Arts et Savoirs
6 | 2016 Women’s portraits of the self Representing knowledge and making identity in early modernity Autoportraits, autofictions des femmes à l'époque moderne: savoirs et fabrique de l'identité
Caroline Trotot and Natania Meeker (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/aes/696 DOI: 10.4000/aes.696 ISSN: 2258-093X
Publisher Laboratoire LISAA
Electronic reference Caroline Trotot and Natania Meeker (dir.), Arts et Savoirs, 6 | 2016, « Women’s portraits of the self » [Online], Online since 06 July 2016, connection on 20 November 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/aes/696 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/aes.696
This text was automatically generated on 20 November 2020.
Centre de recherche LISAA (Littératures SAvoirs et Arts) 1
Written by scholars from Europe and the United States, the articles of this volume offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on the many different ways in which women represented their knowledge from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th Century, using such representations, be they literary or visual artworks, to fashion their identity. What is thus at stake is the transgressive power of education and creation: by accessing knowledge and claiming the right to literary and artistic creation, women ignored and refused the restrictions imposed on them. This volume reveals the extent of their contributions to the art and knowledge of modern times. Dans ces travaux interdisciplinaires, spécialistes français et américains étudient comment les femmes ont représenté leurs savoirs et s’en sont servi pour fabriquer leur identité de la Renaissance à l’aube du dix-neuvième siècle, à travers des créations littéraires ou picturales. La question permet de reconnaître le geste de ces femmes qui ont transgressé le double interdit qui pèse sur leur accès au savoir et à la création. Le volume rend manifeste leur contribution aux arts et aux savoirs modernes.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction Caroline Trotot
Humanist knowledge and practices of resistance
The Dialogic Body and the Humanist Woman in the Self-Portraiture of Catherine des Roches Cathy Yandell
The Martyr Queen Constructions of Identity in Mary Stuart’s Last Letters Colette H. Winn
The Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Experience of Knowledge, Knowledge of Experience Caroline Trotot
“Ignorant and intractable” Elisabeth in her Letters to Descartes Hélène Bah Ostrowiecki
Self-Portrait of a Lady as an Absent Latinist Lucy Hutchinson and the Recording of Encounter and Loss Michael A. Soubbotnik
Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction The Case of the Would-Be Nun, Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet Thomas M. Carr Jr.
Painting the self: craft, skills, knowledge
Inhabiting Flower Worlds: The Botanical Art of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari
“What Do I Know? Who am I?” Self-Portraits and the Literature of Intimacy in the Eighteenth Century” Catriona Seth
Fragmented and Oblique Autobiographies and Memoirs The Case of Madame de Genlis Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol
« Peinte par elle-même? » Women artists, teachers and students from Anguissola to Haudebourt-Lescot Melissa Hyde
“Portrait of the Artist at Work” Painting Self-Portraits in Late Eighteenth-Century France Séverine Sofio
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Introduction
Caroline Trotot Translation : Colin Keaveney
1 The articles1 in this issue are the fruits of research carried out by scholars from a variety of disciplines (literature, history of the arts, sociology, and philosophy) in Europe and the United States. They are the product of several related ongoing projects: a series of literature seminars at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée and of art historical seminars at the INHA2, a symposium at the University of Southern California3, and another series of lectures at the Louvre4. We are very grateful to all the institutions that have supported these projects and to the French embassy in Washington for financing the Los Angeles gathering. While eschewing any claim to comprehensive coverage, these articles take on important issues and questions that appeared during a period stretching from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The volume as a whole takes a cross-disciplinary approach to phenomena that are often poorly understood and underestimated, and the authors collectively employed a wide range of available methods in an effort to better reflect human diversity and speak to the broadest possible audience5. The fragmentary nature of these contributions is emblematic of the place often reserved for women in these fields. Too regularly, only a few early modern women receive any critical attention, as the focus of random exhibitions6 and publications 7, despite the existence of twenty years of very solid research8. Thus, the collection works to make visible what we might not see, even though it is right before our eyes.
2 Women -their knowledge and their skills- still remain all too often invisible, to such an extent that their absence from contemporary historical accounts is often thought to reflect the real state of affairs in bygone centuries. The common belief that there was no literature by women in this period is based on the contempt with which female scholars were treated and their exclusion from centres of scholarly training and progress. Likewise, the belief that there were no female painters stems from the fact that they were not permitted to paint male nudes, models used in history painting, and that they were refused access to academies of painting. Investigating the ways in which women got around these and other limitations avoids somehow perpetuating them and thereby excluding women once again from the common cultural narrative ‒ the mirror
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in which today’s men and women look for guidance in the process of working out who they are. Yet, when scholarly research is directly linked to current social issues, even as it attempts to reconstruct a richer sense of the past, it can be suspected of harbouring a militant agenda. While women were often shut out from the production of knowledge in the past, it is now sometimes suggested that they are not in fact worthy of study. Moreover, although it is easy to believe that women of the past receive fuller consideration today than in their own times, the reverse is often true: some of these women artists were major figures in their own periods and are today largely forgotten, absent from textbooks and museums, especially in France. In order to gain a better understanding of the way representations of women’s knowledge are produced and disseminated, we have chosen to study how women depicted their learning and used it in their art in order to create an identity for themselves. What was their role in the development, shaping and transformation of different forms of knowledge? Through their writing and painting, how did they conceive of their relationship ‒ structured by desires as well as prohibitions ‒ with knowledge as a field? How do these women, who lived at the dawn of modern epistemology, help us, as women and men of the twenty- first century, understand how representations of the self shape the possibilities for self-making available to us?
Reversing the Mirror. Reflexivity, from Absence to Presence
3 Studying female self-portraits from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century involves turning absence into presence. Revealingly, the term self-portrait did not appear before the twentieth century9, even though the phenomenon obviously existed in painting10. Our interest in self-portraiture - a less prestigious genre than that of history painting, and perhaps even than the portrait, since it was often the result of the artist’s inability to find a model - is doubtless a product of our shifting preoccupations today. Applying the category to a period preceding the coining of the word runs the risk of retrospectively creating an illusion. We shall attempt to avoid making this mistake not by trying to write a history, but by considering together works that display similar features, the better to describe and then interpret them.
4 Interestingly, the term self-portrait applies to both literature and painting. It is a category with uncertain limits11. The variability of the term thus permits us to revisit the history of literature and the arts with an attention to their mutual unfolding. In the period under examination, relations among the arts were marked by the influence of the analogy ut pictura poesis12, which led to many reciprocal creative exchanges and a metaphorically unified collective imagination. Considering the works under discussion here as self-portraits (whether literary or artistic), we examine the similarities between these two areas of creation, and we explore what a more extensive knowledge of works produced in adjacent arts, countries, and periods allows us to glean about the meaning of self-representation for these women. Therefore, in what follows, we shall examine the systems of literary and pictorial signification that make up these works, what they tell us about these women as individuals and as a group, and how they relate to one another, in order to allow us to understand what is today referred to as the “woman creative artist” and the “woman intellectual”13.
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5 Art history has taught us the usefulness of inventories. The Louvre does not know how many paintings by women it possesses; estimates suggest a number around 300, but the inventory is not without ambiguities. Certain works are out on loan to regional museums because they were judged of secondary importance; others had their attributions changed in the nineteenth century. Questions of attribution are vital, for the accreditation of the artist’s talent is closely linked to her authorship being recognized. Women artists are still prevented from receiving the credit they deserve, according to a circular logic that has been exposed as such by feminist critics. The prevailing prejudice is that there were no women artists because we do not know of any; we do not know of any, because if any do exist, what they created is of minor interest. The work in this volume postulates a different reality: there are women creative artists in painting and literature, but the way we construct knowledge and conduct analysis has resulted in their neglect. Their works are underrated, even at a time when more and more attention is being paid to minor artists, and when micro- history is being prioritized. Both the inventory itself and the principles that led to the exclusion of these works must be changed. This kind of reassessment has been the goal of our colleague Anne Lafont, with whom this project was conceived. On her arrival at INHA a few years ago in order to participate in writing a dictionary of art historians, she was astounded to see that out of the 400 planned entries, only one and half were dedicated to women (one of whom shared an entry with her husband)14. In other words, the dictionary presumed that there were no women art historians. Along with Melissa Hyde – another contributor to this volume - and Mechtild Fend, Anne Lafont has edited a large volume of texts by women art historians entitled Plumes et pinceaux15. It is no longer possible to say there were no women art historians during the period 1750-1850. Working on early modern women’s artistic production is, in a way, uncovering a previously invisible object, whose existence until now has been forgotten by many of us.
6 Indeed, women who painted themselves or wrote about themselves, or their experience, were engaged in a similar kind of excavation. They gave objective form to what appeared not to exist. Books allow voices to be heard, and paintings make their presence felt16. The painted self-portrait shows above all the worth of a secondary genre, i.e. the portrait, in which women have since the sixteenth century enjoyed some famous successes. Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana thus mirror their working practice in an act of public display, which exhibits their knowledge and abilities. The musical instruments they portray show the range of their artistic talents. The presence of musical scores appears to emphasise the intellectual and scholarly range also evident in other details such as the books or even the chessboard in the self-portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola and her sisters17.
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Sofonisba Anguissola, The Chess Game (Portrait of the artist’s sisters playing chess), 1555
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
7 In these self-portraits, the artists lay bare their own capacities for intellectual reflection and self-awareness. In the book she is holding open, Sofonisba Anguissola has written her signature in this way: Sofonisba Anguissola virgo seipsam fecit anno 155418.
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Sofonisba Anguissola, Autoportrait, 1554
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
8 Not only is she turning herself into an object of her own art, but she is emphasizing the existence of the self-portrait to assert her status as creator: this status is related both to what she has drawn and to her knowledge, as well as to the book in which that knowledge is contained. Given that the self-portrait has effectively been a signature19 for artists since the Middle Ages, particularly in renderings of fictional characters, but also in illuminations where women have inserted self-portraits20, the viewer is here encouraged to recognize this phenomenon and, beyond it, to consider the foundations of authorship, and the relationship between the work, the author and the person – figured here as the self-portrait, the signature and the virgo). Sofonisba also shows how painting and literature were related during the period that is of interest to us. Notwithstanding the rivalry between the arts, painting took inspiration from literature, while literary commentary immortalised painting. From Pliny the Younger to Vasari, painting had been presented in anecdotal accounts as an activity that revealed the relationship between representation and reality. By surrounding themselves with objects whose function was metonymic, women painters depicted themselves as artists and expressed what painting was for them: a scholarly and structured pursuit that allowed them to extract from the world their own ideas about art and to offer new models to this world, within the constraints that they were forced to endure. They used self-portraiture as a “mise en abyme of an art of illusion”, to use Robert Fohr’s expression21: while apparently depicting their reality, they were actually creating it.
9 These women thus drew from real life allegories for the unique way they took part in modern Western painting. Catherine de Hemessen gave us what is considered to be the first self-portrait of an artist at work22.
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Catherine de Hemessen, Autoportrait, 32 × 25 cm (12.6 × 9.8 in), 1548
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
She uses her clothing, her demeanour, and the tools of the painting trade as sign to project her “professionalism”, while at the same time depicting herself as a “respectable woman”23. The canvas on her easel is still only a sketch: a face with red lips. It is impossible to tell whether it is she or someone else, a man or a woman; it is not even clear if it is a portrait. Unless, of course, she is painting her own audience, since she is, after all, looking at us? In self-portraits, women affirmed their existence within communities that were reluctant to include them and, in the process, they invented their own models. They subverted efforts to isolate them, suggesting that everyone see “oneself as an other”24. The issue of models, in all the different senses of that term, is a crucial one. These women artists transposed the lessons they took from the masters in order to become their own models. Their works refer us back to this reflexivity – a dynamic at the heart of modernity that connects us creatively to the world by imagining and transforming it.
10 In this sense, painting became in its turn a model for understanding the processes involved in the other arts. Women appeared in the works they themselves had fashioned by adapting the knowledge they had acquired in order to construct a self- image freed from the bonds imposed upon them by the constraints of real life.
Knowledge, Representations and Creations
11 The topic of painting’s relationship to knowledge is thus a particularly rich one. Indeed,
F0 while there is perhaps a tendency today to oppose knowledge 2D conceived as a handing F0 down of something pre-formed 2D and creation conceived as a new act that opens up the future- the early modern period offers a different vision. In humanist epistemology, knowledge is inventio, a discovery of something ignored, hidden, or even lost until now. In the great period of innovation that was the Renaissance, invention meant rereading the ancient texts that had been lost while measuring them against a real world that was not limited to the external appearance of things. Anatomy is a good example of this approach. The great work of Vesalius, with its plates illustrating human dissections, was entitled On the Fabric of the Human Body; the images included in the work are known for their aesthetic features as well as for their didactic function. It should also be noted that the illustrations contributed as much as did the text to the progress of knowledge. Visual representation was linked to the promotion of observation as a means of learning, in the natural sciences among other fields, as we see in the work of Madeleine Basseporte, who contributed to the botanical understanding of the species cultivated in the Jardin du Roi. Women observed what they could: plants or insects25, as well as their own surroundings and the books they were offered, not to mention themselves. They were part of the humanist enterprise of creation through imitation, to be understood in the double sense of an imitation of nature and of the Ancients. Knowledge in the Renaissance progressed by measuring books against experience, as well as by rewriting these books. Works of art were created through imitating the masters of mimesis.
12 This is the context in which self-portraits by women were produced. By depicting themselves, women created works that displaced inherited knowledge and invented
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new forms of learning through formal innovation. Their work testifies to their erudition. Marguerite de Valois knew her Plutarch, Machiavelli and Aristotle. Catherine des Roches was steeped in Neo-Platonism. Mary Stuart was familiar with the accounts of saintly martyrdom found in Ravisius Textor’s26 De officina, for they were the daily bread of her Latin studies at the French court. Lucy Hutchinson was so expert in Latin that she made the first ‒ and perhaps the best - complete English translation of Lucretius, De natura rerum. Elizabeth of Bohemia conducted a correspondence with Descartes on the topic of philosophy. Marie-Catherine Homassel-Hecquet knew the arguments used in the theological disputes with the Jansenists. Marguerite-Jeanne de Staal-Delaunay was introduced by her sister as someone who knew “all there was to know”27 and Madame de Genlis explored numerous fields of inquiry and gave thought to how they might be taught. There were some female members of the French Academy including Sophie Chéron, Rosalba Carriera, and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. Madeleine Basseporte’s practice of drawing served, first and foremost, a scientific purpose.
13 Armed with learning, women produced singular works that extended the frontiers of knowledge. Like painted self-portraits, literary memoirs allow a better understanding of historical facts and social and political mechanisms, even as they offer psychological insights to the reader. In this volume, Marguerite de Valois, Lucy Hutchinson, Jeanne- Marie Roland, and Madame de Genlis all, attest to this fact. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, women offered their perspectives through genres in which they had particular influence. Their aesthetic choices reflect their social and historical status as well as the paradoxical nature of the access they managed to eke out for themselves in the public sphere. Whether in letters (real or fictional), memoirs, poetic works, or portraits, they transformed received forms, placing their own stamp upon them, and they constructed a space for interaction with the world, one in which indirection, and even absence, had their place. The case of Lucy Hutchinson, as analysed by Michael Soubbotnik, is one model for women’s relationship with learning, creativity and sociability. Lucy Hutchinson thus recounted in her Memoirs of the life of colonel Hutchinson how her husband fell in love with her upon seeing her Latin books on the shelf, even though he had never set eyes on her. The literary and artistic creations of women, who were educated against all odds,were enriched by these paradoxes: their works both allowed them to show who they were and to denounce the fact that they were being overlooked, even if they were partially resigned to this fate. Similarly, Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari demonstrate how, by revealing the morphology and function of plants in scientific illustration, Madeleine Basseporte managed to display her own artistic talent and become known as a woman artist, something which would otherwise have been difficult if not impossible. Thomas Carr explores the tensions highlighted in the writing of Marie-Catherine Homassel, who provides an extreme case of hidden learning and self-affirmation in texts that, while appearing impersonal, are in fact emblematic of how knowledge was seized upon as an act of resistance, and how resistance could be undertaken in the name of knowledge.
14 Thanks to their creativity, the women studied in this collection used their learning as leverage in order to create works that opened up new opportunities for them and others. In her depictions of herself in the process of painting a Virgin and child in 155628, Sofonisba Anguissola not only shows that she can paint works other than portraits; she takes the place of the male painters who had represented themselves as Saint Luke depicting the Holy Virgin, such as Maerten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), who foregrounded Greek works by Galen as a reminder that Luke was a physician29. In
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Anguissola’s image, her canvas depicts the Virgin kissing a nude baby Jesus. This can be seen both as a symbolic depiction of incarnation set within a maternal scene, as in the act of breastfeeding that appears in the painting by Roger Van der Weyden, and as a representation of the Church’s love for mankind, thereby situating the painting within the aesthetic tradition of the Counter-Reformation. At the same time, the naturalistic simplicity of the baby’s kiss, a scene rarely depicted in religious iconography30, brings the painting closer to the genre painting of which Sofonisba Anguissola has been considered one of the inventors, because of her depiction of a chess game with her sisters. In any case, Anguissola pushed the formal boundaries of representation, referencing modes of knowledge in order to show how they animated her life as an artist and as a woman. What is more, she wrote on her painting that she was a modern- day Apelles, thus suggesting how important literature had been to the forging of her identity as an artist31. With the benefit of several centuries hindsight, it is clear how important the sibling relationships in the Anguissola household were; the boys and girls learned and played together, vying with one another to live up to the ancient first names their parents had given them; reality found meaning through representation. In many of the works studied in this volume, as in Anguissola’s paintings, new aspects of reality were found worthy of being depicted, observed and studied: these included women and children, as well as what is hidden from the eye, whether because of its smallness or because its material existence escapes our view - such as the reproductive organs of plants, hidden emotions, or the interior of the body. Furthermore, excluded from knowledge by the obstacles put in their way, these women questioned the very bases of that knowledge, and the acts of knowing that were denied them, by turning the focus back on the driving force behind knowledge: the individual subject.
The Self-Portrait as speculum
15 The women under discussion here were often active in promoting knowledge of the individual embodied subject. Through a depiction of their female bodies in all their specific details and the constraints they were forced to endure, they uncovered the role played by the body, not only in the social arena, but also in the field of knowledge more generally. Descartes’ correspondence with Elizabeth locates the abstract Cartesian subject in a particular body, and as a result establishes a link between philosophy, medicine and self-knowledge. The female body, which was subjected to society’s aesthetic constraints (among other limitations), and was meant to be an image for others to look upon, became host to a paradoxical tension between physical and psychological interiority on the one hand and, on the other, an exteriority that could become the stuff of objective knowledge. Women were defined by the functions of a hidden body. This body, presented within the gendered limits of modesty and decency, was nonetheless crucial to their status as reproductive vessels and, transformed by clothing, exhibited their value as objects of desire. By means of the self-portrait, women redefined this fraught relationship between interior and exterior. In the external sphere of the text or painting, they brought out inner selves endowed with intelligence, feelings, judgements – and even spirituality. Behind the beautiful exterior, they uncovered intellect and creativity. They thus contributed to the advancement of the notion of the individual subject and to progress in the knowledge of this subject’s inner workings. At the end of the period under study, the writings by women that Catriona Seth has edited and analysed show the richness of their examination of the
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relationship between appearances and the inner life of the individual. And Thomas Carr allows us to appreciate not only the role played by spiritual literature in this developing understanding of the individual’s inner life, but also the role of knowledge in the assertion of the value of this intellectual and spiritual space.
16 Women’s self-portraits thus give us an understanding of the links between the self- portrait and the mediaeval speculum, as well as the latter’s relationship with the encyclopaedia studied by Michel Beaujour32. Beaujour explains that the I of the self- portrait confers meaning on the res of the world, which is seen as a space in which the macrocosm is analogically reflected and in which meaning can thus appear: L’autoportrait est une prise de conscience textuelle des interférences et des homologies entre le JE microcosmique et l’encyclopédie macrocosmique. C’est en ce sens qu’il faut voir dans l’autoportrait un miroir du JE répondant en abyme aux grands miroirs encyclopédique du monde33.
17 The self-portrait is the site of a mise en abyme of the relation of the subject to the res, the site of its representation. It marks the emergence of a self-recognition that allows the individual to depict herself in her capacity as a being in the world, and to reveal the nature of consciousness in its potential and its limits. By replacing the observed object with the observing subject, the self-portrait depicts the way in which we look upon the world and allows us to see ourselves in the act of observation. For Louis Marin, the I of the self-portrait is thus one of the “personae of the autoptical current in epistemological fiction”34. It allows for depictions in which the subject is both viewer and protagonist. It depicts the very act of looking, referred to during the Renaissance as autopsy ‒ the act of using one’s own powers of observation in order to acquire knowledge based on experience. The various transformations in meaning undergone by the word autopsy remain murky for lexicographers. Still, they generally tend to refer to the use of one’s own eyes and the act of examining what lies within another self. Indeed, medicine adopted as its own the phrase “know thyself”. The self-portrait permits distinct domains of knowledge to be linked to one another ‒ objective and subjective, those that are noble and those that are not, body and mind ‒ in a self-reflexive move that reveals what cannot be seen by normal means. The self-portrait amounts to a trick or a fiction that allows us to go beyond natural limits in order to obtain knowledge about the embodied subject.
18 Women’s self-portraiture thus throws a particularly intense light on the relationship between gender and knowledge about the body and nature. The Pauline ban on women studying theology provided a justification for their exclusion from access to learning and the mastery of nature that accompanied knowledge within Western culture. By overcoming this ban, women were thus refusing to submit any longer to what was F0 considered natural ‒ their female reproductive role - and what was in reality a social, 2D and perhaps even primarily religious - way of framing nature, one in which propriety was the most powerful instrument of control. In the field of painting, the ban on live models was emblematic of the way in which attempts were made to limit women’s access to knowledge about nature and the consequences that flowed from such learning. Women were not allowed in workshops for reasons of propriety. They were allowed access to moulds of bodies for the purposes of studying anatomy, but not to real bodies. They were obliged to depict themselves according to dress codes that indicated their good character as well as their social status, and hid anything deemed immodest while still displaying desirability. What is more, we know that knowledge of gynaecological anatomy made advances in the sixteenth century, but that women’s
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genitalia were often described as an inverted version of those of men35. The interior of the female body was thus fictionalised in order to turn it into a male preserve given over to reproduction since, in the Aristotelian scheme, women’s role in procreation was fundamentally a passive one. The depiction of an intellectual inner life linked to an individualised body was thus an act of reversal that could be described as obscene, and that was essential in overturning the view that only men had an active and creative purchase on nature through learning. By including references to their virginity and creativity Sofonisba Anguissola and Catherine Des Roches were, on the surface, conforming to propriety, but in fact were subtly subverting the norms governing women’s behaviour. The body was both displayed for everyone to see and hidden – intact, eroticised and disguised. The body in the self-portrait appears as the simulacrum of a real body, which is elsewhere, breathing life into the painting. The self-portrait refers to a body that has changed function, to become the living wellspring of the individual, the mysterious anchorage of personality36.
19 Beginning in the sixteenth century, the querelle des femmes allows women writers to show the decisive role they were playing in the advancement of knowledge by studying the paradoxes of their female “nature”. Marie de Romieu thus wrote that women had gone “as far as to invent the human sciences” even as she compares this powerful role in the establishment of knowledge to women’s powers of procreation: “comme d’elles naissent/ Les hommes, et encore par leur moyen accroissent, / Les sciences aussi qu’on dit d’humanité”37. The associations usually advanced in order to justify the sidelining of women when it came to learning are here redeployed for another purpose. Marie de Romieu put the root of knowledge in the biological function that was exploited socially to imprison women in the role of child-bearer, i.e. in the reduction of the body to this role. She subverted this imprisonment by turning this very function into the source of knowledge - a profane knowledge of the human condition in which her own inner life was at issue. This radical view found expression in her elaboration of a theory that posited a new origin for the sciences and a new way of describing the relationship of humankind with nature.
20 Taking themselves as their own objects of study, little by little women uncovered elements of nature and often developed a particular type of aesthetics that marked the sudden emergence of a part of reality, which had until then received scant attention, but, thanks to their efforts, became vividly present38. This was the aesthetics of the memoir as it came to be written in the wake of Marguerite de Valois, and of the complex dialogues produced by Catherine Des Roches; in painting, it was the art of genre painting, of still life, and above all of the portrait, not to mention their lively botanical and zoological illustrations39. The self-portraits by women artists show just how aware they were of their own innovation, as they invented ways to depict themselves as creators of works of art and of children; and, finally, as both teachers and recipients of an artistic legacy and education.
21 This subversion of the coquette’s mirror, turning it into an instrument of self- knowledge is emblematic, and reflects the ambiguity of the injunction to “know thyself” (as Catherine des Roches explicitly puts it) during the Renaissance, when it referred partially to instrospection, but more often to a moral understanding of our social being. This specular mode involves the kinds of exchanges analysed by Cathy Yandell in her article on Des Roches. Physical appearance functioned as the interface between what women were and what they were supposed to be, how they viewed
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themselves and how others viewed them. In their works, women created characters intended for the eyes of others and were attentive to the ways others viewed them. In this context, they set up an exchange between the viewer and the figures in the work, and encouraged a critique of appearances – and a re-evaluation of reality with all its paradoxical tensions. Not only did they use their knowledge, but they showed its power to cut across divides and free the individual from external constraints.
“The Inner Viewer” and irony
22 Thanks to their creations, these women retook possession of nature, and demonstrated the multiple forms beauty could possess, thereby placing a focus on individual uniqueness and the particularities of history and lived experience. In these mirrors of sisters, mothers and teachers, and in many self-depictions, each woman fashioned her identity, which involved finding a balance between resemblance and difference, between the collective and the individual. Through this playful self-referentiality enabled by self-portraits, women were able to explore many different ways of viewing themselves, and they offered their point of view to those who looked at them. The object became a subject and the play on points of view created a mise en abyme in which the viewer’s motives for looking were called into question. As Melissa Hyde shows in her essay, from Sofonisba Anguissola to Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, women created images that drew on preexisting models and inserted themselves in their work in a concerted and conscious manner, thereby upending expectations, with the pupil now taking the place of the teacher in order to demand recognition for the abilities she had acquired and for the ways she was developing as an artist in her own right.
23 These images objectify and concretize the private experience of coming to understand oneself and the world, in a manner that counters the notion of the body as an invariably decorative object for others to contemplate. These were figures depicting the influence of other artists or of aesthetic education. We find among them many portrayals of women that departed from the aesthetic rules of the day, notably images of older women – in the fictional guise of an aged narrator such as Madame de Genlis – or of “ugly” women, as in the case of Rosalba Carriera. Marguerite de Valois thus opens her Mémoires by saying that she does not recognise the mirror of Brantôme’s text and that she is like an old woman who cannot equate the image offered by the external object with the internal image preserved in her memory. Sofonisba Anguissola as an old woman bears an uncanny resemblance to the servant in her “virgo” paintings40.
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Sofonisba Anguissola, Autoportrait, 1610
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
24 Now her own chaperone and guarantor, she is the auctor whom Van Dyck comes to meet. Madame de Genlis repeatedly referred in her writing to her own works, lending cohesion to a universe built on personal testimony and experience, while still maintaining the distance required by decorum. Marie-Catherine Homassel wrote five professions of faith, which are nothing less than testimonies in which emerges an ever- clearer statement of her theological learning. As mothers, educators, and even girls, they showed how time facilitated the precious acquisition of learning, a process that allowed women to exist socially independently of their looks. They escaped from a conception of nature designed to stifle them into silent reproduction, and they depicted the unique ways in which nature found expression within individuals, with the changes wrought by the passing of time.
25 From professional painters to female politicians, these women displayed their own self- mastery as well as their mastery of an art that worked to constitute their identity and allowed them to assert themselves (even if it does not give us the opportunity to see the “real” self in question). Thus, while early modern self-portraiture perhaps gave the world “une réflexivité qui ne se définit manifestement pas encore tout à fait en termes d’introspection, mais se présente plutôt sous les traits d’une mise en scène de soi à travers la figure d’autrui”41, and while we are faced with personae42 rather than inner selves, we are encouraged to connect these depictions to a conscious being who is indicating she is present, and who is rendered as the site of a self-representation that differs from the one offered by society, a site resistant to the shaping forces of the outside world. Society under the Old Regime was one of appearances, on which French absolutism was built – a regime under which being was utterly bound up with
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representation43. Yet, one could discover an opposing dynamic at work in the area of social mores, a dynamic corresponding to the celebration of the individual described by Burckhardt, and perhaps even more to the separation of public and private spheres, which opened up real spaces where the distinction between inside and outside meant something. The word “conscience” appeared in French in the sixteenth century, in a religious context, and referred to that part of the individual mind engaged in resistance; there was talk of conscience being coerced, and conversely of freedom of conscience, and it is this latter usage that we find in the texts quoted by Thomas Carr. This conscience was the locus of faith, as opposed to the outward social trappings of religious custom; the locus of our intimate choices about belonging, choices in which women played a special role and the space where these choices were safe from external attacks. This inner space was inaccessible to the viewer, but was referenced via the diffraction of images and utterances, whose paradoxes were reconciled within the individual inner self, that peeked out from behind the author’s mask.
26 For example the many images that showed Providence coexisting with Lucretian simulacra in the work of Lucy Hutchinson, were a way of avoiding being hemmed in even by doctrine. The multiplicity of different images in self-portraiture allowed for an unprecedented freedom to indulge in games of smoke and mirrors. In the case of politically active women like Marguerite de Valois or Madame de Genlis, the use of multiple angles was a way of exercising prudence (a virtue whose emblem was the mirror). This prudence allowed a distinction to be made between outer appearances and what lay within and enabled the depiction of women’s lives over time44. Life in society was a theatrical affair, in which one learned to play roles from childhood on without ever being fooled into believing they were real. And in the work of many of our creative artists, the play with mirrors was accompanied by an ironic remove, a humour that signalled a freedom from the constraints of reality, the ability to find space and freedom to move and to confront existing norms. The contributors stress that Catherine des Roches, Marguerite de Valois, Lucy Hutchinson, Mme de Genlis and Rosalba Carriera use irony. But it can be said of all these women that they took the modes of expression addressed to them and turned them to their own discourse, producing an impression that they were quoting (which sometimes makes it difficult to know how to approach their writings). And painting is also another case in point, inviting us to compare similarities and differences among images in order to make sense of them. Among the many forms these ironic confrontations took, one of the most striking is the one pitting man against woman in cases where a female figure was inserted to replace what had been a male figure in the original work upon which the painting was modelled, or, the tension between the real and symbolic in the maternal scenes painted by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, for instance. Sofonisba Anguissola led the way emblematically with her self-portrait with Bernardo Campi45 in which we see that smile, a smile that is the same smile as that of the young girl in the chess game and in her first self-portrait as a child46.
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Bernardino Campi, Painting Sofonisba Anguissola, 1550
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
27 Vasari recounts that, upon seeing this drawing, Michelangelo apparently said he would have preferred a boy crying. In response Sofonisba Anguissola apparently made a drawing, which has become very famous, showing her little brother crying because a crab was pinching his finger as his big sister looked on with a faint smile on her face47.
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Sofonisba Anguissola, Asdrubale Bitten by a Crawfish, 1554
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
28 In this way, she appears to have ironically responded to the request of the humanist painter in order to subvert the hierarchy of passions, artistic genres, and genders, inventing in the process the genre scene. Self-portraits show that women were capable of enjoying a type of intellectual humour that plays with knowledge and conventions in order to create a social space where the energy they carried within them could emerge.
29 Over the period under investigation, this space took shape and reflected an inner space of which they became the “inner viewers”, as Suzanne Necker put it48. They became more and more visible, and the articles by Séverine Sofio, Melissa Hyde and Catriona Seth point to collective trends that these women would go on to utilise in order to conquer a new position in society. While they were always faced with resistance in their capacity as intellectual figures, their portraits were accepted, and even met with unprecedented success in France. The way in which they were received, however, shows how ambiguous this success really was. They could teach, i.e. pass on their knowledge, and it was by this means that they could reach out to one another and construct a collective image, that freed them from limitations. This volume is thus partially chronological, proceeding from the works from the second half of the sixteenth century to those dating from the eighteenth. But the same principles have been applied across the whole period. In the first part, we find a picture of women overcoming difficulties in order to take possession of humanist learning and use it to shape their identity through writing, as well as to have an impact on developments in the arenas of epistemology and politics. They used this learning to resist models of uniformity imposed by the powerful. In political and religious acts of resistance, we can detect the expression of another difference, i.e. feminity and irreducible individuality.
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In the second part of the issue, it becomes clearer that, when women became more visible collectively as a group, they developed complex abilities and strategies allowing talented individuals to be recognised in their own right. But the approaches remain the same for all the individual cases studied here, and elements of the titles of the individual articles could even serve as a list of the components of women’s self- depiction as a whole. We are prompted to recognize and account for the rich and ironic paradoxes in these images, and not to reduce them to the paradoxes of mere imitation, as has often been the case.
