The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ French discourses contributed to perceiving and valuing male and female performances of intelligence. The first tradition is one that intellectual historians have not sufficiently engaged: the large and growing corpus of literary scholarship on the texts produced by the sociable and literary culture of le monde. The second tradition can be broadly described as the historical sociology of knowledge. Beginning in late nineteenth-century German sociology, and flourishing today in scholarship in which sociology and cultural anthropology meet, it is indispensable to positioning our texts within structural and normative wholes.

Aisance and Labor

      Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac’s Oeuvres diverses, published in 1644, included an imagined “conversation” (entretien) with Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, the daughter of a prominent Roman family and the wife of a royal councilor of state. More than a quarter century earlier the marquise had withdrawn from the court of Louis XIII, which she found tiresome and crude. In delicate health after bearing seven children, she preferred not to make the social rounds in Paris. Instead she created a kind of court that brought Parisian high society to her. She herself designed a new hôtel, begun in 1618, with high-ceilinged reception rooms leading into each other and a smaller chamber, known as the ruelle, where she received her guests reclining on her bed. The room was painted blue rather than the usual red or tan, with a matching décor, and the atmosphere was at once elegantly luxuriant and intimate, projecting aristocratic grandeur but offering a retreat from the demands of public life. This “Blue Room” became the fabled archetype for the salons of old-regime France.⁶

      Balzac’s Lettres, published in 1624, used the discursive latitude of the epistolary genre to conduct a high-spirited and mischievous discussion of a wide range of subjects, including politics. The book was a literary triumph in le monde, “so much in vogue,” one of Balzac’s adversaries observed, “that for a long time one has not seen such a small book make such a grand name.”⁷ In the ensuing querelle about Balzac’s prose among men of letters a central issue was the relative value of tradition and modernity, imitation of the ancients and innovation. Balzac’s critics among the learned attacked his unrestrained ornamental exuberance and his impertinent tone for perverting ancient Greek and Latin rhetoric. His defenders haled him for endowing authorship with an unprecedented free subjectivity.⁸

      Balzac had had high ambitions to pursue a political career at court, but having failed to win Cardinal Richelieu’s sponsorship he had retired to the family chateau in Angoulême in 1628, with only occasional visits to Paris thereafter. “I would rather ruin my little hopes than renounce entirely my liberty,” he wrote his friend René Descartes on April 25.⁹ Having marooned himself among provincials, he spent much of his time writing. In letters to friends in Paris he extolled the satisfactions of a solitary life of Ciceronian otium, or leisure, removed from the demands and intrigues of court life. If Balzac had renounced the life of the courtier, however, he could not live in isolation from Paris. Volatile and fiercely polemical by temperament, he would not have shone in polite sociability. But he remained virtually present in le monde through his letters to Jean Chapelain, a celebrated man of letters who was an habitué of the Blue Room and saw to it that Balzac’s letters were circulated and sometimes read aloud there. Balzac wrote his “conversation” with the marquise knowing that, in a limited but real sense, it would be a public event, and that he was addressing the nascent public of le monde.¹⁰

      The opening conceit of the entretien was that, having read selections he had provided her from the canonical Latin texts, the marquise now wanted to learn about the “private” life of the Romans, their “play” (jeux) and “diversions,” and their “conversation” rather than their “ceremony.” Balzac used the opportunity to suggest that the “pleasures” enjoyed in the Roman republic and at the Augustan court, which had been “virtuous,” not “sensual,” should inform the new conversational sociability of the Blue Room. The French, guided by the Romans, would develop a culture of “urbanity,” a term Balzac coined, a “liberty” in social exchange that was “accommodating” without being “servile,” that avoided both “vain ostentation” and “affected restraint,” and that eschewed the burdensome “rules and precepts” of “public rhetoric.” In the new art of conversation, as in Roman urbanity, there would be nothing “studied or acquired.” And yet, even as he went so far in adapting to an aesthetic of play, Balzac, in the same polite prose, asserted his identity as a savant. He explained to the marquise that he was drawing on the fourth book of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, where the “three virtues” needed for rational and self-disciplined conversation were spelled out. That was a daring move: Aristotle was held responsible for university scholasticism, for which le monde had contempt. Balzac claimed to take great pride in having acquired a recently discovered cache of Caesar’s letters to Cleopatra, translated into Greek in an ancient manuscript, though he acknowledged that their authenticity would remain in doubt until an “infallible” philologist at the University of Leiden was consulted. The point was clear: there could be no knowledge of Roman private life—the knowledge the marquise had requested—without the labor of scholars.¹¹

      Balzac was somewhat fatalistic in adapting his literary talents to the demands of mondanité. Even as he supported the French monarchy against the Huguenots and other enemies, he retained his admiration for the civic life of the Roman republic. But he understood that under the political authority of the French monarchy and the cultural supremacy of le monde he could only dream of being a modern reincarnation of the Roman orator addressing “the people.” It was a matter of rhetorical strategy; the eloquence of the Roman orator, intent on persuading his audience on a great public issue, had to accede to a seemingly light, informal, and discursive style that made “pleasing” the condition for instruction. In his heyday Guez de Balzac did please, but in doing so he walked a fine line between two social personas that were not easily combined: the savant laboring in his study, and the “polished” (honnête) man or woman enjoying the diversions of le monde. It was the difference between two meanings of the word loisir, or leisure. In the new social and institutional form the Blue Room gave to the aristocratic ethos of leisure, the usual entertainments acceded to a rarified play of esprit, precious precisely because it had no tolerance for any appearance of strenuous intellectual effort. In his provincial retreat Guez de Balzac tried to practice an otium studiorum; free from negotium, or the demands of public life, he had the liberty to work at his own pace, to let his work ripen. Such “leisure,” he wrote in another entretien, was entirely different from “laziness” (paresse); while “we are in the power” of laziness, leisure allows us our “liberty.”¹² Solitary reading and writing offered liberty in the control of one’s time.

      It was entirely compatible with Guez de Balzac’s agenda that, like most other erudite men of letters, he considered women incapable of the manly labor of “study.” There should be no violating the divide marking the different “duties and conditions” and “virtues” of the sexes, he advised Mme Desloges. “Pedantry” was even more intolerable in a woman than in a schoolmaster. The woman who spoke the language of philosophy (even the Platonic ideal of love), or who laid down rules about literary genres and style, was ridiculous.¹³ As politely deferential as his conversation with the marquise de Rambouillet was, he took care to assert the cultural authority of his own, exclusively male world.

      By the 1640s, however, the tone was being set by Vincent Voiture, a very different sort of man of letters. The son of a wine merchant who supplied the court, Voiture knew that despite his personal merit he would always be regarded as a plebeian by the aristocratic guests of Rambouillet. But his extraordinarily nimble and entertaining wit, made all the more piquant when he courted insolence, made him the central attraction of the Blue Room. It was essential to his carefully cultivated image that he not appear to be laboring as a savant or even as an author. As his nephew recalled in the preface to his posthumously published Letters, he always pleased the ladies, whose “very exquisite taste” was due to “the delicacy СКАЧАТЬ