(Parallax - Re-Visions of Culture and Society) Elena Russo - Styles of Enlightenment - Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France-Johns Hopkins University Press (2006)

         -               
 
Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner,

 
Voltaire, Couronné par les Comédiens François, le 30 Mars 1778.
Il est beau de la recevoir
Quand c’est Arlequin qui la donne.
Se trouve à Paris, chez les Marchands d’Estampes.
Styles of
Enlightenment
Taste, Politics, and Authorship in
Eighteenth-Century France
Elena Russo
The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore
© 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2007
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russo, Elena.
Styles of Enlightenment : taste, politics, and authorship in
eighteenth-century France / Elena Russo.
p. cm. — (Parallax, re-visions of culture and society
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8018-8476-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. French literature—18th century—History and criticism.
2. Enlightenment—France. 3. France—Intellectual life—18th
century. I. Title. II. Series: Parallax (Baltimore, Md.)
pq261.r87 2006
040.9ʹ384—dc22 2006009621
A catalog record for this book is available from the

British Library.
Frontispiece: This engraving is a provocative variation on the

better-known Homage to Voltaire, by Moreau le Jeune, which
commemorates the apotheosis of Voltaire after the sixth
performance by the Comédie-Française of Irène on 30 March
1778, when Voltaire, who had just returned to Paris from
his exile, was hailed by the audience as a hero, and his bust
crowned on stage by the actors. The difference here is that
Voltaire is being crowned by the lowly masks of the Comédie-
Italienne, which he despised and which had produced so
many parodies of his works. Arlequin lays the crown on the
bust while executing a dance step; Momus, the embodiment
of satire, is seated on the right, jingling his bells; and Pedrolino
(or Polichinelle), on the left, kneels in submission to the great
man. Is satire paying its respects to Voltaire’s genius? Or is it
deflecting his apotheosis in the direction of parody, as the Ital-
ians had done so many times before? Courtesy of Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris (Estampes, Collection Hennin 9644).
To Paolo
This page intentionally left blank
Well now, I’m afraid that’s not a view I can share, M. de Norpois
said (and when I realized that the thing I set far above myself,
the one thing I saw as the highest in the world, was the least of
his admirations, the doubts this planted in my mind about my
own intelligence were much more crippling than those which
usually assailed me). Bergotte is what I call a flute-player. It must
of course be admitted that he tootles on his flute quite melliflu-
ously, albeit with more than a modicum of mincing mannerism
and affectation. But when all’s said and done, tootling is what
it is, and tootling does not amount to a great deal. His words
are so flaccid that one can never locate in them anything one
could call a framework. There’s never any action in ’em, well,
hardly any, and especially no scope. It’s their base which is their
weak point—or rather, they have no base. In this day and age,
when the increasing complexity of modern life leaves one barely
any time for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone a
profound recasting, and may well be on the point of undergo-
ing another which may prove to be even more profound, when
so many new and threatening problems are cropping up on all
sides, you will allow that one may fairly claim the right to expect
that a writer might aspire to be something higher than a glib wit
[bel esprit], whose futile hair-splittings on the relative merits of
merely formal matters distract us from the fact that we may be
overrun at any moment by a double wave of barbarians, those
from within and those from without! . . . In our day and age
there are more urgent tasks than stringing jingles of words to-
gether. I must admit that Bergotte’s jingles can at times be quite
pretty, but all in all they add up to something which is pretty
jejune, pretty precious—and pretty unmasculine, if you ask me!
—Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (In the Shadow of
Young Girls in Flower), translated by James Grieve
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Prologue: Boudoir and Tribune 16
1 A Faded Coquette: Marivaux and the Philosophes 45
2 Fakes, Impostors, and Beaux Esprits: Conversation’s
Backstage 59
3 The Sly and the Coy Mistress: Style and Manner
from Fénelon to Diderot 85
4 Capturing Fireside Conversation: Diderot and
Marivaux’s Stylistic Challenge 113
5 Grace and the Epistemology of Confused Perception 141
6 Between Paris and Rome: Montesquieu’s Poetry of
History 167
7 Montesquieu for the Masses, or Implanting False
Memory 194
8 Everlasting Theatricality: Arlequin and the
Untamed Parterre 221
Epilogue: The Costume of Modernity 252
Notes 263
Index 331
Acknowledgments
This book owes many debts of gratitude. I want to thank David A. Bell, Chris-
tian Delacampagne, and Marie-Hélène Huet for reading the manuscript and
offering precious suggestions and encouragement. My conversations with
Mary Salzman have been invaluable in helping me shape my ideas. I have also
profited from the high standards and good counsel of Jean-Marie Apostolidès,
Thomas Kavanagh, Rochelle Tobias, and Anne Vila. My debt to Josué Harari is
greater than I am able to acknowledge. Sarah Benharrech, Gregory S. Brown,
Daniel Edelstein, and Isabelle Monette in various ways offered valuable help.
Elisabeth Ladenson showed me, perhaps without realizing it, how one can
loosen one’s style. A Mellon Fellowship from Stanford University in 1999–
2000 and several leaves of absence from the Johns Hopkins University enabled
me to work on the manuscript as obsessively as I wished. Special thanks go
to Stephen G. Nichols for his generous support throughout. Finally, Michael
Lonegro, of the Johns Hopkins University Press, has been helpful yet discreet,
while Joanne Allen’s stylistic discernment much improved my prose.
A part of chapter 6 was published in “The Youth of Moral Life: The Virtue
of the Ancients from Montesquieu to Nietzsche,” in Montesquieu and the Spirit
of Modernity, ed. David Carrithers, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Century, 9 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002).
I lovingly dedicate this book to Paolo Mancosu, who has been helping all
along, even while pretending he was not.
xi
Styles of Enlightenment
Introduction
There is among us much instruction and little education. We train

scientists and artists of all kinds; every aspect of letters, arts, and sciences
is cultivated with success. . . . But no one has thought of training men
. . . in such a way that they would be accustomed to looking for their
personal interest within the grand scheme of the general good and that,
regardless of their profession, they would be, above all, patriots.
—Duclos
He’ll stuff the bawdyhouse and the boudoir in every context.

—Diderot
In the debates that accompanied the spread of the Enlightenment the enemies
of the philosophes were not limited to the champions of tradition, religious
orthodoxy, and their institutional strongholds—the church, the university, the
court, the parlements, the Jesuits.1 Those enemies could be confronted head-
on with honor. It was a heroic struggle that could only bring credit to the phi-
losophes, who liked to portray themselves as so many Davids battling against
Goliath, armed with nothing but their beliefs and their eloquence. But the
philosophes also had to confront another kind of enemy, one that was more
insidious, more difficult to pin down, and no less formidable for being less
heavily armed. That enemy emerged from within the world of letters; it under-
mined, rather than validated, the identity of the patriotic philosophe because
the philosophe constantly ran the risk of being mistaken for him. That vexing
double of the philosophe was the bel esprit.
1
The bel esprit did not have the seriousness, the commitment, or the pa-
triotism of the philosophe. He was, to borrow M. de Norpois’s expression, a
“flute-player,” dedicated to ephemeral pleasures and to wordplay; he was frivo-
lous, superficial, affected, and vain.2 He lacked hardness and definition, pow-
erful ideas, and, above all, virility. “I would like to call all those artists who are
after miniatures female authors,” wrote Louis-Sébastien Mercier; “all they care
for is brilliance and sparkle; while they believe they are writing with esprit, all
they do is pencil in words that are elegantly carved but mean nothing. Adorn-
ment for those authors has the same function as for some women: it makes
up for the features they don’t have, and it camouflages their bony chest.”3 The
epitome of the bel esprit was Marivaux, whom d’Alembert described as a “min-
iaturist,” one of those “calligraphers who took pride in being read only with a
magnifying glass,” not a forceful history painter but a painter of bambochades,
of genre scenes focusing on low life and trivial subjects.4 More dazzling than
enlightening, beaux esprits made a parade of their verbal brilliance, hiding their
lack of virile attributes with empty virtuosity, much as emaciated women pad-
ded their bosoms with lacy frills.
Beaux esprits embodied and disseminated le goût moderne (modern taste, to
its detractors le petit goût), a kind of aesthetics that the philosophes hoped to
marginalize and eventually to suppress. In the philosophes’ eyes, trivial taste—
le petit goût—threatened the revival of the grand goût, also referred to as goût
sévère or goût à l’antique, which they supported and which was more in tune
with their values.5 Beaux esprits were everywhere, sowing their idle and ama-
teurish productions in a society that they had made in their image and that
had conspired to produce them. From the erotic paintings of Boucher, the offi-
cial court painter and protégé of Mme de Pompadour, to Marivaux’s comédies
métaphysiques,6 to the novels of Crébillon, to the scientific popularizations of
Fontenelle, to the theatrical productions of the fairgrounds, the goût moderne
was successful among the worldly, the powerful, and the wealthy. It was com-
mercial and ubiquitous.7
If the Enlightenment could be said to be a project, that project did not
consist only in remapping the world of knowledge through an encyclopedic
reordering of the sciences; it also meant conquering the domain of taste and
the arts. From genre and history painting to the theater, the novel, and eulo-
gistic productions, the philosophes promoted their own ideas about the social
function of the arts. They set out to reform the manner in which the work of
art was conceptualized and received by the public; they aspired to redefine the
identities of the artist and the audience. Such an endeavor was weighty and
2
Introduction
momentous. In ancien régime France, where political argument was severely

curtailed, aesthetic debates were loaded with political implications.
Art was the mirror in which the dominant classes (the court aristocracy
and the cultivated, wealthy bourgeoisie) constructed the representation they
wished to project of themselves.8 Criticizing a particular genre and manner
meant, therefore, rejecting the values of that part of the population that alleg-
edly sponsored and appreciated it. Apart from early attempts such as the abbé
Du Bos’s Essai critique sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), French thinkers of
the eighteenth century, unlike their British and Scottish counterparts, seemed
less interested in laying out the philosophical foundations for a comprehensive
theory of taste and aesthetic experience than in policing the world of the arts.
They often limited themselves to a critique of bad taste, which they saw as a
vehicle for bad values, and to writing poetics aimed at educating the public
and other artists. In other words, they were more concerned with berating
bad taste and prescribing various remedies for it than with approaching the
aesthetic domain as a field of study, an approach they suspected of being ir-
relevant, pedantic, and smacking of despotism. In a short parable by Voltaire
a French philosopher went to the theater in England and did not like what he
saw: “Uh-oh! said the philosopher, to kalon is not the same for the English as
for the French. After much thought, he came to the conclusion that beauty is
often a relative thing, . . . and he saved himself the trouble of writing a long
treatise on it.”9 Yet, eighteenth-century France produced vast amounts of criti-
cism on literature, language, and the arts; in Voltaire’s oeuvre there is perhaps
more literary criticism than other genres of writing. Taste was consubstantial
with national culture and with the degree of civilization in a given nation.
Discussions of good or bad taste thus always implied a cultural, moral, and
political debate.
From Voltaire to Diderot to Rousseau, the arts in general, but in particular
painting, architecture, and the theater, were seen as tainted by their association
with rich and tasteless patrons. In Le temple du goût (first published in 1733)
Voltaire ridiculed the nouveau riche. The preening financier was a stock figure
of satire and an easy target for the writer who was reluctant to offend the elites
upfront. In reality, no aristocratic family (including members of the court)
could claim to be uncontaminated by alliance with the financial class, and it
is doubtful that someone like the immensely influential and learned financier
and art collector Pierre Crozat—the patron of Roger de Piles and Watteau,
presiding over a shadow academy sustained by his own generosity (subsisting
alongside the far less well funded royal one)—would have recognized himself
3
in that sketch, or that anyone would have, for that matter.10 Social mobility
was universally seen as vulgar, especially by the socially mobile. Writers who
were members of the bourgeoisie dressed their objections in terms of moral val-
ues; only Marivaux dared to go against the grain by portraying a financier who,
in his jovial impropriety, was irresistibly seductive.11 As Charles Pinot Duclos put
it, “Rivers that surge suddenly are always a little muddy.”12 The new incarnation
of the bourgeois gentilhomme bankrolled artists and architects to build himself a
tacky palace, as in these lines from Voltaire’s Le temple du goût:
With happy countenance Pride rested,
And flourished on his large face,
And my Cresus roared:
I have much gold and I am clever;
I have good taste for everything;
I have learned nothing but I know all things;
Therefore I want a beautiful mansion
Built on the spot for myself alone,
Where all the arts will be amassed and piled up,
Where every day I expect to be admired:
Money is ready. Wretches, obey!
Immediately, the rabble around him
Zealously sets out to work.13
Against such ostentatiously bad taste, Voltaire evoked with fondness the golden
age of royal patronage sponsored by Louis XIV and Colbert, who rebuilt the
Temple of Taste from its Greek and Roman ruins and “attracted to this sanctu-
ary the immortal cohort of the Fine Arts,” turning France into an artistic and
cultural pole of attraction for Europe.14 An agenda similar to Voltaire’s was es-
poused in 1747 by La Font de Saint-Yenne, the author of the first art criticism
of a Salon, one of the skirmishes in the war against the goût moderne. Since
1737 the Salon exhibit had given to ordinary people of all ranks a chance to
exercise the kind of artistic appreciation that until then had been restricted to a
few privileged patrons; La Font claimed to speak in the name of the public and
for “the glory of our nation.” In order to counteract the decadence of contem-
porary art, he invited the king to turn the Louvre gallery into a museum filled
with the best artworks from his collection. They would be exhibited for the
public to admire and for artists to emulate; the former would be educated, and
the latter would be held in check by this high tribunal of good taste. Against
the fickleness of the “petty judges of a subaltern kind, prodigal benefactors of
a weekly immortality to our printmakers . . . , fops and dandies of both sexes,
4
Introduction
but especially of the fair sex, which nowadays lords over all works of art,” La
Font opposed the “judgment of judicious experts, enlightened by firm prin-
ciples and even more by that natural light that we call taste [sentiment],” a
judgment that unfortunately was not equally distributed among the public but
restricted to the happy few.15
A decade later, Diderot held a similar position in his own Salon writings,
which, through their publication in the Correspondance littéraire, were des-
tined to shape the taste of a handful of European potentates. While Diderot
by no means shared Rousseau’s prejudice against the art and the economy of
the modern age, he nonetheless was very critical of what he saw as the collu-
sion between the marketplace, a taste for luxury, and the arts. Like Voltaire, he
saw corruption and decadence in a private patronage overrun by the “vermin-
ous epidemics” of the “amateurs,” and he saw salvation in state intervention.16
Left to themselves, without the guidance of an enlightened monarch (such
as Frederick the Great or Catherine of Russia, both subscribers to the Corre-
spondance littéraire)—or, more precisely, without the providential intervention
of an enlightened community of philosophes who would undertake the task
of edifying the monarch—both the artists and the public (led by the band of
powerful surintendants des arts, directeurs des bâtiments, the undying avatars
of the stock figure of the wicked courtier) made bad choices. “There is good
reason for all great artists to despair over the public’s judgment, to have the
most perfect contempt for it,” wrote Diderot.17 In its desire to show off its ill-
begotten wealth and its vanity, in its courtly turn of mind, the public spon-
sored venal and immoral artists—the calamitous cohort of genre painters,
Watteau, Boucher, Lagrenée, Fragonard, Baudouin, and all the decorators of
“overdoors,”18 who degraded the arts and who could not rise to the true great-
ness of history painting:
The talented man of whom a rich one requests a work he can leave to his son
or heir as a precious inheritance will no longer be subjected to my judgment,
or yours, or consideration of self-esteem, or fear of losing his reputation: it
is no longer for the nation but for a private individual that he will produce,
and a mediocre work of no value will be obtained from him in this way.
. . . Ah! my friend, the cursed race which is that of amateurs! . . . It is these
people who determine, erroneously and capriciously, an artist’s reputation;
. . . The tenacity of the amateurs occasionally goes so far as to obtain for
mediocre artists the profit and honor of public commissions.19
In a nation abandoned to the “fantasy” and the “capriciousness” of private
sponsors and powerbrokers genuine talent would yield to greed and lustful-
5
ness. Unchecked by the critical eye of the philosophes and sheltered from the
nation’s scrutiny, the artist would surrender to his own (and his patron’s) worst
instincts; artistic productions would decay along with the public’s taste.20 Thus,
at the time that Habermas has heralded as the birth of an independent, dis-
interested, commercial, and bourgeois public many of those who are credited
with a role in the birth of such a public in reality demonstrated little faith in its
judgment. Instead, they took refuge in the traditional schemes of state patron-
age, which represented a refuge from an unruly, irrational, and unregulated
marketplace.21 Voltaire cautioned the man of letters against dependence on the
market, the viciousness of critics, and the vagaries of the public. It was much
better not to publish at all; in other words, it was better to have one’s work cir-
culated clandestinely, preserving the right to deny one’s paternity.22 Moreover,
the “nation” for whom the philosophes claimed to speak was a political fiction
abstracted from the heterogeneous, bourgeois public that attended the Salon
exhibits.23 In Diderot’s view, the public’s increased access to artworks necessi-
tated a stricter regulation of the material exhibited and a rigorous education of
the public’s taste. In Marmontel’s view, literary reputations must trickle down
from the opinion of gens de lettres to the public at large; those that originate
in “frivolous circles” and then spread to the public might be compared to “an
artificial pond laboriously constructed, whose waters would soon dry up.”24
And in d’Alembert’s view, gens de lettres ought to “legislate for the rest of the
nation in matters of taste and philosophy.”25
If wealthy amateurs were responsible for sinking the arts into insignificance,
beaux esprits were guilty of the same in the world of letters. In Considérations
sur les moeurs de ce siècle (1751) Duclos dedicated a long chapter to the allegedly
widespread obsession with bel esprit, separate from his chapter on professional
gens de lettres. He described beaux esprits as fashionable amateurs who were
culturally immature and whose taste was poor but who wanted to usurp the
rewards that should have devolved on the true gens de lettres. “When that part
of literature that goes under the name of bel esprit becomes a fashion, a kind
of public obsession, men of letters do not profit from it, and other professions
lose too. That horde of suitors to bel esprit is the reason why it is more difficult
to distinguish those who have a right to it from those who are mere pretenders.
. . . They usurp in public opinion a kind of superiority over talent.”26 It is not
clear exactly whom Duclos had in mind. Was it the public of influential ama-
teurs of letters and the arts who frequented the Salon exhibits, displayed their
expertise in writing, sponsored and brokered careers—people like Louis-Petit
de Bachaumont and the comte de Caylus, both proponents of neoclassicism?27
6
Introduction
Was it those successful writers who hobnobbed with the elites in the salons and
the court? Someone like Fontenelle, mathematician and secrétaire perpétuel of
the Academy of Sciences, whom La Bruyère had once called “an insignificant
blabberer,” a “bel esprit,” a “mixture of the pedant and the précieux”?28 Or
someone like Claude-Henri Watelet, painter, playwright, landscape architect,
and art theoretician, a collaborator on the Encyclopédie, a regular guest of Mme
Geoffrin, and a member of the Academy? Or Duclos himself, who straddled
all kinds of cultural venues, both high and low? Duclos was secrétaire perpétuel
of the French Academy, the king’s official historiographer, an advocate of phi-
losophy, a protégé of Mme de Pompadour, a habitué of the Café Procope and
the satirical Société du Caveau, and a friend of Rousseau. He was the author
of novels exploring moral and sentimental education among the worldly (e.g.,
Les Confessions du Comte de ***, 1741) but also of such trifles as Acajou et Zir-
phile, an Oriental tale that, under the pretext of satire, illustrated the eroticism
that the nouvelle vague of the ancients reproved in the goût moderne (the tale
had been inspired by a set of prints made by Boucher and was quickly turned
by Favart into a fairgrounds vaudeville).29 Where exactly could one draw the
boundary separating the worldly activities of the dilettantes from those of the
professional writers?
The reality was that no matter how uncompromisingly the philosophes
tried to categorize and hierarchize “high,” professional and contestatory cul-
tural practices, as distinct from “low” and conventionally subservient ones,
their definitions always remained vague and tentative, exposing the fact that
cultural life was much more integrated than they were willing to acknowledge
and that practices of dissent were continuous with practices of social confor-
mity and assimilation. As Gregory S. Brown has shown, the rhetoric of service
to the patrie, a corollary of the classical theme of literature’s usefulness in the
public arena, was for the writers a self-legitimizing strategy aimed at stressing
their intellectual independence, their authenticity, and the relevance of their
work to contemporary issues, but it did not prevent them from also enjoying
the benefits of elite-oriented networks of sociability and patronage.30 By ap-
pealing directly to the nation and the public at large, the patriotic writer was
able to position himself as an outsider to courtly patronage, as someone inde-
pendent of the networks of sociability. Many writers, Louis-Sebastien Mercier
being prominent among them, resorted, with varying degrees of sincerity, to
such a risky strategy of self-presentation. Many others, however, such as Léo-
nard-Antoine Thomas (a five-time winner of the French Academy’s prize of
eloquence, the secretary of the duke of Choiseul, a regular guest at all the
7
major salons, and the beneficiary of a pension from Mme Geoffrin), played
on both the level of patronage and that of independent patriotism. Hence, an
ever-present desire to discriminate and classify, to rank writers not according
to classes and alliances, which were impossibly blurred, but according to moral
posture and self-fashioning rhetoric.
The perception, however, was that professional writers and artists went
unrewarded, and talent unrecognized; that remained the unwavering belief of
the philosophes long after the public had embraced them and the court and
the academies had opened their doors to them. In their eyes, however, the
danger continued to appear so pressing that in the Discours préliminaire to the
Encyclopédie Jean Le Rond d’Alembert warned against the onslaught of a new,
modern form of barbarity that resulted from the corruption of taste foisted by
bel esprit.31 It was the product of the extreme refinement brought by the clos-
ing of a cycle in a civilization that had peaked in Louis XIV’s Grand Siècle and
had been declining ever since. In other words, modernity was barbaric. In their
attempt to save civilization from its looming decay the philosophes appointed
themselves the reformers of the world of letters and the arts. Regenerating the
nation required purging the public’s taste; that was both the precondition and
the goal of their endeavor.
This book is an attempt to provide a more accurate description of the true
character of le goût moderne, which the Enlightenment and the Revolution
wanted to consign to oblivion and which a literary history shaped by the clas-
sicist viewpoint has for a long time misrepresented as a culture of the joli and
the frivolous, as “vaporous fantasy and sexual escapism.”32 But how could it
have been otherwise? Since such an aesthetics had been closely identified by
its opponents with the class of citizens that the Revolution was to eliminate,
the goût moderne—renamed rococo by David—had by necessity to bow to the
judgment of history and own up to its insignificance. Hence the image of a “de-
liciously decadent,”33 trifling, selfish, pleasure-oriented, feminine, and courtly
ethos cut short by the executioner’s blade (which its own excesses had helped
sharpen), an ethos that Baudelaire’s ironic paean À Mme du Barry, to Mme du
Barry, the ancien régime’s most despised mistress, illustrates quite well:
Vous étiez du bon temps des robes à paniers,
Des bichons, des manchons, des abbés, des rocailles,
Des filles, des marquis, des soupers, des ripailles.
Moutons poudrés à blanc, poètes familiers,
Vieux sèvres et biscuits, charmantes antiquailles,
8
Introduction
Amours dodus, pompons et rubans printaniers,

Meubles en bois de rose et caprices d’écailles.
Le peuple a tout brisé, dans sa juste fureur. . . . 34
But in the same way that Baudelaire’s modernist aesthetics was inspired by
the early eighteenth century’s ironic deconstruction of the classicist tenets of
mimesis, the philosophes themselves in their finest moments could not avoid
engaging in the very practices they professed to repudiate. The war the late
Enlightenment launched against the goût moderne was in reality a war against
itself, that is to say, against the culture of criticism and self-reflexive experi-
mentation with language and form that had produced the Enlightenment.
That is ultimately the point that I wish to make. The goût moderne, as I see
it, illustrates a number of traits that are constitutive of the “post-absolutist
thinking” analyzed by Jay Caplan: it emerges from a semiotic crisis (itself the
manifestation of the crisis of authority that took place during the Regency) in
which “the production and coding of signs” and the “making and interrela-
tion between form and content” became problematic because semiotic systems
were no longer grounded in a reality guaranteed by royal and divine author-
ity.35 Hence its rejection of the absolutist and classicist grand narrative in fa-
vor of dissonant, paratactic storytelling; its ironic use of preexisting forms;
its deconstruction of classicism and its fragmentation of narrative; its use of
contrarieties and contrasts; its recurring theatricality and self-referentiality; its
blurring between reality and the space of representation; its use of a thematic
that embraces the grotesque, the burlesque, and the bizarre; its mixture of
genres and styles (bigarrure); and its confusion of hierarchies, be they ethical,
representational, or gendered.
In her revealing study on the culture wars of the late seventeenth century
(otherwise known as the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns) Joan
DeJean gives us some tools for understanding what was happening in the
following fin de siècle. DeJean has modified the Habermasian version of the
emergence of a public sphere of critical reason.36 She shows that it was in the
late seventeenth century that the “intellectual upheaval that began the revolu-
tionary shift in mentalité upon which the Enlightenment was founded” took
place. “Literature became a radically more public phenomenon, the center of
a cultural sphere in which a variety of previously silent groups began to engage
in active participation.”37 It was through its engagement with literary debates
about who was entitled to exercise aesthetic judgment that a new public was
born. In the pages of the Mercure galant, France’s first and most widely cir-
9
culated journal, Donneau de Visé, its longtime editor (1672–1710), turned

literary criticism, until then the province of professional (male) writers, into
a public and feminine affair. Female readers were invited to write letters and
express their opinion. Women were recognized as vital members of the reader-
ship and as the critical audience for literary productions. The old guardians of
the republic of letters, such as Nicolas Boileau, fought vehemently against this
perceived feminization of French culture. As Charles Perrault pointed out, to
be truly a modern it was necessary to reason as a woman.38
By the eighteenth century the feminization of the public had become some-
thing of a commonplace; it was being felt in the scientific popularizations of
Fontenelle, which dramatized a feminine audience; in such texts as Diderot’s
Le rêve de d’Alembert (1769), which featured a prominent salonniere, Julie de
Lespinasse, and his Entretien d’un philosophe avec la Maréchale (1774); and in
Marivaux’s journals, to name just a few. In 1719 the abbé Du Bos had praised
the sureness of the public’s taste (sentiment) in judging the quality of works of
art, opposing it to the cabals and the interests of the professional critics.39 At the
same time, however, that phenomenon was challenged by the renewal of neo-
classicism. As the imagined site of the public broadened from the salon to the
nation, the attitude of intimacy and equality that writers had previously enter-
tained with their elite audiences was transformed. At the same time, the writers
of the Enlightenment reclaimed the world of letters for the male professionals.
While they claimed to speak on behalf of the public, the philosophes did not
engage with it on equal terms. They no longer addressed its female component
to the same extent as before: as worldliness and the feminine were being identi-
fied with each other, both were becoming obsolete; no longer figures of a rec-
onciled public, women now stood for cultural impotence and bastardization.
In his Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles Rousseau made it clear that while
taste and esprit were feminine, genius was an entirely masculine affair.40 In his
Encyclopédie article “Génie” Diderot reduced the province of taste to that of a
marginal, subordinate region of the cultural realm.41 It was confined to those
who could neither produce nor understand and appreciate a work of genius:
to worldly amateurs, to women and their effete doubles, the beaux esprits.
Among the vast crowd of the credulous and the vulgar, those who were easily
seduced by the decadent Boucher, Diderot counted “fops [petits-maîtres], scat-
terbrained women [petites femmes], young men and the worldly.”42 Thinkers
of the late Enlightenment thus rejected the gender métissage that, as DeJean
argues, had been the achievement of the seventeenth-century culture wars.43
In their desire to save French civilization from decadence and anomie and
10
Introduction
to take back the cultural domain the representatives of the late Enlightenment
belittled some of the practices that Habermas described as constitutive of the
public sphere, in particular the performance of sociability, which gave women
a large role. The irony, of course, was that the philosophes were dependent
on the patronage of wealthy aristocratic and bourgeois women, such as Mme
Necker and Mme Geoffrin, who facilitated the philosophical exchange of ideas
and the relations between writers and patrons (both private and state spon-
sored).44 Essays such as d’Alembert’s Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des
grands, Duclos’s Considérations sur les moeurs, countless academic eulogies (a
genre theorized by Antoine-Léonard Thomas’s Essai sur les éloges) and inau-
gural speeches, memoirs (e.g., Marmontel’s), and works of grammarians and
critics, not forgetting, of course, Rousseau’s works, most notably the influen-
tial Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles and La nouvelle Héloïse), all questioned
worldly sociability as a cultural practice, a code of manners, and a language.
While on the one hand they exalted social sentiment and benevolence as ab-
stract, universal virtues, on the other the philosophes were critical of the ways
sociability was embodied and expressed. They did not take pains to discrimi-
nate between the various kinds of sociable spaces and the various classes of
people who occupied them. They lumped together the court, the spaces of la
ville, the circles and bureaux d’esprit, the cafés and theatrical culture.
With their critique of the institutions of sociability, the thinkers of the
late Enlightenment rejected not only a certain conception of gender but also
the language that conveyed it. In their effort to define the relationship be-
tween the philosophical project and the wider public—notwithstanding their
constant appeal to the authority of public opinion—the philosophes by and
large repudiated the kind of discourse that sociability had fostered (which they
nonetheless continued to practice among themselves), namely, conversational
reciprocity, the careful negotiation of compromise in critical thinking, a search
for complicity between the speaker and the recipient, and the ironic and play-
ful exploration of the polysemic dimension of language. “Irony becomes the
poet’s favorite figure, because it is that favored by the worldly,” wrote Mercier,
who apparently had forgotten how brilliantly Voltaire had wielded irony as a
tool of philosophy), “and worldly circles are made up of three or four hundred
fops who do not know what to make of themselves. . . . Hence those subtle,
jerky, enigmatic ideas, those sparkles that brighten and dim, those lively, inge-
nious and carefully crafted expressions, those combed and ornate vices, shim-
mering with a thousand colors.”45 The new modes of philosophical discourse
rejected such “feminized” idioms; the philosophes took inspiration from ar-
11
chaic and religious models that emphasized the distance between the speaker
and the audience. The author and the public no longer stood on equal footing.
The homme de lettres delivered his message to an audience that was meant to
be edified, transformed, pierced through the heart by the power of his elo-
quence. There could be no reciprocity between them, especially because the
philosophe’s ideal public was not contemporary society but posterity, the new
society created by Philosophy. Emotion became a weapon in the philosophical
struggle, applied in order to control and unify an audience that until then had
been insubordinate, scattered, and unresponsive to truth.
One did not address the nation in the same way as one addressed one’s
friends in the “fireside tone of conversation,” in the intimacy of the conver-
sational circle.46 Because they wanted their words to exert as great a power
and to reach as wide an audience as possible, the philosophes opted for the
ancient drag, donning over their silk breeches the mantle of the classical orator
(Demosthenes haranguing his fellow citizens), of the preacher invested with
a sacred message. They favored the charismatic vehicle of melodrama (Rich-
ardson, Diderot, Rousseau, Mercier). They abandoned the forms that drew
attention to the medium and not to the message. In particular they wished
to reject the theatricality and the self-referentiality that had characterized the
writings of the baroque and the goût moderne (as well as the vast theatrical
culture of the unofficial theaters). To that purpose, language had to be purged
of the scoria of mannerism. Throughout his career, Voltaire devoted countless
pages to tracking down what he saw as bad taste and rhetorical impropriety,
from antiquity to his days; with unflinching severity he obsessively edited,
commented and often reworded all the plays of Corneille, turning his nose
up at the faintest whiff of préciosité.47 Anticipating Diderot’s dramatic experi-
ments, Voltaire sought to reinvent the language of the theater; he yearned to
find the mythical simplicity and straightforwardness to which the ancients had
had the key but which kept eluding the moderns. In the wake of the revival of
Pseudo-Longinus’s Peri Hupsous, which had been translated by Boileau at the
onset of the culture wars of the seventeenth century, the philosophes aspired
to free themselves of the constraints of the literary language of their time,48 of
the received molds. They wanted to recover the sacred in a language that had
been despoiled. They aimed to reach that threshold of pure expressiveness, of
a sublime passion that transcended the linguistic medium. But, prisoners of a
reverence for antiquity that they had absorbed in the collèges and of too exalted
an opinion of their own task, they sometimes flew too high, only to land on
the soft and clammy bed of bombast, melodrama, and kitsch.
12
Introduction
Wishing to reinvent the ideal of the writer and the artist, which demanded
that they demarcate themselves from the goût moderne and the bel esprit, the
philosophers of the Enlightenment defined a domain of high art as separate
from merely pleasurable art (génie versus goût).49 They labored within a cul-
tural field that discriminated more severely than the previous century between
high and low, comic and serious, between good and bad taste, between per-
missible and disreputable genres and venues. Sublime art tended toward the
exceptional and the eternal, hence towards the normative, while pleasurable art
was content with satisfying ephemeral passions (or goûts, as the libertine would
say) and with depicting the vulgar and trivial reality of the here and now.
In Naissance du Panthéon Jean-Claude Bonnet has pointed out the existence
of a double identity in the French Enlightenment, which he identifies with the
opposite rhetorical modes of the satire and the eulogy. There was in the En-
lightenment a dissociation between the language of critique and the language
of belief, between the desire to debunk and undermine the reigning idols and
the need to provide a foundation for new, community-enhancing values.50
Each language involved a distinct conception of the relationship between the
writer and his public and of the ethical and political role that letters were to
play in society. The uneasy coexistence of those two currents fueled a debate
that could not find a resolution until revolutionary Jacobinism coopted the
writer into the vast project of nation building and made him the object of a
national cult.51 As Thomas Kavanagh has argued, in a book that highlights
the specificity of the spirit of the early Enlightenment, the Revolution’s “viru-
lently catechistical orthodoxy” replaced an earlier cultural narrative that had
relied upon “interrogations, ambiguities and subversions concomitant with
the Enlightenment’s dismantling of any civitas dei” with one in which the
newly defined civitas terrena “coalesced into a unified and coercive ideology of
progress” that “deprived [its] Enlightenment sources of the iconoclastic, cor-
rosive and subversive role they had so consistently played within the context
of the ancien regime.”52 In fact, the new, sacralized conception of the patriotic
philosophe, which in the second half of the century replaced a caricaturized
figure of the bel esprit, paved the way for the Jacobinic narrative of cultural fall
and redemption.
It is not my intent in this book to tell a simple story of linear transforma-
tion in which the battle lines would be clearly drawn and writers would be
drafted into one camp or the other. Even though there is much evidence that
an epistemic and aesthetic change did occur at about midcentury, around the
time of the publication and the suppression of the Encyclopédie and the con-
13
troversies that ensued, much of the debate I describe cannot be narrowed to a

particular timespan but was carried on, with varying intensity, throughout the
century. Most important, much of the debate took place within the work of
the philosophes themselves. Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot all labored on
the uncertain frontier between the conversational and the sublime, the satire
and the eulogy, the linear unfolding of narrative and digressive slippage, good
and bad taste, and theatrical and antitheatrical ethos. The “real” Diderot may
be found swaying on the threshold that separates, in Rameau’s Nephew, the
bourgeois respectability of Moi from the grotesque, satirical, modern genius of
Lui; on the line that divides the unctuous eroticism of his tributes to Greuze’s
pubescent girls from the elaborate trompe l’oeil of his fascinating writings on
Vernet. In reality, although Diderot and Voltaire tried to harden themselves
against it, both were drawn to the siren song of “bad” taste; under the pretext
of satire, both practiced the very kind of aesthetics that they loudly claimed to
reject.53 Throughout his career Montesquieu remained more a bel esprit than
a serious philosopher and historian, or so at least thought Voltaire. Voltaire,
in his turn, was reprimanded by many critics, most conspicuously by the young
Rousseau, for being too worldly and vain, for being too modern. Indeed, being
a bel esprit was generally seen as a convenient charge to level against one’s oppo-
nents in the republic of letters: beaux esprits did not have a republican spirit, and
they did not belong. The ancients of the nouvelle vague struggled to demarcate
themselves from the beaux esprits and the lightweights. They tried to exercise
some control over the image they intended to bequeath to posterity.
But the bel esprit was more than simply a reflection of the contest to re-
define the homme de lettres socially and politically. Bel esprit was above all the
embodiment of a style that, as Proust would say, was a kind of vision and a
mode of apprehending the world. Where its detractors saw theatricality and
vanity (the author constantly mirroring himself in his language), we can see
an attitude of self-reflexivity toward mimesis and an ironic questioning of the
foundations of representation and authority, be they divine, political, or nar-
rative.
The following chapters focus on a wide range of interrelated aspects in the
confrontation between the grand goût and the goût moderne and on a cluster of
representative figures: Fénelon (though not a philosophe, he exercised a great
deal of influence on them), Voltaire, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Diderot, Mer-
cier. The proponents of the grand goût rejected all reflexivity in the work of art
(the audience’s critical awareness of the art medium as such). Self-reflexivity
and a ludic approach to artistic forms (which were, I argue, traits inherited
14
Introduction
from the seventeenth-century aesthetics of galanterie) were marginalized and

confined to minor genres and subordinate artistic venues. High art sought
instead a relationship with the audience that was less intimate than the one es-
tablished by the goût moderne. Audiences were to be drawn to the artwork (vi-
sual, theatrical, or narrative), absorbed and enthralled by an illusion achieved
by means of a powerful and sacred emotion. A sublime conception of mimesis
demanded that language aim toward its disappearance, toward the abolition
of all perception of the materiality of the artwork.54 By the same token, narra-
tive unity in painting and in prose had to be immediately and instantaneously
apprehended, a condition that necessarily excluded the narrative fragmentation
and discontinuity (saillie, papillotage) of the goût moderne, its systematic use of
contrarieties and contrast, and its scarce sympathy for closure. I argue, however,
that antitheatrical discourse, no matter how vehement, never entirely displaced
more participatory modes of reception but, on the contrary, was always balanced
by an equally powerful urge toward theatricality. Diderot, for one, embodied
both aesthetics, and his statements against theatricality in the visual and dra-
matic arts are often contradicted by his rhetorical standing in the texts; they
should also be read against the backdrop of his dialogues and his novels. It
would seem, therefore, that the eighteenth century never really lost theatrical-
ity (the distinctive character of the goût moderne). And we, as critics, need to
recover it as a tool for understanding the culture and the arts of that time.
15
Prologue:
Boudoir and Tribune
Always little pictures, little ideas, frivolous compositions, appropriate for

the boudoir of a libertine [petite-maîtresse], for the love nest [petite
maison] of a petit-maître; just the things for little abbés, little attorneys,
big financiers, and other immoral persons with a taste for the trivial
[d’un petit goût].
—Diderot
The perfection of talent consists in the ability to paint on a grand scale,

not in wasting one’s efforts to polish words, to turn an idea into an
epigram, to illuminate a thought.
—Mercier
The Sage par excellence, the Word Incarnate, never laughed. In the eyes
of One who has all knowledge and all power, the comic does not exist.
—Baudelaire
The disjunction between a language of critique, irony, and satire and a lan-
guage of belief involves a difference in the responses elicited from the public.
An attitude of ironic distancing resulting from an effect of dissonance that
splits the audience’s response is offset by an attitude of abandonment to the
emotions created by a discourse that presents itself as the unmediated and
transparent expression of an impassioned individual. Both positions postu-
late a distinct relationship between the writer and the public and a distinct
fictional space. While the first calls for the intimate space of conversation in
the boudoir, the cabinet, the salon, or the garden, the second requires that
16
Boudoir and Tribune
the philosophe address his captive and enthralled audience from the height of
a secular pulpit—a tribune—and, from that distance, sweep it off its feet by
the force of his eloquence. The first position invites reciprocity and exchange
between equals; the second presupposes distance and awe.
Under monarchical rule, before the advent of the revolutionary tribune and
scaffold, such a pulpit was, of course, more often imaginary than real. While
the eloquence of the magistrates was perhaps the only eloquence that had a
chance of reaching an audience in real time (e.g., in the parlement’s opening
session), a writer usually had to content himself with a textual reconstruc-
tion of the staging of such oratorical flights. The “Prosopopée de Fabricius”
in Rousseau’s First Discourse comes to mind. The passage tries to recapture
the imaginary emotion sparked in a late Roman audience by Fabricius, one
of the republic’s founding fathers. The resurrected orator has reached across
the ages in order to confront his decadent fellow citizens. In Rousseau, such
an attempt, twice removed from reality and historical time, may seem to be
permeated with an underlying melancholy: such spectacles may only happen
in the textual memory and in the imaginary reconstruction of a mythical past.
But in his inaugural speech to the French Academy President Lamoignon de
Malesherbes declared, with unabashed confidence, that “a tribunal indepen-
dent of all powers, which all powers respect, has been established; it appreci-
ates all talents and decrees on all kinds of merit. At a time when any citizen
may speak to the entire nation by way of print, those who have the talent to
instruct and inspire men—in one word, men of letters—play, in the midst of
a dispersed people, the same function as the orators of Rome and Athens in
the midst of the people assembled.”1 More fortunate even than Malesherbes,
Voltaire went so far as to embody Cicero himself, not, alas, on a national
tribune, but on the private stage of Sceaux, at the duchesse du Maine’s, dur-
ing the performance of his own play Rome sauvée. “I do not believe that it is
possible to hear anybody who would be more truthful, more full of pathos
and enthusiasm than M. de Voltaire in that role,” wrote the actor Lekain, a
protégé of Voltaire’s; “it truly was Cicero himself thundering from the tribune
and haranguing the people against some enemy of the patrie, laws, customs,
or religion.”2
Of course there was nothing radically new in this confrontation between
two rhetorics and two ethical approaches to discourse: the distinction between
a sermo facetus (or conversation enjouée, informal, affable conversation) and
a contentio orationis (public eloquence) was classic, and it had been clearly
formulated by Cicero.3 If anything was new in this confrontation, it was its
17
renewed urgency, and the sense that the two rhetorics were incompatible, that
a choice had to be made and boundaries drawn. Beginning in approximately
the mid-eighteenth century the philosophes felt that they had to take up new
forms of eloquence and a new identity. This led them to summon a new cov-
enant with their audience and to wish to reject the old ways. The classical dis-
tinction between the sermo facetus and public eloquence was therefore invested
with new meanings and new political implications. As with much that was
heralded as new, the philosophes found inspiration in antiquity: the profes-
sional and courtly écrivain (the bel esprit) was replaced with the orateur, not
the self-interested professional but the disinterested and inspired guide to the
civic community.
The two rhetorics had not always been seen as mutually exclusive, and the
writer had not always been torn between them. In Cicero’s De officiis the orator
could choose between a sermo that was associated with conversation in private
life—with the affabilitas and the comitas of vita contemplativa or otium, which
expressed itself in a simple, familiar style—and the contentio, which belonged
to vita activa, to the negotia of political and juridical activities, and found its
expression in the pathos and the noble style of public speech.4 Both rhetorics
were valid within their own separate spheres of action, and both had a role to
play in the life of an individual who, like Cicero, was active in his dual func-
tion as private citizen and political player. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, one of
the early theoreticians of honnêteté and a classicist, explored the dual face of
the rhetoric of the ancients in a text composed in 1638 and addressed to Mme
de Rambouillet, who was then at the height of her influence as the sovereign
of conviviality and the hostess of the most prestigious salon of the capital.
Guez de Balzac, who had once aspired to put his talents at the state’s disposal,
had been confined, following a faux pas, to the mandatory pleasures of a vita
contemplativa in Limousin by the ires of Cardinal Richelieu, and therefore he
could not attend her gatherings. He nonetheless entitled his text Suite d’un en-
tretien de vive voix, ou De la conversation des romains and lent it the illusion of
conversation, as if consigning to memory a fugitive moment that perhaps had
never taken place.5 In this founding fable of French urbanitas Guez de Balzac
invents an Aristotelian genealogy for the moderate virtues that rule civil life
and make society pleasurable: moderation (douceur), openness (franchise), and
joyfulness or playfulness (enjouement), what we would call a sense of humor.6
While urbanitas is not on a par with the civic virtue of the ancient republics,
it is a virtue nonetheless: “not as resplendent nor as high-minded as wisdom
and magnanimity; but still a virtue acknowledged by philosophy.”7 The social
18
Boudoir and Tribune
virtues that characterize modern, urban life are given an illustrious genealogy
in the ancient and revered world of the Romans: modernity is presented as a
rediscovery of the past, since antiquity, when it is not held up as a mirror to
the decadence of the present, serves to ground and legitimize it. In these early
stages of the confrontation between the ancients and the moderns the hos-
tilities are not yet fully declared between republican liberty and monarchical
yoke: the time is for syncretism and self-celebration, and the world of ancient
Rome and Athens naturally flows into that of modern France, its legitimate
heir. Guez de Balzac may well share some of the melancholy of Montaigne
when he declares that “it does not agree with us to play Camillus or Cato:
we do not have the strength of those people,” but the time has not yet come
when Montesquieu or Rousseau will starkly oppose the communal virtue of
the ancient republics to the moral corruption of modern monarchies.
Rambouillet, born Catherine de Vivonne-Savelli, from a Roman family, is
presented by Guez de Balzac as the heir to Roman urbanitas, now reborn in her
Parisian salon. Guez de Balzac would have us believe that the bonne humeur of
the polite gatherings in which women preside is of the same nature as that of
Cato and Numa; that the aggressive, masculine virtues of the warring noble-
men (Roman or French) may blend easily with the politeness of the honnête
homme; that one can pass casually from the salon to the battlefield. But then,
everything seemed possible to an aristocratic audience who had not yet experi-
enced the disappointment of an aborted revolt and the strictures of Versailles.8
Indeed, Guez de Balzac comes perilously close to a crime of lèse-antiquité and
to painting “Caton galant et Brutus dameret.”9 As a matter of fact, Guez de
Balzac, far less struck with the celebrities of antiquity than Boileau, does not
hesitate to mock the sublimity of republican eloquence and to question its
sincerity:
We cannot doubt that, when among themselves, they were capable of neg-
ligent graces and artless ornament, which our doctors do not know and
which rise above rules and precepts. I don’t doubt that, after having seen
them thunder and overturn heaven and earth on the tribune, it was quite a
relief to consider them under a more human aspect. Once they had removed
their enthymemes and their rhetorical figures, their feigned exclamations
and their artificial ires, they appeared in what we may assume was their true
self. It was then, Madame, that Cicero was no longer a sophist nor a rhetori-
cian; neither extolling this, nor furious against that; neither of one party nor
of the other. He was then the true Cicero, and he mocked in private what
he had adored on the public forum.10
19
There is, for Guez de Balzac, more than a touch of pedantry to the sublime
eloquence that Cicero indicates as appropriate to matters concerning the state
and the courts. No longer a pathos that, like a torrent, carries the audience
away, but feigned anger whipped out of a bag of rhetorical tricks, the kind of
eloquence that is the business of clerks, antiquarians, lawyers, and college pu-
pils. The true spirit of antiquity, Guez de Balzac argues, lies not in its boastful
moments, in its rhetorical ballooning (enflure), but in the “negligent graces,”
in the intimate moments when the orator abandons his contrived posture and
reveals, among friends, his real (even if duplicitous) nature and the expres-
sion of a self-deprecating humor. Guez de Balzac entirely depoliticizes the elo-
quence of public life, devaluing it in favor of the grace of conversation in the
private sphere. In Guez de Balzac’s time, in the wake of Castiglione’s analysis
of courtly sprezzatura, affectation and pomp were the most infamous pitfalls
for a writer, while negligence and naturel, the appearance of artlessness, were
his most valued achievement.11
By the time Voltaire composed his article “Éloquence” for the Encyclopédie,
though the elements were still the same, their value had shifted. Drawing on
the same sources as Guez de Balzac—that is, on Cicero and Aristotle—Voltaire
showed no inclination to depoliticize and deflate the ancient heroes. Rather, he
appropriated the model for himself: trying to emancipate eloquence from the
rhetoric taught in the colleges, he stressed the relationship between eloquence
and the orator’s conviction. Stripped of figures and forms, eloquence appears
as the disembodied spirit that emanates from the pure flame of the speaker’s
passion:
Eloquence was born before the rules of rhetoric, as languages are born before
grammar. Nature makes men eloquent when great interests or great passions
arise. Whoever is violently moved sees things differently from other men.
Everything becomes to him the object of rapid comparison and metaphor:
without even realizing it, he animates everything, and he communicates to
the audience part of his enthusiasm.
Eloquence transcends rhetoric; it comes alive when its forgets itself. Sticking
to the traditional distinction between simple, middle, and sublime style, Vol-
taire harbors no skepticism toward the oratorical sublime. Following Boileau’s
(and Longinus’s) contention that liberty and sublime eloquence are one and
the same, Voltaire sees the sublime as essentially political: “True eloquence
appeared in Rome at the time of the Gracchis and was perfected with Cicero.
. . . Like that of Athens, it perished with the Republic. Sublime eloquence be-
20
Boudoir and Tribune
longs to freedom alone because it delivers harsh truths, strong reasoning, and
powerful images. Often a master does not like truth; he fears reason and pre-
fers a delicate compliment to strong words.”12 Sublime eloquence is the high-
est expression of liberty; it is the language of the ancient republics, not that
of monarchical servility, which expresses itself in “delicacy” and refinement.
Implicit in his words is the belief that the task of philosophy is to resuscitate
it, or at the very least to bring it back to memory. Anything short of that is
viewed with suspicion because it amounts to a moral and political surrender.
Besides the obvious influence of the rediscovery of the pseudo-Longinus’s trea-
tise on the sublime (which Boileau had translated in 1674), nostalgia for the
eloquence of the ancients also revived the Ciceronian distinction between, on
the one hand, conciliare and delectare, which belong to the domain of ethics,
and, on the other, movere, which, transcending all considerations of aesthetic
judgment, focuses exclusively on the means employed to carry the audience
beyond itself, with no concern for the boundaries of reason. While the former
are compatible with conviviality and enjouement, and with the affability of
everyday life, the latter is an extreme and violent measure suited for extraordi-
nary situations of crisis:
There are, for instance, two topics which, if well handled by the orator,
arouse admiration for his eloquence. One, which the Greeks call ethos or
“expressive of character,” is related to men’s nature and character, their hab-
its and all the intercourse of life; the other, which they call pathos, or “relat-
ing to the emotions,” arouses and excites the emotions: in this part alone,
oratory reigns supreme. The former is courteous and agreeable, adapted to
win benevolence; the latter is violent, hot and impassioned, and, by this,
cases are wrested from our opponents; when it rushes along in full career, it
is quite irresistible.13
Because they could not conceive a reconciliation between those two styles
and those two world-views, the philosophes became somewhat schizophrenic
in their perception of themselves and of their function as writers. Conscious
of the magisterial responsibility they assumed toward the nation, from ap-
proximately the 1750s on (i.e., when they came into the public eye and under
the fire of their opponents), the philosophes, with varied degrees of emphasis,
professed to oppose those habits of irony and satire that they nonetheless were
practicing in their writings. The emblematic figure they chose was Heraclitus,
the sensitive philosopher who shed tears for the weaknesses of human nature,
rather than Democritus, who laughed them off.14
Nobody lived that conflict more intensely than Diderot. Haunted by the
21
sublime vision of Socrates’ and Seneca’s philosophical deaths, mindful perhaps

of Bossuet’s maxim that “the Sage laughs not save in fear and trembling,”15
Diderot, who very much wanted to be a sage, wrote in his dialogue Cinqmars
et Derville that “people who are accustomed to reflection must laugh less than
others. . . . A philosopher, a judge, a magistrate, seldom laughs . . . his [the
philosopher’s] status shows him the constant spectacle of human misery. . . .
He perceives all at once a great number of grave consequences emerging from
things that seem quite insignificant to ordinary people.”16 In the same spirit,
Rétif de la Bretonne dreamed that in a society more equitable and consonant
with philosophy “we shall no longer laugh, but we shall be content.”17 In a
letter of 1748 written in reference to the recent publication of his libertine and
philosophical novel The Indiscreet Jewels and to his own subsequent incarcera-
tion, Diderot declared: “I want the scandal to stop, and without wasting any
time in apologies, I am quitting the fool’s baubles and bells for ever, and I will
go back to Socrates.”18 Yet, as we know, Diderot did not stick to those sage
resolutions. Certainly the impish Monsieur Hardouin—the hero of Diderot’s
théâtre de société play Est-il bon, est-il méchant? and a portrait of the author as a
patron and a con artist—was as much a benefactor to his friends as a mischief-
maker and a devilish trickster, as he acknowledged himself with more than a
tinge of (self-mocking) guilt: “Ah! had I wanted, I would have been, I believe,
a dangerous scoundrel. . . . I was born in essence hard, mean, perverse. . . .
Hardouin, you make fun of everything; nothing is sacred to you; you are a
downright monster . . . this is bad, very bad . . . you must give up this evil turn
of mind.”19 But it was Dorval, Diderot’s brooding and melancholic dramatist,
who was the official, public face of the philosopher-playwright; he would put
Hardouin to shame with his stern morality and austere taste: “A distinguished
taste [grand goût] necessitates a great deal of reason, a long experience, a lofty
spirit, a melancholic temperament and refined organs.”20
Diderot was wary of the cult of great men of letters, which filled the halls
of the academies with emphatic eulogies and resuscitated, within the confines
of the republic of letters and for the likes of Thomas, La Harpe, d’Alembert,
and Mercier, the grand emotions of the golden age of republican eloquence,
when orators could make their audiences swoon and quiver with enthusiasm.
But despite Rameau’s nephew’s contempt for that ethos,21 Diderot felt that he
was part of a community of great men stretching across the ages. He staked
his reputation on the homage of posterity and basked in the anticipation of
his posthumous eulogies: “Only a limitless crowd of adoring admirers may sa-
tiate a spirit driven towards the infinite. . . . The eulogy legitimately expected
22
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[from posterity] and guaranteed by the unanimous support of one’s contem-

poraries, is a real pleasure for the living.”22 In his Eloge de Richardson Diderot
devoted a private cult to a writer whose prose exerted the universal appeal of
the sacred word: “The works of Richardson will be appreciated more or less by
everybody at all times and places; but the number of readers who will feel the
full extent of their merit will never be large: they require too severe a taste.”23
If the reader is morally transformed—“Richardson plants in the heart seeds of
virtue. . . : they remain hidden until the right moment comes that shakes them
up and brings them to fruition”24—that is because he has allowed himself to
be drawn into a fictional universe that is more vivid and lifelike than his own
reality: “Oh Richardson! We take, despite ourselves, a role in your works; we
get involved in the conversation, we approve, we blame, we admire, we are
irritated, we are incensed. How many times have I caught myself crying: ‘Do
not believe him, he is lying to you. . . . If you go there, you will be in trouble.’
My soul was in constant turmoil.”25 The power of illusion is so strong that the
reader is entirely absorbed into the fiction, as a child is drawn to a spectacle
that he cannot separate from reality. The writer in Diderot is overcome by the
reader in him, so that he becomes oblivious to the skill and the technique that
have produced such a world: “The interest and the charm of the work conceal
Richardson’s craft even to those who are most able to appreciate it.”26 Having
become a character among others, the reader feels lonely and bereft once he
has turned the last page.27 Diderot the reader is as open to empathy as Diderot
the writer. Over and over again he evokes a scene in which someone intrudes
upon him while he is in the grips of a hallucinatory enthusiasm: “I could no
longer read, and I surrendered to my distress; I would address the brother, the
sister, the father, the mother, the uncles, I would talk loudly, to the great as-
tonishment of Damilaville.”28 Perhaps because the fictional world exerted such
a strong pull on him, Diderot entertained a very ambivalent attitude toward
illusion and trompe-l’oeil effects in the novel, on the stage, and in the visual
arts. Indeed, his entire work is split between the surrender to the lure of the
fictional world and the drive to uncover its workings, to expose its facticity, to
brand it as deceptive. A striking example of that duality, La religieuse, is divided
between the self-absorbed, passionate, and seductive discourse of the heroine
and the ironic unveiling of the illusion in the préface-annexe, which offers us a
glimpse of what goes on backstage. When read as a pair, the two parts produce
a jarring dissonance. In contrast, Jacques le fataliste conflates narrative enchant-
ment and critical deflation in such a way that neither disrupts the other.
These issues are relevant to the status of eloquence in the writings of the
23
philosophes because eloquence draws its power more from the passions raised
by such fictional worlds than from the persuasion of reason. That much was
suggested in the article “Illusion” in the Encyclopédie: “Is there enthusiasm
without illusion? . . . Bring my illusion to its apex and you will produce in
me admiration, elation, enthusiasm, frenzy, and fanaticism. An orator leads
through persuasion; illusion advances by the poet’s side. Orators and poets are
both great magicians.”29 Enthusiasm, admiration, frenzy, fanaticism—all the
passions that are raised by the sublime manipulation of discourse and that are
so crucial to the philosophes—depend upon the poet’s (as well as the orator’s)
ability to induce some kind of belief in his audience. Belief, enchantment, and
illusion weave their deceptions around an audience enthralled by the speaker’s
words. Diderot’s work, however, does not fit squarely within that model, but
wavers between belief and disbelief, between an ironic conception of the writer
as a self-conscious spinner of lies and a sacralized conception of the writer as
celebrant in a secular cult, the virtuous carrier of a truth that transcends all
human practice.
The sacralized, magisterial posture of the sublime had always been wedded
to the aesthetics of the ancients and to classicism. David A. Bell has shown
that the cult of great Frenchmen and great men of letters that became pre-
dominant in the second half of the eighteenth century was an offshoot of
the seventeenth-century quarrel between the ancients and the moderns and
an important stage in the prolonged attempt to promote a national literature
and to advocate the preeminence of the French idiom over other European
languages, such as Spanish and Italian.30 The celebration of great men, which
marked them out as sacred, rested upon the practices and the imagery of Ca-
tholicism, with its emphasis on sacrifice and selflessness.31 More important,
that cult helped to popularize classical republican ideals (focused mostly on the
bellicose Rome and Sparta) that were inherited from the Italian Renaissance.
Republican ideals inhabited the imagination of the aristocracy and the judicial
courts, particularly the barristers and the parliamentary magistrates, who had
passionately identified with a heroic ethos and who tended to see their strug-
gles with monarchical power through the mirror of the Roman senatorial class
sacrificed to the Augustan reason of state.32 The members of the beleaguered
parlements (mostly, but not exclusively, the Parlement of Paris) were the first
constituency to resort to public opinion through countless pamphlets and mé-
moires judiciaires, taking their cause to the “tribunal of the nation” rather than
to the king. Their rhetoric of self-presentation paved the way for the Enlight-
enment philosophes, who, from Voltaire to Rousseau, borrowed the language
24
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of the barristers in claiming moral authority as representatives of the nation,

guardians of legality and the public interest.
On several occasions throughout the century the parlements came to op-
pose the policies of the crown and the clergy by going on strike and publicly
resorting to the language of republican virtue, most notably in the series of
crises triggered by the papal bull Unigenitus: first in 1713, when it was re-
quested by Louis XIV in order to eradicate Jansenism, and in 1730–32, when
Unigenitus became the law of the state; then in 1752–53 with the affair of the
billets de confession (an unpopular measure involving refusal of sacraments to
the dying); and again in the fiscal crisis of 1763, before Maupeou’s sweeping
reform of the judiciary system in 1771. Those showdowns were well publicized
by the lawyers and the magistrates, who presented themselves as the “senate of
the nation” to the people of Paris, who hailed them as “true Romans and the
fathers of the patrie.”33 Already in his address to Parisian barristers in 1698, the
future chancellor Henri-François d’Aguesseau had invoked a kind of “depo-
liticized republicanism” in which members of a profession for whom “virtue is
the source of all nobility” were devoted to the pursuit of glory through selfless
service to the public and to the patrie.34 In the 1760s barristers and philosophes
began collaborating on causes célèbres; the cooperation between Voltaire and
Elie de Beaumont for the redaction of a widely circulated mémoire judiciaire in
favor of Jean Calas’s rehabilitation is a famous example.35 In the last decades of
the eighteenth century the influence between barristers and philosophes was
mutual, as both claimed the title of hommes de lettres, invoked similar concepts
of genius and sentiment, and followed similar publication strategies. Both the
barristers and the philosophes saw themselves as members of a republic of vir-
tue that stood firm against the generalized moral decay of modernity.
From the theatrical works of Corneille to the writings of Montesquieu,
Rousseau, and Mably, “to the neoclassical paintings of David, to the court
speeches and printed briefs of barristers denouncing the corruption and injus-
tice, reverent images of the ancient republics proliferated at the end of the old
regime, along with praise for political systems in which free, independent, and
equal citizens, effortlessly resistant to the blandishments of luxury and amour-
propre, joined together in governing and in defense of the commonwealth. In
strictly political terms, however, this republicanism remained for the most part
an abstraction with no direct relation to the realities of French government.”36
But the language of republicanism, with its longing for antiquity, its hostil-
ity toward mannerist painting, the royal courts, and the culture of sensuality
and luxury that it portrayed as a vehicle for decadence, shaped a new sensitiv-
25
ity that contributed significantly to the neoclassical revival of the grand goût
(which had always been popular among the middle bourgeoisie of merchants
and artisans, even during the heyday of the rococo). Thomas Crow has ana-
lyzed the important role played by the amateur Louis Petit de Bachaumont
(1690–1771) and the parlement-leaning salon of his companion Marie-Anne
Doublet in fostering the classicist renewal and the critique of rococo art at the
Academy in the 1740s and 1750s.37 An important vehicle was a clandestine
newsletter, the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres
en France, sponsored by the Doublet salon, which circulated news, prohibited
literature, irreverent gossip, and esprit frondeur.38 Among the guests of the sa-
lon figured the antiquarian comte de Caylus and La Font de Saint-Yenne. In
1754, in the wake of the parlement’s struggle with the monarchy in the matter
of the billets de confession, La Font proposed that subjects taken from Roman
history could contribute to the revival of the French school of painting; more-
over, he expressed the wish that the portraits of magistrates, who best embod-
ied, among all citizens, Roman virtue, would figure more prominently at the
Salon exhibit for the edification of the public: “What images could be more
dear to all good subjects than those of these men made invincible by their fi-
delity to the laws and to their oaths? Generous to the point of sacrificing, to
no personal profit, the sweet leisure of a tranquil and materially abundant life
to duties which are burdensome and almost always thankless!”39 That wish
would soon be echoed by Diderot: “Wouldn’t busts of those who have served
their country well, whether on the battlefield, in the halls of justice, in the
sovereign’s council chamber, or in the course of literary or artistic careers, be
more properly instructive [than Baudouin’s licentious paintings]?”40
Le Goût Moderne
The republican ideal was conceived as a language of dissent against the
existing state of affairs rather than as a viable alternative to monarchical and
commercial society.41 In spite of its nostalgic, poetic character, or rather be-
cause of it, its imagery was ubiquitous. Toward the middle of the eighteenth
century we witness a return to the grand goût, or goût à l’antique, to the stylistic
“simplicity” and immediacy with which the literature of the ancients had been
credited and which nourished the ideals of classicism in the writings of Boileau,
La Bruyère, Fénelon, and Voltaire. In the name of those values, the philosophes
rejected the features that had distinguished the literature and the arts of 1715–40,
26
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which they branded as embodiments of the petit goût, or, more unbiased, of
the goût moderne, as that culture had once named itself. The goût moderne cor-
responded, by and large, to the aesthetics that the generation of David was to
label the rococo, or goût rocaille. The neoclassical critique of the rococo was
omnipresent and often contradictory; it mixed indiscriminately moral and
economic arguments against the luxury, speculation, corruption, lack of taste,
and ignorance of the class of financiers and parvenus who were alleged to be the
primary sponsors and consumers of that culture with charges that were more
specifically related to aesthetic theory and to academic criteria.42
Among the distinctive features that came under criticism was the irrever-
ent, demystifying, and antiheroic mode that emerged from the spate of mock-
heroic poems (poèmes héroï-comiques) published in the mid-seventeenth century,
the most famous being Paul Scarron’s Virgile travesti (1648).43 The neoclassical
spirit rejected both the burlesque rewritings of epic subjects and the mock-
heroic mode, which insolently elevated lowly subjects by treating them in a
grand manner. Those travesties transgressed the strict hierarchy of styles that
was officially espoused by Voltaire and by the Encyclopédie; they mixed high
and low, serious and comic, familiar and sublime; they favored bigarrure (hy-
bridization of styles and subject matter) and dissonance. They preferred di-
gression over linear development and experimented with idiolects and genres.
In his inaugural speech to the Academy in 1746, Voltaire deplored “the medley
of styles” that threatened the purity of the French language and the impending
“depravity of taste” imputable to those who “pretend to enliven serious and
instructive works with the informal expressions of conversation. Often Marot’s
style intrudes into the most noble subjects: it is as if a prince were dressed with
the attire of a fool.” He recommended the reading of Cicero as an antidote.44
But it was not only in the burlesque genre that writers practiced stylistic
bigarrure. In their attempt to open up scientific knowledge to a wider pub-
lic the philosophers of the early Enlightenment had fashioned their own hy-
bridization; heirs of Descartes’ user-friendly Discours de la méthode, they had
found a middle ground between the language of science and that of worldli-
ness, between philosophical difficulty and enjouement. “I wanted to talk about
philosophy in a way that would not be philosophically heavy-handed. I have
tried to make it neither too dry for a polite audience, nor too facetious for
the learned,” Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle noted.45 Later in the century,
a new generation of philosophes found that such attempts had gone too far.
Fontenelle’s effort to ground the discourse of philosophy and science within
27
the legitimizing sphere of politeness was now seen as shameless pandering to

the ignorant and the philistine. Thus, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert was critical of
Fontenelle for having “a kind of affectation for representing great subjects in
a miniaturized manner.”46 Indeed, Fontenelle had dedicated his Nouveaux dia-
logues des morts (1683) to the Greek satirist Lucian; following in the footsteps of
Anacreontis, Marot, and Scarron, he had treated the great men of antiquity, such
as Cato and Socrates, with an indecorous humor. The notoriously satirical Jean-
Baptiste Rousseau had written that Fontenelle “liked to treat grand subjects gal-
lantly in an effeminate and worldly way [en style de ruelle].”47 Voltaire, for his
part, accused Fontenelle of having abused the language of conversation in his
scientific treatises and of having degraded the dignity of mathematics with an
affected and effeminate style that was more suited to sentimental novels than
to the sciences: “He talked about science in the same way as Voiture talked of
galanterie to Mlle Paulet.”48 In d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire to the Ency-
clopédie, Fontenelle received measly praise and some reproval for having dared
to lend philosophy “the ornaments that seemed less fitting to it, and that most
resolutely ought to have been forbidden to it,” an unfortunate attempt indeed,
happily counteracted by Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle,
which had been written, according to d’Alembert, with “that nobility and that
elevated style which so befit philosophical subject matters and which in the
writings of a wise man must portray his soul.”49 A similar critique was applied
to belles-lettres. Among the many evils that the infamous concept of marivaud-
age stigmatized was a disregard for stylistic propriety, a tendency to mix high
and low, serious and comic: “Marivaux crafted a style so peculiar that he had
the honor of giving it his own name,” wrote the critic Jean-François La Harpe.
“It is the most bizarre medley of laborious gibberish [métaphysique], trivial ex-
pressions, convoluted sentiments and plebeian turns of phrase.”50
The comic approach practiced in the preclassical seventeenth century was
far from being outmoded one hundred years later; it reappeared throughout
the eighteenth century in a variety of venues, most notably in the theater.
It also reappeared in the works of Dufresny, Fontenelle, Le Sage, Marivaux,
Montesquieu, and Crébillon. Marivaux in particular was still writing bur-
lesque adaptations of heroic poems in the manner of Scarron in 1712–13, with
his much reviled Homère travesti and Télémaque travesti, whose authorship he
later repudiated. Even staunch critics practiced that manner, such as Diderot
in The Indiscreet Jewels and Voltaire in La Pucelle. The connection between
those writings and the aesthetics of the first generation of burlesque practi-
tioners, namely, the writers of the 1650s, was still obvious in the mind of the
28
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public as late as 1780, when the architect Le Camus de Mezières wrote a scath-
ing attack against the rococo in the decorative arts:
Every form was allowed, provided that it sparkled and shimmered [papil-
loter]; no harmony, no agreement, no symmetry. . . . The more an ornament
seemed to break with its natural form, the more precious it appeared; such
have been the aberrations incurred by Vatteau [sic], Callot, and in literature
the burlesque genre that was launched by Scarron and his epigones.51
In the eyes of the detractors of the goût moderne there was no categorical dis-
tinction between excess in literature and in the visual arts. A single line con-
nected the works of the painter of fêtes galantes to the early originators of the
literary burlesque: both had a weakness for the “unnatural” combination of
dissimilar elements, for an economy of fantasy that undermined the boundar-
ies between animal and mineral, animate and inanimate, the speech of a prince
and that of a servant; both mediums favored the ironic and playful quotation
of preexisting forms and discourses that were subverted from their original
intent. To their critics, the modernes seemed to betray an overactive imagina-
tion gone astray and unmoored from any reference to reality. In overstepping
hierarchies and boundaries, the modernes favored a wide range of tones that
comprised wit, galanterie, badinage, raillery, whimsicality, parody, burlesque,
and farce. By blurring styles and genres, they not only discredited the liter-
ary models transmitted from antiquity, such as tragedy and epics, but also
challenged the morality of virtue and heroism that was associated with them.
Finally, and most importantly, they disputed the conception of mimesis that
had been the basis of the cult of the ancients in seventeenth-century classicism
and eighteenth-century neoclassicism.
In their effort to forge a philosophical style capable of regenerating the
nation and in their attempt to recapture the energy and the enthusiasm of
the ancients, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, Grimm, Rousseau, Thomas, Mar-
montel, and Mercier distanced themselves from the spirit of modernity that
had radiated in the early Enlightenment; they went so far as to define their
identity as writers and philosophes in opposition to it. They criticized the
moderns for lacking the seriousness, the moral stature, and the creative drive
necessary to enlighten the audience. Suddenly, the moderns became minor
authors; their success was discounted, and they were declared forgettable in
the eyes of posterity. More scintillating than enlightening, more seductive than
pedagogical, the moderns favored form over content, the brilliance of surface
over the depth of engagement. They were decadent. “Seneca and Fontenelle,
29
both idiosyncratic authors [originaux], situated among the first in letters and
the sciences, have nonetheless contributed, by their brilliance, to spoil the taste
of their age. They have spread upon everything a light that is more dazzling
than enlightening [un jour plus éclatant que lumineux].”52
In so doing, the neoclassicists dragged into the same net a whole slice of the
cultural life of their time that existed side by side with the philosophical proj-
ect but which the philosophes disdained. To be sure, it was a genre that never
counted on the reverence of posterity but saw itself as an ephemeral art tied
to current events and the vagaries of literary fashion. I am talking about the
vast productions of the unofficial theater, of the fairgrounds and the boulevard
theater, the vaudevilles of the opéra-comique, and the parodistic productions of
the Comédie-Italienne. Authors such as Fuzelier, Le Sage, d’Orneval, Allard,
Pannard, Piron, and Favart created multimedia spectacles that combined sing-
ing, ballet, pantomime, and puppets. Though frowned upon, those theatrical
spectacles were tremendously successful. “They attract huge crowds,” wrote
Mercier, who recognized the appeal of an entertainment that “draws throngs
to theaters that everybody claims to despise but everybody visits.”53 Like the
burlesque literature of preclassical times, those productions attracted a socially
diverse public and often indulged in biting vulgarity, satirical reference to cur-
rent events, and literary lampooning. It was, however, far more than disrepu-
table entertainment for the wretched rabble. It was a learned and sophisticated
art that presupposed an audience with knowledge of the texts and the dis-
courses that served as its models, as well as an ear sharply attuned to registers
of language: its comic effect emerged from the oscillation between stylistic
obedience to and debunking of its models.54 As César Chesneau Dumarsais
noted in his definition of parody, that type of writing was always intertextual
and relied upon dissonance and surprise: “One must preserve as many words
as possible of the original one borrows from in order to bring its memory to
mind. The idea of the original and its handling in a less serious subject form
a contrast that surprises the imagination, and therein lies the pleasure of par-
ody.”55 Most of the authors of the fairgrounds had benefited from a classical
education. A play like Piron’s Arlequin Deucalion (see chapter 8) was filled with
references to classical mythology that only a college-educated audience could
fully comprehend, though that did not prevent the play from exercising its
appeal on lesser-educated audiences, granted that there existed different levels
of appreciation.
My point is that there is a continuity from the early, preclassical ethos of
the burlesque and mock-heroic to the conversational aesthetics of the moderns
30
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and to the lowly fairgrounds, of which contemporary audiences and critics

were quite aware but which modern historians of literature have tended to
overlook. What those works had in common transcended the specifics of genre
(theater, novel, or poetry): they were instances of critical self-reflexivity. They
took as their subject not the immediate representation of reality but the modes
of mediation between raw experience and cultural forms, that is, the means
of representation themselves. Most of those productions, from mock-heroic
poems to comic versions of heroic novels (such as Sorel’s Le berger extravagant
and Marivaux’s early novels, inspired by Don Quixote) to the fairgrounds the-
aters, were in fact rewritings of existing texts or discursive genres (mostly epics
and tragedy). The intention was most often to deride the well-established and
classically inspired productions of the official, “high” culture sponsored by
the French Academy and by the court-supported Opéra and Théâtre-Français
with plays drawn from the masks of the commedia dell’arte, such as Arlequin
Romulus (Biancolelli, 1722), Pierrot Romulus ou le ravisseur poli (Lesage and
d’Orneval, 1722), Arlequin Thémistocle (Fuzelier, 1715), or Arlequin Endymion
(Lesage, Fuzelier, and d’Orneval, 1721). They were the products of an over-
developed intertextual consciousness that undermined the belief in mimetic
representation and the primacy of illusion and brought to the fore not a true-
to-life experience but the mechanisms of fiction.56 Their referent was not ex-
perience but a preexisting representation; of course, the same could be said of
French tragedy, which was also a rewriting of Latin and Greek texts.57 That,
indeed, was the point: in the eyes of the parodist, as well as in those of the clas-
sically inclined playwrights (Voltaire, Diderot), the ancient dramatic language
had been hijacked and perverted by the decadent mannerism of monarchical
culture. But while the parodists limited themselves to satirizing the epigones,
the philosophes’ most ardent desire was to recapture the original language of
antiquity in its pristine simplicity and power. The trouble was that in the eyes
of the parodists Voltaire’s attempts to renew the genre of tragedy looked very
much like the efforts of yet another epigone. Hence the countless parodies to
which they subjected his works.
We can now better grasp the reason for the philosophes’ hostility toward
this type of aesthetics, whether it came from the practitioners of the goût mod-
erne or from those who wrote for the unsponsored theaters. The reforms the
philosophes advocated on the stage, their ventures into the genre of tragedy,
and their experiments with the drame were aimed at strengthening illusion and
drawing the spectator into the fictional world by erasing the awareness of a
discontinuity between the fictional space of the stage and that of spectatorship.
31
There was nothing radically new about such an enterprise, which relied upon
the tenets of early classicism and the dramatic theories of the Italian Renais-
sance, but the issue of theatrical illusion became timely again after a period of
freedom and experimentation in the 1720s and 1730s. While the moderns ad-
vocated a type of fiction that actively involved the audience in the constitution
of meaning, the nouvelle vague of the ancients preferred to shield the audience
from the perception of theatricality. The purging of spectators from the stage
in 1759, a reform that had long been invoked by Voltaire, must be seen in that
context.58 It is significant that the emphasis placed on representational illusion
was felt at two crucial moments in the confrontation between the public and
the literary institution: in the 1640s, at the height of the monarchy’s theatrical-
ized glory (d’Aubignac’s La pratique du théâtre, which theorized that trend, had
Richelieu as its intended audience), and during the years of the philosophical
struggle. In both cases it was crucial to control and educate the audience by
means of emotion. The audiences of the fairs may well have sung along with
the actors and talked back to the stage; the new audiences dreamed of by Vol-
taire, Diderot, and Mercier must be passive and mesmerized by the spectacle.
The audience was reconfigured along the axis of religious and republican elo-
quence. Louis-Sébastien Mercier put it forcefully in an important work on
theatrical reform:
As soon as the senses and the imagination are affected, we become, luckily
for us, passive beings who follow the impression imposed on us. The art of
the poet consists in paying attention to that essential property of human
nature, in handling it skillfully, in turning the spectator into a kind of in-
strument that he will play at will; once he has made himself master of the
heart, mind and reason will obey too.59
The audience is passive both in the current and in the etymological meaning
of the term (patior): it is disposed to endure passion, to receive through the
senses and the imagination the powerful impressions communicated by the
spectacle. The poet, ruling over the emotions of the spectators, will enjoy
complete power over their reason, playing them like a docile instrument and
leading them wherever he wants. Lest we be troubled by a manipulation that
may evoke revolutionary terror and the sublime oratory that drives a crowd to
commit violence, we should remember that for the philosophes the “poet-leg-
islator” is “the bard of virtue, the great censor of vice, the universal man,”60 and
that the poet, like the divinely invested sovereign, is the living embodiment
of the general interest. Like the king, whose authority he wishes to overtake,
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the poet cannot but will the good of the people, and the audience may safely
surrender to his benevolent, if overpowering, sway. This attitude toward the
passions raised by the stage and by fictional prose presupposed a heightened
faith in the powers of representation intimately to connect with the emotions
of the audience.61
It must also be noted that many of the plays the philosophes found objec-
tionable often presented a satirical portrait of the philosophical movement and
that there was a reactionary, antiphilosophical propaganda that used comic
language to push its own agenda. The bel esprit, which both the philosophes
and their enemies tended to identify with its offensive by-products—satire and
persiflage—was seen by the latter as the quintessentially French language and
the expression of a culture endangered by self-righteousness and philosophical
arrogance. The first of Palissot’s Petites lettres sur de grands philosophes (1757)
chided the philosophical movement for its oracular posture: “They have an-
nounced truth, or what passed as such, with a pomp it never had. We have seen
some philosophical productions heralded with a tone of authority and deter-
mination that until now was suited only to the pulpit. . . . A tone of inspiration
for some, of emphasis for others, so alien to the persuasiveness of reason, has
disgusted some people of good sense.”62 One of the most successful instances
of such disgust was Palissot’s play Les philosophes, which was performed not
on the fairgrounds but, more scandalously, at the Comédie-Française, in 1759,
the year the Encyclopédie was suppressed. Despite its mediocrity, the play at-
tracted large crowds eager to see Diderot vilified as a pickpocketing rogue and
Rousseau as a lunatic walking on all fours. It was certainly embittering for the
philosophes to see how effectively the weapon of ridicule could be wielded to
belittle their efforts and how difficult it was to educate a public that preferred
entertainment to enlightenment and satire to edification. The fact that Palis-
sot’s satire got its comeuppance by becoming, in its turn, the object of several
parodies must have provided little comfort: works were parodied when they
flopped, but even more so when they were successful.63
The marginalization of comic genres was not, of course, an innovation
of the philosophes. Such purism was in many ways the replay of an earlier
one. Already at the time of the publication of Boileau’s Art poétique (1672) a
narrow conception of comedy had emerged that rejected the burlesque and
its alliance with dance and music. The aesthetics of galanterie—practiced by
Molière in the comédies-ballet for royal entertainment, such as La princesse
d’Elide, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, and Le malade
imaginaire—soon came under attack. The mixture of genres that characterized
33
galanterie and the courtly fête has been analyzed by Alain Viala and by Gérard
Defaux; the latter has emphasized the demystifying character of that aesthet-
ics, the skepticism inherent in a genre that “unveils its mechanism, under-
mines the dissembling powers of illusion and turns such demystification into
the very heart of the spectacle.”64 André Félibien’s description of the statues that
occupied the southern façade of the Versailles palace reveals the alliance that once
existed between Melpomène, the muse of tragedy, Thalia, the muse of comedy,
and Momus, the disreputable god of satire, buffoonery, and the grotesque
(whom the gods had chased from Olympus): “In the building of the middle,
which represents comedy, there are four figures, which represent the muse
Thalia, who oversees noble comedy; Momus, who oversees buffoonery; Terp-
sichoris, another muse who administers elegant dance; and the god Pan, who
is the author of grotesque dance.”65 That coalition was broken by a new purism
that repudiated all mixtures of styles and art media. Boileau’s consecration of
the Misanthrope over the comédies galantes marked all the subsequent canonical
interpretations of Molière.66
A century or so later, in the wake of the neoclassical revival and during
the rebirth of the grand goût, Voltaire the tragedian tried to distance his own
art from that of less respectable, outrageous scribblers: “Buffoon, Buffoonery,
belongs to the low comic genre, to the fairs, to Gilles [a servant in the farce],
to whatever may amuse the populace. That is where, to our universal shame,
tragedies started from. Thespis was already a buffoon when Sophocles was not
yet a great man.”67 Even the Comédie-Italienne, which had given Marivaux
his greatest triumphs, was to Voltaire “a theatre consecrated to bad taste and
scandal.”68 True enough, the Italian comedians had often amused the public
at Voltaire’s expense with countless parodies of his tragedies. It was with bit-
terness that Voltaire had resigned himself to witnessing the success of the Ital-
ians. At the height of their popularity in the 1720s, stung by Fuzelier’s parody
of La Henriade (Arlequin persée, performed on 18 December 1722), Voltaire
noted in a letter to Thieriot: “I heartily forgive the scum of authors those farces
[trivelinades]; it is their job, and we must all stick to ours: mine is to despise
them.”69
It so happens that the critique launched against the aesthetics of the mod-
erns by the new wave of the ancients has been handed down to us by a literary
history that, from Boileau, to Batteux, to Rollin, to La Harpe, to Sainte-Beuve,
to Lanson, has been preoccupied with establishing a canon of great authors
that would not disparage a body of literature intended to glorify the nation.
Although both the ancients and the moderns struggled to prove that they were
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best suited to serve what the modern, galant Paul Pellisson named, as early as
1655, “the glory of our nation and our time,” it was the ancients who made
the stronger claim.70 In the seventeenth century the reference to antiquity
served to promote the idea of a translatio imperii in which France triumphed
over its precursors and longtime rivals, the Italians and the Spanish (who were
henceforth declared the epitome of excess and bad taste); it legitimized French
superiority at the same time that it concealed French culture’s true debt.71 In
both centuries, reverence for antiquity served as an argument for the sacraliza-
tion of the writer and his creative task. For Boileau, poetry was the product of
a “divine horror” and “fury”;72 for Diderot, the inspired genius was especially
attuned to the spectacle of moral beauty, and his character would share in some
of its nature.73 The image of the writer as hero and self-sacrificing celebrant of
a national cult became current during the Revolution and in romanticism. By
contrast, the moderns had a conception of creative activity that was more con-
textual and local; they embraced the contingent, and unlike the ancients, they
did not propel themselves forward in time and did not turn to posterity as to
their privileged audience. Their art, which was linked primarily to society and
to an exploration of civility and social forms, tended to be more timely. Their
work bore the marks of the particular circumstances of its production, often
reflecting or alluding to current events. As Baudelaire would say, it embodied
the ephemeral aspect of modern beauty.74 That work, therefore, may be harder
to appreciate when frozen in the timelessness of the canon, extracted from its
surroundings and exposed on the bare walls of a museum, or in an anthology
destined for the classroom.
Two Generations of Moderns

The moderns by and large were excluded from the Pantheon. When they
did enter there, it was at the price of a major reconfiguration and reinterpreta-
tion; whatever did not fit into the official picture was forgotten or considered
minor. That was the case of Molière, as we have seen, and of Montesquieu,
whose canonization as a philosophe à l’antique tended to paper over his un-
seemly past as a bel esprit and a modern (illustrated by such texts as Les lettres
persanes, Le temple de Gnide, and the Essai sur le goût). Galanterie, the style ré-
gence, and the rococo are often synonymous with frivolity, superficiality, and
courtliness. What is lost in this account is the originality and the innovative-
ness of the aesthetics and the social thought of the moderns, which took root
in the circles of the galants and the précieux that flourished between 1635 and
35
1670. One of the reasons why literary historians have tended to misrepre-
sent it is that it is difficult to define. Neither the moderns of the eighteenth
century nor their predecessors in the seventeenth ever formulated an explicit
program; they did not see themselves as part of a school or a movement. To be
sure, there were a few brief moments—such as in 1713–15, at the time of the
Querelle d’Homère, which pitted the partisans of La Motte’s free adaptation
of the Iliad against those of Mme Dacier’s translation—when the polarization
resulting from the hostilities gave the moderns the semblance of a coherent
party. But modernity was far more than a quarrel about the meaning of trans-
lation and the transmission and reception of great classics. Indeed, the literary
historian is confronted with a nebula of uncertain terms, some of which, like
rococo, are not only derogatory but foreign to the period. Thus, a movement
or a tendency took form and definition mainly through the voice of its critics,
who had some interest in being as heavy-handed as possible.
But even those terms that were intrinsic to the period are vague and shifty.
Alain Viala has observed how important it is for the historian to be aware of
the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic classifications (termes endogènes
and exogènes) that are used to frame the object of study.75 What goes for seven-
teenth-century galanterie is equally true for the period that concerns us:
The terms showcased in the titles of works, the theoretical texts exist, but
there was no habit of creating literary movements with manifestos. Galan-
terie was a tendency rather than a movement, and literary history does not
know how to deal with tendencies when they are dispersed. That aesthet-
ics—which was both displayed (in the names it claimed for itself ) and con-
cealed (since it did not aspire to be a theory, even less a doctrine)—aimed
at suggesting an “air,” as Richelet would say. Now, it is difficult to theorize
an air. Galanterie is a social phenomenon of which literature is but a part,
rather than a literary theory. . . . From a linguistic viewpoint, things are not
so simple. Besides the inherent ambiguity of the term galanterie, the gal-
ants themselves hesitated concerning the words they used to qualify them-
selves. . . . No French term could adequately translate that reference ideal:
urbanité (urbanity), mondanité (worldliness), atticisme (atticism), délicatesse
(subtlety) were rival terms; even better: suavitas, urbanitas. Those vacilla-
tions are inevitable when what is at stake is less a fixed model than a con-
stantly evolving ideal.76
An almost unbroken line leads from the aesthetics of galanterie as it appears in
the works of Madeleine de Scudéry, Voiture, Sarasin, Pellisson, and La Fon-
taine (i.e., the circle of Mme de Rambouillet and the writers of the Fouquet
clan) and Molière to the aesthetics of the goût moderne, which flourished in
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the first half of the eighteenth century. Even though such continuity remains
mostly unacknowledged and unformulated, most of the aesthetic and ethical
criteria operative in the eighteenth century were put into place at that earlier
time.
Approximately a century before Alexander Baumgarten introduced the
field of aisthetike as the science of “sensuous imagination,” the moderns were
exploring the key notions of sensibility, taste, and grace, which welded literary
imagination, theories of perception, and a conception of social interaction as
an art form. Because they did not separate artistic self-expression from other
modes of social self-presentation, the moderns were deeply embedded in the
aristocratic ethos that they helped to shape. In the seventeenth century, when
the literary field was not yet seen as autonomous, literature was closely depen-
dent for its values and its modes of expression on the venues of aristocratic so-
ciability. Gens de lettres from the ranks of the bourgeoisie presented themselves
as worldly amateurs; many, such as Vincent Voiture and Jean-François Sarasin,
did not publish their works during their lifetime, and for a time Madeleine de
Scudéry published under her brother’s name. Noblemen practiced literature
not as a profession but as an extension of their social activities.77 At a time
when the established aristocracy was incorporating, faster than ever, new elites
emerging from the royal administration, the magistracy, and the sale of venal
offices, the honnête homme and the homme de lettres galant became the domi-
nant models. Bourgeois writers, newly minted and older aristocrats, came to-
gether to produce a new ideology. Their ideals were to be appropriated later,
pace Rousseau, by the Enlightenment bourgeoisie and upheld as an antidote
to aristocratic manners, but by that time the aristocracy’s creative role in the
production of those ideals had been quite forgotten.
Galanterie is the term that best defines—rather than preciosité—a literary
style and a style of interaction that tries to combine science with a sense of
playfulness and pleasure. Galanterie was primarily a seductive discourse, but
it was not merely a worldly game; rather, it combined a didactic purpose with
a search for naturalness in an attempt to transcend the opposition between
knowledge and amusement. For the galant writers the search for a natural
style, the rejection of specialization, the cultivation of the sociable virtues
and an open disposition towards others, revealed a desire to have an ethical
reach, to appeal widely to all the ranks of society both through their writings
and through the projection of an ideally cultivated public persona. The hope
was to bring a cultural unity to the dispersed members of the body public.
The writer, “spreading everywhere that good humor which is, after virtue, the
37
greatest benefit” hoped to attract the widest possible audience: “family man,
prince, magistrate, soldier, artisan.” Gifted with a protean quality and capable
of embodying all characters without being overpowered by any, “he was well
liked by all different kinds of minds, as if all he ever wanted was to please
each one of them: by the ladies, the men of letters, the courtiers, the most en-
lightened and the most mediocre.” The appeal of the galant consisted in such
“feminine” qualities as a desire to please, a chameleon-like capacity to adapt to
all spirits, and a disposition to become the vehicle of a conviviality that would
overcome the specialization of function.78 In that sense the all-inclusive, ideal
audience of galanterie prefigured the emergence of the unified, educated public
heralded by the Enlightenment: it was in seventeenth-century galanterie that
the conditions for such an emergence originated.
Rhetorically, the galants cultivated the sermo familiaris and the sermo quo-
tidianus evoked by Cicero, Seneca, and Guez de Guez de Balzac. They privi-
leged orality over the written word, improvisation over painstaking composi-
tion, and interaction and dialogism over solitary creation; at any rate, they
sought to create the illusion of such activities in their writings. The art of
dialogue, wrote Pellisson, must be “an intimate conversation, free and sponta-
neous, embellished with the playfulness, good humor and civility of honnêtes
gens, so that the particular character of each would shine through and they
would be known and loved.”79 Conversation was a collective creation in which
the individuality of each participant was preserved, though meaning would
emerge from the interplay of all the voices. With its pluralistic character, it was
a polymorphous art based not on the systematic thinking and demonstrative
reasoning that was taught in the schools but on digression and on the accep-
tance of the random nature of thought connections. It was a hybrid genre that
emerged from the fragmentation and the mixture of preexisting discourses,
and as such it tended, much against academic dictates, to combine styles and
registers of language. Such hybridization was reflected in the protean quality of
the writer and in his ambition to master all genres: “he has a mind that, acting
by the general and universal principle [of reason] and mastering the notions
of all genres of writing, is able to go from one to the other with perfect ease.
. . . The Proteus of the fable and the chameleon of naturalists will not trans-
form themselves more effortlessly than him.”80
Galanterie tends to combine not only genres (prose and poetry, or, in the
theater, music and dance) but also styles and tones: “He will unite subjects that
are serious and subjects that are galants; his familiarity with the most sublime
poetry will not prevent him from writing the most ordinary [bas] language.”81
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In conversation every topic is accepted, but “the great secret is to talk with
dignity about ordinary things [choses basses] and with simplicity about elevated
things.”82 “Great things must be expressed with simplicity: emphasis spoils
them. But little things should be expressed with nobility: they need the sup-
port of expression, tone of voice, and style of delivery.”83 (This lesson of mon-
danité handed down to Proust via Sévigné will become the inalterable quality
of Proust’s own style, the secret spring of its underlying humor.) It must be
noted that the bas is not necessarily the trivial or the vulgar but rather the
technical, the specialized (such as legal or medical jargon), or a language that
describes mundane objects too accurately; in the seventeenth century there
was a tendency to call bas what today we would call realistic.84
The stylistic subversion of hierarchies was something that galanterie shared
with the burlesque rewritings of the classics. Charles Perrault defined the bur-
lesque as “a kind of ridicule which consists in the impropriety [disconvenance]
between the representation of a thing and its true nature. . . . This impropriety
may take two forms: one speaking lowly about eminent things; the other speak-
ing portentously about lowly things.”85 There is therefore only a difference in
degree between the playful mode of conversational galanterie and the outright
effect of dissonance of the burlesque. Though the former is the art of master-
ing propriety (bienséance) and the second is an art of the ultimate impropriety,
the two are connected by an uninterrupted line across varying shades of color.
Those subtle analogies among comic genres and tones were fully appreciated
in the early seventeenth century, at a time when the burlesque was associated
not with vulgarity and excess but with the “elegant teasing of Marot (badinage
marotique)”; not with “ease” and “license” but with the power of poetry to
transcend the boundaries between genres and kinds of knowledge. Gabriel
Naudé held Clément Marot responsible for having introduced in France the
burlesque and “low and comic style,” but he praised him for having been the
first “who dared to explain serious things with comical and familiar expres-
sions, magna modis tenuare parvis.” The comic spirit that Naudé appreciated in
Marot was not outlandish impropriety but the enjouement favored by the ga-
lants, the restrained and inward delight of esprit: “the style of burlesque poetry
is so restrained and measured that it is content to excite a moderate laughter
and an inner delight to those who read it.”86 Some twenty years later, in the
Art poétique, Boileau will carefully separate the badinage from the burlesque,87
an irreversible split between comic genres that the Encyclopédie will sanction
in its final rejection of burlesque playfulness, which will then be equated with
“trivial and extravagant poetry . . . superficial ease of a low style . . . ludicrous
39
imagination, debasement and licentiousness.”88 “The burlesque genre knows

no poetics and may not have any. . . . The burlesque upsets me in all circum-
stances,” declares Dorval, Diderot’s exemplary playwright—was he once more
making honorable amends for his wonderfully burlesque and philosophical
fantasy Les bijoux indiscrets? 89
In 1721, at the height of the goût moderne, was published one of the greatest
works of subversive, burlesque bigarrure, which recklessly juxtaposed theology
and sex, philosophy and satire, natural law and fashion, politics and oriental
romance: the Lettres persanes. The transgressive character of his endeavor did
not prevent the author from having his characters censure (not without added
irony) the very thing that he was himself doing:
To please women, one must have a certain talent rather different from what
pleases them even more. It consists of a kind of badinage, which amuses
them because it seems to promise them at every instant what can be per-
formed only very occasionally. This banter, naturally appropriate to the
boudoir, gradually seems to be forming the character of the nation; they
joke in the council room, they joke at the head of an army, they joke with an
ambassador. Professions appear ridiculous in proportion to the seriousness
of their pretentions, and a doctor would not seem as absurd if his garments
were less lugubrious, and if he jested a bit while killing his patients.90
We have come a long way from the praise of worldly conversation to its satire:
the conception of galanterie has been demoted to that of a badinage that barely
disguises its sexual drive. Rather than bringing together a nation divided, as
Pellisson had imagined, the conversation of the salons has been transported to
the boudoir and is now represented as a degenerate language that degrades the
character of the nation.
The galants practiced a form of poetry that displayed ironically a flamboy-
ant lyricism in which figures such as hyperboles, antithesis, and oxymorons
were flaunted as signs of the poet’s virtuosity and his ability to draw new
meaning out of preempted forms.91 Prefiguring the productions of the fair-
grounds and the vaudeville, the seventeenth-century literature of worldliness
is often a self-referential activity, an irreverent reflection on traditional dis-
courses, which it deconstructs and reconfigures. Modernity does not invent
new forms; rather, it tends to accept existing frameworks, which it empties of
their previous meaning, in an ironic patchwork of quotations.92 This taste for
cautious subversion may account for the universalism of the honnête homme
and the galant, which has too often been seen as an effect of conformism. On
the contrary, if the galant claims he can address any sort of public, it is because
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he likes to transgress the boundaries and the hierarchies that separate various
discourses, be they scientific, religious, or worldly. The combination of high
and low, serious and comic, implies the desire to appeal to as diverse an audi-
ence as possible. Those are the features of Madeleine de Scudéry’s conversa-
tional ideal: “I want you to master the art of deflecting things so skillfully that
you may venture to court the most austere woman; that you may trifle with the
most stern and serious people; that you may talk science to the ignorant.”93
The Importance of Being Earnest