30 Indeed, these women succeeded in transforming mimetic genres through creative use of their learning. In this sense, they are part of the poetic humanist project, and they belong to the world of classical aesthetics. But their intelligence and inventiveness has often been denied, and their work seen as merely repetitive. At the end of this period, Chapelain’s report noted: “elles excellent dans tout ce qui est imitative”49 and this criticism continues to echo through time. Yet, imitation has been fundamental to learning and the arts since Aristotle and Quintilian. And one need look no further than the learned creations of Sofonisba Anguissola in order to see that she was already reflecting on the conditions of representation-as-imitation long before Vélasquez’s Las Meninas. Turning the mirror on themselves in order to describe themselves in the world, women took possession of learning in order to outline the space where their identity could be displayed. They created the places in which they could fashion an authorial identity, an oblique reflection of their real selves, that was in turn linked to collective identities. The studies in this issue, by giving a voice back to these works, are an attempt to uncover the extent of the learning that went into them and to serve as testimony to the uniqueness and energy of the women who created them.
NOTES
1. My thanks go to Natania Meeker and Hélène Bah-Ostrowiecki for their precious advice in the writing of this text. 2. « Savoirs, identités et représentation des femmes à l’époque moderne, Autoportraits, autofictions XVIe-XVIIIe », 2013-2014, organised by Anne Lafont (INHA et UPEM) and Caroline Trotot (UPEM), in connection with the seminar on gender at the INHA, co-organised by Anne Lafont and Frédérique Desbuissons (INHA). 3. Portraits and Fictions of the Self: Representations of Women’s Knowledge in the 16th-18th Centuries, February 2014, organised by Béatrice Mousli-Bennett (USC) and Caroline Trotot (UPEM). 4. Artistes Femmes, 2014, organised by Marcella Lista. 5. The articles that appear in this online issue (in English) will also be published in French as part of the Garnier series entitled masculin/féminin. 6. The considerable role played by the 1977 exhibition “Women artists 1550-1950” organised by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and the accompanying catalogue is generally acknowledged: Ann Sutherland Harris & Linda Nochlin,
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Women Artists: 1550-1950, Los Angeles / New York, LACMA / Knopf,1976, French trans., Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Femmes peintres, 1550-1950, Paris, éditions des Femmes, 1981. 7. The scholarship on women artists and scholars of the early modern period to which we owe a debt, especially in the field of literature, is far too extensive to summarize here. Please go to the SIEFAR website, which has an extensive list of references: http://siefar.org/event/ag- siefar-2016/, accessed on 17 February 2016. 8. On the topic of knowledge among women in the early modern period, please see in particular Femmes savantes, savoirs de femme: Du crépuscule de la Renaissance à l’aube des Lumières, Actes du colloques de Chantilly (22-24 septembre 1995), Colette Nativel ed., Genève, Droz, 1999. 9. See Hannah Williams, « Autoportrait ou portrait de l’artiste peint par lui-même? Se peindre soi-même à l’époque moderne », Images Re-vues [Web], 7/ 2009, posted on 1 September 2009, accessed on 8 June 2015, URL : http://imagesrevues.revues.org/574. 10. Pascal Bonafoux, Les peintres et l’autoportrait, Genève, Skira, 1984; Omar Calabrese, L’art de l’autoportrait, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2006. 11. On this question in literature, Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, Paris, Seuil, 1980; Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, transl. Yara Milos, New York, New York University Press, 1991. On the links between self-portraiture and autobiographical fiction, Vincent Colonna, Autofiction & autres mythomanies littéraires, Auch, Tristram, 2004. On these questions, as well as the relationship between literature and painting, Louis Marin, L’écriture de soi, Paris, PUF, 1999. 12. Rensselaer Lee, Ut pictura poesis, Humanisme et théorie de la peinture XVe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Macula, 1988. 13. We are aware that these terms are also anachronistic when applied to men, which only makes things even more complicated, and shows that the questions we ask about works by women are not limited to them, but apply to artistic works as a whole. With regard to women artists, see the Dictionnaire universel des femmes créatrices, Béatrice Didier, Antoinette Fouque, Mireille Calle- Gruber eds., Paris, Des femmes, 2013. 14. Mechthild Fend, Melissa Hyde, Anne Lafont, ed., Plumes et Pinceaux. Discours de femmes sur l’art en Europe (1750-1850), 2 volumes, Paris, Presses du Réel/INHA, collection « Œuvres en société », 2012, p. 12. A similar observation also lies behind the Dictionnaire universel des femmes…, op. cit., Antoinette Fouque, p. XIX : “In the Panorama des idées contemporaines de Gaëtan Picon (1957), there are only four women among the 212 revolutionary thinkers who represent ‘the unprecedented change’ that took place in the post-war period.” 15. Ibid. 16. They can be viewed in Frances Borzello, Femmes au miroir, une histoire de l’autoportrait féminin, Paris, Thames and Hudson, 1998, translation of Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits, London, Thames and Hudson, 1998, in which all the factual information included here about women’s self- portraits can also be found. See also Liana De Girolami Cheney, Alicia Craig Faxon, Kathleen Russo eds., Self-Portraits by Women Painters, Washington, New Academia Publishing, 2009. 17. On these various issues, see Mary D. Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist Author(s)”, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), p. 556-622, Published by: on behalf of the University of Chicago Press Renaissance Society of America http://www.jstor.org/stable/2863021 Accessed: 08-02-2016, particularly p. 597 ff. Sofonisba Anguissola, see also Omar Calabrese, L’art…, op. cit., p. 226, and Sofonisba Anguissola, The Chess Game (Portrait of the artist’s sisters playing chess), 1555, 72 × 97 cm (28.3 × 38.2 in), Poznan, National Museum https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Chess_Game_- _Sofonisba_Anguissola.jpg, accessed on 6 May 2016. 18. Sofonisba Anguissola, Autoportrait, 1554, 19.5 × 12.5 cm (7.7 × 4.9 in), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sofonisba_Anguissola_002.jpg, accessed on 6 May 2016.
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19. On signatures, André Chastel, “L’art de la signature”, Revue de l’art, n° 26, 1968 and Charlotte Guichard, La signature dans le tableau aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles : identité, réputation et marché de l’art https://www.cairn.info/revue-societes-et-representations-2008-1-page-47.htm, Omar Calabrese, L’art…, op. cit., chap. 1 “L’artiste-signature, le problème de l’identité, de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge”, p. 28-47. 20. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, « Guda et Claricia: deux “autoportraits” féminins du XIIe siècle », Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire [Web], 19 | 2004, published on 27 November 2006, accessed 3 February 2016, http://clio.revues.org/1602; DOI : 10.4000/clio.1602. 21. Robert FOHR, “AUTOPORTRAIT, peinture”, Encyclopædia Universalis [Web], accessed 3 February 2016, https://www-universalis--edu-com.fennec.u-pem.fr/encyclopedie/autoportrait-peinture/, accessed 6 May 2016. 22. Catherine de Hemessen, Autoportrait, 32 × 25 cm (12.6 × 9.8 in), 1548, Kunstmuseum, Basel, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hemessen-Selbstbildnis.jpg, accessed 6 May 2016. 23. Frances Borzello, op. cit., p. 39. 24. This expression is borrowed from the title of Paul Ricœur’s book, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1996. 25. Before Madeleine Basseporte’s work, one of course thinks of Maria Sybilla Merian. See Natalie Zemon Davis, Juive, catholique, protestante, trois femmes en marge au XVIIe siècle, Paris, Seuil, 1997 and Ella Reitsma, Merian and Daughters : women of Art and Science, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. 26. See infra Colette Winn, and Sylvène Edouard, « Un exercice scolaire et épistolaire : les lettres latines de Marie Stuart, 1554 », Paris, Cour de France.fr, 2013, published on 1st janvier 2013 (http://cour-de-france.fr/article2597.html), accessed 2 February 2015. 27. Catriona Seth, La fabrique de l’intime, Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. Bouquins, 2013, p. 95-96. 28. Reproduction dans Borzello, Femmes…, op. cit., p. 44. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sofonisba_Anguissola#/media/File:Self- portrait_at_the_Easel_Painting_a_Devotional_Panel_by_Sofonisba_Anguissola.jpg, accessed 6 May 2016. 29. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Saint_Luc_peignant_la_Vierge_%28Maarten_van_Heemskerck%29.jpeg ou http:// www.mbar.org/services/ressources/dossier_pedagogique_hh.pdf, accessed 6 May 2016. 30. Michelle Bianchini, « Les autoportraits de Sofonisba Anguissola, femme peintre de la Renaissance », Italies [Web], 3 | 1999, published on 27 March 2010, accessed 3 February 2016, URL : http://italies.revues.org/2600. 31. Quoted by Omar Calabrese, L’art…, op.cit., p. 226. 32. Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, op. cit., p. 29-41. 33. “The self-portrait is a textual coming to terms with the interferences and homologies between the microcosmic I and the macrocosmic encyclopaedia. It is in this sense that the self- portrait should be seen as a mirror of the I, containing a mise en abyme of the great encyclopaedic mirrors of the world”, Ibid., p. 30. 34. Louis Marin, op. cit, p. 10. 35. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1990. See also Dominique Brancher, Équivoques de la pudeur, Genève, Droz, 2015, p. 273 “[…] de par l’introversion de ses organes génitaux, thèse que Galien insuffle à la médicine occidentale, le corps féminin constitue par excellence ‘l’espace du dedans’”, Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie à l’apogée du Moyen-Âge, Paris, Flammarion, 1983, p. 224. 36. The interest during the Renaissance for the dramatic trial of Martin Guerre is well known thanks to the account of Jean de Coras. Nathalie Zemon Davies, Le Retour de Martin Guerre, Paris, Taillandier, 2008, “coll. Texto”. On the relationship body/person, see also, Marie-Clarté Lagrée, “ C’est moy que je peins” Figures de soi à l’automne de la Renaissance, Paris, PUPS, 2011, p. 63-71.
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37. “Since from them are born/ Men, and what is more thanks to them grows,/ The knowledge we call the humanities”. Marie de Romieu, “Brief Discours Que l’excellence de la femme surpasse celle de l’homme…, in Les Premières Œuvres Poétiques (1581)”, A. Winandy éd., Paris, Droz, 1972, v. 227-237. 38. See also Vasari’s comments, upon coming across Sofonisba Anguissola’s chess game, about its power as a picture, as well as his remarks about women as creators: “Ma se le donne sì bene sanno fare gl’uomini vivi, che maraviglia che quelle che vogliono sappiano anco fargli sì bene dipinti ?” G. Vasari, op. cit., (Vita di Benvenuto Garofalo), p. 1090, quoted by Michelle Bianchini, “Les autoportraits de Sofonisba Anguissola, femme peintre de la Renaissance”, previously cited article. On the issue of women painters and their depiction of the role of biology, see especially Mary Garrard, p. 574. 39. With regard to Madeleine Basseporte, see for example: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b69550869/f27.item. 40. Sofonisba Anguissola, Autoportrait, 1610, taille et localisation inconnues, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self_portrait,_1610.jpg, accessed 6 May 2016, Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, Autoportrait vers 1610, Berne collection Gottfried Keller, p. 192 et Autoportrait au clavecin, 1561, 83 x 65, Zarl Spencer Collection, Althorp, reproduit dans Borzello, Femmes, op. cit., p. 37. 41. “... a reflexivity that did not yet unequivocally define itself in terms of introspection, but rather in the form of a depiction of oneself in the guise of someone else”, Jean-Philippe de Beaulieu, Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “La réflexivité en question”, Dans les miroirs de l’écriture, la réflexivité chez les femmes écrivains de l’Ancien Régime, Jean-Philippe de Beaulieu, Diane Desrosiers- Bonin eds, Paragraphes vol. 17, Montréal, Université de Montréal, 1998, p. 8. 42. C’est à la persona à la fin de la Renaissance qu’est consacrée l’étude de Marie-Clarté Lagrée, “C’est moy que je peins”, op. cit. 43. The work of Louis Marin comes particularly to mind, but also that of Denis Crouzet and Nicolas Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’État, De la Renaissance à l’absolutisme, Seyssel, Champ vallon, 2013. 44. See my article below. 45. See Borzello, op. cit., p. 43, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofonisba_Anguissola#/media/ File:Self-portrait_with_Bernardino_Campi_by_Sofonisba_Anguissola.jpg 46. See Borzello, op. cit., p. 40, and http://www.rivagedeboheme.fr/pages/arts/peinture-15-16e- siecles/sofonisba-anguissola.html title: L’alphabet. 47. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofonisba_Anguissola#/media/File:Sofonisba_Anguissola_- _Asdrubale_Bitten_by_a_Crawfish_-_WGA00698.jpg 48. See the article by Catriona Seth below. 49. “They excel in all things imitative”. See below, Séverine Sofio, Rapport Chapelain, séance du 5 floréal an IV [25 avril 1796], text reproduced in Lacroix, “Les femmes exclues de l’enseignement des beaux-arts par la République française”, Revue universelle des arts, n°17, 1863, p. 55-61.
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Humanist knowledge and practices of resistance Savoirs humanistes et résistances
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The Dialogic Body and the Humanist Woman in the Self-Portraiture of Catherine des Roches Le corps dialogique et la femme humaniste dans l’autoportrait de Catherine Des Roches
Cathy Yandell
1 Uncovering the individual in the early modern period proves to be a rather daunting enterprise. As the story of Martin Guerre and many other sixteenth-century examples illustrate, individuals were defined less by what we might call character or particular traits than by the functions they fulfilled in society, as indicated by class, rank, familial role, and gender, as well as their “situatedness” in a particular geographical location – the Périgord countryside for Montaigne, Lyon for Maurice Scève, and Anjou for du Bellay. Catherine des Roches poses particular challenges as we seek to unveil her self- portrait: beyond her predicable identification with her native Poitiers and the bourgeois status afforded to a lawyer’s daughter, she forged a unique position for herself as a single woman of note, as half of an intellectual duo along with her mother, and as the first woman to negotiate the publication of her collected letters in the history of France. I propose to examine – and to rethink – a few commonplaces that have come to define Catherine des Roches in contemporary critical discourse, and in so doing to explore the nature of the dialogic body presented in her work.
Corporeal (Af)filiation
2 Symbiotically attached to one another, Catherine Fradonnet and her mother, Madeleine Eboissard, consciously chose to conflate their individual selves in the joint name under which they published and by which they came to be known: les Dames Des Roches. Capitalizing on their almost identical traits in both body and spirit, Madeleine dedicates the first poem of their first published works to her daughter: Ma fille unique, et de moy cher tenue,
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Non pour autant que tu en es venue Et que dans toy je me voy un pourtraict Du poil, du teint, de la taille, et du traict, Façon, maintien, parolle, contenance Et l’aage seul en faict la difference.1
3 The asyndeton of line 5 “Façon /maintien/ parolle/ contenance” verbally underscores the continuity and the ostensible infinity of likeness between mother and daughter. The internal rhyme, “dans toy je me voy,” adds to the seamlessness of first and second- person pronouns, and the caesura after “et l’aage seul” provides a rhythmic pause emphasizing that were it not for age, the two beings would be indistinguishable. For her part, Catherine uses the image of a shadow to evoke her exceptional attachment – both corporal and spiritual – to her mother: “Or connoissant que je tiens de vous, non seulement ceste mortelle vie, mais encore la vie de ma vie, je vous suy partout comme l’ombre le cors.”2
4 Madeleine and Catherine’s contemporaries, too, evoked the indelible mother-daughter bond. Pierre Langlois imagines the two women metaphorically as a single, glorious bird: A l’unique oiseau j’accompare Ces deux Dames de vertu rare, Jointes d’un lien si heureux Que ce n’est qu’une d’elles deux.3
5 This image is striking in its opposition to the flighty bird often associated with women of the time, as illustrated in a famous engraving from Gilles Corozet’s Hecatomgraphie of 1543 titled “La nature foeminine.”4
6 As Guillaume Colletet describes their relationship in his translation of Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, Éloges des hommes illustres (1644), “il y avoit entre elles une si grande union de coeurs, et de volontez, et une affection mutuelle si puissante et si forte, qu’elles disoient hautement qu’il n’estoit pas au pouvoir de la Mort mesme de les separer jamais l’une de l’autre”5.The wishes of Madeleine and Catherine that they never be separated did in fact come to pass, since they both died in October of 1584, victims of the plague that ravaged Poitiers.
7 Contemporary critics have also insisted on a reciprocal devotion and the melding of wills between mother and daughter6. Colette Winn concludes, “Point de conflit entre la mère et la fille car désormais l’Autre se confond au Même.”7 Similarly, Anne Larsen argues that “Catherine did not need to forge by herself a unique identity since she had in Madeleine a model of the scholarly woman whom she could imitate and then surpass.”8
8 In an explicit reversal of roles, Madeleine thanks her daughter in the “Epistre à ma fille” for caring for her through a number of trying situations (Madeleine was twice widowed while still relatively young, and lengthy legal procedures regarding property continued to plague her): Tu as, enfant, apporté un cueur fort Pour resister au violent effort Qui m’accabloit, et m’offris dès enfance Amour, conseil, support, obeissance. . . . Que tesmoignant à la posterité Combien d’honneur tu auras merité, Tu sois un jour par vertu immortelle,
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Je t’ay tousjours souhaitée telle9. Thus by her “vertu immortelle” (‘vertu’ in the dual sixteenth-century sense of both virtue and force or energy) Catherine has become the person her mother has wished her to be (“je t’ai tousjours souhaitée telle”). Without casting twenty-first century judgments on a sixteenth-century arrangement, we can nonetheless signal other passages in Madeleine’s writing wherein Catherine is credited with the mother’s happiness: “[tu] prends peine de me tirer hors des nuitz Cimerienes, où l’ignorance et la viellesse me tenoient ensevelie. Tu resembles au vert rameau qui, par sa naïve grace … n’oublie jamais la vielle souche qui luy a donné un peu de matiere sans forme.”10
9 While at least one critic asserts that Catherine’s mother served as “le garant de [sa] liberté”11, it seems to me that the nature of her freedom is more fraught than we have previously acknowledged. Even though Catherine’s social status is not that of “wife,” it remains that of “daughter” – and both roles in the sixteenth century involve exigencies that by convention define and confine them. While it would be anachronistic to suggest that Catherine sought complete physical and social autonomy, she nonetheless transcends familial bonds through her fictional literary creation, notably in the dialogue between the Neoplatonic lovers Sincero and Charite in her 1578 Œuvres. An examination of her characters who speak in the first person reveals an important dialogic connection between the bodiless, sexless daughter of the letters and the physically engaged lover of her fictional work.
Embodied Pleasure
10 The repeated references to the symbiotic sameness of mother and daughter neglect one quality that does indeed separate and distinguish Catherine from her mother: her celebrated “chasteté”, the quintessential quality for ensuring the good name of a single woman. As the character Raffaella notes in Piccolomini’s dialogue of 1539, “l’onore non è riposto in altro, se non nella stimazione appresso agli uomini” (honor is held nowhere other than in repute among men)12. Both Catherine and her mother understand this dictum and exploit it repeatedly. In the first sentence of her dedication to the Secondes Œuvres, Madeleine mentions her daughter’s “honnéte pudeur”. While it would not be appropriate for a young woman in polite society to boast about her own chastity, Catherine skillfully ventriloquizes the question in her Dialogue de Charite et de Sincero. In this dialogue, Charite, the fictional character who most closely resembles the author, refers to herself as “une chaste maistresse” (Œuvres 274). The equivalence of Catherine and her fictional character is corroborated by the name Charite itself: the letters of the two lovers’ names, Charite and Sincero, form an almost perfect anagram of Catherine Rocis13. Sincero also addresses his beloved as “chaste et belle” (260) and “chaste, sçavante et belle” (p. 266). Not coincidentally, the operative terms other writers use most frequently to describe Catherine are “belle,” “savante”, and especially “chaste”. Scévole de Sainte Marthe dedicates a poem to her titled “Sonnet encor à elle, par sa grand’ chasteté”14.
11 If Charite is meant to represent Catherine in the “Dialogue de Charite et de Sincero,” how are we to interpret what might be called the passionate version of chastity advanced in this work? The dialogue opens with a discussion of the love at first sight, or innamoramento, of Sincero, who has been carried to heaven by Charite’s divine
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beauties (p. 252). Sincero’s exaggerated Neoplatonic claims are met with a gently mocking rebuttal by Charite: SINCERO: Madame, je persevere tousjours en mes premiers propos, et ma requeste premiere, demandant à voz graces, puisqu’il leur plaist bien quelquefois de me conduire au Ciel, qu’elles ne desdaignent non plus de me guider en terre. CHARITE. Puisque vous ne pouvez encore vous guider en terre sans ayde d’autruy, comment vous mettez-vous à vouloir rechercher le Ciel ?
SINCERO. Vous en estes cause, Madame, car j’y suis conduit par vous, et vous par moy. CHARITE. Si n’ay-je point souvenance d’y avoir jamais esté ; mais possible m’en ferez- vous revenir la mémoire me disant ce que j’aperceu de plus esmerveillable en ce voyage. (p. 253)
12 Charite’s playful humor deflects Sincero’s encomium here, but without squelching his efforts. In a series of twelve sonnets and two chansons, Sincero declares his love, replete with Petrarchan images of the suffering poet’s captivity: … Je veux mourir cent fois en ma douce prison, Laissant ma liberté, ma vie, et ma raison Dans voz yeux, dans vos mains, et vostre blonde tresse. (p. 262)
13 While Catherine’s rebuke of Neoplatonic and Petrarchan commonplaces is manifest, the story does not end there. In another series of sonnets, Charite lays out her requirements: her lover must be kind, temperate, just, prudent and strong. Above all, he must remain faithful to her: “Je veux que Sincero m’ayme juqu’à la mort / Me retenant pour tout unique maistresse” (271). A subsequent passage reprises this sentiment: Sincero mon desir, je n’eu jamais envie D’aymer autre que vous : mais aussi ne pensez D’aymer autre que moy, et ne vous avancez De chercher autre nœud que celuy qui nous lie. (p. 272)
14 While Charite speaks of “les honnestes plaisirs … d’une chaste maistresse,” (p. 275), she also evokes “cette flamme nouvelle” (p. 273) and addresses Sincero as “mon doux feu.” She eventually admits her own love for him, “Recevant un amour, un amour je veux rendre / A vous, mon Sincero, et confesse mon heur …” (p. 275). In Charite’s final sonnet, the speaker is at last convinced of her lover’s sincerity and pens a euphoric response, followed by a chanson in which the speaker’s sentiments take on physiological manifestations: “Incessamment je souspire,/Et ne fay que lamenter …“(p. 281-82). In a final display of ardor, Sincero responds to Charite’s melancholy, inviting her to look upon herself, but then counters his invitation in a mannerist retraction: Ha! n’y regardez plus, Madame, car j’ay poeur Que vous reconnoissant si parfaicte en mon cueur, Vous-mesme ne brulez dans voz propres flammes ! (p. 283)
15 The poetry of both Charite and Sincero is thus replete with the conflicting emotions of lovesickness : melancholy, lack of sleep, and the verbs “soupirer,” “lamenter” and “bruler” all record physical effects on the lovers, betraying a corporal passion that seems as much a part of this idealized love as the chastity it seeks so assiduously to represent.
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The Epistolary Body and the Economy of Exchange
16 While Madeleine and Catherine des Roches were heralded as the first women to publish their collected correspondence in France, they were in all likelihood the first writers of any gender at all to publish their collected letters. Estienne Pasquier claims to have been the first to publish a collection of private letters in France, but the records of publisher Abel L’Angelier show otherwise: the privilèges for the Dames des Roches were signed on March 1, 1586, and those of Pasquier on June 7 of the same year. Pasquier, a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris, was a participant in the Des Roches’ literary salon and held Catherine in the highest regard, “entre les belles, honnestes et vertueuses dames de la France”15. Perhaps the Des Roches were willing to cede to Pasquier this claim to fame in exchange for the public compliments of this well-known figure in the Parisian literary establishment16.
17 This likely quid pro quo suggests the kind of relationship between letter-writers that abounds in the Missives. Arlette Jouanna has analyzed the correspondence of nobles in this period, noting the recurrence of the words “dette”, “obligation”, “service”, and “devoir”17. Catherine, too, often frames the exchange of letters in terms of gift and return gift. To a correspondent who has offered her a poem, she responds: Si je voulois tourner vostre don en eschange, Respondant aux beaux vers escris de vostre main, Ce serroit vous priver d’une haute louange : Car le don vient du ciel, et le change est humain. (Missives 325)
18 Marcel Mauss, in his canonical Essai sur le don, emphasizes the personal and social dimensions of exchange in every human society18. In breaking slightly with this tradition, Jacques Derrida notes that each time there is restitution or a countergift, the gift is annulled – there is payment or discharge of a debt19. Catherine des Roches’s letters illustrate that this latter principle did not necessarily obtain in sixteenth- century correspondence: in a tautological twist, Catherine insists on the continuity of epistolary indebtedness: “Mais je me trompe vraiment, plus je paye ma debte, plus je suis obligee: puis que vostre excellence est telle que vous honorant je me fais honneur” (Missives, p. 205-206).
19 This letter aptly illustrates the nature of Catherine des Roches’s correspondence as “lettres de compliment,” steeped in the etiquette of salon and court culture, wherein epistolary writers strive principally to please, or not to displease20. Luc Vaillancourt points out that the strategy of drawing attention to the other becomes a subtle way to honor oneself in a culture in which courtesy is a supreme virtue21. But while the repayment of praise at first glance appears to be a return compliment, upon closer examination, we see that it constitutes a deflection of the sentiments expressed in the admirer’s letter: “Vous dites que vous ne me pouvez dignement louër. Vrayment je le croy, mais c’est pource que je suis indigne de loüange : et puis vostre excellence ne loüe que ce qui est excellent comme elle”22 (p. 166). Thus while still aiming to please, Catherine is simultaneously firmly rejecting suitors. Seen in this light, Catherine’s goals appear to be at cross-purposes, at once inviting and declining, embracing and dismissing.
20 In a related example, having received a mirror from an unidentified admirer, Catherine adroitly turns around the meaning of the gift. Not only did the mirror appear as a metonym for coquettishness in this period, as evidenced by François Clouet’s iconic
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“Dame à sa toilette” (among others), but it also served to exploit the friendly rival motif, as in Ronsard’s “Je parangonne à voz yeulx ce crystal”23, in which the poet envies the felicitous mirror that will be able to gaze at length at the lady. Moreover, in many visual depictions, the mirror appears as Venus’s accessory, as in Titian’s “Venus with a Mirror” of 1555. Given this context, the gift to Catherine was no doubt intended as compliment to her beauty, yet she rejects that reading and turns it into a lesson in Greek philosophy: “Ayant receu de vostre liberalité un veritable et precieux miroir, j’ay pensay lire dedans sa claire face la sentence d’Apollon, Cognois-toy mesmes.” (p. 207-208)
21 In contrast to Catherine’s deliberate cluelessness about the possible meaning of this mirror in the Missives, consider the sonnet from Charite to Sincero in which Charite sees her own reflection in Sincero’s thoughts, eyes, and heart: Ouvrez donc, s’il vous plaist ; ha mon Dieu ! je me voy ! Ha mon Dieu ! que de bien, que d’honneur je reçoy ! Après que vous m’avez par mille vers chantée, Je me voy dans vos yeux et dedans vos écrits Et dedans votre cueur et dedans vos esprits Par la Muse et l’amour si bien représentée.
22 In this poem, in opposition to the previous example, the amorous association with the mirror is not rejected, but rather embraced: the lover’s eyes reflect the beloved, thus affirming Sincero’s assurances to Charite. Once again, what cannot be espoused by the writer Catherine is appropriated and embellished by her character Charite.
23 Catherine des Roches may not have lived a passionate or erotically inspired life, but she created one for her characters. In Charite she constructs an independent spirit who nonetheless grew to trust her lover, and in Sincero, a lover for whom Ficinian reciprocity and mutual devotion are paramount24. Catherine, foreseeing potential criticisms that she should not write love poetry, responds proactively that she wrote only what she conjured up, not what she had personally seen, for she knew Sincero only through her imagination (p. 182). She describes him as the “parfait amoureux”, modestly noting that just as God created Eve to be like Adam, so she has created Charite to be as much like Sincero as possible, “à son patron le plus qu’il m a esté possible… luy donna[nt] une femme semblable à luy (p. 182-183). Catherine states explicitly elsewhere that she is not envious of Charite’s happiness (Missives 183), but it is impossible to confirm the veracity or the fallaciousness of that claim. Perhaps the lady doth protest too much, but in any case, the text remains as historical document, and the gesturing toward reciprocity so evident in the Missives finds its full expression in the amorous relationship embodied by Charite and Sincero.
24 The literary portrayals of Catherine, sketched by both herself and others, did indeed project a chaste, intellectual persona unfettered by sexual attachment. At the same time, as we have seen, that disembodied stance is often complicated and moderated in the text by a lexical field in which physicality, love, and even passion appear25. The verdict remains open as to whether Catherine’s approach to the relationship between the intellect and the physical body is ultimately an example of dialectic, in which a synthesis is achieved between the antithetical poles of the chaste and bodiless erudite, on the one hand, and the sensuous, playful woman-in-her-own body, on the other. Most contemporary critics have argued that Catherine des Roches, through a combination of her bold writing, her lily-white personal reputation, and her mother’s watchful protection, succeeded in negotiating for herself a literary renown that would have been
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impossible under other circumstances. Given the social strictures of the epoch, had Catherine des Roches married, she may indeed have been forced to abandon her profession. But her self-portraiture in the largest sense suggests another fundamental conclusion that the epithet of “tresvertueuse et docte fille” obscures: in Charite, who both reflects and extends the first-person narrator of the poems and letters, she inscribes a dialogic body that is at once learned and sensuous, resistant and engaged. In so doing, Catherine des Roches paves the way for a new kind of female writer, if only in a fictional world – a sexualized and embodied humanist woman.
NOTES
1. Catherine des Roches and Madeleine des Roches, Œuvres (1579), Anne R. Larsen ed., Genève, Droz, 1993, p. 82, my emphasis. 2. Catherine des Roches and Madeleine des Roches, Secondes Œuvres, Anne R. Larsen ed., Geneva, Droz, 1998, p. 119. 3. Pierre Langlois, Discours des Hieroglyphes égyptiens, Paris, Abel L’Angelier, 1583, fol. 58v-59r. 4. Gilles Corrozet, Hecatomgraphie (Paris: Denis Jadot, 1543) n.p. The emblem can be viewed in Gallica, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k70938k/f2.image.r=Corrozet,%20Gilles, vue 169. The motto is also revealing: “Je suys de la complexion / Des petits oyseaux que je garde./Je suys d’aussi maulvaise garde / Qu’ilz sont, en leur condition.” 5. Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, Éloges des hommes illustres qui depuis un siècle ont fleuri en France dans la profession des lettres, composés en latin par Scévole de Ste-Marthe, et mis en français par G. Colletet, Paris, Antoine de Sommaville, 1644, p. 340. 6. Madeleine Lazard, “Les Dames des Roches: une dévotion réciproque et passionnée”, ed. Roger Duchêne et Pierre Ronzeaud, “Autour de Mme de Sévigné. Deux colloques pour un tricentenaire. Rapports mère-fille au XVIIe siècle et de nos jours; Les Voyages en France au XVIIe siècle”, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 1997, p. 9-18. 7. “Miroir d’elle-même, l’image filiale fait naître en la mère non le désir de maîtrise, d’autorité, de possession, mais plutôt la voluptueuse sensation que procure la transgression des limites, l’abolition des divisions, la fusion/ confusion à l’autre”, Colette H. Winn, “Mère/ fille/ femme/ muse: maternité et créativité dans les œuvres des Dames des Roches”, Travaux de Littérature, 1991, 55. 8. Anne R. Larsen, “Legitimizing the Daughter’s Writing: Catherine des Roches’ Proverbial Good Wife”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 21.4 (1990): p. 559-574, citation p. 573-574. 9. Catherine des Roches and Madeleine des Roches, op. cit., p. 83-84. 10. Catherine des Roches and Madeleine des Roches, Les Missives, Anne R. Larsen ed., Geneva, Droz, 1999, p. 5. 11. Lazard, op. cit., p. 17. 12. La Raffaella, ovvero Della bella Creanza delle Donne, Milan, Daelli, 1862, p. 50. See also Jean-Claude Carron, “Les Noms de l’honneur féminin à la Renaissance. Le Nom tu et le non dit”, Poétique 67, 1986, p. 269-280. On the general question of women’s honor in the period, see La catégorie de l’Honneste dans la culture du XVIe siècle, Gabriel-André Pérouse ed., Saint-Étienne, Université de Saint-Étienne, 1985.
