanity could escape its condition. This might have led them to dismiss grand virtues like justice. Instead, as we saw in Thought 7, they developed versions compatible with, and without instrumentalizing, our “mix of good and bad parts.” I cannot say how folks close to Austen and Brontë reacted when they caught wind of the two women’s gifts. Mlle. de Scudéry and our Méré Knight saw in comparable circumstances injustice to be mitigated but never fully overcome.
The other side is that (very likely) Pascal and Mlle. Diodée were intelligent people. They were not fragile geniuses incapable of being pleasant–or choosing not to be pleasant–in society. They were also not Méré’s mythical princes capable of being perfectly agreeable without a helping hand (Thought 9). Both Mlle. de Scudéry and Méré noticed the general talents of their respective bel esprit. Méré was forthright about how quickly (the supposed) Pascal adjusted to a light and agreeable commerce and signs pointed to a similar result for Mlle. Diodée (Rathery 27).
This hints at a certain play between gift and circumstance not obvious in Woolf’s reasoning. The fact is that Mlle. de Scudéry’s life was more limited than that of Simone de Beauvoir’s, which was in turn more limited than Sartre’s (Thought 9). Both Austen and Brontë did not have the freedoms Woolf had, and she was herself limited in a variety of ways. A Room of One’s Own, a series of lectures given at a Cambridge University women’s college, set the tone by describing the formal and structural differences in accumulated wealth and access relative to the men’s colleges.
Mlle. Diodée was part of a pattern. Fifty-odd years after Marseille, the honest abbot Boisot, a regular correspondent, sent Mlle. de Scudéry a letter mentioning a Mlle. Bordey, an intelligent woman struggling to reconcile her intellectual interests with the ridicule such interests caused in the small eastern city of Besançon. By that time Mlle. de Scudéry had built up a reputation of enlightenment not to everyone’s taste, which intimidated Mlle. Bordey, but her friendly temperament remained. Sometimes directly, sometimes using Boisot as intermediary, she established a rapport. This arguably helped Mlle. Bordey (soon to be Mme. de Chandiot) throughout the rest of her life, though did not significantly change her situation (319).
Between Pascal and libertines like our Méré Knight, the traces of influence are exceptionally evident. Pascal’s fundamental convictions and interests never changed, but their expressions did. As we saw in Thought 0, his religious beliefs were at times expressed in terms of gambling and wagers. His mathematical interests expressed themselves in enterprises like an efficient mass transit system for Paris. His engineering interests in how to drain wetlands in Poitou. The expression shifted from the abstract to the practical, insofar as what the part of polite society that was not wilfully ignorant considered practical was actually practical. Beyond that, if Méré’s description was accurate, the main influence was that he was happier.
There are various ways one can think of the Enlightenment. One of the most common is as a shift of circumstances. This started with skepticism regarding received wisdom about ourselves and the world. People like Descartes aimed to go back to the fundamentals with his geometric (Cartesian) method. People like Pascal tested whether nature actually did abhor a vacuum rather than taking Aristotle’s word for it. The seeds of modern philosophy and science were planted and grew into institutions.
Mlle. de Scudéry and other lightly enlightened folks did not seek structural societal, philosophical or scientific change. Accepting the fatality of humanity’s miserable condition and focusing on how to make it as pleasant as possible could even be seen as counter to the Enlightenment ethos. Re-quoting Pascal from Thought 1:
“Misery.
The only thing that consoles us in the midst of our miseries is diversion [divertissement]. And at the same time it is the largest of our miseries. Because it is that which principally stops us from thinking of ourselves, and which makes us imperceptibly lose ourselves. Without it we would feel ennui, and it is this ennui that would push us to search for a more solid means of getting out of it, but diversion amuses us and delivers us imperceptibly to death” (fr. 393, 671).
Another view might emphasize the skepticism itself, while keeping human qualities of mind and heart at hand. Two major commonalities between the lightly and highly enlightened would then be brought to the fore; doubt and dissatisfaction regarding the models in place and some level of confidence that it was within people’s reach to improve their understanding and perhaps their lives.
Our Méré Knight’s habitual conversation partner once said, “To judge philosophy by the idea that [my academic neighbour] gives me of it, I think of it like a type of night, and I asked him one time if it was in its essence to be obscure and shadowy?” (Seconde Conversation 24). Mlle. de Scudéry rejected abbot Boisot’s suggestion that her Interviews on Morality should be between philosophers rather than following the usage of good company, where “one raises with intelligence that which is said agreeably” (Sa Vie 351).
The Enlightenment would not have been the Enlightenment without a Pascal and a Descartes. They could also be pretty obtuse. Their disconnect from people, while novel in many ways, had echoes of Aristotle (Thought 7) and Jansenism (Thought 8). The libertine connections to people, to be fair, risked infecting them with the stupidities of society (Thought 6, 9). Still, it is difficult not to see considerable merit, both intellectual and moral, in being able to make intelligence friendlier and society friendlier to intelligence without fundamentally disrupting either.
To be continued? When a friend wished Mlle. de Scudéry could live forever, she replied that a hundred years would do nicely. Coincidentally, Ludvík Vaculík thought a hundred years was appropriate for his philosopher friend Karel Kosík (Thought 2). Moral of the story: it would not be terribly honest to go on indefinitely.
| “Your madrigal is pretty,
It is agreeable and polite; You praise me with good grace: But for this immortality Of which one speaks so much in Parnassus, Alas! it is only vanity. As in the end, Damon, the greatest name fades In sombre posterity: And if heaven wished to fulfill my desire I would be good with a century of life.” |
“Votre madrigal est joli,
Il est agréable et poli; Vous me louez de bonne grâce: Mais pour cette immortalité Dont on parle tant au Parnasse, Hélas! ce n’est que vanité. Car à la fin, Damon, le plus grand nom s’efface Dans la sombre postérité: Et si le ciel vouloit contenter mon envie J’en quitterois ma part pour un siècle de vie” (530). |
All translations from French by the author.
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