Throughout the eighteenth century the identity of the writer as an hon-
nête homme underwent an evolution that led to the rejection of the alliance
between worldliness and literature. In fact, it may have been precisely be-
cause the integration of the intellectual into the ranks of the worldly public
had been successfully carried out that writers appeared less anxious to fit in.94
Galanterie and bel esprit, once the distinctive qualities of a selected public,
broadened their appeal to include larger and more inclusive audiences. They
gave rise to more universal, rallying values, such as sociability and politeness,
which transcended the poetics of manners and were seen as the harbingers of
a wider progress in morality, science, the arts, and the economy. In the middle
of the eighteenth century d’Alembert’s Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des
grands, sur la réputation, sur les mécènes et sur les récompenses littéraires (1753) called
for the emancipation of all people of talent from their symbolic and economic
allegiance to the elites; intellectuals had been freed from such dependence by
membership in the state-sponsored academies. Littérateurs and philosophes were
coming into their own, and they set out to give themselves a new mission in
the public sphere. A letter written to Voltaire by the abbé de Saint-Pierre,
one of the most eloquent advocates of the exalted task of the homme de lettres
and a thinker who exercised great influence on Rousseau, testifies to a desire
of transforming the identity of both the writer and his readership. Now, the
homme de lettres can achieve the highest glory, provided he is willing to reform
and educate the public and to devote himself entirely to this task:
Devote the rest of your life no longer to amusing witty women and other
such children but to instructing men, to enlightening those who instruct us
and to governing those who govern us. Give us models of history. It is true
that such tasks require great ambition and great patience. I do not know yet
if you have enough of those, but go and try. Quit your works of vanity in
order to march toward sublime glory. Heaven bless the beneficent.95
41
Voltaire is invited to reject esprit’s feminine world of shallow pleasure and se-
duction and to embrace instead the masculine world of politics and history;
he is prodded, with a severity that might have irritated a bit the author of Le
mondain, to pursue glory instead of vanity (gloriole) by becoming the peda-
gogue and the benefactor of humanity, as well as a praeceptor regis. The writer
is turned into the high priest of a secular cult: by becoming a sacrificial figure,
and by agreeing to be an icon for such absolute values as truth and virtue, he
becomes himself an object of public veneration. In so doing, he brings unity to
the body public. No longer limited to the narrow elite of people of good taste,
the public is invoked by the philosophes under its abstracted and universalized
form, that of the nation and of humanity.
A few years earlier, in Le temple du goût (1733), Voltaire had already put into
place the major critical concepts that were to lead to such a transformation.
By dint of a separation between the bel esprit (i.e., the modern writer) and the
genius (i.e., the new writer, the adherent to the grand goût) Voltaire kept out
of the temple several generations of galants and modernes—Guez de Balzac,
Pellisson, Segrais, Saint-Evremond, Voiture, Fontenelle, and Marivaux:
Already of their thin writings, the polish is tarnished,
They still rank among beaux esprits
but are excluded from the ranks of genius.96
In his article “Gens de lettres,” published some twenty years later in the Ency-
clopédie, Voltaire detailed the reasons for such exclusion: “A man of letters is
not what we call a bel esprit: the bel esprit requires less culture, less work, and
no philosophy; it consists only of a brilliant imagination and the graces of con-
versation, supported by mediocre culture.”97 (The moderns, Voltaire suggests,
have scant knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics.) Much is at stake for
Voltaire in this critique. The severity he shows toward the writers he classifies
as minor is in fact very similar to the severity he himself had to endure from
his critics. As Marivaux acutely observed, probably with Voltaire in mind: “I
know clever writers who have ten times more esprit than it takes to be attacked,
if the religion they profess toward the Ancients did not shield them.”98 In spite
of his success as a writer of tragedies, an academically revered genre, Voltaire’s
reputation in the world of letters did not go undisputed. It was not only the
abbé de Saint-Pierre who felt entitled to chide him; his archenemy Élie-Cath-
erine Fréron did not miss any opportunity to humiliate Voltaire by depicting
him as an effeminate and a fop. “M. de Voltaire is without any doubt one of
the most brilliant beaux esprits of France, and the verse polisher whose colors
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are the most flamboyant,” wrote Fréron. “He has all the grace and the liveliness
of our fashionable women; but he is absolutely devoid of Roman beauty. . . .
He will be read as a writer of great witticism [esprit] who lacked some essential
parts.”99 And when the ambitious Rousseau launched his career in the world of
letters with the loudest possible bang, he attacked Voltaire in exactly the same
terms as Fréron: “Do tell us, illustrious Arouet, how many vigorous and mas-
culine beauties you have sacrificed to our artificial politeness; how many great
productions you have lost to the taste for galanterie, so rich in small confec-
tions.”100 Wrapped in the folds of his toga, the young author à l’antique berates
his elder rival for not being Roman enough, or, for that matter, for not being
enough of a man. Effeminate and effete, the bel esprit is alleged to indulge
in ephemeral displays of conversational trivialities and badinage; his style is
“color” without design and contour, grace and délicatesse without masculine
energy.101 Practitioner of a degenerate art, he lacks the virile attributes that are
always associated with the virtuous and wholesome body of the ancient.
Hunting down all symptoms of effeminacy was a persistent theme in the
revival of the grand goût. The influence of women in the cultural domain was
no longer seen as reconciling and inspiring, but rather as a source of decay.
Their language no longer appeared as the model that inspired male writers,
modern and ancient alike, to pursue naturalness and unaffectedness—as it had
at the time of Guez de Balzac and La Bruyère—but was regarded as a danger-
ous instrument of corruption. With the revival of republicanism, throughout
the eighteenth century the public sphere tended increasingly to be conceived
as a masculine world, as women were slowly but surely driven out of the public
domain by an ideology imbued with misogynistic and homoerotic fantasies of
ancient republics populated with austere matrons, glistening, muscular war-
riors, and white-bearded civic leaders. Women were accused of degrading the
public spirit and threatening liberty by their irresponsible mix of sexuality and
politics. They were considered the insidious instruments of a court policy that
relied upon them to reduce men to passivity: sexual dependency was seen as a
sure way to political slavery. In the work of Rousseau and Montesquieu mo-
narchical rule deprives men of freedom by undermining sexual differentiation
and by mixing hierarchies and categorical distinctions. “There is no longer
but one sex, and we are all women in our minds,” Montesquieu dourly ob-
served.102
The identification between eloquence, the endorsement of a moral mission,
and the writer’s masculine energy is typical of the language of the philosophical
culture wars in the Enlightenment. In this game of rivalry and emulation one
43
is often hit below the belt, so to speak, as the writers are summoned to show
the public that they are in fact endowed with the qualities necessary for per-
forming their function. Invariably, the moderns are exiled to the realm of the
feminine and the degenerate. The contrast between the two identities of the
writer is illustrated by Diderot’s comments on his portrait by Van Loo, which
was exhibited in the Salon of 1767. Diderot acknowledges the resemblance and
the vividness of the representation: “A fairly good likeness. . . . Very lively. It
has his kindness, along with his vivacity.” But he deplores the primacy given
to those qualities, and the absence of grandeur from a portrait that owes too
much to the dictates of the petit goût. That “joli philosophe,” that effeminate
and coquettish writer, all dressed up for display in a salon, so eager to be ad-
mired by the bystander, does not measure up to the dignity of his writings and
to the seriousness of his “sad works”:
But too young, his head too small. Pretty like a woman, leering, smiling,
dainty, pursing his mouth to make himself look captivating. . . . But what
will my grandchildren say, when they compare my sad works to this smiling,
affected, effeminate old flirt? My children, I warn you that this is not me.
. . . I had a large forehead, penetrating eyes, rather large features, a head quite
similar in character to that of an ancient orator, an easygoing nature that
sometimes approached stupidity, the rustic simplicity of ancient times.103
More desirous of resembling Seneca and Socrates, at their finest and final
hour, than a smiling, vivacious bel esprit, the author of the Essai sur les règnes
de Claude et de Néron looks forward to the future generations to whom he has
bequeathed his mostly unpublished work. He favors seriousness over enjoue-
ment, rustic simple-mindedness over wit and brilliance, the orator’s tribune to
the conversational circle and the intimacy of the boudoir.
44
1 A Faded Coquette
Marivaux and the Philosophes
We want to replace, in our country, bel esprit with genius and glitter
with truth.
—Robespierre
The particular characteristic of his [Gavarnis’s] comic gift is a great

subtlety of observation, which sometimes goes as far as tenuity. Like
Marivaux, he knows the full force of understatement, which is at once a
lure and a flattery for the public intelligence.
—Baudelaire
Of all the writers who cultivated a feminine esprit and who embodied the ethos
of the moderns, Voltaire was especially irritated by Pierre Carlet de Marivaux.
While Voltaire was laboriously pursuing theatrical glory by attempting to im-
bue the respectable but depleted genre of tragedy with a new life, Marivaux
had reached celebrity in the theater with several successful comedies that ex-
plored the baffling emotions of young love and the predicaments of individu-
als at odds with themselves, torn between their recondite desire and the social
proprieties conveyed by language. He had also gained a solid reputation as a
novelist and essayist. As if that were not bad enough, Marivaux had managed
to secure a place in the French Academy in 1743, three long, scandalous years
before Voltaire himself was admitted among the immortals. Voltaire had a
poor opinion of academicians, but he had lobbied energetically to become
one of them, and he was not pleased with being passed over in favor of light-
weights like Marivaux.1 In the contentious milieu of the republic of letters,
45
split by quarrels among factions and by mutual attacks, Voltaire—who nicely

complemented his causticity toward his opponents with a dose of self-protec-
tive paranoia—suspected at some point that Marivaux was planning to write
a book against him. That turned out to be untrue, but Voltaire vented his
resentment in a letter to Thieriot: “Be as it may, let this wretch make money,
like so many others, by abusing me. It is only fair that the author of La voiture
embourbée, of Télémaque travesti and Le paysan parvenu, should write against
the author of La Henriade, but it is too dishonest of him to try to rekindle the
quarrel [of the Lettres philosophiques].”2
Today we may picture Voltaire rolling over in his grave at the thought that
Le paysan parvenu, a novel he despised, is considered one of the masterpieces
of French narrative, whereas Voltaire’s tragedies and his epic poem La Henriade
are tucked away in dusty in folio. Fortunately, however, Voltaire was spared
any forebodings of that unpleasant reality. Marivaux’s canonization only took
place in the early twentieth century; during Voltaire’s lifetime the reputation
of his rival steadily declined.3
When the young Pierre Carlet, the son of a modest officier, a civil servant in
the town of Riom in Normandy, returned to his native Paris in 1710 with as-
pirations to a literary career, like most children of the administrative classes
he enrolled as a law student. He also started experimenting with his identity.
He added a particle to his name and timidly penned Decarlet, which he used
with increasing assurance for the next two years. By 1713, however, he seemed
uncertain about this attempt at social promotion; on the register of the Faculté
de Droit his de looks more like an ink stain than a mark of nobility. A less than
assiduous student, for a long time he let his enrollment lapse without taking
any exams. Whatever hopes of improvement he had, Pierre Carlet did not pin
them on the pursuit of an administrative career, on the slow and painstaking
accumulation of the money necessary to buy the office that would ensure him,
as it did his father, a life of struggle and humiliation in the low ranks of state
service, always hanging on the threshold of privilege, never fully able to enjoy
its rewards.4 Instead, he opted for a career in letters. His first comedy, Le père
prudent et équitable, performed in 1712, was discreetly signed M***, in keep-
ing with the dedication to a Monsieur Rogier, conseiller du roi in Limoges, not
exactly a resplendent patron. But in 1716, in the dedication of his mock-heroic
poem Homère travesti to the duc of Noailles, he finally adopted the pen name
Carlet de Marivaux, which marked his official admission to the ranks of men
46
A Faded Coquette
of letters and beaux esprits.5 Yet the poem brought him little artistic distinc-
tion and not much social recognition. Literary lampooning and the parody
of the idiom of heroism were alive and thriving in the popular theaters of the
fairgrounds but had long been out of favor with the official culture sponsored
by the academies. As late as 1785 d’Alembert, stiff in the starched collar of the
Academy’s secrétaire perpétuel, cast a disapproving glance at Marivaux’s desecra-
tion of Homer; it was a sorry affair, one that a lifetime of honorable service in
the republic of letters could barely atone for.
Self-consciousness about his social identity and the knowledge that as a
comic playwright and novelist he occupied a less exalted place in the hierarchy
of letters were to stay with Marivaux and feed the vein of his social satire. (As
Voltaire would say in the Encyclopédie, novelists and playwrights were mere
professional craftsmen among gens de lettres, unworthy of the title of philo-
sophe.)6 Marivaux was highly aware of the subtle nuances of status and of the
many ways in which the representation of hierarchy and rank shaped people’s
consciousness in a society obsessed with class mobility and emulation. Unlike
Voltaire, however, he never aspired to consecrate himself in the eyes of the
public as a heroic writer and a poet-king invested with the authority of genius
and social mission; he never wanted to play a public role and did not put his
passions on display in the line of fire.7 His public persona always remained
unpretentious and modest. His noblesse de plume was a mask that he was quite
willing to take off and show for what it was, much like those individuals he
praised for carrying their mask in their hand and playing the social comedy
with self-deprecating irony:
Of those people I do not say that they are masked, because they do not wear
their mask, but they carry it in their hand, and they let you know: here it is;
and that is charming. I quite like this way of acting like a fool, for after all,
we must all be fools, and among the many ways of being so the one that is
the least to blame is, as far as I am concerned, that which does not deceive
others and does not induce them into error. Vanity revolts me only when it
is devious and sly.8
Perhaps because of his long acquaintance with the Italian comedians and the
characters of the commedia dell’arte (who were indeed portrayed carrying a
mask in their hand), Marivaux believed that masking enabled people to dis-
close some truth about themselves. He also thought that the only morally
acceptable social comedy was one that was played with grace and self-detach-
ment and that failed to make anyone a dupe.
47
What is striking in Marivaux’s career is his difficulty in gaining a solid foot-

hold in the world of letters despite the popularity of his theater,9 his protracted
isolation among his peers, and the obstacles he encountered from the early days
of his involvement in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns (he
sided with La Motte against Mme Dacier), to the height of his theatrical suc-
cess, to the end of his life. At the end of his career, after he had long given up,
he did not benefit from his past accomplishments but saw himself outmoded
and obsolete: “No one can be in as bad a mood—not even a woman who
wakes up with a blemish on her nose—as an author who is in danger of outliv-
ing his reputation. Witness Marivaux and Crébillon le fils” wrote Diderot, who
never acknowledged his debt to Marivaux.10 While possessing many of the val-
ues of a Sarasin, a Pellisson, or a Voiture, Marivaux was no longer the homme
de lettres galant of the 1640s, who successfully divided his allegiances between
the academies, powerful patrons, service to king and state, and worldliness.
Having espoused the aspirations and the doctrines of the moderns, his youth-
ful enthusiasm for their cause and his willingness to enter the fray at their side
(albeit after a year’s delay) only succeeded in making him the favorite target of
the sarcasm of the ancients, which lasted long after the fires of the quarrel had
subsided. Marivaux was never a member of a coterie, and apart from his per-
sonal friendship with several salonnieres (notably Mme de Lambert and Mme
de Tencin) and with the financier and philosophe Helvétius, he never sought
to weave around himself a network of supporters in the republic of letters.
Even after he was accepted into the Academy, he remained marginal among
his fellow members. With his sarcasm toward the pedantic philosopher, the
traditional target of beaux esprits of the previous generation, and in spite of his
extraordinary Indigent philosophe, he was not a philosophe. Nothing was more
alien to Marivaux’s conception of the role of the writer than the preachy and
proselytizing enthusiasm espoused by the philosophes. He remained impervi-
ous to the new sense of urgency emerging from the philosophical movement:
in his journals the image of the philosopher is shaped by the prejudices of an
earlier time against a character tainted by pedantry, affected stoicism, and fatu-
ous dogmatism. Despite his keen powers of observation, Marivaux seems out
of place in his own time: in many respects he was a precursor, in others a man
faithful to an ethos that was no longer seen as relevant, but above all, he was a
writer who paid a stiff price for having persevered in the singular turn of mind
that he claimed for himself.
Marivaux did not preserve and edit his correspondence for the benefit of
posterity, but he closely guarded his privacy and bequeathed no information
48
A Faded Coquette
about his life. He left no personal letters nor documents, only a remarkable
collection of suits for all occasions. Others managed, in the void he left, to
freeze him into the image of an effeminate, vacuous utterer of phébus, a fop,
or an aging coquette: “One had to cajole and compliment him all the time,
like a pretty woman,” said Charles Collé.11 “He suffered among us the destiny
of a pretty woman, and of one who is nothing but that: a radiant spring, but
a harsh and lonesome fall and winter. The powerful gust of philosophy has
blown away, in the last fifteen years, all those reputations built on reeds,” wrote
Grimm in his 1763 obituary of Marivaux.12 Throughout his life he was a target
for a variety of detractors. His victories were more often than not discounted
and belittled; the “defects” of his style were pointed out with uncommon per-
sistence and gusto. One has a hard time finding anyone who did not feel enti-
tled to patronize and upbraid Marivaux for his stylistic “sins” and to call for his
linguistic reform. His detractors and satirists belonged to every walk of literary
life. We find them among professional critics and grammarians, like La Harpe
and the abbé Desfontaines, who filled the pages of Le pour et contre and his
Dictionnaire néologique with prickly criticism of every sentence Marivaux ever
wrote. We find them among the antiphilosophe crowd, which featured Palissot
and Fréron; among the satirists who wrote for the fairgrounds theaters, such
as Piron, Le Sage, and d’Orneval. We count them among the philosophes and
their supporters, such as Voltaire, the Marquis d’Argenson, the abbé Raynal,
Collé, Marmontel, and the malevolent Grimm.
While his critics tenaciously berated him, Marivaux was even worse served
by his own friends, or by those who passed as such. Perhaps unique in the an-
nals of the Academy, upon the ceremony of his reception Marivaux was treated,
not to the usual compliments, but to a rambling reprimand from Langlet de
Gergy, the archbishop of Sens, a pious man and author. It was not Marivaux’s
writings—faulted for their excessive “vivacity” and “brilliance”—but rather
his good heart and exemplary conduct that had secured him a chair among
the immortals, the good prelate declared.13 As for his novels, the archbishop
would not venture to read them, but he had heard, from persons he trusted,
that they were scandalous and libertine. Written forty years later Jean Le Rond
d’Alembert’s eulogy of his fellow academician, Eloge de Marivaux, published
posthumously in 1785, starts with an apology for its length, which surpasses
that of the eulogies of other academicians “much superior to Marivaux,” such
as the brothers Despréaux and Massillon (one is puzzled by this comparison
of a playwright and novelist with a critic and a preacher).14 The problem,
d’Alembert writes, is that both the portrait of Marivaux’s character and the
49
description of his works require painstaking meandering into “small, delicate,

and fugitive details,” while the portrait of a “great man” and a “great writer”
may, in contrast, be brushed with “rapid and energetic strokes.” D’Alembert
felt the need for optical enhancement in order to appreciate Marivaux’s talents:
“Sentiment is depicted as a miniature,” as in the works of those “masters of
calligraphy who . . . pride themselves on being read with a magnifying glass.”15
Marivaux’s election to the Academy was something of a scandal, according to
d’Alembert, considering that he was chosen over a great man like Voltaire:
“When the Academy accepted Marivaux, people were shocked . . . that the
doors of that institution should open for the author of Marianne and Annibal
but remain shut to the author of La Henriade and Zaire. People had good rea-
sons to react to that outrageous preference.”16 Toward the end of the century,
a time that worshipped grand spectacles, vigorously outlined plots, and the
display of enthusiasm and masculine energy, Marivaux was shelved away, like
Boucher, among the superfluities of the petit genre. In appraising his work his
contemporaries did not know what to make of it and often resorted to a para-
doxical mixture of admiration and dismissiveness. When they acknowledged
his talent, it was to confine it to the realm of the detail, the minuscule, the
ephemeral. “The works of this author are almost always witty; he has a mind
for details, he treats small things with genius and sublime,” wrote the Mar-
quis d’Argenson. “He was a writer who had a lot of wit [esprit], and when one
looks at him from a certain angle, he is not without resemblance to a man of
genius,” wrote Fréron, with no intent of being facetious. Lost in the intricacies
of a vision that was the product of his feminine esprit, Marivaux was denied
access to a larger perspective, to “interest” and “movement,” the qualities of
the energetic and creative male genius.17
The correlation of effeminacy and rhetorical ornament had been a com-
monplace in rhetorical treatises since antiquity,18 but it was revived with par-
ticular insistence in the eighteenth century. In Les amours déguisés, a comedy
by Le Sage and d’Orneval performed at the Foire Saint-Laurent in 1726, the
dialogues were based on a parody of Marivaux’s journal Le spectateur fran-
çais, and Marivaux appeared in the guise of a précieuse, Mlle Raffinot.19 In
his satirical compilation Eloge historique de Pantalon-Phoebus, the abbé Des-
fontaines mocked many of the expressions used by Marivaux: since the sev-
enteenth century phébus had meant a language excessively ornate or obscure
and, by extension, extravagant gibberish.20 Occasionally a lone voice was raised
in praise of Marivaux: “If one were to analyze Marivaux’s Marianne and Vol-
taire’s Henriade, which of the two would get the prize, if it were awarded by a
50
A Faded Coquette
true philosophe, one who would base his decision upon the criteria of moral-
ity and sensibility?” Louis-Sébastien Mercier asked rhetorically. “Fielding and
Marivaux seem to me to deserve true glory, because their philosophy is based
upon image, action, and sentiment.” But that meant going against the grain:
“Those are indeed blasphemous words,” Mercier felt compelled to add.21
But the most shining example of the poisonous appraisal may be found
in the abbé Trublet’s “portrait” of Marivaux, written in 1755 and published
in Deloffre and Gilot’s edition of Journaux et oeuvres diverses, where it is fea-
tured, quite uncritically, as a “precious document” that should enable us to
set Marivaux’s ideas against “his real personality.”22 Trublet’s anecdotes on
Marivaux, reported in his Mémoires, are largely responsible for spinning the
image of Marivaux that persistently reappears in other allegedly firsthand testi-
monials, such as Marmontel’s Mémoires and d’Alembert’s own Eloge.23 The abbé
Nicolas-Charles-Joseph Trublet (1697–1770), another of Marivaux’s detractors
(or oily pseudoallies), maintained a close correspondence with Marivaux’s ri-
val in theatrical glory, Voltaire, who gave Trublet his vote when the latter was
admitted to the Academy in 1761. The abbé, who had been a candidate since
1736, perhaps resented the fact that Marivaux had been sitting there for almost
two decades; at any rate, the indignity he suffered merged with the resentment
he felt on behalf of his patron (Trublet was in awe of Voltaire, and when the
great man labeled him as mediocre, he gracefully carried the title as a badge of
honor).24 Although his admiration for La Motte and Fontenelle would classify
him among the moderns, Trublet’s aesthetics also belonged to the antineolo-
gist, purist movement, which counted Voltaire as a prominent member. In
1733 Trublet came up with a project for rewriting Montaigne’s work in proper,
modern French, purging the style of the Essays of its équivoques, “barbarisms”
and “negligences” and restoring Montaigne’s text to a more dignified form.
Marivaux, who was convinced that thought was consubstantial with expression
and who saw in Montaigne’s rich linguistic peculiarities an inspiration and a
model for his own style, found such an endeavor profoundly repugnant.25
Trublet’s talent in the genre of the insidious eulogy reveals itself in his ability
to turn against Marivaux the very categories of moral and psychological analy-
sis that the latter had employed in his own work. We thus learn that Marivaux
has miserably failed to carry out in his life the very ABCs of good manners,
not to mention the ethics of honnêteté, which for more than a century had tire-
lessly instructed that when in the company of others one must hide as much as
possible one’s preference for oneself and seek instead to make others happy by
being attentive, responsive, and altruistic. Alas, Marivaux, though “good and
51
decent deep down,” is affected by “an excessive love of himself which is every-
where apparent; he talks about himself all the time because he cares a great deal
about himself; in fact, all he cares about is himself. . . . In general, he expects
much deference and consideration: one must be attentive, listen to him, and
applaud him.”26 As if that were not enough, he is also extremely touchy and
irritable and has the unfortunate tendency to fly into a rage (we can almost
see him stomping his feet hysterically) when others do not understand him,
which happens very often because his language is belabored and obscure: “Ev-
eryone knows that he is convinced that when people do not understand him,
it is their fault, not his. . . . In fact, when someone more brave dares to tell
him so, he gets irritated and sometimes replies with spiteful words. . . . This
has often happened to me.”27 One wonders what abysses of incomprehension
the good abbé might have revealed in order to drive Marivaux to such frenzied
frustration. However, we know that Marivaux was the regular guest of some
of the most influential and independent-minded salonnieres, such as Mme de
Lambert, Mme de Tencin (he was part of her “comité des sages,” a member
of her inner circle),28 Mme de Boufflers, and Mme Geoffrin, who hosted the
philosophes. One has a hard time believing that someone whose company was
“disagreeable because of his obscurity, tiresome, and tedious; what is more,
uncomfortable, because of the constant fear of offending him,”29 would have
been invited at all. Impecunious men of letters of undistinguished social rank
were welcome only on the basis of their personal charm and intellectual merits,
and only when they were able to make a contribution to the general conversa-
tion.
The main reason to distrust Trublet’s “portrait,” however, is that not only
does it look like a catalog of everything one should avoid doing if one has any
hope of having a social life but it also seems to be a compilation of all that was
being said against Marivaux’s literary style. What is more, Trublet aptly sum-
marizes the central themes that occupied Marivaux, from his earliest writings
for the Mercure, to his novels, to his latest reflections presented to the Academy
in the 1750s. Those themes revolve around social ethics and aesthetics. In the
wake of the Augustinian moral reflection on amour-propre, Marivaux greatly
contributed to defining a modern ideal of sociability by systematically, even
obsessively, tracking down the passions that threatened to disrupt human re-
lations from within, such as vanity, pride, the desire to humiliate others and
their accompanying sequel of bad faith and self-deception. It was Marivaux’s
lifelong ambition to devise an increasingly subtle and flexible language capable
of describing the workings of amour-propre, its metamorphosis and masks:
52
A Faded Coquette
“Our weaknesses, which we fight under one form, escape us under another.
We cannot hope to destroy them; we must engage in something more wea-
rying but more heroic: tracking them down with steady persistence.”30 The
rhetorical efficacy of Trublet’s text lies in its familiar air, in the fact that it taps
into the vast reservoir of social ridicules that Marivaux persistently satirized
and turns them perversely against the author. When describing in great detail
the bel esprit’s workings of vanity in Le spectateur français, Marivaux could not
foresee that he had penciled the outline of himself that would pass to posterity
and that he had offered his head to Trublet on a silver platter: “A bel esprit in
such a case is so prickly, his vanity makes him so scrupulously suspicious, his
sensitivity is so alert to the possibility that he might not be esteemed enough,
and his suspicions are tickled by so little that it takes almost nothing to irritate
his tender pride.”31
But the stereotypes Marivaux fell victim to were not of his own making.
There was at the time a well-established tradition of writings targeting the
pedantic philosopher (of the scholastic type) and the bel esprit (the worldly
author), which underlies Trublet’s portrait and lends it a kind of plausibility
in the eyes of the reader familiar with it. Stock characters such as Horten-
sius, who appears in Marivaux’s La seconde surprise de l’amour, Charles Sorel’s
comic novel Francion, and in Le barbon (1648), a satirical work by Guez de
Balzac, exemplify the image of the author as a pompous and pedantic babbler,
ridiculously vain and unfit for social life, someone who, having forgotten his
rightful place in life, has lost any status and sunk into disrepute. The pedant is
condemned socially as a failed parvenu, a sorry imitator of the honnête homme,
and a pathetic snob. In the seventeenth century’s evolving contest to define
the writer’s identity, the pedant stood as a foil to the homme de lettres, who,
like the honnête homme, had no pretensions (ne se pique de rien), was success-
fully integrated in the venues of urban, aristocratic sociability, and was able to
subordinate his identity as an author to a search for communal pleasure. Such
was precisely the identity that Marivaux wished to cultivate.
Excessive dependence upon worldly success, however, could also become
a source of satire. An author could be ridiculed not only for abusing scholas-
tic and technical language but also for indulging in the figurative speech that
had secured the reputation of the poètes mondains. Gibberish (galimatias), the
failing of the learned, was sometimes paired with phébus, the failing of the
worldly. Charles Sorel’s Hortensius, for instance, sins on both counts. He is
“the king of beaux esprits of the University of Paris. . . ; in order to pass for a
gentleman, he always wore his boots and spurs like Amadis of de Gaule, even
53
though he never mounted a horse.”32 Although Hortensius brags that his writ-
ings are “worthy of France’s best literary circles” (des plus belles ruelles de lict
de France), he is told that the only ruelle he may aspire to is not that associated
with the space of polite conversation but rather the one in which chamber pots
are stored when they are full.33 His social shortcomings are compounded by
a lack of taste and judgment that renders his show of erudition pointless and
absurd; alienated from the social grounding of the sanior pars of the public of
the town and the court, which alone is entitled to validate knowledge, the faux
savant talks himself into madness and becomes a solipsistic chatterbox.
This social and aesthetic failure is infamously crowned by a moral one.
In La recherche de la vérité Malebranche describes the figure of the spurious
scholar (faux savant) driven entirely by amour-propre and thus inclined to dis-
rupt the balance of polite gatherings with his arrogance and his contempt for
others: “Since it is vanity and the desire to appear greater than others that
motivates counterfeit scholars [faux savants] to study, no sooner do they take
part in conversation, than the passion and the desire for advancement is re-
awakened in them and carries them away.”34 Malebranche’s satirical portrayal
closely resembles that of Marivaux, courtesy of Trublet:
They are so fearful of not being above all those who listen to them that they
are angered even when followed, infuriated when someone asks them for
some clarification, and even take on a proud air in the face of the slightest
disagreement. In short, they say things so novel and extraordinary, but so
far removed from common sense, that the wisest men have difficulty not
laughing, whereas others are simply dumbfounded by them.35
Marivaux, who wrote extensively about “the science of the human heart”
insofar as he believed it to be universal but scarcely ever wrote a line about his
own personal life, is thus portrayed as a prisoner of his own discourse, refracted
through the distorting mirror of his malicious readers and the prejudices of
his time. His work is used to document his personality, and his personality is
invoked to explain the alleged excesses of his work. D’Alembert, Trublet, and
Marmontel pass for their own personal testimony what was in reality a well es-
tablished commonplace of marivaudiana, namely, the nagging accusation that
Marivaux, out of self-indulgence and a misplaced authorial vanity, courted
complexity for its own sake, thus degenerating and becoming “precious and
affected.”36 To the abbé Desfontaines, Marivaux appeared as “an author whose
figurative and sublime language was torture for the average man, profound in
54
A Faded Coquette
the metaphysics of the heart and an expert in the art of philosophizing about
phantoms.”37 To d’Alembert, Marivaux’s language was a “a twisted and pre-
cious jargon foreign to nature.”38 Voltaire famously wrote that Marivaux was
capable of “balancing a fly’s egg in a spiderweb,” a formula in which we may
recognize a touch of the préciosité it attributes to its victim and which stuck to
Marivaux (though it was not directed exclusively at him, but at the language of
the moderns as a whole).39 Unsurprisingly, the sins of the author also became
those of the man. Marivaux’s own conversation was reportedly convoluted and
tedious for its subtlety. At Mme de Tencin’s, Marmontel reminisces, where the
guests arrived fully rehearsed and ready to play their role, Marivaux was the
most self-conscious of the bunch:
As his works had gained him the reputation of a subtle mind, he felt obliged
to prove that he always had that turn of mind, and so he was always looking
for ideas conducive to comparison and analysis in order to set them against
each other and to distill their essence. He would say that such and such was
true up to a point or from a certain angle, but there was always some quali-
fication or some distinction to make that only he could understand. Such
awareness was arduous for him and often painful for others, but sometimes
it yielded an unexpected insight and a bright revelation. Yet, from the ap-
prehension in his eyes, one could see that he was anxious about his success.
There never was, I believe, a more sensitive and frightened amour-propre.40
The very subtlety and attention that Marivaux devoted to uncovering and
denouncing the many faces of amour-propre became, in the eyes of the public,
a clear manifestation of the amour-propre of the author: like a woman who
puts on too much rouge and ornament, the fop fails to seduce and becomes
ridiculous. Style being equated with morality, stylistic refinement is seen as a
sin, a proof of moral incontinence or of an effete nature. Rather than remain-
ing within the limits of a severe and masculine atticism, Marivaux indulges the
effeminate excesses of an Asian style that delights in words detached from their
referent: “The style of those effeminate philosophers is scented with amber
and musk, like that of Seneca,” wrote Desfontaines.41 Marivaux is both im-
moral and ridiculous because he wallows in orgies of linguistic intemperance.
Thus during his whole career Marivaux had to fight against the image of
himself that was cut by his critics out of the cloth of his own works. But the
battle was lost in advance. The weapon he had at his disposal being his own
language, he only managed to give his detractors ever-renewed fodder. The
more he protested, established new distinctions, and carefully presented his
55
innovative ideas on language and style, the more he was rebuffed for affecta-
tion and obscurity. As Marivaux was accused of being unduly concerned with
his reputation as an author, any effort on his part to redress that judgment was
denounced as further proof of his vanity. Indeed, it was the author’s vanity that
was seen as the source of the obscurity of his language. Like Boucher, Marivaux
was found guilty of being enamored with his technique and of having created
a purely fantastic, formally overwrought world, of being incapable of inspiring
the audience with the powerful emotions elicited by a true representation of
reality: “Jussum se suaque solum amare.”42 The reproach of being vain must
have been particularly stinging to Marivaux, who pursued in all his works a
lucid appraisal of the political, hierarchical nature of relations in the society
of orders and of the wounds inflicted by a universal snobbishness. The many
ways in which individuals are duped by their desire to seek self-affirmation at
the expense of others was for him an endless source of fascination. Pride and
shame hold a true hegemony in Marivaux’s narrative production; indeed, we
may say that Marivaux devoted the best of his abilities to revealing the extent
to which human relations are shaped by a desire to be recognized by others, to
avoid humiliation and to save face, to avoid having inflicted on one or inflict-
ing onto others a narcissistic wound: “Am I being betrayed? I may forget it; am
I being hurt? I may forgive it; but do not humiliate me,” are the closing words
of L’indigent philosophe.43
We may say that in that sense, and in that sense only, Marivaux, though he
never wrote directly about himself, in reality wrote about nothing but himself,
as an author and a social being, under the cover of many masks and borrowing
many voices. From the young coquette of Lettres contenant une aventure to the
world-weary rogue of L’indigent philosophe, to the many impassioned male and
female figures who tell their story and plead their case eloquently in the pages
of Le cabinet du philosophe, Marivaux could say, “C’est moi.” Beyond the ac-
cidental peculiarities of individual “character” (i.e., coded types), those voices
reveal a skeletal psychology reduced to its essential components: pride and
humility (or shame) in their endlessly varied combinations and incarnations.44
Most of those voices stand for the author, each illustrating one aspect of the
relationship between the author and his audience: they embody the author in
his vulnerability, confronting his unknown reader—perhaps a judge, perhaps
a sympathetic soul mate—now seducing, now attacking, now pleading with
his audience.
Well before Proust (another snob and a fellow bel esprit or dandy), with
56
A Faded Coquette
whom he shares the keenest ear for the accent of self-deception in the social
comedy, a defiant faith in his own style and in its power to reveal, through
the sinuous unfolding of complex phrases, the hidden nature of reality and
the emotions, Marivaux exposed his deepest anxieties and obsessions in the
belief that they were universal: “Every soul, from the weakest to the strongest,
from the vilest to the noblest, every soul resembles all the others: each one of
them has something of them all. We all have a glimmer of what we are lacking,
thanks to which we are able to feel and understand, to a greater or lesser
extent, the differences that distinguish us.”45 Writing at the dawn of the modern,
psychological novel, Marivaux was able to transcend the boundaries of the
individual and the personal. Much like Proust, who came at the end of that
tradition, he was able to overcome the limits of the self, as well as those of
language and genre. Both writers analyzed the subtle shades of the moods of
the “soul” in their infinite variations and combinations; the closer they looked
at the “universal fabric” from which individuals were cut, the more they were
drawn to dissolve individuality in favor of a “science of the human heart”
that would analyze human behavior in its essential, atomistic components.
Marivaux thought that we all carry within ourselves the universal traits that
may potentially expose us to the totality of human emotions. “I have known
myself as much as it is possible for anyone to know oneself,” wrote the Spec-
tateur français, “and when I compared that man to others, or others to him, I
seemed to realize that we all resemble one another.”46 It was not so much indi-
viduality as a capacity to transgress the boundaries of the personal and a dispo-
sition to borrow the emotions of others that interested him; in his eyes, it was
there that one could find the source of the moral and aesthetic experience.
Afflicted by the stigma of vanity, Marivaux never gave up the attempt to
show that the source of his writing lay elsewhere, in an economy of disinterest-
edness and uncalculated generosity, the sign of a noble heart (a belle âme) and
an irresistible creative drive. To him, writing, like conversation, was a gift that
invited reciprocity on the part of the reader. Marivaux was acutely aware of the
complexities and the pitfalls of such a relationship, and he tried several ways of
engaging the reader in a dynamic exchange with the text, which, particularly in
his journals, deploys itself in circuitous and digressive ways, through a wealth
of reflections, sentences, and anecdotes and a host of variegated characters. Al-
though they are only detached, errant “sheets” and emphatically presented as
such, when read in their totality, Marivaux’s fragmented journals function as a
polyphonic ensemble. They offer a pattern of echoes and repetitions through
57
subtle displacements; each piece resonates in relation to others, contradicting

or complementing them. If there is a “secret chain,” as Montesquieu was fond
of suggesting in reference to the Persian Letters, for Marivaux too the chain
is concealed: no visible hierarchy or design is imposed on the text; rather the
reader is encouraged to take an active role and to shape and redraw the pattern
as he traces his way along the textual labyrinth.
58
2 Fakes, Impostors, and
Beaux Esprits
Conversation’s Backstage
A rascal feels remorse all the time; it troubles and torments him, but the
bel esprit has no remorse.
—Malebranche
Nothing is capable of inspiring so much aversion to art as having a look

backstage: the imagination is disenchanted.
—Mercier
The Theater of Conversation

There was in Marivaux something that deeply disturbed those of his con-
temporaries who yearned for the redemptive value of archaic models and that
sent them scrambling for the relief of satire. While he remained faithful to the
aesthetics of bel esprit and the comic subversion that was practiced by the first
generation of the galants (1640–70), he fashioned it into an entirely original
poetics and raised it to a pitch that had never been reached before. Ever con-
scious of the fact that all self-expression implies a kind of spectatorial disjunc-
tion, he tried to include in his writing a critical reflection on the act of writ-
ing. Rather than being seduced into passive acceptance, the reader was never
entirely allowed to forget that he was dealing with a fictional work and that
fictionality itself was the issue being explored. Esprit was thus the synonym of a
theatrical writing, of an ironic, self-referential discourse that reflected upon the
conditions of its production. Marivaux’s critics, however, saw nothing but an
excess of vanity in the work of an author who was constantly mirroring him-
59
self in his writing. As was typical of aesthetic debates at the time, they saw as a
moral issue what was in reality a different poetics; one might say it was a new
poetics were it not rooted in the seventeenth-century aesthetics of galanterie
that the nouvelle vague of the ancients had repudiated.
As we have seen, the concept that most often recurs in that criticism is that
of esprit or bel esprit (though the meaning of the former was much more ex-
tensive, it was often used as a synonym of the latter).1 The examples provide
an embarrassment of riches. In 1722 the critic Pierre-François Guyot Des-
fontaines attacked “the modern beaux esprits . . . the chatter of cafés . . . that
subtle and precious esprit that many authors try to pass as legitimate,” and he
clamored that “the corruption of style emerges most often from an excess of
esprit.”2 In 1735, in Prévost’s journal Le pour et contre, the same Desfontaines
declared: “I fervently take position against the abuse of esprit, and I side with
truth and reason against bad taste and ignorance.”3 In 1755, recalling one of the
last lectures that Marivaux delivered at the Academy, the playwright and sati-
rist Alexis Piron recounted the public humiliation endured by “the shallowest
among our beaux esprits and certainly the least Ciceronian.”4 What, then, was
a bel esprit in the eighteenth century?
The concept cannot be quickly defined; its career was long and eventful.
The term harks back to the early seventeenth century, when it was used to
denote mastery of the language of love and understanding of its subtleties.5
The word was not used primarily as a personal epithet (as in to be a bel esprit)
but merely indicated the quality of a refined and cultivated mind (one had
a bel esprit), mainly of the female mind. Many a heroine of L’Astrée and of
Maynard’s poetry was reverently qualified by her lover as having a bel esprit; in
Corneille’s La place royale Cléante refers to Phylis’s flirting as bel esprit.6 That
meaning, which overlapped with that of savante (“learned” in the ways of love
and courtship) and later with that of précieuse, was to endure in misogynistic
parlance: several generations of anxious husbands and educators, from Arnol-
phe to Boileau to Rousseau, were to warn their readers against the dangers of
wedding a woman who was endowed with a bel esprit or who was one herself.7
Soon there emerged another meaning, not unrelated to the first, which de-
noted an ideal of belles-lettres: the bel esprit was a skilled author, someone who
had a mastery of figural language; in the Art poétique Boileau used it to denote
the writer. Eventually it came to indicate a fashionable writer who practiced
literature not as a professional but as an amateur. The bel esprit was now a man,
but he was always marked as feminine.8 In other words, about 1640 the bel
esprit denoted the accomplished homme de lettres galant, the author who most
60
Fakes, Impostors, and Beaux Esprits
successfully embodied the synthesis between worldliness and verbal virtuosity,

between orality and the written, if not always the published, work. Like the
honnête homme, the true bel esprit (for there was a vrai bel esprit and a ridiculous
bel esprit, much as there was a true précieuse and a précieuse ridicule, with the
ridicule eventually taking over and erasing all traces of a positive connotation),
has no pretensions and affects no ambitions (ne se pique de rien).9
In 1751 Duclos saw the bel esprit as an idle and fashionable amateur char-
acterized by vanity and an unfounded belief in his universal competence, as
well as an insidious rival of the true homme de lettres.10 The connotation of
vanity, both in the psychological and in the religious sense, appeared very
early on: beaux esprits were often seen as freethinkers. Père Garasse’s Doctrine
curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps (1623) was a rambling diatribe against
those writers who were atheists, those “Narcisses,” who were infected with
“une estrange philautie amoureuse” (an extravagant love of themselves) that
led them to worship their own esprit.11 In a similar manner, Pierre Nicole and
Nicolas Malebranche accused worldly writers and fashionable preachers of be-
ing diabolically narcissistic. They blamed not only the writer as a social type
but the very fact of cultivating language, not as a means to reach some moral
truth, but for the purely sensual pleasure of its figural dimension. Led astray
by an excessive imagination, the bel esprit, Malebranche wrote, was no longer
able to perceive reality as it was but inhabited the fictional world he had been
bold enough to create: “He allows himself to be seduced by his own creation:
instead of considering things as they are, as their ideas represent them, he is
happy to live constantly under the sway of illusion and to applaud the fictions
produced by his own mind.”12 Conversely, from the pen of more secular seven-
teenth-century writers the bel esprit’s plaisir du texte was derided, not because it
was too worldly, but because it was not worldly enough; that is, such language
was seen as affected and unnatural, tainted either with effeminate pretentious-
ness or with the pedantry of an ill-digested scholarly upbringing. It did not
correspond to the ideal of simplicity and naturalness that distinguished true
worldliness.
One is puzzled by the persistence in the eighteenth century of a term that
should hold little impact and significance. Now that the figure of the writer
posing as an amateur has all but vanished, we would expect the term to vanish
too.13 Indeed, while the concept of bel esprit has been the object of extensive
study for the seventeenth century, the issue has been declared moot for the
eighteenth. Scholars of the Enlightenment have widely ignored the strategic
relevance of the bel esprit. Alain Niderst notes that “the worldly, those who are
61
attacked and disparaged, never make an issue of the bel esprit. Neither Perrault
nor La Motte nor Marivaux ever mentions the bel esprit.”14 That is not true:
the bel esprit is very much an issue in Marivaux’s work, especially in his jour-
nals. His early novel La voiture embourbée (1713) features a chevalier bel esprit,
an annoying babbler who perfectly embodies all the sins habitually imputed
to the worldly, including Marivaux:
He was a man who liked to talk a great deal, who finished every sentence
with a satisfied glance at himself; a man whose demeanor glowed with con-
ceit more than with reason; who would quibble about subtleties and delve
into imaginary worlds; who would lose sight of his argument and would
mislay others too; and who, despite the inanity of his chatter, would keep
rambling on and on.15
But in his late essay Réflexions sur l’esprit humain à l’occasion de Corneille et de
Racine (1750) the paradigm has changed entirely. Marivaux now distinguishes
two types of “great men” and “benefactors to humanity”: the bel esprit and the
philosopher. The first is among
those men of genius who are at times called beaux esprits; . . . those sublime
painters of the wonder and the misery of the human soul, who, even as
they educate us through their works, persuade us, by the pleasure they give
us, that they have no purpose other than pleasing us and enchanting our
leisurely hours. I count Corneille and Racine among the best of them, not
mentioning those of our contemporaries whom it is too early to call publicly
by name but who will be rewarded by posterity for their obscurity today,
though the envy of their contemporaries, by its very fierceness, already offers
them a kind of homage.16
It could not be any clearer that, at the end of a lifetime of mortifications,

Marivaux has decided to wear the infamous label like a badge of honor and
has gone on to declare a national day of bel esprit pride. He may well be the
last one in the eighteenth century to use that term positively rather than as a
foil or a disclaimer. Inverting all the expected paradigms of his neoclassical age,
Marivaux’s bel esprit (in contrast to the philosophe) harbors no ambition other
than a modest desire to persuade through pleasure, not through didactic pos-
turing: it is pleasure and leisure, rather than doctrinal enthusiasm, that carry
the moral weight. National icons such as Corneille and Racine, themselves
not always exempt from the accusation of having indulged in esprit,17 have
been enlisted as allies in a text that confronts the literary glory of le petit goût
in much the same manner as the eulogies of le grand goût that were in vogue
62
at the time. But Marivaux is not a dupe of eulogistic pomp (though he too
is counting on posterity to redress today’s humiliation). Great “geniuses,” he
notes ironically, become the object of a national cult when they are dead; as
long as they are alive, they are derided as beaux esprits: “Our great men receive,
while they are alive, the mundane and often derisive title of beaux esprits; but
they are ennobled, after their demise, with that of ‘men of genius,’ which no
one dares grudge them any longer.”18
The fact is that in the eighteenth century the bel esprit was still very much
at the center of the debate on the identity of gens de lettres. The persistence of
the philosophes’ attacks against it is a measure of the danger that such a model
of the writer still posed to them. As late as 1783, though the ancients had long
gained control of the republic of letters, d’Alembert, in his underhand eu-
logy of Marivaux, sounded an untimely cry of alarm. The republic of letters
was threatened with an infectious disease that forestalled its impending decay.
Writers like Marivaux were, of course, vehicles for such decadence: “The craze
for bel esprit has invaded, not to say infected, every rank of the republic of let-
ters and has led people to disregard every other kind of ambition. We call our
learned ancestors scholarly pedants; they would call us, at best, modish scholars
[jolis écoliers].”19 But bel esprit was no longer all the rage in d’Alembert’s time.
Indeed, the future secretary of the French Academy paints an anachronistic
picture for the late eighteenth century, and one that was certainly not true
at a time in which sociable spaces (from the salons of Mme de Lambert and
Mme de Tencin to those of Mmes Geoffrin, Lespinasse, and Necker), count-
less private academies, clubs, circles, and sociétés had opened themselves up to
the philosophes and to the Enlightenment. Successful gens de lettres straddled
the spaces of the cabinet d’études, of the academies and those of worldliness
(mondanité): philosophy had become fashionable. Salonnieres played the role
of cultural mediators and brokers between artists and writers, on the one hand,
and the public of wealthy amateurs and government officials who controlled
the state-sponsored institutions of letters (academies, state-sponsored journals,
pensions, charges, and sinecures), on the other.20 The republic of letters was
the diversified milieu in which all those spaces and activities intersected.
More in tune with this evolution, in his Encyclopédie article “Gens de
lettres” Voltaire pointed out that the men of letters (i.e., the philosophes) of his
time had resurrected the universalist spirit of knowledge that had flourished
in antiquity, when the grammairien was able to master not only linguistics
but also geometry, philosophy, history, natural history, poetry, and eloquence.
The breadth of knowledge of the modern homme de lettres was actually even
63
wider, Voltaire noted, as he was now well versed not only in the classical lan-
guages but also in the modern European ones, in Spanish, and in English. To
complete this flattering portrait of the well-rounded homme de lettres, which
was very much a self-portrait, Voltaire celebrated his full integration into elite
society. However, true to the self-sacrificial vision that the philosophes held of
themselves, worldly success was presented by Voltaire not as personally advan-
tageous to the homme de lettres but as a vehicle for educating and enlightening
the nation, destroying prejudice and spreading far and wide the benefits of a
critical spirit:
One of the great advantages of our time is this large number of learned men
who pass from thorny mathematics to the flower of poetry, and who are able
to judge equally well a book on metaphysics and a play. The spirit of our
time has made those men as suited to the cabinet as to the convivial gather-
ing; in that respect, they are superior to those of the previous century. They
were excluded from society until the days of Balzac and Voiture; since then,
they have become an essential part of it. The refined and polished reason
that they have disseminated in their writings has contributed a great deal to
educating and to polishing the nation.21
Worldliness was portrayed by Voltaire, not as a self-serving career move, but as

a critical way to reach and edify a wider public. That sense of civic and intellec-
tual responsibility was essentially what distinguished an homme de lettres and a
philosophe from a mere novelist or dramatist. The former were distinguished
by their selfless dedication to public utility, while the latter were simply self-
interested professionals enjoying variable success: “Those who, having read
only novels, compose novels; those who, with a limited culture, have put to-
gether a few plays or have given a few sermons, are not gens de lettres.”22 Labor-
ing as if in a time-lag, d’Alembert in his complaint about bel esprit thus seems
to echo a distant past.
To be sure, the bel esprit had once been a crucial player in contention for
the appropriation of prestige and influence in the world of letters, but that
was long before d’Alembert’s time. In the first decades of the seventeenth cen-
tury that contest had pitted the savant—the erudite scholar and the scien-
tist—against the mondain and the galant (or the bel esprit), who practiced belles
lettres, for control of the relevant places in the academies, in the salons, and
in the awarding of royal sinecures and pensions. While there had been several
attempts to reconcile those two currents of the world of letters, for example,
by Pellisson and Guez de Balzac, others, such as the Chevalier de Méré (the
embodiment of the worldly aristocrat), would widen the gap between science
64
and worldliness: “I told a learned man, the other day, that he talked like an
author. ‘So what,’ he replied, ‘isn’t that who I am?’ ‘You are indeed too much
of an author,’ I replied laughing, ‘and you would do much better to talk as a
polite man [en galant homme]. For no matter how learned you are, you should
never talk in a way that men who are intelligent and worldly cannot under-
stand.’ ”23
The dreadful caricature of Hortensius in Sorel’s Francion is another ex-
ample of the intended marginalization of the professor of philosophy, or the
savant, who was depicted as haunting the colleges, wearing long, dirty robes,
and babbling in a scholastic jargon (galimatias). Such exaggerations were to
a great extent traditional stuff inherited from the Renaissance debates about
humanism and scholasticism. They certainly did not describe the actual career
of someone like the Jesuit abbé Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702), a linguist
and a stylistician, a teacher, as well as a precursor of aesthetics, whose com-
ments on the nature of bel esprit and the je ne sais quoi were widely circulated.
The abbé, who was a conciliatory figure in the debates between the ancients
and the moderns, had an exemplary career that covered a variety of social and
scholarly venues, from the colleges to the court to the salons. He was able to
juggle a lifelong position as a research scholar at the prestigious Collège de
Clermont (later the Collège Louis Le Grand), service at court in the form
of a preceptorship to Colbert’s son, the Marquis de Seignelay, and assiduous
attendance at the salons of Mme de Sablé, Madeleine de Scudéry, and the
scholarly circle of President de Lamoignon. It is true that the abbé’s career
peaked around 1670–85, at a time when the savants and the ancients had re-
gained their influence over the worldly. To a great extent, relations between
the two factions always remained contentious. At the end of the century we
can hear a note of bitterness in the words of La Bruyère, who is still pleading
for the integration of the savant among the polite public:
Some persons are strongly prejudiced against learned men [savants]; they
are declared unfit for worldly politeness, tactless, wanting in human skill,
unsociable, and are sent back, stripped in this way, to their cabinet and their
books. . . . However, it seems to me that people ought to be more careful and
take the trouble of wondering whether that same spirit which produces such
great progress in the sciences, which makes people think well, judge well,
speak well, and write well, might not also help them to become civil.24
Foreshadowing the major arguments of Dumarsais’s influential essay Le phi-
losophe, La Bruyère claims for the savant the independent space of the cabinet
d’études, as well as the public space of worldliness. In his eyes, as in those of
65
the later philosophes, there is a continuity between a disposition to sociability

(l’esprit de société) and scientific esprit.
A wealth of connotations were clustered around the meaning of bel esprit.
Much like other notions of seventeenth-century aesthetics, the term denoted
both a form of writing—a mode of seeing and knowing, a style—and a charac-
ter—that of the writer who practiced such a form. That was inevitable at a time
when literary style was coextensive with manners, when the abbé Bouhours
could speak of “the politeness of style” because the qualities that made a good
style were of the same order as those that made an honnête homme. (Later in
the Enlightenment the same correlation between style and character became
morally and politically inflected.) The Dictionnaire de l’Académie (both the
1695 and the 1740 edition) defined beaux esprits as “those who distinguish
themselves from ordinary people because of the politeness of their discourse
and their works.” When the equilibrium between politeness, amateurism, and
the practice of belles lettres was upset, about 1670, the bel esprit became, if not
an outright negative figure, like the précieux, at least an ambiguous one, one
that needed the qualification of “true,” as in le vrai bel esprit. It came to equate
affectation in style with affectation in social interaction; thus the bel esprit
came to suffer, in his turn, a fate similar to that previously endured by the sa-
vant Hortensius.
Affectation was the charge leveled at the protagonist of Montesquieu’s His-
toire véritable, a charge that the fashionable young author of the Persian Letters
knew perhaps all too well:
I was very popular with every circle, and I was given the task of being en-
tertaining, which afflicted me very much. I was forbidden from saying any-
thing stupid, even though everybody else took astonishing liberties on that
count. On the other hand, there were some socialites who said that they
avoided me because I was a bel esprit. What they meant was that I was
affected and they were natural and that had they wanted it, they would have
been cleverer than I was.25
The bel esprit is as much a victim of his own pretensions as of those of the
public. Paraded in the salons as an amusing phenomenon, he is appointed to
the role of official entertainer by hostesses, who want to get as much value out
of him as they feel entitled to expect from a professional author. Forecasting
Montesquieu’s predicament, Molière’s writer Damon, invited to dinner by a
précieuse, is expected to defray his social obligations with some display of his
trademark wit:
66
You know the man and his insurmountable laziness in conversation. She
had invited him to supper as a bel esprit, and he never appeared so dull,
among half a dozen people who were expecting him as a treat and who were
staring at him wide-eyed as if he were of a different species from them. They
all thought that he was there to defray the conversation and that every word
coming out of his mouth must be a witticism or an impromptu, and that he
would ask for a drink with an epigram. But he disappointed them all with
his silence; and the lady was as dissatisfied with him as I was with her.26
Since the bel esprit had presented himself squarely as an amateur and a disin-
terested practitioner of letters, that disinterestedness was precisely what came
under scrutiny when the ideal went into decline (i.e., when it became too
widespread). “A bel esprit is a ridiculous character, indeed,” says Eugène, one of
the interlocutors of the abbé Bouhours’s Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671).
“And I am not quite sure whether I would not prefer to pass for a simpleton
rather than for what goes ordinarily under the name of bel esprit.” “Every
reasonable person thinks as you do,” replied Ariste. “Bel esprit is now so
disdained since it has been spoiled by its popularity that the most talented
people hide what they do as if it were a crime. . . . There is a world of differ-
ence between being a bel esprit by trade and having a talent for certain things
[avoir l’esprit beau].”27
In the article “Esprit,” Voltaire writes in the same terms: “The bel esprit is an
advertisement [affiche]; it is an art that requires some culture, it is a kind of
profession, and for that reason it makes one vulnerable to envy and ridicule.”28
In a novel published in 1744 Charles Duclos aptly sums up the paradox that
lurks in a term that may be used either to mock or to praise: “As for the bel
esprit, so envied, so abused, so sought after, laying a claim to it is almost as
ridiculous as truly being one is difficult.”29 The bel esprit is now seen as an im-
postor both in his function as a writer and as a member of polite society. He
is an untalented writer who exploits his social relations in order to advance his
career. That is the brunt of La Bruyère’s ferocious satire of Fontenelle, in which
the secrétaire perpétuel of the Academy of Sciences is portrayed under the name
Cydias: “Ascanius is a sculptor, Hegio an iron-founder, Aeschines a fuller, and
Cydias a bel esprit—that’s his trade. He has a signboard, a shop, he works on
command and has craftsmen working under him. . . . He is a compound of
pedantry and préciosité, made to be admired by provincial bourgeois, in whom
there is nothing great except the opinion he has of himself.”30 The mediocrity
of the writer is echoed by that of the public whose approval he seeks just as in
Molière’s Les femmes savantes the preposterous Trissotin deserves the adoration
67
of a deluded Bélise and in Les précieuses ridicules mainstream, Parisian world-

liness is attacked under cover of attacking its bourgeois, provincial epigones.
Fontenelle’s successful attempt to merge academic activities with the rituals
of sociability (he turned the Academy’s public sessions into broadly attended,
worldly events, thus giving the philosophe and the scientist further legitimacy
in the public eye) played against him—a strange indictment coming from La
Bruyère, who had plaintively argued against the marginalization of the homme
de lettres.31 Because he had hoped to straddle both worlds, the bel esprit ends
up exiled from both. But in the eighteenth century it is the Mérés, not the
Hortensiuses, who are the object of ridicule.
A common stock character of eighteenth-century satire is the bel esprit who
fakes the rules of conversational improvisation. Patrice Leconte’s film Ridicule
(1996), which provides a rather trite portrayal of worldly manners (a must in
the majority of today’s depictions of eighteenth-century French society, which
seem to have inherited Rousseau’s prejudice against worldliness), features an
odious abbé, aptly named Vilecourt. The abbé, an ambitious and scheming bel
esprit (he will eventually be mistaken, much to his discomfiture, for an esprit
fort, that is, a freethinker or atheist), masks his ineptitude at improvisation by
having his mistress help him cheat at the game of bouts-rimés.32 Punishment
awaits him. Having argued, in front of Louis XVI and the court, the existence
of God, the abbé promises that the next time he will argue the opposite; in-
stead, he is promptly disgraced. The source of the anecdote, which is related
by Diderot, is located not in the eighteenth century but in the sixteenth and
features Cardinal du Perron as Vilecourt and Henri III as Louis XVI.33 A similar
character appears in the Persian Letters. Through the thin walls of his dingy
lodgings Rica overhears a conversation between two aspiring beaux esprits. “I
don’t know why it is, but everything seems to turn against me,” says the first
interlocutor.
“For at least three days I have not said one noteworthy thing. I find myself
thrown pell-mell into conversation, with no one paying the least attention
or speaking to me twice. I had prepared various sallies to enliven my con-
versation, but no one lets me get them off. I had a fine story to tell, but
whenever an opportunity approached, people evaded it as if on purpose. For
four days several witticisms have been growing stale in my head without my
ever using them. . . . Let me tell you, a reputation for wit [bel esprit] is hard
to achieve, and I don’t know how you managed it.” “I have an idea,” the
other replied, “let’s work together on this and form an association for the
production of wit. Every day we will agree on our subject of conversation,
. . . We will agree upon the places where approval should be voiced, where
68
to smile and where to burst into full laughter. You will see that we will give
tone to every conversation, and that people will admire our lively wit and
apt repartees. . . . Do what I say and I promise you a place in the Academy
in less than six months.”34
This petty conspiracy between two unimaginative parvenus of letters indi-
cates that in the eyes of the satirist the ethos of conversation is thoroughly
suspect. The pleasure that engaged the honnête homme and the galant through
the communal flowering and exchange of verbal gifts was ideally conceived as
a moral education and an exercise in social virtue.35 Under ideal conditions
conversation consisted in spontaneity and improvisation, in the free expen-
diture of evanescent orality: “Conversation must seem so free that it should
give the impression that no thought is ever rejected, that we are allowed to
say everything that comes to mind, with no preconceived intent to talk about
one thing rather than another,” said Sappho, Mlle de Scudéry’s fictional alter
ego.36 In Montesquieu’s personal notebooks, the reality of verbal interaction as
he actually experienced it in Mme de Lambert’s and Mme de Tencin’s salons
for once trumped the drive to satirize: “The spirit of conversation is what is
generally called esprit among the French. It consists in a dialogue, generally
good-humored, in which each person, without being too attentive to oneself,
talks and is talked back to, in which everything is treated in an abrupt, quick,
and lively manner.”37 (While he remarked on his intractable shyness, Mon-
tesquieu also diligently reported in his notebooks some of the witticisms and
repartees that he had been fortunate enough to produce over the years.)38 But
in the Persian Letters such reality is approached obliquely, from the angle of sat-
ire (such debunking being proof of the weight and consequence of the ideal).
Rather than seeing conversation as the privileged space for the exercise of a
collective, oral kind of art that requires perfect timing, self-control, and vir-
tues like reciprocity, complaisance, concern for others, and surrender of one’s
amour-propre, the ambitious beaux esprits have turned it into a forum for their
social advancement and literary career. The spurious beaux esprits collect the
stuff of extemporaneous orality. They capitalize on what should have been the
expression of a wasteful (aristocratic) economy of verbal brilliance and turn it
into an academic career. Conversation is like a game that has no purpose other
than the fugitive pleasure it creates, but the fake beaux esprits rig that game so
as to stake the odds in their favor.
What goes around comes around: Rica’s satire of the bel esprit comes back
to haunt its author in the Mémoires of Jean-François Marmontel. Like Montes-
quieu, Marmontel is fond of directing his barbs against the salons he frequents,
69
particularly Tencin’s and Geoffrin’s. A newcomer to the Parisian literary scene

in 1745, the young author (then a protégé of Voltaire’s and a secretary to the
financier La Popelinière) traces his first steps in the salon of Mme de Tencin,
where he meets Montesquieu, Fontenelle, Mairan, Marivaux, and Helvétius
and where he hopes to find ways to free himself from dependence on a private
patron. However, Marmontel becomes quickly convinced that
there was too much esprit for me. I realized that everybody came fully pre-
pared to play his role and that the desire to be on stage did not allow con-
versation to flow naturally and effortlessly. It was a race for grabbing, before
everyone else, the chance to place one’s own witticism, one’s anecdote, apho-
rism, or one-liner, and one would often grab that chance by the skin of its
teeth. Marivaux was obviously keen to show his penetration and his sagacity.
Montesquieu, more calm, would wait for an opportunity, but one could see
that he was waiting for it. Mairan was on the hunt for the right moment.
. . . Only Fontenelle would let things run their course and get his chance
without tampering with things. He profited from the attention of others so
sparingly that his witticisms and his tales never took more than a minute.39
Like Rica, the young Marmontel sees himself lifting the curtain and enter-
ing backstage in order to uncover the workings of authorial vanity. Effort,
not pleasure, and self-interest, not attention to others, regulate the exchange.
The apparent spontaneity of conversation masks the participants’ anxiety to
occupy center stage and the rivalry between the guests. Everything has been
staged in advance, and each actor struggles to deliver his set piece before the
others. Fontenelle, the old player, is vindicated against La Bruyère’s satire, but
Marivaux’s and Montesquieu’s eagerness to “place” their contribution betrays
a desire for public approval that diminishes them. Tales, anecdotes, aphorisms,
deft expressions, fine witticisms, the genres that ought to thrive in extempo-
raneous communality, are in reality the effect of individual work and struggle,
and as such, they are ridiculous. They constitute the loose fabric of vanity,
trifles that serve no purpose other than self-promotion.
The satirical theme of the rigged conversation appears too frequently in
the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not to be revealing
of something important.40 Much of that literature was in fact based on oral-
ity, both as a practice and as a fictional form featured in written works that
were presented as though they were transcriptions of actual conversations.
The culture of conversation held on to the Platonist ideal of the furor poeti-
cus. It pretended to devalue labor and effort, which it declared pedantic and
debased, and it saw creative grace as the effect of a noble, aristocratic disposi-
70
tion overflowing with an innate talent. In reality, no one was entirely the dupe
of that myth. The good conversationalist was much like a jazz musician: the
outpouring grace of one hour of improvisation on the stage was the product
of years of labor and practice and the mastery of standards that were the start-
ing point of infinite variations, the bedrock of tradition on which personal
innovation and creativity laid their foundation. The greater the preparation
and effort that took place behind the scene, the easier and more natural the
performance would appear. (The same went for the “improvisation” of the
commedia dell’arte, which was also based on the control of verbal and gestural
topoi.) In the reality of ancien régime sociability, whether it was worldly or aca-
demic, there was no dichotomy between savoir and bel esprit, between rhetori-
cal expertise and the virtuosity of worldly conversation: both talents (for men,
at least) were sharpened in the collèges. It was the purpose of a good Jesuit edu-
cation to have the students master oral as much as written composition; the
rhetorical exercise of the extemporanea oratio, which prepared the students to
react quickly and to immediately come up with the appropriate answer, relied
upon memorization and inventio, that is, upon the creative use of a wealth of
commonplaces, anecdotes, portraits, maxims, witticisms, and poems, many of
which were published in countless collections of anas.41
The challenge for the conversationalist as for the writer—and it is impor-
tant to remember that most gens de lettres were both—was to master one’s
craft well enough to produce the effect of spontaneity and total à propos (or
propriety) both orally and in writing. Those who could not master that art
betrayed the “professionalism” of their craft and the fundamental imposture
of improvisation; they could not hide the effort that a more successful artist
and conversationalist was able to keep under control. Their sincerity and dis-
interestedness, qualities traditionally required of the Ciceronian orator, were
also at stake. Those considerations are important because conversation was not
subservient to the written work: it was a form of art in its own right, one that
entered in a fruitful exchange with the written work. We would be greatly mis-
taken if, in order to understand its relevance and significance, we were to turn
to its exponents in a later age, such as Proust: Mme Verdurin and the Princesse
de Guermantes can no more explain Mme de Tencin or Mme Necker than
Proust himself can explain Diderot.42 Toward the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, when worldly orality had lost favor with a literary establishment eager
to reach the whole nation through the written and published work, through
journals, and through the theater, even a detractor of worldly orality such as
Mercier wrote enthusiastically about Diderot’s excellence in this art form:
71
The man in Paris who talks the best about all the arts and whose inexhaust-
ible conversation is not inferior to his style, the man who fills you with en-
thusiasm in his cabinet even more than in his works, that man is Diderot. I
have never heard a more eloquent, more lucid, more varied speech. No one
can, like him, join naturally and forcefully so many diverse expressions; no
one is more capable of delivering so many ideas and so many lively and col-
orful turns of phrase. He is to be considered a first-rate improviser.43
As for the fact that the dialogism of conversation is the structuring principle
of Diderot’s own writings, from his philosophical dialogues (one of which fea-
tures Mlle de Lespinasse, a prominent salonniere) to Jacques le fataliste, that is
a point I need not belabor further.
The charge of “professionalism” that was thrown at the bel esprit must be
understood not only in the sense of someone holding a profession (a métier)
and making a profitable trade out of a noble art but also in the sense of profess-
ing or affirming something, of publicly declaring one’s position and identity
(just as one may profess a belief or a faith). The bel esprit was always accused of
wearing his role on his sleeve, as a label: to him, esprit was something to be dis-
played. For La Bruyère, Voltaire, and Duclos, the bel esprit was someone who
was unable to give himself up entirely to his creation, a self-conscious writer
who made a show of his craft or a bad actor who let his own voice smother that
of the character. Esprit moved the audience’s attention away from the object
toward the subject of enunciation and was thus an effect of amour-propre, the
root of all evil. That is why the attacks on Marivaux’s style often involved a
critique of the author himself. Morality and aesthetics thus converged to con-
demn a certain form of theatricalized self-consciousness.
Illusion Rediscovered
In a letter intended to mollify his longtime rival, Voltaire made the follow-
ing appraisal of Marivaux’s theater:
It is true that I sometimes wish that he had a style less polished and that he
treated more noble subjects. . . . I would disapprove of his representing the
passions with too much detail and of missing the pathway to the heart by
taking roundabout ways. I would like his esprit even more if he were willing
to show less of it! Indeed, a character in a play ought not to appear witty
[spirituel ]; he must be so despite himself and without being aware of it.44
Ironically, in his dealings with the Théâtre-Français Marivaux had advocated
the type of unselfconscious acting required by Voltaire, one similar to that of
72
the Italian actors, who were successful because they were able to play as if the
spectators were not there. “They never seem to be conscious of the implica-
tions of what they say, and yet the spectators are.” But he never got his wish be-
cause he encountered the resistance of the French actors: “Despite my repeated
efforts, the French actors’ obsession with appearing witty [montrer de l’esprit]
was stronger than my humble remonstrations, and they preferred, out of van-
ity, persistently to misinterpret the text rather than to appear the dupes of their
role.”45 But Marivaux was fated to provide fodder to his critics and to see his
own ideas turned against him. To Voltaire, Marivaux’s characters lacked an
independent, all-rounded life and were nothing but a vehicle for the author’s
vain display of esprit. While enthusiasm carries the genius beyond himself and
into his character, esprit, vampirelike, drains the life out of one’s own creation
and forces the audience constantly to face the author’s insignificant self. In his
Lettre sur l’esprit Voltaire made that point again, this time selecting his gallery
of bad examples from Corneille, Racine, and Fléchier: “All that flash . . . is
not suited to a serious work, which must absorb the audience. What happens,
then, is that while all the audience wants to see the character, the author usurps
all the attention.”46
Such vanity has the unfortunate result of leading the writer to sacrifice the
faith, the belief in the illusion he has created, for the sake of the admiration he
craves. Without such illusion, however, there can be no real emotion on the
part of the spectator. In that respect, Voltaire’s position echoes that of Diderot
and harks back to the aesthetic tenets of early classicism, which, in turn, bor-
rowed heavily from the theatrical poetics of the Italian Renaissance.47 In 1623
Jean Chapelain wrote in his Préface à l’Adonis du Chevalier Marin that cathar-
sis (purgation) required that the spectator undergo an emotional event that
he could not experience without immersing himself in the truthlike illusion
of the spectacle: “[The willing suspension of disbelief ] is followed by faith or
confidence in the subject; that is of crucial importance, because wherever be-
lief is lacking, attention and affect are lacking too; and where there is no affect,
there is no emotion and, as a consequence, no purging of the human passions,
which is the function of [dramatic] poetry. Faith, therefore, is absolutely nec-
essary to the theater.”48 It was because he was unable to sustain such faith that
the galant and précieux Corneille found no grace in the eyes of Mirzoza, the
sultan’s favorite and a brilliant critic in Diderot’s Oriental fantasy Les bijoux
indiscrets:
“I do not know the rules,” continued the favorite, “much less the learned
words by which they are expressed; but I do know that truth alone can please
73
and touch an audience. I also know that perfection in a play consists in an

imitation of an action so perfect that the spectator, continually deceived,
imagines himself part of the action itself. Now, is there anything similar to
this in the tragedies you have just praised to us?” . . . “At least, Madame,”
replied Selim, “you will not deny that if the episodes distract us from the
illusion, the dialogue brings us back to it. I do not know anyone who un-
derstands this better than our tragedians.” “Then nobody understands it,”
retorted Mirzoza. “Their bombast, glibness [esprit] and ostentation [papil-
lotage] are a thousand miles from nature. The author may try to hide in
vain, but my eyes are keen and I incessantly see him behind his characters.
Cinna, Sertorius, Maximus and Aemilia are Corneille’s speaking trumpets
on every page.”49
The self-conscious brilliance of the style is said to rip the veil of illusion and
to prevent the spectator from being drawn into the emotions of the spectacle.
Toward the end of the century such a concern for the integrity of theatri-
cal illusion will prompt the proponents of the drame to do away with verse,
which raises distracting applause for authorial skill. Ironically, Voltaire saw the
tables turned on himself when his turn came to become the target of the by
now ubiquitous critique he had once formulated against others: “Monsieur de
Voltaire has become epic in his Oedipe and his Alzire, in Sémiramis, in the first
scene of Orosmane,” wrote Mercier, “seduced by a pompous elocution that is
applauded by the parterre. His confidants are often given the best lines because
he likes to be admired, but as soon as the verse forces us to admire the poet, the
verse for sure has killed the character. And then what is left of illusion?”50
Theatricality on the stage and in the act of writing had been a constant
feature of the genre of the burlesque and the mock-heroic literature illustrated
by Sorel and Scarron, which Marivaux had illustrated in his youth with Phars-
amon, Télémaque travesti, and L’iliade travestie. The burlesque was an eminently
self-conscious genre that relied upon a comic reflection on the forms of writing
and on fictional conventions. It aimed less to be believed by the reader than to
cautioning him or her against the dangers of such belief, because the purpose
of this literature was precisely to undermine the power of illusion conveyed by
the genres it parodied, such as the epic poem or the heroic, sentimental novel.
A good example of such a display of self-consciousness in the burlesque novel
is illustrated by Marivaux’s delightful preface to La voiture embourbée, which
parodistically embroiders on the conventions of captatio benevolentiae:
This is a pleasant and amusing book; the transitions are effortless, there are
many original surprises. If this is so, we have here a good book. But who
74
says so? It’s me, the author. Oh, people will say, how quaint are those au-
thors with their prefaces full of praise for their own works! But you, reader,
how difficult you are! You absolutely require a preface, and then you protest
when the author says what he really thinks of his book. You must agree that
if he thought that the book was no good, he would not have it published. I
agree, you reply. But an attitude of reserve, perhaps even of humility, must,
when he speaks of his book, throw a veil of decency upon his real feelings.
Let him be vain and fearless (for being contemptuous of a work one is about
to publish is worthy of a madman); but being proud of one’s work and an-
nouncing it modestly: that should be the conduct of a prudent author who,
unable to hide his satisfaction completely, would wear a mask of reserve in
order to avoid the ridicule of having his feelings made public. Fine. I agree.
I was wrong. I have spoken too openly; I am going to put on a mask. Now,
my reader ought to know that in publishing this story I am not so conceited
as to think that I am offering him anything special; some friends, flatter-
ers, no doubt, have forced me to publish it, but . . . But enough! will cry
some cranky misanthropist. . . . I cannot stand this phony humility, this
ridiculous combination of hypocrisy and conceit that afflicts most authors.
I much prefer an open expression of conceit to the detours of bad faith. And
as far as I am concerned, Monsieur the misanthropist, I’d rather publish a
book with no preface than sweat and please no one.51
The theatricalization of the author involves that of the reader and of the act
of writing. At a time in which, as Christian Jouhaud puts it, “every action was
also a demonstration of the capacities of its agent, hence a confirmation of
his social and symbolic status,” this approach was particularly suited to the
satirical staging of the writer’s uncertain advance in a world that was rife with
danger.52 The dialogue between “author” and “reader”—both textual effects—
prefigures many of the themes that appear in Marivaux’s subsequent works,
especially in the journals; it enacts a strategy of preemptive strike. The fictional
author is represented as ludicrously paralyzed by a self-reflexive mood; all his
statements revert to questions of authorial intent and to the conventions of
literary discourse. This aspect of the burlesque will flourish, as we know, in
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It is a peculiarity of the burlesque that the reader is
faced with an avowedly incompetent author: unable to tell a story straight-
forwardly, the author does little more than write about writing; his acute self-
consciousness appears as a sterile exercise. The author can never control his
multiple reflections in the eyes of others: the more he protests, answers, and
preempts objections, the more he becomes mired in his own argument and in
countless digressions. The audience is embodied in a multitude of voices con-
75
testing one another. Such dialogism anticipates the multiplicity of characters

who, in turn, take the stage in Marivaux’s journals, none speaking unequivo-
cally for the author and each representing at least one side of him. But more
important, the theme of the author’s amour-propre is woven into a reflection
on the nature of illusion, embodied in the image of the mask (particularly the
mask of false modesty, which in his eyes fares worse than straightforward van-
ity), a central theme in Marivaux’s work. Even the character of the misanthro-
pist, the intolerant rigorist who preaches sincerity to others but is unaware of
his own latent hypocrisy (here Rousseau comes to mind), resurfaces in a more
developed form in his subsequent work.
The language of the burlesque was the vehicle for an ironic reflection on
the act of writing, in which the author’s ineptitude necessarily turned him into
the sole protagonist. But when, in La vie de Marianne, Marivaux imported
those themes from the burlesque to the serious novel and to journalistic writ-
ing, he overstepped a boundary. He was seen as drawing on a tradition that
was increasingly being portrayed as unseemly. What had been a widespread
literary practice was now seen as a personal vice and a breach of the pact of
illusion that novelists had been observing since the times of Du Plaisir. In the
Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire, avec des scrupules sur le style, composed
in 1683 in the wake of the success of Mme de Lafayette’s nouvelle historique,
Du Plaisir had formalized the new rules illustrated by the nouvelle, which set
it apart from the roman or poème héroïque, which had fallen out of favor (of
course, the decline of the roman héroïque had been accompanied by a parallel
decline of the burlesque, which was the flip side of the heroic style). Thus, Du
Plaisir had recommended that the novelist conceal any sign of his presence and
avoid interfering with the narrative and the dialogue of the characters:
The novelist must everywhere appear polite, but he cannot appear witty
[spirituel ]. He cannot give free rein to his esprit; in other words, he cannot
enter into lengthy reflections. . . . The author must seem witty despite him-
self; that is to say, he must use all his resources [tout son esprit] in order to
compose a spontaneous conversation that gives the impression that it is the
characters who speak, not him.53
The new emphasis placed on the illusion of reality in the novel paralleled the
major turn that some forty years earlier had transformed the French theater
and the spectatorial response to the stage. That transformation had been ac-
companied by the formalization of rules intended to preserve the integrity of
verisimilitude or illusion in the theater. It was for the sake of illusion (the term
76
vraisemblance was preferred over a word that smacked of demonic possession,

deceit, or optical trickery)54 that all consciousness of acting and of the presence
of spectators, all awareness of the conventional character of stage rules, had to
be suppressed. Thus d’Aubignac wrote:
The author should arrange everything as if there were no spectators, which

means that all the characters must move and speak as if they really were
kings, not Bellerose or Mondory; as if they were in Horace’s palace in Rome,
not in the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris; as if no one heard and saw them
but those who were on the stage with them and inside the [fictional] space
represented. . . . This must be scrupulously observed, because any interac-
tion with the spectators is a flaw.55
The spectator had to be made to feel that he was witnessing an actual

event, not watching a spectacle. The world on stage must be autonomous
and self-enclosed, emancipated from all explicit or figurative reference to an
author, a spectator, and a theatrical setting. The theoreticians believed that it
was this very distanciation and the bracketing of all awareness of fictionality
that allowed the spectator to be drawn into the spectacle, transported out of
his body, so to speak, onto the scene. Thus, all metatheatrical elements, such
as the prologue addressing the audience, the actor’s asides (apartés), the stances
and the lengthy tirades, which were frequent in the baroque theater of the early
seventeenth century (until approximately 1730), had to be suppressed.56
In that context we can better understand the disapproval felt at the time
of its publication for Marianne’s first-person theatricality, for her continuous
reference to an audience, and for her divided self, all of which were manifest in
her tendency to double the narrative with extensive commentaries. To its crit-
ics, those features were the effect of an unwanted awareness of fictionality; the
narrator, however, presented them as precisely the opposite, that is, as proofs of
the narrative’s authenticity. Only true memoirs (or a truly original novel, for,
of course, that was the drift) could be written in such an unfashionable style:
“If that were an invented story, very likely it would not have the form it has.
Marianne would not make such lengthy and frequent reflections; there would
be more facts and less morals; in other words, it would be more in line with
today’s established taste. . . . People expect adventures, and adventures only;
but Marianne, in writing hers, did not care for that.”57 Moreover, as Marianne
was published in installments, its author had plenty of time to incorporate the
criticism of the novel into his text (a device also amply exploited in his jour-
nals). Thus, to add insult to injury, in answering that criticism Marianne not
77
only commented on her adventures but also commented on the critics’ com-
mentaries. It is not surprising that to his critics Marivaux’s dedication to such
poetics must have looked like perverse obstinacy.
In fact, Marivaux’s writing alternates between preserving and suspending
the illusion of verisimilitude, between, on the one hand, the belief in the
impenetrable integrity of the fictional world and, on the other, the pleasure
of puncturing that perfect façade through a suggestive reflection on the con-
ditions that make illusion possible and the investigation of the moral status
of illusion for both reader and writer. Marivaux never ceased to explore the
interpenetration between reality and fiction, truth and verisimilitude, both
in the realm of literature and in that of personal character. In the eyes of his
critics, however, this interest was imputed not to the writer’s choice of a poet-
ics but to a peculiar defect of his nature, that is, to an excessive amour-propre.
Marivaux shared this belief that mimetic illusion was inseparable from the is-
sue of the moral illusion created by amour-propre. In the Augustinian tradition
he draws from, amour-propre is associated with fiction and spectacles. In the
grip of vanity, we turn ourselves into objects to be beheld, and by relying upon
a wealth of exempla gleaned from our readings, we create a fictional self that
feeds parasitically upon the real one, which we nurture and worship like an
idol. Amour-propre leads us to replace the bleak reality of our wretched selves
with self-aggrandizing fictions and to legitimize them through the mediation
of the audience we have duped, the greatest dupe being, of course, ourselves,
for the self, dissociated in the roles of actor and spectator, is the ultimate the-
atrical stage and the privileged audience for its own antics.58 Self-reflexivity is
the fundamental mode of existence of amour-propre, which is no more than
conscience’s obsessive self-mirroring and folding back upon itself—self-aware-
ness run amok. Amour-propre is an essentially theatrical form.
The Disenchanted Spectator

Throughout the journals, Marivaux mingles discussions on style and au-
thorial intention with anecdotes illustrating the vanity of various characters,
in particular coquettish young women. Many of those stories raise the issue
of self-deception and self-theatricalization, with characters who deceive others
by deceiving themselves first. The narrator takes full advantage of the freedom
offered by the genre and goes back and forth between the metanarrative analy-
sis of his poetics and the narratives of various characters, who are sometimes
embedded in his discourse and sometimes speak in the first person. Meaning
78
thus emerges from the juxtaposition of jarring elements. By alternating discus-

sions on the conditions that make illusion possible with anecdotes illustrat-
ing the perverseness of illusion as such, the narrator never allows the reader
to become a passive recipient. While becoming involved in the pathos of the
characters, the reader is on the alert, encouraged to pay close attention to the
context of enunciation.
Thus the various anecdotes on the vanity of women have a figural function:
they are emblematic of the authorial situation. A striking example appears in
the much-quoted passage that opens the first issue of Le spectateur français,
published in May 1721. The narrator presents himself as a misanthropist, a
world-weary old man cut from the same cloth as the narrator of La Bruyère’s
Caractères, that is, a Christian orator who wants nothing for himself but the
moral improvement of his readers: “Neither the orator nor the writer is able
to conceal the joy he feels in being applauded; but they ought to blush if they
aim at nothing but praise in their speeches and writings. . . . We should speak
and write only in order to instruct.”59 Similarly, Marivaux’s Spectateur likes to
observe others but has no wish to be seen; he is above the social and the literary
fray:
Be as it may, I wish my reflections to be useful. Perhaps they will be; it is
only for that reason that I am publishing them, not in order to prove that
I am talented [si l’on me trouvera de l’esprit]. . . . Besides, my advanced age,
my travels, an old habit of living only for listening and watching, my expe-
rience: everything has softened my amour-propre and made me indifferent
to the many small pleasures that people draw from vanity. So that should
my friends tell me that I pass for a bel esprit, I would not be pleased. On the
contrary, were I to realize that someone had profited from my reflections
and been cured of some flaw, that would really touch me and give me the
kind of satisfaction that I could truly appreciate.60
The narrator then proceeds to recount an episode of his youth that he presents
as a foundational experience and the source of his current misanthropy. When
he was seventeen, he gave his affections to a young woman who seemed to him
as attractive as she was simple and unaffected:
I was sure that she was so unaware of her good looks that she ignored them
completely. I was so naïve in those days! What a joy, I would tell myself, to
be loved by a girl who does not wish to have lovers, since she is beautiful
without paying any attention to it, and therefore she is not vain! . . . Was
she sitting or standing? talking or walking? She always seemed unconscious
of how she looked.61
79
What a treasure this girl is who is entirely devoid of amour-propre and has no
notion of the coquette’s derivative sense of identity. Unlike the coquette’s, her
existence is autonomous: she does not need others because she does not need
to be seen in order to feel that she exists. Rather than searching into their eyes
for that precious reflection of their love that can never quite fill the coquette’s
inner void and inexhaustible need, this girl allows herself to be the purely
passive object of someone else’s gaze: she ignores the reciprocity of desire.
Marivaux, a great parodist of Fénelon, was familiar with the portrait of Anti-
ope, the future wife of Télémaque and the epitome of the Christian spouse:
“ ‘What touches me in her,’ said Télémaque, ‘is her silence, her modesty, and
her privacy, . . . her contempt for vain ornament, her disregard and ignorance
of her beauty. When Idoménée [her father, the king] takes her hunting, she
is skilled and majestic with the bow, like Diana surrounded by her nymphs.
Everyone admires her, but she is the only one who does not see it.’ ”62 Unlike
Télémaque, however, disappointment awaits our Spectator:
One day in the country, I had just left her, but a glove that I had forgotten
made me come back. I saw that beauty from afar: she was looking at her mir-
ror, and I saw, to my great surprise, that she was rehearsing to herself all the
poses that her face had taken during our encounter. Some of the expressions
that had seemed so spontaneous were in fact tricks of the trade. I could see
that her vanity would select some and reject others; she recorded those little
expressions much like a woman would record a musical tune. . . . She saw
me from afar, reflected in her mirror, and she blushed. Ah! Mademoiselle,
I beg your pardon; until now I attributed to nature a charm that you owe
to your skill alone [votre industrie]. . . . I have just seen the machines of the
opera. The spectacle will always interest me, but I will be less touched.63
Chance, an unexpected and trivial accident, dissipates the illusion created by

the artful girl. The lover discovers that what he mistook for nature was a mask,
the product of the most refined and calculated art. The discovery is staged
so as to bring to our attention the complexities inherent in seeing and being
seen. The girl is looking at herself in the mirror, through the projection of her
lover’s gaze, which she has internalized; she is performing, for his future enjoy-
ment and for her satisfaction, perfecting the spectacle she has just offered him.
But suddenly she sees reflected in the mirror the real gaze of her flesh-and-
blood lover, and his all-too-real appearance shatters the delightful intimacy
with her image. As for the Spectator, his own irrelevance is fully revealed to
him when he discovers that he was not a protagonist but only an accessory in
the girl’s staging of a fiction. The ingénue is a consummate actress whose art-
80
ful exploration of physiognomy anticipates Diderot’s conception of acting in

Paradoxe sur le comédien. Rather than being the passive object of the other’s
gaze, the coquette is the stage director in a comedy of innocence that turns the
tables on the spectator-seducer. But she is, in turn, caught unaware and put
to shame. Her plight brings to mind the description of artifice exemplified by
Castiglione’s courtier, who must conceal the effort with which he has turned
himself into a living work of art. That is necessary because everybody dislikes
effort and affectation, which are “contrary to that pure and lovely simplicity
which is so attractive to the human soul. . . . In everything that he must do or
say, let him, if he can, always be prepared in advance, but pretend that every-
thing has been improvised.” Like the beaux esprits denounced by La Bruyère,
Montesquieu, and Marmontel, the apparent spontaneity of the courtier and
the coquette is always secretly scripted before being publicly staged, a duplic-
ity that to Castiglione seems perfectly acceptable, even recommended: all that
matters is concealing one’s game well. “The truest art is that which does not
seem such; above all, it must be hidden, for if it is discovered, one loses face
entirely and is no longer respected.”64 Which is exactly what happens when
chance exposes the coquette’s effort and ruins the effect of her art. The severity
of the humiliation she endures from her lover shows that neither the coquette
nor the artist (nor the courtier, for that matter) can be exposed without losing
face and being put to shame.65 Indeed, the formerly enchanted Spectator feels
nothing but horror for backstage goings-on. Mercier will go so far as to suggest
that the theater-lover would be as profoundly disturbed by a glimpse of what
takes place behind the scene as a lover who uncovers a cancer on the breast
of his beloved.66 The more powerful the sway of illusion, the more bitter the
disappointment at the discovery that the artist’s technique has inadvertently
turned itself into spectacle. On all counts it is a fiasco.
One might think at first that the message conveyed by the Spectator’s an-
ecdote consists in the rejection of artifice and the praise of artlessness. That is
how most critics have read it, and some have read this episode as an autobio-
graphical confession. Its meaning, however, is quite different. The allegorical
status of the Spectator’s story is evidenced by the starkness of the dichotomy
between nature and artifice. Seldom in Marivaux’s oeuvre do we find such a
blatant opposition between nature and the mask. Indeed, Marivaux is typically
fond of filling the gap between the two with a subtle analysis of the degrees
that lead from one to the other. In his work, nature and artifice usually stand
in a dialectical relationship with each other. This anecdote, in contrast, pre-
sents such a caricatural image of the social and erotic comedy that it betrays its
81
ironic nature. Indeed, the coquette is both the artist and the work of art, the
producer and the product of illusion. The spectacular aspect of the illusion-
producing artifice is evoked by the reference to the machines of the opera, the
emblem of unrestrained deceit and imposture. The machinery of spectacles
is the ultimate form of the strategic manipulation of illusion. To which we
may add the word industrie, which smacks of imposture and cheating.67 Did
Marivaux intend to present his denunciation of the artifice of illusion in a
manner as unmitigated as possible? In fact, the juxtaposition of the Spectator’s
denial of esprit with a tale that bluntly exposes the artifice that lies hidden be-
neath the show of modesty and self-effacement is more likely meant to do the
opposite, and to raise in the reader a suspicion of the Spectator’s own words.
Marivaux proceeds, throughout the journals, by sudden reversals that un-
dermine the credibility of the narrator and aim at involving the reader. “It will
always interest me, but I will be less touched,” said the Spectator at the dis-
covery of his beloved’s duplicity. The same words could be put in the reader’s
mouth once he realizes that he has become the dupe of the narrator’s artful-
ness. By drawing the reader’s attention to the machinery of illusion, to its
technique, to the act of writing, and consequently to himself qua author, the
coquettish Marivaux is supposed to prevent the arousal of emotion in the reader.
Like a woman locked in an exclusive relationship with her mirror, the author
is unable to engage in anything other than a narcissistic reflection in his own
writing: “We can see those authors, drawn to frenzy by their desire to seem
brilliant, . . . constantly admiring themselves in everything they say, as if writ-
ing were a mirror that preserved the flattering image of their esprit,” writes an
anonymous contributor to the Mercure.68
But Marivaux’s apparent denunciation of illusion is in fact a denunciation
of those who profess to expose the deceit of others. His target is not the ac-
cused but the accuser—his mood of suspicion, his uncompromising rigorism,
and the naïve faith in the possibility of unmediated representation. The Spec-
tator was too proud of his authorial modesty and too demanding of the mod-
esty of others to be truly innocent of the vice he condemned in others. One
of Marivaux’s most persistent, indeed obsessively repeated, motifs is a dislike
for moral rigorism, self-flagellating humility, and unforgiving misanthropy.
What better way to ridicule such pretensions than to use a story that seems to
indict the duplicity of others but in reality exposes the duplicity that lays in the
moralist himself? In the wake of La Rochefoucauld, Marivaux believes that it
is precisely when amour-propre seems to be working against itself that it savors
its most delightful triumph.69 False modesty always fares much worse with him
82
than the open and straightforward confession of one’s own vanity. (Thus he
follows in the steps of the Jansenist Pierre Nicole, for whom the simulacrum of
virtue was far more perverse than the outright absence of virtue and all seem-
ingly good theater was worse than vulgar farce.) In the words of Marivaux’s
most iconoclastic embodiment of the author, the title character of the Indigent
philosophe:
I would never be done counting hypocrites; there are too many of them;
there is nothing but them in life. As I say in my book, genuine humility is
perhaps nothing but a mask among men. True, there are some masks that
cannot but be mistaken for the real face. . . . Do you hear me, all of you, the
spitting image of sincerity, do not brag about your virtues! I would not want
to be like you; you are all frauds, with your parade of severity for human
weaknesses. Perhaps you are even more contemptible than the others.70
The numerous references throughout the journals to false modesty, and

particularly to the false modesty of authors, deserve to be considered with
attention. They are part of an ongoing apology for the aesthetics of bel esprit
and modernity, which, in the eyes of its critics, is associated with the ethos of
vanity and with misplaced theatricality. This apology is complex and multi-
layered, and it covers much of the writings in Marivaux’s journals, which may
be seen as a laboratory for his aesthetic ideals and a reflection on writing and
on the role of literature in the social constitution of reality. Marivaux invites
the reader to reflect critically on the role of the imagination in the construc-
tion of the self and of reality. Illusion and deceit penetrate reality through and
through, and it is the function of the artist to devise increasingly finer tools
for deconstructing their effects. But in his painstaking denunciation of illusion
Marivaux arrives at conflicting outcomes. On the one hand, he hopes to find
that kernel of authenticity that forever escapes even the severest scrutiny. On
the other, he is committed to embracing the imperfect, deceptive, and hope-
lessly unstable character of a human nature that is separated from itself, never
ceases to reinvent its identity, and cannot help but mask itself, even in the most
intimate moments. In Marivaux’s theater the tension between truth and mask
finds a dialectical solution in the happy denouement. By enacting, and over-
coming, illusory appearances, the theater portrays self-deception as a step on a
path toward self-discovery. But in his prose writings this tension never finds a
clear resolution. The alternation between those two moods constitutes the core
of Marivaux’s irony, or to put it differently, of his attitude of charity toward
a flawed and protean human nature. In the sphere of human agency the only
83
type of truth that is available to us is approximate and tentative; demanding

a more rigorous one would amount to an even worse kind of self-deception.
In that respect, one could see Marivaux’s morality as a kind of Augustinian-
ism lite: the acceptance of human dualism opens onto an ironic acceptance of
worldly immanence rather than onto a refuge in transcendence.
Marivaux’s own idiosyncratic brand of extreme fastidiousness and disen-
chanted tolerance for deception in moral life is paired with a desire to take apart
the mechanisms of illusion in the aesthetic realm. Although his extraordinary
sensitivity to masking and self-deception emerges to a great extent from the
Augustinian mood of suspicion about the nature of our moral drives, Marivaux
ends up undermining some of the most cherished moral and aesthetic beliefs
held by the ancients and by all those who reject the mood of heightened aware-
ness that he is promoting. In Marivaux, as in the other writers and artists of
the goût moderne, notably Dufresny, Montesquieu, Crébillon the younger, and
the Diderot of Jacques le fataliste, the reflection on the role of illusion in moral
life is accompanied by a parallel reflection on the processes of production of
illusion in the novel and the theater. While the reader becomes aware that his
perception of the real is coextensive with his activity as a consumer of fictions,
he is also invited to take an active role in the constitution of meaning and to
reflect upon the spectatorial function. The goût moderne conceives the social
realm as unstable, evolving, and unhinged from its religious foundations. The
undermining of moral and religious authority leads it to see the work of art as
a project in the making, as the result of an interaction between the artist and
the audience in which the former does not necessarily claim precedence over
the latter. All of that was unacceptable to the neo-ancients, who defended a
hierarchical, didactic, and sacralized conception of the relationship between
the artist and the audience. The aesthetics of the moderns was also rejected by
those who, like Voltaire and the Diderot of much of his Salon writings, wished
to introduce an ethos of energy and passion that was presented as the recovery
of a lost state of grace.
84
3 The Sly and the Coy Mistress
Style and Manner from Fénelon
to Diderot
Something is needed besides skill for the work of art to have an impact;
for speculative ideas to become sensate and keep their promise; for rules
to turn into living examples; for knowledge to turn into action and
words into things.
—Guez de Balzac
Find the thought first; the style will follow.

—Diderot
As Buffon said, “All the spiritual beauties to be found in a beautiful

style, all the relations of which it is made up, hold a truth that is more
precious for the public mind than those that constitute the subject
matter.”
—Proust
Divine Mimesis
The dictate on the author’s modesty was sanctioned by three distinct but
interrelated discourses: moral, aesthetic, and worldly. Modesty and unaffect-
edness (or should we say the affectation of modesty) were as suited to a good
writer as they were to the honnête homme and to a beautiful woman. Being a
bel esprit transcended what today we call being a writer; it fell into the murky
category of the things one cannot take credit for without ridicule, such as be-
ing smart or seductive.1 As the abbé Bouhours’s Ariste put it, “ ‘I have too bad
an opinion of myself to fancy myself an acceptable model of bel esprit. I lay no
85
claims to it, and I would feel ridiculous if I did.’ ‘Indeed, one must make no
claims to it,’ Eugène replied. ‘Those who wish truly to be a bel esprit ought not
to be too satisfied with themselves. If I were to add one last touch to your por-
trayal, it would be modesty. It is a quality that enhances all others and that is
becoming both to beautiful women and to beaux esprits.’ ”2 Modesty, however,
was far more than a question of authorial and social propriety. It involved a
particular conception of representation and a theory of the passions: amour-
propre was a passion that led to deceit and illusion, and as such it influenced
both morals and aesthetics.3
In the closing years of Louis XIV’s reign, well before Voltaire and Diderot
took up the fight, one of the most eloquent advocates of a return to the sub-
lime eloquence of the ancients was François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon,
bishop of Cambrai and tutor of the Duke of Burgundy, the heir apparent to
Louis XIV. Marivaux was well acquainted with Fénelon’s work. His Télémaque
travesti (1713) was a burlesque rewriting of Fénelon’s own Christian rewriting of
Homeric epics, Les aventures de Télémaque (1699), a bestseller in the eighteenth
century and the century’s most frequently reedited book. Marivaux’s parody
did not necessarily exclude admiration for an author who, despite his dis-
graced exile to his diocese of Cambrai, was, even after his death in 1715, among
the guiding lights of the circle of Mme de Lambert (which Marivaux fre-
quented regularly until Lambert’s death in 1738). The most openly Fénelonian
of Marivaux’s writings is probably L’éducation d’un prince, one of his last works,
which appeared in the Mercure in 1754. There Marivaux ventured to take the
mantle of mentor to the young prince, the same role he had once parodied
in Télémaque travesti with his portrayal of the rustic pair Brideron, the gaudy
farmer, and Phocion, his dim-witted uncle and guide. Though Marivaux may
have felt little sympathy for Fénelon’s reactionary stance against the moral
economy of the moderns, he may have been drawn to Fénelon’s writings on
the mysticism of pur amour, to his pedagogical thought, to his reduction of
political struggles to the terms of individual, moral conflicts, and, most of all,
to the thematics of benevolent, sentimentalized authority.4
In the Academy session of 26 May 1714 Fénelon proposed a wide-ranging
project of reform of religious eloquence, poetry, and theater. His proposal was
published as Lettre à l’Académie, or Rélexions sur la grammaire, la rhétorique, la
poétique et l’histoire. Inspired by Augustine and by Roman and Athenian ora-
tory, Fénelon advocated the return to a simple and sublime eloquence. The
task of the orator was not simply delectare, to give pleasure, but movere, to raise
passion for the patrie and incite the audience to take action in the civic realm.
86
The Sly and the Coy Mistress
The underlying motivations for such reform were political. Although he was
a staunch monarchist, Fénelon found in the republican ideal a powerful tool
and a metaphor for expressing his disaffection with absolutism, a feeling he
did not hide: his disapproval of Louis XIV’s absolutist policies found ample
expression in Les aventures de Télémaque (a pirated edition of which was pub-
lished without the author’s approval). The book infuriated the king and com-
pounded the earlier disgrace that Fénelon had suffered for his association with
Mme Guyon’s mystical heresy. Those travails, and much misunderstanding
about his true ideas, gave him a place in the revolutionary pantheon.5 At the
opening of his work Fénelon forcefully stated a Longinian idea that was to be-
come a philosophical leitmotif: there was a causal connection between liberty
and eloquence, between the establishment of absolutist rule in France and the
decline of public speech.
Among the Greeks, everything depended on the people, and the people de-
pended on speech. They were led by able and fervent rhetoricians. Speech
was a great resource in peace and war. . . . Discourse no longer has any such
power among us. Assemblies are nothing but ceremony and spectacle. There
no longer are any vestiges of powerful eloquence, of our ancient parlements,
of our Estates General, of our councils of notables. Everything is decided in
secret in the cabinet of a prince or in some secret negotiation.6
Fénelon finds in the republican patrie and in the vertu des païens a secular
equivalent of the Christian mystical body. A dominant theme of antiabsolut-
ist literature from Corneille to Montesquieu to Rousseau, and a major educa-
tional tool in the Jesuit and Oratorian collèges, the Christian appropriation of
ancient history greatly contributed to shaping the myth of republican virtue
advocated by the Revolution.
The majority of Fénelon’s writings on rhetoric and style contained impas-
sioned diatribes against the aesthetics of bel esprit and galanterie: “The elo-
quence of the ancients only aimed at persuading and arousing the passions.
They had no use for bel esprit. . . . How feeble, indecent, and debased their dis-
course would become if it were burdened with witticism and wordplay!”7 Fé-
nelon’s hostility toward esprit, the language of modern worldliness, was a result
of his conflict with the urban, luxury-oriented society that flourished under
absolutism. His admiration for the early republics, for epic poetry, and for an-
cient oratory were all part of his dream to reform French society according to
the archaic utopia of an agrarian and patriarchal order that bore only a partial
resemblance to the early republics. The ideal societies of Bétique and Salente,
87
portrayed in Les aventures de Télémaque (which greatly influenced Rousseau

and Montesquieu), presented a republican-Christian utopia in which social
mobility was forbidden, commerce was rudimentary, the economy was fru-
gal, women were relegated to their domestic activities, and only male citizens
were allowed to play an active role in an oligarchy regulated by a strict and
visible hierarchy. Because of his critique of an absolutist culture geared toward
the production and consumption of luxury goods, his nostalgia for the poet-
ics of the ancients, and his advocacy of the pedagogical and political role of
literature in society, Fénelon exercised a great influence on Diderot, who too
hoped to revive ancient eloquence and to rescue it from the “decadence” it
suffered under the combined influence of absolutism and market society. Many
of the themes we encounter in Fénelon’s battle against galanterie are recycled
by Diderot in his critique of the goût moderne. In his inaugural speech to the
Academy in 1683 (where he replaced the galant Pellisson) Fénelon celebrated
the revival of antiquity in the visual arts and in literature by noting that “we
have finally understood that we must write as Raphael, Carraccio, and Pous-
sin painted: not for the sake of pursuing astonishing fancifulness and putting
one’s imagination on display through brushstroke virtuosity, but for the sake
of painting after nature.”8 The frugality and restraint of a morally reformed
society are thus reflected in an art that makes judicious and guarded use of its
stylistic powers.
Hoping to raise society to the pitch of Christian, heroic self-abnegation,
Fénelon was searching for a language capable of inspiring the people with a
passion for the community and a disinterested love of goodness. The orator
must embody the qualities he wants to impress on the people: “I am seeking
a serious man who would speak for me and not for himself; who would labor
for my salvation and not for his vainglory.”9 The parallel between Cicero and
Demosthenes exemplified those qualities. Writing at the dawn of the empire,
Cicero was an opportunist who endorsed the tyranny of Octavianus and put
his oratorical talent at the service of his career. In contrast, the Greek Demos-
thenes, the citizen of a republic, was willing to forgo his authorial pride and
devote himself to inspiring his audience with a passion for the patrie. “Cicero’s
art is astounding: but it shows through. The orator never loses sight of him-
self, even as he is thinking about the fate of the republic, and neither does the
audience. Demosthenes seems to go out of himself and see only the patrie. He
does not pursue beauty; he finds it without searching for it. He is above ad-
miration.”10 The beauty of Cicero’s language is an effect of the orator’s amour-
propre: the audience may admire it, but it cannot be persuaded by it. The
88
good orator, on the contrary, does not seek beauty, which is useless, but only
efficacy; he becomes a pure instrument of truth, which speaks through him
in an unadulterated flow. The poet and the orator must erase from their work
all marks of their own individuality. Only then can language convey the vivid
presence of the object and raise the audience’s emotion: “The poet disappears;
we see only what he makes us see, and we hear only those he lends a voice to.
That is the power of imitation and painting.”11
The same principles that rule spiritual life must also preside over the compo-
sition of the artwork. Indeed, all human activities are seen by Fénelon through
the prism of a strict economy of selflessness in which the individual devotes
himself to the glory of his community. The matrix of this relationship lies in
Fénelon’s mystical conception of pur amour, a doctrine rooted in the Augustin-
ian principle of the alienating effects of amour-propre and in the doctrine of the
two loves (the postlapsarian soul is torn between the love of God and the love
of himself ).12 But it diverged radically from Jansenism because it upheld the
possibility of redemption through human action and aspired to reach in this
life a perfect state of union with God. Through the cultivation of a mood of
indifference toward one’s affects and passive abandonment to God’s will, the
self is purged of its passions and anxieties and is able to recover a prelapsarian
kind of happiness. The soul must alienate itself from its volitions and self-
interest so as to become enfolded in the embrace of God’s will. To reach that
state, Fénelon recommended curbing the passions by inner discipline, yield-
ing to a love that transcended the self, and persevering on that path with no
thought of a reward:
We may love God with a pure charity untainted by all self-concern. . . .