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13. See Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 176. 14. BnF, Ancien Fonds français 862, 33v, cited by Larsen, Les Missives, op. cit., p. 310. 15. Estienne Pasquier, Lettres familières, Dorothy Thickett ed., Geneva, Paris, Droz, 1974, p. 187. 16. As Luc Vaillancourt puts it, “quitte à racheter ensuite la sympathie des dames de Poitiers par quelques compliments”, La lettre familière au seizième siècle. Rhétorique humaniste de l’épistolaire, Paris, Champion, 2003, p. 319, n. 9. 17. Arlette Joanna, Le devoir de révolte. La noblesse française et la gestation de l’État moderne (1559-1661), Paris, Fayard, 1989, p. 83. 18. Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques, Paris, PUF, 2007. 19. “Pour qu’il y ait don, il faut qu’il n’y ait pas de réciprocité, de retour, d’échange, de contre- don ni de dette”, Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps, Paris: Galilée, 1991, p. 24 ; Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 12. 20. “Cette passion de plaire se situe au carrefour de préoccupations morales, esthétiques et sociologiques et forme la trame des relations mondaines de l’Ancien Régime”, Marie-Claire Grassi, Lire l’épistolaire, Paris, Dunod, 1998, p. 36. 21. Vaillancourt, op. cit., p. 324. 22. Other examples of this techniques abound: “Tout ainsi que ma presence ne vous sçauroit bienheurer, ainsi l’absence de moy ne vous peut rendre mal-heureux, pource que vous portez tousjours avec vous les moyens que vous dites estre seuls forgeurs de vostre felicité”, Missives, p. 169 ; “Mais je ne sçaurois penser quelle occasion vous avez prise pour vous loüer de moy, sinon celle que vous m’avez donné pour me loüer de vous ; pource que j’ay receu les faveurs dont il vous a pleu m’estre si liberal, qu’il sembloit que me faisant grace, vous-mesme la receviez. Mais n’estoit-ce point assez (Monsieur) de m’avoir obligée par tant de bienfaits, sans que je le soie encore par l’infinité de vos courtoisies ; si je dis jamais parole qui vous plust, vous me l’avez renduë, comme la terre fertile qui pour un grain rend un espy”, p. 175; “Monsieur, il me semble voir le beau et bon desiré par les Philosophes, quand je pense aux deux personnages engravez au frond et au sein de vos lettres : il me semble encore que parlant d’eux et de moy, vous avez representé une image de vous mesmes ; car toutes ces excellences dont vous parlez se viennent rendre en vostre ame…”, p. 198. 23. Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager et Michel Simonin ed., Paris, Gallimard, 1993-1994, vol. 1, p. 62. 24. This same reciprocity is resumed in “Chanson de Sincero” and “Chanson de Charite” in Les Secondes Œuvres, op. cit., p. 262-265. 25. For an analysis of parallel questions in the “Dialogue d’Iris et Pasithée” see Cathy Yandell, “Les ames sans cors et les cors sans ames. La pédagogie dialectique de Catherine des Roches”, Lectrices d’Ancien Régime, Isabelle Brouard-Arends ed., Rouen, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003, p. 557-566. Several studies have examined the corporal nature of Catherine des Roches, “La puce de Madame Des Roches”, Ann Rosalind Jones, “Contentious Readings: Urban Humanism and Gender Difference” in La Puce de Madame Des-Roches (1582)”, Renaissance Quarterly 48.1, 1995, p. 109-128; Cathy Yandell, “Of Lice and Women. La Puce de Madame des Roches”, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies n° 20, 1990, p. 123-135; Kendall B. Tarte, Writing Places. Sixteenth-Century City Culture and the Des Roches Salon, Newark, Université of Delaware Press, 2007, p. 26-36; and Leah Chang, Into Print. The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France, Newark, Université of Delaware Press, 2009, p. 76-84.
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ABSTRACTS
In her “Dialogue de Sincero et de Charite”, Catherine des Roches creates an equally intelligent and lettered character in Charite, who embodies both erudition and erotic desire. A reading of the “corporal [af]filiation” between mother and daughter indeed reveals the symbiotic attachment of mother and daughter in both literary and social spheres. Yet a more refined version of Catherine’s self-fashioning can be glimpsed in her Missives. Through a juxtaposition of these two characters, to varying degrees historical and fictional, the image of a dialogical body emerges in the Œuvres. What might be described as a hybrid self-portrait thus exposes a distinct vision that the epithet of “tresvertueuse et docte fille” obscures: in Charite, who both reflects and extends the first-person narrator of the poems and letters, Catherine des Roches inscribes a dialogic body that is at once learned and sensuous, resistant and engaged―in short, a new model for the humanist woman.
Dans son « Dialogue de Sincero et de Charite », Catherine des Roches crée un personnage aussi intelligent que lettré, qui incarne à la fois l’érudition et le désir érotique. Une lecture de l’« affiliation corporelle » entre fille et mère révèle bien une symbiose dans les sphères sociale et littéraire, mais on peut entrevoir une version plus fine du façonnage de sa propre identité dans les Missives. À travers la juxtaposition de ces deux personnages, historiques et fictifs à des degrés divers, l’image d’un corps dialogique émerge dans les Œuvres. Ce qui pourrait être décrit comme un autoportrait hybride expose ainsi une vision distincte que brouille l’épithète de « tresvertueuse et docte fille » : en Charite, qui à la fois reflète et développe la première personne du narrateur des poèmes et des lettres, Catherine des Roches inscrit un corps dialogique qui est à la fois savant et sensuel, résistant et engagé –en bref, un nouveau modèle pour la femme humaniste.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Des Roches (Catherine), Roches (Madeleine des), don, femmes savantes, corps dialogique, lien mère-fille, représentation littéraire Keywords: Des Roches (Catherine), Roches (Madeleine des), dialogic body, gift, learned women, literary portrayals, mother-daughter bond
AUTHOR
CATHY YANDELL Carleton College, Minnesota
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The Martyr Queen Constructions of Identity in Mary Stuart’s Last Letters La reine martyre : constructions identitaires dans les dernières lettres de Marie Stuart
Colette H. Winn Translation : Nicholas Van Handel and Colette H. Winn
1 On October 25th, 1586, Mary Stuart was found guilty of lèse-majesté by the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth of England. On February 8th, 1587, she was decapitated in the great hall of Fotheringhay castle. This is where she spent the last months of her life, forced into total solitude and treated more like a criminal than a queen. Her servants were kept away from her and practically all of the privileges due to her rank were taken away from her. Her guards were unwilling to deliver the letters Mary wrote to Elizabeth.
2 Nevertheless, between the announcement of her death sentence on November 19th, 1586, and her execution on February 8th, 1587, Mary Stuart wrote ten letters, most likely unbeknownst to her guards. Apart from the three letters intended for Elizabeth, she addressed three to men of the Church (Pope Sixtus V, the bishop of Glasgow and her chaplain Camille du Préau, whom she was not authorized to see in her last moments), one to her uncle, the Duke of Guise, who was one of the major leaders of the Catholic party in France, one to the Spanish ambassador don Bernard de Mendoza (the king of Spain, Philip II, was one of Mary’s political allies) and a last letter with instructions serving as will and testament to the king of France, Henry III, who was also her brother-in-law. Why, on the eve of her execution on the scaffold, did Mary Stuart feel the need to write to these powerful and influential people? Did she still hope that her writings would affect the course of events? Was she looking to prevent her death? Based on the content of her letters, this seems unlikely. In fact, she found comfort in the thought that God had allowed her to die blissfully for her faith and she looked forward to her impending execution. What, then, could have motivated Mary Stuart to devote the last hours of her life to writing letters?
3 Judging from Mary Stuart’s last letters, life in prison was not easy for her. These letters reveal a great deal about the hostile prison atmosphere and Mary’s lack of power once
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her royal privileges disappeared. In some letters, Mary keeps quiet about the poor treatment inflicted upon her – her silence is indicative of the control exercised by her prison guards – but invites her correspondent to seek information from the message bearer1: “Ce porteur m’a promis de vous conter comme j’ai été traitée rigoureusement par ceux-ci, et mal servie d’autres”2 (458). At one point, she blames her guards for their extreme severity in response to the slightest request, whether she asks them to leave her a small sum of money to have an annual mass said for the salvation of her soul, to permit her to prepare her will, or to allow her chaplain to accompany her to her final resting place. Elsewhere, she gives concrete details about the harassment to which she is subjected, “l’on m’a tout osté icy… ils m’[ont] quasi rendu impotente”3 (439). The removal of the insignia of her royalty, even though she was still queen, seems to have been particularly insulting to her, “ils vinrent avant-hier lundi ôter mon dais, disant que je n’étais plus qu’une femme morte sans nulle dignité”4 (459). But most humiliating were the degrading images and tales circulated by her guards. These images show the tragic consequences that the accusation of lèse-majesté had for her both as a woman and as the Queen of Scotland. The association between death and the loss of dignity (“une femme morte sans nulle dignité”, “une femme morte sans aucun honneur ny dignité de royne”5, p. 459, 469) refers not only to the ignominious death to which Mary Stuart was sentenced, but also to her ruined reputation. In her work on criminal punishments in early modern France, Nicole Gonthier notes that a person who has lost his or her reputation has lost credibility in society and therefore the trust of others6. Did Mary Stuart, then, turn to writing in order to save her reputation from the degradation of prison? Did she take up her pen to rectify the disparaging image of her spread by her guards? Did she see letter-writing as her last chance to recover her credibility and defy her condemnation to silence and oblivion?
4 Each letter is addressed to a unique, named recipient. However, the content of the letters, the tone, and the absence of intimacy7 lead us to believe that Mary Stuart is actually writing for posterity. Everything in these letters relates to politico-religious issues, which seems to indicate that letter-writing is an instrument in service to a cause, a means by which Mary Stuart can confront the enemies of her faith. The solemnity of her statements suggests that these letters were meant as much for the readers of tomorrow as for the recipient whose name is mentioned and that they have been conceived as a “‘Mémorial’, un reliquaire de soi que d’autres pourront exhumer ultérieurement.”8 None of the letters contains private information. Thus, they could be circulated without inconvenience for the correspondents. For example, Mary Stuart informs Mendoza of a letter she wrote to the King of Spain concerning her decision to cede to him her rights to the throne of England; then she declares, “j’en écris autant à sa Sainteté”9 (p. 459). Elsewhere, she asks her correspondent to let others know what she writes: she invites the duke of Guise to share with the ambassador of Spain the information she divulges in her letter to him and the Pope to share with the kings the information she discloses (p. 451). Finally, the fact that she avoids naming certain people whom she and her correspondent know shows that she suspects that others will read her letters.
5 Let’s consider for a moment the unique aspects of the letters: 1) the female subject constructs herself in full awareness that she is being seen by her correspondent10. This reflexive relationship, present in all correspondence, could be described as “seeing oneself seen”11. The “mise en scene” already present in epistolary exchange is accentuated here as in any “Lettres ostensibles”12. In her letters, Mary Stuart provides
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her correspondent with insight into her person and character, hoping “the image her correspondent holds of her coincides with the image she has of herself.”13 In other words, she expects her correspondent to be a “complicit partner” who will legitimize the representations she gives of herself. 2) The letters conserve traces of the ephemeral (in other words, of who she once was). This material trace is tangible proof of her identity14 that could be produced publically if needed. 3) Finally, writing a letter is to take action and influence the course of events15. Letters have the power to alter reality, to transform a situation, or to bring about an event. Some doubt still remains today concerning the survival of Mary Stuart’s final letters and their reception. According to Prince Labanoff16, on the 25th of November, 1586, Mary Stuart was authorized to see her chaplain Camille du Préau and it was at this moment that she secretly handed him the letters she had written since her death sentence. These letters remained in the hands of Préau and Mary Stuart’s servants until they were allowed to return to France. Her letters were not delivered to the people to whom they were addressed until September or October of 1587. At that time the image of the “martyr queen” had begun to circulate throughout Europe due to the abundant partisan literature that appeared right after her execution17. This image coincides with the one Mary Stuart tried to impress upon her correspondents in her last letters.
6 In spite of the hopeless position in which Mary Stuart found herself in Fotheringhay’s prison, where she no longer expected anything more from the world of the living, she still had the freedom to carry out a final wish: to make sure that her relatives, friends and allies -and, beyond them, future generations- conserved her “true” image. The fact that she had nothing to lose (her sentence was irrevocable) vouches for her sincerity. These letters provided her with the means to accomplish this last wish (posthumous rehabilitation). In contrast to the degrading portrayal of her conveyed by her guards ‒ that of a woman dead and disgraced since she had lost her title of queen and of a criminal ‒, the letters attempt to reconstruct three alternative images:18 the image of the queen, that of an innocent victim and that of a martyred witness. Let’s examine now the rhetorical strategies that Mary Stuart used to achieve this goal.
7 Repetition and demonstrative reasoning are used to construct the image of the queen in contrast to the image of the dead and disgraced woman depicted by her guards. The word queen is used no less than ten times in the letters as if Mary Stuart wanted to impress her true title upon collective memory. She also states that she was “dès la mamelle … apellée à la dignité royale, oynte et sacrée par l’aucthaurité et ministres d’icelle”19 (p. 448); and that, consequently, she will carry the title of queen until her death, whether her enemies like it or not. She declares loud and clear: “Je mourrois royne en despit d’eux”20 (p. 470). Her status as queen is both the essential component of her identity and the proof of her credibility. Mary signs the vast majority of her letters with her title, “Royne d’Escosse, douairiere de France”21 (p. 455, 464, etc.). Time and again she describes her present treatment as a captive, a condition unworthy of her rank, which is another way to call attention to her royal identity. The signature of a letter to Elizabeth goes beyond the expected formalities to reveal that Mary blames her for the unjust and unexpected treatment inflicted upon her: “Vostre affectionnée sœur et prisonnière, MARIE, REYNE” (p. 446, my emphasis)22.
8 Among the degrading images of Mary Stuart, the comparison to a criminal seems to be the most potent, perhaps because all the other depictions crystallize around that one. Clearly, it had a powerful impact on Mary Stuart herself, as it directly associated the
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two dramatic events that occurred in the final months of her life: the trial before her imprisonment at Fotheringhay and her death sentence. Mary Stuart’s last thought shows how much she was tortured by this image of her criminality. Just a few hours before her death, she wrote to her brother-in-law: “Ce jourd’huy, après disner, m’a esté dénoncé ma sentence pour estre exécutée demain, comme une criminelle, à huict heures de matin”23 (p. 493, my emphasis). Was this an obsession with imminent death or the fear of being remembered as a criminal by posterity?
9 A large part of Mary Stuart’s correspondence reads like a defense: it is devoted to refuting the lies spread about her (such as the accusation of lèse-majesté). Judicial rhetoric functions on three levels: 1) vocabulary and imagery; 2) use of personal pronouns, and 3) refutatio. Terms referring to human law (accusations/accuser, avouer, condamner/condamnation, jugement/juger, contredire, droit, innocente, nier, procédures, protester, réfuter, sentence) stand alongside terms referring to both human law and divine law, such as confesser, coupable, juste/justice, injuste, and temoin/témoigner/ témoignage. Personal pronouns are pitted against each other as opposing parties would be in an interrogation. The je plays the role of the accused, alone before her judges, who are themselves designated by the impersonal pronoun ils/leur: “je leur ay dit” (p. 439); “ils m’ont dit … sans nul contredit” (p. 458); “par dépit que je ne veux parler” (p. 459); “ils m’ont denoncé de la part de leur Royne” (p. 467); “ils me dirent… je respondy” (p. 468); “j’ay tousjours protesté” (p. 468); “oh, disent-ils”24 (p. 469). The high frequency of declarative verbs, and the use of direct discourse and present indicative give a sense of reality to the trial scene. This authenticity may come from the fact that these episodes (her trial and the following captivity) are still fresh in Mary’s memory. The hearing behind closed doors by the commissaries designated among the peers of the kingdom and the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth25 took place at Fotheringhay in October 1586, and Mary was then incarcerated (behind closed doors) in Fotheringhay. The similar way in which both episodes are described, the sense of authenticity that Mary tries to achieve through the techniques examined above, the recurring mentions of the confrontational atmosphere, including the accusations against her and her protestations, seem to suggest that she lived her last months in captivity in much the same way that she lived through her trial several months earlier. Both in and out of the courtroom, Mary Stuart felt condemned before any trial had taken place. Clearly, her words proved ineffective at the trial itself, but she continued to hope that her pen would provide her a means to publicize the truth.
10 Her entire argumentation in the letters rests on classical techniques of refutation. Mary Stuart is accused of attempting to kill Elizabeth with the intention of usurping the throne of England or at the very least of participating in various plots against the life of her rival and the security of the kingdom: “On nous veut accuser d’avoir voulu troubler l’Estat et fait pratique contre la vie de ceste Royne, ou d’y avoir consenti”26 (p. 439). Here, she simply denies participation in the crime of which she is accused and points out how irrational her opponents’ arguments are : “ils m’ont dit que j’avais beau faire, car je ne mourrai pas pour religion, mais pour avoir voulu faire meurtrir leur Reine; ce que je leur ay nié comme très faux”27 (p. 458). Why would she try to usurp the crown of England, since the crown already belongs to her by legitimate right and will be passed on, after her death, to her only son (unless, as Mary suggests elsewhere, she bequeaths her right to others should her son remain Protestant)? Elsewhere, she provides evidence of her innocence: she has chosen the common good, that is “to save the souls of this island” at the expense of her own interest and of her own life: “je n’ay plus desir
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de me troubler en ce monde que du service de son Esglise et gain des âmes de ceste isle à Dieu ; pour tesmoignages de quoy à ma fin je ne veulx faillir de préférer le salut public au particulier interest de la chayr et du sang.”28 (p. 453)
11 Finally, she discredits her adversaries in order to undermine their arguments. As evidence of their prejudice, she recalls that heretics have persecuted those of her house for as long as she can remember: “Tous ceux de nostre maison ont tous été persécutés par cette secte”29 (p. 462). Another proof of their unfairness, Mary Stuart argues, is her imprisonment for the last twenty years of her life even though she came to England to seek refuge at her cousin’s side. This feeling of injustice and so many years spent in captivity had a strong impact on her self-image. Mary signs one of her letters to Elizabeth: “Vostre sœur, et cousine, prisonnière à tort”30 (480, my emphasis). In her eyes, her death sentence “par les Estatz et assemblée hérétique de ce pays”31 (p. 449) is further evidence of her unjust treatment. Disillusioned with the justice of men, she turns her faith to divine justice. For a brief moment, the appeasing thought that “le jugement des hérétiques et ennemis de l’Église… est profitable devant Dieu aux enfans de son Église”32 (p. 462) gives her the feeling of winning a sort of posthumous victory, yet the sense of injustice does not disappear entirely. In one of her letters to Elizabeth in which she dwells on the mean acts of her judges and jailers, Mary Stuart reminds Elizabeth that she too will have to answer for her acts some day: “je vous ramentois que ung jour vous aurés à respondre de vostre charge aussy bien que ceulx qui y sont envoyez les premiers”33. (p. 479) In sum, references to family history, to current and past events that call into question her enemies’ credibility, and to the day when divine justice will prevail and evildoers will be punished all contribute to her self-image as a victim of persecution by heretics.
12 There is a fine line between the image of the innocent victim and that of the martyr witness, which is prominent in the letters. The repetition of terms like témoin, témoignage, témoigner serves to impress upon the readers the image of the “witness” (he/she who gives testimony to God).34 The letters trace the emergence of a female subject who defines herself by her testimony,35 by the absolute truth (from God) that she holds and by a sort of prophetic power allowing her to see events to come. Time and again, Mary Stuart expresses her fears at the thought that “cette isle desvoyée” will be abandoned to heretics after her death: “la fin [=ma fin], laquelle j’estime heureuse de précéder à la persécution que je prévois menasser ceste isle”36 (179). The letters serve to make public her testimony, which her servants will transmit, should the letters not reach their intende recipients : “comme mes pauvres serviteurs, présentz à ceste mienne affliction, vous tesmoigneront”; “Aussi les ay-je tous chargez devant Dieu de vous compter tous mes déportemens et ceux des autres en ce faict.”37 (p. 452 and 471, my emphasis) Those to whom the letters are addressed are also called upon to make her testimony public and to act as intermediaries by enlisting others to follow and disseminate her testimony, “Je vous prie lui [=au Pape] certifier que je meurs en cette même volonté que je vous écris [she asks Mendoza]… Croyez ce que ce porteur vous dira et ces deux pauvres filles qui ont été le plus près de moi. Ils vous conteront la vérité. Je vous prie la faire publier…”38 (p. 459-460). These examples, and the biblical image of the shepherd and his flock, point to the apostolic mission Mary Stuart felt she had been entrusted with: “J’assemblay hier mon petit troupeau pour leur répéter à tous ensemble ma protestation…”39 (p. 470)
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13 The false rumors being spread about her could not only soil her name and image, but also invalidate her testimony and the purpose and meaning of her death. In order to reestablish her credibility, she had to demonstrate the legitimacy of her testimony. As proof of her integrity, Mary makes several allegations: when her accusers tried to force her to confess her crimes publically, she resisted, and, because she refused to make amends publicly, she was sentenced to death (p. 459): “m’exhortant à confesser et recognoistre... mes offences… ils n’ont su tirer de moy... on me menace si je ne demande pardon”40. (p. 467 and 458) Perhaps if she had asked for forgiveness, Elizabeth, satisfied in her pride, would have spared her. By highlighting this fact, Mary Stuart points out that she acted with full knowledge of the facts and that she actively participated in her destiny. By consenting to her fate through her own free will (“j’ay volontiers offert ma vie en leur hérétique assemblée”41 (p. 452), she regained her freedom and could therefore proclaim herself to be a “Reine libre, catholique et obéissante à l’Église”42 (p. 462). According to Stephanie Cobb, voluntary submission43 is the distinctive mark of a martyr and the sign of his/her virility44. The idea of martyrdom was not new to Mary Stuart. While learning Latin at the French court she translated the stories of martyrs like Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Anastasia from Ravisius Textor’s De officina45. In the 1570s, she even composed a sonnet devoted to sacrifice46. But at that time, martyrdom remained an abstract notion. She viewed intense piety as a more appropriate expression of her faith than the sacrificial rites of Antiquity: L’ire de Dieu par le sang ne s’appaise De bœufs ny boucs espandu sur l’autel, Ni par encens ou Sacrifice tel, Le Souverain ne reçoit aucun aise. Qui veult, Seigneur, faire œuvre qui te plaise, Il faut qu’il ayt la foy en l’Immortel, Avec espoir, charité au mortel, Et bien faisant que ton loz il ne taise. L’oblation qui t’est seule agreable, C’est un esprit en oraison constant, Humble et devot, en un corps chaste estant…47
14 Mary Stuart’s last letters reveal her spiritual development as well as the impact her classical education had on the way in which she perceived human destiny at death. The idea that the individual freely willed consent to his fate made him a free and responsible agent is inspired by Stoicism48, a philosophy with which Mary Stuart was very familiar49. Her claim that she is a free agent, fully in charge of her destiny (“Moy, Royne libre”50 [p. 452]) calls into question the “illegitimate” power (in Mary’s view) that Elizabeth exercized over her person and her life. Being sovereign princess and queen of Scotland, Mary refused to submit herself to the jurisdiction of the queen of England whom she did not, in any way, regard as her superior51. In her eyes, God alone had the authority of legitimizing her testimony; those who usurped this authority to pass judgment on her could only be illegitimate. To the human court that illegitimately exercized the right to punish her, Mary contrasted the divine court that is not only legitimate, but also is just and merciful (“Jésus Christ… ne manque jamais de justice”, p. 476) even to those who are unworthy of forgiveness like her: “très indigne pescheresse… coupable de damnation éternelle”52 (p. 451).
15 The rhetorical strategies used in these letters indicate Mary’s high learning: at the court of France she studied the art of letter writing and discovered classical authors like Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero while learning Latin. It is difficult to say whether or not
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she studied rhetoric, but clearly she has a sense of argumentation, which was rather unusual for a woman at this time53.
16 Another technique Mary used to make the image of the martyr-witness more real shows how familiar she was with the literary and artistic culture of her time. In her letter to Mendoza, she declares, “Ils travaillent en ma salle; je pense que c’est pour faire un échafaud pour me faire jouer le dernier acte de ma tragédie” 54 (p. 459). This association between the stage that will serve as a scaffold ‒ the last scene of her ordeal ‒ and the dénouement of a tragedy55, the presence evoked time and again of spectators who will let others know what they saw, and the perception of herself as an actress (one who speaks words coming from elsewhere), all contribute to the impression, of a dramatization of her death sentence and of a pathetic mise en scène skillfully orchestrated. Letter ‒ writing allowed Mary to rehearse her execution as a performance where each person plays a role.
17 The concept of tragedy that transpires from Mary’s letters leads us to believe that she had some acquaintance with works of dramatic theory. She is aware of the emotional appeal that her extreme suffering and the cruelty of her enemies might have on her spectator-readers. The theoreticians of this genre, which was in the midst of a revival at that time, conceived of tragedy in much the same way. In De l’art de la tragédie (1572), Jean de La Taille gives the following definition56: Son vray subject ne traicte que de piteuses ruines des grands Seigneurs, que des inconstances de Fortune, que bannissements, guerres, pestes, famines, captivitez, execrables cruautez des Tyrans; et bref, que larmes et miseres extremes, et non point de choses qui arrivent tous les jours naturellement et par raison commune … : car tout cela n’esmouveroit pas aisément, et à peine m’arracheroit il une larme de l’œil, veu que la vraye et seule intention d’une tragedie est d’esmouvoir et de poindre merveilleusement les affections d’un chascun. Car il fault que le subject en soit si pitoyable et poignant de soy, qu’estant mesme en bref et nument dit, engendre en nous quelque passion.
18 Jean de La Taille believed that the story of David and Goliath lacked emotional appeal and therefore should not be considered for tragedy57. Mary Stuart, on the other hand, felt the tale of David was a good subject for tragedy, in particular the episode in which Saul enters the scene. The glory of David, seen as God’s favor, excited passions: jealousy (Saul sees in David a formidable rival) as well as compassion and pity (Jonathan and Mikal help David escape the murderous fury of their father). In her letter to the archbishop of Glasgow, Mary Stuart identifies with this young tragic hero. In her view, with the exception of David’s flight, everything in the narrative enables this identification. One striking example is the fact that both David and Mary who are wrongly suspected of lèse-majesté are called to an exceptional mission58: […] au reste je voulois mourir pour obéir à l’Église, mais non meurtrir personne pour avoir leur droit; mais qu’en cela je voyois manifestement la poursuite de Saül contre David, mais que je ne pouvois fuyr, comme luy, par la fenestre; toutefois de mon sang pourroient naistre des protecteurs de ceste généralle querelle.59 (p. 459)
19 Mary Stuart’s postmortem inventory reveals that she indeed had a particular interest in dramatic art and in the unfortunate endings unique to tragedy. A volume on the tragedies of Sophocles and the chronicles of England in which the stories of the tragic deaths of several kings are told were found among her books60. In her letter to the bishop of Glasgow, Mary Stuart mentions the political motivations behind her death
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sentence, and compares her tragic fate to that of Richard II, assassinated in 1399 on the order of the Duke of Lancaster “pour luy oster son droict” (p. 470).
20 Before we further explore the idea of “mise en scène” implicit in the concept of dramatization suggested above, we should consider the historical context. In sixteenth- century France, executions were public and spectacular events61. As Michel Foucault notes, they were a way to reaffirm royal power and the authority of the law in the face of criminal acts that not only threatened the immediate victim but also challenged the sovereign’s power to make laws in the first place62.
21 The tragic reign of Elizabeth saw the return of ancient persecutions and martyrdom was very much on people’s minds. This phenomenon is particularly striking in Catholic art. According to Brad S. Gregory, what ditinguishes Catholic art of this period from that of other faiths is the visual and spectacular representation of the torments inflicted on martyrs: “Early modern Catholics differed from Protestants and Anabaptists in their emphasis on visual representations of martyrs, continuing a century-old embrace of art and architecture for religious ends.”63 Émile Mâle reminds us that “les premières grandes œuvres d’art dont les Jésuites décorèrent leurs églises, furent des scènes de martyre” whose purpose was to remind the faithful of the virtue of sacrifice64. Moreover, one of the features of martyrdom is that it is a spectacle. Le martyre apparaît comme la volonté de se donner en sacrifice visible, de s’offrir comme le centre actantiel d’un spectacle adressé à des regardants, à des narrateurs qui témoigneront à leur tour. … le geste du sacrifice n’est ni privé ni sans spectacularité. Il doit être vu dans la mesure où il est … un témoignage en action offert à une multitude, un instrument de conviction pour que l’événement soit vu et rapporté comme répliquant l’image sensible du sacrifice de Jésus-Christ.65
22 Mary Stuart declares time and again how important it is that her execution be seen as a spectacle. She fears more than anything that her execution will take place behind closed doors66, which would deprive her of any sort of control over her self-image at the time of death. In several of her letters, she implores Elizabeth that she not be “ suppliciée en quelque lieu caché, mais à la veue de [ses] domestiques et autres personnes qui puissent rendre tesmoignage de [sa] foy et de [son] obéyssance envers la vraye Église”67 (p. 445). Only a public death could demonstrate the strength of her faith, her endurance in suffering, and her courage: “[J]’espère que ma mort témoignera ma constance en la foy, et promptitude à mourir pour le maintien et restauration de l’Église catholique en cette infortunée isle”68 (p. 462). Fortitude at the time of death (the heroism that religious fervor inspires) was viewed as an expression of Grace, as a sign of “la bonne mort,” which was itself the mirror of one’s entire life69, as Mary Stuart well knew: “Je mourray comme j’ay vescu”70 (p. 446). She viewed her death as her last chance to regain control over her life, which had been exposed to all sorts of slander ever since her condemnation to death71.
23 Mary was particularly sensitive to visual imagery72 and very much aware of its persuasive power. In her letters, she uses hypotyposis, which emphasizes showing over telling description, and enargeia, which gives this description its vividness. Suggestive imagery allows her to make public the execution her enemies wanted to keep secret, and to give those who will read her letters the illusion of attending the spectacle.
24 The word martyr appears only twice in Mary Stuart’s correspondence. In her letters to the Duke of Guise, she mentions the deaths of Christ and the holy martyrs in order to validate her own death for the love of her Lord. In another letter, she quotes her jailers
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as proof of their determination to deprive her of her choice to die as a martyr: “Ils me dirent que j’avois beau faire, si ne seroy-je pas saincte ni martyre”73 (p. 468). Though the word martyr is rare in the letters, the image of martyrdom is quite frequent, showing once again Mary’s use of imagery to appeal to her readers’ imaginations and render more real to them the sacrifice to which she consented of her own free will: “recevoir le coup de mort” (p. 457), “suppliciée” (p. 447), “sacrifier ma vie” (p. 474), “offrir ma vie”, “offrir nos corps,” offrir mon sang” (p. 452, 458, 465), “respandre mon sang”74 (p. 467).
25 Appearing with even greater frequency in the correspondance are the word sang, the theme of blood, and the image of blood. In the last third of the sixteenth century, blood was practically a cultural obsession75. Witness the development of various genres in art and literature such as the pictorial tradition of Flanders, which, like Jesuit art, focuses on scenes of bloody massacres, the Baroque tragedy and the tragic novella, both of which privilege bloody subjects with a strong emotional appeal76, the sensational and bloody canards77, and martyrology with the publication in the 1570s of books like the Briefve Description des diverses Cruautez que les Catholiques endurent en Angleterre par la foy by the English Catholic writer Verstegan in exile in the Netherlands78. In the years 1587-1588, the same author published a similar work, Theatre des cruautez des heretiques de nostre temps, which achieved great success across Europe thanks to the support of Philippe II and the Society of Jesus. This work described the tragic fate of the Jesuits and their disciples in Elizabeth’s kingdom and contained 29 annotated illustrations of their arrests, inquisitions, and tortures. The last illustration depicted the martyrdom of Mary Stuart.
26 Clearly contemporary painting and the edifying literature of the time had a strong impact on Mary Stuart’s writing, but blood also had a personal resonance. In the example that follows, the association between ascendance and spilled blood emphasizes her rank and her sense of honor and duty, which she offers as proof of her dignity in defiance of those attempting to deprive her of it: “Quant à moy, je m’estime née, du costé paternel et maternel, pour offrir mon sang en icelle, et je n’ay intention de degenerer”79 (p. 464).In another letter, the parallel between the word blood (used in reference to the royal blood that flows in her veins) and the image of the executioner soaking his hands in her blood (suggestive of the sanguinary cruelty of heretics) arouses indignation: “bien que jamais bourreau n’ait mis la main en nostre sang, n’en ayez honte”80 (p. 462). Elsewhere, the implicit evocation in the term “consanguinité”81 (p. 478), of the family ties shared by Mary and Elizabeth- and Elizabeth’s responsibility in the bloody death that awaits Mary ‒ arouses the horror of fratricide.
27 The word sang clearly evokes the spray of blood ‒ and the savagery of decapitation by axe82. At the time, punishment was “un art des sensations insupportables”83. The bloody violence of certain images in Mary’s letters emphasizes the brutality of executions: “quand mes adversaires seront saoulez de mon sang innocent”84 (p. 445). The image of devouring hunger (or uncontrollable thirst) also brings to mind sixteenth-century visual representations of executions with ravenous beasts at the bottom of the scaffold waiting to be fed or avidly licking the blood flowing from the head of the victim85. The last letters of Mary Stuart were filled with images of a bloody death and terms calling to mind the noises that accompany such a spectacle. For Christians of this period, the hammers pounding as the scaffold is prepared for the execution evoke the brutality of the Crucifixion with the executioners driving nails into the hands and feet of Christ.
