The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ that the worldly shunned. “The true beauty of l’esprit,” Ariste observes, “consists of a correct (juste) and delicate discernment” that reveals “things such as they are.” If such discernment is “brilliant,” it is also “solid,” a matter of “judgment,” with a “force” to “penetrate the principles of sciences and the most hidden truths.”⁵³ Bouhours was trying to remove the true bel esprit from the mondain preoccupation with pleasing appearance, and that in turn required a male repossession of the phrase. “The beauty of the esprit,” he writes, “is a manly and generous beauty, which has nothing of the soft and effeminate.”⁵⁴ Later in the essay Bouhours has Eugène observe that “the savants de profession are ordinarily not beaux esprits,” as they are always “buried” in study and, having little “commerce with les honnêtes gens,” they lack “a certain politesse and I know not what of agrément.”⁵⁵ Bouhours acknowledges the social ineptitude of the stereotypical pedant, however, only to give more credibility to his defense of learned men who are not at home in polite sociability but can nonetheless be polite authors. He breaks down genuine beaux esprits into three types with “talents” that are rarely combined: the worldly conversationalist, the statesman at the pinnacle of government, and the polite author. “There is nothing more opposed to study and public affairs,” he writes, than “the spirit of conversation,” which is “a natural spirit, an enemy of all labor and constraint.” With the term “natural” Bouhours seems to follow the underlying logic of a pure sociability devoted to aisance. But as he continues aisance becomes a more dubious attribute: “those who have this talent are ordinarily idle people (oisifs) whose principal employment is to make and receive visits.” Even as he hales Voiture as the supreme example of the bel esprit who writes effortlessly and delicately, he detaches the bel esprit as a man of letters from Voiture’s conversational artistry. “The most brilliant and exact authors do not always shine in conversation”; they “examine things in depth,” and in company they speak seldom, “as they think too much about what they want to say.”⁵⁶ Bouhours in effect extracts the man of letters from the symbiosis of orality and the written word that the aesthetic discourse of honnêteté made mandatory. Though the author’s style must of course have “I know not what of the agreeable and the flowery to please people of good taste,”⁵⁷ the bel esprit is an emphatically male intelligence whose engagement in the labor of strenuous thought grants him a certain independence from the social aesthetic of play.

      The savant Pierre Daniel Huet also moved fairly comfortably in le monde but kept himself at a remove from its ethos. In his Treatise on the Origins of the Novel, published in 1670, a year before Bouhours’s Conversations, the implicit assertion of authorial independence we find in Bouhours’s text widens into an explicit effort to reclaim the scholar’s cultural authority.⁵⁸ A prodigy of Jesuit education, Huet became a scholar’s scholar. Over the course of his career he would produce translated editions of ancient and early Christian texts as well as his own Latin poems, and would devote serious study to philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and anatomy. In 1670 Louis XIV called him from Caen, where he had founded an Academy of Sciences, to Paris to serve as subtutor of the Dauphin. In 1674 he was appointed abbot of Aunay in Normandy, and shortly thereafter he ascended to the bishopric of Avranches.

      Neither his provincial origins nor his commitment to scholarship prevented Huet from being accepted in honnête circles in Paris. He became a regular visitor in Mlle de Scudéry’s salon and a friend of Mme de Lafayette. He published his Treatise as an epistolary preface to Lafayette’s novel Zaïde, histoire espagnole, which he had probably commented on in drafts as he wrote his treatise. Ignoring the tensions between a scholarly ethos of labor and a social aesthetic of play, DeJean seriously misreads this text and its larger significance in the debates it addressed. She makes Huet’s treatise a key expression of respect for the feminizing (or feminist) impulse in the early novel.⁵⁹ Huet was pursuing a quite different and in some ways opposed agenda. He did, to be sure, give the novel literary legitimacy by placing it in a lineage that went back to the classical epic. And he did conclude with a paean to Mlle de Scudéry, confessing his “astonishment” that a “girl,” not a man, had published three illustrious novels. Perhaps she had originally hidden her authorship, he suggested, and thus had deprived herself of “the glory that was her due” for working for “the glory of the nation,” because “she wanted to spare this shame to our sex.”⁶⁰ But Huet’s overarching argument was that the novel was an “entertainment,” though one that must be morally instructive. He was treading a fine line in a debate about the novel that would continue into the eighteenth century. In L’honneste femme Du Bosc had advised women that to be honnête they had to undertake serious reading, even in the works of savants; but he had warned them against reading novels, as their gallant love stories corrupted female readers insidiously, not only acquainting them with evil, but teaching them how to commit it.⁶¹ Huet obviously disagreed. But what made the novel a moral necessity was the fact that people were naturally “lazy”; unable or unwilling to understand the truth, they were instructed in the effortless reading of a story, without getting behind the fact that the story was a fictional “lie.”⁶² This was to say that the novel adapted to human weakness, whereas serious study overcame it. For all his admiration for this new genre being developed by women, Huet could not refrain from regretting its recent ascendancy in polite circles. The novel reflected the unprecedented “forms” of complaisance with which men in France had to win the favor of women. It is worth quoting in full a passage DeJean has ignored:

      [Women] have made novels their entire study, and have been so contemptuous of the ancient fable and history that they have not understood works which drew on them formerly for their greatest ornament. So as no longer to be embarrassed by this ignorance, of which they have so often the occasion to be aware, they have found that it would be preferable to disapprove what they are ignorant of, rather than to learn it. Men have imitated them to please them; they have condemned what [women] would condemn, and have called pedantry what was an essential part of politeness, still at the time of Malherbe. Poets and other French writers who have followed [Malherbe] have been constrained to submit to this judgment, and several of them, seeing that knowledge of antiquity would be useless to them, have ceased to study what they dare not put in usage. Thus a good cause has produced a very bad effect, and the beauty of our novels has brought contempt for belles lettres, and thus ignorance.⁶³

      It is not surprising that in his later years Huet became estranged from mondain conversational sociability.⁶⁴

The Intelligence of Women

      The last question raised in Bouhours’s Conversations is whether a woman can be a bel esprit. Surely he had heard the subject discussed in worldly circles. Eugène endorses the received view of women’s intelligence:

      This beautiful fire and this good sense (bon sens) of which we have spoken so much does not come from a cold and humid complexion. Coldness and humidity, which render women weak, timid, indiscreet, light-headed, impatient, babbling … prevents them from having the judgment, the solidity, the force, the precision (justesse) that the bel esprit requires. This mucus (pituite) of which they are full, and which gives them that delicate tint, does not accord much with the delicacy and the vivacity of l’esprit; it blunts the point, and weakens [the mind’s] lights (lumières): and if you reflect on it, what women have of the brilliant is in the nature of flashes (éclairs) which dazzle for a moment and have no point at all of consistency. They shine a little in conversation, and provided that one speaks only of trifling things (bagatelles), they do not speak badly, but beyond that they are not very reasonable. In a word, there is nothing more limited than the mind of women.

      The friends admit exceptions to “the general rule,” but agree that there is “some sort of opposition between the beauty of the mind and that of the [female] body.”⁶⁵

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