Neither fear of punishment nor desire for reward may have any share in this
love. We no longer love God for the sake of the merit, the perfection, the
happiness we find in loving him. We would love him just as well even if, by
an impossible supposition, he were unaware of our love; even if he wanted
to make eternally unhappy those who loved him.13
This lesson will not be lost on Sade’s Justine, whose piety is constantly “pun-
ished” by God or by fate.14 The ultimate sacrifice to God would be desiring
one’s own damnation. Such a paradoxical possibility was briefly considered
but forcefully rejected as heretical by Fénelon (who had to submit his doctrine
as a series of propositions to the pope’s approval), yet one feels that the gap
between Fénelonian self-denial and its heretical upshot is not so wide.15 Such
spiritual abnegation may be extended to all aspects of life, but especially to pol-
89
itics and the arts. That is the conception of kingship conveyed by Télémaque,
the educational novel that apparently succeeded in turning the violently as-
sertive Duke of Burgundy into a dedicated and obliging dauphin. A model
to all citizens, but especially to the orator and the artist, the king, Christ-like,
embodies the sacrifice of the self to the community: “He belongs to all the
people he governs. He is never allowed to belong to himself. . . . He is the slave
of those over whom he seems to be lording. He was made for them. He gives
himself entirely to them, he is burdened with all their needs.”16
All art molded after eloquence aims toward pathos and persuasion and
hence requires visual energy (enargeia), something that can be achieved only
through the self-abnegation of the artist:
[In Virgil and Homer] we find simple things, nature is everywhere present,
but art is hidden everywhere. You will not find one word serving the poet’s
bel esprit. The poet prides himself on disappearing so as to plunge you into
the things he paints, just as a painter is concerned with putting before your
eyes the forests, the rivers, the mountains, the perspectives, the men and
their adventures, their actions, their passions, but without allowing you to
see the brushstrokes. Artistry is vulgar and wretched when it is displayed.17
The audience must be drawn into the representation; it must enter into it
and be literally possessed: the tragic spectacle, following the classical theory
of imitation, is an out-of-body experience (transport), a kind of alienation.18
When reading Virgil’s evocation of the fall of Troy, we are transported to the
middle of the fire: “We think we are in the midst of Troy, gripped by horror
and pity.”19 We are not spectators to a fiction but witnesses to a tragic action.
Horror and pity are predicated upon the audience’s capacity to forget that this
experience is mediated by linguistic, conventional signs: all awareness of the
medium that conveys it must be suppressed. In that respect, Fénelon’s concep-
tion of the arts (poetry, oratory, and painting) is the correlative of the theatri-
cal doctrines elaborated in the seventeenth century by d’Aubignac and Cha-
pelain, which in their turn reflected rhetoric’s longstanding desire to merge
with painting and action. The conventional signs of language must have the
same visual presence (enargeia) as natural signs.20 In no way must the material
conditions of the performance interfere with the object conjured by the rep-
resentation—a radically antitheatrical stance that foreshadows Diderot’s own
battle against theatricalized mannerism, his split between the materiality of the
art medium and the ideal of art: “The beauty of the ideal makes an impression
on all men, while beauty of handling [faire] appeals only to the connoisseur; if
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it makes him dream, it’s always of the artist and his art, not of the thing itself;
he always remains outside the scene and never enters into it. True eloquence does
not call attention to itself. If I tell myself you are eloquent, then you are not
eloquent enough.”21
The touchstone of the work of art is the emotion it produces in the be-
holder, just as in oratory it is the action it spurs. The eloquent discourse disap-
pears as a sign, while its object is reincarnated as vivid presence, and the verb
is made flesh: “Demosthenes seems to part with his own self and see nothing
but the patrie. . . . He uses language as a modest man uses his clothes: to cover
himself up. He thunders, he fulminates. It’s a torrent that carries everything
away. We cannot criticize him: we are captured. We pay attention to the things
he says, not to his words. We lose sight of him.”22 Demosthenes’ speech con-
sumes itself and its author on the altar of the real so as to leave nothing in the
audience’s mind but the experience of an emotion so intense that it erases all
memory of the words that conveyed it. Not signs or colors but a pure, disem-
bodied presence. The purging of the author’s subjectivity from his work recalls
the process whereby the soul empties itself of its emotions in order to achieve a
state of passivity and total acceptance of divine will. God traces his characters
upon the docile, receptive soul, which no longer holds any traces of its indi-
vidual interest, with a kind of divine mimesis:
The soul that is moved by self-interested love (the least perfect kind of love)
is still troubled by a trace of apprehension for itself that makes it less weight-
less and nimble when the waft of the inner spirit nudges it. Turbulent waters
are dull and cannot reflect the likeness of the objects that are close to them,
but still water, like an untainted mirror, receives unadulterated the images
of many objects and keeps none. The pure and peaceful soul is the same.
God impresses his image on it and on of all the objects he wants to impress.
Everything is imprinted, and everything is wiped away. The peaceful soul
has no form of its own, but it receives all the forms that grace bestows on it.
. . . Only pure love grants such peace and such perfect compliance.23
In a state of complete surrender the soul feels as light as a feather; it floats with
the tide of a reality willed by God. The pure soul is like a pool of still water
or a mirror faithfully reproducing the divine likeness: devoid of all form or
substance of its own except a capacity to reflect, neutrally, the flow of images
that stream before it or any sentiment willed by God. This supreme impres-
sionability allows the soul to assume all forms without retaining any. The re-
ceptive soul has emptied itself of the peculiarities of character and has become
universal. The principles of mimesis thus coincide with those of pure love.
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Only self-surrender enables the artist to reproduce reality with all the vivid-
ness of a sustainable illusion, because then it is God who holds the pen or the
brush. Unlike Burke’s and Sade’s notions of the sublime, which reside in the
unlimited flight of an imagination out of bounds with the real, the Fénelonian
sublime consists not in a break with reality but in the complete surrender of
the self to a divinely inspired nature.
Fénelon conceives art, whether verbal or visual, as a reproduction or simu-
lacrum of the object experienced by the senses; discourse, bypassing the me-
diation of conventional signs, conjures a visual replica of the object. In classical
rhetoric from Quintilian to Longinus language’s drift toward the visual signals
the presence of the sublime: images or peintures (hypotyposis or evidentia) occur
when figures of speech bring vividly to the mind’s inner eye (phantasia) the
image of an object that the eye does not see: “In a moment of extraordinary
enthusiasm and transport of the soul, we believe we see the object of our dis-
course, and we put it before the eyes of those who are listening to us.”24 In
Longinus, images are a powerful and dangerous tool for taking possession of
the listeners, for raising violent passions capable of turning any audience into a
lynching mob; transcending reason and persuasion, images allow the orator to
dominate and captivate.25 For Longinus, the ultimate example of a rhetorical
image is not verbal; it is the actual display of the object before a crowd: Caesar’s
blood-stained tunic or the alleged criminal himself, who is paraded by the ora-
tor in front of a mob driven to bloodlust by his fiery eloquence: “If, in those
circumstances, anybody were to show them the author of such offense, that
would be the end of him. That unfortunate individual would be massacred on
the spot, before he even had the time to open his mouth.”26
If the power of discourse is to be measured by the effects of movere, then
language must give way to silent display (ostendere). In focusing on the action-
laden value of iconic and deictic images, Fénelon seems to be reaching toward
silence, toward the holocaust of discourse, for the sake of sublime terseness.
The one aspect that Fénelon wishes to exclude is poetry’s capacity to raise and
deepen the consciousness of its own activity. Aesthetic pleasure is distract-
ing and must be suppressed: there can be no awareness of the medium, but
only a self-forgetting, trancelike ecstasy immediately translatable into emotion
and action, for the telos of all poetic language is persuasion, and its ultimate
meaning is the action that it summons. The ability of art to represent an ob-
ject at the same time that it represents itself as the process of representation is
to Fénelon utterly unacceptable. In describing discourse purely as picture or
replica, he denies the consciousness of the poetic vehicle: a good painting, like
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an eloquent discourse, leads the beholder to repress the awareness that he is

contemplating a work of art and to feel as if he were responding to the thing
itself.27 Sublime simplicity, which does not cease to haunt all subsequent reflec-
tion on art, is the dream of an art so perfectly purposeful that it may be graced
with the obviousness of nature, an art object so necessary that it may become
a living thing among others: “The naïf is very close to the sublime; it may be
found in everything that’s beautiful: in an attitude, a gesture, a drapery, an ex-
pression. It is the thing itself, the pure thing, without the slightest alteration.
Art is no longer present.”28
Two things are thus required of the author: that he make himself absent
from his work and that any trace of technique be carefully hidden. Those
requirements are one and the same because technical virtuosity is rooted in
the author’s amour-propre, in the sensual and corrupt desire (concupiscence)
that makes us love the creature more than the creator. Those claims must be
placed within the larger context of the suppression of theatricality on the stage
and in the novel that theoreticians relentlessly advocated in the early seven-
teenth century. The purging of the author from the tribune, from the pulpit,
and from the page was part of a general attempt to endow the fictional world
with a life of its own, with a hallucinatory effect, and to explore the power of
language to entice and captivate. In the theater and in the novel such reform,
which emphasized the power of fiction to enchant the recipient and to allow
him to reach beyond himself, had the result of enhancing the autonomy of the
fictional world and the spectator’s pleasure, but in the Christian-republican
utopia of Fénelon it also aimed at reforming and regenerating the audience,
touching it with the grace of the sacred word. In both cases the audience was
drawn into the discourse so as to emerge transformed.
Successful art aimed at its disappearance: ars artem celare. It was art’s tri-
umph, and the effect of the sublime, to conceal itself behind its very success:
“How does the orator conceal the figures he employed? He does it, of course,
through the overpowering splendor of his idea. In the same way as dimmer
lights vanish under the glow of the sun, so all the subtleties of rhetoric disap-
pear under the majesty that overwhelms us.”29 Fénelon wrote of Raphael that
“far from making his skill visible to us, he tries to hide it. He would like to
deceive the spectator and have him take his painting for Jesus Christ himself
transfigured on the Thabor.”30 Writing in the second half of the eighteenth
century, when classical doctrines were being resurrected to counteract the per-
ceived excess of the goût moderne, the abbé Laugier resumed the same concep-
tion of mimesis as trickery or illusion: “What is the end of painting? To give us
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a representation of the object so truth-like as to trick the mind into the illusion
of believing that what it is seeing is the thing itself.”31 One of the dialogues
in Fénelon’s Dialogues des morts features a conversation between Poussin and
Parrhasius, the legendary Greek painter of a much-quoted parable by Pliny:
Zeuxis, his rival, had deceived birds into taking for real his painted grapes but
was in turn deceived by Parrhasius into taking for real a painted curtain.
Identifying the morality of art with its capacity to deceive would have
seemed especially perverse to Plato, who, in the Republic, reserved a special
blame for skiagraphia, theatrical decoration that produced illusion and trompe
l’oeil by twisting perspective and falsifying the real proportions of objects.32
More relevant to our purpose, it was also antithetical to the Aristotelian concep-
tion of representation. In the Poetics Aristotle had pointed out that audiences
are capable of experiencing pleasure in contemplating a theatrical or pictorial
representation of an object that they may find repulsive or painful in real life:
The sight of certain things gives us pain, but we enjoy looking at the most
exact likeness of them, whether the forms of animals which we greatly de-
spise or of corpses. The reason is that learning things is most enjoyable, not
only for philosophers, but for others equally. . . . Hence they enjoy the sight
of images because they learn as they look. . . . If a man does not know the
original, the imitation as such gives him no pleasure; his pleasure is then
derived from its workmanship, its color, or some similar reason.33
Aristotle was not primarily concerned with the moral status of art but rather
with art’s potential to enlighten the mind about its own process of apprehend-
ing the world. No aesthetic pleasure is possible without the knowledge that
what we are beholding is a representation, all the more so when the referent
of that representation is perceived as repellent, hateful, or distressful. Such a
realization was implicit in Diderot’s befuddled appreciation of Chardin’s still
life La Raie (The Skate). The painting seemed to have no object other than
the celebration of the artist’s ability to flirt with the abject quality of the real:
“The object is revolting, but it is the very flesh of the fish, its skin, its blood.
Beholding the thing itself would not affect us any differently. Monsieur Pierre,
look at this painting carefully when you are at the Academy: learn, if you can,
the secret of redeeming through talent the revulsion we feel for certain ob-
jects. . . . Ah! my friend [to Grimm], to hell with Apelle’s curtain and Zeuxis’s
grapes!”34 Instead of being tricked into illusion, the Aristotelian beholder is
able to distinguish the qualities specific to the representation from the qualities
inherent in the object represented. It is precisely from the awareness of such a
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distinction that he draws a pleasure that is both cognitive and aesthetic. The
flickering awareness dividing the spectator’s attention between the art form
and the object was something that Diderot never ceased to explore.35 Such
a multilayered response to artistic representation was not possible, however,
within a conception of mimesis that sacrificed all cognitive dimension to the
necessities of emotional enthrallment. To Fénelon, the artist was nothing but
the mouthpiece of God: his work had to disappear behind the celebration of
the glories of divine work.36
In a passage in his Dialogues sur l’éloquence, A, Fénelon’s spokesman, at-
tempts to undermine B’s admiration for a prelate’s preaching style. A simu-
lates ignorance: he has missed the sermon, and he wishes his companion to
recount exactly what the preacher said. B is embarrassed: he is not capable to
summarize the sermon and do it justice. “They are thoughts so subtle [pensées
si délicates], they rely so much on the turn of phrase and the refinement of the
expression [finesse] that their immediate seduction cannot be rendered after-
wards. Were one able to do it, one would be forced to employ other terms,
and then it would no longer be the same: the idea would have lost its grace
and its force.” That was the cue that A was expecting: “Then, Monsieur, it is a
fragile beauty that disappears on touch. I would much prefer a discourse that
had more body and less spirit.”37 A’s irony inverts the terms of the debate; B’s
“force” of expressiveness becomes “fragility,” and A plays on the double mean-
ing of esprit: far from being spiritual, esprit belongs to the realm of the body,
to the materiality of language, to everything that Fénelon casts off in favor of
incorporeal expression. A thus rejects the concepts of délicatesse, finesse, and
grâce, which belong to the constellation of agrément and je ne sais quoi, which
constitute the core of the aesthetics of galanterie and bel esprit: they are nothing
but the expression of the speaker’s corrupt desire, which separates the audi-
ence from truth.38 Fénelon’s stringent conception of linguistic humility veers
toward the disappearance of language.
Bare Essentials
Fénelon’s self-defeating approach was by no means exceptional within the
theory of representation of his time. The Port-Royal Logic, for instance, held
not only that the signifier had to be transparent to the signified, erasing all
idea of mediation, such as the idea of the representation as a sign; it also aimed
at reaching an elusive and spiritual eloquence that did not need the support
of rhetoric and linguistic conventions. The same yearning after an intangible
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and pure expressiveness—which is the inner core of art, once art has discarded
its visible trappings—goes for painting. In the tradition of ut pictura poesis,
color is to drawing what rhetorical ornament is to narrative structure (fabula).
Neither the painter nor the poet ought to pay too much attention to color;
rather, he should pay attention to conception and composition. The paradox
here is that hypotyposis, language’s capacity to make the referent virtually vis-
ible to the mind’s eye, is achieved, not by the skilful use of figures, as Longinus
and Quintilian had argued, but without them. Arnauld and Nicole argue that
incorrectness and disregard for the rules of language and art are preferable to
flawless mastery:
Accuracy of language, the use of figures, are to eloquence what color is to
painting: its lowest and most material part. The main thing is to conceive
forcefully, to express things so as to bring to the auditor’s mind a lively and
luminous image: one that would present not only present things naked as
they are but also the very act of conceiving them. All that may be found in
people whose language is not very accurate and who have a scarce sense of
rhythm but rarely in those who pay too much attention to words and orna-
ment, because such concern weakens the force of their thought. Similarly,
painters have noticed that those who excel with color do not normally excel
with drawing; the mind is not capable of mastering both, since one under-
mines the other.39
Pure conception disembodied from its material, linguistic support, the sub-
stance of the idea, standing for the “naked” object (the object as God conceives
it, untouched by human interest and linguistic equivocations), commands the
cultured audience’s attention, whereas the ignorant populace is attracted by
the superficial brilliance of color and verbal “ornament.” The pleasure of lan-
guage (dismissed as a flimsy concern for formless surface) is equated with the
dazzling seduction of a canvas’s bright coloring. The association of bel esprit
with color in painting was commonplace through the eighteenth century: “a
bel esprit is a painter who neglects drawing and is attracted only to color.”40
Eloquence must not only describe things “naked as they are,” in their poi-
gnant lifelikeness; it must also, following Aristotle’s conception of metaphori-
cal energeia, represent “the action of the mind as it conceives them.” Arnauld
and Nicole, as well as Fénelon, favored the depiction of thought in the stages
of its formation, the seemingly unfinished and unpolished sketch, rather than
the effect of completion. In their desire to return language fully to its redeem-
ing function, however, they deprived it of the means of doing so. The language
they prescribed was puritanically stripped of its sensuous body. That was all
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the more paradoxical as it was in the name of expressiveness and pathos that
they were drawn to undercut the powers of figurative language. To Fénelon, it
was inconceivable that the transmission of a spiritual experience should in any
way be the result of the skill of the orator and his mastery of a craft.
Fénelon’s impassioned defense of the sublime simplicity of the ancients in-
volved a wholesale rejection of rhetoric and of the materiality of the linguistic
medium. Adopting a kind of Cliff Notes approach to poetry, he proposed to
rewrite the powerful hypotyposis in Théramène’s speech in Racine’s Phèdre as
a telegraphic two-line information:
Nothing was less natural than the narrative of Hippolytus’s death at the end
of Phaedra, which otherwise has great beauties. Théramène, who comes to
Theseus with the news of the tragic death of his son, ought to say those two
words only, lacking even the strength to utter them distinctly: “Hippolytus
is dead. A monster sent from the bottom of the sea by the wrath of the gods
has killed him. I have seen it.” Would a man in his position, shocked and
terrified, waste his time with the most fatuous and pompous description of
the dragon’s figure? . . . How distant is Sophocles from such a misplaced
elegance, so contrary to truthfulness! He has Oedipus utter only broken
words. . . ; it’s more a groan or a scream of pain than a discourse. . . . That’s
how nature speaks when it succumbs to sorrow. Nothing could be farther
removed from the glittering phrases of bel esprit. Hercules and Philoctetis
speak with the same straightforward and intense grief.41
Fénelon favored an atticism that found its canonical models in the frequently
cited examples of sublime economy in Corneille’s plays.42 In its search for
the ultimate dramatic expressiveness, language surrenders to an emotion that
overrides all verbal expression. “The sublime,” wrote Boileau, “may be found
in a single thought, a single figure, a single turn of phrase.”43 Sublime words
act without mediation upon the body of the auditor, inflicting upon it an
emotion that makes all other language seem irrelevant or redundant: “The
sublime overwhelms us and weighs down on us with all its force; it deprives us
of speech and reduces us to tears.”44
Fénelon’s stance against esprit in classical theater prefigures and very likely
inspires Diderot’s own desire for dramatic reform: they share the same han-
kering after the “simplicity” and the straightforwardness of the ancients, illus-
trated by Sophocles’ wailing heroes, the same desire to disarticulate the struc-
ture of the verse so as to bring out overpowering, nonverbal expressivity. In
the wake of such critique, and inspired by Sophocles’ example, Diderot went
all the way, at least in his theory, toward overcoming the conventions of dra-
97
matic verse. He called for bringing to the stage inarticulate cries and guttural
groaning: “What is it that affects us in the spectacle of a man moved by a great
passion? Is it his speech? Sometimes. But what always moves us is cries, in-
articulate words, broken utterances, some monosyllables that erupt intermit-
tently, a kind of moan deep in the throat, breaking out between the teeth.”45
To Diderot, the tableau of the suffering body exposed to the spectator was far
more powerful than any verbal, poetic mediation. That belief spelled the death
of poetry. Since the seventeenth century the highest kind of poetry had been
drama. But when drama was subsequently pushed in the direction of stronger
expressivity and persuasion, there emerged a danger of subsuming all poetry
under the category of persuasion. To Diderot, the most effective form of dra-
matic persuasion consisted in the communication from one body to another;
on the stage, the immediate contagion of the passions would thus supersede
the mediation of poetic language.46 The sublime was a counterlanguage.
The sublime rose high but aimed at remaining firmly grounded in the ordi-
nary experience whence it emerged. There was a question, however, that few,
if any, openly dared to ask: could it be that the search for the sublime would
result in the trivial and the dull?
A few years earlier, in the Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751), Diderot had
tackled the issue of the function of poetry in drama in much the same terms
as Fénelon. With characteristic deviousness, however, weaving a web of mul-
tiple references and creating a chamber of echoes among his various sources,
Diderot concealed himself behind another great teacher and rhetorician, the
Jesuit Charles Porée (1675–1741), a professor of rhetoric at the Collège Louis le
Grand and a dramatist for the students’ theater. Diderot’s personal apprecia-
tion of the problem at hand remains elusive and ambiguous:
But if we were taught at Louis le Grand to notice all the beauties of this
passage of Racine’s tragedy, we were also warned that they were out of place
in the mouth of Théramène and that Theseus would have had some reason
to stop him and say, “Enough of my son’s chariot and horses; tell me about
him.” It was not thus, the celebrated Porée would tell us, that Antilochus
announced the death of Patroclus to Achilles. Antilochus approaches the
hero with tears in his eyes and tells him in a few words the terrible news:
“Patroclus is no more; they are fighting for his body. Hector has his armor.”
There is more sublime in those two lines by Homer than in all of Racine’s
pompous declamation.47
Antilochus’s superbly dull message, with its tripartite, paratactic structure, is a

close replica of Fénelon’s amended speech of Théramène. The banality of the
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expression passes for a sublime example of reticence bordering on aposiope-

sis.48 Presumably the actor and the spectator must complement such terseness
by adding accent, tone, and gesture. In The Salon of 1767 Diderot notes that
while language is limited in its expressive resources, it is the “variety of accents”
that “compensates for the paucity of words. . . . The number of words is lim-
ited, while that of accents is infinite; this is why each one of us has his own
individual language and speaks as he feels, is detached or ardent, agitated or
placid; is himself and none other than himself, although at the level of idea or
verbal expression he appears to resemble another.”49 Paradoxically, however, in
the same text that theorizes the “hieroglyph” and the emblematic dimension
of a poetic language in which sound and image, mysteriously and ineffably,
converge, Diderot confronts the issue of the appropriateness of poetry to dra-
matic persuasion or verisimilitude in terms that are far from new or original.50
Not surprisingly, he will never be able to bring a coherent resolution to the
intractable problem of the relationship between stylistic texture, poetic imagi-
nation, and verisimilitude: “The truth! The truth!” cries the narrator of Jacques
le fataliste, “but the truth is dry and dull.” The problem of how to infuse new
life into the conventional codes of theatrical and literary propriety comes back
to haunt all of his subsequent works, especially the Salon writings. Diderot’s
mistrust of rhetoric, his flight toward unmediated forms of expression emanat-
ing directly from the body, is rooted in his misgivings about language as an
unpredictable and uncertain vehicle of communication: “Why is it, I said to
myself, that the most general, the most revered, the most widely used words—
law, taste, beauty, goodness, truth, custom, morals, vice, virtue, instinct, mind,
matter, grace, beauty, ugliness—though uttered so frequently, are so little un-
derstood, so variously defined?”51 The philosopher, the ordinary man and the
child all speak the same words and seem to agree about their value and use,
yet they could never agree on their meaning. Diderot’s skepticism about the
incongruity between linguistic meaning and use, his fear that language did not
reflect reality but rather contributed to skewing its perception, was to resonate
throughout the Enlightenment.
While the Fénelonian critique of language relied largely upon classical
themes of oratorical propriety and efficacy that went back to Quintilian and
even to Cicero himself,52 it would find a special political resonance in the dis-
course of prerevolutionary radicalism, among writers such as Jacques-Pierre
Brissot, Jean-Paul Marat, and Jean-Louis Carra. There was a continuity be-
tween the traditional, moral critique of stylistic refinement that Fénelon il-
lustrated and the new “unmasking” of stylistic hypocrisy in manners and lan-
99
guage. The former provided the revolutionary writers with a set of prefabri-
cated arguments ready to be filled with new meanings. In the 1780s numerous
tracts about ministerial policies would invoke a war on style. The people were
warned to be on their guard against the trickery of elaborate or “moderate”
style, against the “abuse of words,” which led to the abuse of things. The public
was encouraged to mistrust the use of uncertain language and to define pre-
cisely the meaning of words so as not to be misled by the false political argu-
ments of their deceitful, rhetorically clever foes:
Today above all, when a universal morality seeks to purify its language and
to fix once and for all our ideas on the true nature of good and evil, of justice
and injustice, it is of the utmost importance not to evade the positive mean-
ing of words, for fear of leaving the mind in a state of uncertainty. . . . The
language of truth cannot allow, in the direct construction of its sentences,
any vague and uncertain nuance.53
Such tendencies were deployed in full force during the revolutionary years.
Sophia Rosenfeld has analyzed the revolutionary “logomachy,” the crucial role
played by debates about the meaning and the use of words in public discourse.
In the wake of the Enlightenment search for a universal language of gesture
rooted in nature (illustrated by Diderot, Condillac, and Rousseau) the revolu-
tionaries believed that if they were able to stem the proliferation of ill-defined
and misunderstood words in the public arena, they would sooner be able to
reach a rational and enlightened consensus on the goals of the Revolution.
“The prevention of semantic subversion and the definition of the language of
politics” was thus one of the essential tasks of the many sociétés that flourished
in 1789, on both the right and the left, such as the Société des Amis de la Révo-
lution, later renamed the Société des Amis de la Constitution, the forerun-
ner of the Jacobin Club.54 Those philosophes who had previously published
works on stylistics, grammar, and criticism, such as Jean-François La Harpe
and André Morellet (who styled himself “Le Définisseur”), worried about the
dangers that democratization would bring to language, fearing that conceptual
errors and misuse of rhetorics would lead to linguistic demagoguery and social
conflict. At the height of the Terror, however, even the mastery of political dis-
course and its correct use became suspect: linguistic ability became a sign of
counterrevolutionary intentions, of overcivilization, duplicity, and attachment
to aristocratic mores. In their pursuit of a masculine and virtuous “laconism,”
the Jacobins, who had become suspicious of the linguistic reforms they previ-
ously had promoted, yearned for a language of action and energy—such as
100
that which Diderot had advocated in the drama—based on natural signs and
symbols that would appeal to the emotions directly.55
Against Style
Most of Marivaux’s writings on style and elocution in the journals con-
tended with the critique raised by Fénelon and the new wave of the ancients.
To be sure, Marivaux was fascinated by courtroom eloquence and by the rhe-
torical power of persuasion, but he did not turn the rhetoric of pathos into
the ultimate touchstone of the work of art.56 Humility, transparency, expres-
siveness, exactitude in the choice of words, faithful reproduction of thought
processes—those issues were very much on the mind of an author who was
drawn to theorize upon his art both because of his own disposition and in
order to respond to his critics’ persistent attacks. “All those discussions on
style are nothing but verbose ramblings that ignorance and malice have put
in fashion; their purpose is to disparage those works that fall outside the trod-
den path. . . . You accuse an author of having a style that is precious; what do
you mean? What do you mean by style?”57 Refusing to separate thought and
linguistic expression, Marivaux argued for the emancipation of language from
the tyranny of custom and genre; he also reintroduced the author into the
representation. The artist’s responsibility to himself comes before his respon-
sibility to the public. Pathos, the persuasive effect of discourse on the audi-
ence, is thus subordinated to ethos, the expression of the mental disposition
of the orator. Style is consubstantial with thought because style is above all a
matter of perception and vision, the author’s own. Style is the expression of
the subjectivity of the artist, that is, of his amour-propre (or concupiscence), the
fundamental drive that shapes his sensual grasp of the world and binds him
to a form. “Amour-propre stands to the mind [esprit] as form stands to mat-
ter. Every mind has amour-propre, and every portion of matter has its form.”58
Thus, it is the writer’s function to fashion a style capable of expressing, with
the utmost precision, the peculiarities of that vision:
But is it true that [the author] thinks incorrectly? That’s what needs to be
proven, for if he must submit to a critique, it must be to that one, and not
to charges about style. Style is nothing but the accurate mold of his thought;
perhaps his style is charged with being bad, precious, and affected only be-
cause the thoughts it expresses are hard to grasp and have been shaped by
idiosyncratic connections of ideas.59
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Marivaux was painfully aware that originality of expression would be equated

by critics with affectation and mannerism. But to his eyes, the relationship be-
tween thought and language was not arbitrary: asking a writer to make himself
accountable for the peculiarities of his style meant inviting him to explore the
nature of that relationship. To support his argument, Marivaux proposed a sty-
listic reduction similar to Fénelon’s and Diderot’s attempts to rewrite poetry in
a rhetorically poor manner. He selected a canonical author and a well-known
witticism, “The mind is often [sic] the dupe of the heart”:
It was M. de la Rochefoucauld who said that. Let us imagine that it was writ-
ten by a contemporary; wouldn’t everybody accuse him of being precious?
Very likely. Why not write, a critic would say, that the mind is often misled
by the heart, or that the heart deceives the mind? It is the same thing. No,
it is not. It is no longer the author’s exact thought; you weaken and dimin-
ish it. The style of your thought (since you insist on style) only conveys a
platitude. The style of that author conveys something more original and
more subtle.60
Marivaux’s modern bent persuaded him that the formation of ideas was de-
pendent on language’s capabilities and that frames of thought and expression
would vary with time, manners, and rhetorical tradition. Thought and lan-
guage were historically and culturally determined; they were dynamic forces
that evolved along the same axis: “If France saw a new generation of people
whose minds were even more refined than those of today, there would be a
need for new words, new signs to express the new ideas that this generation
would be capable of producing.”61 Marivaux replied to the attacks against ne-
ologism and linguistic experimentation by defending the right of the writer to
create new tools for expressing his original perception and for answering the
new and multiple solicitations of a constantly evolving reality. To him, linguis-
tic evolution was the corollary of an increased refinement in the apprehension
of the real:
The man who reflects much meditates on the subjects he treats: he pen-
etrates them and observes things of an extreme complexity that everybody
will be able to understand after he has formulated them, though at any time
only very few people have been able to observe them. That man will nec-
essarily express those observations with a combination of ideas and words
very rarely seen together. But see how critics will take advantage of the inevi-
table strangeness [singularité] that this will bring to his style! How affected
[précieux] it will it be! And also, why does he bother to think so much and
to observe, in what everybody sees, aspects that only a few can notice and
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that can be expressed only through a style that will necessarily appear man-
nered?62
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Marivaux broke with the scholarly (and
Longinian) tradition of inventio and the emulation of great models that was
taught in the colleges and was seen as central to all creative processes. Writing
to him originated in the writer’s sensate body, in his peculiar perception, as
well as in the historically determined manners of a particular society:
Should a young writer be the copier of those [great] authors’ style? No, for
that style has an undefinably ingenious and subtle quality, the literal imita-
tion of which would turn him into a monkey, would force him to become
affected [courir après l’esprit], and would rob him of his naturalness. . . .
Either his organs steer him toward another kind of ingeniousness, subtlety,
and dignity or the quality that he would like to imitate is present in those
authors only as a function of the kind of manners they have depicted. He
should therefore nurture his spirit with what he feels is good in them, but
then he should let his own spirit follow its natural posture [son geste na-
turel ].63
Ingeniousness, the mind’s spontaneous and creative effervescence, is for

Marivaux the essence of an author’s style and the core of his vision, what
makes his style what it is (son geste naturel); as such, it cannot be imitated nor
reproduced. What the young author may try to replicate is not the product
but rather the process of production, the creative drive or the vital sparkle that
animated the original. At a time, however, when particulier or singulier did not
mean “original,” but “eccentric,” “awkward,” or “ridiculous,” when singularité
was a label affixed to any discourse that took liberties with linguistic propriety
and the tyranny of conventional use, all that academic thinking saw in stylistic
experimentation was an imagination unruly and out of bounds. The acad-
emies saw no cognitive or aesthetic value in such adventures.
Despite Buffon’s famous phrase “Style is the man himself,”64 the chevalier
de Jaucourt recommended, in the Encyclopédie article “Style,” that in order to
find a style an author ought to read the best writers, imitate their best models
and try as much as possible to emulate great geniuses. For most people, style
did not denote the expression of an individual voice but rather the encoded
and formulaic encounter of subject matter, audience, and genre: each com-
manded its own stylistic propriety and its own lexical patrimony.65 Style was
not primarily a matter of self-expression on the speaker’s part but one of con-
formity between a discourse and the object it represented. It was not until 1798
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that the Dictionnaire de l’Académie associated style with the expression of an

individual author: “When we say that a writer has no style, we mean that he
has no manner of writing that belongs to him.” To Voltaire and d’Alembert,
style indicated such qualities as propriety or decorum (la propriété des termes),
nobility and elegance, and “pertinence with the subject-matter.”66 In the Dis-
cours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert professed his admiration for
Voltaire’s unfailingly correct style, for the economy of his “color” (rhetorical
figures and ornament), which was “appropriate for each thing,” and for “the
art of . . . never being above nor below his subject.”67 Writers traveled within
a literary landscape already mapped out by tradition and by the emulation of
great models.68 Marivaux’s historicized conception of language and style was
attacked, with a fervor verging on panic, by Voltaire:
That desire to dazzle and say in a new fashion what other people have al-
ready said is the source of new expressions and affected thoughts. Those who
cannot impress by their thoughts try to do so by their words. . . . If we kept
doing that, the language of Bossuet, Racine, Pascal, Corneille, Boileau, and
Fénelon would soon become obsolete. Why neglect a current expression
in order to introduce a new one that means exactly the same thing? A new
word may be forgiven only when it is absolutely necessary, intelligible, and
easy on the ear. We are compelled to create new ones in physics; a new dis-
covery, a new machine, demands a new word. But do we make any new dis-
coveries in the human heart? Is there a greatness other than that of Corneille
and Bossuet? Are there passions other than those that have been handled by
Racine and touched lightly upon by Quinault? Is there an evangelical moral-
ity other than that of the père Bourdaloue?69
To Voltaire, bel esprit meant the undermining of the tradition handed down by
the great men of le Grand Siècle; it meant the sin of neologism, the nightmarish
creation of new linguistic terms and expressions, which risked breaking down
the organic relationship between words and objects. But above all it meant the
disappearance of a national identity transmitted by the canon of great writers
and the loss of all vital connection to that tradition; the inevitable alteration
of the fundamental mapping of the human passions that they had drawn;
the bastardization of morality; and ultimately, the decline of the culture that
grounded the French self. In fact, style was seldom seen in terms of self-expres-
sion; rather it was seen as a collective, national phenomenon, symptomatic
of a nation’s cultural identity. Innovating literary language or tampering with
the style of the great classics meant altering the identity of the French nation,
which rested upon its canon, and risking the loss of France’s cultural pre-
104
dominance. Hence, any discussion of style, taste, and pictorial manner quickly
veered toward a discussion of the politics of the arts and the state of civilization
in the nation at a given time.
Marcel or Suzanne?
In Diderot’s Salon writings and in the Essais sur la peinture, goût, tact fin,
and finesse gravitate in the semantic orbit of style, and manner is often meant
as a synonym of style in painting.70 Goût and tact fin are rooted in tempera-
ment and refined by experience. Pertaining both to aesthetic judgment and to
artistic production, they are relevant to the artist as well as to the beholder of a
work of art.71 All representation, be it pictorial, plastic, or verbal, must be, not
a mimetic reproduction gathered from the passive observation of nature, but
the result of a creative act that culminates in the idea; it is a conceptual insight
into nature and the intuition (tact fin or goût) of the necessary concatenation
of laws that rule nature. Whether nature is intended as an idea or as a phe-
nomenon, for Diderot—in line with his Renaissance predecessors—art is the
product of an intuitive knowledge that is akin to the scientific understanding
of nature’s laws.72 The workings of the imagination thus coincide with nature’s
hidden structure. It is such understanding that informs works such as Vernet’s
landscape paintings. In praising them Diderot finds accents that are close to
Fénelon’s:
There are no more buildings here than are necessary to enrich and animate
the scene; intelligence, and taste, and art, have seen to the effectiveness
of their distribution, but the resulting effect is achieved by concealing the
artistry. . . . Everything is true. One feels it. We reproach nothing, we miss
nothing. We take pleasure in everything. I’ve heard people who have long
frequented the seaside say that they recognized on this canvas this sky, these
clouds, this weather, this entire composition.73
The miraculous balance achieved by Vernet and Chardin transcends the dis-
tinction between nature and art, between the object and its representation,
upon which rest all notions of mimesis. When confronting the demiurgic
power of their works, Diderot reacts with the same émerveillement, the same
stunned and enthusiastic admiration that he showed in his reading of Rich-
ardson: “His compositions preach the grandeur, power and majesty of nature
more compellingly than nature herself: it is written: Coeli enarrant gloriam
Dei, but it’s Vernet’s skies, it’s Vernet’s glory.”74 Such achievement, however,
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is a fragile miracle, one that is constantly threatened by the powers that con-
verge to undermine the work of the artist: the marketplace’s pull toward me-
diocrity;75 the corruption of taste that is brought about by the degradation of
morals and by the progress of reason and philosophy; the influence of artistic
codes and techniques that weigh heavily on the artist who finds himself the
last link in a long evolutionary chain. “There is a traditional technique that
the man of genius has bowed to; it is no longer after nature but after such a
technique that he will be judged.” The iconoclastic Diderot does not hesitate
to tell Grimm that the “technique” he has in mind is Racine’s.76 When the taste
of a nation—or of a particular artist—has peaked to perfection, it is as if one
were standing on a razor blade. Holding one’s balance becomes impossible; a
fall into mannerism, the modern form of barbarity, is fated to happen:
At the origin of societies one finds art that’s crude, discourse that’s barbaric,
and morals that are countrified; but these things tend to work together in
favor of perfection, until the grand style [grand goût] is born; but this grand
style is like the edge of a razor on which it’s difficult to maintain one’s foot-
ing. Very soon, morals decline; the empire of reason extends its boundaries;
discourse becomes epigrammatic, clever, laconic, sententious; the arts are
corrupted through refinement. The ancient routes are blocked by sublime
genres one despairs of ever equalling. Poetics are composed; new genres are
envisioned; the singular, the bizarre and the mannered make their appear-
ance; from which it would appear that mannerism is a vice that occurs in a
highly civilized society [société policée], one in which good taste tends toward
decadence. . . . These copyists of a bizarre model are insipid because their
singularity is secondhand; their vice is not their own; they’re the apes of
Seneca, Fontenelle, and Boucher.77
The same fall into decadence may threaten an individual artist. In his master-
piece, Le miracle des ardents, Gabriel-François Doyen already shows signs of
straying into dreaded mannerism: “He is on the edge; one step further, and
he’ll be smack in the middle of racket and disorder,” the same racket and disor-
der (fracas, tapage) that also characterize the paintings of Boucher, the perfect
embodiment of modern mannerism.78 To Diderot, art, like civilization, is cy-
clical: out of the barbarism of early ages slowly and gradually emerges the grand
style and taste (grand goût). Style thus gradually becomes self-conscious and
self-regulated. Quickly reified, copied, and circulated in countless academic
lectures, discussions, manuals, and schools, it is bound to degenerate into rep-
etitious codification and affectation.79 The sublime embodiments of ancient
art lose their exemplary status, their power to stimulate and inspire. Emulation
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gives way to slavish imitation on the one hand and to a search for the bizarre
and the titillating on the other. Only a violent and bloody return to barbarity
could prevent the civilized world from sinking further into mediocrity and cal-
culated bizarreness. As things stand in modern times, a civilized nation, much
like an aging libertine in need of increasingly potent stimulation, has devel-
oped a taste for provocatively offered, alluring flesh, such as that provided by
the paintings of Boucher, Lagrenée, Baudouin, and Fragonard: “The passionate
young man is not demanding in his tastes. He seeks immediate gratification.
The old man is less in a hurry. He waits. He selects. The young man wants a
woman. Sex is enough for him. The old man wants a beautiful one. A nation
is old when it has acquired taste.”80 A nation is old when it becomes capable
of inventing love and deferred gratification, when a woman is no longer the
same to a man as any other woman, when it comes to regard the aesthetic as
an absolute value, independent from any considerations of purpose.
Diderot’s conception of artistic decadence thus is not far from Rousseau’s
semimythical account of the emergence of a “mirror stage,” in which primitive
human beings become aware of the presence of others and of the reciprocity
of beholding, in which they abandon their previous existence as autonomous
individuals and subject themselves to living under the alienating gaze of oth-
ers.81 The moment when primitive humans begin to conceive themselves as
objects of other people’s attention and to value themselves as by-products of
other people’s opinion signals the rise of individuality and morality; of love,
of deferred fulfillment, and of women’s power over men. By the same token,
those gestures set off corruption and inequality. But what is there in common
between Rousseau’s parable on the origins of civilization and Diderot’s concep-
tion of academic mannerism? What links Rousseau’s political myth of origins
to Diderot’s portrayal of social manners, decadent sexuality, and artistic cor-
ruption? In all of those spheres—political, artistic, social, sexual—distinct as
they may appear at first, a crucial role is played by theatricality and theatrical
self-presentation. Theatricality (with its corollary, inauthenticity) is the under-
lying feature that makes them all interdependent.
“Every individual who seems to say to you: ‘Look how well I weep, how
well I get angry, how well I entreat,’ is false and mannered”; that is, every in-
dividual who is aware of being a spectacle to others and who positions him-
self to his best advantage is false and mannered.82 When a character is not
in the hold of a strong emotion or an absorbing action, when his attention
is divided between his task and his awareness of the presence of a spectator,
his gesture and posture veer toward mannerism. That is true of the academic
107
model, who styles and positions his body so as to resemble closely the ancient
statues that fashion the taste of the Academy’s students: “All these studied,
artificial, carefully arranged academic poses, all these movements coldly and
ineptly imitated by some poor devil, and always the same poor devil, who is
paid to appear, undress, and let himself be manipulated by a professor three
times a week, what do they have in common with postures and movements in
nature?”83 That is true of all the pupils of François Marcel, the century’s most
famous dance master and choreographer of courtly ballet, with whom Diderot
is so taken that he grants him the dubious favor (also enjoyed by Marivaux) of
coining a verb after his name:
Should you lose all feeling for the difference between a man presenting him-
self in company and a man acting from motivation, between a man who is
alone and a man being observed, throw your brushes into the fire. Your fig-
ures will be academized, denatured, affected. Would you like to get a sense
of this difference, my friend? You are alone at home. You are waiting for my
copy, which is late. You are reflecting on the determination of sovereigns to
be served on time. You are sprawling on your cane chair, your arms resting
on your knees, your nightcap falling over your eyes, or your hair down and
dishevelled; your dressing gown is half open, falling in long folds on both
sides: you are utterly picturesque and beautiful. The Marquis de Castries
is announced; suddenly the cap is pulled up and the dressing gown drawn
closed; my man straightens up, composes his limbs; he becomes mannered,
Marcelized, making himself presentable for the arriving visitor, but quite
dull for the artist.84
Addressing first the artist and then his friend Grimm—as Diderot imagines
he might be at the very moment those lines are being written—Diderot draws
a little sketch that dramatizes the difference between the philosophe alone in
his cabinet and the philosophe in the company of someone else—but not just
anybody, for the visitor is the marquis de Castries, Grimm’s most influential
patron. The sketch is at once a study on mannerism and a social satire. Grimm
first appears in all the unstudied glory of the solitary man of talent cogitating
in his cabinet, hair tumbling down his shoulders, his gown baring his chest, in
the manner of antique statues, folds draped like a toga (he is as “picturesque
and beautiful” as Diderot in his old dressing gown),85 an Epictetus living in
austere poverty, slouched on a cane chair. But at the marquis’s imminent arrival
the philosophe, answering the call of his patron and that of worldly ritual, low-
ers himself into the obligatory mimicry of sociability and forces his body into
the gracious movements and the conventional bearing taught by the dance
108
master. No longer a man entirely absorbed in action or meditation, Grimm has

become slightly ridiculous in his polite alienation—perhaps a fitting illustra-
tion for d’Alembert’s rant against worldliness in the Essai sur la société des gens
de lettres et des grands but not a worthy model for the artist.
The same theatricality that Diderot finds objectionable from the stand-
point of artistic representation is also the source of much that he finds morally
offensive in modern manners and art: “Manner in the arts is the same as hy-
pocrisy in manners. Boucher is the greatest hypocrite I know.”86 If theatrical-
ized mannerism makes the philosopher look unnatural and ridiculous, theatri-
cal self-consciousness makes the women in Boucher’s and Lagrenée’s paintings
appear obscene:
A nude woman is not indecent. It’s a woman with her skirts tucked up who
is. Imagine the Medici Venus is standing in front of you and tell me if her
nudity offends you. But shoe this Venus’s feet with two little embroidered
slippers. Dress her in tight white stockings secured at the knee with rose-
colored garters. Place a bonnet on her head, and you’ll feel the difference
between decent and indecent quite vividly. It’s the difference between a
woman seen and a woman displaying herself.87
Any reciprocity between the beholder and the object of representation risks
blurring the separation between the two, sending the beholder back to his
dreary reality and preventing him from being absorbed in the picture or the
fictional space.88 Much like Marivaux’s indignant Spectator (see chapter 2),
Diderot’s spectator draws pleasure from capturing a woman while she is un-
aware of being watched. As with Fénelon’s virtuous Antiope, her obliviousness
to other people’s attention leaves her exposed and available to their gaze. Like
the “savage,” “she is unselfconsciously naked.”89 Like the cavalier d’Arpino’s
Suzanne au bain, in her attempt to block the view of the old men she holds
up her clothing on the side facing them, thus unwittingly “leaving her nudity
completely exposed to the view of the spectator looking at the painting.”90
Diderot is quite besotted with this picture of Suzanne and keeps coming back
to it over the years. His appreciation is a living illustration of the fact that the
last thing a voyeur ever wants is to deal with an exhibitionist: when Diderot
creates a clandestine theater for himself, he does not like to find the stage oc-
cupied by actors in search of an audience.91 A woman looking back at him
or, what amounts to the same thing, a woman scantily decked in provocative
finery (we cannot but be seduced by Diderot’s expert description of lingerie
and shoes), consciously summoning the spectator’s attention, is perceived as
109
indecent and profoundly distasteful. Is that because, as René Démoris has

suggested, those women’s explicit and deliberate erotic appeal no longer al-
lows Diderot to ignore his own scopic desire?92 That may well be; Diderot,
however, is far from ignoring it: “I am looking at Suzanne, and far from feeling
horror for the old men, perhaps I have desired to be in their place,”93 that is,
in their place inside the painting. But for such transference to occur, Diderot
must bracket not only all awareness of pictorial manner but also all reference
to himself as the self-conscious spectator to an erotic scene. In order to enjoy
the painting, both as an aesthetic and an erotic object, Diderot does not want
to be invited: he wants to break in. “Lairesse maintains that it is all right for
the artist to introduce a spectator into the scene he paints. I don’t believe it.
. . . That would be in as bad taste as an actor addressing the parterre. . . . When
Suzanne in hiding behind her clothes from the old men’s gaze is exposed na-
ked to my eyes, Suzanne is chaste, and so is the painter: neither knows that I
am there.”94
At the core of Diderot’s reflection on stylistic mannerism in the arts we
find the ever-present duality of the coquette and the ingénue, of the sly and
the coy mistress. This very duality characterizes another Suzanne (the name
is very likely not accidental), the most memorable of his female characters,
Suzanne Simonin, the religieuse. Readers noting the discrepancies in her story,
as well as the canny use she makes of her body for rhetorical purposes and
for the spectatorial arousal of emotion, have often imputed them to duplic-
ity. Indeed, Suzanne proves to be both an extraordinarily savvy and self-con-
scious manipulator of images in a spectacle of innocence and an oddly naïve,
unselfconscious narrator. But rather than invoking character duplicity, it is
to Diderot’s eroticism of spectatorship that we must turn for an explanation.
The fact is that the religieuse’s otherworldly unawareness of the nature of her
relationship with Mme d’Arpajon, the lesbian mother superior, makes her all
the more available to the game of seduction that she “naïvely” reports to the
appreciative spectator, the marquis de Croismare. Hence the necessary—and
narratively implausible—sexual ignorance of Suzanne, which strangely persists
in her correspondence, even after the events that she narrates retrospectively
have fully unfolded. But Suzanne, like her namesake in the cavalier d’Arpino’s
painting (and unlike Boucher’s coquettes), must be completely ignorant and
completely innocent even as she is actively involved in the sexual act to which
she has made the marquis a party and an accomplice. Even more crucial, her
ignorance and innocence must be fully preserved throughout her narrative
110
of the event: like the biblical Suzanne, Suzanne Simonin exposes herself na-
ked to the marquis’s eyes, but in order to maximize his pleasure and his good
conscience, she must appear unaware that she is doing so. This obdurate in-
nocence, implausibly persisting in the midst of flagrant initiation, is also what
characterizes many other thrilling ingénues, from Molière’s Agnès to Mlle Éra-
dice in Thérèse philosophe to Laclos’s Cécile Volanges.
The coquette is declared abhorrent by Diderot, whose indignation is fueled
by the anxiety of having to relinquish his self-control as a male, as a patriotic
philosophe, and as an art critic, an anxiety that comes forth in his unwitting
and irascible surrender to the seduction of Boucher’s paintings, with their irre-
sistible virtuosity and unabashed grace and their enticing female nudes (which,
in the words of the Goncourts, who had read Diderot, are never “nude” but
always “undressed”).95 But the coy girl is seen by Diderot as his own salvation,
the salvation of modern art and of the nation: if only art were able to discard its
stylistic theatricality in order to recover an untouched, unselfconscious grace;
if only the nation were able to reform its lewd and mediocre taste in order
to restore the grand goût. Indeed, Diderot devotes many pages to exposing
his fascination for the daughter’s sacrifice and the young virgin’s martyrdom.
Iphigenia, both in painting and in poetry, is his persistent obsession (Suzanne
Simonin, sacrificed to parental self-interest and to religious fanaticism, is the
modern equivalent of Iphigenia, sacrificed to her father’s ambitions and to the
reason of state).96 For who could better defeat theatricality than the meditative,
suffering virgin brought to the sacrificial altar? Who could give a more pow-
erful example of selflessness and civic responsibility than Iphigenia, far more
forceful in her filial devotion than the irresolute Agamemnon?97 What better
way to redeem the violence inherent in the voyeuristic appeal of erotic painting
than to replace it with the purified, sanctified violence of martyrdom?98
Unlike the lustful old man holding in wait for a beautiful woman whom he
had turned into the emblem of an aging and corrupt nation, Diderot proudly
confides to Grimm that in his old age he has discarded all taste for coquettes
and self-confident libertines of times past. What he favors now—a sure sign of
his amended ways—is young, innocent, and shy girls:
Each of life’s stages has its tastes. Sharply outlined vermilion lips, an open,
smiling mouth, beautiful white teeth, a provocative gait, a confident gaze,
beautiful full cheeks, a turned-up nose prompted me to hot pursuit at age
eighteen. Today, when vice is no longer good for me and I’m no longer
any good at vice, it’s the young girl with an air of modesty and decency, a
111
restrained gait, a hesitant gaze, walking in silence beside her mother, that
attracts my attention and charms me. Who has good taste? Myself at eigh-
teen? Myself at fifty?99
What Diderot the philosophe and the paterfamilias truly likes in his mature
years is not the provocative gesture and the inviting gaze of Boucher’s coquettes
but the retiring passivity and vulnerability that he sees in Greuze’s portrayals
of self-absorbed, tearful girls; not mannerism but nature in all its untarnished
purity; not vice but ever-alluring virtue.
Sade liked them too, but he knew better.
112
4 Capturing Fireside
Conversation
Diderot and Marivaux’s
Stylistic Challenge
Poets represent the fountain of the Muses gushing forth under the foot of
the legendary winged horse, . . . that is how thought must spring out of
the writer’s mind.
—Mercier
I do not compose, I am not an author; I read and I converse; I ask

questions or I reply.
—Diderot
Parabasis
The core of Marivaux’s oeuvre and of the seduction of his poetics lies in the
disjunction between the surrender to the lure of the fictional world and an
attitude of distrust toward all manifestations of inauthenticity and fictional-
ity. Well before Rousseau, Marivaux was the writer who devoted the most at-
tention to analyzing the contamination of reality by fiction. All of his novels,
including his youthful experiments and his two mock-heroic epics, explored
the troubling role that rhetoric played in personal identity and in the con-
struction of reality. In that respect, Marivaux differs from Diderot and from
other philosophes like Mercier, who felt that the sentiments that we experience
through fiction enhance our sensitivity to the moral dimension of the real. In
his praise of the reader’s response to Richardson, Diderot saw no fundamental
separation, but rather interpenetration, between the emotions created by fic-
tion and those the reader would experience in real life: “My soul was kept in
113
constant turmoil. How good I was! How fair-minded! How satisfied was I with
myself! When I was finished reading, I felt like a man who has spent an entire
day doing good deeds.”1 The admiration the reader feels for the moral beauty
embodied in the characters with whom he empathizes is reflected back upon
himself and leads him to a virtuous emulation, for emulation is a fundamental
aspect of the sublime mode of cultural appropriation, the sacralization of the
audience’s dependence on its heritage and on the culture produced by the great
men of the past, who ground the audience’s identity. Thus, the appreciation of
fictional virtue prepares the reader to engage ethically with the real. In a similar
vein, Mercier waxed enthusiastic about the formative role played by fiction,
and most notably by theater, in shaping the sensitivity of the public: “What is
dramatic art? It is the art that most activates our entire sensitivity; that sets in
motion those rich faculties we have received from nature; that opens up the
treasures of the human heart, makes pity and commiseration fruitful, teaches
us to be honest and virtuous.”2 The philosophes were so confident about their
moral excellence and the sacredness of the writer’s function in society that
they reconfigured the impact of fiction according to the model of religious
eloquence. The response they summoned from their audience was similar to
that elicited by the sacred text. The writer, “bard of humanity, painter of man-
ners, profound moralist, enthusiast of virtue, benefactor of the patrie and the
world,” could do no wrong; indeed, he could achieve nothing but miracles.3
Readers were invited to embrace the text wholeheartedly and to bring it into
their lives in the same way as the readers of a devotional text might hope to
imitate the life of Christ.
But in the early decades of the eighteenth century the novel was not an
analogue of religious experience but rather a rival to it. To Marivaux, who
felt that the writer enjoyed no such mandate to save the world, the literary
text was a thing to be used with caution. The seduction of the written word
was a phenomenon not to be taken lightly, for all emulation was potentially
disastrous. Reading was a form of melancholy that might lead to obsession
and madness. Indeed, many of Marivaux’s readers are visionnaires, like the
characters in Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s eponymous play (i.e., precursors of
bovarism). They are relentless builders of sand castles, delusional enthusiasts
who mistake fiction for reality and are oblivious or even hostile to anything
that might puncture the beautiful bubble of their fantasy. Marivaux’s early
novels are a reflection on the powers of fiction, offering a burlesque represen-
tation of reading and readers in the tradition of Don Quixote. By turning the
reader into the subject of the novel, they offer the empirical reader an unflat-
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Capturing Fireside Conversation
tering and deformed likeness of himself, which he cannot but try to preempt.
These works celebrate fiction’s power to seduce; at the same time, they caution
the audience against the consequences of that seduction, much as Rousseau
does. Indeed, while Rousseau’s works elicited from the public the sacralized,
transformative type of reading that the philosophes advocated, they also led
the reader to question the effects of imitative response. In Emile the young
Sophie, Emile’s future bride, has become a true visionnaire: she has lost her
sanity by falling hopelessly in love with Fénelon’s fictional Télémaque, a para-
gon of perfection. “Sophie loved Télémaque; she loved him with an incurable
passion.” For a moment Rousseau is tempted to drive his heroine to a tragic
end that foreshadows that of Emma Bovary: “Shall I bring this sad tale to its
catastrophic conclusion? . . . Shall I depict the unfortunate girl, whom [her
parents’] persecution has attached even more to a figment of her imagination,
slowly descending into death, and into her grave, at the very time she is ex-
pected to go to the altar? No, let us set aside such gloomy thoughts.”4 Indeed,
more fortunate than Emma, Sophie is rewarded by Rousseau with marriage to
a man whose perfections equal those of the imaginary Télémaque.
In Marivaux’s Télémaque travesti too Fénelon has sown mayhem in young
minds. Unbridled emulation drives the young farmer Brideron and his uncle
Phocion, both avid readers of romances, to the brink of madness: “Having
pronounced those words that hastened in his mind the progress of madness,
he opened the book and gave it to his nephew, who, accustomed by his uncle
to enthusiasm and high-mindedness, devoured the story of Télémaque. He
read it over and over and took from it the dose of noble and extravagant feel-
ings necessary to forming the project of going out to seek adventures.”5 All
of Marivaux’s early works are full of such delusional readers. They all focus
on flawed and ridiculous imitation; indeed, they make the very notion of
imitation appear ridiculous. The burlesque is in fact the ostensibly awkward
and deformed imitation of a text that is already the mediocre imitation of a
previous work. In fact, neither Télémaque travesti nor Homère travesti directly
parodies an ancient epic; rather they are grotesque rewritings of rewritings they
expose as flawed: the first, as we know, mocks Fénelon’s interpretation of the
fifth book of the Odyssey, while the second is a parody of Antoine Houdar de
la Motte’s own free translation and adaptation of the Iliad. Thus Marivaux, a
writer who valued originality above all, started his career by dipping his pen
into the fount of commonplace, as if wishing to exorcise all forms of derivative
writing and the sanctimony of literary cults.
The specter of inauthenticity, which raises its grotesque head in the early
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works, never ceases to haunt the productions of his maturity, albeit more elu-
sively. The early characters—the Pharsamons, Clitons, Briderons, and Pho-
cions—constructed their identity in a parasitical way, following fictional
models; they formed an ideal image of themselves and tried, very clumsily
and ineffectively, to act it out. Marianne and Jacob are far more successful
in peddling their imaginary identity with others, but they are treading a fine
line between the burlesque and the sentimental. In other words, they invite a
reading that is suspended between an awareness of dissonance and absorption
in unmediated emotion, between successful imitation and grotesque failure.
They are theatrical creatures, always aware of their situation as objects in other
people’s eyes, always divided between involvement in their own feelings and
the perception of their effect on the interlocutor. “When this lady looked at
me,” writes Jacob, “I would become self-conscious; I would adjust my gaze,
look at her in a caressing way; and yet, I could not have given any reason for
that: I was acting out of impulse, and impulses are not rational.”6
In a classic article, Jean Rousset has brilliantly shown that Marivaux’s narra-
tive voices are always split between a subject and an object, a protagonist and
a spectator, a then and a now.7 The same goes for his plays, even though in the
theater the spectatorial function is projected onto the masks of the commedia
dell’arte, onto the valets, who, by playing the role of mirror to their masters,
introduce a note of comic dissonance into the language of galanterie spoken
by the protagonists. “The one who is acting and the one who is looking are
not the same person,” argued Dorval in Diderot’s Entretiens sur Le fils naturel.8
That is not necessarily true for Marivaux’s narrative prose; actually it is very sel-
dom true for his work. Writing in the first person, Marivaux develops, through
the mask of his narrators, a hermeneutics of deception. Like Marianne, all his
characters are pursued by the threat of inauthenticity: “This beginning seems
to announce a novel, yet this is not one; I am telling the truth just as I learned
it from those who raised me,” Marianne declares.9 However, the stories they
tell, replete with the clichés of the baroque novel—improbable coincidences,
unexpected recognitions, far-fetched situations—defy the verisimilitude they
claim to respect. Their allegations of truth are undermined by signs that raise
the reader’s suspicion, as if to demonstrate that the only law the novel respects
is one internal to fiction.10 Thus, most of Marivaux’s narrators are unreliable.
They do not so much undermine our belief in their presence as expose the illu-
sions they live by. In other words, the tight coherence of their rhetorical project
and the vividness of their linguistic characterization are able to command the
reader’s attention and draw him or her to their reality, but such reality appears
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deceptive, and the characters, self-deceived. All of Marivaux’s novels present

some hermeneutic conundrum.
Both in Marivaux’s theater and in his novels the audience is driven to know
and understand more than the character himself is able to know, which is the
fundamental structure of irony, both comic and tragic. Le paysan parvenu in
particular shows the cracks between the naked reality of human desire and
the rhetoric that conceals it; it shows the inconsistencies between what the
characters do and the stories they tell themselves in order hypocritically to
comfort one another. The novel’s burlesque quality lies in such incongruities.
For instance, when the mature demoiselle Habert decides to marry the nine-
teen-year-old Jacob, whom she has met just three days earlier on the Pont-
Neuf,11 she relies upon arguments drawn from her religious devotion in order
to interpret the meeting as a miraculous sign of God’s will. If she can see the
attraction she feels for the vigorous young man as being divinely inspired, then
that is a sign that her marriage has been decided in heaven and that in satisfy-
ing her lust she will also be doing God’s work. The burlesque lies in the dis-
crepancy between what she does and what she says; between what she believes
and what she unwittingly betrays to others; between the “low” reality of her
sexual desire and the “high,” noble language of religious faith that legitimates
it. Such dissonances become the structuring principle of a novel that has been
read as a “realistic” account but that in fact shows insidiously the signs of its
implausibility.12 Marivaux thus invites the reader to observe, not what is nar-
rated, but the process of narration, the rhetorical value of mental structures
and stereotypes, or, to put it differently, the ideology conveyed by language.
Indeed, the language of Jacob, redolent with hypocrisy and the ferocious stu-
pidity of popular aphorisms, is a not-too-distant precursor of Le dictionnaire
des idées reçues.
All of Marivaux’s work demonstrates this tension between the irresistible
seduction of discourse and critical resistance to it, between belief in the inter-
nal coherence of the fictional world (vraisemblance) and a mood of suspicion
toward its authenticity. Its comic power and discursive critique emerges from
those structures of destabilization and disjunction. Such an attitude was prac-
ticed by the moderns, often as a tool of satire and philosophical irony. But it
was perhaps never theorized as clearly as in Baudelaire’s essay De l’essence du
rire, which deals largely with the comic effect of the characters of the comme-
dia dell’arte (as we know, one of Marivaux’s sources of inspiration). Laughter
is “a phenomenon [that] comes into the class of all artistic phenomena which
indicate the existence of a permanent dualism in the human being—that is,
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the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.”13 The
source of the comic effect resides in the spectator who laughs, and not in the
object that provokes laughter; that is why only a “philosopher” is capable of
laughing at himself, for he is a man who “has acquired by habit a power of
rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phe-
nomena of his own ego.”14 Understanding the functioning of such duplication
is essential for understanding the nature of Marivaux’s irony and that of the
moderns.
Irony is a relationship between two simultaneous modes of experience that
lead to a disjunction in the subject’s consciousness. Such a disjunction is the
essence of theatricality. A perceptive reader of Baudelaire, Paul de Man high-
lighted that quality in his commentary on Baudelaire’s rhetoric of irony, which
he juxtaposed to a text by Friedrich Schlegel that describes irony as “a perma-
nent parabasis” (eine permanente Parekbase).15 Now parabasis is the move-
ment of the actor confronting the spectators and advancing toward the front
of the stage; in Greek comedy it was the discourse of the coryphaeus in which
the author presented his personal opinion to the public. Parabasis is thus the
equivalent of the infamous esprit, the author’s or the narrator’s intrusion on
the fictional stage, exploding its integrity and preventing illusion from taking
hold. Irony emerges as an essentially theatrical phenomenon. Like parabasis, it
deflects attention from the content of the discourse to the scene of writing; it
introduces discontinuity without, however, breaking the unity of the work of
art. Even this “complete interruption and dissolution” of the performance does
not harm the unity of the comedy, whose essence lies, Schlegel argues, in its
destabilizing all purpose and intention.16 Such displacement, de Man suggests,
undermines the effect of reality and reminds the audience that the essence of
fiction does not reside in its correspondence with reality but in its power of
negation. “Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is
pure mystification and a future that remains forever harassed by a relapse into
the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. . . .
Irony [and allegory] are united in their common demystification of an organic
world postulated in symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mi-
metic mode of representation in which fiction and reality could coincide.”17
Phenomenology of the Coquette

The threat that lurks behind the ironic structure of a disjunct conscious-
ness is that of inauthenticity. That was not fundamentally a problem within
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a Romantic perspective, which saw the essence of art, not as mimesis, but as
the negation of nature, a position endorsed by Schlegel, Baudelaire, and de
Man. But it was certainly an issue for Marivaux, who labored within a mimetic
conception of representation and an Augustinian prejudice that identified self-
consciousness with the inauthenticity of amour-propre, that diabolical mirror.
The moment that triggers theatrical self-awareness, when the self is divided
between its immediate experience and its becoming a spectacle to itself, sug-
gests the danger of dissolution, the flight into the immateriality of a solipsistic
fantasy, and the loss of contact with authentic emotions, a danger that is all the
more pressing as reality is willed by God, whereas fantasy carries the imprint
of demonic simulation and deceit. Rather than abandoning himself to God’s
benevolent gaze, the theatrical self, like Malebranche’s bel esprit, turns into a
self-conscious performer, thus becoming a god to himself. But what is the real,
and can it be experienced without the duplication of theatricality? Hardly,
Marivaux suggests.
Hence his fascination with the character of the coquette. Vanity, vanitas, is
also evanescence and emptiness. The coquette is always eagerly trying to grab a
reflection of her image in the eyes of others in order to buttress her fragile hold
on herself and on her own experience, using that image as a bulwark against
the threat of nonbeing. The protagonist of Lettres contenant une aventure takes
to the privacy of her room so as to collect herself and to recapture, in front
of her mirror, those precious moments that escaped her grasp when she first
experienced them: “When the time came to go to bed, I rushed to my room
to undress and to have a look at myself: yes, to look at myself, because I had
a new appreciation for my face and I was eager to prove to myself that I was
right.”18 Immediate experience does not elicit as much pleasure as the moment
of recollection in the solitude of her room, when she relives the recent past and
recreates it in the private theater of her imagination; like Baudelaire’s artist, she
is at the same time a spectator and a protagonist. It is therefore the reciprocity
of spectatorship that we maintain with others (or with our theatrical self ) that
produces a semblance of continuity and coherence within an experience that
otherwise would be nothing but a “bundle or collection of different percep-
tions” and fugitive moments rapidly succeeding one another and leaving no
trace in memory.19 It is only the spectatorial relationship, with ourselves or
with others, that enables us to hold on to the fleeting moments of our exis-
tence. In a famous passage from the Spectateur français a former coquette thus
describes the fragmented state of a conscience that abandons itself to the flow
of unmediated experience:
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I am, at the moment that I am writing this more than seventy-four years old.
I have been living for a long time. A long time? Alas! I am mistaken. To be
exact, I live only in the present, which is here now and then is gone. Another
moment comes—it has already flown away—and it is as if I had never been.
Could I not say, then, that my life has no duration but is always beginning?
Young or old, we would all be the same age. A child is born at the precise
moment when I am writing this, and if I am right, no matter how old I am,
he would already be as old as me. That is how I see it, and if it’s true, what is
life, then? An eternal dream, but for the moment that we are enjoying now,
which quickly vanishes too, like a dream.20
From the standpoint of the immediate quality of the lived sensation (the
here and now, the ecceitas) a child and an old woman experience the same
feelings and have the same sensations: they have the same experience of red-
ness, of pain, of hunger, of pleasure, and so on. Reduced to a mere succession
of instants, deprived of the awareness of memory and the continuity of con-
sciousness (which to Hume lies in the rhetorical connectedness of contiguity,
resemblance, and causality) they would be very similar because there would be
no individuality. Georges Poulet found here grounds to expostulate eloquently
on the inner emptiness of characters devoted entirely to the enjoyment of a
timeless and inconsequential sentiment of existence.21 In fact, the connection
between Marivaux’s phenomenology, his ethics, and his aesthetics of esprit still
remains to be explored.
Marivaux draws characters who, while they yearn to surrender to the lure of
the moment,22 are torn between their subconscious emotions and their formal-
ization, between the immediacy of the moment and the frozen commonplaces
of language. Language often forces them to express those elusive states of mind
through concepts and signs that are not flexible enough or are informed by
rigid and stereotypical thinking. Marivaux’s pursuit of esprit is therefore a way
to challenge a language and a philosophical system that hampers, more than
it serves, our knowledge of moral life; it is an attempt to push language to the
limits of its expressive powers so as to compel it to account for the infinitely
small, continuously evolving metamorphosis of the emotions.
In the wake of the discoveries of empiricist and sensationalist philosophy,
Marivaux maintained, throughout his oeuvre, a reflection on the phenom-
enology of the passions, that is, on the various states of consciousness and on
their relationship to linguistic expression. In particular, he believed that there
existed several degrees of consciousness and that the awareness of the emo-
tions had many shades of clarity and definition (Leibniz’s and Malebranche’s
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pensées imperceptibles or perceptions insensibles). Exploring the intersection be-

tween ethics and epistemology, Marivaux was always looking for better ways
to describe the murkiness of consciousness. At stake was the principle of ethi-
cal responsibility, which was crucial to the Augustinian phenomenology of
amour-propre. For instance, to what extent can one be held accountable for
a duplicity that is innate, “mechanical,” and unconscious? May a person be
called a hypocrite who is not aware that he or she is dissimulating? As in the
case of Marianne, can one be at once, and almost in the same respect, sincere
and disingenuous, spontaneous and cleverly calculating? Marivaux raised the
issue again and again with respect to innate female vanity, one of his favorite
subjects. He also drew unexpected dramatic potential from the theatricaliza-
tion of half-conscious states of mind in his plays, most notably those that are
reducible to what d’Alembert disapprovingly called “that eternal surprise of
love,”23 those exceptional moments when the self must face unforeseen and
threatening emotions emerging from its subconscious that painfully clash with
its convictions and with socially enforced rules.
In the Spectateur français, the old woman, once a coquette, confronts those
problems in an autobiographical sketch in which she recalls her dealings with
a married man. Even while she believed that she was discouraging his atten-
tions, she says, she was confusedly aware that subtle signs in her behavior were
sending him the opposite message and drawing him closer to her. “I was a
woman,” she notes, “and one cannot be a woman without being a coquette.
Do not tell me that such vanity was in any way remarkable. It was the least
that a woman could do. Indeed, it was nothing more than an instinctive and
mechanical kind of vanity. Really, when reflection enters into it, then we are
in trouble!”24 May a woman call herself virtuous who harbors such conflicting
drives and who is so confused about her motivations and the consequences of
her behavior? To what extent are we able to know and name states of mind
that are so intricately woven with contradictory feelings and moods? Is there a
language that can discriminate ever more subtly between those moods?
Awareness was an important issue to Marivaux because it cast its own pe-
culiar light on the emotions. The object that is illuminated by the mind is no
longer the same as the one that remains in the shadowy unconscious. Emo-
tions are not fixed and stable entities; they are transformed when placed under
scrutiny and named. Discursive imagination and reflection lend a form to the
previously undifferentiated mass of experience and thus alter it. Inauthentic-
ity, therefore, may be the price to pay for consciousness and a stable identity.
The coquette lives an imaginary life in her own mirror and in the eyes of oth-
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ers because her own immediate existence and her core individuality escape her
grasp. Like the Spectator’s duplicitous girlfriend, the coquette is able to master
a technique for producing a mask, a simulacrum of life and the semblance of
spontaneity. But all that a mask can do is reproduce the appearance of a life
frozen in time and threatened by affectation and artifice. Those who live im-
prisoned behind the mask are unable to know themselves, to be creative, and
to evolve, for the only truly authentic moments are those that escape the grasp
of self-theatricalization and the reach of language. Those moments are full of
risk. Marivaux’s theater is rife with situations in which a character is utterly
lost and confused, in which all he or she can say is, “I do not know what I
am doing,” for Marivaux’s theatrical characters—counter to the trite concep-
tions included under the name marivaudage—are most of the time unable to
know what they are saying, to put into words the disturbing and embarrass-
ing cluster of emotions that drive them out of their wits and their language.
Ironically, it is precisely the characters who under normal conditions are the
most verbally deft and astute (most often women) that end up inarticulate or
speechless when a crisis develops. Yet, it is out of such confusion that the most
dramatic transformation takes place and the action moves forward toward its
conclusion.
Even the coquette may experience such moments when she surrenders to a
chance event, to an accidental encounter that, defeating her plans, leads her to
experience the unexpected and to succumb to disruptive emotions. In Lettres
contenant une aventure a woman recalls: “But my dear, the funny thing in this
story is that in the midst of it I had an accident that I had not anticipated.
I took my share in the pleasure of a reconciliation that I had planned out of
coquetterie; I mean, my share of love: it was no longer vanity, it was tender-
ness.”25 Unlike what happens to Crébillon and to Laclos’s libertine self, chance
may undo the web of strategies, but the self does not come undone because of
it. Marivaux rarely reserves a cruel punishment for the character who risks au-
thentic emotion: in his work, libertine chance (occasion) is rife with emotional
self-discovery, not sexual humiliation. Indeed, authenticity is often equated
by him with unreflectiveness, and not only in the realm of romantic love.26
Virtues, for instance, generosity, are such only to the extent that they are un-
reflective and unconscious. Referring to her benefactor, Marianne observes:
“Mme de Miran never cared to think whether she was being praiseworthy or
not. She was never generous because of the beauty of it, but only because you
needed her to be so.”27 Unaware of the symbolic value of her action, Mme de
Miran does not translate the gratitude of her beneficiaries into prestige capital
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for herself; essentially untheatrical, she has no amour-propre. That conception

responded to the tenets of the Augustinian phenomenology of amour-propre.
As Pierre Nicole argued, God made it impossible for us to know the source of
our motivations with any certainty: awareness of our own virtue would inevi-
tably translate into a feeling of pride, thus spoiling the act. Knowing oneself as
virtuous is the same as ceasing to be so; emotions vanish or are denatured by
cognition: “Knowledge of their humility makes them proud, and knowledge
of their pride makes them humble.”28 Everything good turns to dust under the
light of self-scrutiny; conversely, the knowledge of one’s own wickedness may
turn it into goodness. Self-awareness always alters the nature of that which it
reflects.
The challenge set by Marivaux’s narrative is how to represent immediacy,
how to account for the interval between two states of consciousness, between
surprise and knowledge, immediate sensory experience and its processing by
the mind. Marivaux is the poet of thresholds, the narrator of passage and pro-
cesses of change: this preference affects his theater but also the structure of his
novels. The need for closure is subordinated to the description of transient
states; the novels end when the action is still heavy with the promise of its
fulfillment because its completion no longer interests the narrator. Marivaux’s
characters confront the difficulties of expressing, in the first person, the surge
of emotion just before the mind takes hold of it and language alters it beyond
recognition. It is necessary, therefore, to push language to its expressive limits,
breaking out of the mold of trite expressions, forcing thought out of its fa-
miliar tracks. The moment of surprise, that fundamental mode of the rococo
aesthetics, is the mind’s response to the flow of experience and its effort to
make sense of it. Therein lies the key to the concept of esprit, which remained
so controversial during Marivaux’s time.
Against Consciousness
Marivaux’s poetics wavers between two distinct but complementary modes,
both of which are facets of the aesthetics and the epistemology of esprit. On
the one hand, Marivaux displays on the page characters who are highly con-
scious of the difficulties of self-expression. They confront the written medium
with a critical eye: either with a burlesque emphasis on their awkwardness and
lack of experience (as in the early novels) or with an overstated claim on their
sincerity and absence of artifice. Either way, the narrative persona ironically
distances itself from its own words and from the tools of rhetoric. The referen-
123
tial content is sometimes eclipsed by the focus on the materiality of language

and on narrative conventions. On the other hand, Marivaux’s narrators dream
of a purely unmediated discourse flexible enough to express half-conscious
modes of thought, a discourse that would portray characters chiefly as sensi-
tive human beings and not as wily, self-conscious, and rational creatures. Both
tendencies are present in his work, sometimes simultaneously, jostling for the
spotlight. Even while enmeshed in the tangle of rhetoric, his characters yearn
for the unattainable: an entirely spontaneous and unselfconscious discourse
that would transfer onto the page a stream of emotions or a train of thought.
The alternation between those two approaches, between a theatrical mode and
a self-absorbed, spontaneous, and negligent mode, is at the core of Marivaux’s
irony. Never unadulterated and straight, always pulled between those two
poles, the narrative voice is aware, somehow, that its yearning for unmediated
transparency will inevitably lead to a leap into theatricality.
In the journals, the duality of esprit is expressed in the multiple personali-
ties of the fictional author. Though he claims to utter the truth and nothing
but, the author speaks through several masks and voices. One of them is that
of the professional author who never stops reflecting upon his craft and who is
painfully squeezed by the politics of the literary field. He knows that each and
every word might be dissected and parodied by other authors and other pro-
fessional critics, that his discourse will be quoted out of context, perhaps ap-
propriated. For a work of art is also a means for positioning its author within a
community; it leads to the formation of networks of solidarity and rivalry, lit-
erary production and responses being inflected by complex relations of power.
Marivaux introduces as a counterweight a second persona, who devotes a great
deal of energy to protesting that he is by no means an author: “Reader, I do
not want to deceive you; I warn you that what you are about to read was not
written by an author”; “I want to be a man and not an author”; “Here is what
you are about to read, written in the style of a man who has written down his
thoughts as they came along; who only strove to see them plainly, to express
them with clarity, without altering anything of their abrupt frankness.”29 Al-
ready the narrator of Pharsamon declared, “Should you take me for an author,
you would be wrong. I am having a good time, that’s all. . . ; I am not playing
games with you, I am not an author; I spend my time telling fibs, and that’s
better than doing nothing.” And the fictional editor of La vie de Marianne pro-
tested that Marianne “is not an author: she is a woman who thinks. Marianne
has no model present to her mind”; in fact, her style is not that of the novel
but her own.30
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To be sure, such pretense was a tool in the writer’s professional wares at a time
when it was commonplace to introduce fiction under cover of a confession or
a memoir.31 However, the claim is frequent enough to suggest something more
than the simple observance of a convention. Rejecting his role as an author, the
writer enjoys complete freedom; solitary and rebellious, he is released from his
dependence upon the audience and from the need to answer the expectations
implicit in the pact of reading: “I am not promising you anything, I guarantee
nothing. Should I bore you, I did not say that it would not happen. Should I
interest you, I am not committed to it and I owe you nothing. Things being
this way, whatever pleasure I grant you, take it as a present; and if by chance I
teach you anything, I am magnificent, and you find yourself showered with my
blessings.”32 Following the inspiration of the moment—the libertine occasion
or chance—the narrator lives in a purely contingent present. He is indepen-
dent and sovereign. “I am extremely poor, I am picture-perfect poor since my
clothes are in tatters and the rest of my possessions are in keeping with them.
God bless, that does not prevent me from laughing, and I laugh so whole-
heartedly that I want to make others laugh too.”33 Extreme poverty and royal
magnanimity come together across the spectrum of human relations of reci-
procity and exchange because both pretend to ignore agonistic exchange and
the logic of the countergift.34 Laughter supposes the carefree rejection of social
interaction, of subjection to others and to literary conventions. The pauper’s
destitution and his alleged exile five hundred miles from France (it later turns
out that he lied about that) indicate the author’s emancipation from the world
of letters and the milieus frequented by the beaux esprits.
It is exchange, of course, that regulates the pact of reading and that can
never be entirely suppressed. The author nonetheless does his best to bracket
any awareness of it. As if following Diderot’s injunction to play “as if the cur-
tain had not been raised,” the author entertains the possibility of enjoying per-
fect autonomy, writing entirely for himself, with no audience in sight: “At the
moment I am writing this that you are reading (if you are reading me at all, for
I am not sure that this kind of memoir will ever reach you or that I will have
any readers).”35 And again: “I do not remember that in writing these thoughts
I ever dreamed that they would be read; except that now I seem to be think-
ing of it, since I take the trouble of saying that I never thought of it. And yet,
what did I write them for? Was it for me alone? But does one write for oneself
alone? I have trouble believing it. Is there a man who would put his thoughts
down if he did not live with other men?”36 It is, however, impossible to deny
the reciprocity of interaction. Every utterance is a speech act addressing some
125
audience, indeed creating its own audience. The “I” is shadowed by a “you”
that it can never cast aside: theatricality or dialogism—the double rebound of
anticipated response—is the inescapable fate of all expression. The more the
reader is confronted, and his existence denied, the more tightly the author
remains locked in an intimate relationship with the being that his words can-
not fail to conjure up. The Indigent, nonetheless, goes as far as he possibly
can toward the pursuit of an autonomy that emerges comically as a horizon
forever receding. Such lightheartedness is the precondition for the self to be-
come receptive to the flow of sensations and experiences. The prize the author
seeks for suppressing his awareness of the audience and of social dependence
is a better grasp of himself and of the nature of his impressions. Following a
kind of écriture automatique, he hopes to descend into himself in order to dis-
cover a form of authenticity that is guaranteed by chance encounter, not by
the self-conscious rules of the literary trade: “I am unable to create; all I can
do is grab hold of the thoughts that chance fills me up with [les pensées que le
hasard me fait], and I would be sorry to add to them anything of my own. I do
not care to examine whether this or that is clever or not. I only try to record
accurately whatever strikes my imagination, according to its own bent and that
of things.”37 A passive receptacle, the author is pregnant with the impressions
that the real, here identified with random chance, imprints on his mind: like
a child or a woman, whose brains are soft and humid, he receives the flow of
impressions without holding to their form for long.
It may seem paradoxical, however, that the author’s wish to remain true to
the self and to its mode of apprehension of the world should require empty-
ing that self of all intentionality. Subjective intentionality has been framed in
terms of alienation: it is a source of error and prejudice, laden with the dregs
of language and literary codes. The author sees only contrived artifice in the
effort and the attention that ordinary writers devote to composing their es-
says according to a preconceived plan. The receptiveness he seeks is accom-
panied by the need to disengage himself from his own intentions and will, to
emancipate himself from all expectations from the world of letters. Seeking to
embrace the world of sensations, the author refuses to impose on it any con-
certed order: a true libertine, he welcomes confusion and surrenders to chance.
Marivaux’s earlier journalistic venture, Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, already
illustrated the same drifting journey (dérive), the desire to go with the flow:
“I keep going, following chance, and I stop when I like it. In one word, this
work is the product of a libertine mind, which does not deny itself anything
that may gratify it along its journey.”38 One should write as if no one had ever
126
written before, because what matters most is being true to one’s peculiar expe-
rience and avoiding following any models. “Being natural . . . means refusing
to mold one’s thought according to anybody else’s outline, but on the contrary,
faithfully resembling oneself. . . . Thinking naturally means keeping true to
the original turn of mind [esprit] that we have inherited. Just as every face
has its own physiognomy, so every mind carries its own specific difference,”
which must be discovered and preserved.39 Thus Marivaux lends a new cred-
ibility, drawn from the language of empiricism, to the ancient myth of divine
inspiration that manifested itself in the poet’s gift for improvisation, of which
Fénelon’s conception of pur amour provided a Christian version.40
In that respect, both Marivaux and Fénelon were treading the same path:
no claim to spontaneity could be entirely unmediated, nor could it escape the
hold of literary tradition. In this case, the tradition is represented by Mon-
taigne, who was Marivaux’s favorite among the small number of authors for
whom he professed unconditional admiration.41 He was a kindred spirit and
an ally in the contest for stylistic freedom and the right to originality; had
he lived long enough to attract the attention of the Dictionnaire néologique,
perhaps he would have suffered a fate similar to Marivaux’s: “Had Montaigne
lived today, how much blame his style would have attracted! For he did not
speak French, nor German, nor Bretton, nor Swiss. He thought and expressed
himself in agreement with an original and refined mind. Montaigne is dead,
and he gets his due; it is precisely the originality of his mind—and as a conse-
quence of his style—that is admired today.”42 Following his lead, Marivaux’s
narrator would like to write in a language consubstantial with himself and
with his own experience, emancipated from the rules of the literary establish-
ment. “He knows what he is saying, but he does not always know what he is
about to say,” wrote Guez de Balzac of Montaigne at a time in which a noble
sprezzatura, that is, nonchalance or negligence, was the most precious value
bequeathed by the ancients, notably by the Ciceronian notion of neglegentia
diligens.43 Such qualities transcended the distinction between the ancients and
the moderns and were heralded by both. Marivaux and Montesquieu, how-
ever, typified the goût moderne in the emphasis they placed on the association
between feminine, erotic seduction and the seduction of a negligent style.
(The identification of rhetoric with feminine ornament was also a classic mo-
tif, but the moderns revived that commonplace with a positive spin.) “Noth-
ing pleases us more in finery than the negligence, or even the disorder, that
conceals all the attention to detail that vanity, not propriety, required; the
mind never has more grace than when what one says is spontaneous and not
127
contrived.”44 In the wake of galanterie the written word took as its model the
living voice of conversation, the extemporaneous surge of oral improvisation.
The writer, Montesquieu noted, was formed both in the solitude of the cabinet
and in worldly conversation: “In the cabinet we learn to write with method, to
reason well, and to discipline our reason. . . . In a social gathering, in contrast,
we learn to develop our imagination. . . . There, we are thinking beings for the
reason that we do not think; that is to say, we run into the ideas that chance
offers us, which are often the good ones.”45 The imagination, in its creativity
and originality, does not deploy itself in solitude and tranquil recollection but
in the chance encounter that takes place in oral interaction—an attitude that
goes a long way toward explaining the lure of conversation to eighteenth-cen-
tury writers.46
Self-reflexivity and irony, however, are never quite absent from the dis-
course of an author who constantly says he is negligent and unaffected but who
dramatically fails to shed the self-consciousness that prevents him from actu-
ally being so. His many references to simplicity and transparency can hardly
avoid appearing emphatic and ostentatious, and the author does protest too
much for the reader to take such unaffectedness at face value. The author
finds himself in the bind described by Montesquieu: “But how can one work
at being natural?”47 What is more, how credible a claim of spontaneity and
authenticity uttered through a series of masks or dramatis personae may be?
Many of the first-person characters who emerge from the pages of the journals
claim the status of authorship, or, more humbly, that of simple and unaffected
humanness. Yet, in the polyphonic choir produced by this motley crowd (the
misanthropist, the cynical philosopher, the picaro-Harlequin, the drunken ac-
tor, the posthumous homme d’esprit) we can never hope to find the author’s
“authentic” and unmediated voice. In order to lend his characters the veneer
of “authenticity” the journalist draws upon conventions: the treasure-trove of
the “chest full of papers”;48 the letters written to a provincial lady (Lettres sur les
habitants de Paris); fake memoirs and stolen correspondences in Le spectateur
français, to name a few.
Ultimately, none of those voices are able to let the consciousness flow un-
adulterated. Marivaux’s prose writing—in the novels and in the journals—is
unable to resolve the paradox of self-consciousness: Spontaneity cannot be said
nor willed. It can only be performed. It can only happen in the language of
drama.
128
In Search of Voice
Surprisingly, the challenge Marivaux was facing in his search for a new
relationship between language and states of consciousness was not unlike the
challenge his rival Voltaire confusedly formulated in his longstanding crusade
against esprit. If we want to understand the context of Marivaux’s search for
a new fictional language, we must turn to Voltaire’s own, lifelong struggle
against bad taste:
What we call esprit may sometimes be a new comparison or a fine allusion;

here it is the misuse of a word that is used in one sense but suggests another;
there it is a delicate relationship between two ideas seldom encountered; it
is an unusual metaphor; it is the search for a meaning that lies hidden in an
object but nonetheless exists. . . ; it is the tendency to develop one’s thought
halfway so as to suggest the rest. I would say more about esprit had I more
of it; but all that glitter (not to mention fake glitter) is not suited, or is rarely
suited, to a serious work, one that must hold the audience’s attention. The
reason is that the author shows through, while the audience wants to see
the character. Now, the character is always in the grip of passion or danger.
Danger and passion are not after esprit. Priamus and Hecuba do not com-
pose epigrams while their children are being massacred and Troy is in flames.
Dido does not grieve in madrigals while going to her martyrdom. Demos-
thenes does not have pretty thoughts when he prods the Athenians to war.
If he had them, he would be a rhetorician, not a statesman.49
The Lettre sur l’esprit, of which this is an excerpt, was very likely written in
self-defense.50 As we saw in chapter 2, the grievances Voltaire expressed against
esprit throughout his oeuvre were not especially original; rather, they were the
echoes of previously established fault lines in the literary landscape. In this
text, however, something else is at play. Beyond the tired arguments that re-
surface time and again we may discern a new restlessness. What really struggles
to come out of Voltaire’s recurring admonitions is the need for a new theatrical
and poetic language. But like a man facing a danger in the dark, Voltaire strikes
right, left, and center, striking down the language of literature indiscriminately
and blindly. Down with the use of new metaphors! Down with surprising and
discerning comparisons among new ideas; down with ambiguity and com-
plexity of meaning, with polysemy of all kinds; with allusion and reticence.
In other words, down with many of the traits that have made Voltaire’s own
prose, in such works as the Lettres and the Contes philosophiques, so effective.
There is a terrible irony in his position. As Lionel Gossman has remarked,
129
Voltaire proposes a standard of value that renders his own work minor and ir-
relevant. As a dramatist and a historian, he upholds a classical ideal in light of
which the portion of his oeuvre that we value most—his Contes, his dialogues,
his correspondence, his light verse—must necessarily appear as “marginal and
inconsequential.”51
The failings of modern esprit cover a territory that is vast indeed, perhaps
too vast. For once he has purged his prose of it, what is the writer left with?
We find Voltaire in a bind similar to the one confronted by Fénelon. Once
again, what we encounter is a kind of linguistic and stylistic virtue turned ter-
rorist. It is also worth noting the slippages of a text that starts by referring to
modern prose, continues with allusions to modern theater, then to Homer
and Virgil’s epic poems, only to end with the obligatory Demosthenes, that
is, with a “statesman,” not a “rhetorician,” God forbid. Where would Vol-
taire situate himself in relation to such weighty tradition? The author must
disappear, we are told, so as to let the characters speak. But what will be their
language? Voltaire wishes he could set himself free from the theatrical and
linguistic conventions that burden any ambitious and successful tragedian.
But what will he replace them with? In what voice does passion speak when it
flows spontaneous and unshackled from literary codes and rules? In the grip
of a powerful emotion, he insists, the heroine does not speak in epigrams and
madrigals. True enough. But neither does she speak in verse. Does that mean
that tragedy should reject verse altogether? That is a step that Voltaire does not
even consider.52
In reality, the dissatisfaction Voltaire so confusedly expresses here is very
close to that which Diderot conveys in his many writings on dramatic lan-
guage, and most forcefully in the Paradoxe sur le comédien. Contrary to cur-
rent opinion, the Paradoxe is not primarily the paean to the rigid codification
of theatrical gesture and to the rejection of sensitivity in acting that it is taken
to be. The Paradoxe is an extended persiflage,53 a rhetorical ambush, another
example in a long list of Diderot’s deceptions and decoys. It is a clever set piece
in which Diderot pretends to extol the virtues of calculated artifice in acting so
as to expose the intolerable artifice that dramatic language has become in his
day and the decadence of a theater that has lost all power to express the real
emotions of ordinary human beings. “The likeness of the passions on the stage
is not, then, its true likeness; it is but extravagant portraiture [portraits outrés],
caricatures on a grand scale, subject to conventional rules.”54 The sensible (and
relatively banal) argument that Diderot makes in favor of a controlled use of
the emotions in acting is pushed to the extreme so as to highlight his convic-
130
tion that the dramatic style prevalent in his day has grown hopelessly out of
touch with the actual experience of spectators and with the new dramatic
genre that Diderot wishes to promote.
On the one hand, Diderot points out, the simple tone of the sermo famil-
iaris would seem misplaced in the theater: “But now transfer your easy tone,
your simple expression, your informal bearing, your natural manner, to the
stage, and you will see how paltry and weak you will be. You may shed tears:
you will be ridiculous and the audience will laugh. It will not be a tragedy that
you enact but the fairgrounds parody of a tragedy [une parade tragique]. Do
you suppose that the dialogues of Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, and Shakespeare
may be delivered with your conversation voice and your fireside tone?” On
the other, theatrical grandeur would appear ridiculous in an intimate setting
because such grandeur is not rooted in nature: “When by a long stage habit
one keeps the stage’s emphatic accent in society and struts around as Brutus,
Cinna, Mithridates, Cornelia, Merope, Pompey, do you know what one does?
One couples with a soul small or great, exactly as nature has cut its measure,
the outward signs of an exalted and gigantic soul that is not one’s own. The
result is ridicule.” To which his interlocutor replies: “What a cruel satire of
actors and authors is this you are making, innocently or by design! . . . I do not
think that the expression of true grandeur can ever be ridiculous.”55
In fact, Diderot suggests, the putative incompatibility between ordinary
language and theatrical speech, between the “fireside tone of conversation” and
the “stage accent,” is not an ontological, necessary fact of the divide between
reality and representation. Rather, it is a fact contingent on the theatrical con-
ventions tied to a given time and place, one that authors and theater lovers
ought to be able to put into perspective. It is a situation that may seem inescap-
able and God-given only to a theatrical culture that has lost its true function
and identity. Corneille and Racine, revered as they are, are the practitioners
of an art in which “bombast, esprit and papillotage are a thousand miles from
nature;”56 of a style burdened with an emphasis inherited from the Spanish
baroque (“the rodomontade of Madrid”), “overblown bombast in Corneille’s
manner.”57 They have succumbed to a theatrical language that, frozen into a
“three-thousand-year-old protocol,” has lost its capacity to move the audience.
Diderot’s expressions mercilessly emphasize the caricatural, camp quality of
contemporary acting: “Leave those hippogriffs on the stage, with their action,
their posture, and their screams. They would make a sorry figure in history;
they would incite laughter in a circle or in any other social gathering.”58 It is
highly unlikely that Diderot, who did in fact remove the theatrical scene from
131
the stage and bring it to the intimacy of the drawing room and the social gath-
ering (and, indeed, to the fireside), would have endorsed the idea of a theatri-
cal style so outrageous and outlandish as to appear ridiculous and misplaced
in those intimate settings. In reality, his critique of theatrical declamation and
gesture has always been unequivocal, radical, and devastating: “Have people
ever spoken the way we declaim? Do princes and kings walk any differently
from a man who walks well? Do they ever gesticulate like madmen or lunatics?
Do princesses speak in a shrill whistling tone?”59
Like many of their contemporaries, Voltaire and Diderot rejected a lan-
guage and a style that they had inherited from the seventeenth-century conver-
sation of the précieux, a language that in their eyes had become too perverted
by the “luxury” of rhetorical ornament, too contrived, and too morally tainted
to represent the passions that “republican,” regenerated audiences ought to
experience. “It would be desirable,” wrote d’Alembert, “that those among our
writers who attempt, whether in the theater or in another art medium, to por-
tray their own age would not limit their efforts to borrowing its jargon. They
believe that they are writing the history of man, but they are only writing that
of language. It is from this tortuous, inappropriate, and barbaric language
that many claim today to recognize those authors who frequent what goes
under the name of good company.”60 Artistic expression had to be dislodged
from its dwelling within polite society and purged of the ambiguities, the self-
indulgence, and the uncertainties of modern existence: it had to recapture the
intensity of an earlier, mythical time. Like Fénelon before them, Voltaire and
Diderot doggedly pursued and tracked down the so-called esprit, the ubiqui-
tous impropriety that seemed to betray the trace of mannerism and the failure
of fiction to move and persuade. But neither of them succeeded in finding the
radically new manner and style that they were calling for. Neither was able
to implement a theatrical language flexible enough to embody the new pas-
sions, the new morality, and the new characters that they wanted to bring to
the stage.
Rather than trying to capture the accent of the present, Diderot and Vol-
taire sought their inspiration in the revamping of the ancients, a move that
Mercier pitilessly termed “Voltaire’s face-lift” (le retapé de Voltaire).61 They
turned their eyes toward the fabled “simplicity” and the sublime stylistic econ-
omy of a heroic age that they hoped to revive: “If the day comes when a man of
genius dares give his characters the simple tone of antique heroism, the actor’s
art will assume an entirely new difficulty,” wrote Diderot.62 “It is not what we
call esprit, it is the sublime and the simple that constitute real beauty,” noted
132
Voltaire, in a rebuff to Corneille (Voltaire was the author of a multivolume,

line-by-line, severe appraisal of Corneille’s complete theater).63 In Diderot, the
desire to recapture the energy that imbued ancient works of art was countered
by his bitter conviction that their greatness was out of the moderns’ reach: “To
put it in a nutshell, it seems to me that the masterpieces of the ancients will
always attest to the sublimity of artists of the past and eternally guarantee the
mediocrity of future artists. I am sorry about that.”64 Trapped in the logic of
emulation that he had learned in the college inventio, Diderot was obsessed
by ancient models, which haunted him like a bad conscience or as a constant
reminder of the present’s artistic inferiority. Only the sacrifice of their vani-
ties, the trauma of civil war, and a return to the primitive sources of civiliza-
tion could save the French from themselves, their jargon of politeness, their
whigs and their silk costumes: “If our painters and sculptors were henceforth
to be obliged to draw their subjects from the history of modern France—I say
modern, for the first Franks retained in their mode of dress something of the
simplicity of antique garb—then painting and sculpture would soon fall into
decadence. . . . I’d very much like to know how the artists of several thousand
years hence will depict us.”65
In their search for expressive intensity and the stark simplicity of primary
moral conflicts, the philosophes tended to mistake preachiness for pathos,
melodrama for tragedy, and the expression of philosophically good inten-
tions for the representation of the real. They thought that art ought to disdain
the space of ordinary interaction and conversation and instead stake out the
ground of the extreme and the extraordinary, that it ought to embrace the vio-
lently melodramatic spectacle of terror and death:
In general, the more a people is civilized and polished, the less its manners
are poetic; everything weakens when it softens. When does nature prepare
models for art? It is when children pull out their hair around the bed of
their dying father; when a mother uncovers her bosom and begs her son for
the sake of the breast that nourished him; when a friend cuts his hair and
spreads it on the cadaver of his friend; . . . when disheveled widows, whom
death has robbed of their husbands, tear their faces with their nails.66
Poetry, to Diderot, wore the intensely distasteful, messy face of disheveled

mourners, such as eighteenth-century urban France would never see. (It would
be worthwhile exploring the reasons behind Diderot’s curious obsession with
the funereal, hair-rending practices of the traditional Mediterranean world.)
133
From Tragedy to Marivaudage