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Similar images abound in Le vray chemin of Louis de Grenade86 and in works inspired by it such as the poetry of Jean de La Ceppède87 or of Gabrielle de Coignard at the end of the sixteenth century88. Elsewhere in the letters, the savage cries of the wolves howling after their prey89 evoke the violent atmosphere of the executions with, on the one hand, the ferocious excitement of the crowd and on the other, the solitude of the condemned: “resister seule à tant de loups hurlants apres moy”90 (p. 463). Catholics emphasized the importance of the imaginative senses in attaining union with God91. In his Exercices spirituels, Ignace de Loyola bases his method of praying on these senses92. Whatever the proposed scene -Nativity, Passion, Harrowing of Hell- he invites the exercitants to see the characters with the eyes of their imagination, to listen with their ears to what they say, to embrace by touching the places they pass through, to fully feel and taste with the senses the infinite sweetness of divinity93.
28 We cannot say for sure whether or not the vivid imagery of Mary Stuart’s final letters is reminiscent of specific texts she might have read. However, her correspondence from 1574 on with two Jesuits, Father Edmond Auger and Father Henri Samier94, leads us to believe that this highly suggestive imagery and the emphasis on the pathetic are not a mere coincidence.
29 For Mary Stuart, the image of blood spilled by beheading cannot be dissociated from the flow of blood during an offering: “l’heur que j’estime que ce m’est de repandre mon sang à la requete des ennemis de son Eglise” (p. 458)95. Whereas the color red evokes the crimson of the martyrs96, the contrast between red and black brings into opposition the blood of the innocent and the impurity of the sinner : “leur noir désir de mon sang innocent”97 (p. 476, my emphasis). The blood shed recalls that of Christ on the cross: “le sang de Jehsus Christ pour moy crucifié … offrant au piedz de sa croyx volonterement mon sang pour le maintien et fidelle zelle que je porte a son Esglise”98 (p. 51-52). The cross, reminiscent of the freely consented sacrifice in Christ’s image (Imitatio Christi)99, is also a reminder that men will have to account for their conduct someday and be judged accordingly. The cross that Mary Stuart brandishes when her jailers come to take away the dais that sat on top of her armchair serves as a cautionary reminder that they too will face the Last Judgment one day: “L’on m’avoit, pensant me dégrader, fait abattre mon days […] Je leur ay montré, au lieu de mes armes audit days, la croix de mon Sauveur”100 (p. 464). Here, the dais and the cross take on a significance quite different from that which is ordinarily attributed to them. The dais, a sign of earthly power, becomes the symbol of Mary Stuart’s captivity and the humiliations she suffered at Fotheringay. The cross, a symbol of humility and of Christian submission in the hope of reward in the after life, becomes the emblem of her recovered liberty through her freely chosen martyrdom. Mary Stuart carried the cross at her execution101 for it best captured the image that she wished to leave for posterity, that of the martyr queen free in spite of her captivity.
30 The blood shed by Christ is redemptive: it washes away sin, purges, repairs, and regenerates. This idea of regeneration inspires the image of blood that engenders or produces growth102 (“toutefois de mon sang pourroient naitre des protecteurs de ceste generalle querelle,” p. 469)103 and the prophetic vision of a new generation of witnesses coming to the world to vanquish evil and ensure the triumph of the Catholic faith. This vision provides insight into Mary Stuart’s famous saying “En ma fin est mon commencement.”104
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31 In the carceral universe of Fotheringhay, Mary Stuart had one last chance to prevent her enemies from tarnishing her memory forever. Letter-writing provided her with the means of leaving behind a testamentary image, the image of a feminine subject in full control of her being and her destiny, and endowed with the absolute truth. This highest form of knowledge provides access to other kinds of knowledge, including the prophetic knowledge reserved to the elect and allows her “to die well”, as do those who have received Grace. Particularly striking is the image of a learned woman that the letters convey. It may not have been Mary’s purpose to show herself in that light, but her familiarity with literature and art and her grasp of rhetoric, rather exceptional for a woman of that era, certainly contribute to that flattering self-portrait. Since we do not know when Mary Stuart’s last letters reached her correspondents, it is difficult to say for sure whether or not they were the reason for the lasting image of the martyr queen. Nevertheless, this image seduced the imagination of Catholics and late sixteenth-century writers and has subsequently been passed on to us.
NOTES
1. The message was often conveyed by the carrier, and the sole purpose of the letter was to introduce the carrier. See Kristen B. Neuschel, Word of Honor: Intrepreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth- Century France, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 114. 2. “The bearer [of this letter] has promised to relate to you how rigorously I have been treated by those here, and how ill served by others.” The quotations in French are from Volume VI of the Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Marie Stuart, reine d’Écosse, publ. as the originals and the manuscripts by Prince Alexandre Labanoff, 7 Vols., London, Charles Dolman, 1846. When pages are indicated, the English translations are from Letters of Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland, selected from the Recueil des lettres de Marie Stuart together with the chronological summary of events during the reign of the Queen of Scotland by Prince Alexander Labanoff, trans., with notes and an introduction, by WilliamTurnbull: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009735942, accessed 4 May 2016. All other translations are our own. 3. “They have taken everything from me here…they have nearly rendered me impotent.” 4. “They came yesterday (Monday) and took down my canopy, saying that I was no more than a dead woman, and without any rank.” 5. “A dead woman, and without any rank; a dead woman without the honor and dignity of a queen.” 6. Le châtiment du crime au Moyen Âge XIIe-XVIe siècles, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1998, p. 122. On the loss of fama as criminal punishment, see p. 121-122. 7. As Jane Couchman notes about female correspondences of the sixteenth century, public and private were inseparable for women of this rank. See “What is ‘Personal’ about Sixteenth- Century French Women’s Personal Writings”, Atlantis n° 19. 1, 1993, p. 16-20. 8. “‘A Memorial’, a relic of the self that can be unearthed later on.” On the commemorative function of letters, see Brigitte Diaz, L’épistolaire ou la pensée nomade, Paris, PUF, 2002, p. 131. 9. “I have written with the same purpose to his Holiness.” 10. Ibid., p. 149. 11. Ibid., p. 150.
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12. On the ostensible letter, see Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac, L’épistolaire, Paris, Hachette, 1995, p. 33-34. 13. I paraphrase Michel Foucault, “L’écriture de soi,” Corps écrit 5, 1983, p. 17 and 23. 14. See Dictionnaire des genres et notions littéraires, preface by François Nourrissier, Encyclopædia Universalis, Paris, Albin Michel, 2001, p. 449. 15. Neuschel notes that “ the vocabulary used [by nobles in their] letters to describe their requests and promises to one another is heavily weighted with words that convey or cause action, if only in anticipation of reaction in their recipients” (117). 16. Labanoff, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 472. 17. Hidden by Chateauneuf, the French ambassador in London, a letter containing information about what had happened at Fotheringhay arrived in Paris the 6th or 7th of March, 1587. However, according to James Emerson Philips, these were primarily edifying accounts like those of John Leslie, Adam Blackwood, the Scottish Jesuit William Crichton or even George Crichton, the son- in-law of Blackwood, most likely inspired by the partisan literature at the end of the sixteenth century. See J. E. Philips, “Catholic Counterpropaganda on the Execution : 1587”, in Images of a Queen. Marie Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1964, p. 143-170. 18. In spite of the numerous self-images projected back to her through her correspondents, Mary Stuart focuses almost exclusively on these three specific images. For more on the function of the recipient in the construction of self, see Diaz, op. cit., p. 161-162. 19. “from the breast…called to royal dignity, anointed and consecrated by its authority and ministers”, p. 375. 20. “I will die a queen in spite of them.” 21. The “Queen of Scotland, Dowager of France.” 22. “Your affectionate sister and prisoner, MARY, QUEEN.” 23. “Today, after dinner, I was told of my sentence to be executed tomorrow, like a criminal, at eight o’clock in the morning.” 24. “I told them”; “they told me…without contradiction”; “out of spite, because I will not speak”; “they have accused me on behalf of their queen”; “they told me… I responded”; “I always protested”; “oh, they tell me”. 25. On October 11th 1586, the commissaries, officers of justice, and members of the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth arrived at Fotheringhay where Mary Stuart had been transferred and would remain until her death. Initially, she refused to appear before this committee, but after receiving the authorization to consult the list of those appointed to judge her, she agreed. The interrogation took place the 15th and 16th of October. On October 25th, the committee, gathered at Westminster, announced her death sentence. A few days days later, it was confirmed by the Parliament of England. All of these facts are reported in the Journal of Dr. Dominique Bourgoing, the only one among Mary Stuart’s servants authorized to see her until the end. 26. “They accuse us of wanting to disturb the government and of plotting against the life of this queen, or at least of having approved such a plot”. 27. “They told me that, whatever I may say or do, it will not be for the cause of religion that I shall die but for having endeavoured to murder their queen. This I denied, as being utterly false.” In England, during this period, Catholics were considered rebels and sentenced to death for treason. See Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake. Christian Martyrdom in Early Europe, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 274. 28. “I have no more desire to trouble myself in this world with anything other than the service of his Church, and the gaining of the souls of this island to God; for evidence of which at my end I would not fail to prefer public salvation to the private interest of flesh and blood” (p. 378). 29. “Those of our house have all been persecuted by this sect.” 30. “Your sister and cousin, Prisoner wrongfully.”
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31. “by the government and heretical parliament of this country” (p. 376). On this feeling of injustice, see: “par sa grâce, j’ai eu le cœur de recevoir cette très injuste sentence des hérétiques avec contentement” (p. 458); “qu’ils passent outre leur injustice” (p. 459); “estant preste par injuste jugement d’estre mise a mort” (p. 462) [“through his grace, I have had the heart to receive with resignation this unjust sentence rendered by heretics”; “they may proceed with their injustice” (p. 187); “I am ready to be put to death because of their unjust judgment”]. 32. “The judgment cast by heretics and enemies of the Church… is profitable before God to the children of his Church.” 33. “I must remind you, that one day you will have to answer for your charge, and for all those whom you doom.” 34. On this notion of witness, see Tragédies et récits de martyres en France (fin XVIe-début XVIIe siècle), Christian Biet and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard eds., Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2009, p. 56-67. 35. Speech and the profession of faith are crucial for the martyr. See Nikki Shepardson, Burning Zeal. The Rhetoric of Martyrdom and the Protestant Community in Reformation France, 1520-1570, Bethlehem, Lehigh University Press, 2007, p. 57-58: “The proper confession of the faith […] was the defining mark of the martyr. The longer narratives in the martyrologies focused not on the death, but on the oral or written confession and/or interrogation – in other words, the statement of faith. The martyr himself often sent letters to friends, family members, or pastors containing his statement with instructions ‘to give word’ or to make public his confession.” 36. “my end, which I am happy to think will precede the persecution that I foresee threatens this island” (p. 204). 37. “as my poor servants, present at my affliction, will testify to you” (p. 378); “Before God, I charged them with telling you about my conduct, as well as that of those around me.” 38. “I beg you to assure him that I die in the determination which I have communicated to you… You may believe all that the bearer of this shall tell you, and also those two poor girls who have been with me throughout this time. They will tell you the truth. I beg you to make it known to the world.” 39. “Yesterday I gathered my flock to share my protestations with them once again.” 40. “forcing me to confess and recognize…my transgressions… they have not been able to draw out of me; I am threatened, if I do not beg pardon.” 41. “I willingly offered my life before their heretical parliament.” 42. “A free queen, loyal to the Catholic church.” 43. This idea of voluntary submission is repeated time and again in the letters: “pour moy, je suis resolue de mourir pour la mienne [=sa religion]” (p. 439); “avecq une constante résolution de souffrir la mort” (p. 475); “je vous ai bien voulu dire ce dernier adieu, étant résolue de recevoir le coup de la mort, qui m’a été samedi dénoncée” (p. 457); “offrant… volontèrement mon sang” (p. 452); “j’offrois volontairement de respandre mon sang en la querelle de l’Église catholique” (p. 467); “je voulois mourir pour obéir à l’Église”(p. 469) [I am resolved to die for my religion;with a constant resolve to endure death; I wanted to say farewell to you one last time. I am resolved to endure the death sentence that was announced to me on Saturday; willingly offering my blood; I willingly offered my blood for the cause of the Catholic Church; I was willing to die in obedience to the Church.] 44. On the question of virility, see Stephanie Cobb, Dying To Be Men, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 67-68: “Real men choose to die rather than acquiesce to another’s will. The martyrs’ complicity in their death shows that they are not victims of circumstances but fully in charge of their destinies; it also instills in the readers the confidence that they control their own future.” In his Registre-Journal, Pierre de L’Estoile underlines Mary Stuart’s virility: “elle se presenta en la mort avec une resolution genereuse, et plus que masle, monstrant beaucoup de fermeté en sa religion” [she faced death with a strong resolve, more than manly, with great faith in her
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religion”]. See Registre-Journal du règne de Henri III, Madeleine Lazard et Gilbert Schrenck eds., t. 5, TLF n° 542, Geneva, Droz, 2001, p. 268. 45. See Sylvène Edouard, “Un exercice scolaire et épistolaire: les lettres latines de Marie Stuart, 1554”, Paris, Cour de France.fr, 2013. Unedited article put online January 1st 2013 (http://cour-de- france.fr/article2597.html). The Latin manuscript 8660, published by Anatole de Montaiglon under the title Latin Themes of Marie Stuart, Queen of Scots, London, The Warton Club, 1855, contains the themes the young Mary was asked to render in epistolary form and in Latin. 46. Queen Mary’s Book. A Collection of Poems and Essays by Mary Queen of Scots, P. Stewart-Mackenzie Arbuthnot ed., London, George Bell and Sons, 1907, p. 166-167. 47. “The wrath of God the blood will not appease/of bulls and goats upon His altars shed,/Nor clouds of fragrant incense upward spread/He joyeth not in sacrifice like these./Those, Lord, who would Thee in their offerings please,/Must come in faith, by hope immortal led,/With charity to man, and duteous tread/Thy paths, unmurmuring at Thy high decrees./This the oblation which is sweet to Thee:/A spirit tuned to prayer and thoughts divine,/Meek and devout in body chastely pure”, Queen Mary’s Book, A Collection of Poems and Essays by Mary Queen of Scots, p. 111. 48. On these questions of agency, free will, determinism, see Jean-Joël Duhot, La conception stoïcienne de la causalité, Paris, Vrin, 1989, p. 243. On the differences and similarities between Stoic and Christian ethics and on the evolution of their relationship over the course of the sixteenth century, see Stoïcisme et christianisme à la Renaissance, A. Tarrête, Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier ed., no 23, Paris, Éditions d’Ulm, 2006. 49. Among the books belonging to Mary Stuart, John Durkan mentions a volume by Antonio Guevara on the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius as well as a manuscript by John Leslie that treated different questions crucial to the Christian Stoic movement in the last third of the sixteenth century. See “The library of Mary, Queen of Scots”, in Mary Stewart Queen in Three Kingdoms, ed. Michael Lynch, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, p. 82 et 91. This inventory is held today to be the most reliable. Durkan makes numerous corrections to the inventory published in 1889 by Julian Sharman, The Library of Mary of Scots, who relied on the inventories of 1569 and 1578, reproduced in 1815 by T. Thomson and, in 1883, by J. Robertson. 50. “I, a free Queen.” 51. See p. 469-470. Also as a Scot, she was not subject to English laws. On the ambiguous situation of Mary Stuart regarding the queen of England, see Lisa Hopkins, “Renaissance Queens and Foucauldian Carcerality”, Renaissance et Réforme n° 20. 2, 1996, p. 20-21: “Mary, Queen of Scots… occupied an uneasy ground between two contradictory positions. … As sovereign queen of another country [Scotland], she had to be accorded a certain respect; she was not Elizabeth’s subject, which made the question of Elizabeth’s rights over her person highly problematic, and it was, additionally, highly undesirable for the queen to condone regicide by having her put to death.” Another question that was repeatedly brought up in the 1570s, notably by John Leslie, bishop of Ross, is that of Mary Stuart’s rights to the crown of England. See Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 23-26. 52. “Jesus Christ is always just”; “unworthy, sinful, and deserving of eternal damnation”. 53. According to Durkan (op. cit., p. 82), “even if Mary had not mastered the art of demonstrative reasoning, it is likely that she had had some schooling in France in the dialectic of Peter Ramus, who had enjoyed the patronage of her uncle, the cardinal of Lorraine”. 54. “They are working in my room; I believe they are preparing my scaffold to have me act out the final scene of my tragedy.” 55. The death of the tragic hero can effectively constitute the last event of the play, although ordinarily it is one among other events that result from the final coup de théâtre and that create the so-called catastrophe. The theatrical catastrophe is an integral part of the dénouement.
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56. Jean de La Taille, De l’art de la tragédie, F. West ed., Manchester, Manchester University Press, [1572] 1939, p. 24: “Its true subject only concerns the pitiful ruin of great Lords, changes in fortune, banishments, wars, plagues, famines, imprisonment, the execrable cruelty of Tyrants; in short, tears and extreme misery, and not commonplace things that come up everyday for natural reasons… Commonplace things would not move the audience easily, would not even elicit a single tear, given that the true and sole purpose of tragedy is to move and stir everyone’s emotions in unexpected ways. Because the subject of tragedy must be both poignant and pitiable. In short, it must arouse our passions.” 57. According to Jean de La Taille, the principal purpose of tragedy is to move the audience. In his view, the story of David does not inspire compassion but rather satisfaction at the idea that David vanquished the enemy of the Christians: “Voyla pourquoy tous subjects n’estants tels seront tousjours froids et indignes du nom de Tragedie, comme celuy du sacrifice d’Abraham … et d’un autre où Goliath, ennemy d’Israël et de nostre religion, est tué par David son hayneux, laquelle chose tant s’en faut qu’elle nous cause quelque compassion, que ce sera plustost un aise et contentement qu’elle nous baillera” [op. cit., p. 25; This is why any other subject will always be cold and unworthy of the title of Tragedy, like the story of Abraham’s sacrifice… as well as the story in which Goliath, an enemy of Israel and of our religion, is killed by David. This story falls short of inspiring compassion, and instead makes us feel contentment and satisfaction]. 58. David believed that God alone could strike his “oint”. That’s why he spared Saul’s life twice. David became King of Israel, and his entire family line remained on the throne throughout the history of the Kingdom of Judah. 59. “[...] besides, I was willing to die in obedience to the Church, but not with the aim of putting someone to death in order to usurp their power. In all of this I could clearly see Saul’s pursuit of David, but unlike him I could not escape through the window. However, new champions of this cause will rise from my blood.” 60. Durkan, op. cit., p. 83 et 90. 61. Gonthier, op. cit., p. 154. 62. I paraphrase Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, naissance de la prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p. 52 sq. 63. Salvation at Stake, p. 253. See also The Jesuits and the Arts 1540-1773, John W. O’Malley and S. J. Gauvin Alexander Bailey eds., Philadelphia, St. Joseph University Press, 2005, p. 123-199. 64. L’art religieux après le Concile de Trente, Paris, A. Colin, 1932, p. 114. Émile Mâle gives as an example the frescoes painted around 1582 at the Collège des Anglais by one of the Jesuits’ favorite artists, a certain Nicolas Circignani, better known by the name of Pomarancio. Gone today but preserved in engravings, these frescoes tell the story of England almost entirely in terms of the torments endured by its martyrs. Among the numerous martyrs included are Fisher and Thomas More dying on the scaffold for the English Reformation (see p. 110-111). 65. “Martyrdom appears as the will to offer oneself in a visible sacrifice as the principal agent of a show addressed to spectators, to narrators who will one day testify to what they witnessed… The gesture of sacrifice is not a private act but rather a spectacle. It must be seen, since it is a live testimony, a means of convincing the spectators so that the event may be seen and recounted as the live imitation of Christ’s sacrifice.” See Biet et Fragonard, op. cit., p. 82. 66. Elizabeth desired an execution behind closed doors because she did not want to assume the entire responsibility for the execution of her cousin and she feared rebellions. 67. “[…] put to death in a private place but seen by her servants and others who will bear witness to her faith and obedience to the true Church.” 68. “Hopefully my death will bear witness to my unwavering faith and my wish to die for maintaining and restoring the Catholic Church on this unfortunate island.” 69. In essay xix of Book I, Montaigne gives a series of examples to show the importance of the final moment. Among these examples illustrating these twists of fortune is that of Mary Stuart:
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“La plus belle Royne, veufve du plus grand Roy de la Chrestienté, vient elle pas de mourir par main de bourreau ?” [Did the most beautiful queen, widow of the greatest King of Christianity, not die by the hand of an executioner?]. See Œuvres complètes, Albert Thibaudet et Maurice Rat eds., Coll. La Pléiade, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962, p. 78. 70. “I will die the way I lived.” 71. On the relationships between a good life and a good death, see De bonne vie s’ensuit bonne mort: Récits de mort, récits de vie en Europe (XVe-XVIIe siècle), Patricia Eichel-Lojkine and Claudie Martin- Ulrich eds., Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006. On the deaths of illustrious men and the interpretations of these deaths, see the second part of this volume. 72. Durkan op. cit., p. 89 notes Mary’s interest in illustrated books: “Light-hearted entertainment was available in illustrated books attractive to Mary’s strong visual sense.” 73. “They said that no matter what I did, I still would not die as a saint or martyr.” 74. “endure death’s sentence”; “put to death”; “sacrifice my life”; “offer my life, offer our bodies, offer my blood”; “spill my blood”. 75. Henri Weber notes this obsession with blood in poems about religious wars. See “Poésie polémique et satirique de la Réforme sous les règnes de Henri II, François II et Charles IX,” CAIEF 10, May, 1958, p. 116. 76. Mary Stuart owned a copy of Bandello’s Histoires tragiques (see Durkan, op. cit., p. 80). On the affinities between tragic novella and tragedy, see Louise Frappier, “Histoire tragique et tragédie: anatomie du pathétique dans les nouvelles de François de Rosset”, Tangence n° 96, Summer 2011, p. 11-25. 77. See Maurice Lever, Canards sanglants. Naissance du faits divers, Paris: Fayard, 1993. 78. See Anthony G. Petti, “Richard Verstegan and Catholic Martyrologies of the Later Elizabethan Period,” Recusant History n° 5, 2, 1959-1960, p. 64-90 and Frank Lestringant, “Politique du martyre au temps des guerres de religion”, in Politique et littérature en France aux XVIe-XVIIe siècles, Actes du colloque international Monopoli 28 septembre-1er octobre 1995, Paris: Didier Érudition, 1997, p. 173-194. 79. “On both my father’s and mother’s sides, I consider myself destined to offer my blood for the Catholic Church, and I have no intention to go against my destiny.” 80. “even though no executioner has ever dipped his hand in our blood, have no shame”. 81. Earlier in this same letter to Elizabeth, Mary Stuart declares herself incapable of committing such a cruel crime: “de vous remonstrer… pour ma descharge d’aulcune malveillance ou envie de commettre cruauté ou acte d’ennemye contre ceulx à qui je suis conjoincte de sang”, p. 475, my emphasis; to show you… that I am innocent of any evil deed or cruel act against those to whom I am joined by blood. 82. Men from the nobility who had plotted against the sovereignty of the monarch were beheaded by sword. Beheading by axe, as in Mary Stuart’s sentence, and, before her, that of Thomas More (see illustration 27, in Ecclesiae Anglicanae trophaea, Rome, F. Zannettus, 1584, reproduced in Salvation at Stake op. cit., p. 273, required greater skill on the part of the executioner. It was a most ignominious death but also a sensational spectacle due to the great flow of blood. On death by beheading, see Gonthier op. cit., p. 154. 83. See Foucault, Surveiller et punir, op. cit., p. 18. For different perspectives on the implications of the spectacle of executions, see Michel Bée, “Le spectacle de l’exécution dans la France d’Ancien Régime”, Annales ESC n° 38, 1983, p. 843-862 and Thierry Pech, “Le théâtre des supplices”, Littératures classiques n° 40, 2000, p. 309-325. 84. “when my enemies have quenched their thirst for my innocent blood”. 85. Gonthier, op. cit., p. 151. 86. Le Libro de la Oración y Meditación by Louis de Grenade (1566) was translated into French in 1575. We cite here from the translation of François de Belleforest, Traitté de l’Oraison et Meditation, vray chemin… mis en nostre vulgaire par F. de Belleforest Comingeois…, Paris, Chez la vefve Guillaume
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de la Nouë, & Denys de la Nouë, 1608, fol. 59a et b: “Considere encor apres cecy, comme Jesus fut cloüé en la croix, & la douleur qu’il souffroit, lors que ces gros cloux entroient en ses mains delicates, & par les plus sensibles parties du corps. Voy aussi qu’enduroit la Vierge, voyant de ses yeux, & oyant de ses aureilles les durs & cruels coups, qu’on donnoit sur les membres divins du Sauveur ” [Consider also how Jesus was nailed to the cross, and the pain that he suffered when those large nails entered his delicate hands and the most sensitive parts of the body. Consider also the horror the Virgin endured seeing and hearing with her own eyes and ears the hard and cruel blows inflicted upon the Savior’s divine limbs.] 87. The Crucifixion as depicted by Jean de La Ceppède is a scene of brutal realism aimed at assaulting the senses. At one point, La Ceppède describes the inhumane way in which the executioners spalyed Christ’s body out on the Cross, and appeals to our sense of hearing by focusing on the cracking of bones as Christ’s limbs are dislocated under the hammer’s blows. See Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystere de nostre redemption, Yvette Quenot ed., 2 vols, Paris: S.T.F.M., 1988-189), vol. 2, p. 490, 3e Livre, sonnet XVI, vv., p. 11-14. 88. See La Mort et Passion de nostre Seigneur sur le mont de Calvaire, vv. 173-180, in Œuvres chrétiennes, Colette H. Winn ed., Geneva, Droz, 1995, p. 530-531. 89. This image may be reminiscent of the biblical imagery of late sixteenth-century Catholic propaganda where Huguenots were depicted as wild beasts. See Denis Crouzet, “Imaginaire du corps et violence aux temps des troubles de religion,” in Le corps à la Renaissance. Actes du XXXe Colloque de Tours in 1987, Jean Céard, Marie-Madeleine Fontaine and Jean-Claude Margolin eds., Paris, Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990, p. 122. 90. “resist alone so many wolves howling after me”. 91. On the role of imagery in Jesuit spirituality, see Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Ignace de Loyola: le lieu de l’image, Paris, Vrin, 1992. 92. See Philippe Denis, “La Réforme et l’usage spirituel des cinq sens”, in Le corps à la Renaissance, op. cit., p. 188. 93. This is the fifth and final exercise of the first day of the second week. See Exercices spirituels, François Courel transl. and ed., 2nd ed., Coll. Christus no 5, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1963, p. 76-77. On the widespread popularity of this work throughout Europe from the time when it first appeared in 1548, see Henri Brémond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, 11 vols., 1916-1936, Paris, A. Colin, p. 1967-1971, vol. 1 and Pierre Pourrat, La spiritualité chrétienne, 4 vols., Paris: J. Gabalda, p. 1927-1931 vol. 3. 94. See Durkan op. cit., p. 91 sq. 95. “how fortunate I am to shed my blood upon the request of the enemies of Christ’s Church”. 96. Upon stepping onto the scaffold, Mary Stuart asked for red sleeves. See Bourgoing, Journal De Dominique Bourgoing, médecin de Marie Stuart, M. R. Chantelauze ed., Paris, E. Plon & Cie, 1876, p. 512-513. 97. “their dark desire for my pure blood”. 98. “the blood of Jesus Christ, who was crucified for me…willingly offering my blood at the foot of His cross, thus showing my zealous devotion to His Church”. 99. The Imitatio Christi tradition was still very much alive. On this tradition, see Philippe Denis, Le Christ étendard. L’homme-Dieu au temps des Réformes 1500-1565, Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1987, p. 39-45. 100. “They took down my dais, thinking this would humiliate me […] Instead of the coat of arms on my dais, I showed them the Cross of my Savior.” 101. Dr. Bourgoing makes mention of it in his Journal. See p. 578. 102. This idea most likely comes from Tertullian’s Apologeticus n°50, s. 13: semen est sanguis christianorum [the blood of Christians is seed]. 103. “However, new champions of this cause will rise from my blood.” 104. “In my end is my beginning.”
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ABSTRACTS
Between the announcement of her death sentence on November 19th, 1586, and her execution on February 8th, 1587, Mary Stuart wrote ten letters, most likely unbeknownst to her guards in the Fotheringhay castle. What may have motivated Mary Stuart to devote the last hours of her life to writing letters? This paper argues that letter-writing, in which we recognize her Humanist knowledge and skills, provided her the means of constructing a favorable image of herself, thus preventing her enemies from tarnishing her memory forever. Since we don’t know if these letters reached Mary’s correspondents, we cannot say for sure whether or not they were the reason for the survival of the image of the martyr queen. Nevertheless, it is this image that seduced the imagination of Catholics and late sixteenth-century writers and that, through them, was passed on to us.
Entre l’annonce de sa condamnation à mort le 19 novembre 1586 et son exécution le 8 février 1587, Mary Stuart a rédigé une dizaine de lettres à l’insu de ses gardes dans la prison de Fotheringhay. Pour quelles raisons a-t-elle consacré les dernières heures de sa vie à la rédaction de ces lettres ? Cette étude suggère que l’écriture épistolaire, dans laquelle nous reconnaissons ses savoirs humanistes, lui a fourni le moyen de brosser un portrait favorable d’elle-même et d’empêcher de la sorte ses ennemis de souiller sa mémoire. Comme nous ne savons pas si ces lettres sont parvenues aux personnes à qui elles étaient adressées, il est difficile de dire au juste l’impact qu’elles ont pu avoir sur l’image de la reine martyre qui est restée de Marie Stuart. C’est en effet cette image qui a séduit l’imagination des Catholiques et des écrivains de la fin du seizième siècle et qui, par leur intermédiaire, est parvenue jusqu’à nous.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Stuart (Marie), lettres, identité (construction de), martyre, mort, Christ, sacrifice Keywords: Stuart (Mary), letters, martyr, identity (construction of), Christ, death, sacrifice
AUTHORS
COLETTE H. WINN Washington University in Saint Louis
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The Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Experience of Knowledge, Knowledge of Experience Les Mémoires de Marguerite de Valois, expérience des savoirs, savoirs de l’expérience
Caroline Trotot Translation : Colin Keaveney
1 Written in response to Brantome’s portrait of the queen which was seen as overly flattering, Marguerite de Valois’ Memoirs claim to be a diffracted self-portrait in which a true-to-life image is constructed through the process of writing. Throughout the text, the author offers Brantôme pieces of information meant to allow him to correct a picture that has become false over time. Marguerite works to reconstruct past episodes that correspond to different facets of her identity. Her writing assembles the knowledge necessary to rectify the errors commited by her friend - the first being his failure to account for time, which she refers to as Fortune (in contrast to Nature)1 (p. 46). The Memoirs are thus an exercise in self-knowledge that reflects an anthropological outlook. This temporal vision of the human being draws on Marguerite’s philosophical knowledge, as well as on her conception of history and of politics. As a good humanist, one who had had conversations with Montaigne and to whom “L’apologie de Raimond Sebond”2 was apparently dedicated, she put the considerable learning she had to the test of lived experience3, and of writing, wheighing her knowledge against an encounter with learning and the world that takes on meaning in the liveliness of her individual account. It is the interaction among these different types of knowledge - and their relationship to her writing that we shall now examine.
The Memoirs and the Philosophy of History
2 The opening of the Memoirs presents the work as a response to Brantôme’s Discourse on Marguerite, a text judged by the queen to be too laudatory4. Marguerite reproaches its author with creating an idealised portrait that did not take into account the effects of time. Now, the beautiful portrait drawn by Brantôme, a political manifesto against Salic law, was imbued with a Neo-Platonic philosophy that exalted the correspondence
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between the lovely appearance of the princess and her moral and intellectual virtues5. In reality, Marguerite’s Memoirs distance themselves from this whole system of representation.
3 First of all, she chooses to introduce herself via a narrative designed to better illustrate the influence of Fortune on the nature of her being. The form she adopts shows the importance she gives to time, thereby guaranteeing a continuity to the work better than a rhetorically structured argument could. She thus intimates that being is not the product of an unchanging essence, but rather the result of a way of living. Her positioning of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre under the sign of good fortune turned bad (p. 67) echoes the Aristotelian philosophy of Louis Le Roy, who explained in De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers (1575) 6 that the world is structured by oppositions and that this struggle gives form to time. Marguerite is careful to combine historical and biographical narration, a feature that would become characteristic of the genre of autobiography more generally. When writing about herself, she chooses episodes that are never purely personal: they are always linked to the lives of the elite and to the royal family, which shows how impossibly difficult it is to separate public and private selves and furthermore implies that each affects the other. She is not merely recording a situation deriving from a particular social condition; even less is she painting a background. Instead, ‒ events and political decisions are shown to be integral to the way individuals are formed. It is thus important to give appropriate emphasis to the connection she makes between the first anecdote she cites from her childhood and the accidental death of Henri II, ‘which deprived France of peace, and our family of happiness’ (p. 48). The unexpected passing of Henri II weakened royal power and played an important role in the Wars of Religion, a history in which Marguerite was both victim and actor. Marguerite gives an account of a life in history, which is not a hall of mirrors ‒ with ideals on one side and their incarnations on the other ‒ but instead a world of political careers and pragmatic choices, a history that is Fortune in action, but also constituted by human action. This is a history that is both endured and made.
