The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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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 of their esprit.”14 He was perhaps the first complete galant homme, applying his gifts to amuse women with poetry, ballads, and charming, playfully flirtatious letters, all seemingly extemporaneous, though he may have prepared his verbal magic in private. His writings had no room for Guez de Balzac’s view of learned “leisure” as a periodic Ciceronian retreat from public affairs; they record worldly “leisure” as a total way of life in which the value of the written word lay in its air of ephemeral entertainment.
By the 1660s salons, modeled on Rambouillet’s, though usually on a less grand scale, were a fixture of the Parisian social scene. The classical “virtue” that Guez de Balzac had in mind in calling for a new urbanity was not explicitly repudiated, but it lost the moral rigorism of the ideal of republican citizenship as it was folded into what I am calling a social aesthetic of play. Mlle de Scudéry was a protégé of the marquise de Rambouillet and became a prominent salon hostess in her own right. She has Cleonte, one of the characters in her dialogue on politeness, observe that the word “urbanity” has acceded to “politeness” because the latter was better suited to the “natural conversation” of women; though acknowledging that the urbanity celebrated by Guez de Balzac and the Blue Room was clearly at the origins of modern politeness, Cleonte thinks the term should now be left to the learned and to “grand eloquence.”15 In the second half of the seventeenth century the discourse of honnêteté and politesse assumed a new level of selfconsciousness; its family of words acquired a kind of coded meaning for the initiated, and as the self-justification of a privileged and exclusive world it became, in the broadest sense of the term, an ideology. A variety of literary forms—among them model letters and conversations, advice books, essays, dialogues, and novels—sought to capture the essence of honnêteté, drew the boundaries between what it encompassed and what lay outside it, and tried to identify its emblematic forms of behavior without reducing it to a set of rules or abstract principles.
The discourse of honnêteté, it should be stressed, was largely prescriptive. It tells us how a social milieu imagined and justified itself; how it thought it ought to be, and indeed how it thought it had to be if it was to sustain its claim to singular honor. Beneath the lacquered surface lay the actual workings of sociability in what Antoine Lilti has called “the space of mondanité.” Lilti has shown in impressive detail that the high aristocracy dominated that space, linking the salons to the royal court through both patronage and a shared style of worldly amusement; and that in the multiple hierarchies of le monde, the arts of politesse at once enabled and veiled an intense jockeying for social and political power in the circulation of “reputations” and attendant rewards.16 Lilti focuses on the eighteenth century, but there is no reason to think that seventeenth-century mondanité