In the end, for all their emulation of the ancients, the neoclassicists could
not inject one jolt of energy into the carcass of tragedy. The experiment of
the modern drame (which the revolutionary stage would revive) yielded for
the time being only partial success and much promise of future kitsch. In one
of the most scathing chapters of his Tableaux, Louis-Sébastien Mercier jux-
taposed the crowning of Voltaire’s bust on the stage of the Théâtre-Français,
at the end of the performance of Irène (Voltaire’s last and greatest triumph)
to an event of a very different kind that occurred three months later. Mercier
declared that it was no longer Voltaire but the humble fairgrounds actors,
headed by the lowly Janot, who now carried the enthusiasm of Parisian audi-
ences. “Janot acted in a farce that, more successful than Irène, only enjoyed five
hundred performances. The language of the people’s lowest class was portrayed
just as it was; and the actor’s artless manner, his steadfast expression, formed a
tableau that, no matter how lowly, had a quality that one rarely encounters on
the French stage: the accent of perfect truth.”67
It was that same truth, embodied in the “voice of the people”—not that
of the lower classes (which were still confined, with the possible exception
of the drame, to the poissard jargon of the farce), but that of the educated,
worldly bourgeoisie—that Marivaux sought to bring to the stage. And it was
in the theater, rather than in the journals, that he succeeded in carrying out
Montaigne and Pascal’s wager: writing like a man (or a woman), not like an
author; writing in the voice of intimate conversation, capturing the flow and
the spontaneity of the sermo familiaris.
We are accustomed to the style of authors because they have their own. We
almost never write as we speak. When we arrange our thoughts, we give them
a twist. Everywhere there is a taste for uniformity and evenness that we do
not notice because we have grown accustomed to it. But if, by chance, you
abandon that style and bring to a work of art, to a play, the ordinary lan-
guage of men, you will be sure to make an impression. If you are successful,
you will be very successful, all the more so as you will be perceived as new.
But should you do it again, the ordinary language of men will no longer
seem so, because it has been appreciated, not as such, but as your own: peo-
ple will say that you are repeating yourself. I am not suggesting that I have
been in that situation myself, though it is true that I have tried to capture the
language of conversation, the diverse and intimate accents that flow through
it. But I do not claim that I have succeeded.68
134
Marivaux, with his habitual taste for paradox, understood why his critics
blamed him for obsessively focusing on “that eternal surprise of love.”69 The
style of an author was perceived as “natural” only as long as it followed the ex-
pectations of the public and the ruling conventions. Any departure from such
codes, any attempt to break the riddle of “the ordinary language of men,” to
reproduce the rhythm of actual conversation, would be jarring and disconcert-
ing to an ear accustomed to taking the stage jargon for real. Such an attempt
would be perceived as peculiar to an author, not as faithful to the culture he
was trying to portray. Diderot echoed that problem when he noted, some
thirty years later, in the Paradoxe how ridiculous the speech of Merope and
Cinna would sound in the salon and, conversely, how inappropriate the lan-
guage of conversation would sound on the stage. To a certain extent, that was
and always will be the case. What we accept as “natural” and “realistic” in the
cinema and on television today is different from what we take for natural in
our daily interactions: both languages seem “natural” to us only because we are
unaware of the subtle differences that we edit out so as to become inured to the
perception of a distinction between the two.70 And, of course, the audience’s
greater or lesser awareness of the linguistic conventionality of a text depends
on its historical relationship to it. The farther removed we are from it in time,
the more slanted our perception will be by our preconceptions about what
may count as “natural” or “mannered” in a given period and place (we must
remember that Racine’s and Molière’s language had greatly aged in Voltaire’s
time). However, as Marivaux paradoxically suggests, the two poles—the im-
mediate present and the distant, canonized past—end up converging: to an
audience hearing it for the first time, the language of contemporary conversa-
tion, which he had tried to capture in its spontaneous outpouring, might have
seemed just as contrived as Corneille’s poetic idiom.
That foreword accompanied the publication of one of Marivaux’s most
original plays, Les serments indiscrets. The play’s opening night, at the Théâtre-
Français, had been a disaster, probably orchestrated by a cabal mounted by
Voltaire (who was eager to make the stage available for the presentation of his
new tragedy, Zaire). A few months earlier, in an epistolary allusion to the pos-
sible flop of his rival’s play, Voltaire had basked in a bout of schadenfreude:
“We are going to have this summer a prose comedy of the Sieur Marivaux,
under the title of Les serments indiscrets. You may bet that there will be much
gibberish [métaphysique] and scarce taste and that the cafés will applaud, while
people of taste will understand nothing.”71 Voltaire, like most of his contem-
135
poraries in the world of letters, remained deaf to the originality of Marivaux’s

theatrical language.
And yet, rather than follow the timeworn protocol denounced by Voltaire
and Diderot, Marivaux had tried to bring to the stage the revealing rhythm
of actual conversation as he knew it: “Among people of taste [gens d’esprit]
conversations are much more animated than we usually think, and . . . all that
an author can do in order to imitate them will never come close to the ani-
mation, to the spontaneous and sudden outbursts of fancy that they put into
it.”72 Conversation to Marivaux was not the contrived and theatrical exercise
in self-invention that Marmontel, Crébillon, and Diderot satirized.73 Indeed,
he did not emphasize the rhetorical virtuosity that the salon guests had learned
in the colleges, the crossfire between the interlocutors and the verbal brilliance
that constituted esprit. Quite the contrary. We would be hard pressed to find
in his plays the verbal playfulness that characterizes a Crébillon or a Laclos.
His characters seldom show Valmont’s or Merteuil’s ironic detachment and
control over their expression. Most of the time, the occasional pointe is made
by the valets, not the masters, who are too involved in their own emotions to
be able to distance themselves from their language. Indeed, it is often the con-
trast between the verbal playfulness of the valets and the embarrassed silences
of the masters that drives the action. Merteuil and Valmont use language as a
weapon pliable to their will. But in Marivaux’s theater, language and will are
at odds. His characters, even when they make up phrases and speeches, always
allow the spectator to see, through the mask, their humanity and vulnerability.
Whatever they may say, we are able to hear something else.
Damis and Lucile, the young lovers of Les serments indiscrets; the countess
and the marquis, the aging and awkward suitors in Le legs; Araminte in Les
fausses confidences; and Hortense in Le prince travesti are not in control of what
they say and show of their emotions. Their language is revealing, not because
of the meaning that it conveys, but because of what it betrays of their pas-
sions; not by what it says, but by what it suggests in oblique and devious ways;
by its reticence and silence. Through repetitions and reprises, the rebounding
of one word from a character to another, embarrassing pauses, interruptions,
hysterical petulance, slips of the tongue, the characters always show more than
they wish to; language leads them astray, much against their will, to strange
and dangerous places where they would rather not go. Marivaux was alone
among his contemporaries (with the possible exception of Crébillon) to ex-
plore the many ways in which the subconscious peeks through the carefully
wrought structure of verbal and social conventions and the codes of politeness
136
and galanterie. Language to him was a living thing; it had an existence of its
own, independent of the speaker’s intention. Thus, it was only in the theater
that Marivaux was able to overcome the spectatorial self-awareness that per-
vaded his novels and his journals. While in the narrative works the spectatorial
function was internal to the protagonists, in the plays it was divided among
a bevy of subordinate characters (parents, friends, and servants, who played,
in turn, the role of obstacles or facilitators), thus leaving the protagonists free
to become ensnared by their passions and liberated from burdensome self-
consciousness. It was thus in the theater that Marivaux was the least self-con-
sciously “theatrical.”
Another aspect of Marivaux’s reworking of theatrical codes was the trans-
gression of the boundaries of genre. A fact that his contemporaries were unable
to grasp was that through those dislocations of the language of galanterie and
courtship Marivaux had succeeded, where would-be reformers of the theater
had not, in doing the unthinkable, namely, marrying the language of high
tragedy to that of the Italian farce—not in the clashing, contrastive manner of
parodists, but in his own seamless, harmonious, and invisible synthesis. Nei-
ther comedies based on character like those of Molière nor moral and social
satires like those of Lesage, Dufresny, or Dancourt, Marivaux’s plays seemed to
resist all description. No one had come to the realization, undoubtedly because
it would have been unimaginable, that the genre that came closest to them was
not the contemporary comedy of manners but the great classical tragedy of
Corneille and Racine.
What Marivaux did was borrow the structural elements that defined trag-
edy and translate them into the language of comedy and into the idiom of
the contemporary polite world. True, there was nothing “tragic,” in the sense
that we intend today, about Marivaux’s theater, for by and large his plays had
a happy ending. But Corneille did not define tragedy by its catastrophic out-
come: he defined it by the existence of a confrontation between conflicting
passions during an extraordinary and intense encounter between the charac-
ters and/or within the characters themselves as a result of such an encounter.74
The focus of Corneille’s plays was not the calamitous consequences of unruly
passions, as had been the case for earlier tragedies, but the passional event it-
self. Similarly, the nexus of Marivaux’s comedies lies in the dramatization of a
conflict resulting from the clash between contrasting passions. They may not
be grand and imposing ones, but they are equally absorbing and conducive to
a paroxysm of anguish: love and pride (La surprise de l’amour, La double incon-
stance); desire and shame, or fear of losing one’s freedom and autonomy (Les
137
serments indiscrets; Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard); or, even more comical, as is

the case in Le legs, a longing for companionship running afoul of insurmount-
able timidity and fear (with a sprinkling of avarice, which receives a far less ri-
diculous treatment at Marivaux’s hands than at Molière’s). All of those feelings
take hold of the heroes and tear them apart, with varying intensity, in agoniz-
ing, if comical, tension. Marivaux succeeded in adapting those conflicts within
a discourse of galanterie that he had inherited from Madeleine de Scudéry and
Corneille but that he subjected to the attenuations of irony and a benign, lib-
ertine distancing. Thus, his heroines are young coquettes and ingénues, but
they preserve something of the troubling pathos and vulnerability of Racinian
heroes and heroines. At the peak of the crisis—just before the abrupt resolu-
tion that will transform her relationship to herself and to the world—when the
heroine has lost her moorings and her identity, her cry of embarrassment and
anguish, “Je ne sais plus où j’en suis” (I no longer know what I am doing / who
I am), is perhaps no less poignant than that of Mithridates: “Qui suis-je? Est-ce
Monime? Et suis-je Mithridate?”75 In Arlequin poli par l’amour Silvia’s despair
for having put Arlequin’s life into the hands of the jealous and all-powerful
Fairy is not unlike that of Monime, who has been tricked into revealing her
love for Xipharès to his all-powerful rival Mithridates, or that of Atalide, who
has unwittingly betrayed Bajazet to her equally all-powerful rival, Roxanne.
(The same structure occurs again, in the upper register, in act 3, scene 5, of
Marivaux’s Le prince travesti.) When Silvia gives up her love in order to save
Arlequin, her sacrifice is no less heroic than that of Racine’s heroines, though
it is of far shorter duration, for evil is defeated in the end.
Marivaux’s bourgeois Silvias and Angéliques are at least as proud as the
princely Chimène and Emilie; like them, they want to test whether their lovers
are worthy of them: as in Corneille’s tragedy, love is a relationship of rivalry.
To do so, the women engage their adversaries (the various Dorantes, Lélios,
Damis, Lisidors) in an all-out battle of wits and pride, in which the aveu, the
confession of love, is the main stake. (We are reminded of the importance of
the aveu in such plays as Le Cid, Mithridate, or Bajazet.) Betrayal, jealousy, cru-
elty, and deceit, the motors of tragedy, do make their appearance in Marivaux’s
comic world, but in the final revelation they are neutralized, or they turn
out to have been illusory. Those who seem briefly to succumb to such evils,
like Angélique in L’épreuve or Mme Argante in Les acteurs de bonne foi, see
their suffering vanish in a flash when their tormentors take off their devilish
masks and are revealed to be benign fathers, mothers, prospective husbands.
(Whether in reality they are entirely benign remains an open question, and a
138
tribute to Marivaux’s inexhaustible well of ambiguity.) Furthermore, the struc-

ture of tragic irony—the hero’s blindness about his fate or his passions, which
is a source of pathos in tragedy—becomes in Marivaux an endless source of
comical awareness, as the spectator is given an insight into the characters’ mo-
tivations that they are unable to have themselves (an insight mirrored by that
of the spectatorial eye of the valets and soubrettes).
The much-criticized stretching of time in Marivaux’s plays, the narrow fo-
cus on the slow and convoluted unraveling of the emotions (which had Mme
du Deffand complain that “Marivaux makes us run around for miles within
the confines of a single parquet leaf ”),76 may be best understood when placed
alongside the equally maniacally detailed treatment of the passions in tragedy.
As Jean-Marie Apostolidès puts it,
The tragic time is that of the intimate experience, that of a history lived
through the subconscious. That is why it appears as the drawn-out suspen-
sion of a brief moment. The thing that in ordinary life would take a few
seconds, perhaps a few minutes, to formulate and communicate is leisurely
explicated in Racine. All the vacillations of the mind, all the movements of
the heart, are registered, analyzed, dissected in lengthy tirades. Tragedy is
not a temporal shrinking but rather a stretching of time, thanks to rhetori-
cal procedures that may be compared to cinematographical slow motion.
The fluctuations of the hero’s heart and mind are presented as a closeup; we
are able to perceive their microscopic movements, which, when added up,
result in an action that takes place outside the spectator’s purview. Racine
is less interested in the act than in the minute mechanisms of the heart that
prepare and follow the act, and that the author takes apart before our eyes,
from one play to the next, with unswerving patience.77
All of which may be said of Marivaux’s theater. The fact that in his plays action
was carried out through dialogue led d’Alembert to comment quite obtusely:
“It is true that they have no action to speak of; all there is, is dialogue without
a plot.”78
It had not occurred to d’Alembert that it was precisely in his treatment
of speech that Marivaux’s plays came closest to the ideal of le Grand Siècle:
speech is action, the plot is carried out by the dialogue, and the time of the
performance overlaps as closely as possible with fictional time.79 But by the
end of the eighteenth century the ideals of seventeenth-century theater had
been entirely lost in the fog of history (or perhaps in the fallacious familiarity
of endless confrontation and emulation). The extent of the misunderstand-
ing may be measured by La Harpe’s acidic assessment of Marivaux’s poetics:
139
“The crux of his plays is nothing but a word that must at all cost be uttered
at the end, though everybody has known it since the beginning”—one could
find no better description for the plot of Racine’s Bérénice—“obstacles spring
merely from his dialogue; instead of weaving a plot, he endlessly unravels a
declaration or an avowal [aveu].”80 The most significant distinction between
classical tragedy and Marivaux’s comedy lies in the disarticulation of the tirade,
which in Marivaux is replaced by a lively dialogue, by the exchange of replies
bouncing from one interlocutor to another. But the same attention is lavished
upon the minute analysis of the evolution of the passions, which for being sub-
dued—or, as Hume would say, moderate—are no less dramatically significant.
Marivaux’s painstaking detailing of the dynamics that drives ordinary people
in their ordinary moments of crisis (the choice of a husband for oneself or for
a child, the life-changing arrival of a new neighbor, the breaking of a contract,
the sacrifice of one’s longstanding habits), raised such ordinariness to the level
of a representability that, for the first time, transcended the traditional divide
between the comic register (reserved for the pedestrian, concrete aspects of life)
and the dignity of poetry (reserved for highly disciplined passions removed
from the sensuality and the triviality of the present).
Marivaux thus almost alone succeeded in achieving a cross-fertilization be-
tween the traditional, courtly forms of high culture and those of the satirical,
popular theater. He did that for the benefit of an elite audience that was no lon-
ger eager to embrace the upright, reformed taste of courtly classicism (which
remained popular among the lower bourgeoisie), preferring to recognize itself
in the dynamic language of conversational galanterie and in the ironic deflec-
tions achieved through the juxtaposition of galanterie and the irreverent the-
atricality of the Italians and the fairgrounds.81 The marriage of high and low
culture also responded to the aesthetics that had been formulated almost a cen-
tury earlier in the circles of Madeleine de Scudéry and Mme de Rambouillet,
among the elites who had found in the pastoral fantasy of L’astrée a welcome
respite from courtly constraints and from more martial—and highly stylized
and tragic—forms of heroism. In fashioning a coherent aesthetics out of the
apparently unreconcilable elements of tragic passion and farce, Marivaux was
able to bring to the official stage and to the public of the Regency the kind
of synthesis that Watteau had been producing during the same years in the
portrayal of the fête galante, with its metaphorical use of masks, the intimate,
pastoral scenes of nobles and wealthy bourgeois engaged in the “improvised
form of ritual leisure” of amateur theater and parades.82
140
5 Grace and the Epistemology of
Confused Perception
What’s happening to us now is the same that happened the century

following that of Augustus. The likes of Lucan overtook Virgil, and the
likes of Seneca, Cicero. The Senecas and the Lucans had fake glitter;
they bedazzled the people, who rushed to them because they seemed new.
—Voltaire
In some texts, words are sparkling; they are distracting and incongruous
apparitions.
—Barthes
More Dazzling than Enlightening

In chapter 2 we explored one facet of esprit, namely, the bel esprit in its so-
cial dimension as a ridiculous author who turns his craft into a self-promoting
enterprise. But esprit was far more than a snob’s career move. It was above all
a style and a mode of vision, a concept that was both cognitive and aesthetic.
Historically speaking, esprit was associated with the poetics of acumen and
ingenium (Voltaire defined it as raison ingénieuse),1 which, from the sixteenth
century on had been expelled from the national body of French literature and
identified with the conceit (concetto) that characterized the baroque poetry and
poetic treatises that flourished in Italy and Spain, with the works of Ludovico
Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Luis de Góngora, Baltasar Gracián, Emanuele Tes-
auro, and Matteo Peregrini.2 But the genealogy of esprit goes further back.
Latin poets such as Seneca, Martial, and Lucan, infamously born in Roman
141
Hispania, had been diagnosed, by several generations of French writers (no-

tably by Montaigne, Guez de Balzac, Boileau, Bouhours, and Voltaire), with
the same disease as their progeny. Esprit was a miasma that one breathed with
the air of southern climates; it traveled fast and tended to spread its infection.
French authors from Ronsard to Voiture to Corneille, not to mention the
practitioners of préciosité and galanterie, were seen as suffering from its effects.
In the eyes of their detractors in the early eighteenth century, esprit was a
great many things, but most of all it was a delirious language that had lost all
referential function, an empty parade of refinement and virtuosity, the search
for artificial similarities between disparate objects, the evanescent sophistry
that emerged from a mind drawn to “weighing insect eggs on a bed of spider
webs.”3 Morvan de Bellegarde, a harsh critic of the culture of esprit, detailed in
a text published in 1702 an extensive list of offenses, all symptoms of a general-
ized decadence of taste:
Good taste has its tribulations, much like philosophy. Until recently taste in
France was very depraved: phébus, preciosity, buffoonery, had banished good
sense. Witticism [pointe], equivocations, wordplay had replaced true beauty
in writing. Set rimes [bouts-rimés], burlesque gibes, dreary jokes delighted
the populace and the court. Reason was buried and smothered under a
hodgepodge of bad productions. It was only after many trials and countless
combats that good sense recovered its rightful place.4
Readers familiar with the Art poétique may find here an echo of Boileau’s op-
position between pointe and bon sens,5 as well as of his abhorrence for any-
thing resembling semantic polyvalence, such as equivoque, which truly sets
Boileau over the top.6 Esprit is described by Bellegarde as a multifaceted lin-
guistic phenomenon and as a kind of contagious disease that seeps through
the world of letters from the lower strata of the populace to the upper echelons
of the court; from the “turlupinade” that rules the stage of the popular the-
aters7 to the “bouts-rimés” that are the amusement of worldly circles. Worldly
galanterie and the people’s burlesque amusements are fertile grounds for a
linguistic intemperance that shares the same depravity. Marivaudage, the label
that was affixed to Marivaux’s language toward the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, “metaphysical jargon,” a “mixture of burlesque and common language,”8
clearly belonged to the same phenomenon.
Following the Pascalian notion of finesse, however, esprit indicated a kind of
penetrating vision that suddenly illuminated a multiplicity of occult relations
between objects, a form of perception that, unlike the esprit de geométrie, was
able to bypass all the stages of a rigorous and demonstrative reasoning.9 Thus
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Grace and Confused Perception
the latin word acumen (in Italian acume and in Spanish agudeza), aptly trans-
lated in French by pointe, meant not only “witticism” but also the sharp edge
of penetrating, “acute” intelligence. If esprit had anything to do with conceits
and figures of speech, it was because its prompt understanding could hardly
be reduced to a systematic, step-by-step demonstration; it was better suited to
the coming together of metaphorical thinking.10 Esprit relied upon a form of
judgment that eluded expression because the steps it took were too many and
too small to rise above the threshold of awareness.11 Marivaux thus associated
esprit or bel esprit (often used as synonyms) with the domain of intuition (senti-
ment), immediacy of feeling, subtlety (délicatesse), and all that was ineffable in
the mind and in personal character. In her portrait of Mme de Miran, Mari-
anne expressed the difficulty of putting into words her intuitive knowledge of
someone’s character:
I know the people I live with much better than I am able to define them.
There are things in them that I do not know well enough to tell, and that
I perceive for myself, not for others. They are objects of intuition [senti-
ment] so complex and of such delicate makeup that they get blurry as soon
as reason examines them. I do not know how to get hold of them in order
to express them, so that they are in me but do not belong to me. Have you
ever felt the same? It seems to me that on many occasions my soul knows
far more than it can say and that is has a mind of its own that is far superior
to my ordinary mind.12
Sentiment is for Marianne an unselfconscious mode of thought eliciting a

confused representation drawn inferentially from the minute perceptions that
constitute experience and all but impossible to reproduce verbally.13 Marivaux
points out in his journals that a different type of rationality regulates sentiment;
just because we are not aware that we are making a reflection does not mean
that reason is not involved: “What is sentiment? It is an instinct that guides us
and makes us act unreflectively by presenting us with something that affects
us. It is not developed in certain persons as it is in others. . . . Yet, it is the
same as the mind [esprit] but more or less confused.”14 Not only does senti-
ment enable one to perceive beauty but it is an effective tool for understanding
the intricacies of social relations. In fact, goût, finesse, and délicatesse denoted
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a kind of empirical judgment that
could be applied not only to the appreciation of aesthetic objects but also to
discernment in worldly interaction. The domain of the aesthetic and that of
worldliness were coextensive: the same type of rationality informed aesthetic
judgment and the capacity to find one’s way through the social labyrinth, to
143
the ability to regulate behavior and to interpret that of others, to the perspi-
cacity that allowed one to position oneself within the social sphere. In the
seventeenth century, aesthetics and ethics were closely connected under the
combined patronage of such intractably evasive concepts as goût (taste) and
grace. In the writings of Méré, Madeleine de Scudéry, and Bouhours key terms
such as délicatesse, finesse, and je ne sais quoi (as we shall see, akin to grace)
were tools employed in the definition of social ideals such as honnêteté and air
galant. Only secondarily were they used to explore the still uncharted domain
of taste and aesthetic appreciation, which was not yet emancipated from other
kinds of value. In Marivaux, aesthetic judgment and the understanding of so-
cial behavior are both rooted in the faculty of refined intuition. Marianne, in
fact, does not miss any opportunity to suggest that her heightened sensibility
and sharp understanding are the products of an aristocratic nature.15
The author bel esprit—who united elegance of expression, intensity of emo-
tion, and clarity of reasoning—could not fail to demonstrate that he possessed,
more than anyone else, a highly refined cognitive ability drawn from sensation.
His vision was the result of sensibility and a subtle balance of the humors:
A bel esprit is not an artisan geometer but a born architect who, while medi-
tating on a building, is able to see it rising before his eyes complete in all its
various parts. He imagines and perceives its totality thanks to a reasoning
that is imperceptible and instantaneous. . . . In other words, a bel esprit is
blessed with a disposition that gives him a fine and precise intuition of all
the things that he sees or imagines.16
The metaphor of architecture allows the bel esprit to argue for the superiority
of sentiment, a prompt and discerning judgment that does effortlessly what
would otherwise require painstaking and slow laboring on the part of the
master géomètre. While the latter is defined as an ouvrier, a craftsman devoid of
any intellectual creativity, the bel esprit is able to conceive a whole building as
a perfectly achieved form and also to have an intuitive, analytic knowledge of
all its separate components. Those who accuse the bel esprit of being nothing
but a craftsman who makes a trade of his art do not understand that he is an
intellectual, “a sensitive man, a man whose organs are most refined” and who
“carries his sight and his intuition further than ordinary men.”17
Marivaux employs here a language drawn from modern, empiricist episte-
mology, while also relying upon the traditional language of the ancient physi-
ology of the humors, which the abbé Bouhours had illustrated in his widely
circulated essay on the bel esprit. Following Bouhours, the bel esprit draws his
144
superior epistemic capacities from “a well balanced and proportioned head,

of a well-tempered brain filled with a refined matter, a clear bile made stable
by melancholy and smoothed by blood.” The physiology of esprit is more
complex, however. On the one hand, esprit is the product of a balanced tem-
perament and a human being who is perfectly mediocre in the Aristotelian
sense. On the other, it is a creative energy, pure virtuality resulting from the
spiritualization of matter in the brain. It is a sort of elixir, the effusion of mat-
ter distilled into its quintessential components emanating a kind of light, or
enlightenment:
The spirits of blood and bile smolder in the brain in the same way that hot
vapor may blaze in a cold and moist cloud. The burning spirits spread to
the head a dry radiance that, according to Heraclitus, makes the soul wise
and bright. And since among corporeal objects nothing has less matter and
more virtue, nothing is purer and more energetic than those spirits; the
flame that emanates from them is the finest, the most vibrant, and the most
ardent that exists in nature. It is this flame that at once enlightens reason
and fires the imagination, that makes the species of things visible to the
soul and reveals them to it in their true light. In one word, it is in the light
of this splendid fire that the understanding discovers and contemplates the
most obscure truths.18
In 1756, in his article “Esprit,” Voltaire appeals to the same tradition when he
describes esprit as “the most subtle part of matter” and as the energy that cre-
ates movement and life: “Those spirits that we believe run through the nerves
are a subtle fire.” Esprit is the spontaneous efflorescence of the mind’s creative
energy and inventiveness.19 That sense was present in the Latin word ingenium,
which was often translated in French by esprit. In his dictionary, Furetière de-
fined ingénieux as “that which has esprit, which is made with esprit.”20
In the writings of sixteenth-century Italian theoreticians the etymology of
ingenium was ascribed to the verb in-gigno (from genus and generare). One of
its cognates was a term that frequently appeared in theological discourse, that
is, ingenitus, “the unengendered and uncreated,” which denoted the Father.
(Those early masculine connotations, also contained in the image of acumen
and pointe, will turn effeminate, thus sterile, once the ideal falls into disre-
pute.) Ingenium was thus the primal, creative force of intelligence, its inventive
drive, and a reflection of our divine nature. A virtue, or creative energy, esprit
is also the flame that enlightens the mind and allows it to see the true nature
of things and of their species, revealing the hidden qualities of objects and the
multiplicity of their relations. The notions of creative drive and clarity of vi-
145
sion are both contained in the concepts of energy and virtue associated with
ingenium. The Greek term energeia was translated by the Latin vis or virtus,
which in the seventeenth century meant force, virtue, movement as virtuality
(in Aristotle dynamis as power is realized in energeia, the action), the power of
action, language’s faculty to represent the dynamics of thought and percep-
tion. It is paired in book 3 of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with the term enargeia, “clarity
and evidence.”21 Metaphors, Aristotle points out, make the object present to
the imagination, show events as they happen; figurative speech infuses rep-
resentation with life and movement. Both meanings are present in Richelet’s
definition of energy in his 1680 dictionary: “A term is energetic when it puts
something before our eyes, to portray an action.” Esprit thus both lends force
to discourse and brings to light hidden resemblances and analogies; its influ-
ence is deployed in the realm of metaphor and figural speech.
Such influence, as we have seen, was not always perceived as positive. In the
Encyclopédie article “Esprit,” after the obligatory Aristotelian detour, Voltaire,
who was more interested in countermodels than in normative ones, went on
to describe faux esprit in greater detail: “A tiresome search for expressions that
are too refined; the affectation of turning into an enigma what others have
said more simply; bringing together ideas that seem incompatible; dividing
what ought to be united; coming up with false connections; mixing, against
propriety, banter with seriousness and smallness with greatness.”22 This allows
us to understand not only the nature of the accusations that were launched at
the goût moderne but also the core of the poetics of modernity. The moderns,
Voltaire maintains, tend to bring apparently incompatible objects and images
together in a surprising and shocking manner. They operate along two com-
plementary axes. On the one hand, they bring together dissimilar and incon-
gruous ideas and objects, ignoring their differences; on the other, they seem
to discern imaginary distinctions in things that are in reality perfectly similar.
They separate what should remain whole, and they join what should be left
separate; they mix hierarchies and natural species. In their search for surprise
they go for the shock value; they ignore distinctions and boundaries and thus
alter the natural and social order. Like Marivaux, who, according to the abbé
Raynal, “blends the burlesque and the informal,” the moderns confuse serious
and comic styles, mix high and low, noble and debased, and end up upsetting
our view of nature by creating hybrid, even monstrous, creatures. The abbé
Le Blanc wrote in a text contemporary with Voltaire’s article: “The Greek and
Roman authors excite sometimes our admiration for the skill with which they
bring together the most distant ideas; those of today try to surprise us by unit-
146
ing those that are the most contradictory. In writings of all kind, as well as in
all types of drawing, there is a tendency today to wed things of antagonistic na-
tures.”23 The same deplorable tendency to bring together incompatible objects
in the search for a discordia concors, a union of opposites, is detected not only
in language but also in the visual arts of the nouveau goût, or style rocaille:
Nothing is more monstrous, as Horace observes, than wedding together be-

ings of opposite nature; yet, that is precisely what many artists pride them-
selves on doing today. They contrast a Cupid with a Dragon, a sea shell
with the wing of a bat. They no longer respect any verisimilitude in their
productions. They stack confusedly moldings, cornices, pedestals, columns,
cascades, branches, and rocks. In one corner of such chaos they will place a
frightened Cupid and, to crown it all, a garland of flowers. That is what goes
under the name of drawings of a New Taste [d’un nouveau Goût].24
A similar unrestrained and licentious imagination presided over the creation

of neologisms, over the license toward the use of existing terms or the surpris-
ing association of words, all aspects that Voltaire, the abbé Desfontaines, and
many others saw as the distinctive vices of the goût moderne.
Ironically, it was Voltaire’s negative assessment of the faux esprit that cap-
tured the attention of the German writers of the Athenaeum (1798–1800), who
took it in a sense quite contrary to its original intent. French theoreticians had
presented esprit as a purely national phenomenon. The abbé Bouhours had
observed that the lack of a good education and worldly refinement unhappily
conspired with the Germans’ oafish disposition to prevent them from ever
becoming beaux esprit: “A German bel esprit is an odd thing. . . . The bel esprit
is quite incompatible with the coarse temperament and the massive body of
the peoples of the North.”25 Unphased by such a diagnosis, the Germans took
to the aesthetics of esprit and gave it a new dimension and an extended rel-
evance. The conception of esprit that Voltaire rejected eventually found its way
into the writings of Jean-Paul Richter and Friedrich Schlegel (and eventually
Freud). Spilling out of the realm of conversation, rhetoric, and the aesthetic,
Witz finds its fullest expression in the written word and, most important—fol-
lowing Kant’s reading of Locke and Hobbes—in the discoveries of philosophy
and science.26 That was a departure from the traditional, empiricist stance.
Locke had separated wit (the English equivalent of ingenium) from judgment
and had denied wit any significant role in the process of reason. To him, only
judgment offered clear and distinct ideas, whereas wit yielded nothing more
than confused representations:
147
Men who have a great deal of Wit and prompt Memories, have not always
the clearest Judgment or deepest Reason. For Wit, lying most in the as-
semblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety,
wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up
pleasant Pictures and agreeable visions in the Fancy: Judgment, on the con-
trary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another,
Ideas, wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being
misled by Similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is
a way of proceeding quite contrary to Metaphor and Allusion wherein, for
the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of Wit, which strikes
so lively on the Fancy.27
While Voltaire assimilated the two complementary modes of the understand-

ing, analysis (perceiving fine distinctions) and analogy (revealing hidden re-
semblances among objects and thoughts), into the broad category esprit, Locke
separated the two operations and confined each within its proper sphere: anal-
ysis belonged to judgment, analogy to rhetorical ornamentation. Wit, like
Fancy, assembles and puts together with “quickness and variety,” but Judg-
ment “[separates] carefully . . . thereby [avoiding] being misled by Similitude,
and by affinity.” Wit strives for entertainment and may be misled by superficial
similarities. That is what happens with metaphors, which “take one thing for
another,” with little concern for exactitude toward the nature of phenomena.
The scientific spirit, on the contrary, strives to analyze objects and ideas by
carefully articulating the real differences that lie beneath the surface of appar-
ently similar phenomena.28
In his preface to De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu seems to endorse Locke’s
notion of judgment: “When I have recalled the Antiquity, I have tried to
recover its spirit, so as not to consider as similar events which are in reality
different, and not to miss the differences of those which appear similar.” In
this apparently tautological statement Montesquieu insists, from a double per-
spective, that the historian must avoid falling for superficial similarities and
missing the real differences that subtend the apparently seamless texture of the
real.29 The dialectic of treacherous similarities and hidden differences is crucial
to Montesquieu. For instance, since laws must be conceived within the context
of the structure of government and the human passions that set it in motion
(bk. 3, chap. 1), it follows that laws and practices that are apparently similar
may in reality have very different effects: there are crucial distinctions that the
philosopher must bring into the open. Thus, factions play an important role
in the suffrages of the populace and in those of the senate or the aristocracy,
148
but in the former, factions are positive, while in the latter they are dangerous
(bk. 2, chap. 2). The customs of the Lacedemonians seem as barbaric and
bizarre as those of the mythical Sévarambes,30 but because virtue was their
principle, they contributed to the grandeur of the city rather than to its ruin
(bk. 4, chap. 6). Athens always had the same number of soldiers for its defense,
but while twenty thousand soldiers were enough to fight against the Persians
and the Lacedemonians, they did not suffice to defend the city against Philip
of Macedonia at a time when the spirit of virtue no longer prevailed (bk. 2,
chap. 3). Frugality was the foundation of the ancient republics, but it would
be the ruin of modern monarchies, which are founded upon commerce and
consumption (bk. 5, chap. 3). And so on. But Montesquieu also explores the
other facet of esprit, that is, the discovery of hidden similarities within hetero-
geneous elements. Underlying regularities in the apparently “infinite diversity
of laws and customs” must be accounted for, not by the simple observation of
resemblances and metaphorical equivalences, but by inferring from apparently
disparate events the existence of principles that are endowed with a general,
explanatory power: “I have set down the principles, and I have seen particular
cases conform to them as if by themselves, the histories of all nations being
but their consequences and each particular law connecting with another law or
dependent on a more general one.”31 One might argue, in the spirit of Locke,
that the operations of inference, which hypothesize the existence of general
rules from the observation of regularities among discrete events, are a far cry
from the workings of wit, which simply draws resemblances and “agreeable
visions,” with no attempt to provide a general, encompassing explanation.
However, inferring the existence of general laws and uniformities from the
empirical observation of particular cases is not incompatible with the work-
ings of esprit or wit: the sudden intuition that leads esprit to discover hidden
analogies within phenomena is in fact the first step toward the formation of
explanatory, general hypotheses. It is important to keep in mind that in De
l’esprit des lois the linear movement of deduction that characterizes the Carte-
sian, geometric order (which Montesquieu espouses in the preface) conflicts
with the order of finesse (which is also operative in his oeuvre), that is, with a
mode of thinking based on the intuition that order—any order pertaining to
the world of human interest (politics and morals)—is constantly shifting and
unstable because it must accommodate a wide variety of possible structuring
criteria.
The latter order was the one endorsed by the German Romantics. Witz,
which was depicted as an ars combinatoria, as a capacity for detecting both
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similarities in things that appeared dissimilar (i.e., the operation of ingenium,

or wit) and dissimilarities in things that appeared alike (i.e., the action of
judgment), might actually yield true knowledge and content. The purpose
of science, like that of metaphor, is to discover patterns of similarities across
categories and boundaries and to detect connections between particularity and
universality; ingenium is thus coextensive with judgment and is its inseparable
ally. According to Kant,
Intelligence (ingenium or Witz) unites (assimilates) heterogeneous ideas,
which often, according to the law of the imagination (that is, association),
lie apart from each other. It is a peculiar faculty of classifying, which belongs
to the understanding (as the faculty of recognizing the general) in so far as
the understanding attributes objects to a certain class. . . . It is pleasing,
generally accepted, and encouraging to find similarities amidst dissimilar
objects; and so intelligence provides material for the understanding to make
its knowledge more general.32
Witz thus denotes a capacity to discover hidden analogies and similarities
thanks to agility of mind and to a gift for combining images, for formulating
them in a striking and concise manner. It is a step toward the more abstract
operations of classification that constitute the understanding, toward rearrang-
ing the categories of the world in new patterns of relations.
From that perspective, all the rhetorical operations that Voltaire viewed with
suspicion—the sudden joining together of disparate and apparently incongru-
ous objects, which the mind suddenly sees, as in a flash of light, with pleasure
and surprise; the drifting (dérive) of a mode of thinking given to discontinu-
ity and digression—became, for the German Romantic poets, the essence of
creativity. Hence their use of aphorisms and the juxtaposition of fragmented
thoughts in an effect of concerted disorder. To them, science might not be
divorced from its rhetorical, poetic expression, because it was in the nature of
both poetry and science to find some clarity in the cluster of confused analo-
gies that emerge from the perception of the real.
That sudden spark of the understanding—the coming together in a vivid
image, which the abbé Bouhours had termed the “brilliance” of style—was
the very quality that critics of the goût moderne derided under the label of
papillotage (flicker effect)33: “[Bel esprit] is a solid body that shines; it is a bril-
liance that has firmness and body. . . . That is the symbol of bel esprit as I see
it: it has density and radiance in equal parts. It is, properly speaking, the ra-
diance of reason.”34 In seventeenth-century dictionaries papillotes were “éclat
des paillettes,” scintillating pieces of fabric, and the verb papilloter indicated
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the twinkling shimmer of points of light; in the eighteenth century papillotage

indicated the rapid blinking of the eyelids, sheltering the eyes from a dazzling
light. Common to the denunciation of those visual effects (which were also
used metaphorically to describe a type of discursive style) was the mistrust of
everything that drew attention to details, away from the whole, which dis-
persed the focus and shattered the work of art into myriad bright points,
each competing for the attention of the recipient, each becoming an end in
itself, to the detriment of the unity of composition.35 More dazzling than en-
lightening, the diamonds of style radiated a cold light that did not illuminate
the mind but tickled the imagination in a purely sensuous, meaningless way.
“Nothing is more adverse to the light that must solidify into a body and spread
evenly across a written work than those sparks that are produced by striking
words against each other, which dazzle us for a moment but then leave us in
darkness,” wrote Buffon.36 The spark of esprit produced darkness, not light.
That notion was not quite novel. Quintilian had already cautioned the writer
against the lure of those sparkling fragments of discourse, lumina or sententiae
(points of light, traits d’esprit), which emanated scintillis (sparks) as through
a thick smoke, but no flammae, scattered sententiae, or traits d’esprit,37 which,
if used with too great a frequency, would undermine the impact of the work
and turn the body of eloquence into a monstrosity bordering on nonrepre-
sentativeness: “Personally, I think these highlights are in a sense the eyes of
eloquence. But I do not want there to be eyes all over the body, lest the other
organs lose their function.”38
Bouhours, however, was careful to emphasize the content value of bel esprit,
its complementarity with the other operations of the understanding. Esprit
involved connectedness, the joining of elements gathered from the perception
of the particular; it provided the materials that judgment would elaborate into
the formulation of universal statements. Discernment, or bon sens, emerged,
for Bouhours, from the union of esprit and judgment: by relying upon both,
the mind was able to analyze and elaborate what it had intuitively grasped.
Schlegel and Jean Paul too pointed out that the sudden flare of Witz, with its
discontinuous and digressive character, was peculiarly suited for expressing
inchoate states of mind that had not fully emerged to awareness and for shed-
ding some light on the secret workings of consciousness:
That activity through which consciousness reveals itself most acutely as a
fragment is Witz; its essence consists in rivenness and in turn arises from
the rivenness and derivativeness of consciousness. Witz is a bolt of light-
ning from the unconscious world, which for us always exists alongside the
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conscious world, and it thus accurately represents the fragmentary state of

our consciousness. It is a combination and mixture of the conscious and the
unconscious. Without all intention and consciousness something is found
that has no connection with what came before it; on the contrary, it always
stands, as it were, in stark contradiction to it.39
Witz reconciled the aesthetic and the scientific spirit: there was rational value
in metaphors and figures of speech and, more fundamentally, in the percep-
tion of beauty. Both science and artistic representation relied upon similar
operations in the mind: both depended upon the imagination’s capacity to
take sudden leaps into the realm of hypotheses. As in the goût moderne epis-
temology of esprit, in Schlegel’s conception rationality could not be divorced
from sensuous experience, reason from taste, pleasure from knowledge, vivac-
ity from clarity, the perception of beauty from the understanding of truth. Jean
Paul came to similar conclusions when he pointed out that the etymology of
Witz was related to knowing (wissen, therefore witzigen) and that Witz was
a mode of understanding (Verstand) that was communicated in correspon-
dences and analogies, in a sensate, tangible form, revealing on the one hand
“relations of similitude between incommensurable sizes, i.e., the similarities
between corporeal and spiritual worlds . . . , in other words, the equation be-
tween oneself and the outer world,”40 and on the other, the disparate at the
heart of the putatively similar: Witz ruptures identity and creates disjunction
and alienation in “the identical made dissimilar.” For Jean Paul, Witz, as both
knowledge and humor, is able to take minor moments of similarity and turn
them into essential relations: the sublime is juxtaposed with the familiar, the
ephemeral with the eternal. Witz’s unexpected combinations are thus a rebel-
lion against received ideas and their hierarchical positions.41
The French philosophes, however, in their efforts to demarcate themselves
from the tradition of galanterie and from the associations between worldli-
ness, light-heartedness, and esprit, took a different path. Perhaps their effort
to legitimate and ground scientifically their moral endeavor worked against
embracing forms of perception and expression that were associated with ancien
régime society; their enthusiastic intransigence did not allow them to envision
a more integrated conception of the creative enterprise. The philosophes re-
jected the rhetorical brilliance of ingenium and favored a more traditional and
strict division of intellectual labor; as Locke had done before, they attributed
a rational content to judgment only. In his Salon of 1767 Diderot followed Ed-
mund Burke’s reading of Locke (in Burke’s Introduction on Taste) by splitting
imagination from judgment: “The imagination creates nothing; it imitates; it
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composes, combines, exaggerates, expands and contracts; it is perpetually oc-

cupied with resemblances. The faculty of judgment observes, compares, and
seeks only to make distinctions. Judgment is the pre-eminent faculty of the
philosopher, and imagination that of the poet.”42 Conversely, esprit, defined as
a slow and painstaking meandering into irrelevant details, a pointless detour
into the realm of the particular, was ejected from the domain of aesthetics and
from that of science. In his influential article “Génie,” published in the Ency-
clopédie, Diderot’s account of the way the mind operated was symptomatic of
the expulsion of scientific esprit from the aesthetic realm and of its alienation
from the activity of genius and poetic imagination. The philosophical (and
scientific) spirit of the géomètre was deemed incompatible with the disorder
and lawlessness of the creative, artistic genius. In his attempt to endow phi-
losophy (i.e., scientific inquiry) with gravitas and order, Diderot deprived it of
its intuitive, impetuous side. Simultaneity, digression, and multiplicity, need
we say it, the very qualities that characterize Diderot’s own approach to sci-
ence and the arts, gave way to systematic and progressive linear thought (the
unbroken chain of ideas). Finesse was represented simply as attention to detail,
as the handmaid of geometry, with its cautious and patient advance. Hav-
ing begrudged the spark of the poetic imagination to science and philosophy,
Diderot’s next step was to deem the development of sciences responsible for
the decline of poetry:
In Philosophy, which perhaps requires scrupulous attention, a timid cau-
tiousness, a habit of reflection that does not agree with the warmth of the
imagination and even less with the self-confidence of genius . . . one must
seek truth ardently but wait for it patiently. [Philosophy] needs men who are
able to organize the order and the succession of their ideas: to follow their
chain so as to lock it, or to interrupt it if there is any doubt. It needs much
searching, discussion, and slowness, qualities to be found neither in the tur-
moil of the passions nor in the exuberance of the imagination. They belong
to a far-reaching and self-possessed mind, which never perceives anything
without comparing it with another perception; which seeks what different
objects have in common and what distinguishes them; which, in order to
bring together distant ideas, traces step by step a long distance; which, in
order to grasp the specific, delicate, and fugitive connections between re-
lated ideas, as well as their opposition and contrast, is able to sort an object
out of the mass of objects of the same, or of a different, species, to lay the
microscope upon an imperceptible particle, and to stop observing only after
it has observed it for a very long time.43
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Polymorphous Je ne sais quoi

Esprit is a rhetoric of the sketchy and the unfinished; it is the attempt to
catch thought, as it were, in midair, as it takes shape and definition. As such,
it is essentially incomplete, always about to add one further touch and a little
more definition. Such a process also accounts for the structure of Marivaux’s
phrase, which to some critics seems to display, as it unravels, the sinuous-
ness of rococo decorative style44 but is in fact constructed paratactically, with
short sentences and few subordinate clauses, out of successive touches, with
accretions and additions that show the phases of thought as they happen, dis-
continuously, detailing the stages of their modifications.45 Thus, on the one
hand, esprit is the sudden blaze of light that finds its way into the metaphor or
the maxim; the quickness of a condensed form that characterizes the atticist
quality of formes brèves favored by the moralists; the fulgurating conciseness of
acumen, sharpening its edge in the pointe. On the other hand, it is a flexible
and dynamic language that depicts thought in the process of its formation:
not only simultaneity but also reiteration and redeployment within discon-
tinuity. Indeed, the relationship between those two modes of esprit always
posed a problem for Marivaux. The cluster of simultaneous perceptions that
constitute sentiment or pensée confuse are hardly reducible to a clear and distinct
representation: “At all times we take action as a consequence of confused ideas
that come to us we don’t know how, that lead us without any reflection.”46 The
bundle of thoughts condensed in the intuition materializes too suddenly and
far outpaces linguistic expression; therefore, it cannot be adequately translated
into the linear, sequential unfolding of the classical phrase without running
the risk of appearing belabored and affected or without making the character
who formulates them seem calculating and contrived.47 In the Lettre sur les
sourds et muets Diderot showed that he was as intensely aware as Marivaux of
the fact that linguistic expression skewed the representation of the affects:
Our mental state is one thing; our rendition of it—whether to ourselves or

to others—is quite another. The complete and instantaneous perception
of such a state is one thing; the detailed and continuous effort of attention
that we are forced to make in order to analyze it, express it, and explain it
to others is quite another. Our soul is a moving scene that we are perpetu-
ally copying. We spend a great deal of time in rendering it faithfully, but the
original exists as a complete whole, for the mind does not proceed step by
step, like expression.48
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Diderot, however, did not follow Marivaux on the path of linguistic experi-
mentation, twisting and bending the structure of the sentence in the hope of
reducing the gap between simultaneity and progressive unfolding.
Such a flexible conception of style as Marivaux’s did not sit well with the
dictates of neoclassical aesthetics, which demanded that the structure of the
written work (a poem, a play, or a novel), like that of the sentence, develop
along a continuous, linear progression, each element pulling the next, like the
unbroken links of a chain: “[My adventures] hold together neither more nor
less than the links of a curb bit,” Jacques would say, in his naïve belief that the
book of destiny had been written in accordance with the necessity of the se-
quentially developed Aristotelian fable (a belief that the narrator never fails to
challenge).49 According to the philosophes, the grammar of the fable, like that
of the sentence, ought to reflect the temporal and logical structure that rules
the natural world: “The progress of any poem must be like that of nature. . . .
In nature, ideas, sentiments, movements of the soul are generated according to
an order that cannot be reversed without reversing nature itself. . . . In order to
be perfect, the texture of fiction must hold entirely to one piece [il faut qu’elle
tienne au-dehors par un seul bout],” wrote Marmontel,50 probably under the
sway of d’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie: “There scarcely
is any science or art . . . whose propositions or rules cannot be reduced to
simple notions disposed in such an obvious order that the chain would be ab-
solutely unbroken.”51 In Marivaux’s world (as in that of Dufresny, Fontenelle,
Montesquieu, Crébillon, and the other representatives of the goût moderne),
however, no law of linear necessity, no uninterrupted chain of deductions,
dictated the progress of thought and narrative, which were always open to the
disorder of human caprice, random association, and chance interference and
which offered a cluster of confused representations and competing story-lines.
For the moderns, no self-evident, overarching order could ever be imposed on
the representation of the mind and human affects.
In the second installment of Le cabinet du philosophe Marivaux confronted
those issues in an elaborate allegory that dramatized the key concepts of the
epistemology and the aesthetics of galanterie and the goût moderne. Since the
seventeenth century almost all discussions of esprit had relied upon a conve-
niently vague and ineffable notion that seemed ideally suited for discussing
the conceptually intractable phenomena related to confused modes of thought
and to aesthetic judgment. That was the je ne sais quoi (reminiscent of the
Ciceronian nescio quid ), which Bouhours defined as “the inclination and the
155
instinct of the heart for an object that stirs it.”52 It corresponded to an aesthet-
ics rooted in the passions, which could neither be analyzed too closely nor be
reduced to the rationality of well-defined rules. “In fact, it is something so
lissome and imperceptible that it escapes the most penetrating intellect. The
human mind, which knows that which is most spiritual in the angels and that
which is most divine in God, does not know the nature of what is charming in
a corporeal object that touches the heart.”53 A polymorphous energy, the je ne
sais quoi designated the indefinable, the indefinite, and the unachieved in hu-
man desire, in the perception of beauty in the work of art and in nature. It was
a dynamic drive, always eluding our grasp, hiding its nature or only partially
revealing itself. Grace, of which the je ne sais quoi was the obscure law, was
dynamic, the kind of energy that resided in the harmony and the agreement
between the various movements that affected the object, whereas beauty lay in
the measurable symmetry between the parts that formed the work of art. Both
were seen as necessary to the work of art: the je ne sais quoi was the elusive and
secret connection (noeud secret) that united grace and beauty, much like divine
grace united body and spirit, matter and form:
Beauty is born out of the proportion and symmetry that we encounter
among the corporeal and material components of nature. But grace is pro-
duced by the uniformity among the inward feelings caused by the affects
and the emotions of the soul. . . . And since spiritual beauty is more excel-
lent than corporeal beauty, we almost always prefer a person whose physical
beauty is scarce but who has grace to another who has more beauty but no
grace. . . . That grace is primarily a movement of the soul is demonstrated by
the fact that when we see a beautiful woman, we first evaluate her beauty by
the correct relation between all the parts of her body; but we cannot evaluate
her grace unless she speaks or laughs or makes some movement. . . . That je
ne sais quoi, which everybody calls on but which no one can explain, is like
a secret link that joins the body and the spirit. . . . For the je ne sais quoi is
nothing but a divine splendor that is born out of beauty and grace.54
Movement, or grace, is essential to the seduction of je ne sais quoi; it is the drive

that stimulates the mind to explore further the intangible quality of an object
that conceals much of itself. Grace consists in the physiognomy and expres-
siveness that animate facial features, not in their proportion and symmetry.
(Marivaux’s theatrical heroines are never qualified as beautiful, but always as
aimables, that is, attractive, desirable.) Grace is a crucial force in an aesthet-
ics that places incompleteness above achievement, imperfection above perfec-
tion, suggestiveness over explicitness, and therefore may find attractiveness
156
and charm in ugliness rather than in beauty. Ugliness is a deviation from con-
ventional norms that catches the beholder unawares; by its effect of surprise,
it has a more powerful hold over the imagination than beauty because, like
the je ne sais quoi, it is mobile and intangible and stimulates the imagination
to discover the nature of its secret charm. Ugly women, writes Montesquieu,
are known to have far more grace than beautiful ones, and they are able to stir
the passions in more subtle and insidious ways (a fact consecrated today by
the expression jolie laide):
There is sometimes in people or things an invisible charm, a natural grace
that cannot be defined and that we have been forced to call the je ne sais
quoi. It seems to me that it is primarily an effect of surprise. We are stirred
by the fact that we like a person more than we thought we would at first;
we are pleasantly surprised to see that she has overcome some defects that
our eyes still see but our heart no longer believes. That is why ugly women
often have grace and beautiful ones rarely do. . . . That is why beautiful
women rarely excite intense passion. Passion is almost always reserved for
those who have grace.55
Admiration for beauty runs along the path of reason, but the sensual appeal
of the visually off-kilter is far more powerful because it runs counter to every-
thing we are taught to desire. In other words, it has an element of risk; it em-
bodies a victory for the unknown, as well as for originality and transgression.
The troubling seduction of irregular forms foreshadows, albeit in a different
key, an aesthetics based on a notion of the sublime as the terrible, the obscure,
and the monstrous.56
Marivaux’s essay on the je ne sais quoi is not a treatise like Bouhours’s
but an allegorical fable that, like the object it describes, suggests rather than
demonstrates. In the tradition of the allegorical voyage (like Madeleine de
Scudéry’s Carte de tendre), it presents a spatial fiction in which abstract con-
cepts are illustrated as a trajectory and the discovery of aesthetic pleasure is
presented as a process and a journey. The narrator first introduces us to the
garden of Beauty, who sits on a throne surrounded by her admirers, who are
entirely absorbed in the contemplation of her perfections: “All seemed to be
motionless, as if in ecstasy at the view of that woman seated on a throne.”57
Beauty is magnificent and admirable, but she is quite still, silent and ex-
pressionless. The admiration she summons in those who contemplate her
leaves them still and spellbound. But passive entrancement, no matter how
intense, cannot hold their attention for long. As ecstasy fades away after the
first effect of surprise, silent admiration gives way to boredom and disgust;
157
one by one, Beauty’s admirers get up and leave.58 The narrator follows them,
only to find that they have all rushed to the garden of the Je ne sais quoi. The
spectacle there is very different:
There was nothing special in that place, nothing was prearranged: every-
thing seemed left to chance. Disorder prevailed, but a disorder of the best
possible taste. It had a charming effect, but we could not determine nor
understand its cause. In other words, we yearned for nothing there; yet, one
would have thought that nothing was complete or that something that was
supposed to be there was not, since at every moment we saw that something
new was being brought in. Despite the fable that counts only three Graces,
there was there an infinite number of them, who while moving around were
working and touching up everywhere. I say moving around, since they were
constantly coming and going. They passed rapidly, succeeded one another,
never gave us time to know them well. They were there, but soon they were
gone, and others would take their place, only to be replaced in turn, and so
on. In a word, they were everywhere, but they stayed nowhere; we never saw
one, but one thousand.59
Marivaux manages to condense, in a short passage, the essence of his poetics

and of the goût moderne. Indeed, if it is true that the moderns suffer from the
lack of a clearly defined poetics, this text could make up for it, for this is as
close as one gets to a true manifesto.
The garden of the Je ne sais quoi, unlike that of Beauty, is most definitely
not a French garden; there are no symmetric alleyways and no geometrically
arranged parterres, only artful negligence and disorder. While Beauty is im-
mobile, the Je ne sais quoi is dynamic. Beauty offers herself to contemplation
and knowledge, whereas the Je ne sais quoi is invisible and ultimately unknow-
able. Beauty invites sudden enthusiasm; the Je ne sais quoi excites curiosity and
an ever-renewed desire. Beauty is absorbing, whereas the Je ne sais quoi elicits
inconstancy and forgetfulness, as new aspects of reality attract the attention of
the beholder. Beauty is one; the Je ne sais quoi, like the flickering light of papil-
lotage, is multiple and diverse. Beauty is unequivocally female, whereas the Je
ne sais quoi, which in French responds to a male pronoun, is an ambiguously
sexed creature whose erotic appeal transcends gender distinctions, or rather,
has an androgynous undertone. Beauty resides in absolutist pomp and author-
ity; royal, proud, and commanding, she summons attention and admiration
from her devotees. The Je ne sais quoi conceals itself and seduces without mak-
ing any explicit demands on its followers, who remain free to come and go as
they please. Beauty embodies the regularity of perfect proportions, symmetry,
158
and balance, while the Je ne sais quoi is always incomplete and perfectable:
“simple, negligent, irregular.”60 Beauty inhabits a timeless duration, but the
Je ne sais quoi presents itself as a quick succession of discrete moments, each
offering new and unexpected sensations; it inhabits time and history because
it unfolds as a series of distinct experiences vying with one another for the
beholder’s attention.61
As a matter of fact, the explorer in the garden of the Je ne sais quoi is not
purely a beholder: he is an active participant in an experience that transcends
visual contemplation and involves the totality of his mental, emotional, and
sexual faculties. Rather than being docilely carried away by an intense emo-
tional experience, the explorer in the garden of the Je ne sais quoi is always
exerted in an effort to grasp something that forever eludes him. Esprit, the
spark of dynamic intelligence, can only dwell in the realm of imperfection,
approximation, and desire that belongs to the Je ne sais quoi; it is exiled from
the presence of Beauty, whose perfect economy would be troubled by move-
ment and change: “Wishing that esprit would come and play on that beautiful
face is wishing to see her charm altered,” says Immobile Fierté, the handmaid
of Beauty; “a beautiful face is as achieved as it possibly can be; it can do no bet-
ter than remain as it is: the movement of esprit could only disturb its flawless
economy.”62 The Je ne sais quoi is the object of a quest involving the totality of
the passions that are solicited by the various art forms. From painting to ar-
chitecture to garden design to decoration and furniture, transcending all hier-
archy of arts and genres, what matters is the immersion in a multimedia world
of artistic expressions that lure the participants to the spectacle and captivate
them with their polymorphous appeal. Indeed, in the garden of the Je ne sais
quoi artistic experience is freed from all constraints of form and genre; art may
be found and enjoyed anywhere, in any manner one wishes, with a freedom
that eighteenth-century academic thinking would find quite unacceptable:
“You tell us, here I am, but you do not show yourself.” “And yet,” he [the Je
ne sais quoi] replied, “you see nothing but me. In that infinite array of attrac-
tions [grâces] that incessantly pass before your eyes, coming and going, all
different but all equally seductive, some more manly and others more ten-
der, look carefully: I am there. I am always there. In that painting that you
love so much, in those objects of all kinds that are so enjoyable to you, in the
vastness of the space you inhabit, in everything you perceive that is simple,
effortless, perhaps irregular, ornate, or unadorned, I am there to be seen, I
am the only source of its charm, I am all around you. Under the guise of the
seductive graces, I am the Je ne sais quoi that arouses the desire of both sexes;
159
here I am the Je ne sais quoi that delights in the art of painting, there the Je
ne sais quoi that gives pleasure in architecture, in decoration, in gardening,
in everything that may become an object of taste. Do not look for me under
one form: I have a thousand, and none is unchanging. That is why I may be
seen without being known, without being grasped or defined; people lose
sight of me even as they see me, they sense me without comprehending my
nature. You will always see me, always seek me out and never find me; that
is why you will never grow tired of me.”63
The contrast between the cold perfection of elegant Beauty and the unfinished
irregularity of the Je ne sais quoi is a prelude to a post-Longinian conception of
the sublime as an aesthetics of excess and energy, an experience of the bizarre
that transcends beauty and is more powerful than symmetry and regularity.
The aesthetics of the je ne sais quoi is grounded in an anthropology of the soul
that is based on inconstancy and that responds to an epistemology of confused
representation. According to such an epistemology, experience is a succession
of minute impressions, infinite in number, that are too small to incite our at-
tention or to be clearly and distinctly defined but that, taken together, reveal
the subconscious dynamics underlying sensation. In the preface to the New
Essays on Human Understanding Leibniz writes:
At every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions unaccompanied
by awareness or reflection; that is, of alterations in the soul itself, of which
we are unaware because these impressions are either too minute and too
numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive
on their own. But when they are combined with others, they do neverthe-
less have their effect and make themselves felt, at least confusedly, within
the whole. . . . These minute perceptions, then, are more effective in their
results than has been recognized. They constitute that je ne sais quoi, those
flavours, those images of sensible qualities, vivid in the aggregate but con-
fused as to the parts; those impressions which are made on us by the bodies
around us and which involve the infinite; that connection that each being
has with all the rest of the universe. It can even be said that by virtue of
these minute perceptions the present is big with the future and burdened
with the past.64
The soul is agitated by a constant movement that escapes the understanding
but drives the mind to flee from the awareness of the present moment toward
an ever-elusive future that stands in a continuum with the immediate past.
Minute perceptions are thus correlative of “minute appetitions” or “minute
solicitations” that “determine our behavior without our thinking of it.” This
description owes much to the Augustinian conception of the passions, which
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involves something close to a theory of the unconscious, with its belief in the
existence of imperceptible ideas. Those minute perceptions account for the
dynamics of the soul, which wavers, unaware of its own affects, between sin-
ful temptation and God’s grace. Pierre Nicole, the secretary and collaborator
of Antoine Arnauld (a correspondent of Leibniz’s) and the author of the very
popular Essais de morale, argued that the soul receives a confused impression
of the passions that are conveyed by the fictions and the spectacles that are
constantly foisted on it.65 Because of its limited faculties, the soul is not always
clearly and distinctly aware of the imperceptible impressions that drive it to
act.66 Such unawareness is also operative in the realm of taste and aesthetic
pleasure, which is ruled by desire. Nicole thus describes the effects of a je ne
sais quoi that is all the more powerful because it is indistinct:
We may say that books are collections of ideas and that each book is, as it
were, double, because it imprints in the mind two sorts of ideas. It imprints
fully formed ideas, conceived and expressed distinctly. But it also imprints
another kind of ideas, composed of indistinct thoughts that we feel but are
unable to express. As a rule, it is in those stimulating but unformulated
thoughts that consists the beauty of writing. . . . The mind yields to an idea
by virtue of a principle that it senses only, though it is the foundation of
its approval; those principles often include other ideas whose extension is
indeterminate, so that should they be clad in words, they would be acknowl-
edged by no one.67
The fictional text seduces not only by the clarity of its argument but also
through the unconscious inscription of a desire conveyed by the combina-
tory and associative power of figurative language, a desire that carries both
the writer and the reader, despite themselves, beyond the perceptible and de-
finable meaning of the written word. In expanding and possibly deviating
comprehension, in completing what has been left unsaid, or in supplement-
ing it, desire composes its own text. (It is worth noting that Diderot’s account
of Richardson’s text’s germinating in the reader’s mind owes a great deal to
Nicole’s account of the subliminal, unconscious inscription of textual desire:
“Richardson plants in the heart seeds of virtue, which at first remain idle and
inactive; they remain hidden until the right moment comes, which shakes
them up and brings them to fruition.”68 The difference, of course, is that for
Diderot such influence is not malevolent but beneficial.)
The action-oriented drive exercised by confused ideas is rooted in the Au-
gustinian conception of postlapsarian desire, or more precisely, in the notion
of a fundamental inquiétude, the soul’s restless drive toward new objects and
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goals, its flight from what it already possesses toward something unknown that
it yearns to reach. Malebranche grounds the mobility of the ever-desiring soul
in the imperfection of our nature, which enables the soul to entertain only a
confused knowledge of the ultimate good that would set its will at rest:
Thus, with the will always parched by a burning thirst, always driven by
anxieties and desires for the good it does not possess, it cannot comfortably
allow the mind to dwell for any time over abstract truths that do not affect it
and that it judges incapable of making it happy. Thus, it continuously urges
the mind to consider other objects. . . . But since the emptiness of created
things cannot fill the infinite capacity of man’s heart, these trifling pleasures,
instead of quenching its thirst, only aggravate it and give the soul the vain
and foolish hope of being satisfied by the multiplicity of terrestrial pleasures.
This leads to a further inconstancy and inconceivable weakness on the part
of the mind whose duty it is to find these goods for the soul.69
Malebranche portrays inquiétude as a painful flight from object to object
in which the soul is dragged from one disappointment to the next by a restless
will that always hopes to find satisfaction in the object it has yet to possess. But
nothing so wrenching ever happens to Marivaux’s voyager in the garden of the
Je ne sais quoi. Though his quest is repeatedly frustrated, he finds no torment
in it. “It is true that we enjoy seeking him; though we ardently wish to see him,
we are not distressed for not knowing where he is; should we never find him,
we are determined always to look for him.”70 The voyager’s pleasure comes
from a suspension of his desire, from the delayed fulfillment of his search
and the expectation of a pleasure to come. For the whole endgame of desire is
desire itself. In this recognition of the open-endedness of desire, Marivaux is
closer to the abbé Bouhours than to Malebranche. In his account of the je ne
sais quoi, the former puts a positive spin on the inquiétude that spurs the other
passions and engenders an anthropology of instability and yearning:
The je ne sais quoi is the object of most of our passions. Besides love and
aversion—which set in motion all the movements of our heart—desire and
hope, which take up the totality of man’s life, have no other foundation. For
we always desire, and we always hope. There always will be something ahead
of the goal that we have set for us, some uncertain aspiration that we never
reach and that becomes the source of our restlessness in the enjoyment of
the things that we most ardently wished for.71
In a similar mood, rather than attributing uneasiness to the imperfection and

the errors of our nature, Leibniz, following Bouhours in his account of minute
perceptions, considers inquiétude, not as a perverse effect of our fallen condi-
162
tion, but as a quality highly compatible with the realization of happiness in

the realm of human interest:
If you take “uneasiness” or disquiet to be a genuine displeasure, then I do
not agree that it is all that spurs us on. What usually drives us are those
minute insensible perceptions which could be called sufferings that we can-
not become aware of, if the notion of suffering did not involve awareness.
These minute impulses consist in our continually overcoming small obsta-
cles—our nature labours at this without our thinking about it. . . . Far from
such disquiet being inconsistent with happiness, I find that it is essential to
the happiness of created beings; their happiness never consists in a complete
attainment, which would make then insensate and stupefied, but in a con-
tinual and uninterrupted progress towards greater goods.72
Therefore, it does not matter whether the explorer in the garden gets any-
where at all. What matters most is striving toward some goal; as in window-
shopping, which was taking hold at that time, the pleasure of wandering
through the garden and dividing one’s attention among its multiple appeals,
being immersed in a total spectacle that “connect[ed] each being with all the
rest of the universe,” was more enjoyable than the endgame.73 What the garden
offers to the explorer is a narrative with no preordained unity and no ending,
a narrative whose fragments may be put together and rearranged by the audi-
ence, which is invited to search for any hidden meanings and to reconstitute
the narrative’s secret chain. In Marivaux’s cognitive world there is no drive to-
ward a timeless transcendence that would set the mind at rest, but rather the
appreciation of the minute but multiple possibilities offered by the hic et nunc,
by the manifestations of an ephemeral reality that is loved precisely because of
its mortality. The elusiveness of the object represented is as much a function
of its dynamic, transformative nature (vivacité) as it is a function of reticence,
of a capacity to mask itself, of suggesting that its representation is further to be
perfected. Desire draws on itself, on the mind’s effort to grasp the nature of the
unknown: “If a thought or an emotion has too much energy to be adequately
expressed, this same thought may be conveyed clearly within the degree of
meaning proper to suggest the whole range of its indefinable vivacity.”74
Thus the aesthetics of esprit stimulates the reader’s desire and induces him
to complete what the author has left unsaid. The audience is not passively car-
ried away by the passions raised by the writer; rather, it is a participant in the
search for meaning. “We need a penetrating mind in order to make way into
the author’s conception: merely understanding his words does not enable us
fully to comprehend him. We need to create with him [il faut composer avec lui]
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and to gather, from what he has not said what he has left unsaid.”75 Meaning
emerges dynamically as a process, as an open-ended search that is dependent
as much on the finesse of the author as on that of the reader: both bring to the
experience an equal share of curiosity, desire, and critical attention. Let us look
at the way Bouhours defines this relationship in the quality of tenuity and agil-
ity of thought and expression (délicatesse), which belongs to the semantic scope
of esprit:
When you ask me what is a pensée délicate, I do not know where to find
the words to explain it. There are things that are difficult to see all at once
and so tenuous that they slip away when we think we are holding them. All
we can do is look closely, again and again, so as to come gradually to know
them. . . . We need, I believe, to reflect upon the délicatesse that pertains
to works of art by comparison with that which belongs to works of nature.
The most delicate are those in which Nature took pleasure in working on a
minute scale, whose barely perceptible substance makes us wonder whether
she wanted to show or hide her skill, such as a perfectly formed insect, all
the more admirable as it is less discernible, as Pliny says. Let us say, by anal-
ogy, that a thought that has délicatesse is contained in a few words and that
its meaning is not discernible nor emphatic. It seems as if it were partially
concealed so that we might seek it out and guess its nature, as if it peeked
through so as to allow us the pleasure of discovering it, provided we had
taste and discernment [esprit]. For just as we need magnifying lenses and
microscopes in order to perceive the masterpieces of Nature, so it belongs
only to people who are intelligent and enlightened to penetrate the meaning
of a delicate thought in its entirety. This small mystery is like the soul and
the délicatesse of thought, so that those that have nothing mysterious either
in their subject matter or in their phrasing, that are plain at first sight, are
not delicate, though they may be clever. We may therefore conclude that
délicatesse adds a je ne sais quoi to the sublime and the pleasurable and that
thoughts that are only impressive or agreeable resemble those heroines and
shepherdesses of novels, who wear on their face neither a mask nor a veil:
their entire beauty leaps into view.76
Renouncing all claims of authority over his interlocutor, Philante, Eudoxe
makes a gracious show of his awkwardness in an effort to lend to his treatise the
extemporaneous quality of conversation: “I do not know whether I am mak-
ing myself clear; I almost do not understand myself, and at all moments I am
afraid of getting lost in my ruminations.”77 But more important, the speaker’s
show of humility invites his interlocutor to come to his aid: clarity of discourse
is not a precondition but rather the end point of a shared quest. “Delicacy” of
thought in matters of the aesthetic imagination is explained by analogy with
164
the works of nature. The infinitely small invites the scientific mind to sharpen
its powers of observation with the help of special instruments of vision, but
delicacy of thought is associated less with smallness than with the elusiveness
of those objects that do not rise to awareness but are concealed from the curi-
ous and penetrating mind. Rhetoric masks meaning so as to stimulate curi-
osity and intellectual effort, for the understanding goes along with the will,
which is fundamentally inconstant. The resistance encountered in the reticent
object stimulates the mind, just as the masking of the heroine’s face is a pow-
erful erotic stimulant.
Délicatesse is the masking and unmasking of thought, which reveals itself
progressively. That is quite different from Diderot’s description of philosophi-
cal délicatesse, which we have encountered above. To Diderot, philosophy re-
quired “a scrupulous attention, a timid cautiousness, a habit of reflection that
does not agree with the warmth of the imagination.”78 But to Bouhours, intel-
lectual curiosity is not timid and cold, and it is not divorced from the passions.
Knowledge is not split from desire and the imagination.
The teasing appeal of masked thought is nowhere more apparent than in
the work of Montesquieu, in his rejection of the geometrical and deductive
order, of the unbroken chain of demonstrative reasoning, in favor of appar-
ent disorder, discontinuity, and ellipsis. “But one must not always so exhaust
a subject that one leaves nothing for the reader to do. It is not a question of
making him read but of making him think.”79 In a similar mood, Dufresny
had observed that “a thought should never be so complete that it will leave
nothing to think about.”80 Montesquieu relies upon the use of reticence: the
written words lead to what he has left for the reader to complete and fulfill.
In Montesquieu’s writing the dynamism of esprit reveals its full heuristic po-
tential, and délicatesse becomes a regime for liberating the mind from the tyr-
anny of argumentation and from the hold of an authority that relies upon the
seamless texture of commonplace. Suggestiveness is pedagogically more effec-
tive than explicitness: the reader has to reconstitute the interrupted chain of
thought, “a secret, and, as it were, unknown, chain.”81 If frustration should set
in, that is the price to pay for his intellectual emancipation, though President
Hénault skeptically observed that “the writer gives far too much credit to the
reader’s intelligence.”82
Esprit is thus neither in the writer nor in the reader exclusively, but between
the writer and the reader, as a result of their encounter and their common
endeavor. It is not simply the transmission of a clear and distinct message de-
scending from above with philosophical authority, nor is it the experience of
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an all-consuming emotion. It is a journey in which reaching a destination is

less urgent than exploring the circuitous paths that lead to it. The narrator of
Pharsamon, prefiguring that of Jacques le fataliste, suasively invited the reader
to follow him on a voyage that could lead them anywhere or nowhere at all.
“Follow me, dear reader. To tell you the truth, I do not know where I am go-
ing, but let that be the pleasure of the voyage.”83
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6 Between Paris and Rome
Montesquieu’s Poetry of History
Montesquieu, a man superior for his ingenious and profound ideas,

glowing with a light that dazzled him, has been unable to discipline his
talent according to the necessary order and method.
—Voltaire
We shall prove . . . that Montesquieu is nothing but a bel esprit.

—Diderot
Genre Bending
When Montesquieu published his inelegantly titled Considérations sur les
causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Amsterdam, 1734), the
republic of letters was not unanimously impressed. Voltaire, always exquisitely
attuned to the ebb and flow of the reputation of his rivals (anybody vying for
public attention was his rival), welcomed it as a promise of Montesquieu’s
own decadence: “Have you seen the little and too little book writ by Montes-
quieu on the decadence of the Empire?” he wrote to Thieriot. “They call it
the decadence of Montesquieu. . . . There are many things in it which deserve
to be read and that makes me angry with the author for having so lightly
treated of so great a matter. This book is full of hints, is less a book than an
ingenious table des matières writ in an odd style.”1 To Voltaire, who Diderot
once said wrote history “as the great sculptors of antiquity created portraits.
He enlarges, he exaggerates, he corrects the forms,” Montesquieu’s own brand
of history writing must have seemed disconcerting indeed.2 In the rapid fire
167
of twenty-three short chapters Montesquieu covered the whole parable of the

Roman adventure, from its humble beginnings, when the city was but a few
wooden huts on the Tiber, to the waning days of Byzantium, when the empire
dwindled to Constantinople and its suburbs. To be sure, conciseness per se was
not necessarily seen as a fault. Fénelon, for one, had recommended that the
historian avoid “insignificant events” and that he follow “a single, energetic,
narrative line.”3 Relying upon the authority of Cicero (“Nothing is more en-
joyable in history than a pure and splendid brevity”),4 Fénelon had absolved
the historian from dependence upon too scrupulous a respect for scholarly
details or, God forbid, pedantic antiquarianism: “We ought to abandon that
superstitious meticulousness to compilers. The main point is to let the reader
get immediately to the thick of the matter, to explain the connections and
to hasten to the denouement.”5 But Montesquieu had followed that advice
too closely: the book was scandalously short. True enough, its author was fa-
miliar with myriad ancient historians, canonical and not—from Polybius to
Denis of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Titus-Livius, Sallustius, Suetonius, Tacitus,
Frontinus, Flavius Josephus, Dion Cassius, Appian, Florus, Pausanias, Procopius,
and others—as well as with an inordinate number of obscure Byzantine chron-
iclers; the work was packed with references to their oeuvre, with quotations
and excerpts. However, it also displayed a certain high-handedness toward the
fledgling science of archaeology and a tendency to disregard historical accu-
racy. The most blatant example was Montesquieu’s reliance upon the legend
of the kings of Rome at a time when the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles
Lettres had raised serious doubts about it, with the works of Lévesque de
Pouilly and later of Louis de Beaufort.6
But it was not for its brevity nor for its eccentric erudition that readers took
issue with the essay. The work was perceived as baffling on other grounds. If
Fénelon had freed the historian from the strictures of erudition, it was for a
reason, namely, so that he could devote all his attention and skill to weaving
the events into a seamless narrative:
History must resemble an epic poem. . . . In order to get to this beautiful

orderliness, the historian must embrace the totality of the period he is con-
cerned with. He must see it as a whole and at one glance. He must highlight
its unity and draw from a single source, so to speak, all the principal events
that derive from it. By so doing, he will instruct his reader with profit and
interest, he will give him the pleasure of making predictions, and he will put
the entire system before his eyes.7
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Between Paris and Rome
The task of the historian was to instruct and enlighten the reader with an
inspiring tale invested with a high moral content. The tale had a plot with a
beginning, a middle, and an end; like an epic poem, it was a celebration of
national pride. History was eloquence: it appealed to the audience’s passions,
and it induced awe at the grand spectacle of God finally putting human affairs
in order. No matter how much toil and struggle nations must endure, history
always resulted in an order that was to some a theodicy and to others, such as
Voltaire, the triumph of reason and progress. “It is history,” wrote Fénelon,
“that shows us the great examples, that turns the vices of the bad into instruc-
tion for the good, that disentangles the origins and explains the roads that
peoples have taken in order to pass from one form of government to another.”8
History was pedagogical and exemplary, intended primarily for the instruction
of princes but also for that of ordinary citizens:
The advantage of history consists in the comparison that a statesman or a
citizen may make between foreign laws and customs and his own. That is
what induces modern nations to compete in the arts, in commerce, and
agriculture. The great mistakes of the past are useful in all respects, and the
importance of putting before our eyes the crimes and the misery caused by
absurd quarrels cannot be overemphasized. I am confident that by refreshing
the memory of those quarrels we may prevent their renewal. . . . Examples
have a great effect on the mind of a prince who reads them carefully.9
In the same vein, another great orator turned historian, the bishop Jacques-
Bénigne Bossuet, the author of a universal history destined for the instruction
of the Dauphin, the slow-witted son of Louis XIV, had vaunted, with the
tone of an expert puppeteer addressing his fairgrounds audience, the beautiful
completeness of the vast spectacle of history that, in the pen of a skillful writer,
unfolded for the edification of a riveted audience:
Such a digest, Monseigneur, offers you a grand spectacle. You may see the
past centuries unfold, so to speak, before your eyes: see how the empires
succeed one another and how religion, in its different manifestations, holds
sway from the beginning of time to our own time. . . . Seeing everything
included in an abridged version, discovering its order and progress, is to
comprehend everything that is great among men and to hold the thread of
all the events in the universe.10
But Montesquieu’s Roman history did not offer the comfort of a familiar,
overarching narrative; events did not unfold like the uninterrupted links in a
chain; the reader did not feel that he was given to hold the thread connecting
169
the rise and fall of empires across the ages. Indeed, Montesquieu was suspi-
cious of grand narratives and exemplary tales. “History has been written like
tragedy, with a unity of action that readers appreciate because it gives them
cheap emotions and because it seems to instruct them without any effort of
memory and judgement,” he wrote in his notebooks.11 History writing after
his own heart did not turn the reader into the passive recipient of an engross-
ing spectacle. Unlike tragedy or epics, his own history had no apparent unity
of action and no reassuring denouement. It gave the audience plenty of things
to mull over, perhaps too many, according to some. His essay on the Romans
bypassed many of the traditional vantage points of Roman historiography; it
followed unfamiliar pathways and rearranged the events along new axes.
For instance, Montesquieu ignored or underplayed the two major mile-
stones that had been central in virtually all traditional historiography of Rome:
the Augustan empire and the emergence of Christianity, which were causally
related in most providential accounts of Rome (such as Bossuet’s, Rollin’s, and
Lenain de Tillemont’s). The triumph of the true faith had been, of course, the
focal point of Bossuet’s universal history, but Montesquieu treated the rise of
Christianity as just another step in the dissolution of the original Roman spirit
and a move toward decadence. The foreign faith, together with the universal
right of citizenship, contributed to its alienation: “Rome was no longer mis-
tress of the world, but received laws from the entire universe. . . . That, apart
from the secret means God chooses and that he alone knows, did much for
the establishment of the Christian religion. For there was no longer anything
foreign in the empire, and people were prepared to accept all the customs an
emperor might wish to introduce.”12 The Christian emperors, from Constan-
tine to Justinian, showcased disastrous policies, corruption, and tyrannical
rule. In contrast, Montesquieu had nothing but praise for Julian the Apostate,
who was usually the object of the contempt of the faithful. Absent or given
passing mention are the great figures of the vertu des païens, the self-sacrificing
heroes displayed in all Christian reappropriations of Stoic virtue, as well as the
matinée idols of civic republicanism, the two Brutuses (of Brutus the tyranni-
cide, whom Rousseau venerated, and Pompey we learn only that they “killed
themselves with inexcusable precipitation”);13 Coriolanus, Regulus, and Scipio
the African, on whom Bossuet duly reports,14 are all shamefully absent. Even
more surprising, the notorious Tarquinius, the last of the kings who, as legend
had it, single-handedly discredited the monarchy in the eyes of the Romans, is
given a sort of rehabilitation. Montesquieu also devotes much attention to the
great men who resisted Rome: Hannibal and Mithridates each get their own
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chapter, and the Barbarian Attila, who ravaged Rome, is described in a chapter
provocatively titled “Attila’s Greatness” as “one of the greatest monarchs that
history has ever mentioned.”15
The most glaring gap in the book, and the one that sets it apart from the
historiography of Montesquieu’s time, is the refusal to pay homage to, or even
simply to acknowledge, Roman culture, the extraordinary flourishing of letters
and manners that reached its apex during the reign of Augustus. No previous
French account of Rome, from Guez de Balzac to Saint-Evremond to Bossuet
to Voltaire, had failed to glorify it. Montesquieu refuses to indulge in the myth
of a cultural translatio imperii, which had seduced all the apologists of le Grand
Siècle, all the writers who had equated the cultural achievements of the age of
Augustus with those of the age of Louis XIV.16 He is silent on the culture of ur-
banitas, the founding myth of French sociability, and the pivotal axis of Guez
de Balzac’s attempt to transplant the flower of Roman eloquence to the soil of
French absolutist, polite society. In his letters and discourses Guez de Balzac
had lovingly polished the image of a refined and sociable Rome, in which mili-
tary virtues were not incompatible with a taste for the arts and Roman generals
were so dashing that they would have cut a nice figure in contemporary French
salons:
The Senate and the military campaigns, the civil and the martial affairs had
their season; conversation, theater, and poetry had theirs. The pleasures of
good taste were never enjoyed more, and the same hand that had won a war
and signed the destiny of nations would write a comedy or applaud those
who played them. Every day did not bring with it a Hannibal to defeat or an
Africa to subjugate. Anthony and Pompey’s sons only died once. After that
came that general quietness during which the most agitated became idle and
everybody yielded to a government that was as serene as a family.17
But Montesquieu is deeply distrustful of the Pax Romana, the “general quiet-
ness” that oversaw the flourishing of urbanitas. His disapproval of Augustus’s
soft despotism (“Augustus, a scheming tyrant, conducted [the Romans] gently
to servitude”)18 is matched only by his contempt for Louis XIV, whom Vol-
taire had hailed—together with Augustus—as one of the representatives of the
“four happy ages” of history, “those in which the arts have been perfected and
which, serving as the epitome of the grandeur of the human spirit, are an ex-
ample to posterity.”19 By contrast, Montesquieu finds little to admire in Louis
le Grand and in the imperial dream that fostered his policies: “He seemed to
have power only for ostentation: everything was empty swaggering with him,
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even his politics. . . . In a century and a part of the world in which heroism had
become impossible Louis XIV had the foible to pursue it.”20 Both reigns were
characterized by a despotism that concealed its grip under the veil of an all-
pervading ideology conveyed by a strictly controlled propaganda: “Augustus
(this is the name flattery gave Octavius) established order—that is, a durable
servitude. For in a free state in which sovereignty has just been usurped, what-
ever can establish the unlimited authority of one man is called good order, and
whatever can maintain the honest liberty of the subjects is called commotion,
dissension, or bad government.”21
Rather than lingering on the cultural achievements of Roman writers and
orators (with whom Montesquieu nonetheless was intimately familiar and
whom he ardently admired, as is apparent everywhere in his notebooks), Mon-
tesquieu represents Romans as a rough and crude people ideally equipped for
predation and dominion. The book is more an essay on the anthropology of
power than a satisfied look at one’s roots, at our-ancestors-the-Romans (un-
surprising, perhaps, for an admirer of Boulainvilliers). Montesquieu gives the
much-celebrated “sublime and eloquent” simplicity of the ancients, highly
prized by writers from Fénelon to Voltaire, an entirely new spin that prefig-
ures Nietzsche’s account of master morality: “Simplicity (and scarce culture
of the mind) is good for victory; witness the early Romans, the Tartars, the
Arabs.”22 The citizens of the Roman republic, he suggests, were drawn to ac-
tion because of the simplicity, the narrowness, and the unreflectiveness of their
moral motivations, which led them toward a single goal instead of, as in the
case of the moderns, a multiplicity of small, conflicting goals. Their “virtue”
was an action-oriented passion endowed with “force” and directness and hence
with strong creativity.23 Montesquieu was apparently drawn to the Romans
for reasons similar to those that drew Rousseau: both argued that the ancients
embodied the ideal of a society in which sovereignty was achieved effortlessly
and unselfconsciously. Both saw in the classical polis an organic and harmoni-
ous community with no division of functions and labor, in which moeurs and
customs had the same efficacy as laws, the political order reflected the ethical
order of personal conduct, and the duties of public life merged harmoniously
with those of the private sphere, with no conflict and no division within the
self.
Unlike Rousseau, however, Montesquieu’s Considerations do not hide his
revulsion at the Romans’ cruelty, untrustworthiness, greed, and predatory
impulses. In the Considerations virtue comes the closest to the etymological
root of virtus, that is, sheer force, drive, energy: “Each Roman, more robust
172
and belligerent than his opponent, always relied on himself. Courage—the

virtue which is the consciousness of one’s own strength—came to him natu-
rally.”24 The Romans are able to master themselves and to weed out all the
impulses that are not necessary to their survival and to their continuous, lim-
itless growth. Their organic, synthetic society is composed of a few cohesive
parts and does not allow for the free growth of complex individuals; their ter-
rible simplicity of purpose is achieved thanks to a history in which they had
to struggle against forces that threatened their survival: “But, always striving
and always meeting obstacles, Rome made its power felt without being able to
extend it, and, within a very small orbit, practiced the virtues which were to be
so fatal to the universe.”25 Despite several portraits of strong individuals, such
as Cato, Caesar, and Sylla, one is struck by the intent to represent the Romans
as a single, collective body composed of many simple elements devoid of an
inner life and of the peculiarities of individual character.26 That is so crucial to
Montesquieu that for him the decline of the Roman state coincides precisely
with the dissolution of the public spirit resulting from the incorporation of
new, foreign elements into the city, which fragmented the original unity of
its collective génie: “After this, Rome was no longer a city whose people had
but a single spirit, a single love of liberty, a single hatred of tyranny. . . . Once
the peoples of Italy became its citizens, each city brought to Rome its genius,
its particular interests. . . . The city, torn apart, no longer formed a complete
whole. . . . The people no longer saw Rome with the same eyes, no longer had
the same love of the Patrie, and Roman sentiments were no more.”27
Elsewhere, and particularly in De l’esprit des lois, Montesquieu emphasizes
virtue’s sacrificial component as an aspect of the Christianized heroic ideal
that was fostered upon young pupils by education in the Jesuit and Orato-
rian colleges. According to that portrayal, virtue presents some similarities not
only with Corneille’s representation of glory but also with Augustinian charity.
Virtue is a selfless investment of energy in an object that overrides any nar-
row self-interest: “In order to be a good man, one must have the intention of
being one and love the state less for oneself than for itself.”28 That is not so in
the Considerations, where virtue is described in a very unchristian and unhe-
roic way. There the strength of Roman virtue lies in the absence, not of selfish
drives, but of any incompatibility between the selfish drives (the calculation of
utility) and devotion to public welfare. In other words, the early Romans did
not differentiate between their personal, individual interest and that of their
nation, because they did not perceive themselves as separate beings, indepen-
dent of the community. Indeed, the Romans were just as selfish and greedy as
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the moderns, in fact even more so, but the civil and military organization of
the republic was such that it was able to integrate those vices and put them in
the service of the public. Moral life was continuous with economic and politi-
cal life, and the good of the individual merged into that of the state. (That
admirable integration collapsed under the empire, when corruption and greed
disintegrated Roman society and institutions.) Qualities like heroism, cour-
age, and endurance were coextensive with the material conditions of survival
and economic growth: the apparent sacrifice of self-love, family affections, and
private feelings to the state was in reality a way to preserve those affections,
because without the survival of the state there would have been no family and
no private life at all. The Roman republic demonstrates how powerful the
passions can be when they are directed toward a unique goal: “There is noth-
ing so powerful as a republic in which the laws are observed not through fear,
not through reason, but through passion—which was the case with Rome
and Lacedaemon; for then, to the wisdom of a good government is joined all
the strength a faction could have.”29 The fearsome discipline of the Roman
armies was the result of their utter lack of an independent spirit (we would say
individualism), something the barbarians, who had a regrettable tendency to
switch loyalties in the midst of battle, had in plenty.30
It was noted by Montesquieu’s contemporaries that the Considerations
aimed at debunking the Roman myth and scaling it down. Mathieu Marais
wrote to President Bouhier, “People say that . . . the Romans are very badly
treated and that he [Montesquieu] portrays those ancient rulers of the universe
as scoundrels without virtue.”31 If that were true, it would hardly have been
original. Many had trodden on that path before Montesquieu, from the cheva-
lier de Méré, who saw in Roman majesty nothing but “the avarice of conceited
bourgeois,” to Saint-Evremond, who reduced awe-inspiring republican virtue
to the more familiar, far less heroic terms of modern amour-propre, to Voltaire,
who debunked Roman patriotism in his Essai sur les moeurs: “That love of
country consisted, for more than four hundred years, in bringing back to the
communal booty whatever had been plundered from other nations: it was the
virtue of bandits.”32 What is more, both Saint-Evremond and Voltaire showed
a desire to weed out the ancient myths and fables and to unearth the facts that
lay buried beneath age-old layers of prejudice, ideology, and fantastic story-
telling.33 “I hate that admiration founded upon fables and established through
the errors of false judgement,” declared Saint-Evremond; “there are so many
authentic things to admire among the Romans that we spoil them when we
fall for tall tales. To purge them of that sterile wonder is to honor them.”34 As
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for Voltaire, he had little patience with vestal virgins and the Capitol’s watchful
geese.35
But Montesquieu’s Roman history is not simply a debunking of myths;
such a skeptical, enlightened project is undoubtedly present in this work, but
it is not foremost. It is true that its methodology may be described as a product
of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu wishes to set things straight, to establish
the validity of evidence culled from multiple sources and documents, to ex-
amine the facts in light of conflicting interpretations, to balance carefully con-
siderations about the political culture of the Romans with military, economic,
and legal evidence. He sets one historian against another with little regard
for the pieties of established tradition. Much of Montesquieu’s writing in the
Considerations is aglow with underlying polemics with other historians, who,
he suggests, use uncritically a language imbued with an ideology that must be
exposed and analyzed. It is also well known that this essay is Montesquieu’s
first systematic attempt to come up with a theory of historical causality that
would place the apparent randomness of particular events in the wider context
of cultural and political evolution—a kind of longue durée. The focus on this
double logic of causation, which allowed Montesquieu to distinguish between
general causes (causes générales or causes éloignées) and particular events (acci-
dents particuliers or causes occasionnelles), did earn him the approval of nine-
teenth-century positivists, who praised him for producing a “philosophy of
history,” or a work in which “the historian focuses on what is truly general in
history: the chain of probable causes and probable effects.”36 In a similar vein,
d’Alembert had written approvingly that Montesquieu “might have entitled
his book A Roman History Intended for Statesmen and Philosophes.”37
Nothing, however, could be further removed from Montesquieu’s sensitiv-
ity than such a depersonalized, disengaged assessment of historical causality.
D’Alembert would have been more correct had he suggested that this strange
and genre-bending book be named A Roman History Intended for Poets. For
what Montesquieu pursues here is not simply a critical reflection on Roman
historiography from the Latin sources to his own time. What he strives to
achieve is a definition of the role and the significance of “antiquity” for the
moderns: how to define the kernel of that elusive, fascinating, and notoriously
controversial ideal that was very much alive in the Enlightenment, in the on-
going quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.
Montesquieu, the quintessentially modern author of the Persian Letters, the
bel esprit whom his friend Mme de Tencin used to call “my little Roman,” was
drawn to the wonder of a world larger than life that he grew up admiring. A
175
student of the Oratorian College of Juilly, he was steeped in the knowledge

of antiquity, in Greek and Latin; the first manuscript we have by his hand is
a Historia romana, a rhetorical exercise in Latin, written in his early teens,
that records the boy’s wonder at the cruelty of the dictator Sylla. “The history
of the Roman Empire is what deserves our attention the most,” wrote Vol-
taire in the Encyclopédie, “because the Romans have been our masters and our
legislators.”38 More fundamentally, Montesquieu shows that it was through
awareness of the ancients that the moderns had constructed an identity for
themselves; it was antiquity that had revealed modernity to itself: “As soon as
we started reading the ancients and we spent one century commenting and
translating them, . . . we saw the moderns emerge.”39
In the Considerations Montesquieu confronts the ancients on their own
ground, as a civilization, as a myth very much alive in the modern world,
and above all as an aesthetics and a body of literature. The Considerations rep-
resent a tour de force insofar as they manage to combine a variety of modes
and genres that would otherwise seem incompatible. They are a reflection on
historical causality; they take a critical, enlightened approach toward historio-
graphical myths and stereotypes; they are the celebration of political liberty,
both ancient and modern; and finally, they are the rewriting or appropriation,
in a modern language and style, of a vast body of historical literature in Latin
and Greek. Each chapter is based on the work of one or more ancient histori-
ans, which Montesquieu sometimes transcribes, at other times reformulates in
his own terms.
Such rewriting involves far more than simply putting one’s sources to schol-
arly use. The Considerations are a mosaic assembling the many vestiges and
ruins transmitted by antiquity, integrating them into a unique style that was
distinctive enough to deserve blame for being “peculiar” and “original” (a de-
scription that was not intended as complimentary) and thoroughly modern.
Indeed, this work is an example of that rich, erudite palimpsest literature that
alternated literary homage and lampooning of ancient models, a literature in
search of itself, which could invent itself only through critical confrontation
with previous discourses. Montesquieu’s work, however, is neither adaptation
(like La Motte’s) nor parodical rewriting, but appropriation. His intent is to
recreate the passion, the movement, and the energy of the ancient texts (much
as Diderot was hoping to do) and through them to recapture the movement
of the Roman adventure in all the awe and horror it inspires. In so doing, he
turns historical analysis into a kind of poetry. But he does not espouse the
classicist tendency to rework the fragments of antiquity into a new totality
176
glorifying the French monarchy or its culture. Montesquieu refuses to pro-

duce a continuous narrative endowed with the completeness of a divine, or
state-inspired, teleology. Rather, he reworks those texts so as to disassemble
previous narratives and question the tenets of contemporary historians and
theoreticians of absolutism. His own history—provocative, fragmentary, and
disconcerting—sets the stage for a radical questioning of the meaning of an-
cient and modern liberty and for a confrontation between the ancient sublime
and the taste of the moderns, the much-reviled goût moderne.
Sublime Saillies
Montesquieu’s contemporaries, however, accustomed as they were to a differ-
ent historiographical style, were for the most part bewildered by what they saw
as a dangerous contamination of eloquence by a misuse of esprit, which had its
place in the literature of petit-goût and in galanterie but not in history writing,
which demanded a dignified and stately pace. Upon the publication of the
Considerations one reader commented typically:
People find his ideas obscure; that may be an effect of the discontinuous
style [style coupé] that he affects. There are many a capite, and at every step
we may say, borrowing Quintilian’s expression, that it is soluta oratio, et e
singulis non membris sed frustis conlata. That lack of connections is taxing to
the mind. Such a style may be appropriate to maxims, to meditations, or to
histoires galantes. But a book that reasons and argues, that embraces a system
and requires the laying out of principles, cannot accommodate such fits and
starts. What it needs is something more cushioned [moelleux].40
Indeed, there was very little moelleux in the Considerations, and readers felt
that something had hit them very hard. They found little to caress the ear
and coddle the understanding into that happy “discovery of connections” that
Fénelon and Bossuet had made the hallmark of good historical writing; there
was none of the continuous, harmonious, and gradual development of an un-
broken train of ideas that to Buffon revealed in a discourse the same texture as
in the works of nature.41 Instead of finding connections, they complained of
interruptions, gaps, and obscurity in the fast-paced sentences and chapters.
The accusation of indulging in esprit was to accompany Montesquieu
throughout his career and thereafter. Toward the end of the century Louis-
Sébastien Mercier would thus preface his play Montesquieu à Marseille, in which
he did his best to cleanse his hero of all traces of bel esprit: “The physiognomy of
Montesquieu considered as a writer has something peculiar [singulier] and hard
177
to pin down: precision, agility, depth—he covers all that with a veil of enigma;
his thought is far-reaching and his phrase short, discontinuous even. Momen-
tous ideas are presented as epigrams; he is solid, yet he constantly sharpens his
style as if he were nothing but a bel esprit.”42 In Antoine-Léonard Thomas’s
inaugural address to the French Academy in 1767 his Ubuesque eulogy of the
historical writings of his predecessor, Jacques Hardion, the author of a twenty-
volume universal history, was a barely disguised censure of Montesquieu. No
one could miss the many allusions: energy, rapidity, lack of transitions, reti-
cence, subtlety, and an insightfulness “painful” to the mind were the peculiar
defects of Montesquieu’s style. Thomas found Hardion’s honorable mediocrity
profoundly endearing:
[Hardion’s] style was as modest as himself. He succeeded in avoiding the
kind of forcefulness that too often shades into excess; the rapidity that,
compressing objects, jumbles them; the subtlety [finesse] that suppresses too
many transitions in order to suggest others; the painful insightfulness that
affects to enclose into one idea the seed of twenty others. Most important,
he rose above that luxury of esprit, which enjoys its riches only when it can
parade them.43
Voltaire’s early negative judgment on Montesquieu’s style would never wa-

ver. He found in The Spirit of the Laws the same defects that were heralded by
the Considerations:
A book on the law needs . . . no witticisms [saillies d’esprit] and no di-
gressions unrelated to the subject. . . . I was looking for a thread in that
labyrinth, but the thread would break at almost every chapter. I have been
deceived: I have found the spirit of the author, who has a great deal of it,
and seldom that of the laws. He does not walk but he hops [sautille]; he en-
tertains more than he enlightens; he sometimes satirizes more than he forms
an opinion. One wishes that such a remarkable mind had tried to instruct
rather than astonish.44
Sautillement connoted the effeminate and foppish demeanor of petits-maîtres

and persifleurs and the interrupted style of conversation that was satirized by
Crébillon, Diderot, and Duclos. Obscurity, digression, and fragmentation
characterized, in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels “the fashion of the scoffers [per-
sifleurs],” people who “used to begin a conversation with one person, then
pirouette and continue it with another, and finish with a third, for whom it
was half unintelligible, half impertinent.”45 Saillies, hyperbolic exaggeration,
and a desire to astonish were traits typical of worldly conversation, according
178
to Duclos: “It was not one of those speeches in which there is only common
sense; it was a torrent of saillies; everybody would ask questions and no one
would answer right; people understood each other perfectly or they did not,
which amounted to the same for those who were clever. Exaggeration was the ul-
timate, fashionable figure: with no spirited sentiments and no important activity
in mind, people always spoke its language.”46 In Claude Dupin’s caustic critique
of De l’esprit des lois, Montesquieu’s writing, like conversation, was marred by
“those odd expressions made to astonish; those antitheses that sound so pleas-
ant; those fiery figures of speech generously sprinkled here and there.”47
Such improper abundance of rhetorical figures opposes briller to éclairer,
éblouissement to lumières, surprise to persuasion. Voltaire, Diderot, and Rous-
seau all oppose admiration to persuasion, or frapper to toucher: “Nothing sa-
lient, nothing remarkable; neither the words, nor the turns, nor the sentences,
are memorable; there is nothing in it to admire or to be struck by. And yet one
feels the soul melt; one feels moved without knowing why. The strength of the
sentiment may not strike us, but its truth affects us.”48 In the eighteenth cen-
tury, those whom the purists and the neoclassicists deemed likely to sink into
the pitfalls of verbal excess and ornament (such as hyperbole and saillie, affec-
tation and esprit) were the mondains, those who practiced worldliness. But that
had not always been the case. We are struck by a sense of déjà vu when we look
back at early-seventeenth-century debates, for we realize that the very same
quarrel had been played out against quite a different political background in
the world of letters. At that time the debate had pitted the grand eloquence
of the scholarly and the savants against the simplicity of the worldly writers;
the partisans of the latinisant and erudite Guez de Balzac against those of the
worldly and atticist Voiture. The former, like François Ogier, would claim that
“extraordinary things expressed in magnificent language not only persuade but
also astonish the audience.”49 The latter would rebut, quoting Boileau, that
“it is truly a principle of Longinus that ‘elevated and grand thoughts provoke
admiration and surprise, but no belief in the soul.’ . . . Extraordinary and
lofty expressions enchant the mind without taking hold of the will; those of
Monsieur de Balzac overwhelm the imagination without moving the heart and
without leading the mind where intended.”50
In the eighteenth century, by a significant reversal, rhetorical enflure and
bad taste were attributed to the petit goût of the worldly, while sublime simplic-
ity graced the work of the writers and scientists who adhered to the grand goût,
those who claimed to find their inspiration in the writings of the ancients. The
criticism the prose of Montesquieu suffered from was not always distinguished
179
by rigorous coherence; it presented, however, one persistent thesis, namely,

that the author’s immoderate desire to astonish and impress the audience won
out over all concern for clarity, persuasion, and truth. Such astonishment re-
sulted from the obscurity of his broken and disjointed sentences (style coupé),
the staccato rhythm, or the abuse of traits saillants (flashing rhetorical figures
improperly). Both indiscretions were reprehended by Voltaire in his Lettre sur
l’esprit: “Those amusements of the imagination, those subtleties, those turns
of phrase, those surprising expressions [traits saillants], those jokes, those short
and discontinuous sentences [petites sentences coupées], those ingenious liber-
ties that are so common today, are suited only to minor works made for enter-
tainment.”51 Voltaire was not referring here to anyone in particular, but that
judgment was consistent with his lifelong critique of Montesquieu. But this
time Montesquieu would find an unlikely ally. In a review of Voltaire’s Lettre
sur l’esprit (1744) the abbé Desfontaines scoffed: “That may be true in general.
But why should the discontinuous sentences [sentences coupées] be inappropri-
ate to the most dignified style? They sometimes constitute the sublime, as in
the words: God said, let there be light, and there was light. Is it not the case
that M. de Voltaire himself sometimes presents in his tragedies some examples
of those discontinuous sentences and those surprising expressions [traits sail-
lants]?”52 For once the satirical abbé, well served by his desire to nag Voltaire,
had hit the nail on the head.
But what was the precise meaning of the contested term saillie (sally)? In
the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, saillie means primarily a sudden and unex-
pected leap forward, or a movement by fits and starts, like intermittent spurts
issuing forth from a fountain, a jet d’eau; a sudden shift, a jibe or a swing.
Rhetorically it denotes all those figures of speech—“dazzling and surprising
traits d’esprit”—that stand out in a discourse and seem to spring forth spon-
taneously. On that point all the successive editions of the Dictionnaire are in
agreement. But when it comes to defining the discursive context in which
such figures may occur, things change significantly. In the first edition, of
1694, we read that those traits d’esprit may appear “in a work of eloquence, of
poetry, in conversation. [One says:] a lively, noble, clever and pleasing saillie.
That orator, that poet, have striking saillies.” Saillie is unequivocally positive;
it is characteristic not only of conversation but also of high style (une saillie
noble), of eloquence and poetry. It is consistent with the sublime brevity of
atticist style in the Bible (“God said, let there be light, and there was light”)
or in Corneille’s Horace (“Qu’il mourût,” which was universally praised as the
ultimate example of sublime energy). That is no longer the case in the fifth edi-
180
tion of the Dictionnaire (1798), which greatly narrows the spectrum of saillie
by confining it strictly within conversational witticism. Gone is all reference
to poetry and eloquence and to the written word; instead, we are told that
a man who frequently resorts to saillie is superficial and lacks coherence in
his thinking: “Saillie denotes dazzling and surprising witticisms that seem to
emerge naturally in a written work and in conversation. . . . One says of a man
who indulges in saillies that his mind is all in saillies but that he lacks depth
and coherence.” Few examples could be more indicative of the shift that took
place in the later part of the eighteenth century, which delegitimized the very
idea of the figural power of discourse by narrowing its scope to oral expression
and to the undervalued, fatuous worldliness of petit goût.
In the seventeenth century there had been no clear-cut distinction between
the use of figures in conversation and their use in the high eloquence of poetry
and the written word. Saillie and esprit traced their origins all the way back to
the source of eloquence, that is, to the works of Quintilian (sententiae) and to
Longinus’s notion of the sublime, namely, that brevity and surprise were not
necessarily the result of affectation but an effect of pathos. In the eighteenth
century, however, a new desire for respectability—and an unfortunate alliance
between pathos and melodrama—established boundaries and interdictions,
broke connections between levels of discourse and experience, and reinforced
the hierarchy of styles. Writers rejected the kinship between art and the aes-
thetics of worldliness that had been vital to the seventeenth century: “Now
that our language is being denatured and degraded,” d’Alembert declared,
“great writers will find [the true language] by barring from their works the
ephemeral twitter of our coteries.”53 Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were no
longer capable of discriminating between “the magnificence of figures,” which
might or might not be fatuous or grandiloquent, and “the force of the emo-
tions,” which belonged to the authentic sublime. Desfontaines was therefore
right to remind that sentences coupées and traits saillants were truly the legacy
of the Longinian sublime and that Voltaire himself relied upon them whenever
he wished his language to wield the maximum impact.
Montesquieu’s originality consists in the fact that going against the grain
of the neoclassical spirit, he never refrained from experimenting with stylistic
boundaries. There was plenty of genre-bending irreverence not only in the
Persian Letters, where the pathos of belief coexisted with irony, but also in his
scholarly works. Montesquieu always welded registers of style and genre in
personal and daring ways. “A writer [un homme d’esprit],” he wrote in his note-
books, “is in his works creator of idioms, turns of phrase, and conceptions; he
181
dresses his thought as he pleases, molds and creates it thanks to a style that is
different from the current one but that does not aim at seeming so. A man who
writes well does not write like others, but like himself; often it is by speaking
incorrectly that he speaks well.”54 In his writings, and particularly in the Con-
siderations, the aesthetics of admiration and energy that was associated with the
sublime of the ancients came to be joined with the principle of surprise, which
was quintessentially modern, that is, compatible with the goût moderne. In-
deed, admiration, energy, and surprise were to him fundamental passions and
emotions that invested with equal force the political and the aesthetic realms:
Rome was admirable both as a political model and as an object to be consid-
ered aesthetically. “Good prose is like a majestic river that rolls its waters; good
verses are like a fountain that gushes forth under pressure: out of this upheaval
of poetry emerges something that gives us pleasure.”55 However, in the stac-
cato rhythm of phrases bursting forth, in the sudden leaps of thought, in the
bypassing of explicit logical connections, in the dazzling images, the writing
of the Considerations is closer to poetry than to the ebb tide of the Ciceronian
copia and the Longinian plèthos, the majestic river of prose rolling its waves
(Longinus compares it to a spreading fire or a flood).56 The prose of the Con-
siderations approaches a poetic form that Montesquieu finds more congenial
for expressing the cluster of conflicting passions and contrarieties that Rome
embodies for him: Rome cannot simply be narrated and analyzed, it must be
considered in wonder.57
A few years before he wrote the Considerations, or perhaps in conjunction
with them, about 1728, Montesquieu started to jot down ideas for an essay on
the notion of taste, but he never finished it.58 It was revised over the years and
published posthumously in the Encyclopédie in 1757, a late offering to the great
enterprise of the Enlightenment. But the Essai sur le goût was not exactly illus-
trative of Enlightenment aesthetics. It was the work of a previous generation,
the product of the goût moderne. And yet it was armed with a modern aesthet-
ics and epistemology that Montesquieu set down to confront that awe-inspir-
ing monster, the epitome of the ancient spirit, Rome. The result was a striking
synthesis, Montesquieu’s double paean to Rome and to the modern age.
Of Ancient and Modern Desire