4 The individual is affected by episodes that form a chain (or chains) of cause and effect in which the subject reveals her virtues. As always in the Renaissance, history is a “ magistra vitae” offering ethical teachings. Critics have successfully established that Marguerite thus sought to make public her attachment to her faith to the crown. It is also demonstrably the case that she offers an analysis of the behaviour of the nobility in terms that are distinctively philosophical in tone. Thus, regarding the reserve shown by Catherine de Médicis in reaction to Henri d’Anjou’s speech after the battle of Jarnac, Marguerite remarks that she merely highlighted important passages in his speech: “[…] moderating her actions at will, seemingly showing that the discrete person does only what she wishes to do, with no thought to manifestations of joy and public statements of praise […].”7
5 The discrete person is the ‘prudent person’, according to Henri Estienne’s 1549 French- Latin dictionary, the one who shows himself capable of this Aristotelian virtue (i.e. phronesis), a virtue placed under the sign of moderation (since in medio stat virtus). This is the essential virtue prized by history according to Amyot: “the reading of history teaches prudence”8. It is the ultimate political virtue that lies at the heart of sixteenth- century thought and, in particular that of Montaigne, as Francis Goyet showed in Les Audaces de la Prudence9. In harmony with this philosophical framework, ‘prudence
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operates [...] in tandem with Fortune10 and enables the individual to navigate through history. The recurrence of these terms in connection with political figures in the Memoirs inspires a reflection on the possible political meaning of this work. Situating herself in the tradition of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and the political memoirs of Commines and Martin Du Bellay11, albeit obliquely (given her status as a woman in exile and her chosen style of writing), Marguerite questions the behaviour and decisions of all and sundry. She fashions a “political mirror” of her own character as a woman politician, at once the object of decisions, notably the one that saw her married off to Henri de Navarre, and an actor, as when she supported Alençon or participated in the Flemish negotiations recounted in the Memoirs, or even in her writing, which could be considered a form of historical action. Her deployment of art (and its dissimulation) can also be understood as a practical application of prudence as suggested by Francis Goyet in the case of Montaigne12.
6 Prudence is the virtue of the individual acting in time. It includes, in part, caution. The prudent person takes the vicissitudes of history into account when making decisions. She keeps in mind past actions when preparing for the future. She thus uses a practical form of knowledge, an art, as by Aristotle in his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, texts well known to Marguerite who attended the royal academy (Académie du palais) as indicated by the 1576 register of speeches annotated in her hand13. The speech attributed to Catherine de Médicis and written in order to appease Henri III’s anger after Henri de Navarre’s escape is a perfect example of this prudent taking of time into account: [She said] that all things in this world had two faces, and that once this one, which was sad and terrible, had turned away and we got to then see the other side, things would seem more agreeable and tranquil; we could take new counsel from new events; that there might come a time when he would have need of my services; and that, as prudence counselled us not to place too much confidence in our friends, lest they should one day become our enemies, so was it advisable to conduct ourselves in such a manner with our enemies as if we had hopes they might hereafter become our friends.14
7 Marguerite seems to have absorbed this political prudence at the end of the Memoirs when Henri de Navarre asks her to brave Biron “with all his rough and disdainful talk” (p. 194): I dealt with this impassioned order with the help of my brother’s advice and the discretion necessary in such matters, in full knowledge that one day he would regret his actions since such a nobleman might be of much assistance in the future. 15 (p. 195)
8 Prudence comes from experience. And Marguerite proceeds in her Memoirs from ignorance born of inexperience to knowledge born of experience. It is this experience that engenders a knowledge of reality unimpeded by false appearances or by emotion16. Marguerite describes her childhood self thus: Too young and inexperienced as I was, I did not question this good fortune! And considering permanent the happy state I enjoyed, with not a thought that it might change, I took it for granted! (p. 59)17
9 On the other hand, she begins the last paragraph of the Memoirs with the following remark: “All these shows of apparent benevolence did not fool me with regard to what one should expect from the court, for I had long experience of the realities. (p. 213)”18
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10 The Memoirs tell how Marguerite became prudent, how she learned to apply at virtue that requires her to take time into account. Thus, when at Cambrai in Flanders, she comments on Monsieur d’Inchy’s conduct as follows: [...] he left him to come talk to me during the ball, and to bring me afterward to the collation of sweets ‒ imprudently, it seems to me, given that he was in charge of the citadelle. I am speaking about it in too knowledgeable a way as a result of having learned more about how to go about defending a fort than I ever would have wished.19 (p. 125)
11 Here Marguerite plays on the duality of her role, on what she knows as a narrator and as a character. This prolepsis anticipates the years spent in Agen et Usson. Marguerite thus shows the role of experience in learning and in the process of writing through which successive moments are linked together. She emphasizes the political significance of the trip through Flanders, when she observed close-up the major players in one of the principal European conflicts of the period, which had a direct bearing on the Wars of Religion in France and occasioned a very important change in political thought20. The Memoirs tell how Marguerite became prudent, how she learned to apply the virtue that she had observed - a virtue that required an ability both to act and to reflect on these actions, that obliged her to consider the role the role played by time, and that articulated internal life to external behavior.
12 Marguerite responded to Brantôme’s immutable portrait, which turned her into the incarnation of beauty, knowledge, intelligence and virtue, by expressing her intellectual and moral virtues through a dynamic form of writing and calling on numerous areas of learning in order to place them at the service of a new type of knowledge of herself and her contemporaries. In the process, she questioned the possibility of faithfully representing individuals through writing and, going further, called into doubt the Neo-Platonic model positing a correspondence between interior and exterior, a model upon which the Valois monarchy relied.
A World of Representations: Negotiating Appearances in the Valois Court
The problem of representation occurs as a fundamental motif in of these memoirs which place the question of self-representation in the context of the codes of political and social representation. The Valois understood their exercise of power within a Neo- Platonic framework in which politics was an imitation of cosmic harmony. To rule was at once a public relations exercise and a dream, one which the events from the 1560s until the end of the century proved to be cruelly ill-founded. The reality of human action was grounded in pragmatic approach that derived, at best, from Aristotle and, at worst, from Machiavelli himself, or even from a French reception of Machiavelli that had twisted his thought into a polemical weapon for use against Catherine and her children. In the Memoirs, Marguerite offers the self-portrait of someone shaped by experience and by a learning process that led her to uncouple appearances from reality. In the process, she paradoxically discovered within herself the dualities that writing allowed her to express.
13 At the very beginning of the work, Marguerite brings up a facetious anecdote in order to underscore the complicated relationship between individual and text. She explains that she does not recognise herself in what Brantôme has written:
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[...] like old Madame de Randan who, having foregone looking in mirrors after the death of her husband, upon coming on her face perchance in someone else’s mirror, asked who that person over there was.21
14 The Memoirs assert that there is a divide between inside and outside in order to explore the complexities of the relationship between essence and existence. They interrogate the correspondence between being and appearance and question the unity of being over time. Representation furnishes multiple images diffracted by time, like those that Du Bellay offers of Rome in his Antiquités, and whose antanaclasis “chercher Rome en Rome” (“seeking Rome in Rome”) Marguerite paraphrases. The Neo-Platonic notion of representation, according to which a beautiful appearance corresponds to an unchanging nature, does not convey the truth of being. And, if we enjoy contemplating the “destruction of Troy” (p. 46) in literature, as she suggests, Marguerite is perhaps also inviting the reader to consider the destruction of the world of her childhood, at a time when the French imagined they were Trojans. The Memoirs paint a portrait of their author engaged in a kind of apprenticeship, which allows her little by little to recognise the prudence of the political players around her, but which also permits her to partially adopt this virtue, if not politically, at least insofar as it enriches into her literary style. The claim to truth, which governs the book, conflicts with the complex relationship between interiority and exteriority. The Memoirs are not content to record facts and observable data; they map out the internal space in which decisions are made and feelings are born, and they seek in various ways to describe the relationship between these two spheres. They seek to represent the truth of an inner feeling, one that is subjective and even foreign to the outside world, and to investigate the way our internal self encounters others and perceives them, as well as the way in which our language can “represent” to them what is inside us or alternatively can protect it through dissimulation. This experience is fundamental to the pragmatics of politics, but it is also more universal, and in this sense shapes identity. Here, it might be added that the years that form the backdrop to Marguerite’s tale are those in which we see the emergence of a notion of religious conscience in texts that encouraged the latter’s safeguarding and refused attempts at spiritual coercion. Furthermore, Protestantism questioned the link between religion and forms of observance. In her discussion of Jeanne d’Albret’s death (p. 66), Marguerite makes reference to the ‘small apparel’ permitted by the Huguenots, so different from the ‘the pomp and ceremony of our religion’.
15 The Memoirs can thus also be read as an interrogation of the political, anthropological and literary role of representation. Beginning with the depiction of childhood, each section deals with one or another aspect of this question. The anecdote about the choice between the duc de Guise and the marquis de Beaupréau (p. 48-49) suggests that Marguerite places no trust in the beauty of a blond-haired child whom history will show to be violent. The next episode (p. 49-51), devoted to the vitally important Colloquium of Poissy, demonstrates that Marguerite’s Catholic conscience was already present in childhood and was capable of resisting outside pressures; conversely, the court seemed infested by “wretched Huguenot influences” (“l’impression de la malheureuse huguenoterie” [p. 49]), which led Henri d’Anjou into dissimulation, lies and calomny22. The episode that follows (p. 51-53) has often appeared of secondary importance, for it describes a very fine party given by the Valois, that Marguerite attended as a child and that does not seem to have much significance for her life. On the other hand, it has a very definite historical significance23. During the Royal Tour of
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France of 1564-1566, there was a meeting between the envoys of Philip II of Spain, his wife Elisabeth de Valois (daughter of Catherine) and the Duc d’Albe. Catherine was attempting to pacify the kingdom by consolidating Charles IX’s royal status and to neutralise a possible intervention by Philip II. Marguerite says that her recollections of this period have “vanished from her memory like a dream”. She then calls on Brantôme, saying to him “I want to make sure that you will depict the superb banquet given by my mother on the island […]” and, in a page-long parenthesis, she herself describes the scene, in which it seemed as if “Nature had designed it [the layout of the room] for this purpose”. The description concludes with her recalling a storm that put an end to the party. Marguerite depicts it in this way: […] the beautiful ballet whose glory was so galling to envious Fortune that she called down such a strange rain and storm, so that the confusion of the retreat that had to be undertaken at night and by boat provided as much to laugh at in the stories told the following day as the magnificent banquet arrangements had provided satisfaction.24
16 The text creates a mise en abyme around the question of representation: it describes the effect of the discourse commenting on the abrupt conclusion of the performance. It thus reaffirms the power of the celebration organized by the Valois, all the while underlining the vanity involved. According to historians, the range of details recalled by Marguerite reflects her understanding of the political stakes involved in these spectacles25. The subtle opposition between nature and Fortune links this episode to those that precede it, as well as to the incipit. The text thus takes its place as part of a narrative in which each section involves the problem of representation.
17 The next episode (p. 53-59) is devoted to the relationship between Henri and Catherine in 1569. In three movements, Marguerite shows the prudence displayed by Catherine and Henri in their use of words, the feelings of each member of the family and the instrumental function that the family as a whole is forced to fulfill. Marguerite plays on the different registers of representation in order to show how these registers dictate behavior and how she herself learns little by little to recognise them and no longer simply to endure their effects. Describing Catherine’s great delight as she listened to Henri d’Anjou making a fine speech in the wake of his victory at Jarnac, Marguerite thus writes: “What my mother, who loved him most particularly, felt at this cannot be put into words, no more than could the depth of the mourning of Iphigenia’s father.”26
18 Marguerite is pointing simultaneously to the prudent dissimulation of the queen, the difficulty involved in conveying the tensions between inside and outside, the suffering the young girl went through as a result and, finally, the ironic distance she tries to maintain when dealing with Henri and Catherine. With Catherine, Marguerite played the role of a ‘second self’, as Henri had requested she do when he was away, but the way she writes already calls this situation, which denies her individuality, into question. The series of episodes leading up to the wedding and the Saint Bartholomew massacre heighten these effects. The case of Henri d’Anjou definitely makes the point. Catherine’s “idol” gave a speech written by someone else whose ethos was not really in keeping with his own. He was obsessed with Le Guast who, as Marguerite puts it, possessed him so that he “could no longer see except through his eyes, nor speak except through his mouth” (p. 59). The gods had abandoned the Princes, thereby making way for demons, and a Neo-Platonism based on Aristotelian virtue had been replaced by “tyrannical maxims” and “fine Machiavellian precepts” (p. 60).
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19 Marguerite thus offers a model, the product of learning tempered by experience, for deciphering the court. She follows in the footsteps of Commynes, who drew pragmatic and moral lessons from his observation of history. The interpretative model she proposes is similar to certain modern analyses of the French court as a sphere of representation and of the political use of representation as an instrument of domination, notably those of Norbert Elias27 and Louis Marin 28. It also accords with polemical analyses undertaken by Marguerite’s contemporaries and particularly the readings of Machiavelli by opponents of the king29, the best example of which is the Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume ou autre principauté, […] Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin, by Innocent Gentillet, which appeared in 1576 and was dedicated to François d’Alençon. The author writes “against the authors of tyranny exercised in France for the past fifteen years or more”30 and offers a refutation of the maxims derived from Machiavelli’s text. Along with its chronological organisation, which has Marguerite’s story running parallel to the political history of France, Marguerite’s narrative explores representation, offers a hermeneutics of individual behavior and of history. Her text combines a series of perspectives that the reader is encouraged to use in order to interpret both Marguerite’s past and the history of France. Each episode turns the court into a sphere of display where the great and the good are no longer divine incarnations referred to by the rhetorical device of antonomasia and featured in court parties31, but rather actors in a tragi-comedy. “The Court is a Proteus that changes shape from one hour to the next, and where novelty is constant” (p. 145). Marguerite’s narrative breaks up the system of representation by removing the virtuous underpinnings underlying appearances. The court hence becomes a world of dissimulation born either of prudence or of “malice”.
20 With regard to her own past, Marguerite seems to be telling the tale of the difficulties of assuming an identity. Torn between two models of masculinity as a young child, she was rejected by her brother who considered her at best a reflection of his own worth and an instrument to be used. She accepted the rules of her milieu in which appearances, socially speaking, were everything, as is clear from the depiction of her surprise at Henri’s request that she leaves childhood behind in order to take up her place close to Catherine: “since I had until then lived a carefree existence, with thought only for dancing and hunting, having until then had no interest in dressing up or appearing beautiful” (p. 57). Another striking example of this phenomenon lies in the account of the embassy of the king of Portugal: “My mother instructed me to get dressed up in order to receive them, which I did” (p. 63). The difficulty of constructing her identity in a situation where her status as an object was in conflict with her status as an intelligent, educated and loyal subject, and where it was impossible for her to “show her innocence” (p. 61), manifested itself in sickness, explained as a symptom of the violence inflicted by calumny and separation from the queen mother (p. 62-63). The sick body conveys in its “sighs” a truth that cannot be expressed in words. It makes manifest a repressed subjectivity, far removed from the facade constructed for the purposes of court life. The events of Saint-Bartholomew’s Day mark the transformation of Marguerite from an object magnificently attired for her wedding and displayed before the onlooking crowds, to a subject during her interview with her mother a few days later. The Queen of Navarre could then speak and assume the choice of this marriage that had been imposed upon her. The framing of the narrative and the arrangement of its motifs offer an anthropological and political perspective that shows how difficult it is for the individuals to construct themselves in a world where taking
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on an identity amounts to disappearing. Over the course of these episodes, the Memoirs tell of a growing gap between inward being and the world and the emergence of a subjectivity suspicious of appearances. In this process, reading, which “awakens our soul within ourselves”, plays a major role (p. 112). Reading allows us to discover the Good and to recognise God within ourselves. Marguerite explains of how her captivity in the Louvre converted her to reading, which permitted her to detach herself from a universe of deception in order to learn about the world in books and to recognise the innermost self, the home of knowledge and devotion.
21 Her return to the world outside brought with it an introduction to the use of words as tools for prudently expressing her identity. One episode in particular seems to represent this phenomenon through another mise en abyme. Marguerite depicts herself with Catherine, who is questioning her about the escape of her brother: So, finding myself torn between two dire possibilities, either to betray the loyalty I owed my brother, thus putting his life at risk, or to swear to an untruth, something I wouldn’t have wished to do even to save my life a thousand times over, I felt such confusion that, if God had not helped me, my behavior would have given away what I feared would be discovered without me even saying a word. [...] I showed such composure in language and facial expression that she only managed to learn what I wished her to know and I caused no offense to either my soul or my conscience by swearing false oaths32. (p. 175)
22 The literary text represents the moment when perplexed ambivalence turns into the deployment of ambiguity. Here Marguerite outlines the private space inhabited by the thinking person ‒ an identity anchored in connections and values that lend meaning to individual existence (so much so that in the end Marguerite swears on it with her life). She experiences the powers of language and its capacity to shape the individual in her relationship to others. The literary text bears witness to the duality – between a social self and an underlying personal identity appearing beneath the mask (a recurrent motif in the Memoirs) ‒ that brings the individual into being. The episode of the forced reconciliation between Henri III’s and d’Alençon’s favourites, which precedes the one above, testifies to the force of this double relation. Here, Marguerite underscores the disjunction between appearances and inner feelings: [my mother] ordered my brother and me to change our clothes [...] She was obeyed when it came to things that could be taken off or put back on; but, when it came to the face, which is the moving picture of the soul, the justified discontent we were feeling was as obvious as if it had been stamped there with the power and violence of the righteous rancour and disdain we were feeling under the influence of the events of this tragic-comedy.33 (p. 172-173)
23 The metaphor of the theatre shows the role played by literary models in the deciphering of reality. At this court that enjoys theatre shows with such relish, literature mirrors life; it is the fabric on which life imprints a pattern that reveals its meaning. This dialectical relationship is illustrated in the depiction of a surprising character: [...] the chevalier de Seurre (whom the queen, my mother, had handed over to my brother so that he could sleep in his room, and whom she liked sometimes to hear talk because of his frankness, and who freely said whatever he wanted, having something of the cynical philosopher about him) [...] [declared]: “It is too little if the idea is to be open, and too little if the idea is to mislead”. And, turning to me so that she could not hear him, he said: “I suspect this is not the last act in this game; I’d be amazed if our man (meaning of my brother) let things lie”34 (p. 173)
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24 The court is the place where literary models are acted out and literature the space in which individual experience is represented and considered. The cynical philosopher is a model of philosophical and linguistic irony, of the way literature as a mode of thinking and verbal expression shapes the individual. He uses cynical “tropes”35, paradoxical maxims that call into question social appearances in order to discover human truths. Marguerite thus uses the resources of writing in order to create a flexible space in which the individual avoids being constrained, puts her subjectivity to use and shapes her authorial identity. She exposes the individual to the world of knowledge and reshapes this world according to her experience, an experience consisting of prudent confrontation, of inadequate analogies and of ironic distancing.
Literary Strategies for the Construction of the Individual Subject of Experience
25 The initial presentation of the Memoirs as an oral response introduces the basic fiction of a personal contribution to a broader discussion that took place in both speech and writing. Marguerite shows that the individual is constituted through her dialogue with others. But this same introduction reveals the complexity of this largely polyphonic form of speech. Like all Renaissance texts, the Memoirs present themselves as a “second-hand”36 form of writing; they are woven out of quotations with multiple and often ambiguous functions.
26 From the outset, quotations are used in loose, allusive, virtually metaphorical fashion. Marguerite is Rome (p. 46). Her childhood becomes the starting point of the Memoirs, as is the life of Theseus in Parallel Lives, translated by Amyot. This inappropriate reworking of a reference calls attention to the choices made by the author and calls into question her position vis a vis the reader. Marguerite points out the difficulty of distinguishing myth from history in autobiography as well as in biography: [...] [actions] as worthy of being described as those of the childhood of Themistocles and Alexander, the former having put himself at risk in the middle of the road before the advancing horses of a charioteer who had refused to heed his call to stop, the latter disdaining the honours of winning a race if he had not done so against kings.37 (p. 48)
27 Her text thus places itself in a complex way under the patronage of Amyot’s Plutarch. This learned reference allows her to lay claim to the double authority of both Amyot and Plutarch and invites comparisons between the great men of the Lives and the protagonist of the autobiography. But the parallel is rejected as soon as it is made. Marguerite thus opens up an indeterminate space, comparable to the terrae incognitae she first mentions, in which the reader is to create the picture of her life. The process of constructing an identity becomes even more complex in the following paragraph, with the anecdote in which Henri II asks the child to choose between two boys. We are thus encouraged to compare this anecdote with the ones already mentioned. They seem to have nothing to do with one another even as they strikingly reveal the immobility that characterises the princess’ childhood. Perhaps they also show her prudence. On the other hand, one might wonder if the anecdote dealing with Alexander should not at least be read allegorically since hunting was one of her regular pursuits (p. 57) and “riding out with kings” could have a wider significance for Marguerite’s life.
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28 The narrative voice becomes ironic here in its use of comparisons that make the reader uncertain as to the position of the author. In the space that opens up between authorised knowledge and the subject-object that she offers for consideration, Marguerite claims her authorial freedom. Similarly, when Henri asks her to be his representative to Catherine during his absence, she facetiously refers to a famous biblical passage: “[…] I was this close to answering him, like Moses did to God in the burning bush: Who am I? Send the one you must send”38 (p. 57)
29 It is difficult to see Marguerite as Moses, Henri as Yahweh and Catherine as Pharaoh. The reference to this famous passage of the Old Testament moreover evokes the solemnity of a Protestant rhetoric that interprets history as a form of foreshadowing. We are thus encouraged to read the quotation ironically, as a mise en abyme of the way Marguerite finds her own voice through her dialogue with the authority figures of her brother and mother. Indeed, she adds: […] finding within myself what I never thought was there (powers stirred up by the content of his words, powers unknown to me even though [I had been] born with quite a bit of courage), once I had gotten over this initial surprise, these words appealed to me; and it suddenly seemed to me that I had been transformed, and that I had become something more than I had been until then. I began to grow in confidence, and I said to him: “My brother [...]”39
30 The deployment of parenthesis to bracket particular elements combined with the use of concession, opens up secondary perspectives that complicate the apparent simplicity of the transformation. The multi-layered discourse structures the polyphony that allows Marguerite to detach the narrative voice from that of the character who promises her brother that “my being with the queen, my mother, is like you being there yourself’ and to distance herself from the character to whom Catherine says “it will be a great pleasure for me to speak to you as if to your brother. Give yourself over to me, and do not fear to speak to me freely, for I wish it so”40. (p. 58). Marguerite thus shapes her story as one in which a speaking subject learns to dissociate what is said from the person speaking, and to discern difference notwithstanding her desire to be on equal footing with her brothers. A reader of Montaigne, she appears to be retracing the meanderings of his chapter entitled “On Experience”. Experience is the form of knowledge that allows us to understand what is singular. “Dissimilitude effortlessy infiltrates our works [...] Likeness does not unite as powerfully as difference pulls asunder.”41 Approximations, diversions and false pairings allow us to perceive in the mirror the individual who cannot quite recognise herself, or only partially recognises herself. And it is by observing others in comparative perspective that we get to know what it is to be human. Montaigne once again seems to offer insight on the Memoirs: By dint of having trained myself from childhood to scrutinise my life through observing others, I became quite expert in this area; and, when I put my mind to it, I give little away about myself in this respect, whether in terms of expressions, my mood, or what I say.42
31 Henri thus represents a negative self that Marguerite challenges a posteriori43. He is also Catherine’s favourite, as Marguerite, in all probability, would have liked to have been. Marguerite creates history based upon the image she wishes to project of herself, and she chooses Henri as the main target for her irony. She writes history retrospectively, drawing on the experience gained over long years, but she is not too far from historical reality if Thierry Wanegfellen44, for example, is to be believed. He thinks that Henri, who was close to the Guise family, had perhaps “conceived the Saint Bartholomew
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massacre as a sort of coup d’état allowing him to become the principal figure in the royal state, riding on the immense popularity he enjoyed in anti-Protestant circles […]” and that this involvement of a member of the royal family in the massacre probably made any crack-down on the Guise family impossible.
32 Moving well beyond self-justification, the techniques used in the Memoirs depict the changing face of the Valois court, from the fabrication of a glorious historical narrative to the fracture of the Wars of Religion. The canny use of asides allows Marguerite to distinguish her voice from those of the rest of the royal family, thus showing the stakes involved during the rise of absolutism. Hence, beginning with Henri’s speech after Jarnac, she revealingly uses mocking parenthetical remarks: [...] he delivered an oration containing a complete explanation of the way he was carrying out his charge [...] with so much skill and eloquence, and such grace that he earned the respect of everyone present ‒ even more so given that his great youth enhanced and made even more apparent the prudence of his words (more suited to a great beard and an old captain than to a young adolescent of sixteen, whose brow was already garlanded with the laurels of two battle victories) and that beauty, which makes all acts pleasing, was so vigorous in him that it seemed to seek to rival his good fortune in order to see which of them would bring him more glory.45 (p. 54-55)
33 It was the old maréchal Tavannes that had written the speech. While the glory of the victory is real, that of the speech is hollow. And what about the glory of beauty? Marguerite then adds an anecdote about the veil of Timanthes that is obviously sinister in tone. It is no longer a matter of depicting the sublimity of the political sacrifice, but rather of stressingthe culpable blindness of a happily prudent mother. The slipperiness of the discursive system here allows the author to avoid being pinned down.
34 Marguerite also deploys metaphors as ironic quotations in order to create axiological resemblances. Thus, she has Henri say à propos of Charles that he fears that he “does not always get much pleasure out of hunting, but with his newfound ambition he would like to replace the hunting of animals with the hunting of men” (p. 56). Here she sketches Henri’s cruelty while also recalling that Charles had been referred to in a Protestant pamphlet, the Réveille-matin des français, as an “unloyal hunter”46. She may even be referencing by implication the murky dealings of Henri against Charles IX. Later, she would write of the “pumpkin” Le Guast (p. 92), a metaphor once used by Ronsard to describe denizens of the court, Ronsard himself having been attacked by Protestants as the ultimate Catholic courtier for the Valois. As we can see, Marguerite chooses her metaphors, quotations and discursive strategies from the books with which she is familiar. She thus distinguishes herself quite clearly from other authors of memoirs writing not long before her, such as Jean de Mergey, who also recounts the Saint-Bartholomew massacres, or her mother-in-law Jeanne d’Albret, who tells of her political engagement in the 1560s, inasmuch as these predecessors frequently use popular tropes or anecdotes in which any sense of a personal voice is lost47. These juicy example establish complicity with a sort of universalized meta-reader, one who participates in the same discursive community and shares the same type of wisdom. Marguerite, for her part, quotes phrases that evoke particular authors, but we do not always know what she is getting at or her attitude with regard to what is being expressed. She uses Tacitus and Gentillet, but it is not possible to say for sure whether she is on the side of Alençon or the Protestants. Certain phrases seem repeated from one passage to the next as cases of autonymical antanaclases that alert the reader to
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the meaning of important terms. Catherine loves Henri ‘uniquely’, Madame de Sauve leads each of her lovers to believe that she loves them “uniquely”(p. 91) and, finally, Madame de Tournon loves her daughter “uniquely” too, despite driving her to death because of her pitiless heard-heartedness (p. 141). Henri employs “tyrannical maxims”, the political players in Flanders discuss Spanish tyranny (p. 130-131) and Alençon that of his brother’s (p. 165): finally the reader is invited to include in this series the metaphorical tyranny of mademoiselle de Tournon (p. 141).
35 With these techniques, Marguerite invents a lively personal style, one which is conducive to a subtle forms of reading and interpretation, similar to that of the humanists in which she was trained. These include the authors with whom she was in dialogue through her sharing of their metaphors ‒ Erasmus, Du Bellay and Du Bartas, for instance. Her text thus thoughtfully subjects learning to the test of experience and, in itd own way, perpetuates a poetics of imitation. The individual acquires knowledge, incorporates it into her text and turns it into the reflections of a woman threatened by the divisions of her era, questioning even the way in which knowledge, in all its instability, “bigarrure”, and indebtedness to the vagaries of ethics, is partitioned. The pieces of the kaleidoscope point to the subject we can glimpse in the author’s irony and in her paradoxical denials.
36 The Memoirs thus constitute a justification of their author, who creates her identity as one of a victim, but her argument is quite different from that of Jeanne d’Albret, for example. The ambiguous tone, woven out of humanist learning employed in complex fashion, makes for a moving and meaningful text, one which invents “Memoirs”48 as a genre and which provides an exceptional insight into the life of the court. It can be read in many ways -the mark of a great work of literature. However, this epistemological flexibility, which would be cited favourably in the case of other writers ‒ in the cases of Commynes’ Memoirs and Josephus’ Jewish Wars even treason is seen as constitutive discursive act ‒ is considered in Marguerite’s case as a degrading form of feminine weakness. Yet the ambiguities inherent in her identity49 exemplify the paradoxes of the modern self. Her text can be understood as the fashioning of an authorial identity, that brilliantly reveals the power systems in which she was enmeshed, thanks to her contradictory status as royal princess and then childless queen. Hers is a magisterial contribution to Renaissance self-fashioning50 and she helped to construct the spiral staircase from the top of which Norbert Elias imagined Renaissance Man contemplating himself51. She fulfills the program laid out by Montaigne in the final chapter of his Essays, which reminds us both that “know thyself” was engraved on the pediment of the temple of Apollo, god of knowledge, and that “Plato also says that prudence is nothing more than the enactment of this prescription” 52.
NOTES
1. References to the Memoirs will be placed between brackets throughout the article and will refer to the following edition: Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires et Discours, éd. Éliane Viennot, Saint-
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Etienne, Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004. See also the useful edition : Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires et autres écrits, Éliane Viennot ed, Paris, Champion, 1999, french text online http://www.elianeviennot.fr/Marguerite/MgV-Memoires.html, accessed 15 May 2016. 2. É. Viennot, Marguerite de Valois, Paris, Payot, 1993, p. 187 et 236; J. Coppin, “Marguerite de Valois et le Livre des créatures de Raymond Sebond”, Revue du seizième siècle, tome X, 1923, p. 57-66. 3. É. Viennot, “Parler de soi: parler à l’autre. Marguerite de Valois face à ses interlocuteurs”, Tangence, n°77, 2005, p. 37-59, p. 52: “De fait, c’est tout l’être qui a changé, et qui s’est avant tout chargé d’expérience: de la politique, de la guerre, de l’amour, de la vie”; to which can be added “de l’écriture” (“On Writing’), begun in the correspondence, and doubtless lost works of poetry. The last chapter of Montaigne’s Essais (III, XIII) is entitled “De l’expérience” (“On Experience”). 4. G. Shrenck, “Brantôme et Marguerite de Valois: d’un genre l’autre ou les Mémoires incertains”, La Cour au miroir des mémorialistes, 1530-1682, Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 1989, N. Hepp ed., Paris, Klincksieck, 1991, p. 183-192 ; É. Viennot, “Les métamorphoses de Marguerite de Valois, ou les cadeaux de Brantôme”, in Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin eds., Dans les miroirs de l’écriture. La réflexivité chez les femmes écrivains de l’Ancien Régime, Montréal, Paragraphes, 1998, p. 83-94. 5. After ten pages describing Marguerite’s physical appearance, Brantôme writes: “C’est assez, si me semble, d’avoir parlé de la beauté de son corps, encores que le subject en soit si ample qu’il meriteroit une decade : toutesfois j’espere d’en parler encores ailleurs; mais il faut dire quelque chose de sa belle ame, qui est si bien logée en si beau corps.” [It is enough, it seems to me, to have spoken of the beauty of her body, even though the subject fully deserves a week; however, I hope to speak of it again elsewhere; but something must be said about her beautiful soul, which is so aptly accommodated in such a beautiful body.] Brantôme, Recueil des Dames, Étienne Vaucheret ed., Paris, Gallimard, “bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 1991, p. 130. 6. Louis Le Roy, De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers, Paris, Fayard, 1988, p. 17. 7. “[…] modérant ses actions comme elle voulait, montrant apparemment que le discret ne fait rien qu’il ne veuille faire, sans s’amuser à publier sa joie et à pousser ses louanges dehors […].” (p. 55) 8. La “lecture des Histoires est une école de prudence”, Les vies des hommes illustres, grecs et romains, comparées l’une avec l’autre par Plutarque de Chaeronee, Translatées de grec en françois par M. Jaques Amyot conseiller du Roy, et grand ausmonier... Lausanne, Jean Le Preux, 1578, préface au lecteur. 9. Francis Goyet, Les Audaces de la prudence, Paris, Garnier, 2009. 10. Ibid., p. 44. 11. According to the inventory made after her death, Marguerite owned these works. See Marie- Noëlle Baudoin-Matuszek, « La bibliothèque de Marguerite de Valois », Henri III Mécène, Paris, PUPS, 2006, p. 274-292. 12. Francis Goyet, op. cit., p. 92-95. 13. François Rouget, “Les orateurs de ‘La Pléiade’ à l’Académie du Palais (1576): étude d’un album manuscrit ayant appartenu à Marguerite de Valois”, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 31.4, automne, 2008, p. 19-42. 14. “[elle dit] que toutes les choses du monde avaient deux faces, que cette première, qui était triste et affreuse étant tournée, quand nous viendrions à voir la seconde, plus agréable et plus tranquille, à nouveaux événements, on prendrait nouveau conseil ; que lors peut-être on aurait besoin de moi ; que comme la prudence conseillait de vivre avec ses amis comme devant un jour être ses ennemis, pour ne leur confier rien de trop, qu’aussi l’amitié venant à se rompre et pouvant nuire, elle ordonnait d’user de ses ennemis comme pouvant être un jour amis.” (p. 104)
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15. “J’usai de ce commandement passionné avec le conseil de mon frère et la discrétion requise en telles choses, sachant bien qu’un jour il en aurait regret, pouvant espérer beaucoup d’assistance d’un tel cavalier.” (p. 195) 16. “Tut! Envy and hate hold the eyes in thrall so that they never see things as they really are”. (“Mais quoi! l’envie et la haine fascinent les yeux, et font qu’ils ne voient jamais les choses telles qu’elles sont.” p. 195) 17. “Trop jeune que j’étais et sans expérience, je n’avais à suspecte cette prospérité! Et pensant le bien duquel je jouissais permanent, sans me douter d’aucun changement, j’en faisais un état assuré!” (p. 59) 18. “Toutes ces belles apparences de bienveillance ne me faisaient point tromper aux fruits que l’on doit espérer de la Cour, en ayant eu par le passé trop d’expériences.” (p. 203) 19. “[…] il le laissa pour m’entretenir durant le bal, et pour après me mener à la collation de confitures – imprudemment ce me semble, vu qu’il avait charge de la citadelle. J’en parle trop savante à mes dépens, pour avoir plus appris que je n’en désirais comme il se faut comporter en la garde d’une place forte.” (p. 125) 20. Blandine Kriegel, La République et le Prince moderne, Paris, P. U.F., 2011, particularly p. 83. 21. “[…] comme la vieille Madame de Randan, qui ayant demeuré depuis la mort de son mari sans voir miroir, rencontrant par fortune son visage dans le miroir d’une autre, demanda qui était celle-là.” (p. 47). 22. We cannot here go into all the different terms analysed in these pages. 23. Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe, Daniel Nordman, Un tour de France royal, le voyage de Charles IX (1564-1566), Paris, Aubier, 1984. 24. “[…] ce beau ballet, duquel la Fortune envieuse ne pouvant supporter la gloire fit orager une si étrange pluie et tempête, que la confusion de la retraite qu’il fallait faire la nuit par bateaux apporta le lendemain autant de bons contes pour rire, que ce magnifique appareil de festin avait apporté de contentement) […]” (p. 53). 25. Ibid., p. 56, on the subject of regional dances used by Catherine’s for political ends, as mentioned by Marguerite and not by Jouan, the royal chronicler. 26. “Ce qu’en ressentait ma mère, qui l’aimait uniquement, ne se peut représenter par paroles, non plus que le deuil du père d’Iphigénie.” (p. 54) 27. Norbert Elias, La société de cour, trans. P. Kannitzer and J. Etoré, Paris, Flammarion, “Champs”, 1985. 28. Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi, Paris, Minuit, 1981. 29. Quentin Skinner, Les fondements de la pensée politique moderne, trans. Jérome Grossman and Jean-Yves Pouilloux, Paris, Albin Michel, “Bibliothèque de l’évolution de l’humanité”, 2009, p. 768, Nicolas Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’État, De la Renaissance à l’absolutisme, Seyssel, Champ vallon, 2013, p. 107. 30. Innocent Gentillet, Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume ou autre principauté, […] Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin, s.l., s. éd., 1576, Epistre, Jean Balsamo, “‘Un livre écrit du doigt de Satan ”, la découverte de Machiavel et l’invention du machiavélisme en France au XVIe siècle”, in Le pouvoir des livres à la Renaissance, D. Courcelles ed., Paris, École nationale des Chartes, 1998. 31. It should be remembered that Henri had been baptised Alexandre and François d’Alençon was baptised Hercule. See also Nicolas Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’État, op. cit. 32. “Lors me trouvant entre ces deux extrémités, ou de manquer à la fidélité que je devais à mon frère, et mettre sa vie en danger, ou de jurer contre la vérité, chose que je n’eusse voulue pour éviter mille morts, je me trouvai en si grande perplexité que, si Dieu ne m’eût assisté, ma façon eût assez témoigné, sans parler, ce que je craignais qui fût découvert. […] je composai tellement mon visage et mes paroles, qu’elle ne put rien connaître que ce que je voulais, et que je n’offensai mon âme ni ma conscience par aucun faux serment.” (p. 175)
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33. “[ma mère] commanda à mon frère et à moi d’aller changer nos habits […] Elle y fut obéie pour les choses qui se pouvaient dévêtir ou remettre ; mais pour le visage, qui est la vive image de l’âme, la passion du juste mécontentement que nous avions s’y lisait aussi apparente qu’elle avait été imprimée, avec la force et violence du dépit et juste dédain que nous ressentions par l’effet de tous les actes de cette tragi-comédie.” (p. 172-173) 34. “[…] le chevalier de Seurre (que la reine ma mère avait baillé à mon frère pour coucher en sa chambre, et qu’elle prenait plaisir d’ouïr quelquefois causer, pour être d’humeur libre, et qui disait de bonne grâce ce qu’il voulait, tenant un peu de l’humeur d’un philosophe cynique) […] [qui déclare] ‘C’est trop peu, […] pour faire à bon escient, et trop pour se jouer.’ Et se tournant vers moi sans qu’elle le pût entendre, me dit : ‘Je ne crois pas que ce soit ici le dernier acte de ce jeu ; notre homme (voulant parler de mon frère) me tromperait bien s’il demeurait là’.” (p. 173) 35. Michèle Clément, Le Cynisme à la renaissance, Genève, Droz, 2005, p. 194. 36. Antoine Compagnon, La Seconde main ou le travail de la citation, Paris, Seuil, 1979. 37. “[…] aussi dignes d’être décrites que celles de l’enfance de Thémistocle et d’Alexandre, l’un s’exposant au milieu de la rue devant les pieds des chevaux du charretier qui ne s’était à sa prière voulu arrêter, l’autre méprisant l’honneur du prix de la course, s’il ne le disputait avec des rois.” (p. 48) 38. “[…] Peu s’en fallut que je ne lui répondisse, comme Moïse à Dieu en la vision du buisson : ‘Que suis-je, moi ?’ Envoie celui que tu dois envoyer.” (p. 57) 39. “[…] trouvant en moi ce que je ne pensais qui y fût (des puissances excitées par l’objet de ses paroles, qui auparavant m’étaient inconnues bien que [je fusse] née avec assez de courage en moi), revenue de ce premier étonnement, ces paroles me plurent ; et me semblait à l’instant que j’étais transformée, et que j’étais devenue quelque chose de plus que je n’avais été jusqu’alors. Je commençai à prendre confiance de moi-même, et lui dis : ‘Mon frère […]’.” 40. “Ce me sera un grand plaisir de vous parler comme à votre frère. Rendez-vous sujette auprès de moi, et ne craignez point de me parler librement, car je le veux ainsi” (p. 58). 41. “La dissimilitude s’ingere d’elle mesme en nos ouvrages […] La ressemblance ne faict pas tant un comme la difference faict autre”, Montaigne, Essais, III, XIII, éd. Villey, p. 1064. 42. “Pour m’estre, dès mon enfance, dressé à mirer ma vie dans celle d’autruy, j’ay acquis une complexion studieuse en cela, et, quand j’y pense, je laisse eschaper au tour de moy peu de choses qui y servent : contenances, humeurs, discours.” Ibid., p. 1076. 43. Éliane Viennot, Mémoires, Champion, op . cit., p. 47 : “elle resta l’alliée d’Henri jusqu’aux premiers mois du séjour en Pologne”. 44. Thierry Wanegfellen, Catherine de Médicis, Paris, Payot, 2005, p. 369. 45. “[…] il fit une harangue au roi, pour lui rendre raison de tout le maniement de sa charge […] faite avec tant d’art et d’éloquence, dite avec tant de grâce qu’il se fit admirer de tous les assistants – et d’autant plus que sa grande jeunesse relevait et faisait davantage paraître la prudence de ses paroles (plus convenables à une barbe grise et à un vieux capitaine qu’à une adolescence de seize ans, à laquelle les lauriers de deux batailles gagnées lui ceignaient déjà le front) et que la beauté, qui rend toutes actions agréables florissait tellement en lui qu’il semblait qu’elle fît à l’envi avec sa bonne fortune pour voir laquelle des deux le rendrait plus glorieux.” (p. 54-55) 46. “chasseur déloyal”, Le Réveille-matin des français et de leurs voisins, composé par Eusebe Philadelphe, Jacques James, Édimbourgh, 1574, n.p. . 47. Mémoires de Mergey, Nouvelle Collection des Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de France, ed. Michaud and Poujoulat, Paris, 1838, t. IX, p. 575 : [I responded that it was not sufficient to be aware of it, but that it had to be remedied, and that it was not good enough to run fast, but that one had to set off early; he responded that he had not intention of spending the winter there.] ‘je luy repliquay que ce n’estoit pas assez de le cognoistre, mais qu’il y falloit remedier, et que ce n’estoit pas assez de courir fort, mais de partir de bonne heure; lequel me respondit qu’il
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n’esperoit pas de passer là son hyver’. Mémoires et poésies de Jeanne d’Albret, published by baron de Ruble, Paris, 1893, p. 82. [But it has been about as much use to listen to them as the glasses of an old man of sixty would have been to a twenty year old lady.] “Mais de quoy m’a servi de les escouter, sinon comme à une jeune personne de vingt ans les lunettes d’un vieillard sexagénaire?”. 48. Jean Garapon, “Une autobiographie dans les limbes, Les Mémoires de la reine Marguerite”, Marguerite de France Reine de Navarre et son temps, Agen, Centre Mateo Bandello, 1994, p. 205-216, J. Garapon, “Les Mémoires du XVIIe siècle, nébuleuses de genre”, Le Genre des Mémoires, essai de définition, Paris, Klincksieck, 1995, p. 259-271, J. Garapon, “Amateurisme littéraire et vérité sur soi, de Marguerite de Valois au cardinal de Retz”, vol. 103, RHLF, 2003/2, p. 275-285. É. Viennot, “Conversation, innovation: les Mémoires de Marguerite de Valois et la naissance d’un genre”, in Marie-Paule De Weerdt-Pilorge (dir.), Mémoires des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Nouvelles tendances de la Recherche, Tours, Cahiers d’histoire culturelle, n° 13, 2003, p. 5-12, http://www.elianeviennot.fr/ Articles/Viennot-MgV-conversation.pdf, p. 4. 49. Anne-Marie Cocula, “Marguerite de Valois, de France et de Navarre: l’impossible identité de la reine Margot”, Marguerite de France Reine de Navarre et son temps, Agen, Centre Mateo Bandello, 1994, p. 17-27 and É. Viennot, “Les ambiguïtés identitaires du Je dans les Mémoires de Marguerite de Valois”, Le Genre des Mémoires, essai de définition, Paris, Klincksieck, 1995, p. 69-79. 50. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning, from More to Shakespeare, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 1st edition 1980. 51. Norbert Elias, La société de cour, op. cit., p. 279. 52. “Platon dict aussi que prudence n’est autre chose que l’execution de cette ordonnance”, Montaigne, Les Essais, III, XIII, op. cit., p. 1075.
ABSTRACTS
The Memoirs are an exercise in self-knowledge that reflects an anthropological outlook. This temporal vision of the human being draws on Marguerite’s philosophical knowledge, as well as her conception of history and of politics. As a good humanist, she put the considerable learning she had to the test of lived experience, as well as to that of writing, to a first-hand experience of learning that draws its meaning from the vivacity of an individual’s telling. The interaction of these different types of knowledge and their interaction with writing makes her identity.
Les Mémoires sont une entreprise de connaissance de soi-même qui révèlent une anthropologie. Cette vision de l’être dans le temps engage les savoirs philosophiques de Marguerite, sa conception de l’histoire et de la politique. En bonne humaniste, elle met donc les nombreux savoirs qu’elle possède à l’épreuve de l’expérience vécue et de celle de l’écriture, d’une expérience personnelle des savoirs qui prend sens dans la vivacité du discours d’un sujet. L’interaction de ces différents savoirs et leur interaction avec l’écriture fabrique son identité.
INDEX
Keywords: Marguerite de Valois, The Memoirs, experience, knowledge, authorship Mots-clés: Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires, expérience, savoir, auctorialité
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AUTHORS
CAROLINE TROTOT Université Paris-Est, EA LISAA 4120, UPEM, Champs s/Marne
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“Ignorant and intractable” Elisabeth in her Letters to Descartes Ignorante et indocile » : Élisabeth dans ses lettres à Descartes
Hélène Bah Ostrowiecki Translation : Joëlle Theubet and Natania Meeker
1 The woman’s self-portrait under examination here is not framed as such. Instead, it takes shape in the dialogical space established within a philosophical correspondence – he product of a series of depictions that work together to create an image of one of the participants in the exchange as part of the construction of a shared knowledge. Elisabeth, the Princess Palatine of Bohemia who lived from 1618 to 1680, is essentially known to the seventeenth – century history of ideas for the correspondence that she cultivated with Descartes from 1643 until his death in 1649, a period during which she lived in exile following the overthrow of her father Frederick V. This correspondence played a very important role in the evolution of Descartes’ thought, guided as it was by questions from Elisabeth that promoted a rearticulation of soul and body as united within the human being – a theoretical reorientation that produced The Passions of the Soul, published in 1649.
2 Our goal here is to show that, if the contribution of Elisabeth to the correspondence produced this result, it is largely thanks to her deployment of a representation of herself that places a high priority on the body – both the social body to which she belongs and her own physical body. Evoking her own singular experience, she paradoxically grounds her coherence and credibility as a philosophical interlocutor in two seemingly unflattering epithets: “ignorant and intractable”. We will demonstrate how, despite their apparently negative relationship to knowledge, these two designations highlight the ambivalent function of the body in Elisabeth’s writing – a body that is at once, as a source of ignorance, an obstacle to the philosophical process, and, as a reality that resists theory, an unavoidable challenge to this same process.
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The Correspondence: A Space of Parity
3 Elisabeth’s self – portrait is inscribed both within the relationship between the princess and the philosopher and in the philosophical correspondence itself. In other words, the position and status of the two interlocutors structure the exchange on the one hand, and on the other are neutralized in order to guarantee the successful outcome of the correspondence. Thus, from the outset, each participant begins by implicitly accepting the portrait drawn of him or her by the other, in the process completing the image from his or her own point of view. Elisabeth both implicitly assumes her role as princess, and designates herself as a student: I learned, with much joy and regret, of the plan you had to see me […]; I was touched equally by your charity in willing to share yourself with an ignorant and intractable person and by the bad luck that robbed me of such a profitable conversation.[...] The shame of showing you so disordered a style prevented me, up until now, for asking you for this favor by letter.1 (p. 61-62).
4 Descartes, on his side, implicitly assumes his role as philosopher and designates himself as a simple subject: “The favor with which your Highness has honored me, in allowing me to receive her orders in writing, is greater than I would ever have dared to hope”2 (p. 63). Within this framework, the dialogue is presented by both Elisabeth and Descartes as an exchange of favors, by means of which each recognizes the superiority of the other in the position that defines him or her initially, and emphasizes his or her own inferiority in this same context.
5 On the occasion of this sharing of abilities, Elisabeth describes herself in the first lines of the first letter as “ignorant and intractable”, a deficient writer with a “disordered” style. She draws a self-portrait that is marked by a lack of ability – a weakness that becomes the motivation for an appeal itself marked by a pedagogical disparity: a student seeks out a teacher, the supposed bearer of a knowledge that the student herself does not have. In contrast, Descartes, as part of his recognition of the social position of his correspondent, does not delay in noting the relevance of her remarks and the acuity of her understanding. In this way a framework of mutual recognition is established above and beyond the possession of a particular kind of knowledge – a recognition of a shared aptitude for the exercise of reason that works to neutralize the initial social distinctions. This space of parity, forged in the correspondence, accounts for the quality and the longevity of the exchange.
6 Now, from the outset, Elisabeth takes up another discursive element – the therapeutic dimension of the exchange: Knowing that you are the best doctor for my soul, I expose to you quite freely the weaknesses of its speculations, and hope that in observing the Hippocratic oath, you will supply me with remedies without making them public.3 (p. 62)
7 This transition into the realm of medicine allows her to mitigate in a more profound way the intellectual and social disparities that separate her from her correspondent: first, the doctor holds a kind of knowledge that the patient lacks, but he is also at her service; second, the doctor has the authority to make use of his tools, both theoretical and material, but it is the patient who guarantees their actual effectiveness, by putting them to the test of her own experience.
8 In a more formal sense, this type of relationship brings about a need for confidentiality, and highlights on the one hand the separation between an intimate and a public space
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both marked by social constraints, and on the other the break with the social hierarchies that the correspondents begin by acknowledging. In asking for this kind of protection for their exchange, Elisabeth dramatizes the larger question of the safety of the mail and the possibility that their letters might fall into the wrong hands. This subject is taken up several times, as in the postscript to the letter dated May 24, 1645: I realize now in what I send you, I am forgetting one of your maxims, which is never to put anything in writing which can be interpreted badly by less charitable readers. But I have enough faith in the care of M. de Palotti that I know that my letter will truly be delivered to you, and in your discretion that you will destroy it by fire, because of the danger that it will fall into evil hands.4 (p. 91)
9 This concern even led the correspondents to consider the possibility of writing in code: I have examined the code that you sent me and found it very good, but too long to write a whole thought. And if one writes only a bit of a word, one would figure it out by the number of letters [...].5 (p. 176)
10 But, crucially, where the content of the letters is concerned, this reference to the relationship between doctor and patient inflects the framing of the correspondence considerably. Indeed, it transforms deficiency and weakness into an object of research, rather than an obstacle to this research. In this context, the status of “ignorant and intractable” is not so much a position of inferiority that Elisabeth must move beyond as a challenge that Descartes must take up. And Descartes himself understands it in this way: I have a very great obligation to your Highness in that she, after having borne my explaining myself badly in my previous letter [...], deigns again to have the patience to listen to me on the same matter [i.e. clarifying the relationship among the three primitive notions: that of the soul; that of the body; and that of the union between soul and body]. That is, I think, all of what your Highness has prescribed me to do here.6 (p. 69)
11 This reply shows a reversal of the prescription: the prescription of the doctor, with which he affirms his authority over the patient, is echoed by the prescription of the patient, in which she gives him an object, and invites him to embrace a philosophical rigor that is capable of taking account of this object in its singularity.
12 From here on out, the positioning of the exchange within a frame that is at once philosophical and therapeutic casts a different light on the self-portrait of Elisabeth as “ignorant and intractable”: if the assertion of ignorance makes of her an inadequate disciple, hindered by her body in her quest for knowledge, her intractability renders her the spokesperson of a singular experience that resists and requires the modification of this very knowledge.
“Ignorant”: The Body as Obstacle to Philosophy
13 Let us begin with ignorance. This characteristic, one of the first noted by Elisabeth in her representation of herself, is doubly linked to the domain of physicality. First, it emerges from her connection with a social body and the geographical constraints this body places on her; second, it is one of the attributes that are proper to her own individual body.
14 The self-portrait of Elisabeth thus presents her in context, as someone who, in her own words, does not “have occasion to do as I like”7. Elisabeth sees her thirst for knowledge frustrated by the external conditions of her exile and her political circumstances, both
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of which put limits on her freedom of movement and make it difficult for her to use her time as she pleases, in particular by often preventing her from meeting with Descartes. She explains: [...] I would rescind the resolution I have made to return there [to Holland], if the interests of my family do not call me back, and I will wait here until the outcome of the treaties of Munster or some other treaty brings me back to my country.”8 (p. 162)
15 She reveals herself to be at the mercy of events that are beyond her control, and regularly frustrate her desire to be both in places propitious for study and in the presence of the person who could help her to overcome her ignorance. That which keeps her, despite herself, from making this kind of progress in this domain also manifests itself in the more intimate form of the family and of familial obligation: “[…] I do not at all see the electress, my aunt, being in the mood to permit my return […].”9 (p. 158)
16 But this constraint, imposed upon her by the social body to which she belongs, functions independently from the political circumstances that retain her in a particular geographical place. In fact, Elisabeth evokes the different aspects of court life that are incompatible with the full development of her philosophical quest for knowledge. This life is lived as a form of insincerity; Elisabeth evokes the “[…] false praise […] in a place where the ordinary way of conversing has accustomed me to understand that people are incapable of giving one true praise […]”10 (p. 67), and she contrasts this empty flattery with the kind of relationship that the correspondence with Descartes offers. Furthermore, her condition as a princess in itself leaves her little time: Now the interests of my house, which I must not neglect, now some conversations and social obligations which I cannot avoid, beat down so heavily on this weak mind with annoyance or boredom, that it is rendered useless for anything else at all for a long time afterward: this will serve, I hope, as an excuse for my stupidity in being unable to comprehend11. […] (p. 67-68)
17 Even should she work to fortify her “weak mind”, she describes herself as the prisoner of a structural conflict from which, she notes with admiration, others are capable of escaping, as she has heard is the case for Christina, Queen of Sweden: But I wonder how it is possible for this princess to apply herself to study as she does and to the affairs of the kingdom as well, two occupations that are so different, each of which demand an entire person.12 (p. 181)
18 This incompatibility frequently translates itself into the mention of interruptions that prevent Elisabeth from concentrating on the philosophical work represented by the examination of her experience in her letters to Descartes: It has been eight days since the bad humor of a sick brother prevented me from making this request of you […].13 (p. 101) […] I am constrained to abide by the impertinent established laws of civility so that I do not acquire any enemies. Since I began writing this letter I have been interrupted more than seven times […].14 (p. 115)
19 These elements of the self-portrait of Elisabeth as an exiled princess show that the inclusion of the individual in the social body works as an obstacle to the development of philosophical research and contributes to the position of ignorance that she refers to in her self-characterization. But this is not all. This external constraint reflects an internal and individual constraint that is linked to the physical body: But I confess that I find it difficult to separate from the senses and the imagination those things that are continuously represented to them in conversation and in
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letters, so that I do not know how to avoid them without sinning against my duty.15 (p. 93)
20 A difficulty that exists apart from the duties inherent in her position is here rendered insurmountable by them. It takes considerable effort to separate the mind from the bodily circumstances in which it operates, even for a person with as much talent for metaphysical speculation as Elisabeth has, according to Descartes.
21 Thus the princess presents her ignorance in its relationship to causes that she finds in her own person, thereby completing her portrait with the addition of her own bodily attributes: she is a woman, and she is sick. A gendered perspective appears explicitly in her writing three times – each time in association with the idea of constraint. With regards to Queen Christina, Elisabeth brings up the stereotypical representation of women as the weaker sex; Christina gives her, she writes, “the idea of a person so accomplished, who defends our sex from the imputation of imbecility and weakness that the pedants would have given it”16 (p. 181). Elisabeth here rejects the presumption of women’s weakness by presenting it as a form of pedantry; while it may be less widespread at the moment when she is writing (hence the use of the imperfect “soulaient” [“would have given it”]), it apparently still needs to be criticized.
22 And, in fact, this opinion seems still to carry a certain weight for Elisabeth herself, because she takes up for her own purposes the association of femininity with weakness, not as a social construction but as a physiological inevitability: Know thus that I have a body imbued with a large part of the weaknesses of my sex, so that it is affected very easily by the afflictions of the soul and has none of the strength to bring itself back into line, as it is of a temperament subject to obstructions and resting in an air which contributes strongly to this.17 (p. 88-89)
23 The “weaknesses of my sex” merge here with other causes to emphasize the disparity between the movements of the body and those of the soul, thereby preventing the mastery of one by the other. These declarations echo the third mention of femininity in the letters, when Elisabeth seems to make reference to menstruation, which prevents her from traveling: “In addition, the curse of my sex keeps me from the contentment a voyage to Egmond would have brought me.”18 (p. 94)
24 One can see here that Elisabeth deploys her gendered body as an element in her portrait that serves to highlight not only her weakness and deficiency but the inferiority of her position in relationship to knowledge. This theme nonetheless remains rather discreet and intervenes in her writing only as one experience among others, much less salient than her presentation of the ailing body. Elisabeth reaches out to Descartes as a doctor of the body as well as of the soul, and reveals throughout the correspondence different symptoms, for which Descartes, in his answers, works to find a cure: I assure you that the doctors, who saw me every day and examined all the symptoms of my illness, did not in so doing find its cause, or order such helpful remedies, as you have done from afar.19 (p. 88)
25 This fragile body obliges the mind that it shelters to run the risk of their mutual disappearance: If my life were entirely known to you, I think the fact that a sensitive mind, such as my own, has conserved itself for so long amidst so many difficulties, in a body so weak, would seem more strange to you […].”20 (p. 89)
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26 Her portrait of herself is that of a woman whose bodily ailments impede her goal of putting into practice her philosophical principles; the physical dimension of the portrait is an essential part of the representation of her engagement in a shared research project. But it seems as if illness only works to emphasize the reality of the body as obstacle, a reality that exists even in health. Here is Elisabeth writing about a moment and a journey where she appears to be faring well: […] the air here is so pure. I am here in much better health than I ever was in Holland. But I would not want to have been here always, since there is nothing but my books to prevent me from becoming completely stupid.21 (p. 163)
27 The simple enjoyment of the healthy body does not represent, for her, the basis for an improved intellectual activity, but rather comes to signify the risk of being trapped within this body without the external aid of the book.
28 Whether she presents herself as a member of the court, as a woman, or as a person in more or less ill health, Elisabeth locates the physical dimension of experience on the side of impediments, ignorance, and stupidity. And she does this insistently, in a way that recalls the demand that she makes of Descartes. One could even say that this body, which bears such responsibility for the epithet of “ignorant” that Elisabeth ascribes to herself (we note here that she makes no reference to the age difference between herself and Descartes, which could function as a reason for this ignorance), becomes an essential part of her contribution to the philosophical exchange. In this exchange, Elisabeth stresses the experiences that become an obstacle to the practice of philosophy that she takes up. In this way, the representation of her ignorance becomes, for her interlocutor, an appeal, as well as a demand for greater philosophical rigor.
“Intractable”: The Body as Appeal to Philosophy
29 Ignorance produced by the body thus becomes intractability, the resistance of experience to theory that Elisabeth asks Descartes to help her mitigate—a kind disobedience, to echo the definition of the term given by Furetière in his Dictionnaire universel of 1690: “Farouche, revêche, qui ne veut recevoir aucune instruction ni rendre d’obéissance.”22
30 From this perspective, the very existence of the exchange between Descartes and Elisabeth can become an instance of the latter’s intractability. In fact, the young woman first takes up the philosophical problem of the articulation of the body and soul with Regius, the Dutch philosopher and doctor. And it is Regius who advises her to approach Descartes. Thus one could say that, having resisted instruction from a first teacher, she turned to a second. Since Descartes is credited with greater authority, will she adopt a position of intellectual submission with him? The qualifier of “intractable” comes to reflect the considerable ambivalence of the place that she will occupy here: more than a humble representation of her failings and her inferiority, the term designates the force of an object that will not allow itself to be diminished, thereby constructing Elisabeth as a rather Cartesian figure of contestation and autonomous self-assertion.
31 In fact, her whole exchange with Descartes is fed by the intractability that she never ceases to reveal through her persistence: I would not dare to ask this of you if I did not know that you never leave a work imperfect and that in undertaking to teach a stupid person, such as myself, you are
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prepared for all the inconveniences that brings you. It is this which makes me continue and say to you that the reasons do not persuade me […].”23 (p. 123)
32 Descartes accepts her challenge, which pushes him into further retrenchment of his position, and is conscious of the possibilities for clarification that this resistance to his instruction brings. To return to a passage that has already been cited, he declares: I have a very great obligation to your Highness in that she, after having borne my explaining myself badly in my previous letter, concerning the question which it pleased her to propose to me, deigns again to have the patience to listen to me on the same matter […].24 (p. 69)
33 One would no doubt be wrong to see here only the rhetoric of politeness: in this formulation – one that transforms intractability into patience, and the mastery of knowledge into a pedagogical weakness – he recognizes the philosophical coherence of the questions raised by his interlocutor on the basis of her own experience – an experience wherein philosophy, like the doctor he has agreed to become, must find the touchstone of its theoretical constructs.
34 Placed as she is in this crucial position, Elisabeth demonstrates vis à vis Descartes an intellectual confidence that derives from this ambivalent intractability: we thus see her formulating more or less definitive judgements of the philosophical aptitudes of those around her: “[…] there is no one else here who is reasonable enough to understand [your works] […].”25 (p. 152) And we find her remarking, in the context of an encounter in Berlin, on “[…] the capability of the one I find to be the most reasonable of the doctors here, since he has a taste for your reasoning […].”26 (p. 156) Even as she affirms the dutifulness that makes her use an understanding of Descartes’ œuvre as a gauge of intellectual quality, she establishes her own point of view and gives herself as a point of reference, thereby moving away from any position of inferiority that her avowal of ignorance may have implied.
35 Elisabeth’s intractability expresses itself as an intellectual rigor that requires theory to take particularity into account27; this is the thrust of the request that she makes of Descartes from the beginning, and that she reiterates with such persistence: “[…] I ask you for a more precise definition of the soul than the one you give in your Metaphysics.” 28 (p. 62) But she does not just raise a set of questions: throughout the correspondence, she provides the material that is needed in order to arrive at answers. This evidence consists of her personal, even intimate, experience – most notably the experience by means of which she recognizes her body as an impediment to rational control over the course taken by her life.
36 This deployment of the self in the service of a shared search for truth meets two demands: that of the patient who awaits a cure from her doctor, and that of the philosopher who situates her singular experience in the more general content provided by scientific knowledge. This is the origin of the singular tone of an exchange where the narration of physical symptoms moves out of the therapeutic (and strictly private) register and acquires a more general purpose within the construction of knowledge. It is in this context that Elisabeth takes the risk of appearing insignificant – or obscene – by highlighting her intimate experience: I plan as well to be bled in a few days, because that has become a bad habit and I cannot change it without getting a headache. I would fear giving you a headache with this annoying account of myself, if your concern for my health had not brought me to it.29 (p. 159)
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37 She takes this risk because this kind of account is justified as a source of experimental data for scientific study, as she explains in another context: While we were walking through an oak wood, […] we were overcome in an instant by a sort of redness over the whole body […]. It is to be remarked that all the different remedies each imagined for an illness so new […] served for nothing. I give you this account because I presume that in it you can find something to confirm some of your doctrines.”30 (p. 174)
38 In the portrait that she gives of herself, Elisabeth positions herself as an empiricist philosopher positing her individual experience as the foundation for universal scientific judgement, as do the other interlocutors of Descartes during this period, including Regius (her first interlocutor), Gassendi, and Hobbes31.
39 In many senses, the correspondence bears witness to the priority given to experience. To cite only two passages, Elisabeth declares of the passions: For those who call the passions perturbations of the mind would persuade me that the force of the passions consists only in overwhelming and subjecting reason to them [sic], if experience did not show me that there are passions that do carry us to reasonable actions.32 (p. 110-111)
40 And elsewhere: “[…] I have always found it better to avail myself of experience rather than reason, in matters that concern [civil life] […].” (p. 134)33 But Elisabeth’s sensitivity to the stubborn resistance of experience in the face of metaphysics reveals itself most clearly in the means by which she transforms the ignorance produced by the body into an intractability for which the mind must account. At the same time as she expresses a lack of comprehension, she opens up another perspective by tirelessly affirming the objection to theory that her body, and her experience of her body, represent. She thus positions herself vis à vis Descartes, the putative holder of theoretical knowledge, as the bearer of kind of practical, pre-theoretical knowledge, which Descartes himself acknowledges as the impetus for new research.
41 Does Elisabeth actively presume the priority given to the body – a priority that gives her a certain status as an independent interlocutor – or does she endure it despite herself? In considering the body as an impediment, and in painting a portrait of herself as a woman struggling to overcome this obstacle, she displays her fundamental tendency to identify herself as a mind and to separate mind from body; this is a tendency that she describes as “rational”: If I were able to profit, as you do, from everything that presents itself to my senses, I would divert myself without difficulty. It is at this moment that I feel the inconvenience of being but a little rational. For if I were not so at all, I would find pleasures in common with those among whom I must live and so be able to take this medicine and have it do something.34 (p. 93-94)
42 In this passage, Elisabeth evokes the difficulty of putting into practice the following cure (that Descartes proposes): […] your Highness [should clear] her mind entirely of all sorts of unhappy thoughts, and even also of all sorts of serious meditations concerning the sciences. She should occupy herself by imitating those who convince themselves they think of nothing in looking at the greenery of a wood, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, and such things that require no attention.35 (p. 92)
43 Submerging thought in sensation in order to give the impression that the mind no longer operates; keeping to a minimum those moments of intellectual concentration that give access to a genuine grasp of the metaphysical separation of the two
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substances; relaxing the mind to enjoy its union with the body and the pleasures of the senses: such is the cure of Descartes the doctor.
44 Now if we set aside the more or less obligatory euphemism (“a little rational”) that Elisabeth uses with her teacher to qualify her intellectual abilities, Elisabeth draws a portrait of herself as distinguished by her capacity for abstraction – a capacity that, we note in passing, isolates her both from her own body (with her difficulties in accessing the pleasures of the senses) and from the social body to which she belongs (with her difficulties in accessing the pleasures “in common with those among whom I must live”). At this point, the correspondence presents us with a paradox: Elisabeth gives an account of the “inconvenience” of being cut off from her body, and it is Descartes who nonetheless pushes her to cultivate the immersion of the mind in the body. A paradox, in the sense that it is Elisabeth, in their exchange, who highlights, as an argument against metaphysics, the status of this body and her irreducible experience of it.