In the Histoire universelle Bossuet had opened his remarks on Rome with
fanfare and loud brass: “We have finally come to that great empire that has
swallowed all the empires of the universe, whence have emerged all the greatest
182
kingdoms of the world we presently inhabit and whose laws we still observe.”59
By contrast, Montesquieu opens his first chapter with a negative clause, sweep-
ing away all previous grandiosity: “We should not form the same impression
of the city of Rome in its beginnings as we get from the cities we see today,
except perhaps those of the Crimea, which were built to hold booty, cattle, and
the fruits of the field. . . . The City did not even have streets. . . . The houses
were located without any particular order and were very small.”60 And yet,
we would be mistaken to assume that from the onset Montesquieu intended
simply to demythify Rome and scale it down. In the revised edition published
in 1748 this paragraph was added: “But the greatness of Rome soon appeared
in its public edifices. The works which conveyed and today still convey the
strongest impression of its power were produced under the kings. Already the
Romans were beginning to build the Eternal City.”61 The purpose is to present
Rome in the starkest contrast, as a scene of contrarieties, as a shabby settlement
and a monument to timeless power. That requires simultaneously embracing
the myth and dispelling its illusions.
The sublime that Montesquieu pursues rejects all grandiloquence in favor
of a conception of energy in style that aims less at producing rapture (ravisse-
ment) and enthusiasm, which would lull the reader into passivity (“the sublime
. . . overwhelms and carries away . . .”), than at stimulating his curiosity and
his understanding by modulating moments of surprise (“and produces in us an
admiration blended with astonishment and surprise”).62 Indeed, étonnement,
admiration, and surprise are key concepts in the contest between ancient and
modern aesthetics. To Montesquieu, admiration is the fundamental passion
raised by antiquity, and one that modernity, mired in the badinage of petit goût,
seems to have cast aside: “We may hardly believe the extent of the decay of ad-
miration in our century.”63 In French, admiration is a term that conflates two
meanings that English distinguishes: admiration (respect, esteem, awe) and
wonder (astonishment or surprise). The former involves an ethical judgment,
while the latter is a complex aesthetic and intellectual response to an object
that overwhelms our habits and defies the range of familiar concepts. The lat-
ter is the meaning that Descartes emphasized in his Traité des passions de l’âme:
“Wonder [admiration] is a sudden surprise of the soul which causes it to apply
itself to consider with attention the objects which seem to it rare and extraor-
dinary.”64 Wonder is a passion that jolts the mind into a sudden shock, an ini-
tial suspension of its faculties, but subsequently predisposes it to form creative
ideas: “Although it is good to be born with some inclination to this passion,
because it is conducive to science, we must at the same time afterwards try to
183
free ourselves from it as much as possible.”65 Descartes warns us against sur-

rendering to admiration for fear of falling into étonnement, or astonishment, by
which he means a kind of paralysis, a short-circuiting of thought (as in being
stunned ). Significantly, in his own account of the sublime Burke will note the
central role played by astonishment and the paralysis it produces in the mind:
“The passions caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes
operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the
soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In
this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain
any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”66
But Montesquieu’s own treatment of the Roman myth aims less at stun-
ning us into passive reverence than at jolting us into thought-provoking sur-
prise. His own text prevents the reader from becoming absorbed into a story
of wonder and fury by scattering everywhere stop signs, interruptions and
sudden changes of pace and tone; by alternating hot and cold moods: “This
calls for reflection,” he typically warns the audience, “otherwise we would see
events without understanding them, and, by not being aware of the difference
in situations, would believe that the men we read about in ancient history are
of another breed than ourselves.”67
In the Considerations Montesquieu has found a language capable of express-
ing the same ethos of energy that shapes the Roman experience. Following
the Aristotelian principle that one must show the very movement of things as
they are happening, Montesquieu brings all the powers of rhetoric to bear on a
work that ought to strike the reader—by the abruptness of contrasts (parallels,
antithesis, and chiasmus), the use of hyperboles, metaphorical expressions, the
artful editing of events and reflections—with the same visual and dynamic im-
pact as tragedy. Montesquieu, a great admirer of Corneille and Crébillon the
elder, was convinced that modern tragedy was the only genre capable of with-
standing comparison with the literature of the ancients: “That kind of writing
is, by its very nature, the epitome of movement. Everything is, so to speak, on
fire. Narrative and historical account need no ornament. One does not hear,
but one sees, everything”; “strength is to be found in sensory images.”68 In
the Considerations Montesquieu wants to bring the representation back to its
Homeric, mythical sources, to the primitive ideal of a purely dynamic poetic
language that would not say but show (the endgame of the sublime being si-
lent monstration). Roman history is presented as action and spectacle: “When
we carefully examine the multitude of obstacles confronting Hannibal . . . , we
have before us the finest spectacle presented by antiquity”; “Pompey, in a rapid
184
succession of victories . . . served the spectacle of Roman magnificence more

than its true power”; “This is the place to set before ourselves the spectacle of
things human.”69 Spectacles were, of course, a political tool in ancient Rome,
a powerful means of raising and manipulating the passions of the crowd: “The
people do not follow the orator’s reasoning; they may be impressed by images
and by figures of eloquence, but nothing moves them more than spectacles.
. . . All great upheavals have been caused by the sight of some unexpected ac-
tion. The death of Lucretia, . . . the action of Brutus, . . . the sight of Virginia
killed by her father, . . . Caesar’s blood-spattered tunic.”70 But in French trag-
edy, as in Montesquieu’s text, the visual spectacle is effected by language, and
it takes place in the mind’s eye, in keeping with a rhetoric that emphasizes the
visual impact of figural language (hypotyposis, enargeia, phantasia, or evidentia),
which lends discourse its hallucinatory power to captivate an audience (Quin-
tilian) and to drive a mob to violent action (Longinus).71 In the Considerations,
spectacles are staged so as to respond to the soul’s desire to embrace at once as
many objects as possible, thus answering an essentially modern desire:
It is therefore the pleasure that we receive from one object that drives us to
another; that is why the soul is always looking for new things and finds no
repose. That is why one will always be sure that by showing it a great deal
of things, more than it had expected, one will always please it. . . . Since we
like to see a considerable number of objects, we would like to extend our
vision, inhabit several places at once, and cross more space; in other words,
our soul does not accept boundaries and would like to extend the sphere of
its presence. Its great pleasure is to expand its vision far and wide.72
The desire to bypass the sequential chain of cause and effect so as to enjoy
a simultaneous view of things responds to the epistemology of the homme
d’esprit, whose intuitive vision reaches further than that of most men.73 But
above all, it responds to the avid curiosity that results from the anthropology
of inquiétude, the restless desire for an ever-changing reality that characterizes
the modern experience. “Our soul does not accept boundaries”; its pleasure
comes from the ever-renewed experience of a wide range of perceptions, and
its inexhaustible curiosity fosters a continuous quest. Montesquieu’s aesthetics
seemed to fit his own nature; a letter addressed to him by his friend Mme de
Lambert testifies to his restlessness: “As for you, it seems to me that you are
not fond of lingering, not even on what you like; and whatever you like, it is
not for long. Your happiness, therefore, is in the interval; restlessness, to you,
is bliss; you have a quarrel with repose.”74 The law of the modern individual,
like that of the Romans, is dynamism and protean adaptability: “A talented
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man [un homme d’esprit] . . . creates himself, so to speak, at every moment,

according to the needs of the moment; he knows and feels the exact relation
in which he stands to the world.”75 Modern energy consists in the increased
diversification and renewal of desire through as many experiences as possible.
In that sense Montesquieu’s work on the Romans is a celebration of the pas-
sions of the modern age.
In the Considerations, therefore, Montesquieu favors a style that relies less
on sequential connections than on an unexpected swerve: from ancient to
modern times, from Rome to modern France; from economic to military to
moral considerations; balancing the account of one historian with that of an-
other; mixing tones and registers of language. As if looking on from a distance,
the historian is able to embrace, by way of contrast, many diverse objects, to
condense moments that stand far apart in time: “In the abyss in which he
found himself, [Mithridates] devised a scheme for carrying the war to Italy
and going to Rome with the same nations that subdued it some centuries later,
and by the same route.”76 The narration undergoes sudden changes of rhythm,
quickening its pace and compressing time: “The Romans had hardly subdued
the Carthaginians when they attacked new peoples and appeared everywhere
on earth to invade every country”; “They found them in those places where
Mastery of the World was contested three times over.”77 Rapidity involves
suggestion rather than explicitness: “In order to write well, one must skip
transitional ideas: enough, as to avoid being tedious, not too much, for fear of
being misunderstood. It is those felicitous suppressions that drive M. Nicole
to say that all good books are double”; that is, they are written once over by
the reader’s desire.78 In the Essai sur le goût Montesquieu praises the Roman
historian Florus for condensing, into one powerful and unexpected pointe,
what otherwise would have been a lengthy analysis. Dazzling brevity becomes
a condition for the spectacle of evidentia to have its impact:
A thought is great when by saying something it suggests a great deal more

and when we discover at one glance things that we could have gathered
only after much reading. Florus portrays in a few words all of Hannibal’s
faults: “When he was able to profit from victory, he preferred to enjoy it”:
cum victoria posset uti, frui maluit. He gives us a complete idea of the whole
Macedonian war by saying, “Starting it was winning it”: introisse victoria
fuit. He paints the complete spectacle of Scipio’s life when he writes of his
youth, “This will be Scipio, who grows for the destruction of Africa”: hic
erit Scipio, qui in exitium Africae crescit. You think you see a child who grows
and is raised like a giant.79
186
In that sense, brevity and saillie in Montesquieu’s writing reflect the dictates
of the Longinian sublime, which aims at erasing all connecting tissue, leaving
only a pared-down, fragmented, but highly dramatic expressiveness: “By eve-
ning out and leveling everything with transitions, . . . you will descend into a
language that has no edge [pointe] and no spur [aiguillon]; the force of your
discourse will be smothered.”80 Hence the frequent use, in the Considerations,
of chiasmic contrasts and sharp-edged endings: “After the reduction of the
Carthaginians, Rome had almost nothing but small wars and great victories,
whereas before it had had small victories and great wars”; “In Naples today
there are fifty thousand men who live on herbs alone, and have as their sole
possession only half a cotton garment. These people, the most unhappy on
earth, fall into frightful despondency at the slightest smoke from Vesuvius.
They are foolish enough to fear becoming unhappy.”81
The need to shake the audience from indifference and ennui leads Montes-
quieu to emphasize the role of emotion; indeed, his prose does not conceal the
historian’s passions behind a veil of objectivity but artfully modulates them by
alternating between seeming indifference and a sudden blaze of anger, between
reticence and an unexpected outburst. His style offers a study in contrast.
Montesquieu approves of Suetonius for alternating between sang-froid and
anger and for suddenly intruding upon a seemingly objective narrative: “Sue-
tonius describes Nero’s crimes with startling coolness, making us believe that
he does not feel the horror of what he is describing. He suddenly switches and
says that the universe, which for fourteen years suffered this monster, finally
abandoned him. . . . This produces different kinds of surprise.”82 In chapter 15
of the Considerations Montesquieu interrupts the steady flow of his narrative
to intervene with a series of harried exclamations that culminate in a rhetori-
cal question: “How many wars do we see undertaken in the history of Rome,
how much blood shed, how many peoples destroyed, how many great actions,
how many triumphs, how much statecraft, how much sobriety, prudence, con-
stancy, and courage! But how did this project for invading all nations end—a
project so well planned, carried out and completed—except by satiating the
happiness of five or six monsters?” And he ends with a theatrical flourish wor-
thy of the tragic stage: “What! This senate had brought about the extinction
of so many kings only to fall into the meanest enslavement to some of its most
contemptible citizens, and to exterminate itself by its own decrees? We build
our power only to see it the better overturned?”83
With its emphasis on variety, contrast, rapidity, and surprise, this style re-
flects what Montesquieu finds fascinating in the ethos of the Romans, namely,
187
the promptness of their action, the energy they deploy in their relentless ad-
vance. “Consuls waged war with great impetuosity. They went straight for
the enemy, and strength decided matters immediately.”84 “They were able to
embark upon those swift and rapid marches that we may admire but may not
imitate, and they never appeared more suddenly than after a defeat. . . . Noth-
ing brings more terror to the mind . . . than an enemy materializing when
he is the least expected. . . .”85 Rome is a body constantly thrust forward in a
flight that cannot be checked; it is a conquering nation that collapses under
the weight of its own success. Rome can prosper only as long as it keeps grow-
ing, but the very principle that keeps it alive and struggling is the one that will
bring its death. Rome is bent on survival, and its enduring life comes from its
willingness constantly to confront and defy death. At the beginning of the re-
public its energy feeds on the resistance it encounters: “Rome was therefore in
an endless and constantly violent war. . . . All the peoples of Italy . . . opposed
to it an unbelievable resistance and Rome learned its obstinacy from them.”86
However, as the Roman Empire grows beyond all bounds to cover the surface
of the globe, a death wish takes over, and the city turns murderous against it-
self. The struggle for absolute power thus unleashes a desire for death.
Montesquieu is fascinated by the prodigious anomaly of such an organ-
ism, which he describes as a bloated political aberration, a multitude of bod-
ies capped by a single, monstrous head: “Thus Rome was really neither a
monarchy nor a republic, but the head of a body formed by all the peoples
of the world.”87 Emphasizing the excess of such an experience, Montesquieu
frequently uses hyperboles and chthonian metaphors; the Roman adventure
can find adequate expression only in cosmic revolutions and the catastroph-
ies that emerge from the bowels of the earth: “In this war, Philip was swept
along by the Romans as by a torrent” (chap. 5, p. 62); “When they made war
on some prince, they overwhelmed him, so to speak, with the weight of the
entire universe” (chap. 6, p. 75); “While Rome conquered the universe, a secret
war was going on within its walls. Its fires were like those of volcanoes which
burst forth whenever some matter comes along to increase its ferment” (chap.
8, p. 83); “As a river slowly and silently undermines the dikes erected against
it, and finally overthrows them in a moment, flooding the countryside they
protected, so in the same way the sovereign power that acted insensibly under
Augustus overthrew things violently under Tiberius” (chap. 14, p. 129); “By
the most extraordinary circumstance of the world, Rome had so completely
annihilated all peoples that, when Rome itself was conquered, it seemed that
the earth had given birth to new peoples to destroy it” (chap. 15, p. 153).
188
Anticipating Burke’s definition of the sublime as an effect of fear and hor-

ror, Montesquieu’s admiration shades into revulsion. Even the virtue of the
Romans, which he celebrates in his notebooks and in The Spirit of the Laws,
is portrayed here as monstrous, because it overrides the whole range and va-
riety of more moderate passions: “It was an overpowering love for the Patrie
which—taking leave of the ordinary rules for crimes and virtues—hearkened
only to itself and saw neither citizen, friend, benefactor, nor father. Virtue
seemed to forget itself in order to surpass itself, and it made men admire as
divine an action that at first could not be approved because it was atrocious.”88
Indeed, Montesquieu is wary of virtue. Virtue is a drive to unity and an un-
limited expenditure of force, and Montesquieu believes that such unrestricted
force is a danger. Though he is sensitive to the beauty embodied in the heroic
ideal of social cohesiveness and passionate belief that will later seduce Rous-
seau and the Jacobins, he also finds it pointless and destructive.89
Montesquieu’s conception of happiness and moral excellence is the very
antithesis of the virtuous ideal. For Montesquieu, happiness consists, not in a
search for moral excellence and the weeding out of the passions in favor of a
select few, but in the careful balancing and harmonization of all the passions
that are natural to social beings. A society may be conducive to happiness, not
when its members experience no inner conflict, but when society is able to ac-
commodate the greatest variety of goals and values; not when all its members
work toward the same purpose, but when all the different forces within soci-
ety, including potentially destructive but natural instincts such as inquiétude,
anxiety, ambition, emulation, and jealousy, are carefully balanced against each
other. Because of his commitment to pluralism and moderation, Montesquieu
sees nothing but trouble in virtue’s unlimited drive to self-affirmation: “Only
those people who are extremely vicious and extremely virtuous have a certain
strength; as it goes too far in the former, it may not be checked in the latter.”90
“It has eternally been observed,” he writes in The Spirit of the Laws, “that any
man who has power is led to abuse it; he continues until he finds limits. Who
would think! Even virtue has need of limits.”91 Even the passion for goodness
may degenerate when unaware of its own drive to power and when unchecked
by a counterbalancing force. Virtue and viciousness converge from the two
extremes of the moral spectrum.
Montesquieu experiences a tension between, on the one hand, a model of
society based on a creative, single-minded drive toward unity, passionate faith,
and metarational devotion to the collectivity and, on the other, a pluralistic,
unstable, and desacralized model of society, one in which conflicts among vari-
189
ous desires have constantly to be negotiated, boundaries and alliances redrawn.

This latter model is inherently heterogenous and imperfect; its reason is noth-
ing but a capacity to accommodate the “prodigious diversity” of local customs
and idiosyncratic practices. Diversity is usually better than uniformity, which
is the pet peeve of “small minds,” easily fascinated by the idea of perfection
and symmetry.92 Nothing could be more remote from the unlimited drive of
virtuous and revolutionary energy than Montesquieu’s praise of the slow, stag-
gering pace of passion-free institutional habits. He goes so far as to place quite
a bit of faith in the cooling effects of custom-sanctioned legal procedure, in
their “tempering, modification, accommodation, terms, alternatives, negotia-
tions, remonstrances,” because they are the last bulwark against the energy of
reckless political will and the evils of best intentions gone awry: “What would
have become of the finest monarchy in the world if the magistrates, by their
slowness, their complaints, and their prayers, had not checked the course of
even the virtues of its kings. . . ?”93 Unlike late Enlightenment thinkers such as
Condorcet, Montesquieu places very little faith in the universality of rational
law and in the possibility of streamlining all human institutions according to
a universal, rational model based on science.94 To him, such universalism may
lead to despotism. A despotic government tries to be simple and expedient be-
cause it follows a voluntaristic model—the will of a single man, or that of the
“general will”—hence it always starts out by eliminating the procedural forms
that stand as an obstacle between itself and the realization of its will. A moder-
ate government, by contrast, is a complex machine that follows the Newtonian
model of a balance achieved through the interplay of opposite forces and pas-
sions, which neutralize each other.95
And yet it is precisely such a model of government that seduces Montes-
quieu in a Roman history that to his eyes embodies far more than a parable of
monstrous hubris. The Roman republic was admirable not so much because
it was virtuous (i.e., cohesive) but because it was a flexible system that was
able to accommodate internal dissension and strife. Montesquieu’s Rome was
endowed with essentially “modern” institutions, because it was founded upon
the ultimately modern idea that a system can achieve stability, not when its
forces are perfectly ordered and working toward the same goal, but when the
system can withstand controlled chaos and internal pull toward opposite di-
rections. To Montesquieu, in the modern world order emerges from a precari-
ous balance among imperfect elements. (The same is true for Marivaux, who
conceives the individual’s inner life as a decentralized coexistence of various
passions that neutralize one another in a system of controlled disorder.)96
190
In that sense all the characters of the modern spirit that the Essai sur le
goût had emphasized—individual curiosity, restlessness, ambition, desire—are
shown to be present in the Roman spirit. Indeed, the most significant differ-
ence between Montesquieu’s description of Rome and that of his contempo-
raries revolves around the issue of liberty and strife. “You may see the causes
of the divisions, and eventually the fall, of the republic in the rivalry of its
citizens and their love of liberty pushed to an excessive and intolerable scrupu-
lousness,” intoned Bossuet. Rome, he said, had been ruined by “the perpetual
envy of the people against the Senate,” and those “divisions threaten to ruin
the state.”97 “At the beginning of the republic, citizens were possessed with a
frenzy for freedom,” chimed in Saint-Evremond.98 Not so to Montesquieu
(who follows here Machiavelli’s classic account of Roman contentiousness).99
The Considerations formulate for the first time an important idea that was to
find a prominent place in The Spirit of the Laws,100 namely, that imperfection
and desire are not only characteristic of modern existence but the essential
precondition to liberty:
We hear in the authors only of the dissensions that ruined Rome, without
seeing that those dissensions were necessary to it, that they had always been
there and always had to be. . . . What is called union in a body politic is a
very equivocal thing. The true kind is a union of harmony, whereby all the
parts, however opposed they may appear, cooperate for the general good
of society—as dissonance in music cooperates in producing overall con-
cord. In a state where we seem to see nothing but commotion there can
be union—that is, a harmony resulting in happiness, which alone is true
peace. It is as with the parts of the universe, eternally linked together by the
action of some and the reaction of others. But, in the accord of Asiatic des-
potism—that is, of all government which is not moderate—there is always
real dissension. The worker, the soldier, the merchant, the magistrate, the
noble are joined only inasmuch as some oppress the others without resis-
tance. And, if we see any union there, it is not citizens who are united, but
dead bodies buried one next to the other.101
The final pointe crowns this extraordinary defense of the struggles implicit
within political and civil liberty: happiness does not consist in the tranquility
imposed by a comprehensive order nor in the inner peace experienced by an
individual who is never at odds with himself, but, paradoxically, in the free-
dom to engage in a painful struggle that results from the innate inquiétude
and contentiousness of human nature.102 Montesquieu’s brand of liberalism
is a philosophy that embraces imperfection as a condition for social life.103 A
191
good government is not only agitated; it is also a balancing act. It is an institu-

tion capable of setting limits to its power by dividing sovereignty among its
constituents: “The laws of Rome had wisely divided public power among a
large number of magistracies, which supported, checked and tempered each
other. Since they all had only limited power, every citizen was qualified for
them.”104 Lest we think that Montesquieu limits the applicability of this kind
of combative liberty to the republic, and to the civic sphere of politics, one
should consider a passage from his notebooks addressed to his son, in which
Montesquieu broadens the spectrum of such inquiétude by making an analogy
between the drive to social mobility etched within every modern, monarchi-
cal subject and the physical laws of the universe (the Newtonian model of
a balance between opposite forces). Competitiveness and inquiétude are also
dominant motifs in the civil sphere of social relations, in which an individual
is not content with being confined within his or her own circle but constantly
desires to be elsewhere or to be like someone else, a condition that is innate,
and not simply a product of modern decadence:
As the physical world subsists only because each particle of matter tends to
distance itself from the center, so the political world is sustained by each
person’s inner and restless desire [désir intérieur et inquiet] to expand out of
the sphere in which he has been placed. An austere morality labors in vain
to erase the traits that the greatest of craftsmen has imprinted in our souls.
An ethics that seeks to operate on the heart of man ought to regulate those
sentiments, not destroy them.105
According to the Rousseauian-Jacobinic myth, antiquity was a powerful

tool to brandish against the alleged decadence of modern times. The discourse
of civic virtue opposed dramatically, on the one hand, the modern, self-cen-
tered, feminized, subject of commercial and polite society, who was charac-
terized negatively by a capacity to entertain and transmit desires that were
satisfied through her investment in objects of pleasure and who recognized
herself in the self-indulgent works of petit-goût, and on the other, the citizen
of the virtuous republic, an unequivocally male subject, who was defined by
his unconditional attachment to his civic duties in the public sphere, at the
expense of the enjoyment of private life and social relations in civil society, by
frugality and a disposition to give himself entirely to the community.106 One
sentence would sum up those two very different human types: “In a good re-
public people say Us, and in a good monarchy they say Me.”107 That was the
lesson relentlessly upheld by the works of art of the grand goût, by an exem-
192
plary history, and by the advocates of a return to the “sublime simplicity” of

the ancients. But Montesquieu never entirely surrendered to the lure of archaic
virtue. Ultimately, what attracted him to antiquity was not the sublime ideal
of unity that subordinated the individual to a glorified conception of the State.
What he admired in antiquity was the expression of liberty, the same restless
desire, curiosity, and richly diversified experience that were the qualities of the
modern age.
193
7 Montesquieu for the Masses, or
Implanting False Memory
No matter what they say, I will not be persuaded that writing one line,
even sublime, may be worthier than doing a good deed.
—Diderot
I will go and grow cabbage at La Brède.

—“Montesquieu”
Electrifying the Social Sphere

Twenty years after the death of Montesquieu, in May 1775 the Mercure
de France published a story signed by an obscure Mingard that purported to
reveal a touching act of generosity performed by Montesquieu while he was
visiting Marseilles. On a tour of the harbor the président had requested the
services of a boatman, from whom he heard a sad tale. The young man was
trying to put together enough money to pay for the ransom of his father, a
merchant who on his way to Smyrna had been taken prisoner by pirates and
was now held as a slave in Tetouan (northern Morocco). Moved to pity but
wishing to remain incognito, Montesquieu gave the young man a purse full
of louis d’or, and later he secretly arranged to have the ransom paid. To the
author of the article, the anecdote had much to teach about family values and
the philosopher’s role in society:
Sweet, precious, soothing philosophy . . . when those who enlighten and
improve their fellow beings are the first to offer the example of virtue! What
194
Montesquieu for the Masses
a touching tableau for those who know him . . . is the life of the author of De
l’esprit des lois! It was a life entirely sacrificed to compassion and good deeds;
letters and pleasure were only accessory to it. How happy he was to see that
the wife he adored, a wife worthy of him, disdained the courtship paid to
grace and beauty in order to devote herself to helping the needy.1
We might find such rhetoric dismaying; very likely Montesquieu would have
too. After all, he wrote nothing about the sentimental effusions of charity
(rather, he saw it as a matter of justice that the state ensure its citizens the
right to work and a sufficient living);2 his marriage was not quite the stuff of
romance; he would have been surprised to learn that his entire life had been
dedicated to good deeds rather than to writing and even more surprised to hear
about the whole affair, which, to the best of our knowledge, never happened.
Contemporaries, however, found it deeply appealing and the anecdote
quickly became very popular. It circulated widely in eulogies and memoirs; in
1777 Mme de Montesson turned it into a play for her private theater; Mme
Roland mentioned it in her Mémoires; Jean-Paul Marat gushed over it in his
Eloge de Montesquieu, which he presented to the Academy of Bordeaux in 1785;
and the story ended where it was fated to end, as a drame on the public stage.
One Joseph Pihles, a lawyer from Tarascon-en-Foix, managed to have his Bien-
fait anonyme performed at the Théâtre-Français in 1783. Although his play was
translated into German3 and even captured Hegel’s attention,4 it had a harder
time in Paris. It enjoyed one night of vibrant success, however, when the ac-
tors invited M. le baron de Secondat, Montesquieu’s son, to attend the perfor-
mance. “His presence worked marvels on the actors and the audience,” we may
read in Bachaumont’s Mémoires secrets, “they played with exceptional fervor,
and the audience’s enthusiasm was brought to paroxysm. That little charade
sanctioned the success of the play, and in that moment of effervescence it may
go quite far.”5 Indeed, that night at the Théâtre-Français must have been quite
a fête. With only a little planning by the actors, the performance offered a mo-
ment of near-spontaneous effervescence, of all-out enthusiasm during which
the parterre joined the actors in the exalted sense of their own goodness. It was
for such moments that Louis-Sébastien Mercier lived and toiled the thankless
life of the playwright. Perhaps he was present at the performance; at any rate,
he referred to the happening obliquely in his Tableaux: “It is the parterre who
pays back the nation’s debt [to its writers]; . . . it applauds a victorious general
and the son of Montesquieu. The people feel and understand merit and are
moved as if by an electric commotion.”6
In Mercier’s view, the theater was the medium best suited to the produc-
195
tion and transmission of intense civic and patriotic emotion. Conveyed by the
theater, emotions would spread like electricity through the audience and across
the nation, carrying powerful currents of change. To Mercier and many others,
much was amiss in the nation, and it was up to the philosophe and the play-
wright to set things right. Mercier said it very forcefully in a provocative essay
on the theater published in 1772: “The fastest and most effective method of
arming the forces of human reason and unloosening at once upon the people a
great mass of light would surely be the theater.”7 Mercier formulated a compre-
hensive theory of drama that included a poetics and a political approach. (He
also challenged vigorously the monopoly that actors exercised upon theatrical
works and the monarchical system of theatrical privilege. Later he brought that
challenge to the public in several mémoires judiciaires, which goes a long way
toward explaining his protracted marginalization.)8 His ideas about the public
role of the patriotic writer and dramatic art were indebted to those of Diderot,
d’Alembert, and Léonard-Antoine Thomas, who had been an early mentor.
In the wake of the reforms they had envisioned, Mercier imagined a new pact
between the enlightened playwright and theatrical audiences.
It would be difficult to overstate the extent and the significance of the
changes that had taken place in the relationship between the writer and the
public since the 1740s. In 1730, in his influential manifesto Le philosophe, César
Chesneau Dumarsais had argued that the philosophe was an honnête homme.9
What he meant, of course, was that a freethinker was not necessarily a scoun-
drel and that one did not need to accept the Church’s teachings in order to
love one’s fellow beings. But he also meant that the philosophe was a sociable
member of civil society, someone who enjoyed “sociable exchange among hon-
nêtes gens.” Dumarsais ended his essay recommending that the philosophe
shed his prejudices and devote his attention not only to science but also to the
study of sociability: “If they have worked on the mind, let them remember
that they still have much work to do on what we may call the heart and on
the science of manners [la science des égards].”10 The latter expression is remi-
niscent of La Motte and Marivaux’s “science of society” (la science du monde)
and “the science of the human heart,” which was the province of “those great
geniuses called . . . beaux esprits,” a science, in other words, that consisted in
the belief that human beings were situated beings, shaped by complex webs of
imperceptible and unacknowledged social rules.11 The more vital and essential
those rules, Marivaux argued, the more invisible they were, and the easier it
was to dismiss them as irrelevant to philosophical analysis and to literary and
artistic representation. “Let us imagine a science of so important an applica-
196
tion that every man, whoever he is, must know it early in his life if he wants to
be admitted to that junction of interests, relations, and reciprocal needs that
bind us to one another.”12 Its very familiarity and ordinariness placed such a
science below the threshold of analysis. Marivaux felt keenly the need for a
language capable of delving below the apparent banality of the real and ac-
counting for the “nothings” that constitute the texture of experience. In 1749,
however, when he delivered that lecture to the French Academy, Marivaux had
little hope of seeing his program realized: writers, beaux esprits, who explored
“the science of manners” were becoming increasingly obsolete. The province of
women and applied savoir-faire, the observation of the social was now seen as
a practical kind of art and not as a form of knowledge. Only salonnieres, not
artists, need be concerned with it.13
Indeed, from approximately the second half of the century on, many writ-
ers had risen to stake for themselves a different ground. Rousseau’s portentous
critique of sociability was by no means exceptional. Not only was sociabil-
ity no longer the worthy object of a fledgling anthropological science, it was
also not a desirable object of artistic representation. In the eyes of Duclos,
Thomas, d’Alembert, and Diderot, the public was corrupt; its manners were
effeminate and affected; its taste was decadent, and all the arts were suffering
a general decline. Nothing admirable could come out of a close acquaintance
with, and examination of, the sociable sphere. Educated people’s language,
manners, and clothing were deemed degrading and inappropriate to artistic
representation: “Something else that’s no less shocking: the minor customs of
civilized people. The rituals of courtesy, so attractive, so pleasant, and admi-
rable in the polite world, are disagreeable in the arts of imitation. . . . The arts
of imitation require something that is savage, crude, striking, enormous. . . .
To the platitude of our curtsies and bows, add that of our clothing; . . . I defy
painters and sculptors of even the greatest genius to turn this paltry system to
advantage.”14
If the artist and the philosophe could not entirely avoid company, they
should at least limit their dealings with conversational circles as much as they
could, since neither the scientist nor the artist could draw any inspiration
from le monde: “What would be the use to a philosopher of our frivolous
conversations? Only to narrow his mind, to rob him of the excellent ideas
he might acquire through reading and meditation. It was not at the Hôtel de
Rambouillet that Descartes discovered the application of algebra to geometry,”
argued d’Alembert in 1753. It is true, he added, that fiction writers—or beaux
esprits—must frequent society in order to know and understand their fellow
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beings, but they ought to be spectators to, not participants in, such a distaste-
ful comedy: “I wish, at least, that they were simple spectators to that insincere
gathering, attentive enough not to have to come back too often to a comedy
that is not always good to watch. Let them observe the play in the same way
that a parterre judges the actors, who do not dare to offend it. In other words,
let them go there in the same spirit in which Apollonius of Tyana went to
Rome in Nero’s time: to see, he said, what kind of a beast a tyrant was.”15 It is
not quite clear who in d’Alembert’s mind might fit Nero’s shoes; at any rate,
such a parallel between Nero’s court and the eighteenth-century salon from the
pen of a friend, a regular guest, and a beneficiary of Mme du Deffand, Mlle de
Lespinasse, Mme Geoffrin, and Mme Necker may come as a surprise. In fact,
it was precisely at a time when the salon had become a forum for the practice
and the dissemination of philosophy, when hostesses had deferred to the in-
terests of their guests and had become the mediators and facilitators of their
careers and their intellectual exchange, that the writings of the philosophes
reflected little or no acknowledgment of their utility.16 There was scarcely any
effort to credit worldliness with any diversity; on the contrary, social venues
and practices as varied as the court, the salon, and the private academy were
treated as if they were one and the same thing, and in the writings of the phi-
losophes they were often held in equal dislike.
Following Duclos, Diderot, d’Alembert, and Rousseau, Mercier expressed
a similar distaste for the language and the ethos of society:
Why is this writer’s work nice and tidy but cold and lifeless? Why does it
have no enthusiasm? Why is its style halfhearted and awkward? It is because
the author frequents some circles where esprit always takes the place of emo-
tion, where everything is subjected to the fussiest discussion, where people
argue ceaselessly about nothing. His soul dries up and is perverted by the
clash of those different opinions. The sacred fire dies out; esprit replaces ev-
erything; the vigorous traits that distinguish genius are lost. . . . The expres-
sions that appear in a book are modeled after those of conversation: they
become timid, cautious, polite, and arcane. The art of writing becomes a
trade, and every morning the writer churns out his assignment without any
emotion or excitement.17
Much like La Bruyère a century earlier, Mercier deplores the professionalism

of the worldly, who turn art into a trade, but this time it is not for the sake of
preserving language’s purity but for that of enthusiasm, deemed incompatible
with argumentative reason and discussion, that he turns against conversational
esprit. Léonard-Antoine Thomas, for his part, deplores the fact that the people
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who frequent society “must always strive to tone down, to assassinate, so to

speak, language and inventiveness [esprit].”18 Ironically, it is to antiphilosophi-
cal satire that we must turn if we wish to find any trace of the close interaction
that existed between philosophy and worldliness. Thus, Palissot (in the man-
ner of Molière) evoked the calamitous effects that philosophy had on formerly
frivolous hostesses, who, under its influence, had turned their salons into pre-
tentious bureaux d’esprit.19
In the writings of the philosophes, while sociability and love of the public
good were extolled in their ideal, theoretical form, they fared poorly when it
came to their actual, embodied manifestations, of which worldliness was a ma-
jor one. There was a dark side to the exultant proselytizing of an Helvétius and
a d’Holbach in favor of a civil society conceived, in the wake of thinkers of the
Scottish Enlightenment such as David Hume, William Robertson, and Adam
Ferguson, as the harmonization of individual self-interests and the self-regu-
lating environment for the flourishing of moderate passions.20 Religion and
natural law may well have converged to sacralize the idea of society and man’s
natural sociability, but that did not prevent many of the same thinkers who
paid an enthusiastic tribute to the cult of society from being profoundly dissat-
isfied with its tangible physiognomy in the contemporary world.21 Following
Shaftesbury, Diderot saw civil society as a well-wrought mechanism conducive
to the happiness of the individual, but his disaffection with the public at large,
and not only with France’s political institutions, was deep and far reaching.
Society as he knew it offered no inspiration to the creative genius. Rather, the
consumerist public and the private marketplace were such that they hindered
any outburst of enthusiasm and innovation: “In the present century and un-
der the present reign the impoverished nation has framed not a single great
enterprise, no great works, nothing that might nourish the spirit and exalt the
soul. At present great artists don’t develop at all, or are compelled to endure
humiliation to avoid dying of hunger. At present there are a hundred easel
paintings for every large composition, a thousand portraits for every history
painting; mediocre artists proliferate and the nation is flooded with them.”22
The nobility of art, Diderot argued, was debased by a public that was neither
knowledgeable about works of art nor an inspiring model for the artist. The
public demanded and consumed works composed on a small scale, of doubt-
ful execution and uninspired or lewd content, works that reflected the public’s
own lack of values, its narrow range of experience, and its petit goût.
Even though the public targeted by Diderot was construed as an unholy
alliance of the luxury of the fermiers-généraux, the seductiveness of royal mis-
199
tresses, actresses, and petites-maîtresses, and the vile complacency of the artists
that flattered their depravity, one cannot help suspecting that Diderot’s con-
tention was not with a specific portion of the public but with the elite bour-
geois public as a whole. The true menace lurking in the alleged corruption of
the contemporary world was modern life itself, the very ordinariness of life in
a civilized society. The philosophe, whether he was a scientist, a writer, a novel-
ist, or an art critic—and Diderot was all those things—looked at the reality of
the modern world, at its comfort, its peaceful ways, and its subdued complex-
ity, and found it stifling and small. In the absence of overwhelming spectacles
of war and cosmic violence, how was the poet supposed to nourish his inspira-
tion? Diderot drew a causal connection between the flourishing of art and the
experience of historical trauma that did not quite agree with the mainstream
praise of the golden age as a product of Augustus’s and Louis’s peaceful rule;
on the contrary, it seemed to construe those epochs of artistic outburst as the
direct offspring of devastating civil war (the wars that led to the collapse of the
Roman republic and the sixteenth-century French wars of religion):
Poetry requires something enormous, barbaric, and savage. When the fury
of civil war or fanaticism puts a knife in man’s hand, when blood flows in
streams upon the earth, then Apollo’s laurels flourish. They want to be irri-
gated. In times of peace and leisure they wither. The golden age might have
produced a song, perhaps, or an elegy. Epic and dramatic poetry require
other manners. When shall we see the birth of poets? It will be after a time
of disaster and great misfortune, when the beleaguered people will draw
a breath. Then the imagination, shaken by terrible spectacles, will depict
things unknown to those who have not seen them. . . . Talent is of all times;
but the men who have it languish unless extraordinary events heat up the
masses and bring it forth. . . . What will the poet resort to when the people’s
manners are weak, trivial, and affected; when the faithful imitation of con-
versations yields nothing but a string of phony, trifling, senseless expres-
sions; when there no longer is any frankness nor candor; when a father calls
his son “Monsieur” and a mother calls her daughter “Mademoiselle”; when
public ceremonies lack all dignity, domestic life lacks warmth and honesty,
and solemn acts truthfulness? He will try to embellish them; he will choose
the circumstances that best respond to his intent; he will neglect the others
and venture to invent some.23
Artistic expression would not emerge from the sedate and comfortable exis-
tence of modern cities. The French nation was at peace, and no one was asked
to die for the homeland or for anything that the philosophes deemed worth-
while. Social climbing was the only exertion that the nation knew well; it was
200
a devouring obsession, but it was devoid of grandeur. A culture of politeness

had dulled human relations for aristocratic and bourgeois families alike; it had
taken the edge off conflicts and dampened the passions. Artists were eager for
the expression of basic and primitive human conflicts, for issues of life and
death, for the simple language of the struggle to survive—all aspects of ex-
istence that artists, together with the rest of the public, were prevented from
experiencing firsthand.
But what could be done to counteract all that? The tragedies of le Grand
Siècle, those dark flowers of the nation’s wars, were embalmed in splendor and
no longer a source of inspiration. In vain had Crébillon the elder upped the
ante with his truculent and blood-thirsty Atreuses and Catilinas. Voltaire had
exploited the genre for all it was worth, and he had only succeeded in show-
ing how difficult it was to bring it back to life. The new theatrical dramas
and visual representations that Diderot, Greuze, Beaumarchais, and Sedaine
strove to propose were replete with situations borrowed from ancient tragedy,
not from modern life: fathers cursing their sons, sobbing daughters, grieving
friends, repentant spouses, despairing widows, violated maidens, and suicidal
philosophers. The writers of drames tried to extract as much dramatic value as
they could from the conflicts of bourgeois family life, but for all their efforts,
it seemed as if they were beating a dead horse. As for the lower classes, their
calamities had not yet crossed the boundaries of the burlesque and libertine
genres, in which they had been confined from time immemorial, and they
were still awaiting their eulogist. The Sadean sublime had yet to make an ap-
pearance before the large public. Diderot and Rousseau dreamed of baptizing
art in rivers of blood. They yearned confusedly for the revitalizing powers of
civil wars, for the sacrifices of fanaticism and the holocaust of the battlefield,
and subsequent events demonstrated that those yearnings may not have been
entirely misplaced. Of course, such discontent was not incompatible with a
widespread appreciation of the moral and social enlightenment of the modern
age; it subtended the trumpeting of progress, as a basso continuo subtends the
intricacies of melody in the upper register.24
The philosophes were relentless in telling the public that it was no longer
capable of experiencing any passions:
If a people has frivolous and superficial habits; if instead of that profound
sensitivity that focuses the mind and concentrates it on certain objects, it
experiences only a restless activity that extends to everything but focuses on
nothing; if by being too sociable it becomes every day less sensitive; . . . if it no
longer dares to love, hate, admire, or be irate from the heart; if everybody
201
feels obliged to be elegant, polite, and cool; if women lose every day their
true ascendancy; if that ardent and generous emotion that they have a right
to expect is replaced by a base and cowardly sentiment; if fortunate and
unfortunate events are nothing but an object of conversation and never of
emotion; if the lack of noble aspirations constrains the soul and accustoms
it to prize small things: what will become of the eloquence of such a people?
. . . Our age is generally turned toward a spirit of discussion; that kind of
spirit, endlessly bent on comparing ideas, must necessarily undermine the
energy of our emotions.25
The picture they painted was dire indeed. Sociabilité was the antithesis of sensi-
bilité. A frivolous, conventional, hedonistic, and amoral society had grown in-
capable of experiencing strong emotions, of expressing empathy and compas-
sion; the people were afraid to show their feelings or were not even aware they
had any. A feminized society was apparently subservient to women but had
made men unable to love women as women supposedly wished to be loved.26
Conversation, discussion, and the circulation of ideas, which the salonnieres
had done so much to foster, had the unforeseen effect of stupefying the pub-
lic into insensitivity. People were confronted with too wide a range of trends
and ideas; as a consequence, they were unable to care for any of them. They
consumed ideas in the same manner as they followed fads and whims, and
they were willing to cast both off with equal casualness. Another leitmotif of
philosophical discontent, one that neither Montesquieu nor Marivaux would
have endorsed, was that in modern society emotions were too diversified and
varied to take any hold; a multitude of petty interests and pursuits prevented
the emergence of a single, all-consuming passion: “The sentiment of glory de-
mands the removal of ordinary passions. Either it does not exist or it pervades
the entire soul. You will seldom find it in a nation dedicated to what we call
the enjoyment of society; in such a nation the multitude of pleasures spoils the
passions.”27 Petit goût was the death of the soul; it was apatheia.
Something had to be done to shake the people out of their complacency,
their deadening conventionality, and their emotional slumber. The responsi-
bility belonged to the eloquent writer, to the philosophe, the artist, and the
playwright, to grab the public by the throat and shake some life into it. Writers
must rescue the nation from itself, much as the ancient orators had rescued
the homeland during times of war and turmoil. Only this time the patrie had
to be saved not from the distress of war but from the comforts of civilization
and the impending threat of mediocrity. “No, the republican orator is not
. . . the plaything of a coterie or a circle,” thundered Thomas, “he is a man to
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whom nature has given an inescapable preeminence: he is the protector of

the nation, its sovereign, its king.”28 If the people were no longer able to ex-
perience any strong passions, it was the task of art to educate and transform
them. But how? The philosophes thought that the passions were unwelcome
in the conversational circle, that they were incompatible with a democratic
discussion and exchange of ideas; conversation and society were antithetical to
anything elevated and noble. Passions seethed and burned in solitude. Writers
were therefore pictured in the seclusion of their cabinet de travail, surrounded
with the effigies of a public abstracted from its actual, embodied existence and
transformed into a ghostly, allegorical version of itself: “I like to portray to my-
self the generous citizen meditating alone in his cabinet. The patrie stands by
his side. Justice and humanity are in front of him. The ghosts of the wretched
surround him; pity moves him, tears pour from his eyes.”29
But passions were also kindled in the encounter between an eloquent indi-
vidual and a large multitude assembled in one place and drawn to the oratori-
cal spectacle of one talking to many. In the absence of a national tribune such
an event could only take place in the theater. The images used to describe the
relationship between the (implicitly oratorical) theatrical spectacle and the
public were significant: “It is there that, like the sound of the trumpet that
one day will awaken the dead, a simple and luminous eloquence will rouse
in one moment a slumbering nation. It is there that the magnificent thought
of one man will set every soul on fire by an electric commotion,” wrote Mer-
cier.30 Invariably, the public was represented as an inert and lifeless mass, an
unresponsive audience suddenly jolted into life, Frankenstein-like, by the mas-
sive injection of the electric energy of the poet’s eloquence. Mme Necker had
evoked in her memoirs the electricity that animated worldly conversation, the
healing effects that the participants to the conversational exchange had upon
one another: “It is a way of acting upon one another, of giving each other plea-
sure reciprocally and with vivacity . . . , of making one’s esprit manifest by all the
nuances of accent, gesture, glance; of producing at will a kind of electricity that
emits sparks, relieves some of their excessive vivacity, and awakens others from
a distressing apathy.”31 That reciprocity, which Mme Necker had appreciated
as the precondition for the transmission of conversational energy, was no lon-
ger valued. For Mercier, electricity flows downward from a single source, the
powerful sentiment transmitted by the writer: “It is [in the theater] that a man
whom reason has misled is brought to the tribunal of nature and often . . . may
discover truth thanks to the electric shock of sentiment.”32 Thomas similarly
invites the reader to imagine a universe without life, sensation, and motion
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that the power of eloquence infuses with a capacity to feel: “Imagine nature
without movement: everything is dead; no communication; the universe is an
assortment of isolated masses and motionless bodies, eternally still. It is the
same for souls. Sentiment is what animates and moves them; it circulates like
motion; like the clash of bodies, it has its own laws. Therefore, you ought to
depict with energy everything that you wish to inspire me.”33
Teaching sentiment and feeling to an insentient mass demanded new forms
of spectacle and a new language. In their desire to shock the audience into sen-
sibilité Diderot and Mercier called for a theater of cruelty that would take the
Aristotelian principle of terror and pity to new lengths, or rather, would bring
back the violence that had characterized the theater of the ancients and that
French bienséance had banished from the stage:
Then, we would quiver with dread when going to a spectacle, and yet we
could not help ourselves; then, instead of those small, fleeting emotions,
that cool applause, those occasional tears that poets have to be content with,
[the enlightened playwright] would take our breath away and bring awe and
terror to our soul. We would see those phenomena of ancient tragedy, so
real, yet so little understood, being revived among us.34
Mercier was opposed to the convention of the happy ending—vice punished

and virtue rewarded—which had traditionally distinguished fiction from his-
tory and had made fiction more “moral” than history: “If we wish to make a
profound impression and break the hearts of the spectators by portraying the
greatest misfortunes, then the action must be coherent and truthful. Why pull
the dagger out once it has pierced the heart? Why dry those flowing tears? No.
If a spectacle is an illusion, let that illusion grieve the spectator as much as pos-
sible; let it be durable, and let every man agonize until the cause of the public
misfortune is gone.”35 In Mercier’s view, the theater ought to exercise a form of
virtuous terrorism: the audience would be held hostage to a harrowing illusion
and forced to feel the pain of those portrayed by the spectacle until that pain,
the “public misfortune,” was put to an end.
That program was only partially successful. Like tragedy, the new conven-
tions of the drame came under the satirical grind of the petits théâtres, which
produced parodies such as L’humanité ou le tableau de l’indigence, triste drame
par un aveugle Tartare (1761), La lacrymomanie ou la manie des drames, or La
manie des drames sombres (1777), which mercilessly lampooned the philosophes’
abuse of terror and pity for the amusement of audiences who were apparently
unmoved by their efforts. In L’humanité, for instance, a mother choreographs
204
her son’s funeral procession so that it meets with the procession of the father,
on his way to the gallows:
Surrounded by mournful torches, the funeral brings to a halt the procession
of the father in chains, flanked by ferocious sentinels; let that father, alerted
by Nature, shudder, cover his forehead with his hands injured by shameful
shackles, and raise to heaven a heartrending lament. Let his executioners be
moved, the spectators dismayed, everybody in fearful expectation; let, from
the midst of the multitude, finally rise a cry, a vengeful cry, the expression of
Humanity and the scourge of the first monster who will dare violate it.36
In La manie des drames Prousas, a playwright, declares:

I favor touching and pathetic plots
Which antiquity did not know;
Great crimes followed by stirring remorse;
Coffins, graves and skulls.
That’s what I like and always will.
Yes, I like to cry, I sure do!37
The Ungrateful Benefactor

Mercier, however, did not base his entire dramaturgy on terror and pity
alone. He also appealed to another fundamental passion of classical theatrical
doctrine, admiration.38 That passion was particularly suited to a genre that
was to become increasingly popular, especially during the Revolution, a genre
that might be called “dramatic pantheon,” or le grand homme à la scène.39
Those plays offered eloquent tableaux of the lives of great men, among which
men of letters figured prominently. They dramatized the genre of the aca-
demic eulogy, which had flourished since 1758, when the French Academy had
started to award the prize of eloquence to the best eulogies of the nation’s great
men.40 Mercier, who was an admirer and a correspondent of Léonard-Antoine
Thomas’s, the unchallenged master of the genre, had competed for the prize
in 1765, with his Eloge de Descartes, and had composed several plays featuring
the lives of great men, notably a Molière, or La maison de Molière, a “tableau
of the private life of the man of letters,” which made much of the playwright’s
alleged marital problems. The drame—with its emphasis on attendrissement,
on a pathétique that transcended the commonplace distinction between trag-
edy and comedy, on the glorification of private life in its trivial and simple
details—was particularly suited to illustrate an ideology that portrayed men
of letters as examples of sublime simplicity, benevolence, and selfless devotion
205
to the improvement of the human condition. The drame depicted both the
heroic dimension of bourgeois life and the bourgeois dimension of national
heroes: Mercier praised Shakespeare because “all his heroes are men, and the
combination of simplicity and heroism is engrossing.”41 The eulogistic staging
of the philosophe’s life and character was also the best way to counteract the
antiphilosophical propaganda, which, as early as 1720 had exploited the the-
ater as a powerful tool for spreading the image of an egotistical, unpatriotic,
and antisocial philosophe.42 In response to the success of Palissot’s satires, such
as Le cercle ou les originaux (1755) and Les philosophes (1760), the theater and the
visual arts were flooded with virtuous and moribund Socrates and Catos.43
It was perhaps after witnessing that memorable event at the Théâtre-Fran-
çais, when the parterre had risen to applaud the son of Montesquieu and a
mediocre play, that Mercier decided to make his own contribution to the myth
by writing Montesquieu à Marseille (published in Lausanne in 1784 and, like
many of Mercier’s plays, never performed). In the preface, Mercier expressed
the hope that others would follow in his footsteps and bring to the stage those
writers whom the public knew and loved best, “those who belong, so to speak,
to our circle, since their names, their works, and their character traits are al-
ways present in our intimate conversations” (9). As modern-day audiences
feel toward celebrities, people then entertained a cozy sense of familiarity with
writers like La Fontaine, Racine, Fénelon, Corneille, and also Voltaire, who
had become household names. They kept their busts on the mantelpiece and
felt that they knew them intimately—their quirks, their foibles, and their bons
mots: “Oh! If someone were to put on the stage our good La Fontaine, with
his innocence, his simplicity, and his absent-mindedness, everybody would be
touched by this charming tableau . . . , which would bring back to us a man
whose name alone enchants the soul and seduces reason!” (9). Mercier intends
to catch Montesquieu in an intimate moment, not as a great man, but as a sen-
sitive and compassionate man, for “the true man of genius is a good man” (5).
Such a play must be able to grasp “the style and the character of its hero,” not
an easy task with Montesquieu, whose language poses a challenge to Mercier:
“The imitation of his vivid, bold, and swift style, of its energy and fine humor,
will be the bane of every writer. It would be much easier to imitate Fénelon,
Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (6–7).
Ultimately setting those fears aside, Mercier enacts in his play a peculiar
kind of eulogistic ventriloquism whereby he lends his voice to Montesquieu,
who returns the favor by uttering some of Mercier’s ideas, bestowing upon
them the prestige of his own stature. Thus, we should not be surprised to learn
206
that Montesquieu turns out to be, just like Mercier, the advocate of a didactic,
philosophical theater: “Nothing improves our morals better than a good play.
There is the triumph of public instruction” (act 3, sc. 4, p. 127). He has also
become a militant philosophe: “The main point is to discover, as you have
done,” says his friend the abbé Guasco, “what is useful or harmful to human
beings, what makes them happy or unhappy. . . . You will be the cause of a
new legislation, which will become universal. The new ages will shake off the
dregs of error and mirror themselves in a purer light” (act 3, sc. 3, p. 109). Mer-
cier portrays Montesquieu as an antimonarchist—“I distinctly realize what I
have not yet said in my works: that at all times and places human nature . . .
under the governance of one person has been humiliated and despised” (ibid.,
p. 110)—and as a cosmopolitan and universalist—“Europe must make one
family only,” he says. “National characters, already prodigiously altered, must
entirely disappear to make way for the love of peace and the feeling of equal-
ity. That will encourage peoples to acquire the same customs and the same
spirit” (ibid., pp. 118–19). Finally, Mercier allows Montesquieu to confess his
shortcomings: “Ah! why is my book done? I said nothing of what I should have
said” (ibid., p. 105).
It is, however, in his private life that Montesquieu is reconfigured most
significantly. The play acquits him once and for all of any suspicion of ever
having been a bel esprit. Modestly dressed in black, Montesquieu appears as a
self-effacing “melancholic little man” who does not speak much and who does
not mind waiting for hours in the anteroom of a banker, sitting on a bench
and being snubbed by the servants. “What! That small man dressed in black
and with no servants and carriage! . . . But he looks so down-to-earth,” says
Monsieur de Pérouville, the banker who has arranged for the payment of the
ransom (act 1, sc. 6, p. 58). Much of the play revolves around the notion of
reconnaissance in its double meaning of “recognition” and “gratitude.” Mon-
tesquieu struggles with both: he does not want to be recognized for who he
is, and he does not want to accept the gratitude of the people whom he has
helped; he refuses to be admired for his oeuvre, and he does not want to be
thanked or even acknowledged for his generosity. The play’s main action con-
sists, therefore, of Montesquieu’s obstinate struggle to frustrate the sense of
obligation other people feel toward him and to evade all expression of thank-
fulness. Throughout the play, even after he has been recognized and unmasked
by his beneficiaries, Montesquieu is on the run from their pesky gratitude.
Indeed, if there is much to admire in his character, there is little to like in
the way the play portrays him. Mme de Pérouville, the banker’s wife, and the
207
only one in the play who has read De l’esprit des lois, is his strongest advocate
and the embodiment of the public’s and Mercier’s viewpoint. As if separated
by an odd time-lag, she does not see Montesquieu as a person inhabiting the
present, but as a living legend. Montesquieu walks around carrying the weight
of posterity upon his shoulders; understandably, he seems crushed by it. He
is only a shadowy version of himself, enjoying little more than a posthumous
existence. In a conversation with her husband, a simple businessman who has
no time to read books, Mme de Pérouville tries to force upon him a sense of
the importance of Montesquieu’s work: “He is the author of De l’esprit des lois!
. . . You will see the work of a man who shall live through the most remote pos-
terity. . . . That little man, I tell you, will do much good even after he is gone.”
To which Monsieur de Pérouville sensibly replies: “But now that he is alive
he does not look all that cheerful, and his countenance is rather melancholic”
(ibid., pp. 58–59). Indeed, all of Montesquieu’s virtues are otherworldly, which
explains the baffling insensitivity with which he frustrates the most elementary
human and social obligations that others feel toward him.
An otherworldly character, however, presents a special challenge. In Du
théâtre, published in 1772, three years before the Mercure article triggered the
legend, Mercier had written enthusiastically about the staging of generosity:
“We ought to put on the stage a generous man. It would be a great role model,
and it would warm this author’s soul. What elation he would feel in his work!
He would portray that magnanimity that turns a good deed into a work of
art and goes so far as to hide the generous hand that distributes its benefits.”44
The Mercure anecdote had therefore given Mercier a unique chance to fill a
gap, alas a necessary one, in the eulogistic literature. In carrying out such a
program, however, Mercier was not only taking on a formidable challenge but
also ignoring the sound advice that had been offered by several generations of
Christian moralists. Pierre Nicole and Rousseau had both written, a century
apart, violent pamphlets against the pernicious influence of the theater on
morals, but they were sharp connoisseurs of spectacle, and they knew a good
play when they saw one. Both had warned playwrights against the danger of
good intentions: “Most Christian virtues are unsuited to the stage,” Nicole
had written. “Silence, patience, moderation, wisdom, poverty, and penance
are not virtues whose representation might interest the spectators. . . . A mod-
est and silent clergyman would make a strange character in a comedy. The
theater needs what passes for noble and impressive in men’s opinion, which
is incompatible with Christian wisdom and gravitas.”45 Rousseau, who had
been enlightened not only by Nicole but also by the recent developments of
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the drame, agreed: “Reason is completely useless on the stage. A man with no
passions or a man always capable of controlling them would interest no one.
It has already been noted that a stoic character would be insufferable in a trag-
edy.”46 But Mercier did not care for such admonitions. “We ought to prove
to the eloquent Rousseau,” he replied, “that the staging of a man capable of
controlling his passions would be engrossing and that the portrayal of a stoic
beaten but unshaken by misfortune would be worthy of the public’s attention,
all the more so if he were shown on his deathbed.”47
In fact, modesty, silence, and the repression (or sacrifice) of the selfish pas-
sions, no matter how untheatrical, were crucial to the new mythology of the
littérateur, which singled out the best in the Christian and Stoic traditions
of repression and sublimation. Looming behind the shadow of the generous
Montesquieu were those of the virtuous and self-sacrificing Socrates, Seneca,
and Cato, the epitome of good eloquence and service to the patrie. The crux
of Montesquieu’s legendary act of generosity was his obstinate rejection of all
expression of gratitude, which was perceived as both moving and bewildering
(in other words, as sublime). The epigraph to Pilhes’ Le bienfait anonyme was
a passage from Seneca’s De beneficiis, “Quam dulce, quam pretiosum est, si
gratias sibi agi non est passus, qui dedit, si dedisse, dum dat, oblitus est!”48 Sen-
eca’s treatise had greatly influenced the conceptualization of the vast, far-reach-
ing, and complex network of patronage and clientage that dominated French
society in the ancien régime both culturally and economically. Its elaborate
casuistry of benefit and gift-giving could not but resonate in a society raised on
the aristocratic ethos of honor, service, and reciprocity and in the intense, pas-
sionate investment in the binding ties of noncommercial exchange.49 Diderot
himself found Seneca’s treatise poignant and inspiring; for him, it evoked an
admiration akin to that caused by the kind of theater advocated by Mercier. “I
read it three times in a row; at the fourth, I was still wetting its pages with my
tears, not the tears we shed for the narrative of a great misfortune, for tragedy,
for Iphigénie or Mérope, which are a combination of pleasure and pain, but
those that flow blissfully when the soul is moved by a great action, a delicate
sentiment, those that are caused by admiration and that I shed for the heroes
of Corneille.”50 Such a parallel between two genres as diverse as a Latin treatise
on manners and the French classical theater might seem perplexing, but in fact
the theater was considered the genre best able to project the same enthusiasm
and admiration for the spectacle of virtue that Seneca’s treatise illustrated.
What is more, Diderot was well aware that Corneille’s theater was steeped in
the same culture of reciprocity and honor that Seneca advocated.51
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To Seneca, reciprocity was indeed an essential aspect of gift-giving; he com-

pared it to a ballgame, in which the players measure their moves according to
the capacities of their partners.52 His treatise is a scrupulous analysis of the ex-
change of benefits that considers every possible angle and variation. If Seneca
reproves those who make explicit demands on the gratitude of their recipients,
he also finds much to censure in a situation in which the giver deprives the re-
cipient of his right to express his gratitude and to free himself from the burden
of the gift. “In the case of a benefit it is as right to accept a return as it is wrong
to demand it.” Not accepting a return means not playing a fair game: “Just as
if our benefits could be great only when it was impossible to return gratitude
to them! It is as if some spiteful player should purposely try to discomfit his
fellow-player, to the detriment of the game, which of course can only be car-
ried out in a spirit of cooperation.” There is as much art in repaying a benefit
as in bestowing one, and the man who has received a benefit looks for ways
to make an appropriate return, just as a player awaits the proper moment to
leap forth to catch the ball. Seneca makes it clear that giving the recipient the
chance to express his gratitude is as vital to a good exchange as the original
benefit itself.
In the legendary account of Montesquieu’s generous gesture, however, the
balance of reciprocity has dramatically collapsed. The inequality in the re-
lationship between the giver and the recipient is a departure from the Stoic
model, or, for that matter, from Corneille’s consecrated model of noble ex-
change: “A service that is above all reward / by the excess of its obligation be-
comes an offense.”53 Indeed, as we shall see, the play’s new moral covenant
reflects not only the decline of the aristocratic spirit at the dawn of the bour-
geois era but also the profound changes that had taken place in the relationship
between the philosophe and the public.
In his account of the events, Mercier follows largely the same script as Pilhes
and Dalberg. The action, which spans twenty-four hours, occurs seven months
after the initial encounter on the boat between Montesquieu and the young
Robert, the son of the elder Robert, the unfortunate merchant. In the initial
encounter Montesquieu had given the young man a purse containing “fifteen
double louis and ten écus,” and taking advantage of the young man’s surprise,
he had promptly vanished, leaving Robert unable to thank his mysterious do-
nor. The play opens with Montesquieu’s visit to M. de Pérouville, the banker
who has made the payment of “two thousand écus” for the ransom, plus “fifty
louis” to benefit the prisoner. The elder Robert is about to return to his family,
not knowing, of course, who has paid his ransom. As Montesquieu is leaving,
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the young Robert (who does not know yet that his father is on his way home)
arrives at the banker’s house for some business and recognizes the man of the
purse. He rushes to him, but again he is rebuffed. The benefactor denies their
acquaintance and abruptly rushes out. Mme de Pérouville enters, and Robert
turns to her for comfort. He tells her the whole story, and Mme de Pérouville
invites him to come back later that evening, when Montesquieu will be there
for supper: she will make sure that Robert has a chance to speak to him. Robert
promises to make his claims public: “I have seen him, and alas! I have lost him
suddenly; but I will find him again, and he will not get away. Should he reject
me, I will pour my tears at his feet; he will be obliged to recognize me” (act 2,
sc. 7, pp. 87–88). Robert’s desire to express his gratitude (reconnaissance) is also
a desire to be recognized himself, that is, to have his humanity acknowledged
by the man who has obliged him but now denies his existence. In the mean-
time, Robert the father has arrived in Marseilles and is tearfully reunited with
his family.
In the third act, the whole Robert family, Monsieur and Mme Robert and
the young Robert with Henriette, his fiancée, arrive, full of trepidation, at
the salon of the Pérouvilles in order to ambush the philosophe and fall at his
knees. By this time, of course, their debt has vastly increased, and their claims
of gratitude have grown tenfold. “Madame, I recall your promise, we are all
here,” cries the young Robert, “we must fall at his knees. . . ; I have brought
my father. . . . You must allow it; we are dying of excitement” (act 3, sc. 4, pp.
123–24). The moment is tense; everybody is gathered in the salon, waiting for
Montesquieu to appear. When the président finally arrives, Robert goes to him:
“My voice is shaking. (Rushing to M. de Montesquieu.) Man of God! accept to
recognize me” (act 3, sc. 6, p. 130). But the plea falls flat. “Not again. . . . Eh!
Monsieur, what do you want from me?” is the great man’s icy reply. Unshaken
by their entreaties, Montesquieu coolly denies having anything to do with any
of them: he is a stranger in Marseilles and has never met them before; they
ought to pull themselves together and go away. “All this is tiresome to me and
no help to you. Collect your reason and go back to your family to recover the
tranquillity you seem to be needing” (ibid., p. 132). The family is in shock,
and the young Robert is indignant; such a dismissal undermines the value of
Montesquieu’s charitable act: “What a barbarity for a benefactor! why taint the
happiness we owe you? After having been so charitable, will you be so cruel
today as to refuse the tribute that we wish to offer you?” (ibid.). But while
the audience closes down on the président, intoning, “It’s him . . . it’s him, it’s
him,” Montesquieu, his back to the wall, manages to escape. He flees the room
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without taking leave, frustrating the audience’s expectations and rebuffing his
beneficiaries’ claim to a shared emotion.
What are the reasons for Montesquieu’s strange behavior? Why is a man
who is portrayed as a “sensitive man” acting so ungraciously? The play does
not allow the spectator any privileged access to his thoughts; he remains dis-
tant and opaque, and a few asides give us only a glimpse of what he feels. The
practitioner of an austere stoicism, he seems afraid of drawing too much plea-
sure from his good deed or of sharing with others a solitary jouissance.54 “What
pleasure and excitement he causes me. Let us conceal it,” he tells himself when
he sees Robert (act. 3, sc. 6, p. 131). And a little later: “Run, Montesquieu; run
from your own vanity . . . resist the seduction of such enthralling pleasure
[jouissance]” (ibid.). Such rigorism would not have been disavowed by a La
Rochefoucauld, who believed, in true Augustinian spirit, that self-interest al-
ways masquerades as virtue. Only two years before the publication of Mercier’s
play, Choderlos de Laclos had anticipated the fictional Montesquieu’s worst
fears with his account of Valmont’s sly and self-serving act of benevolence. As
the story goes, Valmont, who knows he is being watched by a valet of Mme
de Tourvel, the pious woman he wants to seduce, sets up a trap: he will make
sure he is present at the moment when a destitute family is being evicted and
rescue them from homelessness, knowing that his generous act will be duly
reported to the “celestial prude.” But the rake is surprised to find, in the spec-
tacle of a whole family kneeling in front of him as to a living image of God,
an unexpected and involuntary pleasure.55
Mercier would have us believe that the virtuous Montesquieu is too respect-
ful of other people’s dignity and too scrupulous about his own motivations to
want to see anybody kneel in front of him. When Robert throws himself at his
feet, Montesquieu recoils: “Get up, Monsieur, get up; I will endure no one in
that position in front of me” (act 3, sc. 6, p. 130). But his refusal to acknowl-
edge them is felt as much more humiliating. As Montesquieu quits the room,
he says to himself: “Let us run; am I not rewarded enough by all I am feeling!”
(ibid., p. 133). The satisfaction of having acted well is enough of a reward. As
Seneca puts it, “And what shall I gain, you ask? . . . Only the gain of having
done it. . . . The reward of the virtuous acts lies in the acts themselves.”56 But
the point here is not that the giver should be rewarded but rather that the re-
cipient should be given a chance to unburden himself; both ought to be able
to engage in mutual recognition.57 In Mercier’s play they do not. Montesquieu
prefers to ignore his partners in the exchange and to curtail their right to ex-
pression rather than jeopardize his narcissistic self-approval. To Seneca, giving
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involved two partners who had equal rights. In the play this principle is voiced
by the elder Robert: “Is it not true that denying the beneficiary the touching
and sacred duty of gratitude amounts to destroying one half of a good deed? ” (act
2, sc. 7, p. 88, emphasis added). Montesquieu’s sublime generosity is marred
by the lack of reciprocity. Refusing, however, to be trapped into submissive
admiration of the sublimity of Montesquieu’s gesture, the Robert family rebels
against the constraints that are put upon it. But its rebellion is short-lived.
After Montesquieu has fled the room, his friend the abbé Guasco, who has
witnessed the scene with the Pérouvilles, tries to comfort the family: “Calm
down and prove your gratitude by submitting to his will, otherwise you will
hurt him. He is like that . . . he never wanted to hear any thanks; on the con-
trary, any commotion is a torment to him” (act 3, sc. 6, p. 136). Robert the
elder complies; loosening the knot of resentment, he moves the issue onto an
entirely new ground: “Let us respect him, my son; we owe him the sacrifice
of our best sentiments, since he demands it. Let us be happy with preserving
his traits in our heart; let us recall them to our memory and never erase them;
may his name forever be blessed among us!” (ibid.). The abbé applauds such
feelings, and he offers them a medal with the effigy of Montesquieu: “I have
received this medal from the famous Dassier [sic], who came from London in
order to sculpt this profile, which posterity will hold dear,” he declares. The
elder Robert accepts the gift and promptly hands it to Henriette, his future
daughter-in-law: “Receive this medal and bequeath it to your children so that
they will always recall what the man it portrays has done for us “ (ibid.).
With Montesquieu back to where he came from, and where he truly be-
longs, that is, to the netherworld of the memory of national treasures, com-
memoration replaces the exchange that never took place between the philos-
ophe and his grateful audience. The play is revealed to be truly a eulogy: not
a drama in which the living interact with one another but a ritual of death,
a bridge between the shadowy Montesquieu, who for a moment has reached
onto the stage from the Elysian Fields, and the audience that is yet to come,
the audience that is to rise from Henriette’s womb, to prosper and multiply in
the shadow of the great man, in the new nation that his work and his generos-
ity will help create. Reciprocity between the great man and the public turns
out to be all but impossible: there can be no real engagement between an au-
dience whose existence is only virtual and a being whose only existence is in
memory.
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The Politics of the Sublime

The philosophes were obsessed with creating memory, with implanting
memories of themselves—even grossly exaggerated, embellished, or mythical
ones—into the public’s mind. But the audience their works addressed did not
quite respond to any description of a concrete, contemporary French audi-
ence. It did not overlap with the audience of the fairgrounds spectacles nor
with those who responded to the seduction of modern erotic painting, who
took an afternoon walk in the Tuileries, or who put on a touch of rouge before
a souper. The audience they had in mind was the purer, nobler, virtuous audi-
ence that the work of art would engender and that by necessity was always re-
ceding further beyond the uncertain horizon of a worthier future. As Diderot
had shown in Le fils naturel, the theater was a ritual of commemoration in
which the present generation communed, by way of a founding myth, with
those who were yet to come: “ ‘A play, Father!’ ‘Yes, my son. But we shall not
raise a platform here; rather, we shall consign to memory an event that con-
cerns us and reproduce it exactly as it was. We will renew it ourselves, every
year, in this house, in this hall. . . . Your children will do the same, and so their
descendants. I will endure beyond my life and will converse, across the ages,
with all my grandchildren.’ ”58 In future years Dorval and his family will not
perform but will reenact the founding crisis that has made them aware of who
they are, a family united by the traumatic experience of sublime virtue.
While the future audience projected its towering shadow over the present,
the philosophe conceived himself as a creature of the past, sanctified by im-
mortality. Much like the young Sartre in Les mots, he was the hero of a long
story with a happy ending.59 In his imagination he enjoyed the privileges of
a posthumous existence and saw himself deceased but living gloriously and
usefully in the memory of posterity: “The man who projects himself into the
future and who draws an intense pleasure from the memory of himself will work
through the ages as if he were immortal, . . . for his imagination makes him
present to posterity,” wrote Marmontel in the article “Gloire” for the Ency-
clopédie.60 In a letter to Falconet, Diderot confessed that he thought he heard
the sweet sound of posterity’s eulogistic music playing in his ears a flattering
concert: “The man who has written a great and wonderful work does not see
it as great and wonderful only during his lifetime. He listens to the faraway
concert. He sees it as still great and wonderful for the time he will no longer
exist.”61 Such a character could not help but being, like the Montesquieu re-
visited by Mercier, or like Dorval, rather depressed and scarcely conversant:
214
“Somber and melancholic . . . ; he was sad in his conversation and his manner,
unless he talked about virtue or he felt the emotion of those who passionately
love it.”62 His eyes are turned to the heavens, he is deeply absorbed in himself,
and he prefers to meditate upon the ideals of humanity rather than interact
with those around him. Thus, the young Robert recalled that during their
first encounter in the boat, at the crucial moment when he made his fateful
decision, Montesquieu had suddenly withdrawn into himself and, ceasing all
contact with his companion, fallen into ecstasy: “Averting his eyes from me,
he fell into a profound meditation. I respected his silence. The sea was calm
and the evening serene. He remained immobile in contemplation for a long
time, looking at the sky. . . . His gaze was steady and glistening; in this trance
he sometimes would smile with delight” (act 1, sc. 5, pp. 52–53).
If the philosophes had elected to inhabit a sort of time-lag, it was a choice
bolstered by their familiarity with the Longinian sublime. For Longinus, great
orators formed their own community, set apart from ordinary people, one that
stretched across the centuries and was ruled by a virtuous emulation: “Those
great men that we intend to imitate are present to our imagination, they en-
lighten us like a torch, they raise our soul almost as high as the conception we
have formed of their own genius, all the more so if we keep this thought clearly
in mind: if Homer or Demosthenes were hearing me, what would they think
of what I am saying, how would they judge me?” stated Boileau’s Longinus.63
The great men of antiquity represented a kind of tribunal that modern writers
had internalized; they were the golden rule against which everything that one
did and wrote had to be measured and judged. At the same time, the good
orator did not write primarily for the present, but for the future. He would
still await his true audience: “An even more powerful motive to inspire us is the
thought of how the entire posterity will judge our works.” Those who failed to
do so would produce nothing but “blind and deficient stillborn offspring.”64
Appreciating the influence of Longinus’s work in the eighteenth century is
fundamental to understanding the philosophes’ conception of themselves and
the work of art in the public sphere. Longinus provided the philosophes with a
mythology that they found deeply congenial. In other words, the sublime was
the dream of the political at a time when the political was out of the immedi-
ate reach of the philosophes. It was a relentless, increasingly clamorous plea for
their own relevance in the public sphere.65 In that respect the true readers of
Longinus were not Boileau’s contemporaries but the late-eighteenth-century
philosophes and eventually the orators of the Revolution. Longinus, a writer
of the first century of the Roman Empire, had lamented that the age of great
215
orators had passed and that his was a time of decadence, his discontent was ex-
emplary to the philosophes. Why, Longinus asked, were so many orators of his
day capable of grace and verve but so few capable of reaching the sublime?
Is it not what we usually say? That it is a republican government that nur-

tures and shapes great genius, for after all, until now good orators have
flourished and vanished with it. In fact, perhaps nothing ennobles the soul
of great men but liberty. . . . As for us, we have been swathed in the cus-
toms and manners of monarchy, . . . we have never tasted that energetic
and fruitful source of eloquence. . . . No slave will ever be able to become
an orator.66
To the first-century rhetorician, absolutist rule fostered petty virtues and trivial
passions; greed, avarice, luxury, and love of pleasure contributed to smother
the fires of eloquence: “As soon as a man, forsaking the cultivation of virtue,
admires only frivolous and perishable things . . . he will no longer be able to
raise his eyes above himself and express whatever surpasses ordinary experi-
ence. . . . Everything that was noble and great in him will wither and decay and
attract only contempt.”67 Such discontent about the present was the basis for
the nostalgia that drove the writers of the late Enlightenment to the imaginary
community of the great men and orators of the past.
But the sublime meant also the dream of the hegemony of art in society, the
obliteration of any distinction between politics and art and, more important,
between action and representation. While intellectuals were deprived, in real-
ity, of direct participation in political institutions, everything was possible in
the philosophical imagination. The philosophes did not tire of repeating that
they would much rather produce good deeds than good writing: their prose
was intoxicated with good intentions, and they seemed to care for nothing but
the warmest engagement with the real. We should not, however, be misled by
those claims: in the aesthetics of the sublime good writing was good deeds,
and language was action; words, if uttered with enough enthusiasm and belief,
would immediately burst onto the stage of reality. One gets the impression
that rather than subordinate representation to the real, the philosophes wished
to merge reality and representation into one unified, utopian totality. Hence
the endless fascination with the fiat lux, with the creative bolt of lightning that
created a world out of a simple utterance.68 Hence the obsession with the the-
ater, which was the genre that best resurrected the physicality and the sensual
violence of the tribune, the communality of shared emotion in the double
rebound of enthusiasm from the speaker to the crowd and back.69
216
A large gathering elevates the soul. Emotion travels from the orator to the
people and comes back to the orator. Thousands of people whom he affects
reach back to him. Besides his tone of voice, his eyes, all his movements,
in harmony with the passion that moves him, persuade the audience that
this passion is authentic. He strikes the senses, and through them he grabs
the soul and shakes it. But for the writer, everything is quiet. We read him
in silence; every man with whom he enters into a conversation is isolated;
emotion is solitary; the orator himself is absent. . . . We must admit that the
effect of such eloquence is more doubtful and its success more uncertain.70
Like the tribune, the theater allows discourse to have an unmediated im-
pact: “When I leave the theater, I do not want to come away with words, but
with impressions,” wrote Diderot. “The excellent poet is the one whose impact
will stay with me for a long time. Playwrights! The truest applause you must
want to hear is not the sound of hands clapping after a brilliant verse but the
deep sigh that relieves the soul after the constraint of a long silence.”71 Over the
self-questioning aesthetics of bel esprit the philosophes favored a conception of
writing that shared much with sacred eloquence and that opposed pleasure to
persuasion, applause to tears, irony to entrancement. Persuasion demanded the
complete surrender of the artist, the absolute sacrifice of language to a purified
but emaciated conception of itself. Diderot and the other philosophes were
thus following in the footsteps not only of Demosthenes but also of Augus-
tine and seventeenth-century Christian rhetoric. The Augustinian conception
of the sacred sublime was borrowed, as we saw earlier, by Fénelon, an author
adopted by the Enlightenment, who was fond of quoting long passages from
Augustine. In one excerpt that Fénelon translated, Augustine explains how he
persuaded the people of Mauritania to abandon their custom of internecine
fighting:
The sublime crushes us with its weight and reduces us to silence, to tears even.
. . . I had employed, to the full extent of my capabilities, the strongest expres-
sions in order to eradicate from the heart and the customs of those people
such a cruel and longstanding practice. I felt I was getting nowhere as long as
I heard their applause. But when I saw them cry, I started to hope.72
In a similar mood, d’Alembert emphasized the absolute transparency of elo-

quence to passion and the immediate transmissibility of the emotion conveyed
by discourse from the orator to the public:
Eloquence is the talent to transmit rapidly and impress deeply into the soul
of others the powerful emotion that penetrates us. That sublime talent has
217
its origin in an exceptional sensitivity to greatness and truth. The same dis-
position of the soul that makes us inclined to feel vigorous and exceptional
emotions is sufficient to project their image outward. Therefore, there can
be no art to eloquence, as there is none to feeling.73
Eloquence was a matter, not of art, but of conviction, character, and morality.
Thus, the modesty and self-effacement of the eloquent writer, his sacrifice to
his task, were a small price to pay for the extraordinary power his eloquence
had over society: “The poet will be a new Demosthenes,” Mercier declared,
“and we shall never again see the people inattentive. Joining the title of legisla-
tor to that of poet (which were once one and the same), he will fill all hearts
with a virtuous hatred of tyrants, and he will teach them to recognize the many
paths that lead to despotism.”74 What is the greatest applause that a dramatic
author and an actor may expect from their audience? asked Mercier; not ap-
plause, but silence and tears. “It is when a profound silence fills the theater
hall; when the spectator, his heart broken and his eyes filled with tears, has
neither the force nor the desire to applaud; when, sunk into an all-pervading
illusion, he forgets acting and art; everything has become real and the scene is
permanently engraved in his heart.”75
However, at a time when writers could not emphasize enough how little
they cared for the trappings of art or for bel esprit and how much their impact
on the audience and the improvement of the human condition meant to them,
it was somewhat paradoxical that much of what they wrote focused, not on the
real, but on the act of writing (or on the oratorical tribune). The eulogies they
wrote for one another were often conversion stories modeled after the lives of
saints.76 They relentlessly reflected upon the glorious writers of antiquity and
those of the present, upon the function of art and the debt society owed its
artists for the sacrifices they endured for art’s sake. It was precisely at a time
when literature was supposed to defer to the real that literature could not stop
talking about itself, celebrating its own powers and the delight it took in its
good intentions. It was as if literature had replaced the image of the society
that it hoped to create with that of a heavenly republic of letters, bustling with
saints and martyrs. “I confess that my work almost killed me; my hair has all
turned white,” says Mercier’s folksy Montesquieu.77 The play makes much
of the persecutions he had to suffer because of his writings. The philosophes
undoubtedly encountered an all-too-real opposition from the religious and
secular authorities, as illustrated by the censorship and suppression of the En-
cyclopédie, as well as the imprisonment of Diderot, the exile of Voltaire, and
the vicissitudes of Rousseau.78 The image of the philosophe crucified for the
218
sake of the public, however, was an all-too-cherished component of their self-

mythologizing, and there was a grain of truth to Palissot’s bitter sarcasm:
“They would show much indifference for that sublime chimera that is called
glory; and all the while, they would write, conspire, and try to make them-
selves interesting by seeming to be readying themselves for a persecution that
never came. But playing at being persecuted or ready to be so is so flattering!
One becomes famous while giving up fame.”79
There was, however, more than a self-serving strategy to the philosophe’s
attitude. In his article “Eclectisme,” published in volume 5 of the Encyclopédie,
Diderot listed among the reasons for the decline of philosophy and the arts the
poverty of the homme de génie, the unwisely placed rewards of the state, and
the indifference of a government that had abandoned “the men of the nation;
those who represent her with dignity among other nations; those to whom she
will owe her rank among future generations; those whom she venerates in her
bosom and who are the object of admiration in distant lands.” A little further
on, Diderot added a brief but intense eulogy of Montesquieu:
I was writing those reflections on February 11, 1755, on my way back from
the funeral of one of our greatest men, saddened by the loss that the nation
and the world of letters had suffered and profoundly irate at the thought
of the persecutions he had endured. My veneration toward his memory
engraved this epitaph, which some time earlier I had intended as an in-
scription to his great work, De l’esprit des lois: “Alto quaesivit coelo lucem,
ingemuitque reperta.” May it pass to posterity, to let it know that troubled
by the threats of enemies he feared, and made sensitive to injuries he would
have disregarded had they not seemed to carry the seal of authority, the loss
of his peace of mind was the miserable reward that that man, born sensitive,
reaped for the honor he had brought to France and the important benefit
he had given the universe!80
One cannot help realizing that while Montesquieu’s fate had not been half as
dire as Diderot paints it, Diderot had many reasons to feel that those words
fit his own situation very well. Unrewarded, unrecognized, persecuted by the
vilest of the littérateurs, abandoned by an ungrateful nation—as Dido was
abandoned by Aeneas—the man of letters, undaunted and bold, did not cease
to labor for the sake of the people. He was the conscience of the nation. What
better metaphor for such a sacrifice than the parable of Montesquieu’s secret
act of generosity? In this idealized projection of himself the philosophe turns
the tables on the public and on the whole system of patronage on which he
depends. Rather than being the recipient of the humiliating protection of
219
the powerful, rather than begging from the state the recognition that is with-
held from him, the homme de lettres finds in himself alone, and in his own
resources, the source of all that is life-enhancing for the people. He is now
their benefactor, and no longer their beneficiary. In its hyperbolic dream of a
power achieved through the spectacle of martyrdom, literature casts its protec-
tive shadow upon the whole nation in its advance toward a most auspicious
future.
220
8 Everlasting Theatricality
Arlequin and the Untamed Parterre
Monseigneur the Public . . . I beg you not to disapprove of Polichinelle

if, following the example of large dogs, he were to piss against the wall of
your attention and inundate it with the torrents of his eloquence.
—Fuzelier, Lesage, and d’Orneval
What I like in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure
but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface.
—Barthes
Many phenomena lead us to think, however, that prerevolutionary audiences

reacted to the aesthetics of the drame in ways that the philosophes found pro-
foundly disconcerting and distasteful. Despite the many injunctions against
theatricality (of which Voltaire and Diderot were the most outspoken repre-
sentatives at midcentury), manifestations of self-conscious, theatrical aware-
ness of form did not decline on the French stage. Even before the expulsion
of the Italian actors in 1697 a variety of unsponsored playhouses (or comédies
irrégulières, which offered plays written outside the dictates of classical, Aristo-
telian rules) had sprung up on the Parisian fairgrounds and, later in the cen-
tury, on the boulevards. There, audiences from all walks of life flocked to spec-
tacles that illustrated the culture of critique, satire, parodistic rewriting, and
self-reflexive engagement with classical forms that had been the hallmark of
the goût moderne. Pushed to the margins of state-sponsored culture, excluded
from the status of academy-worthy high art, the fundamental principles of
the goût moderne—reciprocity and engagement with the audience—continued
221
to thrive; audiences refused to become alienated and disenfranchised, even

if such alienation was presented as a prerequisite to virtuous enlightenment.
This chapter focuses on those aspects of theatrical culture that are seldom
mentioned in current histories of the theater but are crucial because they il-
lustrate the rebellion of ancien régime audiences against subjection by means
of emotion-laden illusion.
The Reversibility of Spectacle

The relationship between playwrights and Parisian audiences had never
been easy. Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Mercier followed in the footsteps
of predecessors such as Boursault, Dufresny, Baron, Donneau de Visé, and
many others in deploring the rowdiness, the lack of attention, the unpredict-
able taste, and the tyrannical leanings of audiences, whom they sometimes
compared to Asiatic despots. A few years before the Revolution, Louis-Sébas-
tien Mercier harangued those audiences with Ciceronian severity (“Quo us-
que tandem abutere, spectatores . . .”) from the pages of his Tableaux: “Until
when will the spectator abuse his privilege to applaud, interrupt foolishly an
eloquent verse, and destroy its effect by cutting it short with restless impu-
dence?”1 If only audiences had limited themselves to applauding too much.
Sometimes, if we may trust Mercier, they pilloried authors and subjected them
to humiliating practices reminiscent of ritual sacrifice: “When the parterre
screams for the author, it is allowed to fill the hall with inarticulate and sav-
age cries. . . . It increases its bawl until the victim is brought to the stage, and
then its applause is nothing but abuse.”2 Throughout the century, spectators
in the pit (the parterre, by general consensus the recognized leader of the rest
of the audience)3 felt free to address the actors, to interrupt the performance,
to clamor for another play, or even to invade the stage. From the early years of
the eighteenth century, one royal ordinance after another enjoined audiences
to refrain from disrupting, interrupting, and invading the space of the perfor-
mance, their frequency sufficient proof of their ineffectiveness.4 In the second
half of the century, however, it seemed as if Voltaire, Diderot, and Mercier had
finally gotten what they wanted, perhaps even more than they had hoped for.
In 1751 thirty or so blue-uniformed and heavily armed gardes-français had been
conspicuously introduced into the parterre, defusing the customary eruptions
of violence but often exercising their function with unchecked arrogance.
Less conspicuously, however, other events had occurred that gradually
transformed the relationship between the stage and the audience, events that
222
Everlasting Theatricality
belonged to a different kind of authority. Many of the reforms that philos-

ophes and playwrights had been asking for had finally taken place. In 1759,
thanks to Voltaire’s efforts, the stage had been cleared of marquis and petits-
maîtres. In 1782 spectators in the parterre of the Comédie-Française were no
longer allowed to stand, but were seated on benches. In the following years
the same innovations were brought to the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra.
Changes in costume brought to the stage the historical accuracy that had be-
come habitual in history painting. As Dorat remarked, “A Sarmatian no lon-
ger comes on stage to make love wearing a grand panier.”5 Tragic declamation
became less solemn and hieratic; actors were invited to deliver their speeches
facing one another rather than facing the audience. Prologues and direct ad-
dresses to the audience, already scarce by 1740, disappeared altogether. All
those changes were part of a general trend toward enhancing illusion and sepa-
rating the space of the stage from that of the audience. Dramatic action, as the
abbé d’Aubignac had long before theorized, was meant to create a world of its
own, an autonomous space to which the spectator would be irresistibly drawn,
but only if he was willing to forfeit all awareness of himself as a spectator. “In
a dramatic performance,” wrote Diderot, who looked upon tirades and rhe-
torical set pieces as disruptive, “we should deal with the spectator as if he did
not exist. Does anything address him directly? The author has abandoned his
subject, and the actor has walked out of his role. Both have quit the stage; I see
them in the parterre. As long as the tirade goes on, the action is suspended and
the scene is vacant.”6 Tirades were exploits of virtuosity on the part of authors
and actors; they were products of bel esprit; they stood out from the rest of the
play and invited loud applause. For Diderot, as for Mercier, applause upset the
fragile balance of dramatic action; it punctured the autonomy of the fictional
world and veered toward ostentatious vulgarity, the phony rhetoric that killed
all emotion: “If the frenzy to be applauded takes hold of an actor, he will be-
come excessive.”7
Apparently, Diderot got what he wished for, and more. That he was not
entirely satisfied with the result emerges in a letter written a year after the
Entretiens sur Le fils naturel to the actress-turned-novelist Mme Riccoboni, in
which Diderot mourned the passing of a golden age of theatrical life, when
audiences were free to misbehave:
More than fifteen years ago our theaters were tumultuous places. The cool-
est heads would heat up upon entering there, and men of good sense would
share in the excitement of the insane. We would hear from one side, “Hands
223
off, Monsieur l’abbé”; elsewhere, “Off with your hat”; from all sides, “Hush,
hush the cabal.” We were turbulent, we tossed each other around, we pushed
one another. The soul was beside itself [l’âme était mise hors d’elle-même]. I
know of no other disposition more favorable to a poet. The play would
start with difficulty and be interrupted often, but was there a good passage?
It was an incredible clamor. Encores were endlessly called for; people were
enthusiastic about the author, the actor, the actress. The thrill would pass
from the parterre to the amphitheater to the boxes. Having arrived excited,
we would leave inebriated with enthusiasm. Some would go to the brothel,
others to visit polite society; it was like a storm slowly dying away, its hum
lingered long after it had departed. That was pleasure. Today, we go there
cold, we listen coolly, we depart cold, and I don’t know where we go after-
wards. Those insolent soldiers posted right and left to temper the excess of
my admiration, my sensitivity, and my joy, who make our theaters more
tranquil and decorous than our churches, irritate me prodigiously.8
Diderot blames the indifference and dejection of contemporary audiences on

the presence of the French guards. Reality, however, was more complicated.
The interaction between the military police and the audience was undoubt-
edly contentious; people were occasionally brought to the police and arrested
at the discretion of the guards, whose judgment was often seen as arbitrary. But
that was not the only factor in the perception of increased audience passivity.
Exempts and guards had been present in the theaters to arrest offenders as early
as 1706, under the especially effective (or repressive, depending on one’s point
of view) administration of Lieutenant General d’Argenson. Police activity had
been particularly intense from 1733 to 1738, when arrests for theatrical infrac-
tions peaked, and then again from 1747 to 1751, that is, at approximately the
time Diderot describes in his letter as free-for-all liberty of expression (which
corresponds to his youthful theatergoing days, 1735–48).9
But what most strikes us in his nostalgic portrayal of earlier times is the
extraordinary emphasis that Diderot places on activities that in his theoreti-
cal writings he normally views as troubling the integrity of the spectacle. The
noise, the loud and repeated applause, the enthusiasm for the artistry of this
or that actress, the tumultuous and insolent exclamations of members of the
audience addressing one another with little regard for the actors and the il-
lusion, the audience’s intoxicating mirth—all those activities would lead to
breaking down the “fourth wall” separating the audience from the stage, a wall
that Diderot had long seen as a condition vital to theatrical reception. In the
letter to Riccoboni we read nothing of the oft-praised introspective emotion
that makes the audience shiver in silence, the quasi-religious, contemplative
224
entrancement that drives the spectator to forget himself and to espouse the
passions of the character onstage. A tumultuous pit seems inhospitable to such
feelings. “The soul was beside itself ”: to Diderot, the aim of the theater was to
enable the spectator to recover his regenerated self through a salutary process
of alienation, an out-of-body experience. The reader familiar with Diderot’s
writings on theater is surprised to discover that this same effect is achieved, not
by means of a silent communion with the spectacle, but by a carnivalesque fête
that transgresses all boundaries between the stage and the audience and sub-
verts much of what Diderot had been advocating in his art and theater criti-
cism. In his letter to Riccoboni the communion between the spectators and
the performance is subordinated to the interaction among the spectators. The
pit appears as an eminently sociable space in which cabals and factions come
together and spill out of the theater into other spaces of le monde, such as the
salon and the brothel (which for him is also a space of sociability). It would
seem that Diderot the theoretician and the playwright clashed with Diderot
the theater lover. As a passionate spectator, Diderot resented being deprived of
the right to be an active participant, something that, as an author and a theo-
retician, he had promoted.
A similar conflict may be observed in the writings of Mercier. Mercier was
not only a playwright, a theoretician, and a would-be reformer of the theater
but also a perceptive observer of actual, embodied audiences. His Tableaux de
Paris reflect (making allowances for the distortions of satire and polemics) the
changes that were taking place in audiences of the late eighteenth century. A
quarter-century after Diderot’s letter to Mme Riccoboni, Mercier too waxed
nostalgic about the past, the days when theatergoers were not deprived of their
fundamental rights to self-expression, no matter how outrageously they might
behave. Occasionally Mercier too attributed the reason for this decline to the
presence of soldiers in the pit: “The parterre, if we except some passing fervor,
is fearsomely dull. Should it try to make its existence manifest, soldiers are
there to grab it by the collar.”10 At other times, however, he observed that such
repression had the contrary effect of fueling insubordination and disorder: “I
have witnessed days when the audience felt something like a desire to show its
independence. . . . I have reason to believe that the threatening image of the
police only adds to the restlessness of the public, which is willing to jeopardize
its pleasure because it experiences a much stronger one in defying the blue
uniforms. Anarchy has its appeal to youths of all ranks, whose boiling effer-
vescence is hard to restrain.”11 Elsewhere still, Mercier saw in the new system
of seating the parterre the main reason for its new-found docility:
225
The parterre of the theater has lost its ancient privileges. It no longer exer-
cises with vigor an authority that has been contested; it has been robbed of
it and has become passive. It has been ordered to sit down, and it has fallen
into lethargy. Electricity has been interrupted, for benches no longer allow
heads to touch and communicate. In the past an incredible enthusiasm ani-
mated it, and a general effervescence lent to theatrical productions an inter-
est that they no longer have. Today, calmness, silence, and icy disapproval
have replaced the ancient tumult.12
Be that as it may, neither Diderot nor Mercier had much of an explanation

for such changes. More important, their perception of that change was highly
subjective. As Mercier was born in 1740, the time Diderot depicted as the
good old days of freedom, we may safely assume that Mercier’s own good old
days, to which he does not assign a specific time span,13 coincided with the
late 1750s, that is, precisely with Diderot’s bad days of repression. Are we to
conclude that those anxieties only reflected a kind of spectatorial midlife crisis?
That would be too hasty.
In their revealing studies of revolutionary political and representational
practices, Marie-Hélène Huet and Paul Friedland describe the process of alien-
ation that transformed the French people in their functions as theatrical audi-
ences and as political agents. Each analyzes the fundamental shift that trans-
formed the ancien régime’s corporate entities (such as the Estates Generals) into
collections of isolated individuals willing to delegate their political decisions
to representative bodies. The Legislative Assembly and the Convention both
claimed to represent them abstractly as the “people” and to be speaking in their
name while in fact revoking their agency. Huet shows how the Revolution
ruled by means of theater. By dint of carefully choreographed spectacles (such
as the king’s trial, Marat’s funeral, the Convention debates) citizens became
not actors but spectators alienated from what went on in their name on the
political stage: “The Revolution’s constant concern with making the people
into a public did not necessarily correspond to any form of political liberalism;
that this objective was political in nature is beyond doubt, but it was inscribed
in a tradition that consists in repressing by means of the spectacle. To make a
spectator of the people, while making sure that the possibility of spectator-
actor reversibility remains carefully controlled, is to maintain an alienation
that is the real form of power.”14
Paul Friedland confirms Huet’s claim about the political use of the revolu-
tionary spectacle from a different angle. He argues that changes in theatrical
practices and doctrines at midcentury paved the way for a revolutionary sys-
226
tem of political representation that turned the people into passive spectators
of the drama of power. In the passage from the Estates General to the Legisla-
tive Assembly the revolutionaries abolished the ancien régime’s system of the
binding mandate (mandat impératif ), in which the relationship between the
people and their representatives was one of embodiment, and replaced it with
one of alienated representation. In the old system, “political representatives
were truly beholden to the constituencies that had elected them,” since they
were allowed to express only the political positions that the people they repre-
sented commissioned them to endorse. The new system, on the contrary, freed
the representatives from all dependence on their constituents by creating the
fiction of a disembodied and unified general will of the nation, to which the
representatives claimed they were beholden. “The Revolutionaries [abolished]
the binding mandate as an impediment to the representation of the general
will. Representatives would, in effect, sever the bond between themselves and
their constituents and relegate the latter to the passive role of spectators to a
representative process performed on their behalf.”15
That is not to say that spectacles had not been put to political use well before
the Revolution; Jean-Marie Apostolidès has well shown the central role played
by spectacle in the enactment of monarchical power in the seventeenth cen-
tury.16 But those were not mass spectacles addressing the nation; their intended
audience was the court, and any effect on the nation at large was mediated
and oblique. What is more, court spectacles and fêtes tended to be interactive
and to include the spectators as participants. Both Rousseau’s opposition to
theater and Diderot’s and Mercier’s faith in its potential for reform were based
on an analogous awareness of the performative nature of power and of the po-
litical uses of spectacle. The only difference was that while Rousseau decried
the theater’s nefarious effects on an audience alienated from the immediacy
of experience and inoculated by spectatorial passions against authentic ones,
Diderot and Mercier looked for ways to enhance such alienation and to put it
to good use. Hence their advocacy of reforms aimed at deepening the impact
of the spectacle and the verisimilitude of stage illusion by means of a greater
separation between the stage and the audience. The corollary of such reforms,
however, on both the political and the fictional stage, was an increased passiv-
ity on the part of the public.
But what, in reality, was the extent of such change? Was it truly the case
that beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century ancien régime au-
diences were slowly headed toward becoming the uniformly docile and silent
mass audiences of modern times, for whom political elections are a remote
227
spectacle and who politely stand in ovation even when they have been bored
stiff? That there was from the mid-eighteenth century on a growing fear that
theatrical audiences were becoming indifferent and aloof is undoubted. That
philosophes and playwrights were worried about the function of the theater
both from an esthetic and a political point of view, that they were ambivalent
as to the impact of the theatrical reforms they were proposing, is also a fact.
But that audiences were becoming submissive in every respect was a fear be-
lied by any close observer of ancien régime theatrical life in all its rich diversity.
Let us take Mercier. “Since the parterres have been sitting,” he wrote in the
Tableaux de Paris, obviously undaunted by any fears of contradicting himself,
“they have become more noisy and more clamoring than ever; they exercise
upon the actors a comical sovereignty that wears them out. The obstinate in-
fighting between the actors and the parterre has become a new and curious
spectacle that replaces the expected one. The racket lasts for several hours and
seems to amuse the assembly. Soldiers have lately become inactive.”17 In fact,
as Marie-Hélène Huet forcefully puts it, ancien régime audiences were yearning
for the possibility of a “transmutation from the role of receiver to that of ac-
tor,” and there existed in them a “latent and desired reversibility of the position
of spectator. . . . To appeal to an audience is to appeal to this possibility of a
spectator-actor exchange, and an audience that does not achieve this exchange,
this cycle, this transformation, is a mutilated audience—or, one might say, an
alienated one.”18
In spite of the reformers’ efforts to the contrary, in spite of the increased
police presence in the pit, audiences throughout the eighteenth century, for
better and for worse, stubbornly refused to become alienated. It is apparent
from Mercier’s own observations, as well as from what we know about ancien
régime theatrical life, that many strategies and practices enabled spectators
to engage in what Huet describes as spectator-actor exchange. Well before
the revolutionary upheaval, audiences throughout the eighteenth century had
been able to cross the barrier of the fourth wall and to engage in a variety of
transgressive acts. Some scholars of revolutionary theater have perhaps given
the Revolution (with its embrace of new audiences and its carefully planned
theatrical insurrections) too much credit for breaking down the frontier be-
tween fiction and reality and for undermining the ideology of the fourth wall.
In reality, such undermining had been a persistent, unavoidable phenomenon
of theatrical life throughout the century, one that for a long time had pitted
rebellious audiences against the would-be reformers who hoped to control
them by holding them in emotional thrall.19
228
The most obvious way to achieve a spectator-actor reversal was for specta-
tors literally to become actors by performing in one of the countless théâtres
de société (or comédies bourgeoises),20 that is, in private playhouses that enabled
amateurs of all classes of society, from the bourgeoisie to the court, from duch-
esses to shoemakers, to be seen rather than simply see: “People play theater
in certain milieus, not because they love it,” observed Mercier, “but because
of the rapport established through their roles. Where is the lover who would
refuse to play Orosmane? The most timid beauty takes heart for the role of
Nanine.”21 The theater was a space favorable to framing relations among the
participating actor-spectators; playacting would enable a group of separate in-
dividuals to come together and turn themselves into a community, to endow
themselves with an identity, whether for the purpose of courtship, for family
bonding, or for politics. That was a fact well understood by Diderot, Rous-
seau, and the planners of the revolutionary fête. The physiocrat Pierre-Samuel
Dupont de Nemours noted that in the years between the publication of the
Letter on Spectacles and the outbreak of the Revolution the people yearned to
take center stage and to perform in their own name, in order to escape the
deadening effects of alienating, “tyrannical” boredom:
The spectacles of the people are fêtes. Not idle fêtes . . . but fêtes . . . that
allow them to be actors and not simply spectators. For the position of an in-
active spectator has something slackening and lifeless; it often turns boring,
whereas those who have a role to play and applause to merit are never bored.
. . . That is why there are now emerging in Europe so many private stages
[comédies bourgeoises]: it is much more enjoyable to play than to watch,
which is why women everywhere prefer dance to theater: better to be seen
than to see others. . . . Man was made to be active. If we want to offer the
people spectacles that would trump that cold and cruel tyrant, that spoiler
of the world that is boredom, let the people themselves offer them.22
The issue of audience participation and involved playacting is implicitly

at the heart of Rousseau’s and Diderot’s reflections on theatricality. It was on
that point that the two were able to meet across the divide of their ideological
polarization about the social function of spectacle. Diderot’s major plays were
intended to be performed for an intimate circle, on the private stage of a salon
(even if they were eventually publicly produced by professional actors). Le fils
naturel is a case in point. The play had been staged several times in the theater
of the duc d’Ayen, at the Hôtel de Noailles in Saint-Germain, but only once,
on 26 September 1771, at the Théâtre-Français.23 In the dialogue with Dorval
229
a great deal of emphasis is placed upon the distinction between the public
theater and the private home: “—Me: But this tone would be scandalous on
the stage . . . —Dorval: Forget the stage; go back to the drawing-room. . . .
It is not in the theater, it is in the drawing-room that my work must be ap-
preciated.”24 In the preamble to the play, entitled “The True Story behind the
Play,” Lysimond, Dorval’s father, invites his entire family, not to simulate, but
to reenact the original event that saw them as protagonists.25 Lysimond pushes
his concern for authenticity so far as to preserve the clothes he wore in prison
so as to wear them again on the family’s stage.
The play breaks down a number of distinctions that were vital to the theater
as the French knew it, namely, the distinctions between the original event and
its representation; between reality and fiction; between the protagonists and
the actors; and, more crucial for our argument, between the actors and the
spectators. In so doing, the play transcends all theatrical boundaries and ap-
proaches the kind of celebratory fête that Rousseau describes so lyrically at the
end of the Letter on Spectacles. Le fils naturel in effect does not claim to be the
mimetic reproduction of an actual event, but the recurring reenactment of that
event. The actors are not actors in any conventional sense, but celebrants in a
ceremony reminiscent of transubstantiation, one that establishes for genera-
tions to come a cult of the family. Taking his cue from the Last Supper, Lysi-
mond invites his children to relive and celebrate the original event in his name
so as to perpetuate the memory of a moment that, for all its traumatic effects,
brought them together and revealed them to themselves. It is that founding
event, indefinitely repeated, that will maintain for future generations their
existence as a community. In the eyes of Diderot, theater ought to become a
ritual of memory playing a foundational role in the nation’s identity.
In their desire to draw the spectators emotionally to the stage, Diderot and
Rousseau both imagined a spectacle that would overcome the alienation of
representation and collapse all separation between actors and spectators. In
Rousseau’s childhood memory of the fête the women who have been watching
from their windows the regiment of Saint-Gervais cavorting in the street are
so drawn to the show that they join in. As they do so, the graceful spirals of
the dance unravel; the spectacle dissolves, and everybody is inebriated with a
disorderly joy: “We no longer knew what we were doing; everyone was giddy
with an inebriant sweeter than wine.”26 The people’s elated participation in a
performance that represents nothing has no purpose other than to establish a
binding sense of community: “But what will be the object of such spectacle?
What shall we show? Nothing, if you will. . . . Let the spectators become the
230
spectacle; let them turn into actors. Let each one of them see himself and love
himself in everyone else so that all will be better united.”27 The utopian dream
of new forms of spectacle pulls Diderot and Rousseau, who see the space of
modern theater as symbolic of the prison and the oppressive sway of the state,
away from the institution of ancien régime theater toward the imaginary open
spaces of the ancient republican theater.28 Diderot envisioned a newborn com-
munity both within the confines of the family and within the archaic utopia
of immense amphitheaters, reminiscent of ancient coliseums: “Let us measure
the strength of a huge gathering of spectators by our knowledge of the action
that men have upon one another and of the transfer of passions that takes place
during a popular insurgency. Forty or fifty thousand people will not restrain
themselves for the sake of propriety. If a great man of the republic were to shed
a tear, what effect would his emotion have upon the rest of the spectators?”29
Diderot yearned for the intoxicating effects arising from a turbulent crowd of
all-male spectators massed together in close contact. But in his theoretical writ-
ings he was unable to conceive those effects in terms other than the physical,
nonverbal transmission of emotion among a merely sentient, undifferentiated
mass. Diderot understood very well that the theater was conducive to creating
bonds among the spectators, but he was reluctant to consider that those bonds
might be predicated upon the exercise of critical, subversive reason, not sheer,
animal-like emotion, upon laughter rather than tears. Fifty thousand specta-
tors might be held captive by the speech of one godlike orator; they might
cry in unison at the shedding of one tear (but how would they be able to see
it?); their potential unleashed force could be devastating if it were not held in
check by the emotion emanating from the spectacle or by the authority of the
(reassuringly omnipotent and male) orator. But a small group of five hundred
spectators obey a different dynamic: they do not lose themselves in the mass;
they are able to band together, to form factions and parties, to critique the
representation, contradict one another, express themselves in an unexpected
and irreverent manner.
Improper Encounters, or Meet the Audience