45 Everything proceeds here as if Descartes, demonstrating a genuine therapeutic receptivity as well as a great deal of philosophical honesty, heard the appeal of Elisabeth despite her own unwillingness to formulate it as such36. Aware as he is of her potentially dangerous aptitude for metaphysics, he invites her to plunge herself into the body that she offers up to him in writing, rather than to separate herself from the body that is a source of so much complaint. But this is not to say that Elisabeth remains passive throughout this process. Let us not forget that this entire approach is conditioned by the representation of herself that she elaborates in writing.
46 The correspondence represents a site where the body is put into play even from a distance. This distance, which requires Elisabeth to articulate her physical reality in words, is perhaps the condition for the effectiveness of Descartes’ therapeutic intervention: I assure you that the doctors, who saw me every day and examined all the symptoms of my illness, did not in so doing find its cause, or order such helpful remedies, as you have done from afar.37 (p. 88)
47 Descartes had likewise noted the possibilities inherent in their epistolary relationship: […] had I been able to be admitted the honor of paying you reverence […], I would have had too many marvels to admire at the same time […]. This would have made me less capable of responding to your Highness […].38 (p. 63)
48 This comment on the positive effects of neutralizing physical presence, far from being a simple piece of rhetorical gallantry, underscores the importance of written mediation, which represents for Elisabeth an opportunity to actively construct a representation of herself.
49 In conclusion, the history of philosophy recognizes the coherence and the philosophical scope of the correspondence between Descartes and the Princess Elisabeth39. We note here with interest how the self-portrait of the princess, with its emphasis on the body – both the social body to which she belongs, and the individual body that constitutes the human person – transforms the written articulation of her experience into a partial solution to the very problems posed by this experience. At once obstacle to thought and permanent appeal, the body represents a form of intractability that transforms ignorance into philosophical potential: what could be more Cartesian?
50 Stubbornly, and under the protection of the therapeutic tie that binds her to her mentor, Elisabeth has the courage to accept her body, notwithstanding her own
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“rational” character, and in doing so she makes of Descartes the anti-metaphysical instrument that she needs to make the leap that this integration of the body represents. She thus obliges the philosopher to move from a consideration of the metaphysical ego toward a consideration of the whole human being who will become the subject of The Passions of the Soul40. We can find here an effect of Elisabeth’s self- portrait, offered to Descartes in the correspondence, as an ignorant and intractable woman.
NOTES
1. English translations taken from The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, Lisa Shapiro ed. and trans., Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2007. All references to the correspondence in French are from: Descartes, Correspondance avec Élisabeth et autres lettres, Jean-Marie Beyssade and Michelle Beyssade ed. Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1989: “J’ai appris avec beaucoup de joie et de regret, l’intention que vous avez eue de me voir [...], touchée également de votre charité de vous vouloir communiquer à une personne ignorante et indocile, et du malheur qui m’a dérobé une conversation si profitable. [...] La honte de vous montrer un style si déréglé m’a empêchée jusqu’ici de vous demander cette faveur par lettre.” May 16, 1643, p. 65. 2. “La faveur dont Votre Altesse m’a honoré en me faisant recevoir ses commandements par écrit, est plus grande que je n’eusse jamais osé espérer.” May 21, 1643, p. 67. 3. “Vous connaissant le meilleur médecin pour [mon âme], je vous découvre si librement les faiblesses de ces spéculations, et espère qu’en observant le serment d’Hippocrate, vous y apporterez des remèdes, sans les publier.”, May 16, 1643, p. 66. 4. “En relisant ce que je vous mande de moi-même, je m’aperçois que j’oublie une de vos maximes, qui est de ne mettre jamais rien par écrit, qui puisse être mal interprété de lecteurs peu charitables. Mais je me fie tant au soin de M. de Palotti, que je sais que ma lettre vous sera bien rendue, et à votre discrétion, que vous l’ôterez, par le feu, du hasard de tomber en mauvaises mains.”, May 24, 1645, p. 100. 5. “J’ai examiné le chiffre que vous m’avez envoyé et le trouve fort bon, mais trop prolixe pour écrire tout un sens; et si on n’écrit que peu de paroles, on les trouverait par la quantité de lettres […].”, October 10, 1646, p. 184. 6. “J’ai très grande obligation à Votre Altesse de ce que, après avoir éprouvé que je me suis mal expliqué en mes précédentes [...], elle daigne encore avoir la patience de m’entendre sur le même sujet [i.e. éclaircir l’articulation entre les trois notions primitives que sont l’âme, le corps, et l’union de l’âme et du corps]. Ce qui est, comme je crois, toute la matière que Votre Altesse m’a ici prescrite.”, June 28, 1643, p. 73. 7. “n’a pas sujet de disposer de sa personne”, November 29, 1646, p. 189. 8. “[...] je relâcherais [ma résolution] de retourner [en Hollande], si les intérêts de ma maison ne m’y rappellent, et attendrai plutôt ici que l’issue des traités de Munster ou quelque autre conjoncture me ramène en ma patrie.”, May 1647, p. 205. 9. “[…] je ne vois point que Madame l’Électrice, ma tante, soit en humeur de permettre mon retour […].”, April 11, 1647, p. 200.
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10. “[…] fausses louanges […] en un lieu où la façon ordinaire de converser m’a accoutumé d’en entendre des personnes incapables d’en donner de véritables […]”, June 20, 1643, p. 71. 11. “Tantôt les intérêts de ma maison, que je ne dois négliger, tantôt les entretiens et complaisances, que je ne peux éviter, m’abattent si fort ce faible esprit de fâcherie ou d’ennui, qu’il se rend, pour longtemps après, inutile à tout autre chose: qui servira, comme j’espère, d’excuse à ma stupidité, de ne pouvoir comprendre[…]”, June 20, 1743, p. 71. 12. “Mais j’admire qu’il est possible à cette princesse de s’appliquer à l’étude comme elle fait, et aux affaires de son royaume aussi, deux occupations si différentes, qui demandent chacune une personne entière.”, December 4, 1649, p. 236. 13. “Il y a huit jours que la mauvaise humeur d’un frère malade m’empêche de vous faire cette requête[…].” August 16, 1645, p. 111. 14. “[…] je suis contrainte de céder aux lois impertinentes de la civilité qui sont établies, pour ne m’acquérir point d’ennemis. Depuis que j’écris celle-ci, j’ai été interrompue plus de sept fois […].”, September 30, 1645, p. 137. See also April 25, 1646, p. 164: “I have been interrupted so often in writing you that I am constrained to send you my rough draft […]”. (p. 134) [“J’ai été si souvent interrompue, en vous écrivant, que je suis contrainte de vous envoyer mon brouillon .[…]”]; October 1646, p. 184: “I have so little leisure to write here that I am constrained to send you this draft, in which you can see from the difference in pens all the times I have been interrupted.” (p. 147) [“J’ai ici si peu de loisir à écrire, que je suis contrainte de vous envoyer ce brouillon, où vous pouvez remarquer, à la différence de la plume, toutes les fois que j’ai été interrompue.”] 15. “Mais j’avoue que je trouve de la difficulté à séparer des sens et de l’imagination des choses qui y sont continuellement représentées par discours et par lettres, que je ne saurais éviter sans pécher contre mon devoir.”, June 22, 1645, p. 104. 16. “l’idée d’une personne si accomplie, qui affranchit notre sexe de l’imputation d’imbécilité et de faiblesse que MM. les pédants lui soulaient donner”, December 4, 1649, p. 236. 17. “Sachez donc que j’ai le corps imbu d’une grande partie des faiblesses de mon sexe, qu’il se ressent très facilement des afflictions de l’âme, et n’a point la force de se remettre avec elle, étant d’un tempérament sujet aux obstructions et demeurant en un air qui y contribue fort.”, May 24, 1645, p. 98. 18. “Avec cela, la malédiction de mon sexe m’empêche le contentement que me donnerait un voyage vers Egmont.”, June 22, 1645, p. 105. 19. “Et je vous assure que les médecins, qui me virent tous les jours et examinèrent tous les symptômes de mon mal, n’en ont pas trouvé la cause, ni ordonné de remèdes si salutaires que vous avez fait de loin.”, May 24, 1645, p. 99. 20. “Et je pense que, si ma vie vous était entièrement connue, vous trouveriez plus étrange qu’un esprit sensible, comme le mien, s’est conservé si longtemps, parmi tant de traverses, dans un corps si faible […]”, May 24, 1645, p. 99. 21. “[…] l’air y est fort pur. J’y ai aussi plus de santé que je n’avais en Hollande. Mais je ne voudrais pas y avoir toujours été, puisqu’il n’y a rien que mes livres pour m’empêcher de devenir stupide au dernier point.”, May 1647, p. 207. 22. Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tous les mots françois, tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts, 1690. 23. “Je n’oserais vous en prier, si je ne savais que vous ne laissez point d’œuvre imparfaite, et qu’en entreprenant d’enseigner une personne stupide, comme moi, vous vous êtes préparé aux incommodités que cela vous apporte. C’est ce qui me fait continuer à vous dire, que je ne suis point persuadée […].”, October 28, 1645, p. 148. 24. “J’ai très grande obligation à Votre Altesse de ce que, après avoir éprouvé que je me suis mal expliqué en mes précédentes, touchant la question qu’il lui a plu de me proposer, elle daigne encore avoir la patience de m’entendre sur le même sujet […].”, June 28, 1643, p. 73.
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25. “[…] il n’y a personne ici d’assez raisonnable pour comprendre [vos œuvres] […]”, November 29, 1646, p. 191. 26. “[…] la capacité de celui que je trouve le plus raisonnable entre les doctes de ce lieu, puisqu’il est capable de goûter votre raisonnement […].”, February 21, 1647, p. 196. 27. On this point, see the article of Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine, “Élisabeth philosophe: un cartésianisme empirique,” in Élisabeth de Bohême face à Descartes: deux philosophes?, Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine and Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin eds., Paris, Vrin, 2015, which shows how Elisabeth requires Descartes to “ […] affronter la question de la possibilité de faire une science du particulier. […] A plusieurs reprises, Elisabeth oppose ainsi à Descartes son cas ou son expérience particulière et s’interroge sur la capacité de la règle générale à rendre raison des contre- exemples qu’elle valorise (en elle, la tristesse diminue l’appétit, etc.)” (p. 128); thus, “le bât a donc constamment blessé, pour Elisabeth, sur la même question de savoir comment la philosophie nouvelle, dans sa double dimension métaphysique et physiologique, est susceptible de rendre raison des particularités des expériences quotidiennes que tout un chacun peut faire de son incarnation” (p. 131). 28. “[…] je vous demande une définition de l’âme plus particulière qu’en votre métaphysique”, May 16, 1643, p. 65. 29. “Je prétends aussi me faire saigner en peu de jours, puisque j’en ai pris une mauvaise coutume, que je ne saurais changer à cette heure sans en être incommodée du mal de tête. J’aurais peur de vous en donner par ce fâcheux récit de moi-même, si votre soin de ma santé ne m’y avait portée.”, April 11, 1647, p. 201. 30. “En nous promenant sous un bois de chêne,[…]il nous est venu en un instant une sorte de rougeole par tout le corps […]. Et il est à remarquer que tous les différents remèdes que chacun s’est imaginé pour un mal si nouveau, […] n’y ont rien servi. Je vous en fais le récit, parce que je présume que vous y trouverez de quoi confirmer quelques-unes de vos doctrines.”, August 23, 1648, p. 224. 31. On the relationship of Elisabeth’s arguments to the philosophy of the period, see Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine, op. cit. She situates the thought of the princess in the framework of the “[…] relations complexes et évolutives entre ce cartésianisme et le champ de la ‘nouvelle philosophie,’ qui regroupe Descartes et Bacon, Gassendi ou Hobbes, c’est-à–dire ceux qui s’opposent à la scolastique sans cependant tomber dans la croyance aux fantômes (le néoplatonisme ou l’hermétisme). […] Il est donc possible […] de dégager des filiations entre ses arguments et d’autres arguments antérieurs, et de singulariser le type de question qu’elle pose. Incontestablement, ses objections se rattachent à la mouvance ‘matérialiste’ des objecteurs proches de Mersenne, de Gassendi, de Hobbes et de Regius” (p. 127-128). 32. “Ceux qui les nomment perturbations de l’âme, me persuaderaient que leur force ne consiste qu’à éblouir et soumettre la raison, si l’expérience ne me montrait qu’il y en a qui nous portent aux actions raisonnables.”, September 13, 1645, p. 130. 33. “[…] touchant la vie particulière, […] je me suis toujours mieux trouvée de me servir de l’expérience que de la raison […]”, April 25, 1646, p. 164. 34. “Si je pouvais profiter, comme vous faites, de tout ce qui se présente à mes sens, je me divertirais, sans peiner [mon esprit]. C’est à cette heure que je sens l’incommodité d’être un peu raisonnable. Car si je ne l’étais point du tout, je trouverais des plaisirs communs avec ceux entre lesquels il me faut vivre, pour prendre cette médecine avec profit.”, June 22, 1645, p. 102. 35. “[…] il se faut entièrement délivrer l’esprit de toutes sortes de pensées tristes, et même aussi de toutes sortes de méditations touchant les sciences, et ne s’occuper qu’à imiter ceux qui, en regardant la verdeur d’un bois, les couleurs d’une fleur, le vol d’un oiseau, et telles choses qui ne requièrent aucune attention, se persuadent qu’ils ne pensent à rien.”, May or June 1645, p. 102. 36. On the role played here by Descartes, see Yaelle Sibony-Malpertu, “Descartes thérapeute”, La clinique lacanienne , n°19, 1/2011, p. 159-174.
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37. “Et je vous assure que les médecins, qui me virent tous les jours et examinèrent tous les symptômes de mon mal, n’en ont pas trouvé la cause, ni ordonné de remèdes si salutaires que vous avez fait de loin.”, May 24, 1645, p. 98. 38. “[…] si j’eusse pu être admis à l’honneur de vous faire la révérence […], j’aurais eu trop de merveilles à admirer en même temps […]. Ce qui m’eût rendu moins capable de répondre à votre altesse […]”, May 21, 1643, p. 67. 39. Recent research around the correspondence bears witness to the latter’s philosophical significance, including most notably all the contributions to the volume (cited above) Élisabeth de Bohême face à Descartes: deux philosophes?, op. cit. 40. Jean-Marie Beyssade makes the case thusly in the introduction to his edition of the Correspondence, op. cit., p. 29-31: “La correspondance entre Descartes et Elisabeth marque une péripétie dans la philosophie cartésienne, le dernier mouvement par quoi elle s’est révélée à elle- même[…]. C’est l’ego qui accède à sa forme ultime […]. L’homme prend le premier rang, non point comme substance, mais comme personne.”
ABSTRACTS
Depicting herself, in the correspondence with Descartes, as an “ignorant and intractable” woman, Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, places a high priority on the body — a body that is at once, as a source of ignorance, an obstacle to the philosophical process, and, as a reality that resists theory, an unavoidable challenge to this same process. She thus obliges the philosopher to move from a consideration of the metaphysical ego toward a consideration of the human being who will become the subject of The Passions of the Soul.
En faisant d'elle-même, dans sa correspondance avec Descartes, un portrait en femme « ignorante et indocile », la princesse Élisabeth y fait valoir l'expérience de son corps à la fois comme obstacle à la démarche philosophique en tant que facteur d’ignorance, et comme incontournable défi pour cette même démarche, en tant que réalité résistant à la théorie. Ses questions conduiront Descartes à repenser l’articulation de l’âme et du corps à partir de leur union dans la personne humaine, ce dont témoigneront Les passions de l’âme.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Descartes, Élisabeth de Bohême, expérience, corps, féminin
AUTHORS
HÉLÈNE BAH OSTROWIECKI Université Paris-Est, LISAA. EA 4120, UPEM
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Self-Portrait of a Lady as an Absent Latinist Lucy Hutchinson and the Recording of Encounter and Loss Autoportrait de femme en latiniste absente : Lucy Hutchinson ou le récit de la rencontre et de la perte
Michael A. Soubbotnik
An Encounter in absentia
1 Lucy Hutchinson was born on January 29th 1620 the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower of London and his third wife Lucy, daughter of Sir John St John. The land was then at peace (it being towards the latter end of the reign of King James), if that quietness may be called a peace which was rather like the calm and smooth surface of the sea whose dark womb is already impregnated with a horrid tempest.1
2 Her family belonged to this English puritan-leaning gentry whose economic power and (cautious) political activism in the Commons had been steadily growing since the transference to the Crown of the taxes payable to Rome in 1536 and the ensuing dissolution of monasteries which, as Lucy notes, “left” the members of her own kind, in whom she saw the bearers of the “interests of the people”, “only to expect an opportunity to resume their power into their own hands”2. “Received with a great deal of joy”3 by her parents who doted upon her as the first female child after three boys, she manifested such remarkable intellectual aptitudes and appetites at a very early age, that her father gave her a typically humanist education rarely bestowed on a girl : French, Italian, Latin, Greek, even a little Hebrew. At four, she “read English perfectly” and at seven, she had “at one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing, writing and needlework” but had a “genius quite adverse from all but [her] book” and took every opportunity to escape girly tuition or games and “steal into some hole or other to read”4. Above all else, Latin was her favorite study. At ten she was
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fluent in reading, writing and speaking it. It was to be one of the main passions of her life.
3 The great swerve in Lucy’s life was her marriage for love with John Hutchinson in 1638. A puritan gentleman, John was elected to the 1640 Parliament and received a commission of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Parliamentary Army after the Civil War broke out in 1642. He was subsequently appointed Governor of Nottingham Castle then of the town as well in 1643. Lucy followed him everywhere, tending the wounded of both sides during the siege of Nottingham and discussing all political and religious5 matters with her husband who, as it appears, hardly took any significant decision without consulting her. The royalist defeat brought John back to Parliament. In January 1649, he signed King Charles’ death warrant. Highly critical of the rising power of the Army over Parliament, John and Lucy broke with Cromwell for good in 1650 and retired from public life on their Nottinghamshire estates where she composed in verse the first complete English translation of the six books of Lucretius6. At the Restoration John was arrested on a charge of regicide. Lucy managed to have him freed and pardoned against his will, but in October 1663, he was accused of having taken part in a republican plot. Arrested once again, he was transferred from the Tower to the cold and damp Sandown Castle in Kent where he died of illness in September 1664. Lucy started almost immediately to write her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, which she completed in 1671. This impressive masterpiece was first printed in the early 19th century by a descendant.
4 This is where we find the “self-portrait” mentioned in the title. It is inserted in the narrative of John’s first encounter with Lucy… in her absence. Entangled in difficult relationships with his father and stepmother, John had gone to Richmond, which was then some sort of meeting point for young courtiers, and had taken up lodgings at the house of a gentleman composer of lute music for the court. There, he befriended the nine year-old Barbara, Lucy’s baby sister, who “tabled for the practice of her lute” at the same house. While John Hutchinson was arriving and settling in Richmond, Lucy was in Wiltshire with their mother who was determined to negotiate a match between her quite unenthusiastic elder daughter and some suitable local gentleman.
5 Barbara, having the keys of her mother’s house, some half a mile distant, would sometimes ask Mr. Hutchinson, when she went over, to walk along with her and carry him into her sister’s closet and give him of the sweetmeats she had left behind her. (MH, p. 46)
6 The “encounter” in absentia took place on one of these occasions. One day when Mr. Hutchinson was there, looking upon an odd by-shelf, he found a few Latin books; asking whose they were, he was told they were her elder sister’s, whereupon, enquiring more after her, he began first to be sorry she was gone before he had seen her, and gone upon such an account that he was not likely to see her. (MH p. 46)
7 In the immediate aftermath of this encounter wherein the Latin books played the very same role as the portraits or medallions in romances, he grew to love to hear mention of her, and the other gentlewomen who had been her companions used to talk much to him of her, telling how reserved and studious she was, and other things which they esteemed no advantage. But it so much enflamed Mr. Hutchinson’s desire of seeing her that he began to wonder at himself, that his heart, which had ever had so much indifferency for the most excellent of
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woman kind, should have so strong impulses towards a stranger he never saw; and certainly it was of the Lord, though he perceived it not, who had ordained him, through so many various providences, to be yoked with her in whom he found so much satisfaction. There scarcely passed any day but some accident or some discourse still kept awake his desire of seeing this gentlewoman, although the mention of her, for the most part, was enquiries whether she had yet accomplished the marriage that was in treaty. (MH p. 46-47)
Lucretius and God’s Providences
8 In what follows I will assume it correct to admit that a literary self-portrait may consist of a limited number of identifying features held by the self-portraitist to present and/ or represent themself in a relevant manner. Relevance is admittedly a somewhat blurry notion here, but since it is typically a family-resemblance concept, blurry is after all what it should be. Pushing my initial assumption even further, I therefore assume it possible for a literary self-portrait to consist of one single feature, given that this feature be inserted in a proper background or set of “circumstances”.
9 The problem I propose to start with relates Lucy’s self-representation at an unparalleled moment of her (and John’s) destiny, to her work as a poet and translator of Lucretius7. Like everyone else I wonder how a devout puritan and committed republican like Lucy could spend so much time studying and translating a philosophical poem which not only seemed to contradict all her beliefs but was also an object of interest in royalist coteries. After the royalist defeat, a strong wave of interest in atomism swept through some Cavalier circles in Paris, in particular the one presided by William Cavendish Marquis of Newcastle, who would play an important role in promoting epicurean ideas in Restoration England. Gassendi’s work on Epicurus inspired Margaret Cavendish’s atomistic pieces in her 1653 Poems and Fancies8.
10 Oppositely, Lucy’s rather disingenuous disavowal of her carefully wrought artwork in her famous 1675 letter to Lord Anglesey some twenty years later, should equally raise questions. “My Lord”, she writes, When I present this unworthy Translation to your Lordship, I sacrifice my shame to my obedience for though a masculine Wit hath thought it worth printing his head in a laurel crown for the version of one of these books9, I am so far from glorying in my six, that had they not by misfortune been gone out of my hands in one lost copy, even your Lordship’s command, which hath more authority with me, than any human thing I pay reverence to, should not have redeemed it from the fire […]. So I beseech your Lordship to reward my obedience, by indulging me the further honor to preserve, wherever your Lordship shall dispose this book, this record with it, that I abhor all the Atheisms and Impieties in it, and translated it only out of youthful curiosity, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernicious doctrines in it. [Even] I did not employ any serious study in, for I turned it into English in a room where my children practised the several qualities they were taught with their Tutors, and I numbered the syllables of my translation by the threds of the canvas I wrought in, and set them down with a pen and ink that stood by me [...]. (L, p. 23)
11 Surely, the evocation of a charming family scene offers a rather lame excuse for such a translation (considering the stakes of propagating “wicked and pernicious doctrines” full of “Atheisms and Impieties”) and a yet weaker plea to have a book burnt (whose malfeasance seems hardly to exceed that of needlework). Contrasting with such
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belittling of her own work, her annotations and the verse summaries at the head of every book, help the reader understand the text and discard its doctrines but very rarely. These elements were most probably added the very same year as the letter.10 Moreover, one cannot but agree with Jonathan Goldberg11 that Lucretius’ influence is pervasive in Lucy’s writings, which is the main point at hand.
12 It is most remarkably so in the various and numerous metaphors relative to all forms of simulacra that she uses in death-related passages of the Memoirs, the Elegies12 and, last but not least, her great religious poem Order and Disorder13. But more of this later. The main point now is this: as readers of both Order and Disorder and Paradise Lost never failed to notice, Lucy, contrary to Milton, never endeavors to explain or justify God’s actions in His own terms, so to speak, but is always remaining at human level. It is true, of course, that the lucretian view of divine beings totally removed from human affairs is the exact opposite of Lucy’s puritan emphasis on divine providences taking “care and account of [men’s] smallest concernments, even the hairs of their heads”. Particular providences constitute for Lucy an extremely significant element of a person’s identity: the providences in our lives combine with our “circumstances” to define us, and this they do in relation to that part of ourselves which, most of the times unbeknownst to us, will shape our lives. This is why Lucy maintains an exquisite tension between her radically transcendent god and the constant relation human individuals must maintain with this god’s business in human affairs both particular and collective. But this too she meditates and reflects upon exclusively from the creature’s point of view, leaving the deity as impenetrable as Lucretius’ gods.
The Grace of Love by the Grace of God and Death Without Simulacra
13 Now, the Lucy/Lucretius question may be approached along more psychological lines as well. Greenblatt certainly hints at an important element when he emphasizes the sheer literary beauty of Lucretius’s poem and the appeal it exerted on early modern Latinist readers14. Lucy was indeed extremely fond of poetry and more especially of classical Latin verse. Her commonplace book displays excerpts from Virgil, Ovid, Horace, etc. in the original and in translations by various authors, as well as drafts of her own translations. With her being so engrossed in Latin language and so good at it, the sheer challenge of translating Lucretius and the sumptuousness of his poetry could but help strengthen Lucy’s usual drive to “see by herself” and “understand things [she] heard so much discourse of at second hand” (L, p. 23). Moreover, Latin was a very intimate part of herself in relation to this most important feeling of hers – that of being elected, first by her parents’ love, particularly as manifested in their educational care, then by her husband’s and hopefully, though she proclaims that there is no way to know, ultimately by God’s.
14 With all that in mind, we may turn to what I deem, perhaps a little boldly, to be Lucy’s self-portrait. Michel Beaujour insists that “the absence of a continuous narrative in the self portrait distinguishes it from the autobiography”15. This sounds both reasonable enough and a trifle too peremptory. If the mention of some distinctive feature in a relevant context can function as a self-portrait asserting some form of “here I am”, why should anything forbid the relevant context to be of a narrative kind?
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15 This is the case here. The bookshelf episode is a segment in a narrative, although some parts of this narrative may serve non-narrative functions as well. The episode is carefully staged in the Memoirs. Two notable passages function as a prelude to the encounter.
16 The first one consists of two sketches which illustrate John’s resistance to the combined “temptations” of feminine beauty, cunning and wealth. While clearing the way, so to speak, for Lucy’s entrance as “the real deal”, both sketches are written in the best rhetorical vein of the times as exempla of virtue, allowing for a puritan vindication of love (including physical desire) in matrimony and showing the workings of providence in bringing John and Lucy together. [...] there was in the town a young maid, beautiful, and esteemed to be very rich, but of base parentage and penurious education, though else ingenious enough. She was the grandchild and heiress of an old physician, and from her childhood having been acquainted with Mr. Hutchinson who used to visit her grandmother, she had conceived a kindness for him, which though he civilly resented, his great heart could never stoop to think of marrying into so mean a stock; yet by reason of some liking he showed for her company, and the melancholy he had, with some discontents at home, she was willing to flatter herself it was love for her, wherein, when she discovered her mistake, it was a great grief [...]. In the house with Mr. Hutchinson, there was a young gentlewoman of such admirable tempting beauty and such excellent good nature, as would have thawed a rock of ice, yet even she could never get an acquaintance with him. Wealth and beauty thus in vain tempted him, for it was not yet his time of love; but it was not far off. (MH, p. 44)
17 In the first sketch, the more important teaching probably concerns what John does not see, that is the maid’s love for him. This has to be contrasted to what he will see when he finally meets Lucy and engage in what initially takes the form of a close friendship, that is her love for him. Love here follows the same pattern as divine grace and election16 whose surest sign is that it is bestowed on those whose own predisposition to love enables them not to confuse God’s love with anything else the world has to offer. A few lines later, Lucy wraps up the whole morality of her sketches by plunging John in the wider theater of the courtiers’ society of Richmond. Note here the use of the word “snares”, commonly associated with devilish doings, to give added color to this true to life allegory of “temptation resisted”. And Lucy being a wit atop of a freakishly knowledgeable young woman17 may have also mocked her own mother’s repeated attempts to marry her, the difference being here that she herself was responsible for the ensuing repeated failures. He […] went to Richmond, where he found a great deal of good young company, and many ingenuous persons. [...]. Mr Hutchinson was soon courted into their acquaintance, and invited to their houses, where he was nobly treated, with all the attractive arts that young women and their parents use to procure them lovers; but though some of them were very handsome, others wealthy, witty, and well qualified, and all of them set out with the gaiety and bravery that vain women put on to set themselves off, yet Mr Hutchinson could not be entangled in any of their fine snares; but without any taint of incivility, he in such a way of handsome raillery reproved their pride and vanity, as made them ashamed of their glory, and vexed that he alone, of all the young gentlemen that belonged to the court or neighbourhood, should be insensible of their charms. (MH, p. 45-46)
18 The second passage is more complex: [That] day telling a gentleman of the house whither he was going [to Richmond], the gentleman bid him take heed of the place, for it was so fatal for love, that never any young disengaged person went thither, who returned again free. Mr. Hutchinson
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laughed at him, but he to confirm it told him a very true story of a gentleman who not long before had come for some time to lodge there, and found all the people he came in company with, bewailing the death of a gentlewoman that had lived there. Hearing her so much deplored, he made inquiry after her, and grew so in love with the description that no other discourse could at first please him, nor could he at last endure any other; he grew desperately melancholy, and would go to a mount where the print of her foot was cut, and lie there pining and kissing of it all the day long, till at length death, in some months’ space, concluded his languishment. This story was very true; but Mr. Hutchinson was neither easy to believe it, nor frighted at the example, thinking himself not likely to make another. (MH, p. 45)
19 At the most obvious level, the pining lover episode ironically foreshadows John’s own obsession with a very elusive Lucy and once again bears testimony of how little humans know of themselves, while God’s providences lead the elect from what they unknowingly have to become to a better knowledge of what they are. But there is more than that. In the story told to John, the woman is dead. In John’s story, Lucy merely is in Wiltshire but John could very well never get to meet her. Hence the scene of Lucy’s practical joke. Having defused all threat of a Wiltshire marriage in ways she does not deem fit to tell in the Memoirs, Lucy, who knows that her common hostile attitude towards suitors and her mother’s desperate efforts to drive her toward a consented marriage are a favored topic in Richmond, sends a servant to the house where Barbara is tabling, with instructions to make the company believe she is married and distribute “bride laces” to everyone according to the custom of the times. Whereupon Mr. Hutchinson immediately turned pale as ashes and felt a fainting to seize his spirits in such extraordinary manner that, finding himself ready to sink at table, he was fain to pretend something had offended his stomach and to retire from the table [...]; the distemper of his mind had infected his body with a cold sweat and such a dispersion of spirits that all the courage he could at present recollect was little enough to keep him alive. [...]. When Mr. Hutchinson, being alone, began to recollect his wisdom and his reason, and to wonder at himself, why he should be so concerned in an unknown person, he then remembered the story was told him when he came down, and began to believe there was some magic in the place which enchanted men out of their right senses. But it booted him not to be angry at himself, nor to set wisdom in her reproving chair, or reason in her throne of council: the sick heart could not be chid or advised into health. [...] [H]aving fortified himself with resolution, he got up he next day, but yet could not quit himself of an extravagant perplexity of soul concerning this unknown gentlewoman, which had not been admirable in another light person but in him, who was from his childhood so serious and so rational in all his considerations, it was the effect of a miraculous power of Providence, leading him to her that was destined to make his future joy. (MH, p. 47-49)
20 Now, the story does not only concern Lucy’s absence (prefigured by the woman’s death) and John’s fainting (prefigured by the gentleman’s languor). As deadly languor can be an image of fainting, fainting can be an image of fading away, that is of dying. Roles are then reversed. If the story concerns John’s death and absence when the Memoirs, this “imprint” of his life, were written, the gentlewoman is an image of him who is dead and the languid gentleman an image of Lucy in her grief. But there is still more. Here is what Lucy writes of their mutual love after she told the rather romantic story of their encounter: [N]ever was there a passion more ardent and less idolatrous; he loved her better than his life, with inexpressible tenderness and kindness, had a most high obliging esteem of her [...]. And thus indeed [...] she was a very faithful mirror, reflecting truly, though but dimly, his own glories upon him, so long as he was present; but
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she, that was nothing before his inspection gave her a fair figure, when he was removed, was only filled with a dark mist, and never could again take in any delightful object, nor return any shining representation. The greatest excellency she had was the power of apprehending and the virtue of loving his. So, as his shadow, she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken into that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing. (MH, p. 51-52)
21 Shadows and reflections are, in a very lucretian way, the outer material shapes of material beings. Their disappearance is the effect of the disappearance of their causes: death being the realm of pure light, does not admit of shadows, nor reflections, nor images. It admits of no simulacra, as Lucretius calls them, because it admits of no body and no sense. True enough, a person’s perfections are not all corporal; but the images used by Lucy to represent how such perfections of body and soul are reflected, “shadowed”, represented, apprehended and loved, definitely hint, at least metaphorically, at material lucretian simulacra. If anything, what Lucy picked up in Lucretius are those images which tell us what images are and by whose means she manages to express what it feels to be this particular living and mortal person.