Parisian audiences had long held privileges that the presence of fusiliers was
not quite able to undercut. They had ways of making their voices heard and
of becoming active participants. Indeed, they took it as their inalienable right
to engage in subversive forms of reception that could transform the content of
any spectacle, potentially sinking any tragedy into farce. In several crucial pas-
231
sages in his Tableaux de Paris Mercier draws our attention to one of the least
discussed peculiarities of ancien régime audiences:
It is there that a parterre is electrified in a moment and creates allusions rela-

tive to current events. He does it with a calculated and insightful mischie-
vousness. Nothing escapes it: everything becomes subject to interpretation.
That is how the public sometimes enjoys its revenge: it is attentive only to
those verses whose meaning may be hijacked and made applicable to its
anathemas. [Royal] censors and actors are taken by surprise; they did not
anticipate, they could not anticipate, what would become of such and such
a passage. The public, which is dying to have its voice heard, makes it manifest
in a hemistich by Corneille that for the last one hundred and forty years
has presented a perfectly innocent physiognomy. A mediocre play may be
applauded with a fifteen-minute ovation for four usurped verses. The poet
takes himself for a genius, but no one thinks of him. His dull verses have
morphed into energetic sentiments. That goes so far that on special occa-
sions all performances of tragedies must stop because the audience, hunting
for allusions, finds unexpected ones and, searching every recess of the work,
forces, whether it wants it or not, an old tragedy set in Mauritania to tell
the history of the present.30
In the text-fetishistic mentality of academic canon builders such behavior

seems inexplicable. When it has been noticed at all, it has been portrayed as
a symptom of the immaturity of ancien régime audiences rather than as the
sign of a radically different attitude toward textuality and reception. Indeed,
such phenomena have been relegated by and large to the domain of anecdotal
curiosity and petite histoire. Yet, in what is perhaps the secret reason of autho-
rial humiliation and resentment, and in an instance of theatricality gone wild,
audiences held the habit of systematically twisting the content of a play so as to
turn it into a signifier of current events, a chronicle of modern times. Far from
allowing themselves submissively to be absorbed into the fictional world, the
spectators of the parterre subordinated the play to their own situation, know-
ingly and maliciously altering the meaning of the text, so as to shoot them-
selves right into the orbit of the fictional universe and to explode its illusory
autonomy. No work of art was protected from such a volatile reception; noth-
ing came out unscathed from its encounter with the fires of the parterre. Not
only Voltaire, always a favorite target, but also the revered Corneille and Ra-
cine were subjected to that treatment. The most sublime verses became vulner-
able to deflationary interpretations. Audiences demonstrated a truly diabolical
creativity in finding allusions, equivocations, puns, and wordplay in the most
232
innocent passages. Good plays sunk into ridicule, while mediocre plays were
applauded beyond their merits for a verse that was the audience’s own creation.
The applause went to the audience, not to the hapless author, whose place
the parterre usurped. Creativity flared across the audience in the form of mots
d’esprit, collections of which were published.31 Mercier wished that he could
himself write a book of parterriana: “There are scarcely any plays, good or bad,
that have not produced a bon mot, sometimes wittier and more profound than
the work that occasioned it. The pride of the audience has always been at odds
with the vanity of the author. From such conflict have emerged very funny
incidents.”32 The parterre competes with the playwright, as the center of atten-
tion is transferred from the stage to the audience, in a game of improvisational
virtuosity that is reminiscent both of the verbal brilliance of salon conversation
and of the oratorical jousts that took place in the collèges.
Perhaps there was more to that attitude than a special attention paid to
language and dramatic forms. In the parterre’s argumentative passion for non-
political issues there might have been a deflected political drive: “The parterre
has always been the stage of the most heated cabals and factions. There has
been more squabble about the structure of a few hemistiches than about the
exportation of grain or the American war.”33 Rather than seeing the theater
as a space in which the power of the monarchy plays itself out in its symbols
of dominance, Mercier considers the theater to be an area of relative freedom
of expression, a convenient outlet for a political combativeness that cannot be
expressed in any other venues: “One feels that the parterre needs to give itself
free rein in order to regain in the theater the unconstrained voice it has lost
elsewhere.”34 Guy Spielmann has emphasized the highly referential content of
the comedy of the fin de règne and the first decades of the eighteenth century.
In the plays of Thomas Corneille, Dancourt, Regnard, and Dufresny conven-
tional intrigues allowed authors to encode references to current events culled
from the gazettes and from legal briefs.35 In reality, this trend toward a coded
but narrowly pointed referentiality was a trait that characterized the entirety of
the eighteenth century and included all theatrical genres and all types of per-
formance. Self-referentiality, however, was not limited to textuality, but found
an outlet in the interpreting activities of parterre audiences.
In the eighteenth century theatrical language was perceived to be flexible
and polyvalent, a nightmare for someone like Boileau, whose invectives against
the ubiquitous équivoque had enlivened his Satire XII, but a delight for writ-
ers and censors alike, at least those perverse enough to author books such as
Polissoniana ou recueil de turlupinades, quolibets, rébus, jeux de mots, allusions,
233
allégories, pointes, expressions extraordinaires, hyperboles, gasconnades, espèces de

bons mots et autres plaisanteries (Amsterdam, 1722), a collection from the pen
of the abbé Claude Chérier,36 who was holding the lucrative office of censeur
des théâtres. The abbé, whose delight in obscene équivoque made him the ideal
man for the job, in 1726 had granted the official approval to the libretto of a
pastorale comique written by Alexis Piron and set to music by Jean-François Ra-
meau, Le pucelage ou La rose, but its performance was nonetheless forbidden.
It was finally produced with great success in 1744 by Jean-Louis Monnet’s fair-
grounds Opéra-Comique under the more allegorically elegant title Les jardins
de l’hymen ou La rose. The report of the abbé Chérier in his function as royal
censor is worth citing at length:
Monsieur, the comic pastoral entitled The Rose represents allegorically a
young girl hesitant about the choice of several lovers who finally, inspired by
Hymen, makes a decision; therefore, the conduct of the play is so standard
and proper as to be above criticism. The name and the title Rose do not
raise in themselves any dirty suggestions. Every day people say in polite
circles to pluck the rose when they talk about a lover who has enjoyed the
first favors of a young girl; therefore, the title cannot be attacked. It is not
quite the same for other terms that occur here and there and that may pro-
voke dangerous allusions, such as Rose, Bush, Shepherd’s Crook, Seeing the
Wolf. . . ; Shepherd’s Crook [Houlette] might be interpreted in a dishonest
sense, but only if one really tries hard. . . . I do not believe that they ought to
be suppressed because of someone’s maliciousness; besides, if we suppressed
those words or the phrases that feature them, we would have to suppress the
entire play. . . . The more I think about it, the more I believe that the play
respects theatrical propriety. All the malicious construals that can be made
of Rose and Shepherd’s Crook are nothing but interpretations. We must stick
to the meaning of words and not bother with the way some twisted minds
may torture and abuse it.37
The efficacy of Piron’s language lies in the deft use of allegory and the skillful
exploitation of the vast stock of images and figures of speech that constitute
the interpretive repertory of any audience familiar with the codes of dramatic
pastoral. Its success depends upon a collaborative effort that combines what
the author has left unsaid with what the audience is willing to contribute.
The practice of theatrical reception and censorship, therefore, much like that
of libertine courtship, consists in a balancing act between the text’s potential
for erotic suggestiveness and the audience’s creativity in the exercise of its own
cultural competence for the expression of its desire. The onus here is on the
recipient: the more profligate the censor’s imagination, the more severely he
234
will want to excise the work. But in his own disingenuous way the abbé was
right: it is not possible to establish a foolproof set of rules that would enable
the censor to discriminate between what the words actually say and what they
imply or connote or the manner in which they will be interpreted. Preempt-
ing all possible interpretations of a text remains an unattainable goal, all the
more so at a time when a theatrical text can be made to signify just anything.
Each text is a Pandora’s box of free associations and connotations whose ex-
plosion is channeled, but not checked, by cultural conventions. Ultimately,
all power rested with the audience. A theatrical text was a type of which each
performance was a token: each of its occurrences yielded a potentially different
work. Application and allusion sprung inexhaustibly from the wellspring of the
audience’s rebellion. As Mercier observed, the audience’s capacity to rewrite a
play in its own image came not only from its alert erotic imagination but from
a repressed political drive that censors were unable to quash completely: “How
can we on the one hand anticipate all possible allusions and on the other leave
newly minted allusions in preexisting verse?” asked Mercier, musing upon the
potentially subversive content of Corneille’s and Voltaire’s plays, replete with
conspiracies and regicides.38
Such a tendency to carnivalesque subversion helps to explain the extraor-
dinary vogue enjoyed by dramatic parody throughout the eighteenth century.
The drive to self-referentiality tended to breed a desire to explore self-reflexiv-
ity in critical, parodistic rewritings of the classical repertory. Playing with lan-
guage led audiences to reflect upon the language of dramatic forms. Because
of the parterre’s clever games and unpredictable reception, every serious play
teetered on the verge of becoming a parody of itself. “Normally the parodist is
nothing but an echo of the parterre,” wrote the playwright and parodist Louis
Fuzelier, “it is from the parterre itself that he borrows the material to enter-
tain it; all he does is give a theatrical form to the general remarks that he has
heard.”39 In the tradition of Molière, Fuzelier professes to be nothing but the
faithful, and therefore the best, interpreter of public taste. However, there is
more than self-advertisement to that claim. Audiences that had just applauded
Voltaire’s latest tragedy would flock to see it parodied at the Théâtre-Italien or
at the fairgrounds, where Oedipus, Mahomet, or Sémiramis’s ghost was played
by a mask of the commedia dell’arte, usually Arlequin, or by a marionette. The
drive that urged dramatic authors to churn out parodies faster than they could
print tickets found its origin and justification in the parterre’s schizophrenic
taste for both serious plays and comic subversions.
We now know that dramatic genres were not neatly divided among so-
235
cial classes, with the cultivated elites frequenting the Comédie-Française, the
Théâtre-Italien, and the Opéra and the uncouth crowds favoring fairgrounds
farces and parades.40 In reality, cultivated audiences and connoisseurs of trag-
edies also liked to deride the masterpieces that they had admired; because of
their expertise, they were the fairgrounds’ best audience. Such versatility was
the result of the peculiarities of royal administration. Theatrical life in the
ancien régime was richly but rigidly diversified thanks to a system of privilèges,
or royally granted monopolies, that “protected” and therefore ossified the rep-
ertories and the acting styles of the various playhouses, official and nonofficial
alike, from the Comédie-Française to the Opéra to the Troupe Royale des
Pygmées (an opera company with oversized marionettes that had obtained
its own letters patent).41 Following that system, tragedies and comedies of
the French repertory could only be played by the Théâtre-Français, while the
Théâtre-Italien had to share with minor playhouses of the fairgrounds and
the boulevard a mixed repertory of comedies with masks, parodies, vaude-
villes, parades, ballet, pantomime, and machines (special stage effects). Seri-
ous and comic theaters were rigidly separated, with scarcely any possibility of
exchange and with a premium placed on the exploitation of competitive and
antagonistic styles. Hence the drive to compete among the various forms of
spectacle and within the confines of each genre. Each theatrical venue had to
perform according to its character and style; however, it was not forbidden to
make reference to another’s repertory, provided it was adapted to one’s allot-
ted language and genre. Audiences loved to shuttle back and forth between
the official playhouses and the fairgrounds, between the tragic spectacle and
its parodistic reformulation.
But what is less often emphasized is that within the confines of the strictly
regulated tragic stage itself, at the very heart of the Comédie-Française, there
were forms of theatricality that tended to challenge and destabilize, by means
of bathos (the sudden descent in style and manner from the elevated and the
sublime to the commonplace), the purported aims of high tragedy. Tragedy
and comedy had always coexisted side by side, not so much in the texts them-
selves, but in the way those texts were produced on the stage and interpreted
by the audience. As we have seen, audiences were willing to subvert the con-
tent of any spectacle: “High tragedy, which was supposed to draw tears, has
degenerated into a clownish farce that excites universal laughter.”42 But there
were other, less adversarial manifestations of the coexistence of comic and
tragic theatricality. At the Comédie-Française, for instance, it was customary
to perform a one-act comedy or farce (la petite pièce) in conjunction with a
236
tragedy.43 Moreover, at the margins of the classical theater a number of minor

figures and ancient, customary practices emerged from the shadows of the
backstage and, somewhat unassumingly, fulfilled their humble functions in
ways that helped to keep alive the kind of mutinous theatricality that reform-
ers such as Voltaire and Diderot were anxious to suppress.
One of those figures was the servant who extinguished the candles after
the performance (moucheur de chandelles), or paillasse, the heir of the Italian
pagliaccio and a variant on the zanni Pedrolino (a kind of clown whose name
meant literally “chopped straw,” and the coarse fabric of his outfit also evoked
that used in straw mattresses, or paillasses). The paillasse disappeared from the
Comédie-Française after April 1784, when candles were replaced by a new sys-
tem of illumination, the Argand burner, but he remained very much alive in the
fairgrounds and boulevard theaters, where he filled the traditional function of
charlatan and aboyeur (literally, “barker,” the actor who, standing at the door,
advertised as loudly as possible the spectacle inside). At the Comédie-Française
the role of the paillasse was not limited to kindling and extinguishing the stage
lights. The paillasse filled the space that separated the stage from the audience.
Walking straight through the fourth wall, removing barriers and introducing
continuity and connection where there should have been division, he acted as
an intermediary between the spectators and the universe of spectacle:
The leading actor cannot always be on stage; his attitude is always a lit-
tle stiff. He might, in the long run, incite laughter if the paillasse did not
come to deflect the audience’s attention and distract it and, in so doing,
strengthen the gravity of his comrade. Besides, there are in every play inter-
vals during which no one is on stage; the paillasse comes in handy and fills
the void. He stands in for those who are absent. When once upon a time, at
the Comédie-Française, the moucheur de chandelles used to serve as paillasse,
the spectators would cry, “Will he laugh, or will he not laugh?” But when
the curtain was lifted, the Greek king of kings, the superb Agamemnon,
seemed much more majestic. Those verses became more portentous and
roaring: “Oui, c’est Agamemnon, c’est ton roi qui t’éveille; / Viens, recon-
nais la voix qui frappe ton oreille.” Agamemnon would preserve his dignity
to the end. Perhaps our modern tragedies are booed because there no longer
is a moucheur de chandelles. The gravest things would become comical if the
paillasse were not there to function as the butt of the public’s mockery.44
The paillasse, a marginal character with no specific, explicit role, is nonetheless

an institution in the theater. He belongs to the stage more than anyone else
because, thanks to his capacity to turn even a trivial, everyday action into spec-
237
tacle, he is the living embodiment of theatricality.45 Like Arlequin, he is a jack-

of-all-trades, a figure without a fixed emploi yet capable of playing any role.
The paillasse is essentially a go-between, an intermediary who both disrupts
the mood of the spectacle and makes it possible. By virtue of his insignificance,
he is the only one who is allowed to communicate with the audience: “ ‘How
can we perform a play without a paillasse? ’ would cry the worried impresario.
‘Who will make the audience laugh? Who will communicate with the public?
Someone must communicate with it.’ ”46 Like the prompter (souffleur), an-
other interloper on the tragic stage, the paillasse, who is always on the verge of
becoming a nuisance yet absolutely necessary, functions as a foil to the tragic
actor; he tames the beast of the parterre and redirects the laughter that always
risks disrupting the performance. Perhaps, Mercier suggests, modern tragedies
flop because the paillasse is no longer there to act as a lightning rod, to direct
toward himself the mockeries of the parterre. The majestic Agamemnon and
the crude paillasse are joined at the hip: the latter enables the former to come
forth and deliver his overblown verses.47 Comedy, rather than upsetting trag-
edy, is what makes tragedy possible; in other words, theatricality and illusion,
rather than excluding each other, may well coexist as two correlated and fully
integrated aspects of the spectacle.
In “Le trou du souffleur” (The Prompter’s Box) Mercier deplores the intru-
sive presence of an individual who, rather than making himself invisible, acts
as if he were the axis of the spectacle. Oblivious of his subordinate state, the
souffleur is imbued with a sense of his own importance. It is as if, obeying a
desire to revolt, the backstage were always about to flip over and expose itself to
the audience, eclipsing the stage. “Like the northern star, which from its fixed
point watches everything move around it,” the prompter destroys all illusion.
“We see the prompter’s head bobbing up and down all the time. . . . During a
comedy we may see the prompter roll with laughter about a double entendre,
drop his score or the manuscript, and be the first to burst out loud, as if the
performance were especially for him, just because he happens to be the closest
to it.”48
Before the reforms aimed at enhancing the illusion of verisimilitude were
fully implemented, the classical stage allowed for great latitude in the interac-
tion between the scène and the salle. Both spaces were generically inflected:
any reference to the salle was comic, while the stage was the space where seri-
ous theatrical emotion could vibrate. An unexpected encounter between those
two spaces might result in a clash and a bout of improvised comedy. But un-
less some stunning incident were to cause the play to flop (and the annals of
238
theater are replete with them),49 spectators could glide easily back and forth
between the two. In other words, extemporaneous theatricality did not nec-
essarily dislocate or undermine the spectacle. Comedy always accompanied
drama as if its shadow, in the same way that the space of the salle always con-
taminated, or was in a relationship of complicity with, that of the scène. David
Trott has noted that in spite of the official disdain for the “irregularity” of spec-
tacles, ancien régime audiences were always able to enjoy their effect of illusion
by means other than those familiar to modern audiences. “Codes functioned
by metonymy or synecdoche rather than mimesis; signs stood for the object
represented, and the part stood for the whole,” as contemporary costume and
stage directions indicate.50
At the Comédie-Italienne, the juxtaposition of incongruous elements was
part of a repertory that normally brought together the leading men and ladies
(premiers amoureux), who expressed themselves in lofty, sentimental language,
and the masks of the commedia dell’arte, who expressed themselves in comic
pantomimes (lazzi) and grotesque jargon, a structural feature that inspired
Marivaux. Bathos was therefore an openly acknowledged comic device of Ital-
ian theatricality.51 But at the Comédie-Française bathos came from the chance
encounter between the stage and the audience. Before the spectators were re-
moved from it, the stage was a carnivalesque world that mixed high and low,
antiquity and the present, tragedy and farce; where mythical characters tripped
on the moccasin of a marquis before drawing their last breath, and Phèdre and
Monime were publicly exposed to all sorts of indignities from spectators who
were drunk, obnoxious, or both. The serendipitous show imposed by stage
spectators onto the rest of the audience had become a staple of satire, the most
notorious example being Molière’s portrayal of the fop who had caused such a
disturbance on the stage with his late arrival in Les fâcheux.
In 1759, when the stage was cleared of the marquis, observers like Charles
Collé and Edmond Barbier reported in their journals that everybody was
thankful that theatrical illusion had been restored to its wholeness. The Mer-
cure de France and the Année littéraire joined in to celebrate the fact that the
tumultuous mingling of actors with spectators had been brought to an end.
“French frivolity will no longer stand in ridiculous contrast to Roman gravity.
The Marquis de *** will no longer elbow Cato,” reported the Année littéraire.52
“Theatrical illusion is now whole. One no longer sees Cesar wiping the pow-
der off the wig of a spectator sitting in the first row, nor Mithridate expiring
in the midst of people of our acquaintance; nor the ghost of Ninus bumping
into a farmer-general; nor Camille falling dead in the wings onto Marivaux
239
and Saint-Foix, who must shift here and there, to be a party to the assassina-
tion, and dodge the blood which spurts on them,” wrote Collé.53 The evic-
tion of spectators was unanimously seen as a victory of antiquity over French
modernity, of Roman gravity over modern levity, of order over offensive com-
mingling. It was a victory for Voltaire’s project on tragedy and for the authors’
desire to preserve the autonomy and the dignity of the fictional world. The
inappropriate encounters that had been taking place on the stage were pre-
cisely the kind that d’Alembert had condemned in such works as Fontenelle’s
Dialogues des morts (in which Socrates conversed with the courtesan Phryné,
and Cato with Ninon de l’Enclos), Marivaux’s youthful desecration of Fénelon
and Homer, and Marivaux’s mixture of popular (low) language and the up-
per register of sentimental discourse.54 Stage impropriety mirrored the textual
impropriety of parody and the satirical rewriting of the ancient canon that the
moderns had been practicing for a long time.
This chorus of approval from the literary establishment notwithstanding,
the removal of spectators from the stage did not put an end to the public’s de-
sire to undermine the integrity of an illusion that, by and large, was identified
with the world of high tragedy, with antiquity, and with the acting style of the
Comédie-Française. The parterre went on demonstrating its customary rest-
lessness. And at the Comédie-Italienne, on the fairgrounds, at the boulevard
theaters, and at the Opéra-Comique (where the same stage reforms took place
in the following years), Cesar and Mithridate kept bumping into Arlequin and
Smeraldine, while pages, bourgeois, soldiers, petits marquis, students, and the-
ater-lovers in general continued to intrude into the performance in a variety
of boisterous and troublesome ways.
In the next section, we will look more closely at one successful fairgrounds
play in which parody, bathos, a self-referentiality critical of theatrical genres,
and audience participation all coalesced in a memorable production that de-
fied the authority of the theatrical institution.
Arlequin-Deucalion, or Who Gets the Last Word?

Besides being the age of enlightenment, the eighteenth century was also the
age of parody. Of the twelve thousand plays he inventoried between 1700 and
the Revolution, Clarence Brenner did not specify which were parodies or plays
referencing preexisting works.55 A few examples will give an idea of the vastness
of the phenomenon. Voltaire’s Mariamne, performed at the Comédie-Fran-
çaise on 6 March 1724, flopped. While Voltaire was busy writing a new version
240
(Hérode et Mariamne, performed by the Comédie-Française on 10 April 1725)

the Comédie-Française produced a version by Nadal entitled Mariamne on 15
February 1725. Louis Fuzelier took advantage of the event to produce a parody
entitled Les quatre Mariamne at the Foire Saint-Germain on 1 March 1725;
the title evoked Voltaire’s first version, that of Nadal, and two more by other
authors. Riding on that wave, on 2 April Piron anticipated the launching of
Voltaire’s new version with his own parody, performed at the Théâtre-Italien,
Les huit Mariamne, the title alluded to the four tragedies plus the four Mari-
amnes of Fuzelier’s parody. Perhaps the most famous parody of the century
was Agnès de Chaillot, by Pierre-François Biancolelli, which opened on 24 July
1723 at the Theâtre-Italien on the heels of the success enjoyed by La Motte’s
Inès de Castro, performed on 6 April. Agnès had a run of 125 performances, an
exceptional number, during the first half of the century and had the distinction
of acquiring a life of its own, emancipated from its hypotext. It often happened
that a performance launched a cascade of parodies that drew upon one another:
from the focal point of the Comédie-Française, parodies would reach the outer
circles of the fairgrounds theaters. Thus, La Motte’s Romulus, performed at the
Théâtre-Français on 8 January 1722, was parodied at the Théâtre-Italien on
18 February with Arlequin Romulus, by Pierre-Françoise Biancolelli (known
as Dominique). It was soon followed by Lesage and Fuzelier’s marionettes
play Pierrot Romulus ou le ravisseur poli, performed by Delaplace and Dolet’s
Marionnettes Etrangères at the Foire Saint-Germain in 1722. Close to the end
of the century, Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro sparked an explosion of
parodies, all of them produced in 1784: Les cartes parlantes ou le mariage du va-
let de carreau, by Destival de Brabant, at the Théâtre des Grands-Danseurs on
19 June; Le repentir de Figaro, by Pariseau, at the Théâtre de l’Ambigü-Comique,
on 28 June; La folle soirée, by Bonnefoy, at the Comédie-Italienne on 14 July;
La folle nuit, by an anonymous author, at the Ambigü-Comique on 26 August;
Les amours de Chérubin, by Desfontaines, at the Comédie-Italienne on 4 No-
vember; and Le mariage par comédie, by Dorvigny, at the Ambigü-Comique
on 9 November or 20 December. Beaumarchais’s case was not at all unusual;
earlier in the century opéras lyriques had frequently generated multiple paro-
dies (Persée, Phaeton, and Roland each had seven).56
As we have seen, the extraordinary vitality and longevity of the parodistic
pandemic were undoubtedly owing to the peculiarities of the ancien régime
policies on theaters, that is, to the rigid stratification of genres and venues.
As repertories and acting styles were protected by parlement-enforced mo-
nopolies, theaters were prevented from performing certain genres, and each
241
was limited to a specific kind of spectacle and manner. While the heaviest
prohibitions were laid by the parlements upon the minor playhouses (the so-
called petits théâtres, or spectacles irréguliers), which were not allowed to per-
form plays from the classical repertory and often were even forbidden to pro-
duce anything endowed with unity of action and dialogue, proscriptions cut
both ways. When, in a desperate attempt to lure spectators away from the fairs,
the Comédie-Française ventured, a couple of times in the first decades of the
eighteenth century, to produce parodies of its own repertory, the parlement
remained silent, but Parisian spectators mutinied, and the experiment ended
amidst catcalls and universal scorn.57
But there were reasons other than legal and economic ones for the public’s
hunger for works that endlessly reworked, disfigured, and tore apart canoni-
cal works. It mattered little whether the hypotext (tragedy, comedy, or opera)
had been successful or had flopped. The more visible an author made himself
on the literary scene, the more famous or infamous his work became, the
more eager audiences were to see it migrate from the center to the periphery
of the theatrical world. There, they would enjoy seeing the work picked apart
or simply performed in a different style and with a different medium—with
puppets, pantomime, or the masks of the Italian commedia. Perhaps unique in
the history of the European theater, French audiences of the eighteenth cen-
tury, because of their continuous exposure to endless variations on the same
theme, were able to develop a heightened critical sense of stylistic specificity
and an appreciation for the diversity and range of acting styles, which were
lost once the Revolution abolished the monopoly and introduced freedom of
the theaters. It must be noted that the culture of parody could be subversive,
but it could also be compatible with a conservative conception of the separa-
tion of genres and the preservation of the Aristotelian theatrical rules. Once
the performance was over, carnivalesque reversals did not prevent society from
returning to its previous, orderly hierarchy nor the Comédie-Française from
going on declaiming its tragedies as it had always done. The commingling of
genres often aimed less at reversing hierarchies than at chastising any depar-
ture from the norm.58 There would be much to say about the role that parody
played both in favor of and against the evolution of dramatic genres. For the
purpose of the present argument, however, I will limit myself to discussing
one relevant feature in this extraordinarily rich and still largely unexplored
theatrical ethos: that the culture of parody was an extension of parterre culture.
The same creative and improvisational drive that engaged the audience in a
competition with the author resurfaces in parodistic reworkings; the same at-
242
tention to linguistic detail and the same playfulness grounded in a mastery of

codes and forms are operational here. What is more, the spectatorial practices
allowed in the fairgrounds theaters enabled the audience to participate in the
spectacle in ways that were far more direct and empowering than those that
were tolerated in the official theaters.
I will take as an example one of the most remarkable plays written for
the fairgrounds theaters, Alexis Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion, performed by the
troupe of Francisque at the Foire Saint-Laurent on 25 February 1722. Always
on the margins of literary respectability, despite several tragedies and a success-
ful comedy (La métromanie, 1738, which spoofed Voltaire) performed by the
Comédie-Française, Alexis Piron (1689–1773) never made it into the French
Academy (his youthful Ode à Priape was brought up as an obstacle), and he
was compelled to spend much of his life doing what perhaps he liked best,
that is, haunting parodistic circles, writing satirical works, parodies, and libret-
tos for the fairgrounds opéra-comique.59 His talent as a satirist and formidable
conversationalist (Grimm said that he was much better than Voltaire) won
him protection and a pension from the marquis de Livry, the king’s first maître
d’hôtel. Livry hosted the meetings of the Régiment de la Calotte; Piron was
also a member of the Societé du Caveau, founded by Crébillon the younger in
order to write parodies of his father’s works.60
Arlequin-Deucalion enjoyed an exceptionally successful run of thirty per-
formances to packed theaters. Piron’s play stands out among the repertory of
the commedia dell’arte introduced in France by the Italian companies (which
the fairgrounds pilfered freely after the exile of the Italians from 1697 to 1716)
because it is a fully written work with little room for improvisation on the part
of the performers; as such, it is better suited to canonical transmission than
most traditional plays of the Théâtre-Italien. Yet, the historical context of the
performance is paramount to our appreciation of this work. Embedded in the
play are traces of the legal status of the forains and of their relationship with the
audience; indeed, the dramatic drive that propels the play lies in its challenge
to an authority that would muzzle the work. The troubles of the fairgrounds
theater dated from the fin de siècle and continued, on and off, through the
second half of the eighteenth century. In 1690, under the police administra-
tion of La Reynie, the Comédiens-Français, who were undergoing a period of
decline, had the theater of one Alexandre Bertrand, puppeteer, demolished.
Bertrand had replaced his marionettes with live actors and had dared to per-
form a complete comedy without permission. In the following years the forains
tried to circumvent the prohibitions against dialogue and unity of action (an
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Aristotelian rule, and as such the birthright of the Comédiens-Français) by de-

vising a variety of creative experiments. They would perform detached scenes;
mix dialogue with song (which eventually gave birth to the opéra-comique);
mix actors with puppets; perform monologues only; combine monologue and
pantomime; have actors enter the stage whenever they had to reply to one an-
other and then exit; or have the audience sing couplets in response to the actors
onstage. All of those strategies became wildly popular. Audiences flocked to
the fairs in hopes of seeing the latest ploy invented to dodge the prohibitions.
Police officers would be among the audience; the new stunt would be reported
to the authorities; a decree would be promulgated against it; it would spur the
invention of a new theatrical device; and the cycle would go on.61 This repres-
sive system encouraged complicity between the actors and the audience. Both
came in order to engage in a ritual of transgression against the representatives
of royal authority that involved collaborating with each other, testing the lim-
its of the game and those of law enforcement. The report of a police officer
dated 16 February 1712 is enlightening. The officer reports having seen a three-
act comedy at the theater of Octave;62 however, “we have noticed that no actor
spoke during the play, but they used placards [écriteaux] instead of speech;
thanks to them the dialogue was unbroken and the scenes were continuous
until the end of the play, with that particularity that the parterre turned to act-
ing: prompted by the orchestra, it lent its singing and its speech to the actors
onstage.”63
By 1721 the theater of Francisque had performed (by permission of the
Royal Academy of Music) many successful opéras-comiques. The permission,
however, was suddenly revoked, and after a period of relative laxity the prohi-
bitions against dialogue came back into force. Lesage, Fuzelier, and d’Orneval,
the principal suppliers of opéras-comiques, defected in frustration to Delaplace
and Dolet’s marionette theater, where the curtain showed a Polichinelle with
the motto “J’en valons bien d’autres!” (We are no worse than them!). Piron was
said to have composed Arlequin-Deucalion in a couple of days.64 It was a tour
de force, the response to a crisis and a challenge to the authority of the police
as well as to the dictates of theatrical canon. Merging classical mythology with
the masks associated with popular culture for a mixed audience familiar with
the symbols of high and low theater, the play is an apparently freewheeling
improvisation with scarcely any plot. Arlequin embodied Deucalion, the son
of Prometheus and the only human who escaped the punitive flood that Zeus
had let loose on the whole human race.
When the curtain opens, Arlequin has landed, astride a wine barrel, upon
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Mount Parnassus, the residence of the Muses and the only dry spot in a thor-
oughly soaked world. In fact, he has landed right in the middle of a Parnasse
satirique, that is, in the contentious space of the Parisian world of letters. In
the course of his rambling monologue Arlequin interacts with a number of
mythological figures, all emblematic of theatrical institutions: Melpomène,
the muse of tragedy; Thalie, the muse of comedy; Apollo; Pegasus, the winged
horse of poetic fancy; and Momus, the god of criticism and satire, embodied
in the puppet Polichenelle. None of those characters are able to preserve any
dignity or grandiosity, but according to the dictates of mock-heroic and bur-
lesque rewriting, all are reduced to the scale of Arlequin’s carnivalesque world
of basic appetites and insubordination. Of all the masks [tipi fissi] of the com-
media dell’arte, Arlequin is the most proteiform. Within the loose constraints
of his type (gluttony, childish greed, sexual appetite, scatological tendencies,
a disposition to deceit coupled with the greatest naïveté), he is like a crutch
on which any character can be hung: king (Arlequin roi par hasard), emperor
(Arlequin empereur dans la lune), mythological hero (Arlequin Jason), demigod
(Arlequin-Phaëton), or even animal (Arlequin cochon par amour). He is pure
dramatic potentiality, the embodiment of theatricality. With his black mask,
always recognizable to the spectator but not to the other characters on stage,
Arlequin subverts by his presence any illusion of verisimilitude.65
The dramatic engine of the play may be located not only in the content of
Arlequin’s speech but especially in his speech act. By engaging with a variety
of characters, Arlequin challenges the Théâtre-Français and the parliamentary
decree that forbids fairgrounds actors to engage in dialogue with one another.
In a burlesque reversal, Arlequin settles his scores by turning a situation in
which he alone was barred from verbal exchange into one in which he is the
only speaking character in a world that has turned silent and deserted. A Pyr-
rhic victory, to be sure, for Arlequin no longer has an audience (a reference to
the scarce attendance at opening night). “Here I am, forlorn! I am alone in this
world. No one is here to answer me! No matter, I will keep on speaking, if only
to preserve the habit. Ah! we are going to have a magnificent soliloquy” (act 1,
sc. 1, p. 492).66 Originally barred from speech by royal authority, Arlequin now
has the last word. He is the last man and by default the one and only king. The
only voices that are heard besides Arlequin’s are those of Polichinelle, who, as
a puppet, is allowed to engage in dialogue, and a parrot, whose repeated cries
of “Hail to the king! hail to the king!” are answered by Arlequin with a “Many
thanks, I am the only king here now” (act 1, sc. 2, p. 495). The parrot is the
burlesque incarnation of the dove that in the Bible signaled to Noah the end
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of the flood, as well as the emblem of a world of letters constantly parroting

itself.
Just when Arlequin has resigned himself, after the loss of his wife, Pyrrha,
to limit his appetites to mere gluttony, a lady walks onto the stage. Dressed
in “Roman” costume (the classical garb of the actors of the Théâtre-Français)
and holding a dagger in one hand and a trumpet in the other (the attributes
of tragedy and epics), she strides majestically, making faces, gesturing wildly,
and uttering “Ah!” “Alas,” and “Great Lord!” in the manner of tragic actresses.
Wasting no time, Arlequin proposes to her. “She is scary and pathetic. Has she
put on fancy rags! What gestures! what expressions! From head to toe she is
nothing but convulsion. She might make me laugh every now and then. Let
us approach her and cajole her into marrying us” (act 1, sc. 3, p. 496). But the
muse of tragedy is unimpressed by a marriage with Arlequin’s low farce. Un-
like her counterparts at the Théâtre-Français, she is silent, and Arlequin is able
to settle his score with the theater that has muzzled him. A loud whistle, the
weapon of choice of dissatisfied audiences, is blown right into her ear: “Say
something, my priggish lady! You have no reason to act so stiff. Do you realize
who it is that you are rejecting? Am I not at the moment the greatest catch in
the whole universe, heaven included?” (ibid., p. 498). But Melpomène remains
silent. She drags her robes across the stage and exits, lugging with her a few
pages ripped from the fifth act of La Motte’s tragedy Romulus, which was then
playing at the Théâtre-Français. Tragedy is a solemn fool with nothing to say.
She is immediately followed by Thalie, who enters dancing and prancing, sing-
ing light airs. Unlike her predecessor, Thalie appears quite hysterical; she opens
her mouth very wide and is about to speak. That is the moment everybody was
expecting: “Hell! here is a tough one. Monsieur the officer, beware. I decline
my responsibility. God help us with the fine!” cries Arlequin (act 1, sc. 4, pp.
498–99).
Will she or will she not speak? Will the play break the injunction against
dialogue and allow the police officer to halt the spectacle and arrest the off-
enders? Arlequin manages to gag Thalie by placing a hand over her mouth,
but the play’s entire monologue is a conceit aimed at the very real presence of
the representative of royal authority among the audience. Flirting with disas-
ter, the comedy plays at teasing his power. Indeed, the play may be see as an
elaborate persiflage that involves three characters: Arlequin, the embodiment
of the subordinate theaters; the audience, who is his accomplice; and the vic-
tim, as it were, the royal exempt.67 There are times when dialogue seems about
to break but is stopped at the last moment by an ostensibly panicked Arlequin,
246
or when Arlequin’s interlocutor turns out, unexpectedly, to be legitimate (as

with Polichinelle-Momus, who, being made of wood, poses no threat to the
Comédiens-Français). In reality, the play’s main purpose is to create situations
that challenge and neutralize the power of the exempt.68
But the brunt of the satire is not aimed at the police only. It is also directed
against those forms that were closely identified with a state-sponsored cul-
ture that in the eyes of many had ossified into the direst conformism. Piron,
Diderot (notably in Paradoxe sur le comedien), and, at the end of the century,
Mercier all railed against the “mannequin,” the “tragic monster,” the bloated
“French Melpomène,” who was nothing but a corpse. To Mercier, it was un-
fortunate that aspiring authors neglected better goals in order to turn into
morticians: “To go and unearth a Greek or a Roman cadaver; to color its ashen
cheeks, dress its cold limbs, raise it on its wobbly feet, and impress on those
pasty eyes, on that frozen tongue, on those stiff arms, the look, the language,
the mimicry that are customary on our stage—what a misuse of the manne-
quin!”69 The same image of bodily decay may be found in Nicolas Racot de
Grandval’s Discours préliminaire to his Le pot de chambre cassé [The Broken
Chamberpot] (1749). Grandval (1676–1753), who was a former actor turned
satirist, saw tragedy as a swollen body ready to be punctured, as a genre that
had degenerated into epic bombast and grandiloquence. “It is not possible
that the sales [of the Comédie-Française] will hold for long with those cold
plays that are tragedies only in name, that make us neither laugh nor cry, that
impress us only with their old rags and their fake diamonds, that are a bulge
swelling out of the epic poem, plays that, like dropsy, would be best taken care
of with a good perforation.”70
In Arlequin-Deucalion the wrongdoings of the theater have unleashed Zeus’s
flood. Tragedy’s epic swagger has turned to muteness: “What we used to call
tragedy was nothing but a mass of fifteen hundred or eighteen hundred epi-
dramatic verses” (act 1, sc. 3, p. 496);71 comedy, were it given a chance to speak,
would be a grating blabberer. Much of Piron’s play is a lively dramatization of
the form of criticism that subtends parody. The shadowy characters that Arle-
quin encounters are symbols of the official theater culled from the repertory of
classical emblems of high culture. The play strikes at a variety of targets. There
are paraphrases of verses taken from Marivaux’s La mort d’Annibal, Voltaire’s
Artémire, La Motte’s Issé and Romulus. But it is against high theater as a whole
that Arlequin unleashes his sedition. In the second act, Apollo makes an ap-
pearance as an effeminate petit-maître who tries to seduce Arlequin’s wife, Pyr-
rha (who has miraculously resurfaced and is, of course, mute). Apollo plays
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the flute, sings vaudevilles, and leans too close to her. In a typical reversal, it
is Apollo, once the symbol of the Sun King, who gets the thrashing that tra-
ditionally falls upon Arlequin’s rear end. “I am the only male here. Apollo is
effeminate and a fop. He has been with those nine girls for centuries, and they
are still virgins” (act 2, sc. 3, p. 501). Pyrrha has descended onto the stage rid-
ing Pegasus, the winged horse, the symbol of poetic enthusiasm and Pindaric
flight. But the wondrous creature has donkey’s ears and the wings of a turkey;
it is all covered with placards of unsuccessful plays produced by the Théâtre-
Français. When Arlequin mounts it, uttering tragic verses, the horse wobbles
under the weight of a particularly heavy quotation from Artémire and then col-
lapses (a reminder that Voltaire’s play had flopped after a few performances).
Finally, Pegasus takes off thanks to the help of a hatful of water and the recital
of some satirical verses by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (act 2, sc. 4, p. 501).
But the emblems of classical theater are inseparable from the social order
that nurtures them. Inevitably, Arlequin’s satire widens to include the totality
of the ancien régime hierarchical structure. In the third act, Arlequin opens the
casket to discover, much to his disappointment, that it contains, not wine, but
the jetsam and flotsam of a society swept away by the flood: a book of heraldry;
the transcript of a lawsuit between partisans of the ancients and the moderns; a
gun, which Arlequin throws into the sea; a lawsuit against the plaintiff’s entire
family; a bag of money; and finally a Polichinelle puppet. Only the puppet
makes himself useful by revealing to Arlequin the meaning of the mysterious
prophecy received by Deucalion. According to the myth, in order to recreate
the human race, Deucalion and his wife will have to pick up the bones of their
grandmother and throw them behind them: their grandmother, Polichinelle
explains, is the earth, and stones represent her bones.
Arlequin and Pyrrha comply, but in their doing so the play demonstrates
the limits of carnival. The five children who spring up, fully grown, from the
earth are nothing but the representatives of the three orders of French society: a
farmer and an artisan; a military man and a robin, or magistrate; a grotesquely
dressed member of the clergy. Each one of them is welcomed differently by
an Arlequin turned patriarch; each receives praise or a reprimand, according
to his deserts. The soldier has his hat knocked off to punish his insolence:
“Doesn’t he fancy he is made of a stone more precious than the others! My
lord, a little more humility” (act 3, sc. 6, p. 515). The robin should never have
been born: “He has something wily, flaccid, and arrogant that repels; . . . I
wish that when I threw that damn stone I had hurled it deep into the sea or I
had got a cramp” (ibid.). The priest will reproduce himself with no need of a
248
woman, and there will always be too many of his kind. Only the farmer and
the artisan are declared useful and good. But each child will fulfill his destiny
and reproduce the same social order that the flood wiped out. Arlequin seems
quite resigned to seeing things resume their normal course; indeed, it does not
even occur to him that they might do otherwise. (From the stones thrown by
Pyrrha, four women emerge, but being female, presumably they have no rank
worth mentioning, and indeed, they are not mentioned.)
Like much of the literature of the moderns, the fairgrounds spectacles were
pointed critiques of the existing aesthetic and social order, but they had no
utopian vision to propose, no radical departure from the status quo, no drive
to reform. The critique they presented, daring as it often was, was split between
the bold undermining of the symbols of monarchical culture and the resigned
acceptance of the way things were, including the cherished rules of Aristotelian
doctrine, the spectacles réguliers of the privileged theaters, and the inescapable
superiority of the Comédie-Française. We might even ask to what extent the
existence of a culture of parody contributed to maintaining tragedy as it was
and to ensuring that it preserved its position of prestige. Comic theatricality,
such as that embodied in the paillasse, kept alive the connection between the
audience and the space of representation; it forced the fictional world to open
itself up and to engage with the reality of the salle. But by keeping that contact
on the margins, it provided the spectacle of classical tragedy with a kind of
alibi, a convenient means of escaping more stringent demands. When Lesage
and d’Orneval published a ten-volume collection of the best plays of the fair-
grounds theater, Théâtre de la foire ou l’Opéra Comique (1721–37), they prefaced
it with a bitter acknowledgment of their subordinate status and a good dose of
persiflage:
It is not with the intent to challenge the immortal masterpieces that en-
sure the superiority of the Théâtre-Français above all the other theaters of
the world that we publish this collection today. We do not even wish to be
compared to the two other authorized theaters, even though they too do not
always follow Aristotelian principles. It is in order to transmit to posterity a
memorial testifying to the different forms taken by the fairgrounds theater.
“A wasted effort,” will say those who judge of a work by the site of its perfor-
mance. “Why publish those wretched poems? Is it so as to remind the public
of the shameful taste it had for them? The mere title fairgrounds theater
implies something low and vulgar that will disgrace the book.” . . . Some
manufacturers of tragedies and lyric poems will say, seeing the simplicity of
our subjects, that they must have taken little effort. They ought to be more
cautious. It is not easy to find a middle ground between high and low, to fly
249
low to the ground without touching it. The sublime is no more difficult to
capture than the art of teasing the mind with humor.72
Mixing authorial pride with humility, Lesage, d’Orneval, and Piron knew that
there was no prestige and no status to be gained for writers of second-tier
theaters, regardless of the quality of their spectacles, and that even if the king
himself had occasionally hosted marionette shows at court, comedy, let alone
farce, was always going to be held as inferior to tragedy. Unlike Voltaire, his
lifelong rival, Piron was never elected to the Academy, but remained a minor
author despite having written tragedies for the Comédie-Française and suc-
cessful comédies regulières. The epitaph Piron wrote for himself was representa-
tive of a whole class of talented authors who by choice or by necessity remained
on the margins:
Here lies . . . Who? By God, a nonentity, a zero.
Someone who was neither a lackey nor a master;
Neither a judge, nor an artisan nor a tradesman;
Nor a farmer, a soldier, a magistrate, a priest;
Nor a Freemason. He chose to be nothing.
Here lies Piron, who was nothing at all;
Not even a member of the Academy.73
Marivaux, who in his youth had practiced a genre that was typical of low
literature, that is, the mock-heroic satire of high epics, and who regularly at-
tended the fairgrounds spectacles, denied the paternity of his early works and
never acknowledged being the author of plays like the wonderfully unconven-
tional Le triomphe de Plutus (performed by Dominique at the Théâtre-Italien
in 1728), very likely inspired by an opéra-comique by Dupuy performed at the
Foire Saint-Germain on 15 July 1721 by the company of Lalauze, Pierre Alard,
and Mlle d’Aigremont. Diderot, who wrote a sketch for an opéra-comique set
among the fairgrounds stalls,74 nonetheless despised the culture of the petits
théâtres because it was commercial and successful. In his writings on the Salons
he all but called the actress and opéra-comique singer Mme Favart a prostitute.
He never mentioned that the pantomime he nostalgically associated with the
Greeks was alive and flourishing on the lowly tréteaux of the fairgrounds.75
Even though the uncanny mimic abilities of Rameau’s nephew can be better
understood in light of the careers of the gifted actors and mimes of the fairs
(such as Nicolas Vienne, also known as Beauvisage, the founder of the Theâtre
des Associés),76 the memory of those artists did not deserve being transmitted
to posterity; but then again, the nephew was immersed in a satirical subculture
250
that Diderot had portrayed as repugnant and corrupt. To Diderot, the divide
between the grand goût and the petit goût corresponded, to a great extent, to
that between grands and petits spectacles, between sublime entrancement and
an inferior, commercially oriented comedy that grew as a parasitical tumor out
of the dignified endeavors of the official theaters. In his eyes, salvation for the
theater was to come not from below, that is, not from the “irregular” spectacles
that the public loved, nor from the unruly activities of the parterre, but from
above, from a more enlightened involvement of the state in cultural affairs and
from renewed state patronage. Diderot envisioned vast, national amphithe-
aters, not a multitude of private, independent ventures. That wish was partially
realized in the revolutionary reform of the theaters. But when freedom from
the constraints of privilege and monopoly finally came in January 1791, it was
at the price of stringent regulation and control of the content of spectacles.
The Terror finally succeeded in purging, at least for a while, the boulevards and
the opéra-comique of all vestiges of undignified, impious laughter.77
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Epilogue: The Costume
of Modernity
We must speak about modern things in the antique manner.

—Diderot
The lively theatrical culture that was reflected in the activities of the parterre was
a sign that insubordinate forms of theatricality were being enacted throughout
the eighteenth century, despite the playwrights’ (and the authorities’) attempts
to channel and control the audience’s response. I have defined such theatri-
cality as the effect of a heightened awareness of forms, as the knowledge that
those forms were rooted in the monarchy’s (and the authors’) appropriation of
the culture of antiquity for purposes of self-representation, legitimation, and
enhancement; hence the desire to deflect them through parodistic reformula-
tions and reappropriations. A symbiotic relationship developed between the
cultural categories of classicism, with its rationalization of forms and its cult of
antiquity, and the subversions and parodies of the goût moderne.1
The philosophes’ antitheatrical, neoclassical stance made them wary of such
attempts, which they saw as decadent manifestations of a subculture mired in
commercialism, mannerism, and inauthenticity. They could not detect in the
ferment of the parterres and in the ventures of the fairgrounds playhouses an
echo of their own yearnings for change and renewal. While on the one hand
the philosophes were suspicious of the disorderly stylistic experimentation that
was manifest in parterre activities, on the other they were themselves con-
cerned with breaking loose from the shackles of classical forms as they knew
them and with inventing a new language for the arts. Reform was their mantra
252
The Costume of Modernity
and their passion. Whereas Voltaire devoted much of his life to reworking the
tragedy from within—tinkering here and there, rewriting Oedipus, competing
now with Corneille, now with Sophocles, in a struggle that he saw as titanic
but one that only gained him, as a playwright, a truncated immortality—
Diderot attacked the problem from without. In the Entretiens sur Le fils naturel
he not only invented a new genre that transcended the distinction between
comedy and tragedy but also proposed radical reforms of the role of language
and visualization on the stage. In a visionary stroke he imagined the birth of
what was to become romantic opera and ballet. The theater and the visual arts
had been Diderot’s (and the philosophes’) favorite ground for experimenta-
tion and reform. Since the mid-seventeenth century the theater had been held
up as not only the highest form of poetic expression, as the most prestigious
career for a writer, but also as the best and most effective way to reach a wide
audience in real time, hitting it with the irresistible force of ancient oratory. In
the theater, the philosophes argued, words became action and tears; rhetoric
shaded into drama and good intentions aroused authentic emotion. But in
their search for a universal language of the emotions that would overcome dis-
sension and apathy, they cast a disapproving eye toward the medley of idioms,
the fragmentation of languages, that fermented in the struggling theaters the
audiences loved.
The philosophes were chronically dissatisfied with themselves, even as they
cherished dreams of unprecedented relevance to society, and with the ratio-
nalizing powers of philosophy, which they (with the exception of Condorcet)
saw as antithetical to the arts.2 Voltaire (who was less happy than he would
seem to Barthes) was largely responsible for inventing the myth of le Grand
Siècle, as well as that of the decadence of his own age.3 Highly civilized people,
Diderot lamented, no longer created; they were too self-conscious. They wrote
poetics, criticism, methodologies, and grammars.4 And indeed, write criticism
and dream about poetics they did. Voltaire, d’Alembert, Marmontel, Thomas,
and Mercier wrote extensively about grammar, stylistics, the social role of the
writer, and the function of art. Voltaire perhaps devoted more energy to his
work as a critic than to the rest of his numerous activities. Diderot spent much
time mulling over a reform of the arts. While only a couple of his plays became
public, he dedicated himself to imagining countless others, which he sketched
in his notebooks; he also liked to compose in his imagination large canvases,
which he would lovingly describe in his Salons, and which he would propose
as subjects to the painters he befriended.5 The sketch, or esquisse, was the genre
that he favored above all others because it promised much to the imagination;
253
it suggested everything, while it remained preserved from the curse of labor

and manner and from the descent into form. It would be accurate to describe
Jacques le fataliste as a vast canvas composed entirely of sketches.6 The art of
the philosophes was one of the esquisse. It thrived on potentiality; it was an art
to come. The arts and the public would engender each other: the arts had to
take a vanguard role in creating the ideal public, which alone could appreciate
the new productions that would be made for it.7 Art professed a commitment
to reality and to service in the public sphere, but it did not reproduce reality;
rather, it was devoted to reinventing it. While the philosophes did not gen-
erate great poetry, they became the poets of their unimpeachable ambitions;
they reinvented themselves in their function as writers, patriots, intellectuals,
republican orators. Like Mme de Merteuil, they engendered themselves and
became their own creation.
The sublime they invoked sought to eliminate all mediation so that their
eloquent art would become pure engagement with the real, but it was a poetic
reality shaped by the literary memories of their collège days. The philosophes
were caught between two kinds of greatness, both of which they thought were
out of their reach: that of past masters, and that of the future generations that
philosophy would engender. They had to be content with acting as midwives.
Eloquence would make the real happen; it would recreate the world to the size
of the artist’s soul, which must be vast, ardent, and pure enough to raise the
public to the level of his imagination. Artistic excellence was conflated with the
cult of ancient virtue, and the artist was called upon to embody in the eyes of
the public the civic and moral values that inspired the greatness of ancient art
and civilization.8 In the ideology of the sublime, the artist must personify the
qualities that he represents in his art: he cannot represent great men without
being one himself.9 That is a belief that Diderot puts forth in his eulogy on
Richardson and that he never quite abandons, despite his sojourn in the hell
of Rameau’s Nephew.
All renewal had to be a return to the origins, to the rejuvenating sources
of Sophocles, Homer, Virgil, Demosthenes. Diderot did not refrain from en-
gaging in a bit of deception now and then, ventriloquizing Sophocles, making
Philoctetes sound very much like a dutiful father in a drame bourgeois. Yet the
cult of antiquity pervades his work; the “simplicity” and “naïveté” of the ancient
text remained a constant, if elusive, reference. In the pages of the Salons Diderot
upbraided rococo artists for neglecting to acquaint themselves with the spirit
of the classical texts on which their paintings were based; his reprimands were
all the more stern as they were prevented from reaching their targets.
254
The aversion Diderot felt for the modern French ethos was symptomatic of
the late Enlightenment process of abstraction, through which artists sought to
reach the basic and elemental sources of beauty. That process, which led drame
playwrights and painters to favor the representation of basic and primordial
conflicts—death, sacrifice, violence, revenge—made any reconciliation with
the ephemeral, mundane, and mortal quality of reality very problematic. “If
our painters and sculptors were henceforth to be obliged to draw their subjects
from the history of modern France . . . then painting and sculpture would soon
fall into decadence.”10 The modern was by definition unrepresentable; unrep-
resentability and Frenchness were one and the same. A prejudice of exoticism
would draw Diderot to compare the contemporary French costume with that of
peoples of the Orient, whom he saw as happily uncontaminated by modernity:
What’s shabbier, more barbarous, more tasteless than French garments, than
the dresses of our women? Tell me, what beauty could possibly result if
trussed-up dolls like that were introduced into a composition? What a fine
effect that would produce, especially in tragic subjects! How to confer upon
them even a hint of nobility, of grandeur? In contrast to the dress of Orien-
tals, Asians, Greeks, and Romans, it reveals the talent of the skillful painter
and highlights the limits of the mediocre one.11
We might assume that for Diderot everything held together and that the main
reason why he despised the modern costume was that he saw it as the outer
layer of an inner, moral disintegration. However, we cannot but suspect that
occasionally it was the clothes that made the man and that giving Caesar a mar-
quis’s outfit would have been enough to diminish his character, to turn him
into a fairgrounds puppet.12 Indeed, much in the spirit of a fairgrounds paro-
dist, Diderot sometimes imagines burlesque cross-dressing scenarios: “Deck
out Caesar, Alexander, Cato with our hats and wigs, and you’ll split your sides
laughing.” Conversely, putting the most depraved of French kings in a toga
would do wonders for his dignity: “If you dress Louis XV in Greek or Roman
dress, you won’t laugh at all.”13 At times, seeming to forget his own lessons
about the uses of antiquity as an artistic ideal, Diderot lets himself fall into
outright kitsch, that is, into a sentimentalized aesthetics made of parts pieced
together, of fragments detached from their original context and stuck hap-
hazardly onto something foreign to them. His commentary on Noël Hallé’s
Minerve conduisant la paix à l’Hôtel de Ville illustrates that tendency. Diderot
utterly despises this painting, as he does most allegorical paintings exposed at
the Salon. “One has the impression that Monsieur the Provost of the Trade
255
Guilds is inviting Minerva and Peace to take chocolate.” Yet, he suggests, there
might be a way to rescue it from the contempt it richly deserves:
This picture is laughable; it’s an assemblage of overscale doctors and apoth-
ecaries perfect for a production of Le medecin malgré lui. But move the scene
from Paris to Rome, from the city hall to the senate; for these damn red and
black sacks crowned with wigs, with their silk stockings diligently secured
above the knee, their fancy collars, and their heeled shoes, substitute grave
figures with long beards, their heads, arms, and legs unadorned, their chests
exposed, wearing long, flowing, ample consular robes; assign the same sub-
ject to the same utterly mediocre painter, and you’ll see what an interesting,
satisfying thing he could make of it.14
Antiquity is a formula that can be easily applied, the result almost guaranteed.
All one needs is a few touches: removing high heels and stockings, adding a
beard, baring a chest. If a few such corrections here and there may morph
a mediocre painter into a competent one, and a bad picture into a moving
scene, then the modern world, no matter how mediocre and despoiled, may
be dressed in ancient drag and rescued from its pit of depravity. Thus, not
unlike the Goncourt brothers, who recommended cultivating an artistic man-
ner, Diderot recommends cultivating an antique one. A touch of superstitious
idolatry toward the customs and ceremonies of antiquity—the same that will
inspire the revolutionaries to dunk contemporary France into the republican
fountain of youth15—leads him to associate a certain aesthetics of manners
with the sublime and to invest the ancient costume with socially therapeutic
powers:
One rarely becomes a great writer, a great man of letters, a man of reformed
taste [grand goût] without making a close study of the ancients. There is a
simplicity in Homer and Moses about which one would perhaps have to
say what Cicero said of Regulus’s return to Carthage: “Laus temporum, non
hominis”: it is more the result of contemporary morals than of individual
genius. Peoples with these practices, these robes, these ceremonies, these
laws, these customs could not have another tone. But it existed, this tone that
cannot be invented; that’s precisely where we should look, in view of trans-
porting it to our own time, which, while very corrupt or very mannered, is
still enamored of simplicity. We must speak about modern things in the an-
tique manner [il faut parler des choses modernes à l’antique].16
Laws, practices, and customs are coextensive with robes and ceremonies, for
there is a correlation between politics, manners, publicly displayed symbols,
and taste. The same reaction that makes Diderot recoil at the representation
256
of the modern body, both in outfit and manner, draws him, with a touching
faith, to the costume of antiquity: if only its appearance, its tone, its baffling
simplicity could be transported to his own time, perhaps some radical change
might follow. This fetishistic cult of ancient taste prefigures the anticomanie
of the revolutionaries, who in November 1793 decided to replace the “royalist”
images on playing cards with icons of republicanism. Thus the kings were re-
placed with Brutus, Cato, Solon, and Rousseau (dressed in a toga); the queens
with four virtues (Prudence, Unity, Justice, and Fortitude); and the valets with
four Roman heroes (Hannibal, Mucius Scaevola, Horace, and Decius Mus).
(As we know, it is not one of the minor paradoxes of the Revolution that the
event that is credited with the birth of modern democracy should have been
steeped in the iconography of antiquity, or, even further removed in time, that
of myth.)
The artistic sensitivities of the late Enlightenment were not turned toward
the pursuit of the time-driven, contingent appeal of je ne sais quoi, but rather
toward the cultivation of an ideal beauty abstracted from its environment and
made absolute. Diderot’s conception of mimesis is revealing. Although, as
some critics have noted, his discussion of the modèle idéal seems to come close
to a Platonist ideal of perfection, in fact his conception of art is willing to em-
brace imperfection and deformity, but only on the condition that the artist
be able to reveal the underlying, essential logic that produced them. Beneath
the multitude of apparently random and haphazard malformations, the law of
nature works in secret but permanent ways: “Nature does nothing that is not
correct. Every form, whether beautiful or ugly, has its cause, and of all extant
beings there isn’t a single one that is not just as it should be”; that is equally
true of a blind woman or of the twisted body of a hunchback.17 It is up to
the artist to decipher and reveal their occult law. A process of abstraction, a
reduction of complexity in favor of strongly outlined conflicts, must inform
all representation of evanescent, chance-driven reality so as to bring its time-
less, universal dimension to the fore. The one thing that Diderot truly cannot
abide, the one feature that would condemn all representation to insignificance
and triviality, is the incorporation into the artwork of the fleeting, ephemeral
moment: “A laughing portrait is without nobility, lacking in character, some-
times even devoid of truth, and consequently quite silly. Laughter is fleeting.
One laughs at something specific, but susceptibility to laughter is not an essen-
tial character trait.”18 It is significant that the aspect that Diderot singles out as
emblematic of things ephemeral is laughter, which he sees not only as a fleeting
mood but as the theatrical awareness of the spectator’s presence in the picture
257
and as a manifestation of mincing mannerism (like the “smile” that floats on

Diderot’s lips in his 1767 portrait by Van Loo). In its transient quality, laugh-
ter, like clothing, is the emblem of a modernity that speaks to the senses but
not to the soul, that gives fleeting pleasure but no true emotion, that is made
of composite and indefinite elements rather than starkly dramatic ones. The
reference to antiquity, in contrast, has become the foundation for a kind of
beauty that rests upon the expression of boldly stated passions. It is a guaran-
tor of universality and permanence akin to the immutability of nature’s order
and conducible to the quest for the elusive modèle idéal. Of course, neither the
antique nor the modern was a known quantity; the former was supposed to
ground the latter, but both were uncertain and ideal, their language yet to be
(re)discovered.
It was not until Baudelaire’s own Salon writings that it became possible to
imagine an encounter between, on the one hand, a universal, abstract beauty
emancipated from the constraints of mimesis and normative references to na-
ture and, on the other hand, a newly rediscovered, modern, emotionally and
narratively complex aesthetics of the transitory and the contingent. “He makes
it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of po-
etry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”19 To Baudelaire,
who no longer shared the linear narrative of the cyclical rise and fall of civiliza-
tions, modernity (the word was still a neologism in his time)20 was a concept
relative to the situation of the beholder; in fact, modernity was not unique but
multiple and indefinitely recurrent:
Every old master has had his own modernity; the great majority of fine por-
traits that have come down to us from former generations are clothed in the
costume of their own period. They are perfectly harmonious, because every-
thing—from costume and coiffure down to gesture, glance and smile (for
each age has a deportment, a glance, a smile of its own)—everything, I say,
combines to form a completely vibrant whole. This transitory, fugitive ele-
ment, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised
or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss
of an abstract and indeterminate beauty, like that of the first woman before
the fall of man.21
Baudelaire’s embrace of modern costume rested upon the belief (shared by

Diderot) that there was an organic, necessary relation between the fashion,
the manners, and the spirit of a particular time. But while Baudelaire cel-
ebrated the metamorphosis of the fugitive as being vital to the creative process,
Diderot recoiled from it. Because he too was convinced that the costume of
258
the modern age reflected its manners and values, his disgust for contemporary
fashion was the symptom of an intense, visceral rebellion against contempo-
rary civilization, a comprehensive, all-embracing aversion. Diderot did not
look at his time as a poet or as an artist: he looked through it, as a utopian
and a visionary. The price to pay for that attitude, as Baudelaire would have it,
was an art deprived of sensuality, imperfection, and mortality, an art that was
angelic and insipid, like Eve before she sinned.
If we have become inured to the radical oddity of such an attitude, it is
because for a long time we have envisioned the Revolution, not as the result
of a political crisis and the outcome of a specific political culture, but as the
ultimate outburst of a crisis of civilization—a civilization so decadent and ser-
vile, as one Salon pamphleteer put it, that it did not deserve having its portrait
taken. (Incidentally, the pamphleteer in question was also a court portraitist
and a reputed bel esprit.)22 But what if such a crisis of civilization were nothing
but an indictment a posteriori, or the effect of a political discourse emerging
from certain tendencies within the Enlightenment? As Keith Baker has shown,
the notion of crisis, together with organic metaphors of vigor and weakness,
health and sickness, was central to the discourse of classical republicanism in
its French form; in the ideology of crisis, the life of the republic was always
hanging in the balance, always dependent for its salvation on an effort of po-
litical will.23 Debates about the decadent state of culture and the arts in the late
Enlightenment must be seen as by-products of that political consciousness.
When Diderot writes that the fate of the nation’s taste and morals is poised
on the edge of the abyss, when he fantasizes that salvation that may come in
the form of a violent rediscovery of barbarity, we tend to view his assessment
as a reaction to a factual situation of crisis. Instead we should see it for what
it actually is: the expression of passionate, if not quite lucid, participation to
the pervasive discourse of republicanism, which by that time had become the
politically correct jargon among the intellectuals.
The paradox of the goût moderne consisted of course in the fact that it soon
came to be seen as anything but modern. Instead, the true moderns seemed
to be those new intellectuals—the philosophes—who were willing radically to
rethink the task of the writer along morally and socially messianic ways. While
they borrowed their rallying cries from the language of classical republicanism
and their self-image from archaic conceptions of the artist as republican orator,
the philosophes were modern insofar as they believed that their work would
contribute to refashioning society, to giving birth to a new, enlightened, and
engaged public, and in a general, if rather fuzzy, way to making things better
259
and more equitable. In this protracted battle between the ancients and the out-
moded modernes, the latter seemed to have been left behind; the Revolution
drew its symbols and its inspiration largely from the ancients of the nouvelle
vague.
Yet, the untimely modernes of the 1720s and 1730s were moderns too,
and in a way that may seem more congenial to us. True, they had lingered
on the wrong side of history; they had been “blown away by the powerful
gust of philosophy,” as Grimm put it; they had outlived their reputation, as
Diderot declared. However, in the resistance their work opposed to the new
creed and style, in their imperviousness to all utopias, they were, as Antoine
Compagnon has said of postrevolutionary and twentieth-century antimod-
ernes (countermoderns), the true moderns, because they lived on the edge
of uncertainty; in their skepticism and wariness, they were not the dupes of
modern doctrines and dogmas.24 Of course, the boundaries were not clearly
drawn between the two factions of moderns; there was much intermingling,
trespassing, misunderstanding, and being at cross-purposes. The Enlighten-
ment, far from being a coherent and unified doctrine, was the result of such
tensions and strains.
While someone like Marivaux opposed a tenacious resistance to the new
trends, passing for outmoded and idiosyncratic, Montesquieu could be easily
co-opted by the ancients of the nouvelle vague and even by revolutionary dis-
course (now and then fragments of his lines and echoes of his turns of phrase
pop up in Robespierre’s speeches). Yet Montesquieu, in tune with the ethos of
the belated modernes, would have remained fundamentally a dissenter (and he
probably would have emigrated). He was a skeptic who harbored no illusions
about the innate goodness of human nature. He may have been fascinated by
republican virtue, but he never dreamed that it could be resuscitated within
the contemporary polis. The man who had put much effort into devising ways
for setting limits and boundaries to the exercise of political will would have
been appalled by the idea of a government based upon the exercise of unfet-
tered general will. Indeed, Montesquieu’s awareness that a shadowy area within
the self would forever remain resistant to the light of reason made him espe-
cially wary of angelic political plans. As we know, he placed little faith in vir-
tue and much trust in articulated political institutions and division of power.
Hence this prophetic warning:
By a misfortune attached to the human condition, great men who are mod-
erate are rare; and, as it is always easier to follow one’s strength than to
check it, perhaps, in the class of superior people, it is easier to find extremely
260
virtuous people than extremely wise men. The soul takes such delight in
dominating other souls; even those who love the good love themselves so
much that there is no one fortunate enough not to have to distrust his good
intentions; and, in truth, our actions depend on so many things that it is a
thousand times easier to do good than to do it well.25
A similarly disenchanted belief lies at the core of Marivaux’s profound skepti-

cism concerning those virtues that would be extolled by Rousseau and by the
Revolution: transparency, sincerity, moral rigorism, and clarity. Nothing in
Marivaux’s world is ever endowed with absolute moral or political clarity, for
he considered absoluteness inhuman, hypocritical, foolish, or a combination
thereof. In his utopian comedy L’ile des esclaves (1725), masters and servants
are compelled, by the will of Trivelin turned legislator, to switch places and
to play each other’s roles, but such playacting, which at the hands of a Delisle
de la Drevetière, a Mercier, or a Marmontel would have been the occasion for
many an earnest speech about equality and justice for all, has quite a different
purpose here.26 If the masters-turned-slaves must be enlightened about the
vices that belong to their privileged condition, conversely the servants-turned-
masters have to be purged of the resentment and the yearning for revenge
that is part and parcel of their subordinate status. In the end, even though
both sides have been healed of their dependence on each other, the world
they return to has not been radically transformed; evil and inequality have not
been eradicated. In La double inconstance (1723) the “sincere” (but comically
self-deceived) Arlequin cannot resist the temptation to deliver a few pointed
aphorisms in his incarnation as a naïve and good “savage,” but he is also quite
willing to shed that role in order to become the prince’s favorite and marry a
scheming courtier. In Marivaux’s novels, social prejudice and the bigotry of
rank weigh most heavily, not in the minds of the nobles, but in those of the
petit bourgeois: his churchwardens, stewards, and petty officials already pre-
figure the fatuous obtuseness of a M. Homais. As for Diderot, when he was
not perched on his pontifical soapbox, he would write like a moderne of the
first hour, in a skeptical, self-reflexive, ironic, fragmented, discontinuous, and
digressive mode, a problematic style unreconcilable with sublime pathos and
earnest advocacy. Like Voltaire, who consigned to eternity his extemporane-
ous, epistolary self, Diderot lovingly crafted and preserved his correspondence
with Sophie Volland, the minute, intimate chronicle of his states of mind and
fleeting fervors. The emblem of the age was not the talented Rameau but his
nephew: the artist bereft of an artwork, who vented his resentment and despair
through parody and satire. Diderot himself could never decide whether he
261
wanted to be Socrates, who rejected the law of the state for the sake of moral
law and died, or Aristippe, who bowed to the authority of bad laws for the sake
of public order and lived happily ever after.27 He settled for Seneca, who tried
being both. As for Voltaire’s style, in such texts as the Lettres philosophiques and
the Contes it was propelled, not by a desire for the monumental and the eter-
nal, but by the provocation of esprit and saillie. It was made up, “like a conver-
sation, of discontinuous witty shafts that erode a position without confronting
it directly, and indicate one without defining it.”28
For the Enlightenment modernes did not believe in the revolutionary pos-
sibility of establishing a radically new civitas terrena. They were antitheoretical
and wary of systems; they tinkered around the edges; they were restless and
uncomfortable with all doctrines, defining themselves only in light of what
they repudiated; they had no plan. Such a mind-set would be swept away by
history, but they had literature on their side.
262
Notes
Introduction
Epigraphs: Charles Pinot Duclos, Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle (1751),
ed. Carole Dornier (Paris: Champion, 2000), 106; Denis Diderot, The Salon of
1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, trans. John Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 170, translation modified. Unless otherwise noted, all transla-
tions are mine.
1. Robert Darnton, “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Episte-
mological Strategy of the Encyclopédie,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other
Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984; New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1985), 191–213; Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment:
The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
2. Marcel Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (In the Shadow of Young Girls
in Flower), trans. James Grieve (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 48.
3. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre, ou nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique, in
Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du théâtre (1784–85), ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet
and Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 1212, emphasis in the original.
4. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux (1785), in Pierre Carlet de
Chamblain de Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed. Jacques Scherer and Bernard Dort
(Paris: Seuil, 1964), 22.
5. See Diderot’s commentary on Boucher in Denis Diderot, Salon de 1761, in
Essais sur la peinture: Salons de 1759, 1761, 1763 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 120. See
also his Eloge de Richardson (1762), in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris:
Garnier, 1968).
6. “A kind of metaphysics of the heart has taken hold of our theaters,” wrote
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert in his Discours préliminaire to Encyclopédie, ou diction-
naire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert, 32 vols. (Paris, 1751–77), 1 (1751): xxxi. By metaphysics he meant
pretentious nonsense.
7. On the onslaught against the amateur in midcentury and the decline of
the aesthetic values of the early eighteenth century see René Démoris, “Le comte
de Caylus et la peinture: Pour une théorie de l’inachevé,” Revue de l’art, no. 142
(2003): 31–43.
263
Notes to Pages 3–6
8. Remy G. Saisselin, “Diderot from Outside the Research Machine: Recon-

textualizing Diderot,” Studies on Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 241–50.
9. Voltaire, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1771), s.v. “Beau,” in Oeuvres complètes
de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 18:24.
10. See Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 39–40.
11. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, in his one-act comedy Le triom-
phe de Plutus, performed at the Théâtre-Français on 22 April 1728, published in
Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed. Henri Coulet and Michel Gilot, 2 vols. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1993), 1:575–601.
12. Duclos, Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle, 178.
13. Voltaire, Le temple du goût, ed. Elie Carcassonne (Geneva: Droz, 1938), 67.
14. Ibid., 64.
15. La Font de Saint-Yenne, Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’état présent de la
peinture en France, avec un examen des principaux ouvrages exposés au Louvre le mois
d’août 1746 (1747; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 44–45. On La Font see René
Démoris and Florence Ferran, La peinture en procès: L’invention de la critique d’art
au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2001). The king’s
artworks were first publicly exhibited in 1750 at the Louvre.
16. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 8. In the Encyclopédie article “Gens de lettres” Vol-
taire argued that Louis XIV’s patronage had intellectually emancipated writers
of small means, freeing them from humiliating dependence on the grandees. See
Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 7 (1757): 599.
17. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 252.
18. “‘Little rascal, whom will you imbue with grandeur, solemnity, and majesty
if not Religion, Justice and Truth?’ ‘But,’ the artist responds, ‘these virtues will serve
as overdoors for an administrator in the Department of Finance.’ ” Ibid., 47. “Vien
paints nothing but overdoors. Boucher paints garbage for the boudoir of a grandee.
. . . There are pictures lined up from Versailles all the way to the bottom of the fau-
bourg Saint-Marceau, but not a single good painting.” Denis Diderot, “Du luxe,”
in Mélanges pour Catherine II, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent Versini, vol. 3, Politique (Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1995), 295. Joseph-Marie Vien’s painting Saint Denis prêchant la foi
en France (Saint Denis Preaching the Faith in France), of 1767, in the style of grand
goût, had been praised by Diderot for its “harmony” but blamed by him for its lack
of interest, imagination, and “ideal.” See Diderot, Salon of 1767, 28–39.
19. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 6–9. On the role of amateurs and art collectors in
the eighteenth century see Rémy G. Saisselin, “Neo-Classicism: Images of Public
Virtue and Realities of Private Luxury,” Art History 4, no. 1 (1981): 14–36.
20. Neoclassicism was in reality nurtured among the financial elites close to
Louis XV. It was the powerful financiers Lenormand de Tournehem and the Mar-
quis de Marigny, respectively the natural father and the brother of Mme de Pom-
padour—both directors of the bâtiments du roi, of which the Academy of Painting
264
and Sculpture was a part—who moved the Academy in the direction of the grand
goût and classicist narratives. On the other hand, the circle of Mme de Pompadour
also favored rococo style and Boucher.
21. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
22. Voltaire, “Gens de lettres.” See Roger Chartier, “The Man of Letters,” in
Enlightenment Portraits, ed. Michel Vovelle, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 142–89.
23. “The anti-Rococo program itself was, in its rejection of the sensual, abun-
dant, and worldly, as much a denial of popular impulses and pleasures as it was
of the private tastes of the rich and the court.” Crow, Painters and Public Life,
130–31.
24. Jean-François Marmontel, speech delivered to the French Academy on 20
June 1776, www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/discours_reponses/marmontel
.html. In the Encyclopédie article “Parterre” Marmontel notes approvingly that the
lack of cultural pretentiousness of theatrical audiences in the pit exposes them to
being manipulated by enlightened intellectuals: “They follow the impulsion that is
given to them, and they form one mind and one soul with those who, being more
enlightened, make them feel and think.” Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (Amsterdam,
1776), 4:241.
25. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands,
sur la réputation, sur les Mecènes, et sur les récompenses littéraires (1753; 2nd ed.,
1764), in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, vol. 4 (Paris: A. Belin / Bossange Frères, 1822),
374.
26. Duclos, Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle, 194–95.
27. Duclos wrote: “They become amateurs of bel esprit, they advertise their
taste; it is their shop sign; they look for things to read, they meddle, they offer
support and advice without being asked and without having any right to do so.”
Ibid., 195. On Louis-Petit de Bachaumont and Anne-Claude Philippe de Tubières,
comte de Caylus, see Crow, Painters and Public Life, chap. 4.
28. Jean de La Bruyère, “De la société et de la conversation,” sec. 75, in Les
caractères (1688; reprint, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1990), 175–76.
29. Charles Pinot Duclos, Acajou et Zirphile (1744), ed. Jean Dagen (Paris:
Desjonquières, 1993). The one-act vaudeville Acajou et Zirphile was performed
on 28 September 1744 at the Foire Saint-Laurent and eventually was made into a
three-act opera by Charles-Simon Favart.
30. Throughout the eighteenth century primarily aristocratic behavioral ideals
shaped the identity of the homme de lettres: “Rather than looking forward to more
modern ideas of social prominence based on property and ownership, eighteenth-
century men [and women] of letters looked backward in time, adopting Renais-
sance strategies of self-fashioning to define themselves as socially prominent and
therefore as authorized to speak publicly.” Gregory S. Brown, A Field of Honor:
265
Writers, Culture, and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revo-
lution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 24, www.gutenberg-e.org.
On the patriotic writer, see ibid., chap. 3.
31. “We may consider that false love of bel esprit, which protects ignorance and
prides itself on it and which will sooner or later spread it far and wide, as one of
the major causes pushing us headlong into barbarism. That will be the result and
the endpoint of bad taste. . . . It is to the obsession for bel esprit and to the abuse
of philosophy that we must attribute our present sluggishness and the decadence
of good taste.” D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire, xxxii–xxxiv.
32. Gita May, “Neoclassical, Rococo, or Preromantic? Diderot’s Esthetic Quest,”
in Diderot, Digression, and Dispersion, ed. Jack Undank and Herbert Josephs (Lex-
ington, KY: French Forum, 1984), 180–92. More recently, see the Washington Post
review of the exhibit The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces
of French Genre Painting, at the National Gallery: “France was at its Frenchest.
Much of what’s on view in the gallery’s West Building is off-color and frivolous,
as soft as a powder-puff, and as luscious as whipped cream.” Paul Richard, “The
Frills of France: At the National Gallery, Extravagances That Brought On a Revo-
lution,” Washington Post, 11 October 2003, C01, www.washingtonpost.com.
33. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, L’art du XVIIIe siècle (1859–
75; reprint, Paris: Hermann, 1967), 94.
34. “You belonged to the good old days of pannier gowns, / Of lapdogs, of furry
muffs, of abbés and rocaille, / Of harlots and marquis, and suppers and orgies. //
White-powdered sheep, salon poets, / Old porcelain and bisque, charming old
junk, / Chubby cherubs, pompoms and bright ribbons, / Rosewood furniture and
tortoiseshell extravagance. // The people, in their righteous fury, have shattered all
that. . . .” Charles Baudelaire, À Mme du Barry, in Poésies diverses, vers retrouvés, in
Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, 2 vols. (Paris, Gallimard,
1975–76), 1:219, emphasis in the original. Originally published in L’artiste on 1 De-
cember 1844, the poem has also been attributed to Privat and Nerval.
35. Jay Caplan, In the King’s Wake: Post-Absolutist Culture in France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6.
36. Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a
Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
37. Ibid., x, xi.
38. Ibid., 75.
39. A public, it is true, purged of its elements of the bas peuple: “Not only does
the public judge of a work of art in a disinterested and impartial manner but it
does so in the required way, that is, by way of taste and intuition [sentiment] and
according to the impression that the poem or the painting makes on it. . . . Now,
taste tells us much better whether the work of art touches us as it should than
any learned dissertation composed by critics in order to account for its merits, to
calculate its accomplishments and defects. . . . The word public denotes here only
those who have enlightened themselves either through reading or through worldly
266
interaction.” Abbé Jean-Baptiste du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la

peinture (1719), 7th ed. in 3 pts. (1770; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1982), pt. 2,
chap. 22, pp. 339–51, tellingly entitled “That the public judges well of poems and
paintings; of the taste that is required in order to appreciate the merits of those
works.”
40. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758; reprint,
Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2003), 158.
41. “Taste is often separate from genius. Genius is purely a gift from nature
. . . taste is the result of study and time; it relies upon the knowledge of a mul-
titude of established or hypothetical rules; it leads to the production of conven-
tional beauty.” Denis Diderot, “Génie,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie,
7 (1757): 582. Diderot’s assessment of the faculty of goût for the artist was more
nuanced in The Salon of 1767.
42. Diderot, Salon de 1761, 120.
43. DeJean, Ancients against Moderns, 76.
44. “Speaking of which, did you know that I have a right to be vain! We have
here Mme Necker, a beautiful woman and a bel esprit, who is crazy about me; she
pursues me, insisting that I visit her. Suard courts her with . . . perseverance.” Denis
Diderot, Lettres à Sophie Volland (1774), ed. A. Babelon (Paris: Gallimard, 1950),
2:64. On the role of salonnieres in the system of patronage, see André Morellet,
Portrait de Mme Geoffrin, in Eloges de Mme Geoffrin, par MM. Morellet, Thomas
et d’Alembert, ed. André Morellet (Paris: H. Nicolle, 1812); Dena Goodman, The
Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1994); and Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: La sociabilité
mondaine à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005).
45. Mercier, Du théâtre, 1212. On Diderot’s position see below, chapter 7.
46. Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien (1770), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 314.
47. See Voltaire, Commentaire sur Corneille (1761–65). Among many other
texts of his see Lettre sur l’esprit (1744, postface to Mérope), Essai sur la poésie épique
(1727), his articles on goût in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1752), and of course
Le temple du goût (1732) and his satirical epic poem La pucelle d’Orléans (1730).
48. As in Diderot’s extraordinary Paradoxe sur le comédien, which has been
generally misunderstood; see below, chapter 4.
49. Saisselin, “Diderot from Outside the Research Machine,” 243–44. In the
Critique of Judgment (1790) Kant distinguishes between beautiful and pleasant art:
the latter is directed merely at enjoyment, such as conversation, telling stories in
an entertaining way, games, music (all his examples relate to worldly activities);
the former is purposive for itself. J. H. Bernard, ed., Kant’s Critique of Judgement
(London: Macmillan, 1914), 169–73. See Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and the Sublime (1763) for a distinction between the beautiful (feminine
wit) and the sublime (manly profundity).
50. “The Enlightenment’s Socrates is an ambivalent figure, a strange Janus
whose double face is the emblem of an era divided between the drive to shatter the
267
idols and the need to found new, positive values.” Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance
du Panthéon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 137.
51. See David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism,
1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Paul Bénichou,
Le sacre de l’écrivain (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).
52. Thomas Kavanagh, The Aesthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the
French Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 12.
53. See Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orléans (1730), in Oeuvres complètes de Vol-
taire / Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Ulla Kölvig et al. (Geneva: Institut et Musée
Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968–), 7:251–588; and Jennifer
Tsien’s excellent analysis in Voltaire and the Temple of Bad Taste: A Study of La Pu-
celle d’Orléans, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 5 (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 2003).
54. In the wake of Michael Fried’s influential book Absorption and Theatrical-
ity: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1980) other scholars, such as Marian Hobson, in The Object of Art: The
Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1982), have attenuated the rigidity of his description of the shift in the
conceptualization of the reception of the artwork that took place in the mid-eigh-
teenth century.
Prologue. Boudoir and Tribune
Epigraphs: Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, trans. John
Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 164, translation modi-
fied; Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre, ou nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique, in
Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du théâtre (1784–85), ed. Jean-Claude Bon-
net and Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 1314; Charles Baudelaire,
De l’essence du rire (On the Essence of Laughter) (1855), in Baudelaire, The Painter
of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon,
1964), 149.
1. Lamoignon de Malesherbes, speech to the French Academy, 16 February
1775, www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/index.html.
2. Lekain [Henri Louis Cain], Mémoires de Lekain, précédés de réflexions sur cet
acteur et sur l’art théâtral par F. Talma (Paris: Ponthieu, 1825), 430–31.
3. Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2.14.48, p. 217. Cicero argues that the “de-
bating power” of eloquence (contentio) “counts far more toward the attainment of
glory” but that “it is not easy to say how far an affable and courteous manner in
conversation [comitas affabilitasque sermo] may go toward winning the affections”
of the audience, in war and in political debate.
268
4. See Marc Fumaroli, La diplomatie de l’esprit (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 289.

5. On the vicissitudes of Guez de Balzac’s literary and political ambitions see
Christian Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
6. Guez de Balzac takes inspiration from the Nichomachean Ethics, 1126b–1128b,
in which Aristotle develops the three virtues of comitas, veritas, and urbanitas.
7. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Oeuvres diverses (1644), ed. Roger Zuber (Paris:
Champion, 1995), 80.
8. The process of “curialization” is by no means as stark as Norbert Elias would
have us believe. The Court Society (1969), trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Black-
well, 1983), esp. chap. 6. The aristocracy of the salons were quite capable of playing
several roles and juggling military activities and sociability, the battlefield or the
dueling ground and the courtly ritual. They managed all those functions simulta-
neously down to the end of the ancien régime. See David A. Bell, The First Total
War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, forthcoming).
9. In his Dialogue des héros de roman (1664) Nicolas Boileau accuses Madeleine
de Scudéry of perverting history and disrespecting ancient heroes by portraying
them as modern galants. Boileau, Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,
1969), 2:195–219.
10. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, “Discours 2: Suite d’un entretien,” in Oeuvres
diverses, 82–83.
11. See Marc Fumaroli “Rhétorique d’école et rhétorique adulte: La réception
européenne du Traité du sublime aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” Revue d’histoire lit-
téraire de la France 1 (1986): 33–51, reprinted in Fumaroli, Héros et orateurs: Rhéto-
rique et dramaturgie cornéliennes, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 377–98.
12. Voltaire, “Éloquence,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences,
des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 32 vols.
(Paris, 1751–77), 5 (1756): 529.
13. Cicero, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 37.128, pp. 401–2.
14. See Anne Richardot, “Un philosophe au purgatoire des Lumières: Démo-
crite,” Dix-huitième siècle 32 (2000).
15. From Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie (1694).
The aphorism struck Baudelaire, who commented extensively on it in De l’essence
du rire.
16. Denis Diderot, in Le neveu de Rameau, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 1983), 158–59. The piece was prompted by the indignation
ignited by the success of Palissot’s mean-spirited satire Les philosophes; given the
polemical circumstances, Diderot emphasized his position.
17. Rétif de la Bretonne, Les nuits de Paris, ed. Patrice Boussel (Paris: Editions
10/18, 1963), 96.
18. Quoted in Dominique Quéro, Momus philosophe: Recherches sur une figure
littéraire du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1995), 461.
269
19. Denis Diderot, Est-il bon, est-il méchant? act 3, sc. 9, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent
Versini, vol. 4, Esthétique: Théâtre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996), 1472.
20. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul
Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 114.
21. Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, 55–56.
22. Denis Diderot to Étienne-Maurice Falconet, 4 December 1765, in Diderot
and Falconet, Le pour et le contre: Correspondance polémique sur le respect de la pos-
térité, Pline et les anciens, ed. Yves Benot (Paris: Editeurs Réunis, 1958), 48–49.
23. Denis Diderot, Eloge de Richardson (1762), in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul
Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 39–40.
24. Ibid., 31.
25. Ibid., 30.
26. Ibid., 40.
27. The type of response elicited by Richardson’s novels will find a striking
echo in the readers’ enthusiastic response to Rousseau, especially to La nouvelle
Héloïse, which was experienced as a religious conversion. As Robert Darnton puts
it, “Ordinary readers from all ranks of society were swept off their feet. They wept,
they suffocated, they raved, they looked deep into their lives and resolved to live
better. . . . Rousseau’s own reading showed the influence of the intense, personal
religiosity of his Calvinist heritage. His public probably applied an old style of
religious reading to new material, notably the novel, which had previously seemed
incompatible with it.” Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” in The Great Cat
Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books,
1984; New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 242, 251.
28. Diderot to Sophie Volland, 17 September 1761, quoted in Diderot, Eloge
de Richardson, 44. In the Eloge Diderot reverses the roles: Diderot is the intruder,
and his friend is the enthusiast (44). In the préface-annexe to La religieuse Grimm
(or Diderot) recalls once more the same scene: d’Alainville intrudes upon a tearful
Diderot intent on writing Suzanne’s letters. See Diderot, La religieuse, ed. Roland
Desné (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 211.
29. “Illusion,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 8 (1765): 557.
30. David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism,
1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
31. See France Marchal-Ninosque, Images du sacrifice, 1670–1840 (Paris: Cham-
pion, 2005).
32. Marc Fumaroli, L’age de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Révolu-
tion au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980; Paris: Albin Michel, 1994);
Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); David A. Bell,
Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994).
33. See André Zysberg, La monarchie des Lumières, 1715–1786 (Paris: Seuil,
2002), esp. chap. 5.
34. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens, 63–66.
270
35. Ibid., 131–37.

36. Bell, Cult of the Nation, 126.
37. “The critics who were most assertive in advocating a moralistic classicism
and most severe in their judgment of Rococo tendencies were almost all associated
with the Doublet-Bachaumont circle.” Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in
Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 123.
38. The Mémoires secrets were started by Bachaumont and continued by Pidan-
sat de Mairobert and others, until they reached thirty-six volumes (1777–89).
39. La Font de Saint-Yenne, Sentiments sur quelques ouvrages de peinture, sculp-
ture et gravure, écrits à un particulier en province (1754), quoted in Crow, Painters
and Public Life, 120.
41. See Keith Michael Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in
Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (2001): 32–53.
42. Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1995), 262–63; Melissa Hyde, Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Crit-
ics (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006).
43. Alain Génetiot, Poétique du loisir mondain, de Voiture à La Fontaine (Paris:
Champion, 1997), 67–78. Inspired by the mythological parodies illustrated by Ital-
ian poets such as Berni and Tassoni, the genre was explored earlier by Saint-Amant
and du Bellay. In 1644 Scarron published Typhon ou la gigantomachie, dedicated
to Mazarin; Brébeuf wrote a Lucain travesti in 1650; Charles Coypeau D’Assoucy,
L’Ovide en belle humeur in 1653; and Jean-François Sarasin composed in 1654 Dulot
vaincu ou la défaite des bouts-rimés, his last work.
44. Voltaire, Discours à l’Académie, in Mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 248.
For a study of Voltaire’s critique of the mixture of genre, class, and identity as mon-
strosity in the epic poem, see Jennifer Tsien, Voltaire and the Temple of Bad Taste:
A Study of La Pucelle d’Orléans, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 5
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003).
45. Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes
(1686; reprint, Paris: Didier, 1966), 4.
46. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Réflexions sur les éloges académiques, in Oeuvres
de d’Alembert, vol. 2 (Paris: A. Belin / Bossange Frères, 1822), 152.
47. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, in an epigram published as an appendix to Des-
fontaines’ Dictionnaire néologique in the Pantalo-Phoebana, quoted in Marivaux et
le marivaudage: Une préciosité nouvelle, by Frédéric Deloffre, 2nd ed. (Paris: Colin,
1967), 17n6.
48. Voltaire, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1771), s.v. “Style,” in Oeuvres com-
plètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 20:436–44.
Vincent Voiture was a poet in Mme de Rambouillet’s salon, and Mlle Paulet, the
daughter of a financier, was a celebrated beauty of the same circle.
49. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Discours préliminaire to Diderot and d’Alembert,
Encyclopédie, 1 (1751): xxx–xxxi. For the changing conception of the relationship
271
between science, worldliness, and society from Fontenelle to d’Alembert and

Condorcet see Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social
Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), esp. chap. 1.
50. Jean-François de La Harpe, Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et mod-
erne, 16 vols. (Paris: H. Agasse, 1799), vol. 2, pt. 3, bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 5046, www.lib
.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/databases/bibliopolis/cli/.
51. Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières, Le génie de l’architecture (1780; reprint, Ge-
neva: Minkoff, 1972), 53.
52. André Pierre Le Gayde Prémonval, L’esprit de Fontenelle (1744), quoted in
Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, Jugements sur quelques ouvrages nouveaux, 11
vols. (Avignon: Pierre Giroux, 1744–46; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 1:29.
53. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Tréteaux des boulevards,” in Tableaux de Paris,
ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 2:284.
54. See Francis Bar, Le genre burlesque en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: d’Artrey,
1960); Alain Génetiot, Les genres lyriques mondains (Geneva: Droz, 1990); Roger
Lathuillère, La préciosité: Étude historique et linguistique (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 250;
and Dominique Bertrand, ed., Poétiques du burlesque (Paris: Champion, 1998).
55. César Chesneau Dumarsais, Traité des tropes (1729), republished with
a commentary by Pierre Fontanier in 1818 (reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints,
1984), 517–18.
56. David Trott, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle: Jeux, écritures, regards (Mont-
pellier: Editions Espaces 34, 2000).
57. See Georges Forestier’s introduction to his edition of Racine’s theater, Oeu-
vres complètes, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 1:xi–lvii.
58. The change was brought about by the concerted efforts of Voltaire, the ac-
tor Lekain, and the comte de Lauraguais on 23 April 1759.
59. Mercier, Du théâtre, 1353–54.
60. Ibid., 1132.
61. Marian Hobson described this fundamental epistemological and represen-
tational shift very well in The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-
Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
62. Charles Palissot de Montenoy, Oeuvres complètes de M. Palissot, vol. 1 (Paris:
L. Collin, 1809), 270. On the rich culture of persiflage see the captivating account
of Elisabeth Bourguinat in Le siècle du persiflage, 1734–1789 (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, 1998). In Le neveu de Rameau Diderot lends the voice of the neveu
to the antiphilosophes: “We shall give a good thrashing to all those little Catos like
you, who despise us out of envy; whose modesty is a cover for pride and whose
sobriety is the law of necessity” (74).
63. A. C. Cailleau responded to Palissot with his Philosophes manqués, per-
formed on 15 May 1760, and on 17 July he presented Les originaux ou les fourbes
punis. See Valleria Belt-Grannis, Dramatic Parody in Eighteenth-Century France
(New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931), 162–66.
64. See Alain Viala’s introduction to L’esthétique galante, ed. Alain Viala et al.
272
(Toulouse: Société des Littératures Classiques, 1989); and Gérard Defaux, Molière
ou les métamorphoses du comique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), 246.
65. André Félibien, Description du château de Versailles (1696), quoted in
Quéro, Momus philosophe, 254.
66. Nicolas Boileau, L’art poétique, canto 3, lines 391–400, in Oeuvres, 2 vols.
(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 2:108.
67. Voltaire, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1771), s.v. “Bouffon,” in Oeuvres com-
plètes de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 18:25.
68. Voltaire to Everard Falkener, n.d., published as a preface to Zaire, in Oeu-
vres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 2:547: “The same audience who applauded
him goes to see him become the butt of ridicule at the Théâtre-Italien and at the
fairs, drawing from his humiliation a greater pleasure than [the writer] ever drew
from his long nights of work.”
69. Voltaire to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, 3 January 1723 (Best. 142), in Voltaire’s
Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, 107 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée
Voltaire, 1953–65), 1:188.
70. Paul Pellisson, Discours sur les oeuvres de Monsieur Sarasin (1655), quoted in
Viala et al., L’esthétique galante, 57.
71. Alain Viala, “Le dialogue ‘à la française’ et les modèles italiens: Affirmations
et dénégations d’une esthétique,” in Estetica e arte: La concezione dei “moderni,”
ed. Stefano Benassi (Bologna: Nuova Alfia Editoriale, 1991), 45–58; idem, “Le pal-
marès de la querelle,” D’un siècle à l’autre: Anciens et modernes, ed. Louise Godard
de Donville and Roger Duchêne, 16e colloque du CMR 17, January 1986, Centre
National des Lettres (Marseilles: CMR 17, 1987), 171–78.
72. Nicolas Boileau, L’art poétique, canto 4, lines 153–54, in Oeuvres, 2:113.
73. See Denis Diderot, “Génie,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 7
(1757): 582–84.
74. See the epilogue notes.
75. Alain Viala, “ ‘Qui t’a fait minor?’ Galanterie et classicisme,” Littératures
classiques, no. 31 (1997): 115–33. In the polarization between galanterie and classi-
cism the first is endogène, the second exogène. See also idem, “La littérature galante:
Histoire et problématique,” in Quaderni del seicento francese, ed. Giovanni Dotoli
(Bari: Adriatica; Paris, Nizet, 1944), 101–13.
76. Viala, “Qui t’a fait minor?” 126. “Air” refers to a way of being, a manner,
or a tone. See Madeleine de Scudéry, “De l’air galant” et autres conversations (1653–
1684): Pour une étude de l’archive galante, ed. Delphine Denis (Paris: Champion,
1998).
77. Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain (Paris: Minuit, 1985).
78. Pellisson, Discours sur les oeuvres de Monsieur Sarasin, quoted in Viala et al.,
L’esthétique galante, 65. See also Marc Fumaroli, “L’empire des femmes, ou l’esprit
de joie,” in La diplomatie de l’esprit.
79. Pellisson, Discours sur les oeuvres de Monsieur Sarasin, quoted in Viala et al.,
L’esthétique galante, 55.
273
80. Ibid., 63.

81. Ibid., 64.
82. Scudéry, “De l’air galant” et autres conversations, 72.
83. Jean de La Bruyère, “De la société et de la conversation,” sec. 77, in Les
caractères (1688; reprint, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1990), 177.
84. The language of Corneille provides a good example of such convergence
between burlesque bassesse, the verbal virtuosity of rhetorical amplification, and
a fascination for the materiality of words. In L’illusion comique, when Matamore
boasts that his sword will spark a fire that will destroy the house of his beloved, the
art of masonry never looked so good in alexandrins (3.5.747–57).
85. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (Paris: Jean-Baptiste
Coignard, 1690), 3, 296.
86. Gabriel Naudé, Mascurat (Jugement de tout ce qui a esté imprimé contre le
cardinal Mazarin, depuis le sixiéme janvier, iusques à la declaration du premier avril
mil six cens quarante-neuf ) (1650), quoted in Clément Marot, Oeuvres poétiques
complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris: Bordas, 1990), 1:468.
87. Boileau, L’art poétique, canto 1, lines 96–97, in Oeuvres, 2:89.
88. “Burlesque,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 2 (1751): 467. The
article endorses Boileau’s censure of the burlesque.
89. Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel, 155–57.
90. That is Rica’s distinctive voice in letter 63. Charles de Secondat, baron de
Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, trans. George R. Healy (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1964), 106.
91. See Génetiot, Les genres lyriques mondains, 132; and Jean Weisgerber,
Les masques fragiles: Esthétique et formes de la littérature rococo (Lausanne: L’Age
d’Homme, 1991), 109.
92. Something similar happens in the visual arts in the early eighteenth cen-
tury. See Scott, Rococo Interior, 263–64.
93. Scudéry, “De l’air galant” et autres conversations, 72, emphasis added.
94. The transformation of the role of the salonniere may be an effect of this
evolution. See Elena Russo, “From Précieuse to Mother Figure: Sentiment, Au-
thority, and the Eighteenth-Century Salonniere,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eigh-
teenth Century 12 (2001): 199–218.
95. Abbé de Saint Pierre to Voltaire, 2 October 1739, quoted in Jean-Claude
Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard,
1998), 36.
96. Voltaire, Le temple du goût, ed. Elie Carcassonne (Geneva: Droz, 1938), 83.
97. Voltaire, “Gens de lettres,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 7 (1757):
599.
98. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in Marivaux,
Journaux et oeuvres diverses, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Michel Gilot (Paris: Garnier,
1988), 146.
274
99. Élie-Catherine Fréron, Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps (1749–54), vol.
3 (1750), 46–47, quoted in Raymond Naves, Le goût de Voltaire (1938; reprint,
Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 421. Toward the end of the century, bel esprit
has become a generic slur directed against the philosophes, who are now being
branded with the same term they previously had used against the modernes.
100. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in Oeuvres complètes,
ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 21.
101. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Paint-
ing in the French Classical Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1993). By virtue of the ut pictura poesis commonplace, an echo of the wars
between Rubénistes and Poussinistes at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture
was still lingering in the eighteenth century, in the critique of the bel esprit’s verbal
virtuosity. Lichtenstein shows how, from the classical times, rhetorical ornament has
been associated with the painted body of the prostitute or the effeminate male.
102. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 1062, in
Pensées / Le spicilège, ed. Louis Desgraves (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), 389. Louis-
Sébastien Mercier, in the wake of Rousseau, deplored women’s corrupting influ-
ence on the theater: “Nowadays it is the childishness of our fashionable women
that appears on the stage; when he has reproduced their tone, a writer fancies him-
self a true painter, and the poet seems proud of having given a voice to those futile
beings who deserve a lesson in being ignored. Instead, they are erected a throne,
and this ridiculous fanaticism is consecrated in a nation that is sapped by women
of all strong, courageous, and lofty ideals.” Mercier, Du théâtre, 1211–12.
103. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 19–20. See also his dislike of Rousseau’s portrait
by La Tour: “I search there for the literary censor, the Cato and Brutus of our age,
I expect to see an Epictetus, his clothes rumpled, his wig tousled, with a severity
frightening to writers, fashionable people, and the powerful, and I see only the
author of the Village Fortune-Teller, well-dressed, well groomed, well powdered,
ridiculously seated on a cane-back chair.” Notes on Painting (1765), in Diderot on
Art, trans. John Goodman, vol. 1, The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 210.
Chapter 1 A Faded Coquette
Epigraphs: Maximilien François Marie Isidor de Robespierre, Sur les principes de

morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans l’administration
intérieure de la République, discourse presented at the convention, 5 February 1794;
Charles Baudelaire, Quelques caricaturistes français (Some French Caricaturists)
(1857) in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan
Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 182.
1. P. M. Conlon provides a concise account of Voltaire’s persistent efforts from
1731 to 1746 to be elected to an institution he claimed to despise in Voltaire’s Liter-
275
ary Career from 1728 to 1750, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 14
(Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1961).
2. Voltaire to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, 6 March 1736 (Best. 993), in Voltaire’s
Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, 107 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée
Voltaire, 1953–65), 5:80.
3. On the relationship between Marivaux and Voltaire see Christophe Cave,
“Marivaux revu par Voltaire: L’image de Marivaux dans la Correspondance de Vol-
taire,” in Marivaux et les Lumières: L’homme de théâtre et son temps, ed. Geneviève
Goubier (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996), 195–
208.
4. For a description of Marivaux’s familial and social background and the diffi-
cult life of Nicolas Carlet as director of the Royal Mint of Riom, see Michel Gilot,
Les journaux de Marivaux: Itinéraire moral et accomplissement esthétique, 2 vols.
(Paris: Champion, 1975), vol. 1, chap. 1.
5. Ibid., 1:76.
6. Voltaire, “Gens de lettres,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sci-
ences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 32
vols. (Paris, 1751–77), 7 (1757): 599–600.
7. On Voltaire’s construction of a nobility of authorship see Jay Caplan, In
the King’s Wake: Post-Absolutist Culture in France (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), chap. 2.
8. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, L’indigent philosophe, in Marivaux,
Journaux et oeuvres diverses, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Michel Gilot (Paris: Garnier,
1988), 314–15, hereafter cited as JOD.
9. Even though none of Marivaux’s plays ever knew the booming success of
a play like Destouches’s Le philosophe marié, which attracted 23,500 spectators
between 15 February and 29 March 1727, with an average of 1,200 spectators at
each performance, most of them enjoyed a moderate but steady success and many
revivals lasting well into midcentury.
10. Denis Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 1983), 47–48.
11. Charles Collé, quoted in Marivaux: Un humanisme expérimental, by Henri
Coulet and Michel Gilot (Paris: Larousse, 1973), 28.
12. Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, Denis Diderot, Jacques-Henri Meister,
and Abbé François Raynal, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (1751–
1793), ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–82), 15 February 1763,
5:236.
13. Quoted in Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed.
Jacques Scherer and Bernard Dort (Paris: Seuil, 1964), cxli. See also Coulet and
Gilot, Marivaux: Un humanisme expérimental, 28.
14. One of the last texts written by d’Alembert, the Eloge de Marivaux was read
by Jean-Sylvain Bailly in 1785, after d’Alembert’s death in 1783.
276
15. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux (1785), in Marivaux, Théâtre

complet, 22.
16. Ibid., 36. The only tragedy written by Marivaux, Annibal was performed,
with limited success, at the Théâtre-Français in 1720.
17. Marquis d’Argenson, Notices sur les oeuvres de théâtre, ed. Henri Lagrave,
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 43 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
1966). Fréron’s pronouncement appeared in the Année littéraire 1 (1782): 107; it is
quoted in G. Larroumet, Marivaux, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Hachette, 1894), 3n1.
18. See Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8.3.6.
19. JOD, 701.
20. “Phébus is a flower of rhetoric, an ornament, but also an obscure and enig-
matic turn of phrase, both too polished and too brief. . . . It means both sharp
witticism [pointe] and figural excess.” Roger Zuber, “Le style Nervèze,” in Les
emerveillements de la raison (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), 91–92.
21. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du théâtre (1784–
85), ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet and Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999),
750–52.
22. JOD, 728.
23. On Trublet see Jean Jacquart, L’abbé Trublet, critique et moraliste (Paris: Au-
guste Picard, 1926), 326–28.
24. Voltaire’s verdict on Trublet was couched in an epigram: “He compiled, he
compiled, he compiled!” Voltaire, Le pauvre diable (1760), in Oeuvres complètes de
Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 10:107–8.
25. Trublet’s project gave rise to a short “Quarrel of Montaigne,” fought in the
pages of the Mercure, between Trublet on the one hand and Marivaux and Prévost
on the other. See Sarah Benharrech, “Lecteur que vous êtes bigearre! Marivaux et la
‘Querelle de Montaigne,’ ” Modern Language Notes 120, no. 4 (2005): 925–49.
26. JOD, 728–29.
27. Ibid., 729.
28. See Roger Marchal, Mme de Lambert et son milieu, Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century, 289 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), 248. The seven
sages were Fontenelle, La Motte, Mairan, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Duclos, and
Marmontel.
29. JOD, 729.
30. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in JOD, 143.
31. Ibid., 248.
32. Charles Sorel, Histoire comique de Francion (1623), Romaciers du XVIIe
siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 410, 413. Amadis was a popular epic hero in the
Middle Ages and the inspiration for Don Quixote.
33. Ibid., 126. The ruelle was the space between the bed and the wall. In the
seventeenth century, when the ceremonial bedroom was considered a public area,
women used to receive guests seated on a stately bed.
34. Nicolas de Malebranche, The Search after Truth (1674), trans. Thomas M.
277
Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), bk.
4, pt. 1, chap. 8, p. 299.
35. Ibid., 299–300.
36. Père Desmolets, Continuation des mémoires de littérature et d’histoire (1727),
quoted in JOD, 703.
37. Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, La relation de ce qui s’est passé au sujet
de la réception de Messire Christophle Mathanasius à l’Académie française (1727),
quoted in JOD, 702.
38. D’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux, 34.
39. Voltaire to the abbé Trublet, 27 April 1761 (Best. 8974), in Voltaire’s Cor-
respondence, 45:312–13. The formula seemed to please Voltaire a great deal: see his
letters to Formont (29 April 1732) and Moncrif (10 April 1733), quoted in Cave,
“Marivaux revu par Voltaire.”
40. Jean-François Marmontel, Mémoires, ed. Jean-Pierre Guicciardi and Gilles
Thierriat (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 199.
41. Quoted in JOD, 709.
42. “He is condemned to love only himself and his own works.” Diderot on
Boucher, in Salon de 1763, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier,
1968), 452.
43. JOD, 323.
44. Jay Caplan suggests that psychology is just an illusion Marivaux’s theatri-
cal characters live by. Relations among them are structured in symmetrical pat-
terns “as if to underscore the resemblance of the players to pieces on a game board
and to undermine the self-deceptively psychological terms in which the characters
interpret their destiny.” In the King’s Wake, 109. But psychology at the time was,
indeed, rigidly codified in a way not unlike the rules of a chess game.
45. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Réflexions sur l’esprit humain à
l’occasion de Corneille et de Racine (1749), in JOD, 472.
46. Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in JOD, 232. See Marcel Proust, Journées
de pélerinage, in Pastiches et mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 71–72: “For no one
is original, and luckily for sympathy and understanding, which are such great plea-
sures in life, our individualities are cut from a universal fabric. If we were able to
analyze the soul as we do matter, we would see that below the apparent diversity of
minds, as well as below that of things, there are only a few simple bodies and irre-
ducible elements and that in the composition of what we take to be our personality
enter very ordinary substances that may be found everywhere in the universe.”
Chapter 2 Fakes, Impostors, and Beaux Esprits
Epigraphs: Nicolas de Malebranche, Traité de morale (Cologne: Balthasar

d’Egmont, 1683), 1.12.18; Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Coulisses,” in Tableaux de
Paris, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 2:481.
278
1. For the purpose of this discussion, I focus on circumscribed aspects of the

rich semantic baggage of the word esprit. It may mean “mind” as a faculty of rea-
soning or the faculties peculiar to a person. In his Dictionnaire universel (Rotter-
dam, 1690) Antoine Furetière writes, “Esprit denotes reasoning, the functions of
the soul which act by its different organs: judgement, imagination, and memory.
. . . Esprit may also mean the special qualities that characterize a person, the talents
he applies to one thing or another. . . . Esprit also indicates the meaning, the intent,
the motivation of something.”
2. Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, Lettres de M. l’abbé *** à M. l’abbé
Houtteville au sujet du livre de la Religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits, in Pierre
Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Journaux et oeuvres diverses, ed. Frédéric De-
loffre and Michel Gilot (Paris: Garnier, 1988), 690–91, hereafter cited as JOD.
3. JOD, 717, emphasis added.
4. Alexis Piron to the abbé Dumay, 12 may 1755, in Alexis Piron épistolier, ed.
Gunnar Von Proschwitz (Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis,
1982), 160.
5. Montaigne used the term occasionally, as in Essais 3.5: “The activities of
beaux esprits enhance the value of language.”
6. Pierre Corneille, La place royale (1637), act 5, sc. 1.
7. See Molière, L’école des femmes (1663), 3.3.817–25: “Every simple woman is
docile to our lesson; . . . But a clever one is quite another animal. . . . Her bel esprit
helps her to make sport of our principles, and to turn her vices into virtues.” With
Rousseau, Arnolphe is redux: “But I would much rather deal with a simple and un-
educated girl than with a savante and a bel esprit, who would preside over a literary
academy in my own house. A woman bel esprit is the scourge of her husband, her
children, her friends, her servants, everybody.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, bk.
5, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 4 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1969), 768.
8. Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 149.
9. In Molière’s Les précieuses ridicules, act 1, Mascarille poses as a bel esprit.
10. Charles Pinot Duclos, “Sur la manie du bel esprit,” in Considérations sur les
moeurs de ce siècle (1751), ed. Carole Dornier (Paris: Champion, 2000), 194–204.
11. Père François Garasse, Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps (Paris:
S. Chappelet, 1623), bk. 1, sec. 10, p. 63.
12. Malebranche, Traité de morale, 1.12.15.
13. For instance, when the Italian Jesuit Daniello Bartoli’s highly successful
Dell’huomo di lettere difeso ed emendato, first published in Rome in 1645, was trans-
lated in into French in 1654, it bore the title Le guide des beaux-esprits. In 1769 it
underwent another translation and was renamed L’homme de lettres. Bartoli’s book
enjoyed wide success, with nineteen Italian editions and translations into English,
German, and Castilian. Significantly, the 1769 French translation stressed the dig-
nity and the absolute disinterestedness of intellectual activity. See Roger Char-
279
tier, “The Man of Letters,” in Enlightenment Portraits, ed. Michel Vovelle, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 169–70.
14. Alain Niderst, “Le bel esprit,” in L’esprit en France au 17e siècle, ed. François
Lagarde (Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1998), 75–84. For a contemporary understanding
of the concept see Père Dominique Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène
(1671), ed. Bernard Beugnot and Gilles Declercq (Paris: Champion, 2003); Mad-
eleine de Scudéry, “De l’air galant” et autres conversations (1653–1684): Pour une
étude de l’archive galante, ed. Delphine Denis (Paris: Champion, 1998); François
de la Rochefoucauld, Réflexions diverses (1731), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Martin-
Chauffier and Jean Marchand (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 499–541; and Jean de La
Bruyère, Les caractères (1688; reprint, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1990), esp. “De la
société et de la conversation” and “Des jugements.” Among scholarly studies see
Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain, esp. 147–51; 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, 1992), 111ff. and chap. 2; Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de
l’éloquence: Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Révolution au seuil de l’époque clas-
sique (Geneva: Droz, 1980; Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 674; idem, La diplomatie
de l’esprit (Paris: Hermann, 1994); Roger Lathuillère, La préciosité: Étude histo-
rique et linguistique (Geneva: Droz, 1966); Mercedes Blanco, Les rhétoriques de la
pointe: Baltasar Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe (Paris: Champion, 1992); and
idem, “Esprit,” in Dictionnaire raisonné de la politesse et du savoir-vivre, ed. Alain
Montandon (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 329–58.
15. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Oeuvres de jeunesse, ed. Frédéric
Deloffre and Claude Rigault (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 320.
16. JOD, 471.
17. Corneille had come under fire in the prefaces that Voltaire wrote for his
edition of Corneille’s work, and both Corneille and Racine were indicted for the
crimes of esprit and papillotage in Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets.
18. JOD, 473.
19. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux, in Pierre Carlet de Cham-
blain de Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed. Jacques Scherer and Bernard Dort (Paris:
Seuil, 1964), 29, emphasis in the original.
20. For the salonniere’s role as cultural mediator, brokering the relationship be-
tween artists and patrons, see André Morellet, Portrait de Mme Geoffrin, in Eloges
de Mme Geoffrin, par MM. Morellet, Thomas et d’Alembert, ed. André Morellet
(Paris: H. Nicolle, 1812), esp. 56–59.
21. Voltaire, “Gens de lettres,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sci-
ences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 32
vols. (Paris, 1751–77), 7 (1757): 599.
22. Ibid.
23. Antoine Gombauld, chevalier de Méré, De la conversation, in Oeuvres com-
plètes du Chevalier de Méré (1668), ed. Charles-Henri Boudhors, 3 vols. (Paris:
Fernand Roches, 1930), 2:119.
280
24. La Bruyère, “Des jugements,” sec. 18, 353–54.

25. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Histoire véritable, in Oeuvres
complètes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 1:451.
26. Molière, La critique de L’école des femmes, sc. 3, in Oeuvres complètes, ed.
Robert Jouanny, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 1:484. Montesquieu was wary of the
possible mortifications looming over the after-dinner bel esprit: “In conversation
and at the table I was delighted if I could find a man who was willing to be bril-
liant; a man like that is always exposed, while all the others are shielded by him.”
Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 213, in Pensées / Le
spicilège, ed. Louis Desgraves (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), 246–47.
27. Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 238–39, emphasis added.
28. Voltaire, “Esprit,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 7 (1757): 599.
See also Duclos, Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle, 195: “We see men who
have no status other than idleness; they turn themselves into amateurs of bel esprit;
they display their taste, it becomes their advertisement [affiche].”
Desjonquières, 1993), 47.
30. La Bruyère, “De la société et de la conversation,” sec. 75, 175–76.
31. See Dinah Ribard, “Philosophe ou écrivain?” Annales: Histoire et sciences
sociales 55, no. 2 (2000): 355–88.
32. In bouts-rimés, or set rimes, players must compose on the spot at least two
lines of verse around the riming words they are given.
33. The source may be found in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Journal des règnes de Henri
III et Henri IV, 25 November 1583. The journal was published in 1741, and Diderot
recounts the episode in a note to “Des lettres de Sénèque,” bk. 2 of Essai sur les
règnes de Claude et de Néron, sec. 10, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent Versini, vol. 1, Phi-
losophie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), 1127.
34. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Persian Letters,
George R. Healy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1964), letter 54, pp. 91–93.
35. See Elizabeth Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
36. Madeleine de Scudéry, “De la conversation,” in “De l’air galant” et autres
conversations, 73.
37. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 1740, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 547.
38. See esp. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, nos. 1003 and 1005, in ibid., 379–81.
39. Jean-François Marmontel, Mémoires, ed. Jean-Pierre Guicciardi and Gilles
Thierriat (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 135–36.
40. Tallemant des Réaux thus “unmasked” the poet Vincent Voiture: “He pre-
tended to compose on the spot. That may have happened a few times, but he of-
ten brought with him pieces he had composed at home.” Historiettes, ed. Antoine
Adam, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–61), 1:489. See also Alain Génetiot, Poétique
du loisir mondain, de Voiture à La Fontaine (Paris: Champion, 1997), 415–29.
281
41. See Marc Fumaroli, “L’art de la conversation ou le forum du royaume,” in

La diplomatie de l’esprit, 298–301.
42. See Antoine Lilti, “Sociabilité et mondanité: Les hommes de lettres dans
les salons parisiens au XVIIIe siècle,” French Historical Studies 28, no. 3 (June
2005): 415–45.
43. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Du Style,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:298.
44. Voltaire to Berger, 2 February 1736 (Best. 967), in Voltaire’s Correspondance,
ed. Theodore Besterman, 107 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1953–65),
5:37. On this letter see Christophe Cave, “Marivaux revu par Voltaire: L’image
de Marivaux dans la Correspondance de Voltaire,” in Marivaux et les Lumières:
L’homme de théâtre et son temps, ed. Geneviève Goubier (Aix-en-Provence: Publica-
tions de l’Université de Provence, 1996), 195–208. D’Alembert included the letter
in his Eloge de Marivaux.
45. Reported by d’Alembert in Eloge de Marivaux, 20. That judgment about
the Italians was corroborated by Diderot: “In the Italian theater, our Italian ac-
tors play with more freedom than our French actors; they pay less attention to the
audience. Very often it is entirely forgotten. There is in their action something
original and effortless that I like.” Denis Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, chap.
21, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 268. Molière
had mocked those actors who played for the parterre. In Molière’s Les précieuses
ridicules, sc. 9, Mascarille asks: “How are we supposed to recognize a good line
if the actor does not pause, so as to warn us that we have to start a brouhaha?”
Mercier also complained about the actor’s unfortunate tendency to overact at the
expense of the integrity of the play: “His exuberance dooms the play; the author is
ridiculed by the excesses of the actor. . . . Don’t we often see the fire, the eloquence
of the character, destroyed by an actor who preferred to put himself [son esprit]
ahead of the author?” Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre, ou nouvel essai sur l’art
dramatique, in Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du théâtre (1784–85), ed. Jean-
Claude Bonnet and Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 1476–77.
46. Voltaire, Lettre sur l’esprit (1744, postface to Mérope) in Oeuvres complètes
de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 19:3–9.
47. See Emmanuelle Hénin, “Poétique de l’illusion scénique: Des poétiques
italiennes de la Renaissance à la doctrine classique,” Littératures classiques, no. 44
(2002): 15–34, and her masterful Ut pictura theatrum: Théâtre et peinture de la Re-
naissance italienne au classicisme français (Geneva: Droz, 2003).
48. Jean Chapelain, Préface à l’Adonis du Chevalier Marin, in Opuscules cri-
tiques, ed. A. C. Hunter (Paris: Droz, 1936), 85. See also idem, Lettre sur la règle des
vingt-quatre heures (1630), in ibid., 115: “I postulate as a foundation that imitation in
dramatic poetry must be so perfect that there should be no perception of difference
between the original and the imitation, since the latter aims at presenting things as
if they were real and present to the mind, in order to purge it of its passions.”
49. Denis Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York:
Marsilio, 1993), 165–66. Corneille, however, was well aware that in the theater
282
rhetoric was subservient to action: “One of the differences between the dramatic
poet and the orator is that the latter is free to display his art and make it remark-
able, whereas the former must carefully conceal it, since he is not the one to speak,
and those who do speak are not orators.” Pierre Corneille, Discours de l’utilité et
des parties du poème dramatique (1660), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton,
3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–87), 3:134.
50. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Rime,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:452, emphasis
added. Epic, of course, is the unfortunate intrusion of epic bombast into drama.
51. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, La voiture embourbée, in Oeuvres
de jeunesse, 313–14, emphasis in the original.
52. Christian Jouhaud, “Histoire et histoire littéraire: Naissance de l’écrivain,”
Annales: Economie, société, civilisations 43, no. 4 (1988): 859.
53. Günter Berger, ed., Pour et contre le roman: Anthologie du discours théorique
sur la fiction narrative en prose du XVIIe siècle, Papers on French Seventeenth-Cen-
tury Literature, 92 (Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1996), 181–82.
54. For Furetière, in his Dictionnaire, illusion is “false appearance, artifice in-
tended to show something that does not exist or to show it differently than it actu-
ally is. Optics displays a thousand agreeable illusions through polyedric or faceted
lenses and through magic lanterns. . . . It is also said of the artifice of the Demon,
who makes visible what does not exist.”
55. François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, La pratique du théâtre, ed. Hélène
Baby (Paris: Champion, 2001), bk. 1, chap. 6, pp. 81–82. The pictorial and optical
roots of theatrical illusion in France may be found in the Italian Renaissance, a
time when stage decorations were inspired by the theories of perspective held by
Brunelleschi, Vasari, Alberti, and Peruzzi. See Hénin, “Poétique de l’illusion scé-
nique,” 19–20. On the innovations of the early-seventeenth-century French stage
see also Jean Rousset, L’intérieur et l’extérieur: Essais sur la poésie et sur le théâtre au
XVIIe siècle (Paris: Corti, 1968), 165–82; and Georges Forestier, Le théâtre dans le
théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1996).
56. See Molière’s L’impromptu de Versailles (1663) for a critique of bad theatri-
cality and the emphatic mannerisms of the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne.
57. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, foreword to La vie de Mari-
anne, ed. Frédéric Deloffre (Paris: Garnier, 1957), 5. Claude Crébillon’s satire of
Marivaux’s language in the novel, in chap. 25 of L’écumoire ou Tanzaï et Néadarné
(1734), is notorious. Tanzaï rebukes Néadarné, who admires this style: “ ‘What
beautiful reflections,’ said Néadarné. ‘Were it true that they are as beautiful as you
say,’ Tanzaï replied, ‘I still would not like them. I find them lengthy and inap-
propriate, and nothing is more ridiculous than a display of esprit where it is not
needed. . . . If by chance an event invites a reflection, let that be short.’ ” Crébillon,
Oeuvres, ed. Ernest Sturm (Paris: François Bourin, 1992), 296.
58. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,
1976), nos. 147, 150, p. 93.
59. La Bruyère, Les caractères, preface, 61–62.
283
60. JOD, 117.

61. Ibid., 118.
62. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Les aventures de Télémaque, ed.
Jacques Le Brun (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1995), bk. 17, p. 376.
63. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in JOD,
118.
64. Baldassarre Castiglione, Le livre du courtisan, trans. Alain Pons after the
1580 translation by Alain Chappuis (Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1987), 55–56.
65. “Artistic or artful self-expression in poetry, as in society, is partly a matter
of self-concealment as well as concealing one’s art or artifice.” Jeffrey Barnouw,
“The Beginnings of Aesthetics and the Leibnizian Conception of Sensation,” in
Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Mattick Jr.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 58.
66. Mercier, “Coulisses,” 482–83.
67. In Manon Lescaut, for instance, the gambler and trickster Des Grieux styles
himself a “chevalier d’industrie.”
68. “Essai sur l’origine et les progrès des connoissances humaines,” Mercure de
France, September 1753, 53, quoted in Jean Weisgerber, Les masques fragiles: Esthé-
tique et formes de la littérature rococo (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1991), 82.
69. See La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes, 486–87, Maxime supprimée 563.
70. JOD, 314–15.
Chapter 3 The Sly and the Coy Mistress
Epigraphs: Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Paraphrase, ou de la grande éloquence

(à M. Costar), discourse 6, in Oeuvres diverses (1644), ed. Roger Zuber (Paris:
Champion, 1995), 163; Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art,
trans. John Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 267; Marcel
Proust, John Ruskin, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et Mélanges, ed.
Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 128 (the reference is to
Buffon’s Discours sur le style, his inaugural speech to the French Academy, delivered
on 25 August 1753.
1. “What goes for intelligence [esprit] goes for taste and philosophy: nothing is
more rare than having it, more impossible than acquiring it, and more common
than believing one has it.” Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur la société des gens de
lettres et des grands, sur la réputation, sur les Mecènes, et sur les récompenses littéraires
(1753; 2nd ed. 1764), in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, vol. 4 (Paris: A. Belin / Bossange
Frères, 1822), 346.
2. Père Dominique Bouhours, Le bel esprit, in Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène
(1671), ed. Bernard Beugnot and Gilles Declercq (Paris: Champion, 2003), 249.
3. See Marian Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-
Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 47–48.
284
4. On the influence and the legend of Fénelon throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury and the Revolution see Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: Essai sur
le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 41–49.
5. Part of the success of Les aventures de Télémaque was due to the fact that
it was read as a satire of Louis XIV. See also Fénelon’s famous Lettre à Louis XIV,
December 1693, published in the eighteenth century by d’Alembert, reprinted in
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Oeuvres, ed. Jacques Le Brun, 2 vols.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 1:543–51. The letter, which circulated clandestinely, an-
ticipates the critique of absolutism formulated in Télémaque and subsequently in
the Tables de Chaulnes (1711), a detailed program of government for the Duke of
Burgundy. The idea was to counteract the power of the king with that of the aris-
tocracy and the Estates General.
6. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Lettre à l’Académie (1714), ed.
Ernesta Calderini (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 40.
7. Ibid., 48–49.
8. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Discours à l’Académie française,
in Oeuvres, 1:535–36.
9. Fénelon, Lettre à l’Académie, 51.
10. Ibid., 57. That parallel was a staple of rhetorical literature from Quintil-
ian to Longinus. See Longinus, Traité du sublime, trans. Nicolas Boileau (1674),
ed. Francis Goyet (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995), 12.4, p. 93; see also Fénelon’s
“Cicéron et Démosthène,” in Dialogues des morts, in Oeuvres, 1:369–76. Montes-
quieu emphasizes the orator’s character: “Cicero always thought of himself first,
Cato always forgot about himself. The latter wanted to save the republic for its
own sake, the former in order to boast of it.” Charles de Secondat, baron de Mon-
tesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence
(1734; 2nd ed., 1748), trans. David Lowenthal as Considerations on the Causes of the
Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (New York: Free Press, 1965), chap. 12,
p. 116. On Demosthenes’s linguistic sobriety see also Guez de Balzac, Paraphrase,
165; and Charles Perrault, Parallele des anciens et des modernes (Paris: Jean-Baptiste
Coignard, 1690), 163.
11. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence (1718),
in Oeuvres, 1:35.
12. See Blaise Pascal, Lettre à sa soeur Mme Périer, sur la mort de leur père, 17
October 1651, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1954),
496.
13. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Explication des maximes des
saints, in Oeuvres, 1:1011.
14. Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, Justine ou les infortunes de la vertu,
1778 (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969).
15. The political implications of Fénelon’s spiritualism did not escape the scru-
tiny of the court. His doctrine of pur amour incurred the combined disapproval of
his one-time protector Mme de Maintenon and Bossuet. Fénelon was disgraced,
285
deprived of his preceptorship, and exiled; twenty-three propositions from his

Explications were condemned by Pope Innocent XII in 1699, at about the time
Fénelon’s friend and spiritual leader Mme Guyon, the founder of quietism, was
imprisoned in the Bastille.
16. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Les aventures de Télémaque, ed.
Jacques Le Brun (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1995), 321, 400.
17. Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence, in Oeuvres, 1:37, emphasis added.
18. Georges Forestier, “Imitation parfaite et vraisemblance absolue: Réflexions
sur un paradoxe classique,” Poétique, no. 82 (1990): 187–202.
20. Marc Fumaroli, “Illusion et dramaturgie dans L’illusion comique,” XVIIe
siècle, nos. 80–81 (1968): 107–32, reprinted in Fumaroli, Héros et orateurs: Rhéto-
rique et dramaturgie cornéliennes, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 271. For a com-
parison of natural and artificial signs in poetry and painting see Abbé Jean-Baptiste
du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), pt. 2, chap. 40. See
also François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, La pratique du theâtre, ed. Hélène Baby
(Paris: Champion, 2001), bk. 1, chap. 6, p. 87.
21. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 206 (on Hubert Robert’s Port of Rome), emphasis
added.
23. Fénelon, Explication des maximes des saints, in Oeuvres, 1:1074–75.
24. Longinus Traité du sublime 15.1. The visual aspect of hypotyposis must be
taken as a metaphor for the emotion created by the image: “We are the specta-
tors of a theater without visuals but not without spectacle. Words raise a virtual
scene, a theater of the emotions, a communication among souls. The illusion of
presence relies upon the actual communion between the poet-rhetorician and his
audience.” Francis Goyet, “De la rhétorique à la création: Hypotypose, type, pa-
thos,” in La rhétorique: Enjeux de ses resurgences, ed. Jean Gayon, Jacques Porier,
and Jean-Claude Gens (Brussels: Editions Ousia, 1998), 61.
25. “Besides many other properties, images have that of enlivening and rousing
emotion in a speech. So that when they are joined to other evidence, they not only
persuade but conquer, so to speak; they dominate the audience.” Longinus Traité
du sublime 15.9.
26. Ibid.
27. “Hypotyposis is a Greek word that means image, tableau. It occurs in those
descriptions in which events are depicted as if they were before our eyes; in which
what is narrated is displayed; in which the original is given instead of the copy,
and pictures are replaced by the objects themselves.” César Chesneau Dumarsais,
Traité des tropes (1729), republished with a commentary by Pierre Fontanier in 1818
(reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1984), 151.
28. Denis Diderot, Pensées détachées sur la peinture (1781), in Oeuvres esthé-
tiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 824.
29. Longinus Traité du sublime 17.2. “The interest and the charm of Richardson’s
286
work is such that it conceals its artistry even to those who are most capable of per-
ceiving it.” Denis Diderot, Eloge de Richardson (1762), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 40.
30. Fénelon, Lettre à l’Académie, 78–79.
31. Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, De la manière de bien juger les ouvrages de pein-
ture (1771), 84, quoted in Hobson, Object of Art, 62. Laugier was the author of the
neoclassical Essai sur l’architecture (1753).
32. In the Republic, bk. 10, Plato opposes eikastikê, which reproduces the object
while preserving its exact proportions, to phantastikê, which seeks to reproduce it
for the eye by means of tricks based on color and drawing, not geometrical calcu-
lations. The latter was akin to sophistry. See Emmanuelle Hénin, Ut pictura thea-
trum: Théâtre et peinture de la Renaissance italienne au classicisme français (Geneva:
Droz, 2003), 27.
33. Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1958), 4.48b, pp. 7–8.
34. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1763, in Diderot, Essais sur la peinture: Salons de
1759, 1761, 1763 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 220. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre (1713–89),
admitted to the Academy in 1742 and the successor of Boucher as first painter to
the king in 1770, was an appreciated history painter. Diderot admired his compo-
sitions but found his drawing style cold and dry (Diderot, Salon of 1767, 299).
35. When confronting the impact of landscape painting by Vernet, Diderot de-
clares: “Their character is such that the spectator who had remained unmoved and
serene at the seashore is astonished by [its representation on] the canvas.” Salon of
1767, 121.
36. On theories of illusion in eighteenth-century painting see Eveline Manna,
“Discours contre la peinture et mise en question de la perception au tournant du
XVIII siècle,” in Ecrire la peinture entre XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ed. Pascale Auraix-
Jonchière (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2003), 57–74;
and Sylvain Menant, “Les fins de la peinture selon l’abbé Du Bos,” in Les fins de la
peinture, ed. René Démoris (Paris: Desjonquières, 1990), 157–62.
37. Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence, in Oeuvres, 1:4.
38. Malebranche too saw style as belonging to the realm of worldly desire (con-
cupiscence) and the materiality of the body and its passions: “All the various styles
ordinarily please us only because of the secret corruption of our heart. . . . It we
wish to reflect upon . . . what happens in ourselves when we are reading some
well-written piece . . . we would find that this relish we take in the delicacies of
effeminate discourse has no other source than a secret inclination for softness and
voluptuousness. In a word, it is a certain attraction to what affects the senses, not
awareness of the truth, that causes us to be charmed by certain authors and to
be carried away by them almost in spite of ourselves.” Nicolas Malebranche, The
Search after Truth (1674), trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Colum-
bus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), bk. 2, pt. 3, chap. 5, p. 185.
39. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique ou l’art de penser (1662; re-
print, Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pt. 2, chap. 20, p. 339, emphasis added. On this
287
passage see Louis Marin, La critique du discours (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 67–74. On
the association between color and rhetoric see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Elo-
quence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
40. Review of André Pierre Le Gayde Prémonval, L’esprit de Fontenelle (1744),
a collection of anas, in Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, Jugements sur quelques
ouvrages nouveaux, 11 vols. (Avignon: Pierre Giroux, 1744–46; Geneva: Slatkine
Reprints, 1967), 1:38.
41. Fénelon, Lettre à l’Académie, 93. Racine’s text had been the object of a de-
bate between La Motte and Boileau on the nature of the sublime and the role of
metaphors. See Nicolas Boileau’s Réflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rhéteur
Longin, reflection 11, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 560.
42. Corneille’s “Qu’il mourût” from Horace (3, 6, 1022) and “Moi, dis-je, et
c’est assez” from Medea (1, 5, 321).
43. Nicolas Boileau, preface to Longinus, Traité du sublime, trans. Boileau, ed.
Goyet, 70.
44. Augustine De doctrina Christiana 4.24.53, quoted in Fénelon, Lettre à
l’Académie, chap. 4, “Projet de rhétorique.”
45. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel (1757), in Oeuvres esthétiques,
101–2.
46. Paraphrasing Longinus (Traité du sublime 9.2) and prefiguring Diderot’s
Entretiens sur Le fils naturel, the abbé Bouhours gives as an example of nonverbal,
sublime expressiveness Ajax’s silence, powerfully set off by Ulysses’ insincere ver-
bosity: “We admire him for his silence, which signifies all the nobility of his soul.
. . . Ulysses cajoles Ajax, who does not even condescend to reply, and this si-
lence has a je ne sais quoi that is greater than anything he might have said.” Père
Dominique Bouhours, De la manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687;
reprint, ed. Suzanne Gellouz, Toulouse: Atelier de l’Université de Toulouse-
Le-Mirail, 1988), 168.
47. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre
sur les sourds et muets, ed. Marian Hobson and Simon Harvey (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 2000), 124–25. Those verses from Phaedra had launched a “Quarrel
of Racine” that pitted La Motte’s Discours sur la poésie against Boileau’s Réflexions
critiques sur quelques passages du rhéteur Longin, reflection 11, published posthu-
mously in 1713. The quarrel rebounded in the eighteenth century, opposing an-
other Jesuit professor of Louis le Grand, the abbé d’Olivet (Remarques de gram-
maire sur Racine, 1738) to the abbé Desfontaines (Racine vengé, 1739). In Questions
sur l’Encyclopédie (1771), s.v. “Amplification,” Voltaire asked, “Was it appropriate
for the man who has Mentor ramble on and on to shut Théramène’s mouth?”
Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85),
17:183–93. Leo Spitzer resurrects La Motte’s and Fénelon’s arguments in “L’effet de
sourdine dans le style classique: Racine,” in Études de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970),
262–68.
288
48. Aposiopesis, which means stopping abruptly in the middle of a sentence

because of an excess of emotion, comes from the Greek aposiopao, “to be silent
after speaking, to observe a deliberate silence.” See Quintilian Institutio Oratoria
9.2.54–55.
50. Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 116–17. See also idem, Salon of
1767 (on Renou’s Christ at the Age of Twelve Debating the Law with the Doctors),
278–85.
52. See Francis Goyet’s introduction to Boileau’s translation of Longinus, Traité
du sublime, 5–60.
53. Jean-Louis Carra, M. de Calonne tout entier (Brussels, 1788), vii–viii, quoted
in Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Ha-
ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 222.
54. Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late
Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 138.
55. Ibid., 165–66.
56. As we know, both Marianne and Jacob often find themselves in trial-like
situations, thus becoming eloquent advocates of their own situations.
57. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le cabinet du philosophe, “Du
style” (1734), in Marivaux, Journaux et oeuvres diverses, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and
Michel Gilot (Paris: Garnier, 1988), 384, hereafter cited as JOD.
58. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Lettre sur les habitants de Paris, in
JOD, 35.
59. Marivaux, “Du style,” in JOD, 386.
60. Ibid., 387.
61. Ibid., 383. Marivaux’s justification of neology as an effect of intellectual
progress and increased clarity prefigures Condorcet’s, who stated that “men, in
becoming enlightened, acquire more ideas; the nuances distinguishing objects
become finer and more precise. Languages must therefore be perfected and en-
riched, for their true richness does not consist in the number of words but in the
abundance of those that express clear ideas with precision.” “Des avantages et des
progrès des sciences,” inaugural speech to the French Academy, 21 February 1782,
www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/index.html.
62. Marivaux, “Du style,” in JOD, 386, 383.
63. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in JOD, 148.
64. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, “Discours sur le style,” inaugural speech
to the French Academy, 25 August 1753, www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/
index.html.
65. Thus the Encyclopédie article on style upholds the traditional distinction
between simple, middle, and sublime style: the first for letters, fables, and “in-
formal conversation”; the third for “noble and elevated subjects”; the second for
289
everything in between (whatever that may be). Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Style,” in

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis
Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 32 vols. (Paris, 1751–77), 15 (1765): 551. See
also Voltaire, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1771), s.v. “Style,” in Oeuvres complètes
de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 20:436–44; and idem, “Genre de style,” in Diderot and
d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 7 (1757): 594.
66. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, “Elocution,” in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, 4:617.
Encyclopédie, 1 (1751): xxxi.
68. Boileau noted that in the world of poetry, farm animals were not all cre-
ated equal. Thus, while the pig (truie, cochon) or the calf (veau) could never gain
admittance, the cow was welcome, provided that she was a génisse and not a vache;
the sheep too, provided that she was a brebis and not a mouton. Boileau, Réflexions
critiques sur quelques passages du rhéteur Longin, 532.
69. Voltaire, Lettre sur l’esprit (1744, postface to Mérope), in Oeuvres complètes
de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 19:3–9.
70. Manner, of course, is not quite a synonym of style. in the tradition of
Giovanni Bellori and Giorgio Vasari, Diderot often uses it in the sense of “man-
nerism,” a work inspired by academic models and not by nature. See his article
“Manière” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 10 (1765): 34–35. For a discus-
sion of manner and mannerism in painting see Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept
in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1968).
71. See Diderot, Salon of 1767, 252–54 (on Lépicié’s Painting of a Family); and
idem, Paradoxe sur le comédien (1770), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 310: “Great poets,
great actors, and perhaps great imitators of nature in general, whoever they are,
are endowed with a great imagination, great judgment, fine tact [tact fin], and an
unfailing sense of taste [goût très sûr].”
72. See Diderot’s discussion of the modèle idéal in the Salon of 1767 and in Essais
sur la peinture, chap. 1.
73. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 119–20, translation modified.
74. Ibid., 121. “O Chardin, it is not white, red, and black that you are blend-
ing on the pallet, it is the very substance of things; it is air and light that you are
holding at the tip of your brush and are laying on the canvas.” Diderot, Salon de
1763, 218.
75. “One has only to walk about the Salon and listen to the various judgments
proposed there to become convinced that, in this genre, as in literature, success, the
greatest success, is a sure thing for mediocrity; that happy mediocrity which puts the
average spectator and artist on the same level.” Diderot, Salon of 1767, 253.
76. Appendix 3 to Denis Diderot, Salon III: Ruines et paysages (Paris: Her-
mann, 1995), 516.
77. Denis Diderot, “On Mannerism,” in Diderot, Salon of 1767, 321.
78. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 155. “What a clamor of disparate objects! We feel its
290
utter absurdity; and yet, we are unable to avert our eyes from this painting” (ibid.).
On Boucher’s pastorals and landscapes see Diderot, Salon de 1761, and Diderot,
Essais sur la peinture, 120.
79. The cyclical nature of such evolution is confirmed by the reference to
Seneca, the undisputed embodiment of late imperial mannerism. Of course, a few
years later Diderot will go out of his way to rescue his hero from such accusations
in Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron. See below, chapter 5. See also Voltaire:
“Like an artist who gradually shapes his taste, so a nation shapes hers. For centuries
she stagnates into barbarism, then rises a fragile dawn; finally, the daylight sets in,
followed by a long and sad twilight. We have all agreed for quite some time that
despite François I’s efforts to encourage in France the emergence of taste in the
arts, good taste did not set in until the century of Louis XIV; and we now lament
the fact that the present age is degenerating.” Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1771),
s.v. “Goût,” in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 19:270–84.
81. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, in Oeuvres com-
plètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),
169–70.
82. Diderot, “On Mannerism,” 323.
83. Denis Diderot, Notes on Painting (1765), in Diderot on Art, trans. John
Goodman, vol. 1, The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1995), 193.
84. Ibid., 214, translation modified.
85. Denis Diderot, Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre (1772).
86. Diderot, Pensées détachées sur la peinture, 825.
87. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 50. Referring to Boucher’s Angélique et Médor,
Diderot writes: “That man takes up the brush only to show me tits and bums. I
am happy to see them; but I do not want them to be displayed.” Denis Diderot,
The Salon of 1765, in Diderot on Art, 1:26, translations modified.
88. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder
in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
89. Diderot, Notes on Painting, 212.
90. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 50. Diderot compares his impression of the Suzanne
by Giuseppe Cesari, cavalier d’Arpino (1568–1640), to that of Lagrenée.
91. I borrow Elisabeth Ladenson’s terms from her book Proust’s Lesbianism
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 66.
92. René Démoris, “Peinture et cruauté chez Diderot,” Colloque international
Diderot, ed. Anne-Marie Chouillet (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1985), 299–307.
93. Diderot, Pensées détachées sur la peinture, 767.
94. Ibid., 792.
95. See esp. Diderot, Salon de 1761, 120. See also Edmond de Goncourt
and Jules de Goncourt, L’art du XVIIIe siècle (1859–75; reprint, Paris: Hermann,
1967), 95.
291
96. See France Marchal-Ninosque, Images du sacrifice, 1670–1840 (Paris: Cham-

pion, 2005), 263.
97. See, e.g., Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel, 168–72; idem, Eloge de Rich-
ardson; the commentary on Fragonard’s Corésus and Callirhoé in Diderot, Salon
of 1765, 141–48; and the remarks on the elder Lagrenée’s Sacrifice of Jephta in ibid.,
40. Carle Van Loo had painted a Sacrifice d’Iphigénie in 1757, the same year that
Guimond de la Touche’s Iphigénie en Tauride was performed triumphantly at the
Comédie-Française.
98. Démoris, “Peinture et cruauté chez Diderot,” 302–3.
99. Diderot, Notes on Painting, 211.
Chapter 4 Capturing Fireside Conversation
Epigraphs: Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre, ou nouvel essai sur l’art dra-

matique, in Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du théâtre (1784–85), ed. Jean-
Claude Bonnet and Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 1316; Denis
Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent Versini,
vol. 1, Philosophie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), 972.
2. Mercier, Du théâtre, 1147.
3. Ibid.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, bk. 5, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gag-
nebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 762–63.
5. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Télémaque travesti, in Oeuvres
de jeunesse, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Claude Rigault (Paris: Gallimard, 1972),
724–25.
6. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le paysan parvenu, ed. Frédéric
Deloffre (Paris: Garnier, 1959), 73. Both Marianne and Jacob are able to conceive
who they are; in that respect they anticipate the self-determination of the libertine
persona, who is able to subordinate his character to his will, with the sole reserva-
tion that for Marivaux such a will is subconscious. See André Malraux, Le triangle
noir: Laclos, Goya, Saint-Just (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 34.
7. Jean Rousset, “Marivaux et la structure du double registre,” in Forme et
signification: Essai sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: Corti,
1964), 45–64.
8. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel (1757), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 81.
9. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, La vie de Marianne, ed. Frédéric
Deloffre (Paris: Garnier, 1957), 9.
10. In Jacques le fataliste Diderot too reflected on the paradoxical nature of
the opposition between narrative verisimilitude and historical truth. Seventeenth-
century baroque novelists, in Aristotelian fashion, believed that historical truth,
292
unlike poetic truth, need not be plausible (vraisemblable); the search for verisimili-
tude was proof of the novel’s moral superiority over history writing.
11. The choice of location is not irrelevant; a pont-neuf was a vaudeville song, a
composition inspired by current events, often parodistic and obscene. See Louis-
Sébastien Mercier, “Complaintes,” in Tableaux de Paris, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet,
2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 2:954; and Robert Isherwood, Farce and
Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1986), chap. 1.
12. Jean-Pierre Sermain, “Pourquoi riez-vous? La question du Paysan parvenu,”
Revue Marivaux, no. 6 (1997): 209–29.
13. Charles Baudelaire, De l’essence du rire (On the Essence of Laughter) (1855),
in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne
(London: Phaidon, 1964), 164.
14. Ibid., 154.
15. “The only difference [between comedy and tragedy for the Greeks] consists
in parabasis, a speech that in the midst of the play was held by the chorus in the
name of the poet to the people. Yes, it was a complete interruption and dissolu-
tion of the play, during which (just as in the play itself ) the greatest licentiousness
reigned and the chorus, which had stepped out to the outer limits of the prosce-
nium, said the grossest vulgarities to the people. The name is derived from this
stepping out (ekbasis).” Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Beheler et
al. (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958–), 18:85, fragment 668, English transla-
tion by Michel Chaouli in The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the
Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 200.
See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1983), 218.
16. Chaouli, Laboratory of Poetry, 200.
17. De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 222.
18. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Lettres contenant une aventure,
in Marivaux, Journaux et oeuvres diverses, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Michel Gilot
(Paris: Garnier, 1988), 86, hereafter cited as JOD.
19. David Hume defined the self not as a substance or a substratum but as a
“bundle or collection of different perceptions” with no unified core, no identity
beyond that which is produced in the imagination by the uninterrupted flow of
impressions. See A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1978), 252. And Rousseau wrote, “I would tell myself that all we do is con-
stantly begin anew; that there is no link to our existence other than a sequence of
present moments, the first of which is always the one that is happening here and
now. We die and are reborn at every moment of our life.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires (1762), in Oeuvres complètes, 4:905.
208.
293
21. Georges Poulet, La distance intérieure (Paris: Plon, 1952), 1–34; Leo Spitzer,
“A propos de La vie de Marianne: Lettre à M. Georges Poulet,” Romanic Review,
1953, 102–26, reprinted in Spitzer, Études de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). See also
J. S. Spink, “Marivaux: The ‘Mechanism of the Passions’ and the ‘Metaphysics of
Sentiment,’ ” Modern Language Review 73, no. 2 (1978): 278–90.
22. As Thomas Kavanagh beautifully argues in The Aesthetics of the Moment:
Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1996), esp. chap. 1.
23. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux (1785), in Pierre Carlet de
Chamblain de Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed. Jacques Scherer and Bernard Dort
(Paris: Seuil, 1964), 20.
24. Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in JOD, 207–8.
25. Marivaux, Lettres contenant une aventure, in JOD, 99.
26. Marivaux owes to Madeleine de Scudéry an interest in half-conscious states
of mind, which are part of Scudéry’s phenomenology of love. For both, the rise of
true tendresse always presupposes unawareness (a surprise de l’amour). Surprise is a
proof of the genuineness of the emotion. See James S. Munro, “Sensibility and the
Subconscious in Marivaux and Mlle de Scudéry,” Romance Studies, no. 15 (Winter
1989): 89–97.
27. Marivaux, La vie de Marianne, 169.
28. Pierre Nicole, De la charité et de l’amour-propre (1675), in Essais de morale,
ed. Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 412.
29. Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in JOD, 114; idem, L’indigent philosophe,
in JOD, 311; idem, Le cabinet du philosophe, in JOD, 335.
30. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Pharsamon ou Les nouvelles folies
romanesques, in Oeuvres de jeunesse, 603; idem, La vie de Marianne, 55–56.
31. See Georges May, Le dilemme du roman au dix-huitième siècle (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1963).
32. Marivaux, L’indigent philosophe, in JOD, 311.
33. Ibid., 276.
34. See Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les so-
ciétés archaïques (1923–24); and Georges Bataille, La part maudite (1976), translated
into English as The Accursed Share: “For I shall always be concerned, however it
may seem, with the apparently lost sovereignty to which the beggar can some-
times be as close as the great nobleman, and from which, as a rule, the bourgeois
is voluntarily the most far removed.” The Accursed Share, 2 vols. (New York: Zone
Books, 1988–91), 1:197.
35. Marivaux, L’indigent philosophe, in JOD, 275.
36. Marivaux, Le cabinet du philosophe, in JOD, 351.
37. Marivaux, Le spectateur français, in JOD, 114.
38. Marivaux, Lettre sur les habitants de Paris, in JOD, 8.
39. Ibid., in JOD, 149.
294
40. Marivaux’s conception of expressive spontaneity prefigures that of Rous-

seau: “If I were, like all the others, to produce a work meticulously written, I would
not be making a self-portrait, but a made-up likeness. What we have here is a por-
trait, not a book. I will work, as it were, in a camera obscura. I will need no skill
other than that needed for reproducing the traits that I see in there. I have made a
decision regarding style as well as subject matter. I will not try to make it smooth;
I will change it according to my mood; I will always have the style that comes to
me. I will say each thing as I feel and see it, with no elegance or scruple; without
bothering about the medley [bigarrure]. Abandoning myself both to the memory
of the [past] impression and to the present feeling, I will paint a double portrait
of my state of mind, at the moment when the event took place and at the mo-
ment I will be writing it. My style—uneven and artless, now rapid, now detailed;
now sensible, now mad; now grave, now light—will itself be part of my story.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fragments autobiographiques, sketches for Les confessions,
in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1959), 1154.
41. “Corneille and Montaigne were, after Dufresny, the only writers whom
Marivaux sometimes consented to approve of. Montaigne even more than Cor-
neille, for the reason that his manner of writing belonged to him more; it was less
likely to be copied by the multitude and therefore more likely to receive the ap-
proval of a writer who prided himself on resembling no one.” D’Alembert, Eloge
de Marivaux, 35n20.
43. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, entretien 18, in Les entretiens, ed. Bernard
Beugnot (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1972), 290. Cicero wrote:
“Plainness of style seems easy to imitate at first thought, but when attempted,
nothing is more difficult. . . . [The style] should be loose but not rambling; so
that it may seem to move freely, but not to wander without restraint. . . . For the
short and concise clauses must not be handled carelessly, but there is such a thing
even as a careful negligence [neglegentia diligens]. Just as some women are said to
be handsomer when unadorned—this very lack of ornament becomes them—so
this plain style gives pleasure even when unembellished: there is something in
both cases which lends greater charm [venustas], but without showing itself. Also
all noticeable ornament, pearls as it were, will be excluded; not even curling-irons
will be used; all cosmetics, artificial white and red, will be rejected; only elegance
and neatness will remain.” Cicero, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical
Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 23.77–79, pp. 363–64.
See also John C. Lapp, The Esthetics of Negligence (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1971).
44. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Essai sur le goût, in Oeuvres com-
plètes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 2:1255. See also Paul Pellis-
son, Discours sur les oeuvres de Monsieur Sarasin (1655): “We may say that two things
make poetry admirable: the inventiveness, which gives it its name, and ease, which is
295
absolutely necessary. I do not mean ease in composing, which, though it may some-
times be a gift, should always be held as suspect. I mean the ease that readers enjoy in a
composition that has cost its author the greatest pains. One might compare it to those
terraced gardens the expense of which is hidden and which, having cost millions, seem
nothing but the work of chance and nature.” Quoted in L’esthétique galante, ed. Alain
Viala et al. (Toulouse: Société des Littératures Classiques, 1989), 62.
45. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 1971, in Pen-
sées / Le spicilège, ed. Louis Desgraves (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), 607–8.
46. “Conversation must appear so free that it must seem as if no idea were ever
rejected; one should be able to say anything that comes to mind, with no precon-
ceived design to talk about one thing rather than another. . . . That is why I would
like you never to know what you must say, though you should know what you are
saying.” Madeleine de Scudéry, “De la conversation,” in “De l’air galant” et autres
conversations (1653–1684): Pour une étude de l’archive galante, ed. Delphine Denis
(Paris: Champion, 1998), 73.
47. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Essai sur le goût, ed. Louis
Desgraves (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1993), 38.
49. Voltaire, Lettre sur l’esprit (1744, postface to Mérope), in Oeuvres complètes
de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 19:3–9.
50. After the flop of La Mort de César (29 August 1743) and his recent rejection
by the Academy (February 1743).
51. Lionel Gossman, “Ce beau génie qui n’a point compris sa sublime mission: An
Essay on Voltaire,” French Review 56, no. 1 (1982): 44.
52. But the proponents of the drame will, for the same reasons laid out by
Voltaire: “The Parisian . . . will see that verse on the stage is but a fake ornament
that corrupts the mind at the very moment it wishes to devote itself to sentiment
and image.” Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Rime,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:452. At the
dawn of the eighteenth century, in his Discours sur la tragédie, Antoine Houdar de
la Motte had been the first to propose introducing prose into tragedy.
53. That is, the exaggerated praise of something or someone one wishes in fact
to satirize. See Elisabeth Bourguinat, Le siècle du persiflage, 1734–1789 (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1998).
54. Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 357. I have
loosely based my translation on Lee Strasberg, The Paradox of Acting (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1957).
55. Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien, 314, 358, 358–59, emphasis added.
Marsilio, 1993), 166.
57. Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien, 360, 362.
58. Ibid., 315.
59. Diderot, Indiscreet Jewels, 167.
60. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands,
296
sur la réputation, sur les Mecènes, et sur les récompenses littéraires (1753; 2nd ed., 1764),
in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, vol. 4 (Paris: A. Belin / Bossange Frères, 1822), 361.
61. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, untitled manuscript quoted in Pierre Frantz,
“L’usage du peuple,” in Louis-Sébastien Mercier: Un hérétique en littérature, ed.
Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1995), 78.
62. Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien, 362. Diderot follows Fénelon closely in
his admiration for Sophocles’ Philoctetes: both oppose the “sublime simplicity” of
Sophocles to the decadence of contemporary theater. See François de Salignac de
la Mothe-Fénelon, Lettre à l’Académie (1714), ed. Ernesta Calderini (Geneva: Droz,
1970), 93–94. In the Paradoxe, under cover of translation, Diderot freely rewrites
Philoctetes’ address to Neoptolemus as if it were a drame bourgeois.
63. Voltaire, Lettre sur l’esprit, 3. See also idem, Commentaire sur Corneille
(1761–65).
64. Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, trans. John
Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 15.
65. Ibid., 188–89.
66. Denis Diderot, De la poésie dramatique (1758), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 260,
262.
67. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Triomphe de Voltaire: Janot,” in Tableaux de
Paris, 2:266. Of course, Mercier is being ironic: five hundred performances would
have been a phenomenal number. Janot was the character played by the actor Vo-
lange (Maurice-François Rochet) in Dorvigny’s immensely popular play Les battus
paient l’amende, performed at the Variétés-Amusantes in 1778. Despite Mercier’s
praise, the play’s poissard language was far from being “realistic” or untouched
by crafted conventions; not surprisingly, since it had emerged from the imagina-
tion of a handful of aristocrats, writers, and amateurs, members of the Société du
Bout du Banc (which counted among its members the comte de Caylus, the abbé
de Sade, uncle of the marquis, Maurepas, La Chaussée, and Voisenon), founded
in 1735. See Valeria Belt-Grannis, Dramatic Parody in Eighteenth-Century France
(New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931), 138–39.
68. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, foreword to Les serments indis-
crets (1732), in Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed. Henri Coulet and Michel Gilot, 2
vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) 1:663.
69. “That eternal surprise of love, the one and only subject of Marivaux’s com-
edies, was the main criticism that he had to endure concerning the subject matter
of his plays.” D’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux, 20.
70. Let a screenwriter attempt to cross the boundaries, and language will dis-
solve into the grunts and groans of the Joel and Ethan Cohen’s Blood Simple (1984),
which is closer to the reality of the action it depicts than a conventionally written
thriller. Conversely, what we take for real in “reality shows” is real in the limited
sense that it reflects the reality of television formulas, a reality filtered by gauzy and
contrived visual and narrative clichés. See Alessandra Stanley, “Blurring Reality
with Soap Suds,” New York Times, 22 February 2003, A-19. Director-screenwrit-
297
ers such as David Mamet and Eric Rohmer create subtle cognitive dissonance by
blurring the line between informal conversation and “written” formality.
71. Voltaire to Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Formont, 18 April 1732 (Best. 464), in
Voltaire’s Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, 107 vols. (Geneva: Institut et
Musée Voltaire, 1953–65), 2:303.
72. Marivaux, foreword to Les serments indiscrets, 663.
73. See, e.g., Marmontel’s Mémoires and Eléments de littérature, s.v. “Familier”;
Crébillon’s L’écumoire; and Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets.
74. Pierre Corneille, Discours de la tragédie (1660), in Oeuvres complètes, ed.
Georges Couton, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–87), 3:154–55.
75. Marivaux, Les serments indiscrets, act 2, sc. 5; idem, Les fausses confidences, act
3, sc. 12; idem, Le triomphe de l’amour, act 3, sc. 9; Jean Racine, Mithridate 4.5.1382,
in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 1:675.
76. Quoted in d’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux.
77. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le prince sacrifié: Théâtre et politique au temps de
Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 116–17.
78. D’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux, 20.
79. “Speech is action [Parler c’est agir]. . . . The entire representation of a trag-
edy consists in speech. . . . If we examine it carefully, we realize that the action
resides in the imagination of the spectator, who, led skillfully by the author, is
driven to conceive it as visible; yet, nothing is visible there but speech.” François
Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, La pratique du theâtre, ed. Hélène Baby (Paris: Cham-
pion, 2001), bk. 4, chap. 2, “Des discours en général,” 407–8.
80. Jean-François de La Harpe, Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et mod-
erne, 16 vols. (Paris: H. Agasse, 1799), vol. 11, pt. 3, bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 5049, www.lib
.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/databases/bibliopolis/cli/.
81. On the lower bourgeoisie’s taste for seventeenth-century classical artists such
as Poussin, Le Sueur, and Le Brun see Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in
Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), chap. 1.
82. Ibid., chap. 2.
Chapter 5 Grace and the Epistemology of Confused Perception
Epigraphs: Voltaire, Lettre à M. D***, in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis

Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 22:1–11; Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du
texte (1973; reprint, Paris: Seuil, 2000), 111.
1. Voltaire, “Esprit,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des
arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 32 vols. (Paris,
1751–77), 5 (1755): 973.
2. Antoine Furetière saw the burlesque and the conceit as forms of verbal ex-
cess issuing from the same source: “That genre of writing [burlesque] which came
to us from Italy, together with witticism and nonsense, still betrays the libertinism
298
of its origins.” Preface to his Enéide travestie (Paris, 1649). See also Jean-Louis Guez
de Balzac: “As for that ancient grace that belonged to the writings of the Romans
before the plaster and the coloring of the Spanish altered its purity, . . . you may
conclude that the Spaniards ruined everything in the world.” Quoted in Jean Je-
hasse, Guez de Balzac et le génie romain, 1597–1654 (Saint-Etienne: Publications de
l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1977), 46.
3. Voltaire to the abbé Trublet, 27 April 1761 (Best. 8974), in Voltaire’s Corre-
spondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, 107 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire,
1953–65), 45:312–13. For a history of the concept of esprit see Mercedes Blanco, Les
rhétoriques de la pointe: Baltasar Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe (Paris: Cham-
pion, 1992), introduction. On the identification between Italian poetry and the
excess of esprit see Alain Viala, “Le dialogue ‘à la française’ et les modèles italiens:
Affirmations et dénégations d’une esthétique,” in Estetica e arte: Le concezioni dei
“moderni,” ed. Stefano Benassi (Bologna: Nuova Alfia Editoriale, 1991), 45–58; and
Cecilia Rizza, “Le clinquant du Tasse,” in La France et l’Italie au temps de Mazarin,
ed. Jean Serroy (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1986), 201–8.
4. Morvan de Bellegarde, Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale, quoted in
Bernard Magné, La crise de la littérature française sous Louis XIV: Humanisme et
nationalisme, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1976), 1:63.
5. Nicolas Boileau, L’art poétique, canto 2, lines 105–10, in Oeuvres, 2 vols.
(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 2:95. Bellegarde’s ires were directed against the
generation of Voiture and Sarasin; when his text was written, the goût moderne was
just emerging.
6. Equivoque is made to stand for the poetics of galanterie. See Nicolas Boileau,
Satire XII, in Oeuvres, 1:33–34.
7. Turlupinade (from the stage name of the seventeenth-century actor Henri
Legrand, who was Belleville on the tragic stage and Turlupin on the fairgrounds)
is one of the many negative terms indicating jokes and wordplay, usually with a
sexual or a scatological content.
8. The expressions are from the abbé Raynal in a text from 1748, quoted in
Marivaux, Journaux et oeuvres diverses, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Michel Gilot
(Paris: Garnier, 1988), 714, hereafter cited as JOD.
9. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,
1976), no. 1.
10. Ibid., 49–50.
11. See Jeffrey Barnouw’s excellent synthesis in “The Beginnings of Aesthetics
and the Leibnizian Concept of Sensation,” in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and
the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Mattick Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 52–95.
12. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, La vie de Marianne, ed. Frédéric
Deloffre (Paris: Garnier, 1957), 166, emphasis added.
13. Ernst Cassirer defines the type of reason that is associated with délicatesse
as follows: “The concept of ‘délicatesse’ as used by Bouhours, amounts, as it were,
299
to a new organ. The aim of this organ is not, as with mathematical thinking, con-
solidation, stabilization, and fixation of concepts; on the contrary, it is expressed
in lightness and flexibility of thought, in the ability to grasp the finest shades and
the quickest transitions of meaning.” The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 300. See also Annie Becq, Genèse de
l’esthétique française moderne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), esp. 97–114.
256.
15. Marivaux, La vie de Marianne, 32–33. On sensitivity see Anne Vila, Enlight-
enment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Cen-
tury France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), esp. 128–40, for an
analysis of La vie de Marianne.
16. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Lettre sur les habitants de Paris, in
JOD, 34.
17. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, “Sur la pensée sublime,” in Pen-
sées sur différents sujets, in JOD, 67.
18. Père Dominique Bouhours, Le bel esprit, in Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène
(1671), ed. Bernard Beugnot and Gilles Declercq (Paris: Champion, 2003), 251.
19. This sense, which goes all the way back to a Galenic conception of the
mind-body union, was attested by Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universal (Rot-
terdam, 1690), s.v. “Esprit”: “Esprit, in terms of medicine, indicates those volatile
and weightless atoms that are the smallest components of bodies, which give bod-
ies their movement, act as a bridge between the body and the faculties of the soul,
and allow the soul to perform all its operations. . . . Esprit is a subtle body, always
moving, made of blood and vapors, carrier of the mind’s faculties and commands
by dint of nerves and muscles.”
20. Ibid.
21. The Aristotelian text wavers, sometimes confusedly, between energeia and
enargeia. The uncertainty between the two will shape the entire history of rhetoric.
See Aristotle Rhetoric 3.1410b; and Michel Delon, L’idée d’énergie au tournant des
Lumières, 1770–1820 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 36.
22. Voltaire, “Esprit,” 974–75. See also idem Lettre sur l’esprit (1744, postface to
Mérope), in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 19:3–9: “What we call esprit
. . . is the art of uniting two distant objects, or dividing two objects that seem
joined, or opposing them to each other.”
23. Abbé Le Blanc, Lettres de Monsieur l’abbé Le Blanc: Nouvelle edition de celles
qui ont paru sous le titre de Lettres d’un François, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1751) 3:359,
quoted in Jean Weisgerber, Les masques fragiles: Esthétique et formes de la littérature
rococo (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1991), 104.
24. Ibid., 2:51–52, quoted in Weisgerber, Les masques fragiles, 106–7.
25. Bouhours, Le bel esprit, 180–81.
26. See Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, written in 1640 and published in
1650, chap. 10, sec. 4, quoted in Barnouw, “Beginnings of Aesthetics,” 57: in wit,
300
or ingenium, “quick ranging of mind . . . is joined with curiosity of comparing the

things which come into the mind, one with another: in which comparison, a man
delighteth himself either with finding unexpected similitude of things, otherwise
much unlike, in which men place the excellency of fancy . . . , or else in discerning
suddenly dissimilitude in things that otherwise appear the same . . . which is com-
monly termed by the name of judgment: for to judge is nothing else, but to dis-
tinguish and discern: and both fancy and judgment are commonly comprehended
under the name of wit, which seemeth to be a tenuity and agility of spirits.”
27. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 11, sec. 2, p. 156.
28. The same mistrust of the value of esprit for the sciences may be found in
Dumarsais: “[The philosopher] is not always able to avoid the vivid turns of phrase
that come to mind by a prompt connection of ideas that we may be surprised to
see joined. It is this sudden assemblage of ideas that is commonly called esprit. But
it is also his least favorite, since to this glitter he prefers the painstaking distinc-
tion among ideas; he’d rather explore their exact extent and connection so as to
avoid being misled and carried away by some random connection of ideas. It is in
such discernment that consists what we call judgement and exactitude of mind.”
César Chesneau Dumarsais, Le philosophe (1730), in Le Philosophe: Texts and Inter-
pretation, ed. Herbert Dieckmann (Saint Louis: Washington University Studies,
1948), 41.
29. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and
trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xliv. In his early Essai sur les causes qui
peuvent affecter les esprits et les caractères Montesquieu, like Locke, divides the two
operations of the understanding along social and generic lines, but his whole work
suggests that he sees those two modes as complementary: “Esprit for the worldly
consists in bringing together the most distant ideas; esprit for the philosopher con-
sists in distinguishing them. To the former, all ideas have some relation, however
distant; to the latter, they are so distinct that nothing can join them.” Montes-
quieu, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 58.
30. The subject of Denis Vairas’s utopian novel, Histoire des Sévarambes.
31. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, xliii.
32. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (lectures de-
livered in 1772–73 and published in 1798), trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 118–20.
33. Ironically, we find the same language in Diderot’s passionate defense of
Seneca’s style against the numerous detractors who, for centuries, have accused
Seneca of excessive subtlety of esprit and of a “desire to shine.” When he falls in
love with Seneca, Diderot switches gears: “Seneca speaks with the warmth of his
soul and the nobility of his character. If he has brilliance, it is like a diamond or the
stars, whose nature it is to sparkle. Blaming him for an affectation of brilliance is
like blaming the swallow for the grace of its flight. Seneca has the tone of bel esprit
301
as someone else would have a tone of conceit, without being aware of it.” Denis
Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent Versini,
vol. 1, Philosophie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), 1130.
34. Bouhours, Le bel esprit, 239.
35. As Marian Hobson observes, the papillotage of rococo painting is the vi-
sual equivalent of the narrative techniques of interruption used by Scarron and
Diderot. The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 52. See also Diderot: “A prolix-
ity of incidents can impose a flicker effect on the mind that’s just as unpleasant as
the one inflicted on the eyes by poor distribution of light, and while this flicker-
ing light destroys harmony, the flickering of excess incident disperses interest and
destroys unity.” Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, trans.
John Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 291.
36. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, “Discours sur le style,” inaugural speech
to the French Academy, 25 August 1753, \www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/
index.html.
37. “Hence, though these things seem to glitter and to some extent to stand
out, their brilliance may be said to resemble not so much a flame as a few sparks
emerging from the smoke (indeed they are invisible when the whole speech is
bright, just as stars cannot be seen in sunlight.” Quintilian, The Orator’s Educa-
tion, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 8.5.29, pp. 421–22.
38. Ibid., 8.5.34, pp. 423–24.
39. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Beheler et al. (Munich: Fer-
dinand Schöningh, 1958–), 12:392–93, English translation by Michel Chaouli in
The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 203–4.
40. Jean Paul, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, 6 vols. (Munich: C. Hanser, 1966–
75), vol. 5, Vorschule der Asthetik, 171, quotation trans. Paul Fleming in “The Disso-
nant Whole: Jean Paul’s Polyphonic Prose” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University,
2002), 27.
41. I rely here upon Paul Fleming’s analysis in “The Dissonant Whole,” 26–33.
43. Denis Diderot, “Génie,” in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 7 (1757):
583.
44. See Patrick Brady, Rococo Style versus Enlightenment Novel (Geneva: Slat-
kine, 1984); and idem, Structuralist Perspectives in Criticism of Fiction: Essays on
“Manon Lescaut” and “La Vie de Marianne” (Bern: Lang, 1978).
45. “The phrase is deployed by successive touch-ups, by replications and cor-
rections. By using simple procedures, such as reiteration, corrective adjustment,
apposition, he creates a phrase that is so flexible that it will not find its equal
until Proust, or at least until the Goncourts.” Frédéric Deloffre, Marivaux et le
marivaudage: Une préciosité nouvelle, 2nd ed. (Paris: Colin, 1967), 443.
302
46. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le paysan parvenu, ed. Frédéric

Deloffre (Paris: Garnier, 1959), 129–30.
47. “After those short reflections, which in the mind of our admirers occur in
one instant, and not consecutively as we describe them here” (Marivaux, Lettre sur
les habitants de Paris, in JOD, 37); “All I do is unravel the chaos of their ideas: I
itemize whatever they experience wholesale” (idem, Le spectateur français, in JOD,
126); “By the way, what came to my mind at that time, though lengthy to say, only
took an instant in my thought” (idem, La vie de Marianne, 72); “That thought
came spontaneously; it may seem contrived, but it isn’t: nothing is simpler” (ibid.,
37); “Can we say all that we feel? Those who believe that do not feel much, and
they probably only see half of what one can see” (idem, Le paysan parvenu, 142).
48. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre
sur les sourds et muets, ed. Marian Hobson and Simon Harvey (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 2000), 111.
49. Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, trans. J. Robert Loy
(New York: Collier Books, 1959), 29.
50. Jean-François Marmontel, Poétique française (Paris: Lesclapart, 1763). I
thank Luc Monnin for bringing this text to my attention.
Encyclopédie, 1 (1751) ix.
52. Père Dominique Bouhours, Le je ne sais quoi, in Les entretiens d’Ariste et
d’Eugène, 281. In France, the earliest formulation of an aesthetics of je ne sais quoi is
probably by the poet Jean Ogier de Gombauld, “Sur le je ne sais quoi,” his inaugu-
ral speech to the French Academy in 1635. On the history of the concept see Erich
Köler, “Je ne sais quoi: Ein Kapitel aus der Begriffgeschichte des Unbegreiflichen,”
Romanistisches Jahrbuch 6 (1953–54): 21–59; Jean-Pierre Dens, L’honnête homme et
la critique du goût (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1981), esp. chap. 3; Pierre-Henri
Simon, “Le je ne sais quoi devant la raison classique,” Cahiers de l’Association In-
ternationale des Études Françaises 11 (May 1959): 104–17; and Delon, L’idée d’énergie
au tournant des Lumières, 65–71. See also Barnouw, “Beginnings of Aesthetics.”
53. Bouhours, Le je ne sais quoi, 284.
54. André Félibien, entretien 1 in Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus
excellents peintres anciens et modernes (1666), ed. René Démoris (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1987), 120–22.
55. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Essai sur le goût, in Oeuvres
complètes, 2:1253–54. For a later formulation see Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, La ven-
geance d’une femme, in Les diaboliques (1874): “There is much less variety than we
think in the human countenance, whose traits obey a narrow and inflexible ge-
ometry and may be reduced to a few general types. Beauty is one: only ugliness is
diverse. . . . God has ordered that physiognomy alone should be infinite, because
physiognomy is the immersion of the soul into the perfect or imperfect, pure or
tormented, outline of the face.” In Oeuvres romanesques complètes, ed. Jacques Pe-
tit, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964–66), 2:233–34.
303
56. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin
Books, 1998), pt. 2.
57. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le cabinet du philosophe, in JOD,
347.
58. For Dominique Bouhours, the ideal of beauty is associated negatively with
the pomp and magnificence of the rhetorically inflated noble style (the Ciceronian
genus vehemens or the swollen sublime), which excites cold admiration but carries
no persuasion and does not stir the emotions: “In matters of taste [esprit] it is nei-
ther the grand nor the [emphatic] sublime that we like: it is an undefinable quality
[je ne sais quoi] of tenuity and agility [fin et délicat]. . . . Beauty itself, when it is so
splendid, is overpowering rather than pleasing. Whatever is offered exclusively for
admiration quickly becomes tiresome and no longer excites any emotion.” There
is in those definitions an implicit critique of the monarchical pomp of Versailles.
Pensées ingénieuses des anciens et des modernes (1689), quoted in Sophie Hache, La
langue du ciel: Le sublime en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2000), 93.
59. Marivaux, Le cabinet du philosophe, in JOD, 349–50.
60. Ibid., 350.
61. The Je ne sais quoi presents life, as Thomas Kavanagh puts it, “as an epiph-
any of unexpected discontinuities rather than as a fulfillment of promised coher-
encies. The life portrayed . . . is one open far more to the abrupt redefinition of
surprise than to the predictable certitudes of the sequence.” Kavanagh, The Aes-
thetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 7.
63. Ibid., 350–51.
64. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans.
and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), preface, secs. 53, 55. Written in 1703–4, the book was not published
until 1765.
65. Unconscious and imperceptible impressions, which are stored in the soul
and exercise a covert action, account for the effect of theater on the spectator and
of literature on the reader: “The passions that take hold of us are imprinted in our
books and then carry this imperceptible imprint right into the soul of those who
read them. . . . By reading the books of other human beings, we are imperceptibly
filled with their vices.” Pierre Nicole, “De la manière d’étudier chrétiennement,”
from Essais de morale, vol. 2, secs. 8 and 9, quoted in Pierre Nicole, Traité de la
comédie et autres pièces d’un procès du théâtre, ed. Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Cham-
pion, 1998), 50n27.
66. Grace acts through imperceptible and unformulated thoughts, which are
more powerful determinants to action than linguistically mediated thoughts. The
idea of injustice, for instance, “is blended and confused in the mind of men with
objects that hold our attention more directly. We know those actions directly, but
304
we feel their injustice only by virtue of accessory ideas that we do not distinguish
clearly and whose effect is felt only through the aversion they give us for those
actions.” Pierre Nicole, Traité de la grâce générale, quoted in Louis Marin, “La cri-
tique de la représentation théâtrale classique à Port-Royal: Commentaires sur Le
Traité de la comedie de Nicole,” Continuum 2 (1990): 81–105.
67. Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale, quoted in ibid., 99.
69. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth (1674), trans. Thomas M.
Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), bk.
3, pt. 1, chap. 4, p. 212.
71. Bouhours, Le je ne sais quoi, 293.
72. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, II, xxi, sec. 36, pp. 188–90.
73. The quotation is from ibid. On window-shopping and the Saint-Germain
fair as shopping theater under Louis XIV’s reign see Joan DeJean, The Essence of
Style (New York: Free Press, 2005), chap. 12.
74. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, “Pensées sur la clarté du dis-
cours,” in Pensées sur différents sujets, in JOD, 53.
75. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, paraphrasing Saint-Evremond in “De la ré-
ticence,” in Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du théâtre (1784–85), ed. Jean-Claude
Bonnet and Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 741. Il faut composer
avec lui may also be intended as “we need to make a deal with him” or “we need
to come to terms with him.”
76. Père Dominique Bouhours, De la manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages
d’esprit (1687; reprint, ed. Suzanne Gellouz, Toulouse: Atelier de l’Université de
Toulouse-Le-Mirail, 1988), 158–61.
77. Ibid., 161.
78. Diderot, “Génie,” 583.
79. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 11, chap. 20, p. 186.
80. Charles-Rivière Dufresny, Les amusements sérieux et comiques (Paris: Claude
Barbin, 1699), amusement 1, quoted in Moralistes du XVIIe siècle, ed. Jacques Chu-
peau (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992), 977.
81. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Quelques réflexions sur les
Lettres persanes, in Lettres persanes, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1975), 6.
82. Quoted in Bertrand Binoche, Introduction à De l’esprit des lois de Montes-
quieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 12. See also Roger Laufer, Style
rococo, style des Lumières (Paris: Corti, 1963), 25.
83. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Oeuvres de jeunesse, ed. Frédéric
Deloffre and Claude Rigault (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 457.
305
Chapter 6 Between Paris and Rome
Epigraphs: Voltaire, Idées républicaines par un membre d’un corps (1765), in Oeu-
vres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85),
24:413–32; Denis Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 1983), 74.
1. Voltaire to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, November(?) 1734 (Best. 780), in Vol-
taire’s Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, 107 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Mu-
sée Voltaire, 1953–65), 3:326, original letter in English.
2. Denis Diderot, fragment on portraits and history painting in appendix 2 to
Salon III: Ruines et paysages (Paris: Hermann, 1995), 515.
3. Fénelon, Lettre à l’Académie, chap. 8, “Projet d’un traité sur l’histoire,” 108–9.
4. “Pura et illustri brevitate dulcius.” Cicero Brutus 25.262.
6. See Patrick Andrivet and Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, introduction to
Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la
grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, in Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed.
Françoise Weil and Cecil Courtney, vol. 2 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation; Naples:
Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 2000), 23. Even a few years later, in The
Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold
Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), bk. 11, chaps. 12–14,
Montesquieu does not seem to doubt the existence of the Roman monarchy.
7. Fénelon, Lettre à L’Académie, 110.
8. Ibid., 106.
9. Voltaire, “Histoire,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des
arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 32 vols. (Paris,
1751–77), 8 (1765): 223.
10. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, foreword to Discours sur l’histoire universelle, ed.
Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 41. On the rhetorical nature
of history in the eighteenth century see Lionel Gossman, “History and Literature:
Reproduction or Signification,” in Between History and Literature (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 227–56.
11. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 1183, in Montes-
quieu, Pensées / Le spicilège, ed. Louis Desgraves (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), 403.
12. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of
the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York:
Free Press, 1965), chap. 16, p. 148. Unless otherwise noted, I refer to the edition
revised by Montesquieu in 1748 and published under the title Grandeur et déca-
dence des Romains, ed. Jean Ehrard (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968). Whenever
necessary, I have also used the original 1734 edition, published in the Oeuvres com-
plètes de Montesquieu, vol. 2. English translations are from Lowenthal’s translation,
which is based on the 1748 edition, with minor modifications.
13. Ibid., chap. 12, p. 117.
306
14. “It is undoubtedly great men who constitute the strength of an empire. . . .
The Roman state had a temperament . . . most productive of heroes.” Bossuet,
Discours sur l’histoire universelle, pt. 3, chap. 6, pp. 404–5.
15. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 19, p. 177.
16. See Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le roi machine (Paris: Minuit, 1981), esp. chap. 6.
17. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Suite d’un entretien de vive voix, ou De la conver-
sation des Romains, in Oeuvres diverses (1644), ed. Roger Zuber (Paris: Champion,
1995), 75.
19. Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV, chap. 1. See also Frederick II’s preface to La
Henriade (1717): “The century of Louis the Great, of which it can be said, without
any flattery, that it equals perhaps that of Augustus, gives us the same example of a
happy and tranquil reign in the interior of the kingdom.” In La Henriade, in Oeu-
vres complètes de Voltaire / Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Ulla Kölvig et al. (Geneva:
Institut et Musée Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968–), 2:361.
20. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, nos. 1302 and 1306, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 456, 458.
23. “Since corrupt peoples rarely do great things and have established few so-
cieties, founded few towns, and given few laws; and since, on the contrary, those
with simple and austere mores have made most establishments, recalling men to
the old maxims usually returns them to virtue.” Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws,
bk. 5, chap. 7, p. 49.
25. Ibid., chap. 1, p. 32.
26. Giuseppa Saccaro Del Buffa, “Le passioni come artificio storiografico nelle
Considerazioni di Montesquieu,” in Storia e ragione, ed. Alberto Postigliola (Na-
ples: Liguori Editore, 1987), 220.
27. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 9, pp. 92–93.
28. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 3, chap. 6, p. 26. See also idem, Mes
pensées, no. 221, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 253: “It is the love of their country that lends
Greek and Roman histories that nobility that is unknown to ours. Virtue, beloved
by all who have a heart, is the perpetual springwell of all their actions. When one
thinks of the meanness of our motives, the inadequacy of our means, the greed
with which we pursue contemptible rewards, of our ambition so remote from the
love of glory, one is stunned by the diversity of the spectacles. Now that those two
peoples are gone, it seems as if men’s stature had shrunk a great deal.” See also
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 4, chap. 4.
30. “When they were mixed in with the barbarians, they contracted the spirit
of independence which marked the character of these nations.” Ibid., chap. 18,
p. 171. Such spirit is far from negative for Montesquieu: “Each age has its pecu-
liar temperament: a spirit of turmoil and independence rose in Europe with the
307
Gothic government.” Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 810, in Pensées / Le spicilège,

351–52.
31. Jean Bouhier, Correspondance littéraire du Président Jean Bouhier, ed. Henri
Duranton (Saint-Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 1987), letter 13, p. 144.
32. Antoine Gombauld, chevalier de Méré, Suite de la vraie honnêteté, in Oeu-
vres complètes du Chevalier de Méré (1668), ed. Charles-Henri Boudhors, 3 vols.
(Paris: Fernand Roches, 1930), 2:92; Charles de Saint-Evremond, Réflexions sur les
divers génies du peuple romain dans les divers temps de la république (1684), in Oeu-
vres en prose, ed. René Ternois, vol. 2 (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1965), 229; Voltaire,
introduction to Essai sur les moeurs et sur l’esprit des nations, ed. Réné Pomeau, 2
vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1963), 1:181. Montesquieu is no less severe; see Considerations,
chap. 6, p. 74.
33. A move that was indebted to Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle’s De l’origine
des fables: “The tales of the Greeks were unlike our novels, which pass as such and
not as history: all ancient history was fabulous.” Corpus des oeuvres de philoso-
phie en langue française, 3 (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 187.
34. Saint-Evremond, Réflexions sur les divers génies du peuple romain, 222.
35. Voltaire turned legend into parody: “The great Romulus, king of a village,
is the son of the god Mars and a nun who went searching for water with her jug.
He had a god for a father and a whore for a mother. . . . The Gauls from yonder
came to plunder Rome. Some say that they were scared away by geese, others, that
they took with them a lot of gold and money; more likely, in those times there
were in Italy a lot more geese than money. We have ourselves copied the early
Roman historians, at least when it comes to their taste for tales. We have our ori-
flamme carried by an angel and our holy ampulla carried by a pigeon.” Voltaire,
De l’histoire (1764), in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 19:352–56.
36. Emile Faguet, preface to Montesquieu, Considerations (Paris: Nelson, n.d.),
quoted in Corrado Rosso, “Demiurgia e parabola delle élites nelle Considerations,”
in Postigliola, Storia e ragione, 188.
37. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Eloge de M. le Président de Montesquieu, in
Diderot et d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 5 (1755): vii.
38. Voltaire, “Histoire,” 223.
40. Pasquale Anfossi, quoted in Françoise Weil’s introduction to Montesquieu’s
Considerations, 45–46. The Latin soluta oratio, et e singulis non membris sed frustis
conlata translates as “This leads as a rule to a broken style, made up not of cola,
but of tiny scraps, and devoid of structure.” Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed.
and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
8.5.27, p. 421. On Montesquieu’s use of saillies throughout his oeuvre see Corrado
Rosso, “L’ideale letterario di Montesquieu et il problema delle saillies,” in Montes-
quieu moralista: Dalle leggi al “bonheur” (Pisa: Libreria Goliardica, 1965), 26–60.
41. See Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, “Discours sur le style,” inaugural speech
308
to the French Academy, 25 August 1753, www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/

index.html.
42. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, preface to Montesquieu à Marseille (Lausanne:
Heubach, 1784), 6–7.
43. Antoine-Léonard Thomas, “De l’homme de lettres considéré comme ci-
toyen,” inaugural speech to the French Academy, 22 January 1767, www.academie
-francaise.fr/immortels/discours_reception/thomas1.html.
44. Voltaire, Idées républicaines par un membre d’un corps. Voltaire may have
borrowed here the critique formulated by the financier Claude Dupin, who had
published in 1749 an acerbic pamphlet against De l’esprit des lois. Dupin, the au-
thor of the widely circulated quip that Montesquieu’s treatise was nothing but “de
l’esprit sur les lois,” had written that the pace of the book was “so uncertain, so
rapid, so leaping that we lose our way at every moment; all of a sudden, we are
transported, from a familiar country to the most exotic regions.” Réflexions sur
quelques parties d’un livre intitulé De l’esprit des loix, quoted in Corrado Rosso,
“Montesquieu et Claude Dupin: Una stroncatura infelice,” in Rosso, Montesquieu
moralista, 252. It might have been the Dupin coterie that Diderot had in mind,
along with that of Bertin-Hus when he had the Neveu declare, “We shall prove
that de Voltaire is no genius; that Buffon, always perched on stilts, is nothing but
a pompous haranguer; that Montesquieu is nothing but a bel esprit.” Diderot, Le
neveu de Rameau, 74.
Marsilio, 1993), 247.
Desjonquières, 1993), 61.
47. Dupin, Réflexions sur quelques parties d’un livre, quoted in Rosso, Mon-
tesquieu moralista, 252. Montesquieu’s disclaimer, in the preface to The Spirit of
the Laws, xliv, forestalls such criticism: “The sallies [traits saillants] that seem to
characterize present-day works will not be found here. As soon as matters are seen
from a certain distance such sallies vanish.”
48. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, preface to Julie or the New Heloise, trans. Philip
Stewart and Jean Vaché, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Mas-
ters and Christopher Kelly, vol. 6 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New Eng-
land, 1997), 10.
49. François Ogier, Apologie pour Monsieur de Balzac, ed. Jean Jehasse (Paris:
Claude Morlot, 1623; Saint-Etienne: Editions Universitaires de Saint-Etienne,
1977), 72.
50. Pierre Costar, Suite de la défense des oeuvres de Mr de Voiture, à Monsieur
Ménage (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1665), 72, quoted in Sophie Hache, La langue du
ciel: Le sublime en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2000), 69–70.
51. Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Moland, 19:3–9.
52. Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines, Jugements sur quelques ouvrages nou-
309
veaux, 11 vols. (Avignon: Pierre Giroux, 1744–46; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967),
1:238.
53. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands, sur
la réputation, sur les Mécènes, et sur les récompenses littéraires (1753; 2nd ed., 1764), in
Oeuvres de d’Alembert, vol. 4 (Paris: A. Belin / Bossange Frères, 1822), 362.
55. Ibid., no. 2101, p. 634.
56. See Longinus, Traité du sublime, trans. Nicolas Boileau (1674), ed. Fran-
cis Goyet (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995), 12.4, p. 93. A parallel has been drawn
between Montesquieu’s prose and Tacitus’s: “The mechanism of Tacitus’s style is
original. Ellipsis is very frequent with him. As he leaps from one object to the next,
he touches only on the main points; he subtly understates them; he omits transi-
tions; he is a profound soul who seems to have several erogenous zones.” Louis-
Sébastien Mercier, “Tacite,” in Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du théâtre (1784–85),
ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet and Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 266.
See also Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Tacite et Montesquieu, Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century, 232 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985).
57. For an excellent analysis of the poetic quality of Montesquieu’s text see
Pierre Rétat, “Images et expression du merveilleux dans les Considerations,” in
Postigliola, Storia e ragione, 207–17.
58. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Essai sur le goût, ed. Louis
Desgraves (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1993). Montesquieu started working on the
essay about 1726–28, influenced by his reading of the abbé Du Bos’s Réflexions
critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719); he revised it in 1735 and again toward
the end of his life, without completing it.
59. Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, pt. 3, chap. 6, p. 392.
61. Ibid., p. 24.
62. Longinus, Traité du sublime, trans. Boileau, ed. Goyet, 1.4, p. 74.
64. René Descartes, Traité des passions de l’âme, sec. 70, in Philosophical Works
of Descartes, trans. E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1911), unpagi-
nated.
65. Ibid., sec. 75.
66. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin Books,
1998), pt. 2, sec. 1, p. 101.
68. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, nos. 118 and 1444, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 215,
477. On the visual dimension of theatrical narrative see François Hédelin, abbé
d’Aubignac, La pratique du théâtre, ed. Hélène Baby (Paris: Champion, 2001), bk.
4, chap. 2, pp. 407–8.
69. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 4, p. 49; chap. 7, p. 81; chap. 15, p. 138.
310
70. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 1507, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 486. See also
idem, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 11, chap. 15, p. 176: “The Roman people, more than
any other, were moved by spectacles.”
71. Longinus Traité du sublime 15.1. See also Quintilian: “Vividness [enargeia],
or, as some say, ‘representation’ [evidentia], is more than mere clarity of expres-
sion, since instead of being merely transparent it somehow shows itself off. It is a
great virtue to express our subject clearly, but also in such a way that it seems to
be actually seen [ostendit]. A speech does not adequately fulfil its purpose or attain
the total domination [plene dominatur] it should have if it goes no further than the
ears, and the judge feels that he is merely being told the story of the matters he has
to decide, without their being brought out and displayed to his mind’s eye [oculis
mentis ostendit].” Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 8.3.61, pp. 375–76.
72. Montesquieu, Essai sur le goût, 16–17.
73. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 2061, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 630: “A great
man is someone who sees rapidly, far away, and accurately.”
74. Mme de Lambert to Montesquieu, 10 December 1728, quoted in Rosso,
Montesquieu moralista, 57.
75. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Essai sur les causes qui peu-
vent affecter les esprits et les caractères, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard,
1949), 57.
77. Ibid., chap. 5, p. 57; chap. 12, p. 117.
78. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 1970, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 607. On Pierre
Nicole’s statement see Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 5, p. 32.
79. Montesquieu, Essai sur le goût, 17–18.
80. Longinus, Traité du sublime, trans. Boileau, ed. Goyet, 20.1–21.1, pp. 106–7.
81. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 5, p. 56; chap. 14, p. 133.
82. Montesquieu, Essai sur le goût, 29.
83. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 15, p. 138. This is a paraphrase of Clau-
dian’s Rufinum 1.22–23, “Tolluntur in altum ut lapsu graviore ruant” [They were
raised high so as to fall with greater clash], which was to have been the epigraph of
the Considérations. See Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 1519, in Pensées / Le spicilège,
488.
85. Ibid., manuscript variation to chap. 2 quoted in Françoise Weil’s edition of
the Considérations, 102.
87. Ibid., chap. 6, p. 75.
88. Ibid., chap. 11, p. 111. This description of the proximity between the atro-
cious (or the bestial) and the divine may be indebted to Plutarch’s commentary
on the first Brutus, the executioner of his children. (Montesquieu had read and
appreciated Plutarch’s Life of Brutus.) We may also note the disjunctive analysis
of Brutus’s motivations and the historian’s suspension of judgment: “It was an act
311
that cannot be praised or blamed enough, for it was either a superiority of virtue
that made his heart impassive or a violent passion that made it insensitive, neither
being negligible, but surpassing human nature and touching on the divine or the
bestial.” Plutarch, Publicola, trans. Amyot (1645), quoted in Charles de Saint-
Evremond, Réflexions sur les divers génies du peuple romain dans les divers temps de
la république (1684), in Oeuvres en prose, ed. René Ternois, vol. 2 (Paris: Marcel
Didier, 1965), 228.
89. “The only talent worthy of Rome is conquering the world and enforcing
on it the rule of virtue.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts,
Gallimard, 1964), 15. “Men conquered with no motive and no utility. They ravaged
the earth in order to exercise their virtue and display their excellence. Now that
we have been assessing the value of things more fairly, heroes have been covered
with ridicule; and those who would defend them, would be a thousand times more
ridiculous still.” Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 575, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 321.
91. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 11, chap. 4, p. 155; see also bk. 28, chap.
41, p. 595.
92. Ibid., bk. 29, chap. 18, p. 617. Montesquieu repeatedly criticizes the fasci-
nation for uniformity; see ibid., bk. 5, chap. 14, and bk. 6, chap. 2.
93. Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 10, p. 29; bk. 5, chap. 10, p. 57.
94. “A good law must be good for all men, as a true proposition is true for
everybody.” Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Ob-
servations sur le vingt-neuvième livre de “L’esprit des lois” (1817), quoted in Montes-
quieu, De l’esprit des lois, ed. Robert Derathé, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1973), 2:548.
On Condorcet’s objections to Montesquieu’s pluralism see Jean Erhard, “L’aune
ou le mètre?” in L’esprit des mots (Genève: Droz, 1998), 295–306.
95. “In order to put together a moderate government, one must offset powers
against each other, fine-tune and regulate them, encourage one so as to enable it
to resist another. It is a masterpiece of legislation that chance rarely assembles and
that prudence is never allowed to put together.” Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no.
892, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 366–67; see also idem, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 5, chap.
14. Montesquieu uses the metaphor of the machine to account not only for the
dynamism of political communities but also for the rhetorical organization of De
l’esprit des lois: “When a work is systematic, one must be sure to embrace the whole
system. You see a great machine, made to produce an effect. You see wheels that
turn in opposite directions; you may think, at first, that the machine will destroy
itself, that the mechanism will fail and the machine will stop. But it keeps going;
and all those pieces that seemed to destroy one another work together toward the
intended goal.” Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 2092, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 633.
96. The stability of the whole is assured by an “inner policing that mediates
between the [various] inclinations of the heart and, when it is active, induces them
to correct and offset one another, to balance and help one another; according to
312
the occasion, they are the remedy to the disorder that they sometimes raise in us.”
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Suite des réflexions sur l’esprit humain,
in Marivaux, Journaux et oeuvres diverses, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Michel Gilot
(Paris: Garnier, 1988), 483. See also Sarah Benharrech, “Lecteur que vous êtes big-
earre! Marivaux et la ‘Querelle de Montaigne,’ ” Modern Language Notes 120, no. 4
(2005): 925–49.
97. Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, pt. 3, chap. 7, p. 423.
98. Saint-Evremond, Réflexions sur les divers génies du peuple romain, 231.
99. Virtù for Machiavelli is systemic or relational. His account of what it meant
to be a citizen in the Roman republic reflects his conception of the conditions of
the Florentine republic in the early fifteenth century. There is mutuality between
the leaders and the led, with open access to office for all. Directed and used in
the right way, internal conflict, aggression, and ambition are sources of strength,
health, and growth. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito
Livio (1513–17), in Opere, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997–),
1:202–12. Machiavelli’s and Montesquieu’s ideas of popular government stand in
stark contrast to the Rousseauian (as well as to the revolutionary) idea of the indi-
visibility of the general will.
100. See Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 19, chap. 27 (the famous chapter
on the English constitution), pp. 325–33.
101. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 9, pp. 93–94. Montesquieu prudently
added “Asiatic” to “despotism” in 1748.
102. For a parallel between the harmony of the state and musical harmony see
Cicero De republica 2.42; and Plutarch De musica 25–34.
103. “Liberalism imposes extraordinary ethical difficulties on us: to live with
contradictions, unresolvable conflicts, and a balancing between public and private
imperatives which are neither opposed nor at one with each other.” Judith Shklar,
Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 249.
104. Montesquieu, Considerations, chap. 11, p. 103. The internal struggles that
characterize a free state are not to be equated with civil war; they are the ordinary
rivalry, expressed within the confines of the law, between social classes organized as
political constituencies (the senate and the plebeians in Rome, the House of Com-
mons and the House of Lords in England). In Rome their degeneration into full-
fledged civil wars was not necessary to the system but contingent upon a whole set
of other circumstances. It is not within the scope of this chapter to give an account
of Montesquieu’s complex analysis of the degeneration of Roman liberty.
105. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 5, in Pensées / Le spicilège, 187–88. In his
acceptance of inquiétude as essential to human nature, Montesquieu is closer to
Leibniz than to Malebranche.
106. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne,
Gallimard, 1964), 966: “Every true republican suckled the love of the patrie—that
is, of laws and liberty—together with his mother’s milk. That love is the founda-
313
tion of his whole existence; all he sees and all lives for is the patrie; alone, he is
nothing; without the patrie he no longer exists, and if he is not dead, he is worse
than dead.” And in idem, Economie politique, ibid., 252: “Virtue is the conformity
of the individual will to the general will.”
Chapter 7 Montesquieu for the Masses, or Implanting False Memory
Epigraphs: Denis Diderot to Mme d’Epinay, 1767, quoted in Jack Undank,

introduction to Est-il bon, est-il méchant? ed. Undank, Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century, 16 (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1961), 104; Louis-
Sébastien Mercier, Montesquieu in Montesquieu à Marseille (Lausanne: Heubach,
1784), act 3, sc. 3, p. 100.
1. Le Mercure de France, May 1775, 204, quoted in Corrado Rosso, La réception
de Montesquieu (Pisa: Editrice Goliardica, 1989), 13–14.
2. See Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, ed. Rob-
ert Derathé, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1973), vol. 2, bk. 23, chap. 29.
3. The play was translated by one Von Dalberg, the manager of the National
Theater of Mannheim, in 1787.
4. The young Georg Wilhelm Hegel referred to it in an early work, Der Geist des
Christentums und sein Schicksal. See Rosso, La réception de Montesquieu, 47–57.
5. Louis Petit de Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la ré-
publique des lettres en France (Mémoires de Bachaumont), 36 vols. (London: J. Ad-
amson, 1777–89), vol. 26, 17 September 1784. See also Friedrich Melchior von
Grimm, Denis Diderot, Jacques-Henri Meister, and Abbé François Raynal, Cor-
respondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (1751–1793), ed. Maurice Tourneux
(Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–82), January 1784, 13:474–75, and March 1777, 11:444,
for the reception of Montesson’s play.
6. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Rumeurs théâtrales,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:707.
7. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre ou nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique, in
Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du Théâtre, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet and
Pierre Frantz (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 1131–32.
8. On Mercier’s career as a “patriot playwright” and his struggles with the Co-
médiens-Français see Gregory S. Brown, A Field of Honor: Writers, Culture, and
Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), chap. 3., www.gutenberg-e.org.
9. Composed in 1730, Dumarsais’s manifesto was published in 1743 in Amsterdam.
It was borrowed and rewritten by Voltaire and published subsequently in the Encyclo-
pédie. For a complete history of its diffusion see Herbert Dieckmann, ed., Le Philos-
ophe: Texts and Interpretation (Saint Louis: Washington University Studies, 1948).
10. Egards means something closer to “thoughtfulness” and “respect.”
11. In his eulogy of Valincour, presented to the French Academy on 16 March
314
1730, Antoine Houdar de La Motte had praised Valincour’s mastery of a science

of manners that was like the glue that held together the other sciences and made
them accessible: “That science of manners [science du monde], which is not always
known to men of letters, so pleasurable though it is profound, and without which
other sciences would be a dry and uninviting exchange, whereas it could, all by it-
self, subsist without the help of the others.” www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/
index.html.
12. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, Réflexions sur l’esprit humain à
l’occasion de Corneille et de Racine (1749), in Marivaux, Journaux et oeuvres diverses,
ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Michel Gilot (Paris: Garnier, 1988), 476, hereafter cited
as JOD.
13. Intuitive and applied knowledge of the social put to practical uses is con-
fined by Rousseau to women only (to Emile’s wife, Sophie), or, more specifically,
to the salonniere, as Léonard-Antoine Thomas notes regarding Mme Geoffrin:
“No one has been more successful in the art of capturing and understanding char-
acter, even in small things. Such an art is necessary to those who want to know
human beings, especially in polite society, where civility and fear of ridicule have
erased all conspicuous traits. It requires a deft perception, the talent of grasping
tenuous relations between manners and morals, between character and tone of
voice, between demeanor and the passions one tries to conceal. Every emotion has
its expression to an expert eye.” Léonard-Antoine Thomas, A la Mémoire de Mme
Geoffrin, in Eloges de Mme Geoffrin, par MM. Morellet, Thomas et d’Alembert, ed.
André Morellet (Paris: H. Nicolle, 1812), 87–88.
15. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands, sur
la réputation, sur les Mecènes, et sur les récompenses littéraires (1753; 2nd ed., 1764), in
Oeuvres de d’Alembert, vol. 4 (Paris: A. Belin / Bossange Frères, 1822), 361.
16. This holds true for those writings that were intended for publication; pri-
vate correspondence often presents a different picture. For the relationship be-
tween the philosophes and the salon see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters:
A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1994); Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability
in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
and Elena Russo, “From Précieuse to Mother Figure: Sentiment, Authority, and the
Eighteenth-Century Salonniere,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 12
(2001): 199–218.
17. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Danger de certaines sociétés pour le poète,” in
Mercier, Du théâtre, 1315–16.
18. Léonard-Antoine Thomas, Essai sur les éloges (1773), bk. 2, chap. 28, p. 28, in
Oeuvres complètes, 7 vols. (Paris: Desessarts, 1802), vol. 4, emphasis added, http://
humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html.
315
19. See Charles Palissot de Montenoy, Les philosophes (1760), act 1, sc. 1, in
Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle, ed. Jacques Truchet, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972–
74), 2:144.
20. Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Holbach, Morale universelle ou les devoirs de l’homme
fondés sur sa nature (1776). On sociability and natural law, see Gordon, Citizens
without Sovereignty.
21. Alongside such dissatisfaction, there were attempts, such as André Mo-
rellet’s treatise “De la conversation,” to confer philosophical utility on worldly
conversation. The abbé Galiani’s Dialogues sur le commerce des blés (1771), much
praised by Diderot, is a learned debate on political economy framed within a so-
cial gathering. See Antoine Lilti, “Vertus de la conversation: L’abbé Morellet et la
sociabilité mondaine,” Littératures classiques, no. 37 (1999): 213–28. But Morellet’s
text was published well after the Revolution had swept away a world that he re-
gards nostalgically from afar (see Morellet, Eloges de Mme Geoffrin); his perspective
is shaped by that distance.
22. Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, trans. John
23. Denis Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, chap. 18, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed.
Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 261–62.
24. “As for me,” wrote Mercier, “I am convinced of the advantages we enjoy
over our ancestors. Our manners are more gentle, and men are less harsh and
barbaric. . . . Our vices derive from generalized exchange in our immense society;
they derive from a luxury that has brought us new pleasures; but we no longer have
the vices that derive from fanaticism, superstition, pride of rank, and capricious
haughtiness.” Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Des prôneurs de l’antiquité,” in Mon bon-
net de nuit, 873–74.
25. Thomas, Essai sur les éloges, bk. 2, chap. 38, p. 177.
26. On women’s influence on the theater Mercier, who had often taken femi-
nist positions and had written in favor of femmes auteur, was even more vehement
than Rousseau: “Today it is the childishness of our fashionable women that is
put on stage; when we have rendered their tone, we fancy we have become true
painters, and the poet is proud to have lent a voice to those futile beings that one
ought to ignore if one wishes to amend them. Instead, we erect a throne to them
and consecrate that ridiculous fanaticism of the nation, which is thus deprived
of all noble, energetic, and courageous ideas; that is why it loses every day that
discernment that consigns everybody to their proper place.” Mercier, Du théâtre,
1211–12.
27. Thomas, Essai sur les éloges, bk. 1, chap. 1, 3:5–6.
28. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 28, 4:28.
29. Antoine-Léonard Thomas, “De l’homme de lettres considéré comme ci-
toyen,” inaugural speech to the French Academy, 22 January 1767, www.academie
-francaise.fr/immortels/ discours_reception/thomas1.html.
316
31. Quoted in Marguerite Glotz and Madeleine Maire, Les salons du XVIIIe
siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1945), 57.
33. Thomas, Essai sur les éloges, bk. 2, chap. 38, 4:175–76.
34. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel (1757), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 115.
36. Quoted in Valleria Belt-Grannis, Dramatic Parody in Eighteenth-Century
France (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1931), 91–92, translation mine.
37. Ibid., 99, translation mine.
38. Pierre Corneille, Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique
(1660), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–
87), 3:117–41.
39. The prize had previously been awarded to royal eulogies. See Jean-Claude
Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard,
1998), 122–27. During the Revolution, Villemain d’Abancourt performed La bien-
faisance de Voltaire (1791); Marie-Joseph Chénier, Jean Calas in 1791 and Fénelon ou
les religieuses de Cambrai in 1793; Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, J. J. Rousseau à ses derniers
moments in 1791 and René Descartes, trait historique en deux actes et en prose in 1796;
and Andrieux, L’enfance de J. J. Rousseau in 1794.
40. Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon.
42. Le philosophe à la mode, performed at the Petite Tragédie des Jésuites in
May 1720, the work of Jean-Antoine Du Cerceau, 1670–1730, a Jesuit priest who
taught humanities at La Flèche, Rouen, and Bourges and later became the pre-
ceptor of the Prince de Conti, was the object of a fifty-page article in Le Mercure
in June 1720 (the editor of the Mercure in June 1720 was the abbé Buchet). The
program distributed at the performance declared: “What we mean by the name
Philosophe à la mode is a species of so-called sage whose philosophy is nothing but
an infinite love for himself and a perfect indifference for the rest of humanity. . . .
What we intend to show in this play is that this kind of philosophy, which ren-
ders a man indifferent to the patrie, to his peers, his friends, and everything that
does not touch his immediate interest, is the poison and the ruin of civil society.”
Quoted in Ira O. Wade, The “Philosophe” in the French Drama of the Eighteenth
Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1926), translation mine.
43. In 1759 Voltaire published a Socrate, but he did not have it performed; Sau-
vigny had his La mort de Socrate performed at the Théâtre-Français in 1763, and
Linguet represented his own Socrate in 1764. By 1762 the philosophes had won the
battle of public opinion, but the satirical onslaught did not subside. Among the
various titles we find L’homme dangereux (Palissot, 1770) and Le séducteur (marquis
de Bièvre, 1783). See Wade, “Philosophe.”
45. Pierre Nicole, Traité de la comédie (1667), par. 14, in Traité de la comédie et autres
pièces d’un procès du théâtre, ed. Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Champion, 1998), 64.
317
Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2003), 66–67.
48. “How sweet, how precious is a gift, for which the giver will not suffer us to
pay even our thanks, which he forgot that he had given, even while he was giving
it!” Seneca, De Beneficiis (On Benefits), 2.6.2, in Moral Essays, vol. 3, ed. and trans.
John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 61.
49. Sharon Kettering, “Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France,”
French History 6 (1992): 139–58; idem, “Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early-Mod-
ern France,” ibid., 2 (June 1988): 131–51.
50. Denis Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, in Oeuvres, ed.
Laurent Versini, vol. 1, Philosophie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), 1179.
51. See Bradley Rubidge, “Rates of Exchange: Reciprocation and Commerce in
Seventeenth-Century Heroic Drama” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1993).
52. Seneca De Beneficiis 2.17.3–5.
53. “Un service au dessus de toute récompense / A force d’obliger tient pres-
que lieu d’offense.” Pierre Corneille, Suréna, 3.1.705–6, in Oeuvres complètes, ed.
Georges Couton, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1980–87), 3:1269.
54. Separating virtus and voluptas, Montesquieu seems to share with the stoic
Seneca the belief that “virtue is not associated with pleasure at all, for virtue de-
spises pleasure, is its enemy, and recoils from it as far as it can, being more ac-
quainted with labour and sorrow.” De Beneficiis 4.2.4.
55. “I have been surprised at the pleasure we feel in doing a good deed: I would
be tempted to believe that those we call virtuous do not have as much merit as
we credit them with.” Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons
dangereuses (1782; reprint, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1996), letter 21, p. 120.
56. Seneca De Beneficiis 4.1.2–3.
57. That aspect was precisely what caught the attention of Hegel in his reading
of this play in Der Geist des Christentums. See Rosso, La réception de Montesquieu,
47–48.
58. Denis Diderot, introduction to Le fils naturel ou Les épreuves de la vertu
(1757), in Truchet, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle, 2:4.
59. “I would envision my life from the perspective of my death, and all I saw
was a foreclosed memory from which nothing could escape.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Les
mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 189.
60. Jean-François Marmontel, “Gloire,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire rai-
sonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond
d’Alembert, 32 vols. (Paris, 1751–77), 7 (1757): 716, emphasis added.
61. Denis Diderot to Étienne-Maurice Falconet, 4 December 1765, in Diderot
and Falconet, Le pour et le contre: Correspondance polémique sur le respect de la pos-
térité, Pline et les anciens, ed. Yves Benot (Paris: Editeurs Réunis, 1958), 49.
62. Denis Diderot, Le fils naturel ou Les épreuves de la vertu, in Truchet, Théâtre
du dix-huitième siècle, 2:3.
318
63. Longinus, Traité du sublime, trans. Nicolas Boileau (1674), ed. Francis
Goyet (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995), 14.1–2, p. 96.
64. Ibid., 14.3, p. 96.
65. “A great revolution of ideas has taken place in the last thirty years. Public
opinion nowadays in Europe is an overwhelming force to be reckoned with. . . .
The influence of writers is such that today they may reveal their power and no
longer disguise the legitimate authority they have over minds.” Mercier, “Belles-
lettres,” in Tableaux de Paris, 1:971.
66. Longinus, Traité du sublime, trans. Boileau, ed. Goyet, 44.2–4, pp. 136–37.
67. Ibid., 44.8, p. 137.
68. Jules Brody rightly points out that most of Boileau’s monosyllabic ex-
amples of sublime expression (“Qu’il mourût,” “Moi”) are drawn from drama,
“that literary form in which language most nearly becomes one with action.” Boi-
leau and Longinus (Geneva: Droz, 1958), 91. Horace’s and Medea’s sublime utter-
ances are cited, for instance, in Diderot’s article “Génie,” in vol. 7 of Diderot and
d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
69. “Tragedy will be heard and appreciated by citizen of all ranks; it will
have an intimate relation with political affairs and, replacing the pulpit and the
tribune [la tribune aux harangues], it will enlighten the people about their true
interests, it will present them under a striking light, it will exalt in their heart an
enlightened patriotism, and it will make them cherish their homeland.” Mercier,
Du théâtre, 1176.
70. Thomas, Essai sur les éloges, bk. 2, chap. 38, 4:177.
71. Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, chap. 3, in Oeuvres esthétiques, 197.
72. Augustine De doctrina Christiana 4.24.53, quoted in François de Salignac
de la Mothe-Fénelon, Lettre à l’Académie (1714), ed. Ernesta Calderini (Geneva:
Droz, 1970), 44–45. In his Dialogues des morts, dialogue 32, Fénelon has Demos-
thenes rebuff Cicero: “They admired you, while I was forgotten by my audience.
You entertained it with your wit, while I would strike, devastate, and terrify
with lightning.” Oeuvres, ed. Jacques Le Brun, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1983),
1:371–72.
73. John Le Rond d’Alembert, inaugural speech to the French Academy, 19
December 1754, quoted in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, 4:305. See also idem, Discours
préliminaire to Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 1 (1751): xi: “As for those pe-
dantic puerilities that have been honored with the name of rhetoric . . . and stand
to oratorical art in the same way as scholasticism stands to true philosophy, they
are good only for giving of eloquence a barbaric notion.”
75. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Battements de mains,” in Tableaux de Paris,
1:533.
76. Fontenelle’s eulogies of the members of the Academy of Sciences were for
the most part conversion stories, which endlessly rehearsed a sudden turn to sci-
ence after some inaugural event, away from the strictures of society and institu-
319
tional authority. See Dinah Ribard, “Philosophe ou écrivain,” Annales: Histoire et

sciences sociales 55, no. 2 (2000): 378–79.
77. Mercier, Montesquieu à Marseille, act 3, sc. 3, p. 102.
78. See Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Coun-
ter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001).
79. Charles Palissot de Montenoy, Petites lettres sur de grands philosophes (1757),
in Oeuvres complètes de M. Palissot, vol. 1 (Paris: L. Collin, 1809), 272.
80. In Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 5 (1755): 285, emphasis added.
The full lines in Latin, from bk. 4, lines 691–92, of Virgil’s Aeneid, on the death
of Dido, read: “Oculisque errantibus alto / Quaesivit coelo lucem, ingemuitque
reperta” [Her eyes drifting to the heavens / she seeks the light and grieves upon
having found it].
Chapter 8 Everlasting Theatricality
Epigraphs: Louis Fuzelier, Alain-René Lesage, and Jacques-Philippe d’Orneval,

“Harangue de Polichinelle au public,” in La grand’mère amoureuse, parody in three
acts of Atys performed with puppets on 10 March 1726, quoted in Charles Magnin,
Histoire des marionnettes en Europe (1862; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1981) 160;
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1975), 11–12.
1. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Battements de mains,” in Tableaux de Paris, ed.
Jean-Claude Bonnet, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 1:532.
2. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “L’auteur! L’auteur!” ibid., 1:1133. Acknowledging
the applause from the pit was considered undignified for authors. Gregory S.
Brown notes that “there are no recorded incidents of playwrights actually taking
the stage.” A Field of Honor: Writers, Culture, and Public Theater in French Literary
Life from Racine to the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002),
85, www.gutenberg-e.org.
3. “We call parterre the group of spectators who have their places in the pit
[parterre]; they are the ones who decide the merit of plays; we say: the judgement,
the cabal, the applause, the booing of the parterre.” “Parterre,” in Encyclopédie, ou
dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean
Le Rond d’Alembert, 32 vols. (Paris, 1751–77), 12 (1765): 87. See also Jean-Fran-
çois Marmontel, “Parterre,” in Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (Amsterdam, 1776),
4:241–42.
4. Ordinances were issued on 12 January 1685 (“Ordinance forbidding anyone
from creating disorder in the playhouse”), 16 November 1691, 19 January 1701, 18
May 1716 (for the Comédie-Italienne), 10 April 1720, and 7 December 1728. See
Adolphe Jullien, La comédie et la galanterie au 18e siècle (Paris: Edouard Rouveyre,
1879), 76–77; and Emile Campardon, Les comédiens du roi de la troupe italienne
320
(Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1880), 238. For a complete history of the activities and the
policing of the parterre see Jeffrey Ravel’s illuminating book The Contested Par-
terre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
5. A pannier gown. Claude-Joseph Dorat, La déclamation theâtrale, poème
didactique en trois chants, précédé d’un discours (Paris, 1766), quoted in Angelica
Goodden, Actio and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance in Eighteenth-Century
France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 74.
6. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel (1757), in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed.
Paul Vernière (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 102.
7. Ibid., 103.
8. Denis Diderot to Mme Riccoboni, 15 November 1758, in Diderot, Oeuvres
complètes, vol. 10, ed. Jacques Chouillet and Anne-Marie Chouillet (Paris: Her-
mann, 1980), 441–42.
9. Ravel, Contested Parterre, chap. 4.
10. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Fusiliers au spectacle,” in Tableaux de Paris, 1:483.
11. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Rumeurs théâtrales,” ibid., 2:705.
12. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Théâtre national,” ibid., 2:88.
13. Mercier refers both to the practices of ancient audiences in Greek and Latin
theaters and to those of the theater he knew during his youth, at an unspecified
“earlier” time.
14. Marie-Hélène Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death,
1793–1797, trans. Robert Hurley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1982), 35.
15. Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the
Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 71.
16. See Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps
de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981); and idem, Le prince sacrifié: Théâtre et politique
au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1985).
17. Louis Sébastien Mercier, in “Parterres assis,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:1470.
We must acknowledge that in Mercier’s portrayal of the actors as victims of the
parterre there was a good deal of wishful thinking.
18. Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution, 33–34.
19. See, e.g., Pierre Frantz, “Naissance d’un public,” Europe 703–4 (1987): 26–
32; Judith Schlanger, “Théâtre révolutionnaire et représentation du bien,” Poétique
22 (1975); Susan Maslan, Representations and Theatricality in French Revolutionary
Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
20. Martine de Rougemont, La vie théâtrale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Champion, 1988), chap. 13, “Les théâtres d’amateurs”; David Trott, Théâtre du
dix-huitième siècle: Jeux, écritures, regards (Montpellier: Editions Espaces 34, 2000),
165–82. The Mercure of April 1732 estimates the number of theaters in Paris to be
50; in the 1748 issue 20 of the Correspondance littéraire Grimm writes that there are
321
at least 160. Trott, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle, 167. In Farce and Fantasy: Popu-
lar Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986), Robert Isherwood has evoked the elite’s taste for erotic parades, a genre that
migrated from the fairgrounds to the private stages.
21. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Théâtres bourgeois,” in Tableaux de Paris, 1:534.
22. Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours to the Margrave Carl Friedrich of
Baden, 31 December 1772, in Carl Friedrichs Von Baden brieflicher Verkehr mit Mi-
rabeau und Du Pont, ed. Carl Knies, 2 vols. (Heidelberg, 1892), 2:17–18.
23. See Jacques Trouillet’s introduction to Diderot’s Le fils naturel in Théâtre du
dix-huitième siècle, ed. Jacques Truchet, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), vol. 2.
24. Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel, 85–86.
25. Diderot, Le fils naturel, in Truchet, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle, 2:4.
Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2003), 192–93.
27. Ibid., 168.
28. “But let us not adopt those exclusionist spectacles that miserably confine a
small number of people in a dark chamber; that hold them fearful and immobile
in silence and inaction; that offer to the eye nothing but walls, spikes, soldiers, and
wretched images of servitude and inequality.” Ibid.
29. Diderot, Entretiens sur Le fils naturel, 122.
30. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Tragédistes,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:750–51, em-
phasis added.
31. A relevant collection is the abbé Jean-Barthélémy de La Porte and Jean-
Marie-Bernard Clément’s Anecdotes dramatiques (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1775)
and the journal edited by La Porte, Les spectacles de Paris (1751–89). A frequently
cited incident is that in which the actor Jean Mauduit de Larive abandoned the
Comédie-Française after the parterre heckled him with loud applause when he
uttered this verse from Racine’s Iphigénie: “La rive au loin gémit,” or “The distant
shore laments.” See Mercier, “L’auteur! L’auteur!” 2:1132.
32. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Cabale,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:154. Martine de
Rougemont is one of the very few to have appreciated this aspect of theatrical re-
ception beyond its dimension of anecdotal amusement: “That intellectual game is de-
veloped to a point that seems incredible today. It involves an improvised rewriting and,
above all, an appropriation of the play. The exuberance of the reactions is indicative of
the extraordinary attention that spectators pay to each word uttered by the actors and
by the parterre itself.” La vie théâtrale en France au XVIIIe siècle, 230.
33. Mercier, “Cabale,” 2:154.
34. Mercier, “L’auteur! L’auteur!” 2:1134.
35. Guy Spielmann, Le jeu de l’ordre et du chaos: Comédie et pouvoirs à la fin
de règne, 1673–1715 (Paris: Champion, 2002), 201–37. See also Jeffrey Ravel, “Cer-
titudes comiques et doutes judiciaires: Le procès La Pivardière (1697–1699),” in
Représentations du procès: Droit, théâtre, littérature, cinéma, ed. Christian Biet and
Laurence Schifano (Paris: Université Paris X-Nanterre, 2003), 437–43.
322
36. Try as we may, the English language simply does not have as many words
as French to indicate mischievous wordplay. Turlupinade (see above, chapter 5),
polissonnerie, quolibet, and gasconnade (Gascons had quite a reputation) all meant
“whimsicality” with a sexual or a scatological twist. Chérier’s collection also prom-
ises much in the way of wordplay, set rhymes, puns, allusions, equivocations, al-
legories, witticism, hyperboles, and uncommon expressions.
37. Abbé Claude Chérier, in Claude Parfaict and François Parfaict, Diction-
naire des théâtres (Paris, 1767), 3:116, quoted in Emile Campardon, Les spectacles de
la foire, 2 vols. (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1877), 2:197–98. In 1744 Piron remarked
in a letter to Maurepas, who as a fellow member of the poissarde Societé du Bout
du Banc was well versed in such issues: “I have read The Rose in a circle in which
there were two bishops in their sixties and some ladies who had reached the age of
piety. The work was graciously received by them. They only read in it what I had
meant to say. True, they found the words Rose, Rosier, Houlette, and Jardin sugges-
tive of a few little things, but they all agreed (I asked them explicitly) that the veil
of allegory was so tightly woven that there was not the smallest crack to expose
nudity.” Quoted in Pascale Verèb, Alexis Piron, poete (1689–1773): La difficile condi-
tion d’auteur sous Louis XV (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 107. Needless to
say, allegory was precisely the problem.
38. Mercier, “Théâtre national,” 2:86.
39. Louis Fuzelier, Discours sur les parodies, in Parodies du nouveau théâtre ital-
ien, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1738; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970).
40. See Henri Lagrave, Le théâtre et le public à Paris, de 1715 à 1750 (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1972), chap. 3; Ravel, Contested Parterre; Spielmann, Le jeu de l’Ordre
et du chaos; Trott, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle; and Michèle Root-Bernstein, Bou-
levard Theatre and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI
Research Press, 1984). In the prologue to Lesage’s Turcaret (1709) Don Cléofas
and the devil Asmodée observe the audience at the Comédie-Française: “—Don
Cléofas: What an elegant gathering! How many ladies! —Asmodée: There would
be even more of them were it not for the fairgrounds spectacles: most women are
crazy about them. I am glad to see that they have the same taste as their lackeys
and their coachmen.” In Truchet, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle, 1:89. More to
the point, most fairgrounds and boulevard playhouses had private loges. While
the prices for a parterre ticket were much lower at the fairs than at the Comédie-
Française (1 livre compared with 5 sous), those for the first loges were comparable
(4 livres and 6 livres). For lists of prices see Lagrave, Le théâtre et le public, 234–36;
and Verèb, Alexis Piron, 94.
41. Louis XIV granted Dominique de Normandin letters patent registered
with the Parlement of Paris in 1675 allowing him the exclusive privilege to exploit
his spectacle. See Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire, 2:286. Toward the end of
the seventeenth century, at the time of the solidification of the classical doctrine,
the king stopped granting privileges to the minor spectacles, trying instead to con-
solidate monopolies to fewer venues. Privilege was the “Power accorded to a Person
323
or a Commonality to do or enjoy something to some advantage to the exclusion of

others.” Joseph-Nicolas Guyot, Le grand vocabulaire françois, vol. 23 (Paris, 1772),
313. See also Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theatre and Revolution.
42. Mercier, “Rumeurs théâtrales,” 2:705.
43. The practice had been introduced by Molière and resumed by La Motte in
1722, when his tragedy Romulus was followed by Le mariage forcé. See Lagrave, Le
théâtre et le public, 350–59; and Charles Varlet de la Grange’s report on Molière’s first
performance for Louis XIV, on 24 October 1658, quoted in Virginia Scott, Molière:
A Theatrical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 91–92.
44. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Paillasse,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:429. Agamem-
non’s lines, from Racine, Iphigénie, 1.1.1–2, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Fores-
tier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 1:703, translate as, “Yes, it is Agamemnon, your
king, who is waking you up. / Come, recognize the voice that strikes your ear.”
45. In Fatouville’s Arlequin-Protée (1683), Arlequin, who impersonates an actor
in a play within the play, boasts to Columbine that he plays the main character,
“who always puts an end to the play.” “Then you must be the moucheur de chan-
delles, who always ends the play [che finisce sempre gli atti],” Columbine replies.
Théâtre du XVIIe siècle, vol. 3, ed. Jacques Truchet and André Le Blanc (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1992), 253.
46. Mercier, “Paillasse,” 2:431.
47. The two verses quoted here, drawn from Racine’s Iphigénie, had become
the target of Diderot’s, Voltaire’s, and Mercier’s criticism, standing for all that they
found exaggerated in classical elocution. See Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédian,
Voltaire’s Discours sur la tragédie, and Mercier’s Du théâtre, ou nouvel essai sur l’art
dramatique.
48. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Le trou du souffleur,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:1332–35.
49. See the description and analysis of one such incident in Jeffrey Ravel’s “La
reine boit! Print, Performance, and Theater Publics in France, 1724–1725,” Eigh-
teenth-Century Studies 29 (Summer 1996): 391–411.
50. Trott, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle, 190.
51. See Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della commedia
dell’arte (Florence: Casa Usher, 1982); and Spielmann, Le jeu de l’ordre et du chaos,
323–24: “It is the disjunction between the serious and the parodistic that triggers
the comical effect, not parody alone.”
52. L’année littéraire, 3 May 1559, quoted in Barbara Mittman, Spectators on
the Paris Stage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI
Research Press, 1984), 98.
53. Charles Collé, Journal et mémoires de Charles Collé sur les hommes de lettres,
les ouvrages dramatiques, et les événements les plus mémorables du règne de Louis XV
(1748–1772), 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1868), 2:172, quoted in Mittman, Specta-
tors on the Paris Stage, 98.
54. D’Alembert had deplored the mixture of high and low in Marivaux’s nov-
els: “We must acknowledge that Marivaux, by wanting to put too much truth in
324
his low-life tableaux, has indulged in some sordid details that are at odds with the
refinement of his other portrayals. That refinement, however, justifies our indul-
gence for—if I am allowed here a technical term—those bambochades. The painter
of the human heart fortunately makes us forget the painter of the populace.” Jean
Le Rond d’Alembert, Eloge de Marivaux (1785), in Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de
Marivaux, Théâtre complet, ed. Jacques Scherer and Bernard Dort (Paris: Seuil,
1964), 22. The term bambochade (low farce) was usually applied depreciatively to
genre scenes in Flemish painting. In the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, 4th ed. (1762),
it is defined as “the name that we give to certain grotesque paintings. Composition
of low-life subjects [sujets populaires] of a low nature.”
55. Clarence D. A. Brenner, Bibliographical List of Plays in the French Language,
1700–1789 (1947; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1979).
56. See Evaristo Gherardi, Le théâtre italien, ou le recueil général de toutes les comédies
et scènes françaises jouées par les comédiens italiens du roi, 6 vols. (Paris: J. B. Cusson et
P. Witte, 1700); Parodies du nouveau théâtre italien, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1738); and
Alain-René Lesage and Jacques-Philippe d’Orneval, Le théâtre de la foire ou l’opéra-
comique, contenant les meilleures pièces qui ont été représentées aux Foires Saint-
Germain et Saint-Laurent, 10 vols. (Paris: Ganeau, 1721–37). Several modern
anthologies are more readily available: see Marcello Spaziani, ed., Il teatro della
“foire”: Dieci commedie di Alard, Fuzelier, Lesage, D’Orneval, La Font, Piron (Rome:
Ateneo, 1965); Derek Connon and George Evans, eds., Anthologie de pièces du
théâtre de la foire (Egham, Surrey: Runnymede Books, 1996), with the complete
scores of the vaudevilles; and Dominique Triaire, ed., Parades extraites du théâtre
des boulevards (Montpellier: Editions Espaces 34, 2000). See also Valleria Belt-
Grannis, Dramatic Parody in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Institute of
French Studies, 1931); Frank Whiteman Lindsay, Dramatic Parody by Marionnettes
in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1946); David Trott,
“Pour une typologie des séries parodiques dans le théâtre du XVIIIe siècle,” pa-
per delivered at the international colloquium “Parodie et série dans la littérature
française du XVIIIe siècle,” Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 14 November 1998, in
Séries parodiques au siècle des Lumières, ed. Sylvain Menant and Dominique Quéro
(Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2005).
57. See Ravel, Contested Parterre, 127.
58. In Marotte ou l’enfant trouvé, a parody of Voltaire’s Mérope (1743) by
members of the Société du Caveau (Pannard, Gallet, Laffichard, and Boizeau
de Ponteau), when Marotte is about to kill the presumed murderer of her son,
his guardian hastens to stop her: “Dans quel désordre vous seriez / Par votre injuste
haine, / Contre les règles vous auriez / Ensanglanté la scène. (What a mess you were
about to make! Because of your unjust hatred, you would have spilled blood on
the stage and broken all the rules.)” Belt-Grannis, Dramatic Parody, 315. A similar
parterre rebellion against the infringement of theatrical bienséance (one could not
show a murder onstage) caused the failure of Voltaire’s first Mariamne. See Ravel,
“La reine boit!”
325
59. Piron had been accepted by the academicians in 1754, but the abbé Jean-
François Boyer, preceptor to the dauphin (and an ally of Jean-Pierre de Bougain-
ville, the Academy’s other candidate), felt obliged to warn Louis XV about the
pornographic poem. The king, who knew it, pretended he did not and gave him-
self the pleasure of having the abbé read it to him in full. But at that point Piron’s
election was no longer a possibility.
60. The Régiment de la Calotte was an imaginary militia founded in 1702 by
royal officers and courtiers that took aim at the pompous language of contempo-
rary tragedy and at the antiquarian gravitas of the parlements; they specialized in
composing dramatic parodies and satirical eulogies. See Antoine de Baecque, Les
éclats du rire: La culture des rieurs au 18e siècle (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2000); and
Léon Hennet, Le régiment de la Calotte (Paris, 1886). On the Société du Caveau
see Brigitte Level, Le Caveau: Société bachique et chantante (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de la Sorbonne, 1988); and Marie-Véronique Gauthier, Chanson, sociabilité,
et grivoiserie au 19e siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1992).
61. See Emile Campardon, “Procès des comédiens français et des comédiens
forains,” in Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire, 2:250–85.
62. Jean-Baptiste Costantini, a former actor at the old Comédie-Italienne,
which had been shut down in 1697; he had since become an impresario on the
fairgrounds.
63. Quoted in Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire, 2:187. The same proce-
dure is explained thoroughly in the prologue to La forêt de Dodone, performed by
Francisque in 1721. A countess, a chevalier, and a marquis discuss the merits of the
placards: “At the time of the placards we could see two children dressed as Cupid
[carrying the placards swinging in the air and being pulled up and down. . . . That
was a spectacle in itself. . . . As the children switched the placards all the time,
they would offer us a changing tableau. . . . The spectators would become actors
themselves. As soon as a placard was rolled out, the orchestra gave the cue, and
we would immediately hear the most discordant chorus one could ever imagine.”
Dominique Lurcel, ed., Le théâtre de la foire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Union Générale
d’Editions, 1983), 175–76.
64. For two analyses of the play see Pierre Gobin, “L’Arlequin-Deucalion de
Piron: Pertinence de l’impertinence,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
192 (1980): 1478–86; and Walter Rex, “Inversions and Subversions in the Theâtre de
la Foire, or, the End of Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion,” in The Attraction of the Con-
trary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 49–72.
65. Spielmann, Le jeu de l’ordre et du chaos, 341–42.
66. I use Jacques Truchet’s edition, based upon the revised edition published
in vol. 3 of Piron’s Oeuvres (1776), in Truchet, Théâtre du dix-huitième siècle, 1:491–
516.
67. “Persiflage,” writes Mercier, “is a continuous mockery under the false ap-
pearance of approval. We use it to lead the victim into all the ambushes that
326
are laid out for it. We entertain a whole assembly at the expense of the victim,
who, deceived by the appearance of ordinary politeness, is unaware of being ridi-
culed.” Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Persiflage,” in Tableaux de Paris, 1:384. See Elisa-
beth Bourguinat, Le siècle du persiflage, 1734–1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998).
68. A similar game occurred during the performance of d’Orneval’s opéra-
comique Arlequin Traitant, performed at the Foire Saint-Germain on 22 March
1716, on the heels of the March 1716 edict establishing a chamber of justice to
prosecute the tax collectors suspected of malfeasance. D’Orneval inserted in the
play portraits of well-known gens d’affaires. In the second act, Arlequin is in hell;
he points his finger toward a spectator in the audience, who gets up angrily, goes
onto the stage, and slaps Arlequin with his glove. The police are ready to intervene,
and the audience expects all hell to break loose. But the offended individual was
an actor; the butt of the joke were the exempt and his men.
69. Louis Sébastien Mercier, “Tragédies modernes,” in Tableaux de Paris, 2:892.
A reminder, perhaps, of Diderot’s “grands mannequins d’osier,” mentioned in his
Paradoxe sur le comédien.
70. Nicolas Racot de Grandval, quoted in Bourguinat, Le siècle du persiflage, 27.
71. Epidramatique is a neologism made from épique and dramatique, which
Mercier will borrow.
72. Connon and Evans, Anthologie de pièces du theâtre de la foire, 19–20.
73. The last two lines read, “ci-gît, piron, qui ne fut rien, / Pas même Aca-
démicien.” Quoted in Verèb, Alexis Piron, 313.
74. Denis Diderot, Plan d’un opéra-comique, probably composed before 1762,
in Oeuvres complètes, 10:515–41.
75. In August 1760 Camille Veronese, a dancer at the Comédie-Italienne,
performed, to great acclaim, the role of the statue in Billioni’s ballet Pygmalion.
Charles-Simon Favart reported: “Nothing equals the refinement of her panto-
mime, especially when the statue gradually comes alive. She depicts her surprise,
her curiosity, her budding love, all the degrees of her emotions, with unparalleled
expressiveness. One may say that Camille is able to dance her very thoughts. I
believe that the ancient art of Greek pantomime could not surpass her talents in
that genre.” Oeuvres de M. et Mme Favart (Paris: Eugène Didier, 1853), quoted in
Campardon, Les comédiens du roi de la troupe italienne, 2:199.
76. Vienne was nicknamed Beauvisage because of the ugliness of his face and
his freakish capacity to mold it into the strangest shapes and expressions. He had
started his career as an aboyeur. When he founded the Théâtre des Associés, at the
Foire Saint-Laurent, in 1774, he played tragedies and drames—Mercier’s Jenneval
and La boutique du vinaigrier, among others—altering them through his comic
talents and his “bovine mooing.” On Vienne and the Associés see Campardon, Les
spectacles de la foire, 1:26–28 and 2:457–59.
77. Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theatre and Revolution, chap. 7.
327
Epilogue. The Costume of Modernity
Epigraph: Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, trans. John
1. See Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1995).
2. See Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, “Des
avantages et des progrès des sciences,” inaugural speech to the French Academy, 21
February 1782, www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/index.html.
3. Roland Barthes, “Le dernier des écrivains heureux” (1958), in Essais critiques
(Paris: Seuil, 1964), 94–100.
4. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 110–20.
5. Ibid., 66–67.
6. “Why does a beautiful sketch accord greater pleasure than a beautiful paint-
ing? Because it has more life and fewer forms. The more forms one introduces, the
more life disappears. . . . Such sketches thrive on enthusiasm and genius, while
paintings demand work, patience, prolonged study and extensive technical experi-
ence.” Ibid., 212 (on Hubert Robert’s sketches).
7. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 186.
8. See Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
9. Longinus Traité du sublime 9.1–3.
11. Ibid., 187.
12. Diderot has inherited Boileau’s horror for Caton galant and Brutus dameret,
as Boileau puts it in his satirical Dialogue des héros de roman (1665), in which he up-
braids Mlle de Scudéry for having dressed up those heroes à la mode in her novels.
13. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 188. For a similar position see William Hogarth, The
Analysis of Beauty (1753; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 48.
14. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 25, 189. Another acerbic critique of modern costume,
inspired by Rousseau, may be found in Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle’s commen-
tary on Ménageot’s painting La mort de Léonard de Vinci (1781), in his anony-
mously published Salon pamphlet La patte de velours, of the same year, quoted in
Régis Michel, “Diderot et la modernité,” in Diderot et l’art, de Boucher à David,
ed. Marie-Catherine Sahut and Nathalie Volle (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des
Musées Nationaux, 1984), 110–21; on Carmontelle see 121.
15. Literally so, if we think of the Fountain of Regeneration featured at the Fes-
tival of Unity and Indivisibility, held on 10 August 1793, in which representatives
drank the water squirting from the breasts of a gigantic statue of Isis, in truth not
a republican icon but an Egyptian deity, the emblem of Nature’s mythical origins
and of the golden age. I thank Daniel Edelstein for this reference.
16. Diderot, Salon of 1767, 208, translation modified, emphasis added. “Laus
328
temporum, non hominis,” Cicero’s De officiis 3.31: “Glory of the times and not of
the man.”
18. Ibid., 231.
19. Charles Baudelaire, “Modernité,” in Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863),
trans. Jonathan Mayne as The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London:
Phaidon, 1964), 13–14.
20. The first known use of the word modernity may be ascribed to Honoré
de Balzac (La dernière fée, 1823), but it became acceptable in aesthetic discourse
only about the time of the Second Empire. See Claude Pichois’s notes to Charles
Baudelaire, Critique d’art (Paris: Gallimard Folio Essais, 1992), 647–48.
21. Baudelaire, “Modernité,” 13–14.
22. “It is doubtless a taxing effort [for painters] to invent fortunate physiogno-
mies in the midst of people who display none; proud or generous features when
one views only slaves and masters; true expression in a country of dissimulation;
strong and vigorous postures among models whom either poverty or debauchery
have rendered hideous, and who, in order to provoke less disgust, carefully cover
themselves in cloth of gold or in rags.” Louis de Carmontelle [Louis Carrogis],
La patte de velours (1781), 36, translated in Crow, Painters and Public Life, 186.
Carrogis, commonly called Carmontelle, was a shoemaker’s son and a self-taught
artist. In 1763 he was appointed reader to the son of the duc d’Orléans. He wrote
parades and designed and supervised their production. He also helped to organize
a literary salon at the Palais Royal. At court gatherings he entertained by projecting
painted panoramas through a magic lantern, and he drew portraits on the spot,
aux trois crayons and in pencil, with watercolor and gouache.
23. Keith Michael Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in
Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 1 (2001), 36.
24. Antoine Compagnon, Les antimodernes, de Joseph de Maistre à Roland
Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
25. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans.
Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), bk. 28, chap. 41, p. 595, translation modified.
26. Louis-François Delisle de la Drevetière (1682–1756) was the author of the
very popular Arlequin sauvage, performed at the Theâtre-Italien in 1721. Arle-
quin—whom Lelio, who has been shipwrecked on a distant land, has brought
back with him to Marseilles—has never been exposed to modern French customs;
he reacts to them in the manner that is to be expected from a character who owes
a great deal to Montaigne and Lahontan.
28. Lionel Gossman, “Ce beau génie qui n’a point compris sa sublime mission: An
Essay on Voltaire,” French Review 56, no. 1 (1982): 41.
329
Index
Academy. See French Academy 172; and 17th-century culture wars, 9,

Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 24; and theater, 12, 32, 134, 204; and
265n20 Voltaire, 132–33. See also antiquity
Academy of Sciences, 7, 67–68 Andrivet, Patrick, 306n6
acumen, 141, 143, 145, 154 Anfossi, Pasquale, 308n40
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’: and bel esprit, antiquity: cult of, 12, 29, 252, 254–59; and
8, 63, 64, 266n31; and degradation of Fénelon’s utopia, 86–89; glorification
language, 132, 181; Discours prélimi- of writers of, 218; and Montesquieu,
naire, 28, 155; Eloge de Marivaux, 49– 175–76; Rousseauian-Jacobinic myth
50, 51, 63, 121, 282n45, 295n41, 325n54; of, 192; and theatrical reforms, 240.
on esprit, 284n1; Essai sur la société des See also ancients
gens de lettres et des grands, 41, 109; and aposiopesis, 99, 289n48
gens de lettres, 6, 253; and goût moderne, Apostolidès, Jean-Marie, 139, 227, 307n16
29, 263n6; and Marivaux, 2, 47, 54, 55, Argenson, René Louis de Voyer de
139, 297n69; and Montesquieu’s his- Paulmy, marquis d’, 49, 50
tory of Rome, 175; and the orator, 22, Aristotle: Aristotelian theatrical rules,
217–18, 319n73; on style, 104; and the- 221, 242, 243–44, 249; and Guez
ater, 196, 240; and worldly sociability, de Balzac, 18, 269n6; conception of
11, 197–98 representation, 94; energeia and
amour-propre: and Augustine, 78, 89, enargeia, 96, 146; and esprit, 145;
119, 121, 123; of author, 93; and esprit, and linear structure of writing, 155;
69, 72; Malebranche on, 54; and and Montesquieu, 184; principle of
Marivaux, 52–53, 55, 76, 78–80, 82–83, terror and pity, 204; and Voltaire, 20
123; and morals and aesthetics, 85–86; Arnauld, Antoine, 96
and republican virtue, 25, 88, 174; and artist-audience relationship: the bou-
style, 101 doir and the tribune, 16–18, 202–4,
ancients: and the bel esprit, 14; and abbé 216–18; and the burlesque, 74–76;
Bouhours, 65; and Diderot, 97, 132–33; and Diderot, 109–10, 125; and the
and Fénelon, 86, 87, 88, 97; and galan- eulogy, 213, 214–15; and Fénelon,
terie, 60; and goût moderne, 7, 29, 177; 88–89, 91; and goût moderne, 15,
and grand goût, 179; and ideal of antiq- 221–22; and illusion, 23, 24, 73–74,
uity, 19, 34–35, 193; and Marivaux, 48, 76–77, 84, 204; and the je ne sais quoi,
84, 101; and Montesquieu, 172, 175–76, 161; and Longinus, 92; in Marivaux,
182–84; and neglegentia diligens, 127; in 56–59, 78, 79, 82, 117, 124–26, 159; in
Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion, 248; and Montesquieu, 183, 184, 185; and the
the Revolution, 260; Rousseau on, paillasse, 237–38, 249; and parabasis,
331
Index
artist-audience relationship (cont.) 266n31; decline of ideal of, 66–67;

118; and the parterre, 222, 231–36, Dictionnaire de l’Académie definition,
243–44; in search for meaning, 163–66; 66; and Diderot, 44, 223, 301n33;
and spectator-actor reversal, 229; in and Duclos, 265n27, 281n28; as ef-
theater, Rousseau and Diderot on, feminate, 10, 43, 275n101; in the 18th
229–31; theater and the Revolution, century, 59–60, 61–64; and esprit, 141;
226–28; and theatrical reforms, 31–33, Fénelon on, 87, 90, 95; Fontenelle
223–28, 239–40 as, 7; German bel esprit, 147; and
Assoucy, Charles Coypeau d’, 271n43 Malebranche, 119; and Marivaux, 47,
Aubignac, François Hédelin, abbé d’, 32, 53, 56–57, 83, 125, 143, 144, 196–97;
77, 90, 223, 298n79, 310n68 and Mercier on Montesquieu, 177–78,
Augustine, Saint: and amour-propre, 52, 207; and Montesquieu, 35, 66, 175,
78, 89, 119, 121, 123; conception of the 281n26; in painting, 96; vs. persuasion,
passions, 160–62; and Fénelon, 86; and 217–18; and philosophes, 1–2, 13–14,
Marivaux’s morality, 84; and the sub- 33, 275n99; Proust as, 56; in the 17th
lime, 217, 288n44; and virtue, 173, 212 century, 60–61, 64–67; and Le specta-
Augustus, 171, 171–72, 200, 307n19 teur français, 79–80; and Voltaire, 42–
Aurevilly, Jules Barbey d’, 303n55 43, 104; in women, 60, 279n7; writer
as, 18, 53–54
Bachaumont, Louis-Petit de, 6–7, 26 Bell, David A., 24, 268n51, 269n8,
Baecque, Antoine de, 326n60 270n32, 270n34, 271nn35–36
Baker, Keith Michael, 259, 271n41, Bellegarde, Morvan de, 142
271n49 Belt-Grannis, Valleria, 272n63, 297n67,
Balzac, Honoré de, 329n20 317nn36–37, 325n56, 325n58
Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de: Le barbon, 53; Benharrech, Sarah, 277n25, 313n96
on Demosthenes, 285n10; and esprit, Bénichou, Paul, 268n51, 270n32
142; and the galant, 38; on Montaigne, Bertrand, Dominique, 272n54
127; and rhetoric of antiquity, 18–20; Biancolelli, Pierre-François (also known
and Roman culture, 171; and savant vs. as Dominique), 31, 241, 250
galant, 64; on the Spanish, 299n2; vs. bigarrure, 9, 27, 40, 295n40
Voiture, 179; and Voltaire’s temple du Binoche, Bertrand, 305n82
goût, 42 Blanco, Mercedes, 280n14, 299n3
bambochades, 2, 325n54 Boileau, Nicolas: and ancient heroes,
Bar, Francis, 272n54 19, 269n9; Art poétique, 33, 39, 142;
Barnouw, Jeffrey, 284n65, 299n11, 303n52 and bel esprit in women, 60; and clas-
Bataille, Georges, 294n34 sicism, 26; and the équivoque, 142,
bathos, 236, 239, 240 233; and esprit, 142; and feminization
Bauchaumont, Louis Petit de, 195 of public, 10; and literary propriety,
Baudelaire, Charles, 8–9, 35, 117–18, 118– 290n68; on modern costume, 328n12;
19, 258–59, 269n15 and Molière, 34; and sacralization
Baudouin, Pierre-Antoine, 5, 26, 107 of the writer, 34–35; and sublime of
Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, Longinus, 12, 20–21, 97, 215, 288n41,
201, 241 288n47, 289n52, 319n68; and Voiture,
bel esprit: abbé Bouhours on, 65, 85–86, 179; Voltaire on, 104
144–45, 150, 151; and conversation, Bonnet, Jean-Claude, 285n4, 317nn39–40
68–72; and corruption of taste, 8, Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne: and Fénelon’s
332
Index
pur amour, 285n15; and history, 169, Carra, Jean-Louis, 99, 289n53
177; Rome, account of, 170, 171, Cassirer, Ernst, 299n13
182–83, 191, 307n14; and the Sage, 22; Castiglione, Baldassarre, conte di, 20, 81
Voltaire on, 104 Castries, Charles Eugène Gabriel de la
Boucher, François: and Acajou et Zirphile, Croix de, 108
7; and Diderot, 106, 107, 109, 110–12, Cavaliere d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari), 109
290n78; as object of critique, 2, 5, 10, Cave, Christophe, 276n3, 282n44
56, 264n18 Caylus, Anne-Claude Philippe de
Bouhours, Dominique, abbé: on bel es- Tubières, comte de, 6–7, 26
prit, 67, 85–86, 144–45, 147, 150, 151, Cerceau, Jean-Antoine du, 317n42
280n14; and conciliation of ancients Chaouli, Michel, 293nn15–16, 302n39
and moderns, 65; on délicatesse, 164– Chapelain, Jean, 73, 90, 282n48
65; Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 67, Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 94, 105,
280n14; and esprit, 142, 151; and hon- 290n74
nêteté and air galant, 144; and the je ne Chartier, Roger, 265n22, 279n13
sais quoi, 155–56, 162, 304n58; and “the Chérier, Claude, abbé, 234
politeness of style,” 66; the sublime as Christianity: Catholicism and cult of
counterlanguage, 288n46 great men, 24; and Fénelon, 86, 87–88,
Bourguinat, Elisabeth, 272n62, 296n53, 93, 127; and Montesquieu on virtue,
326n67 173; in Montesquieu’s history of Rome,
bouts-rimés, 68, 142, 281n32 170; and novel as analogue of religious
Bovary, Emma, and bovarism, 114, 115 experience, 114; rhetoric of, and the
Boyer, Jean-François, abbé, 326n59 philosophes, 217; and theater as mor-
Brady, Patrick, 302n44 ally pernicious, 208
Brenner, Clarence D. A., 240 Cicero: Guez de Balzac on, 19–20;
Brody, Jules, 319n68 Ciceronian copia, 182; and ethos
Brown, Gregory S., 7, 314n8, 320n2 and pathos, 21; and Fénelon, 99;
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte and the galant, 38; on history, 168;
de, 28, 103, 151, 177, 309n44 Montesquieu on, 285n10; and negli-
Burke, Edmund, 152, 184, 189, 304n56 gentia diligens, 127, 295n43; parallel
burlesque: and Corneille, 274n84; in with Demosthenes, 88; and rhetoric of
18th century, 27–29; and esprit, 142; sermo and contentio, 17, 18, 71, 268n3;
Furetière on, 298n2; and galanterie, 39; and Voltaire, 17, 20, 27
and Marivaux, 74–76, 114–15, 116, 117, classicism, 32, 73, 93, 140, 176–77, 252.
123, 146, 292n6; and Piron’s Arlequin- See also neoclassicism
Deucalion, 245; and self-reflexivity, Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 4
30–31 Collé, Charles, 49, 239–40
Comédie-Française: audiences and rep-
Cailleau, A. C., 272n63 ertory of, 236; and bathos, 239; and
Campardon, Emile, 320n4, 323n41, eviction of stage spectators, 240; and
326n61 fairgrounds theaters, 249; Nicolas
Caplan, Jay, 9, 276n7, 278n44 Racot de Grandval on, 247; and
Carlet, Pierre. See Marivaux, Pierre Lesage’s Turcaret, 323n40; Palissot’s Les
Carlet de Chamblain de philosophes, 33; parodies performed at,
Carmontelle, Louis Carrogis de, 328n14, 242; and parterre, 223; la petite pièce at,
329n22 236–38; and Alexis Piron, 243,
333
Index
Comédie-Française (cont.) Costar, Pierre, 309n50

247, 250; and theater of Alexandre Coulet, Henri, 276n13
Bertrand, 243; Voltaire’s Mariamne, Crébillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de:
240–41 burlesque writing of, 28; and con-
Comédie-Italienne: audiences and rep- versation, satire of, 136, 178; and
ertory of, 239; and eviction of stage Diderot, 48; and the goût moderne, 2,
spectators, 240; and Marivaux, 47; 84, 155; and libertine self, 122; satire
parodies performed at, 241; and par- of Marivaux, 283n57; and Société du
terre, 223; and the unofficial theater, Caveau, 243
30; and Camille Veronese, 327n75; and Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot de, 184, 201
Voltaire, 34, 273n68 Crow, Thomas, 26, 264n10, 265n23,
commedia dell’arte: and Arlequin, 245; 265n27, 298n81, 328nn7–8
and bathos, 239; Baudelaire on, 117; Crozat, Pierre, 3–4
“improvisation” of, 71; and Marivaux,
47, 116; and parody, 31, 235, 242; and Dacier, Anne Lefèvre, 36, 48
Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion, 243 Dancourt, Florent Carton, 137, 233
Compagnon, Antoine, 260 Darnton, Robert, 263n1, 270n27
Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas David, Jacques-Louis, 8, 25, 27
de Caritat, marquis de, 190, 253, Defaux, Gérard, 34
289n61 Dejean, Joan, 9, 10, 305n73
Conlon, P. M., 275n1 Del Buffa, Giuseppa Saccaro, 307n26
conversation: and bel esprit, 68–72; délicatesse, 43, 95, 143–44, 164–65, 165,
Cicero and sermo facetus, 17–18; and 299n13
galanterie, 38–41; Marivaux’s language Deloffre, Frédéric, 51, 271n47, 302n45
of, 134–37; Montesquieu on, 128; Delon, Michel, 300n21, 303n52
Mme Necker on, 203–4; of précieux, De Man, Paul, 118, 119, 293n17
132; sautillement and saillies, 178–79; Démoris, René, 110, 263n7, 264n15,
Madeleine de Scudéry on, 41, 69, 292n98
296n46; as stupefying, 202 Demosthenes, 12, 88, 91, 129–30, 215,
coquette, 49, 80–82, 110–12, 118–22, 138 217–18, 254
Corneille, Pierre: and admiration, Dens, Jean-Pierre, 303n52
317n38; antiabsolutism of, 87; and Descartes, René, 27, 183–84
bel esprit, 60; and burlesque, 274n84; Desfontaines, Pierre-François Guyot,
as celebrity, 206; classical tragedy of, abbé: Les amours de Chérubin, 241;
137, 138; Diderot on, 73–74, 131, 209, Dictionnaire néologique, 49, 127; and
280n17; and esprit, 142; and galan- effeminate philosophers, 55; Eloge his-
terie, 138; Marivaux on, 62, 295n41; torique de Pantalon-Phoebus, 50; on
and Montesquieu, 184; and noble esprit, 60; and goût moderne, 147; on
exchange, 210; referential content of Marivaux, 54–55; on Racine, 288n47;
plays, 233, 235; and saillie, 180; sublime and Voltaire’s Lettre sur l’esprit, 180, 181
language of, 97; as target of parterre, Desmolets, Père, 278n36
232; and theatrical illusion, 282n49; Dictionnaire de l’Académie, 66, 104, 180–81
and virtue, 173; and Voltaire, 12, 73, Dictionnaire néologique, 49, 127
104, 133, 253 Diderot, Denis: and the ancients, 132–33,
Correspondance littéraire, 5 297n62; art and historical trauma,
Costantini, Jean-Baptiste, 326n62 200, 201; and artist-audience rela-
334
Index
tionship, 125; and Bienfait anonyme, Dieckmann, Herbert, 314n9

314n5; Les bijoux indiscrets (The Dorat, Claude-Joseph, 223
Indiscreet Jewels), 22, 28, 40, 73–74, Dorvigny, Louis-François Archambault
178; on the burlesque, 40; and conver- (called Dorvigny), 241, 297n67
sation, 71–72, 135, 136, 178, 267n46; Doublet, Marie-Anne, 26
and Corneille, 280n17; and cult of Doyen, Gabriel-François, 106
antiquity, 254–59; and cult of great drame, 201, 204–6, 221, 255
men, 26; and degradation of lan- Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, abbé, 3, 10, 266–
guage, 31, 100–101, 181; and drama- 67n39, 286n20, 310n58
tic tragedy, 201, 247; “Eclectisme,” Duclos, Charles Pinot: Acajou et Zirphile,
219; Eloge de Richardson, 23, 161, 254, 7, 265n29; and the bel esprit, 6–7, 61,
286n29; Entretiens sur Le fils naturel, 67, 72, 265n27, 281n28; Considerations
116, 253; and esprit, 132, 152–53; on the sur les moeurs de ce siècle, 6; and con-
esquisse, 328n6; Essais sur la peinture, versation, satire of, 178; on gens de
105; Est-il bon, est-il méchant?, 22; and lettres, 6–7; sociability, critique of, 11,
Fénelon, 88; Le fils naturel, 229–31, 197, 198; and social mobility, 4
318n62; “Génie,” 10, 153, 267n41; and Dufresny, Charles-Rivière, 28, 84, 137,
goût moderne, 14, 15, 29, 84; and illu- 155, 165, 222, 233, 295n41
sion, 23–24, 73–74; on Italian theater, Dumarsais, César Chesneau, 30, 65, 196,
282n45; Jacques le fataliste, 23, 254, 286n27, 301n28
292n10; Lettre sur les sourds et muets, Dupin, Claude, 179, 309n44
98, 154; and linear structure of wri-
ting, 155, 303n49; and mannerism, Edelstein, Daniel, 328n15
90–91, 106–11, 221; on Marivaux, 48; Elias, Norbert, 269n8
and the moderns, 84, 260, 261–62; Le eloquence, 20–21, 23–24, 86–96, 181,
neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), 217–18, 254
254, 272n62, 309n44; on painting, enargeia, 90, 146, 185, 300n21, 311n71
94–95, 105–12, 263n5, 264n18, 278n42, Encyclopédie: d’Alembert in Discours
286n28, 290nn74–75; and Palissot’s préliminaire, 8, 28, 104, 155; bur-
Les philosophes, 33; and papillotage, lesque, rejection of, 39–40; Diderot’s
302n35; Paradoxe sur le comédien, 81, “Eclectisme,” 219; Diderot’s “Génie,”
130–31; and petits théâtres, 250–51; on 10, 153, 267n41; and epistemic and
philosophy, 165; and the public’s taste, aesthetic change, 13; and hierarchy
3, 5–6; and Racine, 280n17, 324n44; of styles, 27; “Illusion,” 24; che-
La religieuse, 23, 110–11, 270n28; The valier de Jaucourt’s “Style,” 103,
Salon of 1767, 99, 152–53; self-image 289n65; Marmontel’s “Gloire,” 214;
of, and posterity, 21–22, 44, 214–15; Marmontel’s “Parterre,” 265n24;
and Seneca, 209, 301n33; sociability, Montesquieu’s Essai sur le goût, 182;
critique of, 197–200; sublime as coun- opposition to, of authorities, 218;
terlanguage, 97–99, 179, 217, 319n68; “Parterre,” 320n3; Voltaire on gens de
and theater audiences, 204, 222–26; lettres, 47; Voltaire on the Romans,
theatrical experimentation of, 12, 176; Voltaire’s “Éloquence,” 20–21;
253–54; and theatrical reforms, 32, 196, Voltaire’s “Esprit,” 145, 146; Voltaire’s
227, 237; on Voltaire, 167, 309n44; and “Gens de lettres,” 42, 63; Voltaire’s
writer as patriotic moralist, 35, 113–14, “Histoire,” 306n9; Claude-Henri
219–20 Watelet, 7
335
Index
energeia, 146, 300n21 101, 115, 240; and pur amour, 89–93,
enjouement, 17, 18, 21, 27–28, 39, 44 127, 285n15, 286n23; and Rousseau’s
équivoque, 142, 233, 234, 299n6 Emile, 115; and sublime eloquence,
Erhard, Jean, 312n94 86–99, 217, 319n72
esprit: d’Alembert on, 284n1; and amour- Ferran, Florence, 264n15
propre, 72; bureaux d’esprit, 11, 199; finesse, 95, 142–44, 149, 153, 164
and conversation, 136, 198, 203; and Fleming, Paul, 302n41
Corneille, 62; description and evolu- Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier, sieur de:
tion of, 141–55; and Diderot, 73–74, and Academy of Sciences, 67–68; and
131, 132, 280n17, 301n33; Dumarsais ancient history, 308n33; as bel esprit, 7;
on, 301n28; and Du Plaisir, 76; in the Diderot on, 106; eulogies written by,
18th century, 60, 179, 279n1; and elo- 319n76; and law of linear necessity, 155;
quence, 181; esprit de géométrie, 142; Marmontel on, 70; Nouveaux dialogues
esprit frondeur, 26; faux esprit, 146; des morts, 28, 240; and scientific popu-
as feminine, 42; and Fénelon, 87, 95, larization, 2, 10, 27–28, 29–30; and
97; and the galant, 39; and the je ne abbé Trublet, 51; and Voltaire’s temple
sais quoi, 159, 304n58; and Marivaux, du goût, 42
45, 50, 82, 103, 120, 123–24, 127–28, Forestier, Georges, 272n57, 283n55, 286n18
136; and Marmontel, 70; Mercier on, Fragonard, Jean Honoré, 5, 107
2; and Montesquieu, 165, 177, 178, Frantz, Pierre, 321n19
181–82, 185–86, 301n29; mots d’esprit Frederick II, 307n19
of parterre, 233, 322n31; and parabasis, French Academy: and Duclos, 7; and eu-
118; and Racine, 62; saillies d’esprit, logies of great men, 205; and Fénelon,
179; scientific, and esprit de société, 66; 86, 88; and Marivaux, 45, 48, 49, 50;
as self-referential, 59; traits d’esprit, 151, and neoclassicism, 26; and the paro-
180, 302n37; and Voltaire, 43, 72–73, dists, 31; and Alexis Piron, 243, 250;
129, 132, 180, 262; between writer and and Antoine-Léonard Thomas, 7, 178;
reader, 163–66 and abbé Trublet, 51
esquisse, 253–54, 328n6 Fréron, Élie-Catherine, 42–43, 49, 50
eulogy, 11, 13, 205–6, 213, 317nn42–43 Fried, Michael, 268n54, 291n88
evidentia, 185, 186, 311n71 Friedland, Paul, 226–27
Fumaroli, Marc, 269n4, 269n11, 270n32,
Faguet, Emile, 308n36 273n78, 280n14, 282n41, 286n20
Fatouville, Anne-Mauduit de, 324n45 Furetière, Antoine, 145, 279n1, 283n54,
Favart, Charles-Simon, 7, 30, 327n75 298n2, 300n19
Félibien, André, 34, 303n54 Fuzelier, Louis, 30, 31, 34, 235, 241, 244
Fénelon, François de Salignac de la
Mothe: and the ancients, 26, 172, galanterie, 35; air galant, 144; and an-
297n62; Les aventures de Télémaque, cients, 60; and conversation, 69, 128;
86, 87, 88, 90; as celebrity, 206; on Corneille as galant, 73; and équivoque,
Demosthenes, 286n22; Dialogues des 299n6; Fénelon on, 87, 88, 95; fêtes
morts, 94; and esprit, 132; and grand galantes, 29, 140; the galant, 36–42,
goût, 14; and the historian, 168–69, 59, 64–65, 69; and goût moderne, 29;
177; Lettre à l’Académie, 86; Lettre à and Marivaux, 116, 137, 138, 140, 155;
Louis XIV, 285n5; and Marivaux, 80, and philosophes, 33–34, 152; and self-
336
Index
reflexivity, 14–15; and Voiture, 28; and parodies of, 252; and Diderot, 84, 88;
Voltaire, 42, 43 Enlightenment rejection of, 9, 12,
Galiani, Ferdinando, abbé, 316n21 13; and epistemology of esprit, 152; as
galimatias, 53, 65 excess in the arts, 29, 93, 147, 150–51;
Garasse, François, père, 61 and galanterie, 36–37; and grand goût,
gasconnades, 234, 323n36 14–15, 26–35; and Etienne La Font de
Gauthier, Marie-Véronique, 326n60 Saint-Yenne, 4–5; and law of linear
gender: bel esprit as effeminate, 2, 10, 43, necessity, 155; and Marivaux, 84, 127,
60, 275n101; Diderot’s orator and au- 155, 158; and Montesquieu, 40, 84, 127,
dience as male, 231; esprit as feminine, 182; as outmoded, 259; and theatrical
42; and Fénelon’s utopia, 88; the galant culture, 221–22; true character of, 8,
as feminine, 38; goût moderne as femi- 266n32; and Voltaire, 146; writers of,
nine, 8; of ingenium and esprit, 145–46; 84. See also moderns
of the je ne sais quoi, 158; Mercier goût rocaille. See rococo
on women and the theater, 316n26; Goyet, Francis, 289n52
modern society as feminine, 9–11, 192, grand goût: and the ancients, 179; vs. the
197, 202, 315n13; negligent style as bel esprit, 42; and Diderot, 22, 106, 111,
feminine, 127; rhetorical ornament as 251, 256; eulogies of, 62–63; and goût
effeminate, 50, 55; sautillement as ef- moderne, 2, 14–15; rebirth of, 26–27,
feminate, 179; woman as coquette, 121; 29–30, 31–35; and republic vs. monar-
women as corrupting, 43–44 chy, 192–93; and women as corrupting,
Génetiot, Alain, 271n43, 272n54, 274n91, 43–44
281n40 Grand Siècle, 8, 139, 171, 201, 253
génie, 13, 219, 267n49 Grandval, Nicolas Racot de, 247
gens de lettres, 6–7, 37, 47, 63–64, 71. See Greuze, Jean Baptiste, 14, 112, 201
also homme de lettres Grimm, Friedrich Melchior von, 29,
Geoffrin, Mme, 7, 8, 11, 52, 63, 69–70, 49, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 243, 270n28,
315n13 321n20
Gherardi, Evaristo, 325n56 Guyon, Jeanne Marie de la Motte, 87,
Gilot, Michel, 51, 276n4, 276n13 286n15
Gobin, Pierre, 326n64 Guyot, Joseph-Nicolas, 323n41
Goldsmith, Elizabeth, 281n35
Gombauld, Jean Ogier de, 303n52 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 9, 11
Goncourt, Edmond, and Jules, de, 111, Hallé, Noël, 255–56
266n33 Hardion, Jacques, 178
Goodman, Dena, 267n44, 315n16 Hegel, George Wilhelm, 195, 318n57
Gordon, Daniel, 315n16 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 48, 70, 199
Gossman, Lionel, 129–30, 306n10, 329n28 Hénault, Charles Jean-François, 165
goût, 13, 105–7, 143–44, 147, 182, 267n49, Hénin, Emmanuelle, 282n47, 283n55,
290n71, 291n79. See also goût moderne; 287n32
grand goût; petit goût; taste Hennet, Léon, 326n60
goût à l’antique. See grand goût Hobbes, Thomas, 147, 301n26
goût moderne: and Acajou et Zirphile, Hobson, Marian, 268n54, 272n61, 284n3,
7; and ancient sublime, 177; and 302n35
beaux esprits, 2; cult of antiquity, and Hogarth, William, 328n13
337
Index
Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’, 199, late Enlightenment, 257; Marivaux’s

316n20 essay on, 157–60, 162; and materiality
Homer, 90, 98, 130, 215, 240, 254 of language, 95
homme de lettres: and the bel esprit, 14, 61; Jouhaud, Christian, 75, 269n5
exalted task of, 12, 25, 41–42, 219–20;
homme de lettres galant, 37, 60–61; and Kant, Immanuel, 147, 150
La Bruyère, 68; Marivaux as, 46–47; Kavanagh, Thomas, 13, 294n22, 304n61
vs. the pedant, 53; self-legitimizing of, Kettering, Sharon, 318n49
265n30; Voltaire on, 42, 63–64. See
also gens de lettres La Bruyère, Jean de: and art as a trade,
honnête homme: philosophe as, 196; qual- 198; and bel esprit, 72, 81, 280n14;
ities of, 19, 53, 61, 66, 85; in society, 37, Caractères, 79; on conversation,
38, 40, 41, 69 274n83; and Fontenelle, 7, 67, 68; and
honnêteté, 18, 51–52, 144. See also honnête grand goût, 26; and the savant, 65
homme Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise-François
Huet, Marie-Hélène, 226, 228, 321n14 Choderlos de, 102, 111, 122, 136, 212
Hume, David, 120, 199, 293n19 Ladenson, Elisabeth, 291n91
Hyde, Melissa, 271n42 La Drevetière, Louis-François Delisle de,
hypotyposis, 92, 96, 97, 185, 286nn24–25, 261, 329n26
286n27 Lafayette, Marie Madeleine Pioche de La
Vergne, comtesse de, 76
illusion: artifice of, 284n65; audience La Fontaine, Jean de, 36–37, 206
as hostage to, 204, 222; Diderot on, La Font de Saint-Yenne, Etienne, 4–5, 26
23–24; and Fénelon, 92; Furetière on, La Grange, Charles Varlet de, 324n43
283n54; in Marivaux, 78–84; in the Lagrave, Henri, 323n40
novel, 74, 76; in the theater, 31–33, Lagrenée, Louis Jean-François, 5, 107, 109
73–74, 76–77, 223, 227, 238–40, La Harpe, Jean-François, 22, 28, 34, 49,
282n48, 283n55 100, 139–40
ingenium, 141, 145–46, 147, 150, 152, La Motte, Antoine Houdar de: and
301n26. See also wit bel esprit, 62; debate with Boileau,
inquiétude, 161–63, 185–86, 189, 191, 192 288n41, 288n47; and Marivaux, 48,
irony, 117–18, 123–24, 138–39, 217, 249–50 115; and la petite pièce, 324n43; in
Isherwood, Robert, 293n11, 322n20 Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion, 247; and
Italians, 35, 141 Querelle d’Homère, 36; Romulus, 241,
Italian theater. See commedia dell’arte; 246; “science of society,” 196, 315n11;
Théâtre-Italien and tragic drame, 296n52; and abbé
Trublet, 51
Jacobinism, 13, 100–101, 189, 192 Langlet de Gergy, 49
Jacquart, Jean, 277n23 Lapp, John C., 295n43
Jansenism, 25, 89 La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de,
Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de, 103 82–83, 102, 212, 280n14
je ne sais quoi: and abbé Bouhours, 65, Lathuillère, Roger, 272n54, 280n14
155–56, 288n46; discussion of, 155–64; La Tour, Maurice Quentin de, 275n103
Jean Ogier de Gombauld on, 303n52; Laufer, Roger, 305n82
and honnêteté and air galant, 144; Laugier, Marc-Antoine, abbé, 93–94
Thomas Kavanagh on, 304n61; and Le Blanc, Jean Bernard, abbé, 146–47
338
Index
Le Camus de Mezières, Nicolas, 29 par l’amour, 138; and authenticity,

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr 113–19, 121–29; and bel esprit, 2, 62–63,
von, 120–21, 160, 162–63, 305n73, 144; burlesque writing of, 28, 31,
313n105 74–76, 146, 250; Le cabinet du philoso-
Lekain, Henri Louis Cain, 17, 272n58 phe, 56, 155, 296n48; character, 56–57,
Lesage, Alain-René: Arlequin Endymion, 190, 312n96; comedies of, 137–40;
31; comic theater of, 28, 30; and and commedia dell’arte, 239; and the
Marivaux, 49, 50; and opéras-comi- coquette, 118–22; Crébillon’s satire of,
ques, 244; Pierrot Romulus ou le ra- 283n57; La double inconstance, 137,
visseur poli, 31, 241; Théâtre de la foire 261; early career of, 46–47; L’éducation
ou l’Opéra Comique, 249–50, 325n56; d’un prince, 86; L’épreuve, 138; and fe-
Turcaret, 323n40 minization of public, 10; and Fénelon,
L’Estoile, Pierre de, 281n33 80, 86, 240; and the grand goût and
Level, Brigitte, 326n60 goût moderne, 14; Homère travesti, 28,
Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 275n101 46–47, 115; L’ile des esclaves, 261; and
Lilti, Antoine, 267n44, 282n42, 316n21 illusion, 76–84; L’indigent philosophe,
Locke, John, 147–48, 149, 152 56, 83, 125–26; and irony, 117–18, 123–
Longinus. See Pseudo-Longinus 24; Jacques le fataliste, 166; je ne sais
Louis XIV, 4, 25, 86, 87, 171–72, 200, quoi, essay on, 157–60, 162; Le jeu de
307n19, 323n41. See also Grand Siècle l’amour et du hasard, 138; Le legs, 136;
Lettres contenant une aventure, 56, 119,
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 191 122; Lettres sur les habitants de Paris,
Malebranche, Nicolas, 54, 61, 119, 120–21, 126; and linguistic experimentation,
162, 287n38, 313n105 28, 101–3, 127–28, 134–37, 154–55,
Malesherbes, Chrétien Guillaume de 302n45, 303n47; literary reputation
Lamoignon de, 17 of, 48–56, 59–60, 72, 276n9, 276n13;
Malraux, André, 292n6 Marmontel on, 70; and moderns, 260;
Manna, Eveline, 287n36 Le paysan parvenu, 117; Pharsamon,
mannerism: and Diderot, 90–91, 106, 166; and philosophes, 48, 202; in
107–10, 132, 258; in painting, 25; and Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion, 247; Le
the parodists, 31; and philosophes, prince travesti, 136; Réflexions sur l’es-
12–13, 252; and Seneca, 291n79 prit humain à l’occasion de Corneille
manner(s), 105, 109, 196, 256–59, et de Racine, 62; “science of society,”
290n70, 315n11 196–97; La seconde surprise de l’amour,
Marais, Mathieu, 174 53; Les serments indiscrets, 135, 136,
Marat, Jean-Paul, 99, 195, 226 137–38; and social mobility, 4; Le
Marchal, Roger, 277n28 spectateur français, 53, 57, 79–82, 109,
Marchal-Ninosque, France, 270n31, 119–20, 122; La surprise de l’amour,
292n96 137; Télémaque travesti, 28, 86, 115;
Marigny, Abel-François Poisson de Le triomphe de Plutus, 250; and abbé
Vandières, marquis de, 264n20 Trublet, 51; La vie de Marianne, 76,
Marin, Louis, 287n39 77–78, 124, 143; and virtue, 261; La
marivaudage, 28, 122, 142 voiture embourbée, 62, 74–75; and
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain Voltaire, 34, 42, 45–46, 72–73; and
de: Les acteurs de bonne foi, 138; writer-reader relationship, 56–59, 74–
d’Alembert on, 325n54; Arlequin poli 76, 78, 79, 82, 166, 305n83
339
Index
Marmontel, Jean-François: and art, writ- antiquity, 29; and Diderot, 105, 230,
ings about, 253; and bel esprit, 81; and 257; divine, 85–95; and irony, 118; and
conversation, 69–72, 136; and gens de Marivaux, 119; and the parodists, 31;
lettres, 6; “Gloire,” 214; and goût mod- sublime, and language, 15
erne, 29; and Marivaux, 49, 51, 54, 55; mock-heroic writing, 30–31, 74, 113,
“Parterre,” 265n24, 320n3; on structure 245, 250
of fiction, 155; and worldly sociability, 11 moderns: vs. ancients, 9, 24, 34–35, 133,
Marot, Clément, 27, 39 172, 174–77, 183; Baudelaire on art
Maslan, Susan, 321n19 and, 258–59; and abbé Bouhours, 65;
Mauss, Marcel, 294n34 as decadent, 29, 44; and Fénelon,
May, Georges, 294n31 86; and galanterie, 35–41; and irony,
May, Gita, 266n32 117–18; key notions of, 37; and law of
McMahon, Darrin M., 263n1, 320n78 linear necessity, 155; and Marivaux,
Meister, Jacques-Henri, 314n5 45, 48; Montesquieu as, 35; in Piron’s
Menant, Sylvain, 287n36 Arlequin-Deucalion, 248; and revolu-
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien: and bel esprit, tionary civitas terrena, 262; and rheto-
2; “Complaintes,” 293n11; on Diderot, ric as feminine ornament, 127; and
71–72; and dramatic tragedy, 247, self-reflexivity, 30–31; and theater, 12,
296n52, 324n42; Eloge de Descartes, 205; 32, 240, 249; abbé Trublet as, 51; and
and goût moderne, 14, 29; La maison Voltaire, 42, 146. See also goût moderne
de Molière, 205; on Marivaux, 50–51; Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin: and
Montesquieu à Marseille, 177–78, 205–9, acting, 282n45, 283n56; and bel esprit,
210–13, 214–15, 218; and overacting, 66–67, 279n7; and L’école des femmes,
282n45; and the paillasse, 238, 324n44, 279n7; Les fâcheux, 239; Les femmes
324n46; on persiflage, 326n67; and savantes, 66; and galanterie, 33, 36–37;
Racine, 324n47; and reader-author and the ingénue, 111; and la petite
relationship, 305n75; Tableaux de pièce, 324n43; Les précieuses ridicules,
Paris, 222, 225, 228, 232; on Tacitus, 67; reconfiguration of, 34, 35; theater
310n56; and theater as tribune, 12, 22, of, 135, 137, 138
32, 195–96, 319n69; and theater audi- Monnin, Luc, 303n50
ences, 222, 225–29, 232, 233, 235, 321n13, Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 19, 51,
321n17; and theatrical illusion, 81, 204; 127, 134, 142, 279n5, 295n41
“Le trou du souffleur” (The Prompter’s Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, ba-
Box), 238; and the unofficial theater, ron de: antiabsolutism of, 87; and bel
30; and Voltaire, 50–51, 74, 132, 134; on esprit, 14, 35, 66, 68–69, 81, 281n26;
women and theater, 275n102, 316n26; burlesque writing of, 28; Considerations
and worldly sociability, 11, 198, 316n24; sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains
and writer, public role of, 7, 113–14, et de leur décadence, 167–77, 182–88,
218, 319n65 191, 285n10; criticisms of style of,
Mercure, 9–10, 86, 194, 239, 317n42, 177–80; De l’esprit des lois, 148–49,
321n20 173, 178–79, 189, 191, 208, 309n44,
Méré, Gombauld, Antoine, chevalier de, 312n95; Diderot on, 219, 309n44;
64–65, 144, 174 and esprit, 148–49, 165, 301n29; Essai
mimesis: and amour-propre, 78; and an- sur le goût, 182, 186, 191, 310n58; and
cien régime theater, 239; and beauty, Fénelon, 88; and goût moderne, 84,
258; and the bel esprit, 14; and cult of 155; on jolie laide, 157; Lettres persanes
340
Index
(Persian Letters), 40, 58, 66, 68–69, paillasse, 237–38, 249

274n90; Louis XIV and Augustus, Palissot, de Montenoy, Charles, 33, 49,
contempt for, 171–72; Marmontel 199, 219, 269n16, 320
on, 70; and Mercier’s Montesquieu Panofsky, Erwin, 290n70
à Marseille, 206–9, 210–13, 214–15, papillotage, 15, 29, 74, 131, 150–51, 158,
218; Mes pensées, 307n30, 314n107; 280n17, 302n35
Mingard’s anecdote about, 194–95; on parabasis, 113, 118, 293n15
moderate government, 189–93, 312n95, parades, 140, 236
313n104; and negligent style, 127–28; parody, 204–5, 235, 240–49, 252
and philosophes, 202; and republica- parterre: and Diderot, 224, 251; in
nism, 19, 25; and Rome as modern, Encyclopédie, 320n3; Marmontel on,
190–93; and stylistic experimentation, 265n24; Mercier on, 222, 225–26, 228,
181–82, 310n56; and traits saillants, 321n17; and the paillasse, 238; parody
309n47; on virtue, 172–74, 189–93, as extension of, 242–43; participa-
260–61, 307n23, 307n28, 312n89 tion of, in theater, 231–36, 240, 244,
Morellet, André, 100, 267n44, 280n20, 252, 326n63; and Voltaire’s Mariamne,
316n21 325n58
Munro, James S., 294n26 Pascal, Blaise, 104, 134, 142, 283n58,
285n12
Naudé, Gabriel, 39 patriotism: and the artist, 202–3, 209;
Nemours, Pierre-Samuel Dupont de, 229 and the bel esprit, 14; Fénelon and,
neoclassicism: and linear structure of 86–90, 91; and Montesquieu on the
writing, 155; and Marivaux, 62; and Romans, 189; the patriotic writer, 1,
mimesis, 29; and mondains, 179; and 7–8, 35, 114, 195–96; and Rousseau’s
Montesquieu, 181; and philosophes, myth of antiquity, 313n106; and style,
252; proponents of, 6–7; and return to 104–5
grand goût, 25–27, 29–30, 31–35; and Pellisson, Paul: and Academy, 88; on
tragedy, 134; and the unofficial theater, conversation, 38, 40; and the galant,
30. See also classicism 36, 64, 273n78; and the nation, glory
neologism, 49, 51, 102–3, 127, 147, 289n61 of, 35; and the negligent style, 295n44;
Newton, Sir Isaac, 190, 192 and Voltaire’s temple du goût, 42
Nicole, Pierre: on accuracy and eloquence, Perrault, Charles, 10, 39, 62, 285n10
96; on bel esprit, 61; Essais de morale, persiflage, 33, 130, 246, 249–50, 326n67
161, 304n65; on grace, 304n66; and petit goût: and admiration, 183; as death
Montesquieu, 186; on theater, 208; of the soul, 202; and Diderot, 44, 251;
and virtue, 83, 123 and esprit, 177; goût moderne as, 2,
Niderst, Alain, 61–62 27; and Marivaux, 62; as worldly bad
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 172 taste, 179, 181, 192, 199
Normandin, Dominique de, 323n41 phébus, 50, 53, 142, 277n20
philosophes: and bel esprit, 1–2, 63; and
Ogier, François, 179 the classical orator, 17–24; and de-
Opéra, 31, 223, 236 mocratization of language, 100; and
Opéra-Comique, 234, 240 the eulogy, 205–6, 317nn42–43; and
opéra-comique, 243, 244, 250, 251 Fontenelle, 68; and the goût moderne,
Orneval, Jacques-Philippe d’, 30, 31, 49, 9, 26–27, 29–30, 31–35; and Heraclitus,
50, 244, 249–50, 325n56, 327n68 21; and judgment vs. imagination,
341
Index
philosophes (cont.) Quéro, Dominique, 269n18

152–53; and linear structure of writing, Quintilian: on enargeia and evidentia,
155; and Mercier’s Montesquieu, 207; 311n71; and esprit and saillie, 181; and
as pedants, 48, 53; and posterity, 214– Fénelon, 99; and hypotyposis, 92, 96;
15; public mission of, 8, 24–25, 41–42, and Montesquieu’s style, 177, 308n40;
64, 194–95, 202–3, 218–20, 253–54; and the power of discourse, 185;
and sublime of Longinus, 215–16; and rhetorical ornament as effeminate,
theater, 30–34, 204–5, 221–26, 223, 277n18; and traits d’esprit, 151, 302n37
228, 252–53; and worldly sociability, 11,
63, 65–66, 196–203, 210; and writer as Racine, Jean: classical tragedy of, 137,
patriotic moralist, 32–33, 113–14 140; and Diderot, 98, 106, 131, 280n17;
Pichois, Claude, 329n20 Fénelon’s rewriting of, 97; Iphigénie,
Pierre, Jean-Baptiste-Marie, 94–95, 324n44, 324n47; language of, 135;
287n34 and Marivaux, 62, 138; “Quarrel of
Pihles, Joseph, 195, 209, 210 Racine,” 288n47; as target of parterre,
Piron, Alexis: Arlequin-Deucalion, 30, 232; tragic time in, 139; Voltaire on,
240, 243–49; epitaph of, 250; Les huit 73, 104
Mariamne, 241; and Marivaux, 49, 60; Rambouillet, Catherine de Vivonne-
Ode à Priape, 243, 326n59; Le pucelage Savelli, 18, 19, 36–37, 140, 271n48
ou La rose, 234, 323n37 Rameau, Jean-François, 234, 261
Plato, 70–71, 94, 287n32 Ravel, Jeffrey, 321n4, 321n9, 322n35,
Plutarch, 311n88, 313n102 323n40, 324n49, 325nn57–58
pointe, 142–43, 145, 154, 186, 187, 234 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François,
polissonnerie, 233, 323n36 abbé, 49, 146, 299n8, 314n5
Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Régiment de la Calotte, 243, 326n60
marquise de, 2, 7, 265n20 Renaissance, Italian, 24, 32, 283n55
Poulet, Georges, 120 republicanism, 19, 24–25, 43–44, 192–93,
préciosité and précieux, 37, 60–61, 66, 67, 259, 260
73, 101, 102, 132 Rétat, Pierre, 310n57
Prémonval, André Pierre Le Gayde, Revolution: and ancien régime, binding
272n52, 288n40 mandate of, 226–27; anticomanie of,
privilège, 236, 323n41 257; cultural orthodoxy of, 13; and the
Proust, Marcel, 14, 39, 56–57, 71, 263n2, goût moderne, 8; and le grand homme à
278n46 la scène, 205; Longinus, and orators of,
Psuedo-Longinus: and artist as great 215; and Montesquieu, 260; panthéon
man, 328n9; Boileau’s translation of, 35, 87; as political crisis, 259; and
of, 12, 289n52; and Cicero and republican fountain of youth, 256,
Demosthenes, 285n10; and eloquence, 328n15; the revolutionary fête, 229;
20–21, 87, 179, 181, 185, 187; and and the revolutionary tribune, 17; and
hypotyposis, 92, 96, 286nn24–25; and the theater, 226–28, 242, 251; and war
inventio, 103; je ne sais quoi, sublime on style, 99–101
of, 160, 288n46; Longinian plèthos, Rex, Walter, 326n64
182; and philosophes, 215–16; on the rhetoric: admiration vs. persuasion, 179–
sublime, 286n29, 310n62 80; and conversation, 71; and Diderot,
pur amour, 86, 89, 91, 285n15 99; eloquence vs., 20; energeia and
342
Index
enargeia, 146, 300n21; and Fénelon’s geois writer, 37; and language of natu-
sublime eloquence, 86–94, 95, 97; and ral signs, 100; Letter on Spectacles, 229–
Marivaux, 113, 124; in Montesquieu’s 31; and Marivaux, 76; and melodrama,
Roman history, 184, 185; ornament of, 12; myth of antiquity, 5, 29, 170, 172,
as feminine, 50, 127, 132; satire and 192; and Palissot’s Les philosophes, 33;
eulogy as opposite modes of, 13, 14; “Prosopopée de Fabricius,” 17; readers’
the sermo facetus and public eloquence, response to, 270n27; and republican-
17–24; the sermo familiaris and sermo ism, 19, 25; and rhetorical figures, 179,
quotidianus, 38 181; and abbé de Saint-Pierre, 41; and
Ribard, Dinah, 281n31, 319n76 the theater, 208–9, 222, 227, 229–31,
Richard, Paul, 266n32 322n28; and theatricality, 107–11; and
Richardot, Anne, 269n14 Voltaire, 14, 43; and worldly sociabil-
Richardson, Samuel, 12, 23, 113, 161, 254, ity, 11, 68, 197–98, 315n13
286n29 Rousset, Jean, 116
Richelet, Pierre, 146 Rubridge, Bradley, 318n51
Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, ruelle, 54, 277n33
Cardinal, duc de, 18, 32 Russo, Elena, on the salonniere, 274n94,
Richter, Jean-Paul, 147, 151–52 315n16
Rizza, Cecilia, 299n3
rococo: anti-rococo program, 265n23; Sade, Donatien Alphonse François,
and Diderot, 254; and goût moderne, comte de, 89, 112, 201
8; Le Camus de Mezières on, 29; and saillies, 15, 178–81, 187, 262, 309n47
Marivaux, 123, 154; and neoclassicism, Saint-Evremond, Charles de Marguetel
26–27; as term foreign to period, 36; de Saint-Denis de, 42, 171, 174
and union of opposites, 147 Saint-Pierre, Charles Irénée Castel, abbé
Rome, 167–77, 182–88, 190–93, 215–16 de, 41–42
Root-Bernstein, Michèle, 323nn40–41, Saisselin, Rémy G., 264n8, 264n19,
327n77 267n49
Rosenfeld, Sophia, 100, 289nn54–55 salonnieres: Mme de Boufflers, 52; as
Rosso, Corrado, 308n40, 318n57 cultural mediators, 63, 198; Mme
Rougemont, Martine de, 321n20, 322n32 du Deffand, 139, 198; Marie-Anne
Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, 28, 248 Doublet, 26; Mme Geoffrin, 7,
Rousseau, Jean Jacques: antiabsolut- 8, 11, 52, 63, 198, 315n13; Mme de
ism of, 87; art and historical trauma, Lambert, 48, 52, 63, 69, 86, 185; Mlle
201; and bel esprit in women, 60, de Lespinasse, 10, 63, 72, 198; Mme
279n7; Diderot on La Tour’s portrait Necker, 11, 63, 198, 203, 267n44;
of, 275n103; and Duclos, 7; Emile, and philosophes, relationship to, 11,
115; existence as present moments, 315n16; Mme de Rambouillet, 18, 19,
293n19; and expressive spontaneity, 140; Mme de Sablé, 65; “the science of
295n40; and Fénelon’s Les aventures de manners,” 197; and social knowledge
Télémaque, 88; and fiction’s contami- as feminine, 315n13; Mme de Tencin,
nation of reality, 113; and the financial 48, 52, 55, 63, 69, 70, 175; transfor-
class, 3; and genius as masculine, 10; mation of role of, 274n94. See also
and ideal of social cohesiveness, 189, Scudéry, Madeleine de
313n99, 313n106; and ideals of bour- Sarasin, Jean-François, 36, 37, 271n43
343
Index
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 214, 318n59 l’Académie, 104; and Diderot, 106–7,

savants, 60, 65–66, 179 261; and esprit, 60; Fénelon on, 87,
Scarron, Paul, 27–29, 74, 271n43, 302n35 88; and galanterie, 37–41; chevalier
Schino, Mirella, 324n51 de Jaucourt’s “Style,” 103, 289n65;
Schlanger, Judith, 321n19 Malebranche on, 287n38; and manner
Schlegel, Friedrich, 118, 119, 147, 151–52 in painting, 105; and Marivaux, 28, 78–
Scott, Katie, 271n42, 274n92, 328n1 79, 101–3, 154–55; and Montesquieu,
Scottish Enlightenment, 3, 199 177–88, 310n56; as moral, 55, 72, 88,
Scudéry, Madeleine de: and the bel es- 99–101, 104–5, 109; negligent style,
prit, 280n14; and Boileau, 269n9, 127, 295n43; and papillotage, 150–51;
328n12; and abbé Bouhours, 65; Carte and parterre, experimentation of,
de tendre, 157; on conversation, 41, 69, 252; and philosophes, 21, 253; of the
274n82, 296n46; and galanterie, 36–37; précieux, 132; and saillie, 180–81; and
and honnêteté and air galant, 144; and the sublime, 96–99; and theatrical illu-
Marivaux, 138, 140, 294n26 sion, 73–74; and Voltaire, 27, 262
self-referentiality, 12, 40, 233, 235, 240 style rocaille. See rococo
self-reflexivity, 14–15, 30–31, 75–76, 78, sublime, the, 13, 214–20, 217, 254, 319n68
122–23, 128, 235, 261 Suetonius, 187
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus: De beneficiis,
209–10, 212–13; decadent, viewed as, Tacitus, 310n56
29–30; and Diderot, 22, 106, 262, Tallemant des Réaux, Gédéon, 281n40
301n33; as effeminate philosopher, 55; taste: and Diderot, 10, 14, 255–59,
and esprit, 141; and the galant, 38; and 267n41; and Enlightenment values,
mannerism, 291n79; on virtue, 318n54; 2–10; and the je ne sais quoi, 304n58; as
as virtuous, 209 moral, 3–9, 106; and Romans, 171; and
sensibilité, 202, 204 Schlegel on Witz, 152; tact fin, 105; and
sentiment, 143, 144, 154, 203. See also taste Voltaire, 14, 129, 291n79. See also goût;
Sermain, Jean-Pierre, 293n12 goût moderne; grand goût; petit goût
sermo: facetus (or conversation enjouée), Taviani, Ferdinando, 324n51
17–19; familiaris, 38, 134; quotidianus, 38 theater: the age of parody, 240–43; and
Shklar, Judith, 313n103 Diderot, 130–32, 214; fairgrounds the-
Simon, Pierre-Henri, 303n52 aters, 2, 236, 240, 243–52, 250, 323n40;
Société du Bout du Banc, 297n67, 323n37 le grand homme à la scène, 205, 213;
Société du Caveau, 7, 243, 325n58 and “idiom of the people,” 134; and
Socrates, 22, 209, 267n50 illusion, 31–33, 73–74, 76–77, 204–5;
Sophocles, 253, 254, 297n62 and Marivaux, 72–73, 134–40; as mor-
Sorel, Charles, 31, 53–54, 65, 74 ally pernicious, 208–9; la petite pièce,
Spielman, Guy, 233, 323n40, 324n51, 324n43; petits théâtres, 204–5, 242,
326n65 250; and philosophes, 11, 12, 252–53;
Spink, J. S., 294n21 Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion, 243–49;
Spitzer, Leo, 288n47, 294n21 and prerevolutionary audiences,
Stanley, Alessandra, 297n70 221–22; reforms in, 222–27, 239–40;
Sterne, Laurence, 75 regulated repertory of, 236–39; and the
Strasberg, Lee, 296n54 Revolution, 226–28; salle, 238–39, 249;
style: and bel esprit, 14, 66; bigarrure, scène, 238–39; spectacles irréguliers, 242;
9, 27, 295n40; and Dictionnaire de and spectator-actor relationship, 229–
344
Index
31; théâtres de societé, 229; as tribune, Veronese, Camille, 327n75

195–96, 203, 216–18; the unofficial Viala, Alain, 34, 36, 273n71, 273n75,
theater, 30–34. See also parterre; names 273n77, 279n8, 280n14, 299n3
of theatrical institutions Vienne, Nicolas (also known as
theater of Francisque, 243, 244, 326n63 Beauvisage), 250, 327n76
Théâtre-Français: audiences and reper- Vila, Anne, 300n15
tory of, 236; Diderot’s Le fils naturel, Virgil, 90, 254
229; and Marivaux, 72–73; Marivaux’s virtue, 172–74, 260–61, 318n54
Les serments indiscrets, 135; La Motte’s Visé, Donneau de, 9–10
Romulus, 241; and parody, 31, 235; Voiture, Vincent, 28, 36–37, 42, 142, 179,
Joseph Pihles’s Bienfait anonyme, 195; 281n40
and Piron’s Arlequin-Deucalion, 245, Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine, 306n6, 310n56
246, 248; Voltaire’s Irène, 134 Voltaire: and the ancients, 26, 132–33,
Théâtre-Italien, 72–73, 140, 221, 235–36, 172; and art, writings about, 253;
241, 243, 250, 282n45 and Elie de Beaumont, 25; on bel es-
Thomas, Antoine-Léonard: and art, writ- prit, 72; as celebrity, 206; as Cicero,
ings about, 253; and eulogy, 11, 205; 17; and comic theater, 34; and
on Mme Geoffrin, 315n13; and goût Corneille, 280n17; correspondence
moderne, 29; and Jacques Hardion vs. of, 261; Diderot on, 131, 309n44;
Montesquieu, 178; and the orator, 22, and Dumarsais’s manifesto, 314n9;
202–3, 203–4, 319n70; and patriotism, “Eloquence,” 20–21; “Esprit,” 67,
7–8, 196; sociability, critique of, 197, 145, 146; and esprit, 129–30, 132, 142,
198–99, 316n25, 316n27 147, 148, 262, 299n3; on Fontenelle,
Timmermans, Linda, 280n14 28; “Gens de lettres,” 42, 63; and goût
tirade, 223 moderne, 29, 84, 147; and le Grand
Tournehem, Charles Lenormand de, Siècle, 171; “Histoire,” 306n9; and
264n20 history, 169, 308n35; Irène, 134; and
traits saillants, 180, 309n47 irony, 11; Lettre sur l’esprit, 73, 129,
Trott, David, 239, 272n56, 321n20, 180; Mariamne, 240–41, 325n58; and
323n40, 325n56 Marivaux, 45–46, 49, 50, 55, 72–73,
Trouillet, Jacques, 322n23 135–36; and Marmontel, 70; Mercier
Trublet, Nicolas-Charles-Joseph, abbé, on, 50–51, 74; and Montesquieu, 167,
51–53, 54, 277n25 178; on the philosophe, 47, 63–64;
Truchet, Jacques, 326n66 in Piron’s parodies, 243, 247, 248;
Tsien, Jennifer, 268n53, 271n44 La Pucelle, 28; and Racine, 288n47,
turlupinades, 142, 233, 299n7, 323n36 324n44, 324n47; referential content
of plays, 235; and rhetorical figures,
urbanitas, 18–19, 171 179, 181; and rhetorical operations,
150; on the Romans, 171, 174–75, 176;
Vairas, Denis, 301n30 Rousseau’s attack on, 43; and abbé de
Valincour, Jean Baptiste Henri du Saint-Pierre, 41–42; Société du Caveau
Trousset de, 314n11 parody of, 325n58; Socrate, 317n43;
Van Loo, Carle, 292n97 on style, 27, 104, 290n65; as target of
Van Loo, Louis-Michel, 44, 258 parterre, 232; and taste, 3, 6, 12, 14,
Verèb, Pascale, 323n40, 326n60 291n79; Le temple du goût, 3, 4, 42; and
Vernet, Claude, 14, 105, 287n35 theater audiences, 221–22, 223; and
345
Index
Voltaire (cont.) Watteau, (Jean) Antoine, 3, 5, 29, 140

theatrical reforms, 32, 237, 240; and Weisgerber, Jean, 274n91, 284n68
tragic drama, 31, 201, 253; and abbé Whiteman Lindsay, Frank, 325n56
Trublet, 51 wit, 147–48, 149, 300n26
vraisemblance. See illusion Witz, 147, 149–50, 151–52
Wade, Ira O., 317nn42–43 Zysberg, André, 270n33

Watelet, Claude-Henri, 7
346

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         -               

Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner,

The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the

Frontispiece: This engraving is a provocative variation on the

There is among us much instruction and little education. We train

He’ll stuﬀ the bawdyhouse and the boudoir in every context.

momentous. In ancien régime France, where political argument was severely

Amours dodus, pompons et rubans printaniers,

culated journal, Donneau de Visé, its longtime editor (1672–1710), turned

troversies that ensued, much of the debate I describe cannot be narrowed to a

from the seventeenth-century aesthetics of galanterie) were marginalized and

Always little pictures, little ideas, frivolous compositions, appropriate for

The perfection of talent consists in the ability to paint on a grand scale,

sublime vision of Socrates’ and Seneca’s philosophical deaths, mindful perhaps

[from posterity] and guaranteed by the unanimous support of one’s contem-

of the barristers in claiming moral authority as representatives of the nation,

the legitimizing sphere of politeness was now seen as shameless pandering to

and to the lowly fairgrounds, of which contemporary audiences and critics

Two Generations of Moderns

imagination, debasement and licentiousness.”88 “The burlesque genre knows

The Importance of Being Earnest

The particular characteristic of his [Gavarnis’s] comic gift is a great

split by quarrels among factions and by mutual attacks, Voltaire—who nicely

What is striking in Marivaux’s career is his diﬃculty in gaining a solid foot-

description of his works require painstaking meandering into “small, delicate,

subtle displacements; each piece resonates in relation to others, contradicting

Nothing is capable of inspiring so much aversion to art as having a look

The Theater of Conversation

successfully embodied the synthesis between worldliness and verbal virtuosity,

It could not be any clearer that, at the end of a lifetime of mortiﬁcations,

Worldliness was portrayed by Voltaire, not as a self-serving career move, but as

the later philosophes, there is a continuity between a disposition to sociability

of a deluded Bélise and in Les précieuses ridicules mainstream, Parisian world-

particularly Tencin’s and Geoﬀrin’s. A newcomer to the Parisian literary scene

and touch an audience. I also know that perfection in a play consists in an

testing one another. Such dialogism anticipates the multiplicity of characters

vraisemblance was preferred over a word that smacked of demonic possession,

The author should arrange everything as if there were no spectators, which

The spectator had to be made to feel that he was witnessing an actual

The Disenchanted Spectator

thus emerges from the juxtaposition of jarring elements. By alternating discus-

Chance, an unexpected and trivial accident, dissipates the illusion created by

ful exploration of physiognomy anticipates Diderot’s conception of acting in

The numerous references throughout the journals to false modesty, and

type of truth that is available to us is approximate and tentative; demanding

Find the thought ﬁrst; the style will follow.

As Buﬀon said, “All the spiritual beauties to be found in a beautiful

portrayed in Les aventures de Télémaque (which greatly inﬂuenced Rousseau

We may love God with a pure charity untainted by all self-concern. . . .

an eloquent discourse, leads the beholder to repress the awareness that he is

Antilochus’s superbly dull message, with its tripartite, paratactic structure, is a

expression passes for a sublime example of reticence bordering on aposiope-