22 Now, if Lucy believed, as she should have and most certainly did, in the resurrection of bodies after Judgment Day, she never ventured to say anything about it, since death and the “beyond” admit of no image, therefore of no way to say it. Partings are definitive and no happy reunions of lovers beyond death are forthcoming. One could venture that both Lucy’s unwavering religious refusal to have a peek at the unknowable and her profound need of John’s physical presence18 combine to wipe off any trace of a representation of the afterlife from Lucy’s writings. This very peculiar kind of iconoclasm is not just a vivid expression of the melancholy of grief. The fading away of simulacra has a much wider range in Lucy’s own vision. In Order and Disorder she relates how Abraham’s dead body was laid in the sepulcher alongside his “dear Sarah”, then comments: Death now rejoins whom death did late divide. But none the joy of these reunions share, For after death the tenderest loving pair No more converse, though lodged in one cold bed; No more embrace when sense and life are fled. (HO 16., p. 314-318)
23 What remains, though, in the case of John and Lucy, is the materiality of Lucy’s writing, (too) expectedly as a trace but more significantly as an act which contradicts the self- proclaimed passivity of her conventional social role. Hence the extreme importance of the Memoirs, which could very well bear the same preamble than the attempted then interrupted autobiography. They are indeed a rewriting of God’s writing of the characters of his providences: The Almighty Author of all beings in his various providences, whereby he conducts the lives of men from the cradle to the tomb, exercises no less wisdom and goodness than he manifests power and greatness in their creation; but such is the stupidity of blind mortals that, instead of employing their studies in these admirable books of providence wherein God daily exhibits to us the glorious characters of his love, kindness, wisdom and justice, they ungratefully regard them not, and call the most wonderful operations of the great God the common accidents of human life, especially if they be such as are usual [...]; for in things great and extraordinary, some, perhaps, will take notice of God’s working who either forget or believe not that he takes as well a care and account of their smallest concernments, even the hairs of their heads. (MH 3)
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Hypothetical Conclusions
24 This is how Lucy’s self-portrait as an absent Latinist stands at the meeting point of various lines of thought and feeling. Firstly, we may consider Lucy’s tendency to emphasize the love she inspires and reciprocates as an identifying feature. The love of her parents who had Latin and humanities in general taught to her and the love of John Hutchinson who scorned beauty and wealth and fell for her after seeing her Latin books. Secondly, the series of God’s providences who guide John to Richmond, then to her house, then to her chamber where he eventually spots the “odd bookshelf” do not only “yoke” Lucy and John together and commit them both to the Good Old Cause of Parliament and congregationalism. They also contribute to define each one of them as a person under the unfathomable discretion of a transcendent God.
25 The relation between the first and the second element is above all textual. As has been shown, the images and narratives of marital love, as opposed to flimsy and insignificant affections, are encased in passages on loss and death. As much as Lucy’s metaphors bear witness to the influence of the lucretian theory of images (simulacra), the narrative and autobiographic sketches hint at what remains after shadows and reflections of beautiful objects faded into nothingness. What remains is the double writing of God’s providences and of the creatures’ memorials. Of Lucretius, nothing remains but his poem, noted Lucy. Of John and the mirror she handed to him, nothing remains but the translation “of the six” that she wrote during a politically disappointing but privately fulfilling period, the Elegies, the sumptuous Memoirs and the great poem Order and Disorder. Writing is where this paradox of the author’s quasi omnipresence in her very elusiveness qua widow can be expressed as the truest “here I am and there I am not” at the core of Lucy’s identity as a living and surviving person.
NOTES
1. Lucy Hutchinson, “Fragment of autobiography”, in Memoirs of the life of colonel Hutchinson, with a fragment of autobiography, N. H. Keeble ed., London, Dent, 1995 (Thereafter FA), p. 4. 2. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the life of colonel Hutchinson, with a fragment of autobiography, edited by N. H. Keeble, London, Dent, 1995 (Thereafter MH), p. 61. Here is the whole passage. Lucy’s republicanism considerably radicalizes the interests of her own class : « The interest of the people, which had been many years growing, made an extraordinary progress in the days of King Henry the Eighth, who, returning the vast revenues of the church into the body of the people, cast the balance clear on their side and left them now only to expect an opportunity to resume their power into their own hands, which, had not the different interests of religion divided them among themselves and thereby prolonged the last gasps of expiring monarchy, they had long since exercised it in a free commonwealth ». 3. FA, p. 4. 4. FA, p. 14.
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5. She most probably convinced her husband to embrace her Baptist creed, a rather dramatic step at the time. 6. Lucy’s faircopied manuscript verse translation antecedes the first printed (almost) complete one by Thomas Creech in 1682. 7. Lucy Apsley Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius De Rerum Natura, edited with introduction and commentary by Hugh de Quehen, London, Duckworth, 1996 (thereafter L). 8. Margaret Marquess of Newcastle, Poems and Fancies, London, J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653. The first part of the collection is a series of atomistic didactic poems. After an allegoric opening showing how “Nature calls a Councell, which was Motion, Figure, matter, and Life, to advise about making the World” and “Deaths endeavour to hinder, and obstruct Nature”, the first poem bears the title “A World made by Atomes”. 9. John Evelyn, whose translation of Book I of Lucretius was published in 1656. In his introduction, Hugh de Quehen provides a very interesting comparative study of Lucy Hutchinson’s translation with other verse renditions, complete or partial, down to Dryden’s. 10. See Jonathan Goldberg, “Lucy Hutchinson Writing Matter”, ELH, vol. 37, no 1, 2006, p. 279. 11. For a very detailed analysis of Lucretius’ presence in various writings by Lucy Hutchinson, see Jonathan Goldberg, op. cit., passim. 12. Lucy Apsley Hutchinson, “Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies’ (Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/HU2)” in Jill Seal Millman & Gilian Wright eds., Early modern women’s manuscript poetry, Manchester, New York, Manchester University Press, 2005, p. 97-110. 13. Lucy Apsley Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, David Norbrook ed., Oxford, Blackwell, 2001 (thereafter OD). 14. See Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve. How the World Became Modern, New York, Norton, 2011, p. 256. 15. Michel Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, transl. Yara Milos, New York, New York University Press, 1991, p. 2. 16. Easy enough, given that the Augustinian view construes the whole history of nature and grace more or less on the model of a love affair. 17. This explains, along with her good looks, why Lucy was relentlessly being courted (in vain) by young gentlemen who, according to the standards of the times, should have been deterred by her bookish tastes. 18. As shown by her relentless efforts to be authorized to spend nights with her husband in his ultimate gloomy and fatally uncomfortable place of detention.
ABSTRACTS
In The Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson not only built a vibrant vindication of her late beloved husband, but also wrote an impressive account of the English Civil War. The genre demanded that this remarkably talented and knowledgeable woman remain self-effaced behind the man she praised. Here we find her, however, as much self-enhanced as self-effaced in the guise of the great latinist she was, author of the first complete translation of Lucretius in verse.
Dans les Mémoires du Colonel Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson non seulement construit une vibrante défense de la mémoire du mari bien-aimé mais encore une impressionnante histoire de la Guerre Civile Anglaise. Le genre exigeait de cette femme au savoir et au talent hors du commun qu’elle
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s’effaçât derrière l’homme dont elle dressait l’éloge. La voici pourtant, tout autant glorifiée qu’effacée sous l’aspect de la grande latiniste qu’elle fut, auteure de la première traduction complète de Lucrèce en vers.
AUTHOR
MICHAEL A. SOUBBOTNIK Université Paris-Est, LISAA EA 4120
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Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pauline Interdiction The Case of the Would-Be Nun, Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet Religieuses et laïques jansénistes aux prises avec l’interdiction de Saint Paul : le cas de Marie-Catherine Homassel Hecquet
Thomas M. Carr Jr.
1 In May 1708, the bishop of Amiens interrogated a twenty-one-year old woman Marie- Catherine Homassel who was returning with her father from Paris to her home in Abbeville about her ties to Jansenism. He showed her a picture of a cleric, and professed astonishment when she claimed not to recognize him: “C’est de Mr [Antoine] Arnault reprit-il, le chef des jansénistes, et il n’est pas possible que tu ne le connaisses.” 1 He then demanded that she sign a document condemning Arnauld, Pierre Nicole and Cornelius Jansen in order to prove she was not a heretic. She replied that she would gladly sign the creed, but that since she had only heard good things spoken about the three men he named, she could not sign any blanket condemnation. She would sign a condemnation of propositions the Church condemned, but refused to attribute them to the Jansenists. She claimed not to be familiar with the theological disputes involved and invoked her conscience: “Je ne connais point Mr Arnauld, lui répondis-je, et ne sais pas qui il est, mais tel qu’il puisse être, avec la grâce de Dieu, ni son exemple ni son commandement ne me ferait jamais une chose contre ma conscience.” (p. 126)
2 Despite her protestations of ignorance, the bishop had good reason to be suspicious. The distinction the young woman drew in agreeing to condemn propositions the Church condemned, but refusing to attribute them to Jansen, was exactly the one used by the nuns of Port-Royal in the formulary disputes in the 1660s. In a 1653 papal bull, Innocent X had condemned five propositions on grace, predestination, and sin that supposedly summed up the doctrine found in Jansen’s 1640 posthumous Latin treatise, Augustinus. However, only one of the propositions could be found textually in the book. Jansenist leaders had sought a compromise that recognized the Church’s authority to condemn heresy; the propositions were ambiguous enough that the Jansenists claimed that one could condemn them and thus affirm the church’s teaching authority, while
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refusing to admit that the propositions adequately represented Jansen’s views: in their eyes, the church was not condemning Jansen when it condemned the five propositions. The bishop was probably not surprised that the young woman invoked this same droit/ fait distinction used by the Port-Royal nuns since she had been testing her vocation in the Parisian Benedictine convent of Liesse, whose abbess, Marie-Angélique Hébert, had been a boarding student at Port-Royal and was a great niece by marriage of Antoine Arnauld.
3 Although Marie-Catherine Homassel (1686-1764) remained out of the public eye, the range of her interests and her multiple spheres of activity make her an exemplar of the tensions surrounding learning and gender among Jansenist women. Her only published work during her lifetime was a short 1755 book about a feral girl found in 1731 near Châlons-en-Champagne. Many intellectuals of the time commented on the moral, scientific, and theological issues raised by the case – Voltaire, La Mettrie, Louis Racine – and it continues to attract interest2. Homassel also wrote a biography of the aunt who raised her which was only published in 1862 and was republished in 20083. In addition, family letters have been preserved in the Archives Nationales, and manuscript accounts of the persecutions she endured as a Jansenist are found in at least two libraries in France. Her father was a self-made entrepreneur who ran a successful enterprise in Abbeville that manufactured upholstery material. When her mother died, he sent her to Paris to be raised by a widowed aunt who was pious, but not a Jansenist. He largely ignored her until all his sons died, and he had no heir for his business. Despite Marie- Catherine’s desire to become a nun, he pried her out of the convent with the bishop’s help, and eventually coerced her into marriage. She seems to have become – or one might say – realized she was a Jansenist only when accused of being one4. She suffered for her opposition, without her case attracting public notice; she believed in the miracles attributed to the Jansenist saint François de Pâris, without being a convulsionary. She would go on to have six children whom she sought to raise as Jansenists, and even won over her father in his old age. She was a strong-willed wife who obtained a financial separation from her husband when his drinking and gambling threatened her children’s future. A voracious reader who educated herself on theological issues, she kept abreast of current events by reading gazettes. When she died in 1764, she possessed a large enough library that a bookseller had to be brought in to appraise it: a total of 455 volumes valued at 345 livres. Almost all are religious, but do include Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages, and a title I decipher as the Journal des savants5. Her intellectual interests were wide-ranging, even if she saw all issues through the lens of her militant Jansenism.
4 In order to illustrate Homassel’s use of theological learning, I will use two kinds of “I” documents: professions of orthodoxy and debates contained in first-person accounts of persecution. Since both were practiced ably by Jansenist nuns and since Homassel modeled herself on such nuns, I will first show how nuns used these genres: first, the seventeenth-century Port-Royal nuns who only reluctantly agreed to the formulary under pressure from Antoine Arnauld; then eighteenth-century ones who refused to accept Clement XI’s condemnation of Pasquier Quesnel in the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus6.
5 Women’s relation to theological learning was constrained by the restrictions based on the common interpretation of I Timothy 2 11-12 where Paul had written, “Que les femmes se tiennent en silence et dans une entière soumission lorsqu’on les instruit. Je
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ne permets point aux femmes d’enseigner… mais je leur ordonne de demeurer dans le silence.”7 According to this view, women were excluded from the clergy and from public declarations on religion; whether nuns or lay, they were also expected to eschew theology proper and concentrate on devotional practices that were more affective than intellectual, more practical than dogmatic. As one eighteenth-century Ursuline nun described her reading before her theological awakening as a Jansenist: “J’avais passé les temps qui avaient précédé et qui étaient mes premières années de religion dans la lecture des livres de morale par de bons auteurs sur la vie chrétienne et religieuse.” (CSR, (p. 272)8
6 The Pauline prohibition seemed to be especially convenient to the nuns of Port-Royal in the 1660s. They used the droit/fait distinction when refusing to sign the formulary condemning the five propositions as summarizing Jansen’s stance. The abbess, Agnès Arnauld, a sister of Antoine Arnauld, insisted that the nuns had been isolated from discussion of the contested issues. Moreover, they were unable to read Jansen’s Latin treatise to determine for themselves if it contained the condemned propositions. But since they had heard much good spoken of the Flemish bishop, they could not unreservedly in conscience swear to the question of fact. However, the abbess’s claim was not entirely true. A handful of nuns, probably no more than five or six, the intellectuals among them, had followed the theological debate and a couple had likely at least dipped into the Latin Augustinus, including Blaise Pascal’s sister Jacqueline, and a niece of the abbess and future abbess herself, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly.9 Pierre Nicole is said to have described her as “naturellement un peu scientifique”10. This reference to her “scientific” expertise refers to a taste for abstract, learned questions and argumentative tendencies that were not suitable for women in general, and even less for nuns. Angélique de Saint-Jean’s learned intransigence would, in fact, create problems, when in 1668 the male Jansenist leaders sought a face saving compromise with the church, by which the nuns would formally agree to both parts of the formulary, while adding restrictive clauses dealing with the fact issue.
7 The professions of faith that the Port-Royal nuns produced took the form of collective “we” declarations concerning their stance on the formulary which they drew up after deliberation among themselves during chapter meetings and which each nun signed one after another. These declarations were presented to representatives of the archbishop of Paris, and quickly circulated, sometimes in print, among supporters of the nuns. The declarations walk a thin line between the humble stance of nuns respectful of authority and the defiance that their refusal to accept the formulary embodies. For example, on July 5, 1664, the nuns signed a lengthy statement setting forth their reasons for non-compliance. In the following extract, they justify their respectful refusal with two of their key arguments – an appeal to conscience and their submission as nuns to the Pauline interdiction, as seen in their ignorance of the facts of the case. Respectful of the interdictions, they have not looked into the fait issue themselves: Mais après tout ce qu’ils nous ont dit, nous n’avons pu vaincre la répugnance de notre conscience, qui nous persuade toujours que ne sachant point si les hérésies condamnées sont dans le livre d’un évêque catholique que nous sommes incapables de lire, nous sommes incapables aussi de rendre témoignage par une signature publique de ce fait que nous savons être contesté entre des théologiens, et dont par notre état et notre profession nous ne sommes point obligées de nous informer.11
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8 The nuns are much less concerned with observing the Pauline interdiction in the other set of “I” documents – their captivity narrations. In August 1664, the archbishop Hardouin de Beaumont de Péréfixe had twelve Port-Royal nuns who were considered the ringleaders arrested and moved to other Parisian convents where they were isolated in hope of breaking down their resistance. Upon their release, they wrote up their experience of imprisonment at the suggestion of the male Jansenist leaders. Within these memoirs, I highlight the interviews they recount with emissaries sent to “convert” them; in some cases, their opponent was the archbishop himself. These self- reported debates allow the nuns to display their own theological prowess in action. Angélique de Saint-Jean’s are the most famous12. She expresses her dismay at the lack of theological knowledge of a lay woman, Madame de Rantzau (p. 56-60), sent to dispute with her and of the nuns in convent in which she is held. An even greater satisfaction comes from holding her own against the archbishop himself. She has the pleasure of hearing him acknowledge her expertise: he flatters her by saying that with her he can use technical distinctions, such as the one between being formally and materially a heretic: “vous qui êtes savantes, vous entendez bien ces termes”. (p. 51) She notes as well that he was incapable of producing any new arguments in favor of the formulary. (p. 49)
9 The problems with unruly Jansenist nuns should have been over when Unigenitus was promulgated in 1713. Louis XIV had destroyed the monastery of Port-Royal and dispersed its nuns. However, Jansenist tendencies had spread among the laity, male clergy, and nuns. Instead of condemning abstract propositions that were said to sum up the errors of a theological treatise, Clement XI condemned 101 quotations taken directly from a popular devotional text written in French, the Réflexions morales sur le nouveau testament of Pasquier Quesnel. The strategy of resistance could thus no longer be the droit/fait distinction. Instead, Jansenists appealed over the pope’s head to a hypothetical general council of the whole church. While waiting for the council to convene to hear the appeal, the bull would be suspended. Officially, the appeal was made by an ever dwindling minority of the French episcopate. Clerics and laypeople could support this appeal by the bishops by filing their adhesion to the appeal in various forums.
10 Given the fact that the Port-Royal nuns had been a focal point of resistance to the formulary in the seventeenth century, it is not surprising that women became a target of a proposition condemned by Unigenitus. One of the most important goals of the Jansenist movement was to extend access to all the faithful to the tools of spiritual life, including scripture and liturgical texts, instead of reserving such “primary texts” to male clerics with theological training. Thus the messieurs de Port-Royal had translated the mass and the Bible, and Quesnel had insisted that all Christians, including women, incorporate scripture into their devotions13. The 83rd condemned proposition in Quesnel’s book had defended women’s access to scripture. He had written: “C’est une illusion de s’imaginer que la connaissance des mystères de la religion ne doive pas être communiquée à ce sexe par la lecture des Livres Saints…. Ce n’est pas de la simplicité des femmes, mais de la science orgueilleuse des hommes qu’est venu l’abus des Écritures et que sont nées les hérésies.”14 By stigmatizing this statement, the bull suggested that female access to scripture encouraged the birth of heresies15.
11 Supporters of Unigenitus were quick to discredit the appeal movement by identifying it with the damage caused by unruly women. In 1715, the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel published
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an anti-Jansenist text he had written some ten years earlier that targeted women’s propensity to encourage heresy in their discussions. His Lettre à une dame de qualité où l’on examine jusqu’à quel point il est permis aux dames de raisonner sur les matières de religion (Paris, L. Coignard, 1715) was moderate, however, in comparison with the ridicule another Jesuit, Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant, heaped on Jansenist women who dared to meddle in theology in his parody of Molière’s Les Femmes savantes entitled La Femme docteur ou la théologie tombée en quenouille (Liège, Veuve Procureur, 1730). The play went through multiple editions and was performed in some private homes and colleges. Bougeant followed up in 1731, 1732, and 1733 with sequels16. A third Jesuit, le père Le Fèvre, preached that it was not permissible for women to discuss religion and that several heresies were born from their conversations in a sermon in the Parisian church of Saint-Louis-dans- l’Ile in spring 173417. One of the most energetic enemies of the Jansenists in the French episcopate, Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy (1677-1753), bishop of Soissons and later archbishop of Sens, complained that in opposing the bull, women had learned to engage in such unseemly activities as to “disputer… s’élever contre l’autorité légitime … être des raisonneurs”18. His own preferred model was the Visitantine nun, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, whose biography he wrote; her visions were a source of the non-liturgical cult of the Sacred Heart, of which he was a fervent promoter.
12 The leaders of the Jansenist appeal were much more interested in gathering public support from male clergy who had standing to make such an appeal than enlisting nuns. While the number of nuns who signed a formal appeal was small, there was resistance in many convents19. The position of such nuns was particularly vulnerable: trapped by their vows and cloister, they could not flee when church authorities demanded submission, as male clerics or lay persons could do. Both church and royal authorities were determined to crush opposition, and although the mechanisms of enforcing conformity took decades to put effectively in place, they moved inexorably. The Jansenist leaders, who could seldom protect the nuns from bishops and confessors who demanded submission to Unigenitus, had to at least provide the inmates of convents moral support. In the 1720s and 1730s, nuns turned to two hold-out bishops, Charles-Joachim Colbert de Croissy (1667-1738) of Montpellier and Jean Soanen (1647-1740) of Senez for advice, comfort, and reassurance.
13 The stance of the nuns had also shifted. The Port-Royal abbess claimed to have shielded her nuns from the theological disputes, and Homassel in 1708 claimed that such had been the case at Liesse. After Unigenitus, nuns felt it their duty to keep abreast of “the affairs of the day”. A novice mistress wrote in 1737 that she taught her charges in a general way about the disputes and thought she should have them read the bull itself (CSR, (p. 98). Other nuns report that they continued to read the condemned book of Quesnel (c(p. CSR, (p. 165, 187). In none of these cases did either bishop discourage access by nuns to the controversies. Rather, the bishops saw being well informed as the best way to defend what the Jansenists called “les verités de la grâce.” The shift can also be seen in the debates with church authorities that nuns reported to Colbert and Soanen. In 1726, a priest accused a Carmelite novice of acting like a doctor of the church: “Vous êtes vous-même un docteur, un père de l’Eglise, l’Augustin de nos jours, il ne vous manque plus que le bonnet.” Her stance was that all one needed was “un peu de sens commun … pour distinguer l’erreur de la vérité” (CSR, (p. 318). The issue was not whether the condemned propositions were or were not in a book; anyone who could read French could determine that. Now the content of the condemned
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propositions was openly discussed. The playing field had changed from the fait to the droit20.
14 The function and nature of the nuns’ professions of orthodox faith shifted as well. The Port-Royal nuns had been responding to specific demands for their adhesion from competent ecclesiastical authorities. The documents nuns sent to Colbert and Soanen had no legal status. They were spiritual testaments by which the nuns solemnly, but privately, declared their allegiance. The nuns were often fearful that on their deathbed, submission would be extorted from them in return for access to the last sacraments and burial rites. These professions of faith could take many forms and offered the nuns a space to display their theological knowledge as they enumerated their beliefs and reasons for rejecting Unigenitus. Françoise de Noirefontaine gives five examples, and here I have only space to note the bishops’ response. Colbert and Soanen preferred that the nuns’ statements be brief and avoid theology. In 1739, Soanen chided one nun of the Visitation order: “On n’est pas surpris de voir une fille instruite ; mais on goûte rarement qu’elle se montre théologienne. Votre acte, ma très chère fille a des beautés qui paraissent empruntées aux personnes qui ne connaîtront pas vos lumières…. j’impute à son élévation le défaut de subscriptions.” He thus suggested that she would have obtained more signatures from sister nuns in her convent had she stuck to basics (CSR, (p. 107, 204).
15 In fact, despite the Jansenist leaders’ insistence that women have equal access to scripture with men as a source of spiritual interiority, they shared the reservations of proponents of Unigenitus about women becoming theologically learned. Even Quesnel, in defending his eighty-third condemned proposition, protested that he had never proposed that women become “savantes”: On ne trouvera rien dans le livre des Réflexions qui favorise dans les femmes l’ambition d’acquérir le nom de savantes, ni même de le devenir. Au contraire, j’ai averti celles qui se mêlent de juger et de décider des choses de la religion d’apprendre (de l’Apôtre [Paul]) à se renfermer dans le silence que l’esprit de Dieu leur impose à cet égard. Heureuse condition, dis-je ailleurs, de trouver dans son état et dans son devoir l’inestimable avantage de ne se point produire au dehors, et de ne prêcher que par l’amour et la pratique du silence, de l’humilité, de l’obéissance, de la dépendance et par la bonne odeur des vertus chrétiennes.21
16 His patronizing attitude sums up the gender bind the nuns found themselves in. The eighteenth-century Jansenist bishops did not dissuade the nuns from familiarizing themselves with the theological issues; they knew that the better informed the nuns were, the stronger their resistance would be. Yet as women, as nuns, this resistance should not be cast as formal theological argumentation. Be knowledgeable, but keep your knowledge to yourself, even in these professions of faith that were not meant to be made public, was the message. Theological dispute should be left to men.
17 I will now turn to how this gender bind played out in the life of a laywoman, albeit, one who at one time aspired to a life as a nun. Marie-Catherine left various texts that recount the first fifty years of her spiritual life. Her biography of the aunt who raised her covers her own life up to age twelve; her first “relation de captivité” entitled “Vexations au sujet du formulaire” extends to her marriage in 1710; a second one, “Vexations au sujet de la constitution” goes up to about age fifty. Both of these last two contain accounts of debates, the first with the bishop of Amiens in 1708 that I began with; the second, with her pastor in Abbeville in 1736. In each, she believes she has won at least a moral victory. In the first in 1708, she presents herself as being at a
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disadvantage in terms of theological knowledge: a bishop against a young woman who claims not to master the theological issues; but she is confident that she has the moral high ground, and resists as long as possible. By 1736, she was fully informed theologically. Even when she claims ignorance, she cites the history of Arianism, and it is clear that she is at least the equal of her local pastor as a controversialist. She has become, if not a theologian, a learned apologist for Jansenism: Curé : Y pensez-vous de parler comme cela des évêques, de vos supérieurs ? À vous entendre, ce sont des hérétiques, des gens qui veulent détruire la religion, et vous êtes plus éclairée qu’eux tous. Homassel : Je ne dis pas qu’ils veulent la détruire, mais qu’ils sont hommes, et par conséquent capables d’être trompés et séduits sans qu’ils le veuillent ; au reste, Monsieur, je n’ai pas la présomption de me croire plus éclairée qu’eux ; au contraire, c’est parce que je me crois ignorante, mais en même temps par la grâce de Dieu fort attachée à ma religion que j’ai peur de tout ce qui pourrait y donner atteinte : ainsi il me suffit que je voie dans les propositions ce que l’évangile, le Credo et mon catéchisme m’ont appris pour que j’aie une horreur invincible pour un décret qui le condamne. Il me suffit que je voie et n’entende dans ces propositions que la toute- puissance de Dieu ; le besoin que nous avons de la grâce pour pratiquer le bien ; l’obligation de l’aimer par-dessus toutes choses ; de lui rapporter toutes nos actions, de faire toujours notre devoir au risque de tous les maux qui en peuvent arriver ; en un mot les mêmes choses que l’Église a toujours crues et enseignées depuis J.-C. pour que je me garde bien de condamner son langage. Je l’entends et je le crois comme nos pères l’ont entendu et cru ; je suis trop simple et trop ignorante pour aller plus loin.
Curé: Quel entêtement ! Mais qui vous a dit que la Bulle condamne toutes ces vérités ? Homassel: La Bulle elle-même; il n’y a qu’à la lire.
Curé: Eh ! Non, encore une fois ce n’est rien de tout cela qu’elle condamne ; vraiment ce sont là les vérités de la religion et je mourrais pour les soutenir : mais c’est un mauvais sens qui est caché dans les propositions que la Bulle condamne. Homassel: La Bulle ne dit pas cela, Monsieur, et qui plus est, défend de parler, de penser autrement qu’elle; mais si, comme vous le dites, on ne doit condamner que le mauvais sens caché, je signerai, si vous voulez que respectant les paroles et la doctrine catholique que me présentent d’abord les propositions du Père Quesnel, je ne condamne avec la Bulle que le mauvais sens et les interprétations hérétiques qu’on peut lui donner.
Curé: Cela suffirait dans un sens, mais on ne serait pas content d’une telle signature; ce serait marquer de la défiance et faire injure au Pape. Homassel : Mais si on n’est pas content, Monsieur, que je condamne seulement le mauvais sens qu’on dit caché dans les propositions, et qu’on refuse ma signature à moins que je ne condamne aussi les paroles que vous convenez contenir et exprimer les vérités de la religion. Ce refus m’est bien suspect et me ferait volontiers croire que les auteurs de la Bulle, bien loin de vouloir s’assurer par là de la foi des fidèles, ont envie de la leur faire renoncer. Tenez, Monsieur, je suis ignorante et toute ma science se borne à l’évangile qui m’ordonne d’obéir à l’Église, et l’histoire de l’Église m’a appris ce qu’elle demande à ses enfants. Permettez-moi de vous demander si elle a jamais obligé les Ariens même ou ceux qu’elle soupçonnait de l’être, de condamner les paroles de l’Évangile, sur lesquelles les hérétiques croyaient prouver leurs erreurs22.
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18 Much more intimate than such confrontations with church authorities are the professions of faith that mark crossroads in her life. We know of five (1696, 1708, 1732, 1736, 1754), of which the last three survive. The first is in many ways the fountainhead of the others. It was written as the culmination of her preparation for her first communion at age ten in 1696. She was instructed by her aunt Michelle Homassel with whom she lived, under the direction of her aunt’s spiritual advisor. At the time, there was no way of knowing the role this director, Jean Soanen, would play in Marie- Catherine’s career as a Jansenist. In 1696, Soanen was an Oratorian conforming court preacher who had distanced himself from Jansenism. In fact, Louis XIV had nominated him for bishopric of Senez on this basis in 1695. Marie-Catherine notes that her preparation for this communion was unique. Instead of attending the catechism classes organized in her parish for girls, she read the Bible and church fathers privately. This method gave her from childhood a much deeper knowledge that that of the average girl and one that was based on primary sources. Two weeks before the communion, her aunt had her write “une espèce de profession de foi de tout ce que je pensais et croyais sur toutes les principales vérités et en particulier sur le mystère de l’Eucharistie” that was submitted to Soanen so that he could judge if the girl was sufficiently instructed.23 This proof of the purity of her faith, written long before she was accused of heresy, likely became the model for subsequent attempts to testify to her orthodoxy.
19 This was certainly the case of the second one, which was written under more stressful circumstances. In 1708, shortly after her interviews with Sabatier when she signed the formulary and soon after retracted her signature, she fell ill. “Ne voulant laisser aucun doute de la pureté de ma foi, j’écrivis une profession de foi pour lui être envoyée après ma mort.” 24 However, this 1708 text took on a role beyond that of testimony addressed to others. It became a way to reassure herself that she had remained faithful to the lessons learned from her aunt. Of the 1708 profession she said, “Je m’en sers de temps en temps pour m’affermir et me rassurer contre tous les reproches qu’on m’a faits.”
20 This 1708 profession has not survived, but Homassel reports that it forms the basis of the 1736 one25. In fact, the text of 1732, one which has also survived, follows closely that of 1736, so that all three are linked. The two professions of faith surviving from the 1730s are largely generic in that they are inspired by creedal statements like the Nicene Creed and catechism texts. They open with the standard doctrine about the Trinity, move on to the church and close with the seven sacraments. The goal is to prove the Jansenists’ contention that they were not heretics like Protestants, but accepted traditional Catholic teaching. Nonetheless, from time to time, Homassel interjects a Jansenist gloss on the creeds, as when she discusses for whom Christ died in the 1732 one, or when she explains how the Jansenist interpretation of efficacious grace can be reconciled with free will in the 1736 one.26 Jansenism was a many-layered theological movement whose center of gravity shifted, but the controversies over grace and contrition were the original bone of contention. She shows her awareness of the fundamental theological issues and her mastery of the arguments on both sides. However, on the whole, these two professions of faith steer clear of detailed theological argument, as if she knew that Jansenist leaders like Soanen, to whom the 1736 one is addressed, preferred this stance in women.
21 All three of the surviving professions were occasioned by crises in her life or linked to measures taken against Jansenists. In early 1732, there had been incidents of convulsionism in Abbeville; while there is no evidence that Marie-Catherine took part,
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during the repression that followed, known Jansenists like her were threatened. She knew that other Jansenists had been refused the last sacraments, and thus wanted to leave a testimony of her true beliefs in case she suffered such deathbed excommunication. During the first part of 1736, the stress was more personal. Turning fifty sparked a period of self-doubt that was heightened by losing her two oldest daughters who left Abbeville to marry Parisian merchants and residual guilt for having signed the formulary. In a search for reassurance, she tried to reestablish contact with Soanen whom she had last seen in 1705. This childhood link adds a personal dimension not present in the letters sent him by nuns collected by Françoise de Noirefontaine. In the meantime, he had become the focal point of the appeal of Unigenitus and a Jansenist martyr after his deposition as bishop of Senez in 1727 and exile to the abbey of La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne. The eighty-nine- year-old bishop reassured her in his reply that she had expiated a fault that he himself was guilty of (he had signed the formulary as well), while enjoining her to remain vigilant in the future: Que vous êtes heureuse, ma très chère fille, d’avoir essuyé par vos larmes une faute que je ne cesse de pleurer dans ma solitude! Le repentir sincère que vous témoignez de la signature pure et simple du formulaire que l’on vous a extorquée malgré vous, ne laisse plus subsister devant le Seigneur cette cédule de mort qui vous était contraire; mais souvenez-vous toujours que vous avez été surprise, afin que la connaissance de votre faiblesse devienne le principe d’un courage plus généreux.27
22 The October 24, 1754 profession of faith is much longer and more interesting as Jansenist apologetics. It was written during the billet de confession controversy when again Homassel felt threatened by refusal of the last sacraments and Christian burial. She no longer uses the creeds of the early church as a framework. After all, there was no disagreement over the doctrine of the Trinity that they had been meant to settle. Instead, she focuses on the nature of the church itself, specifically, its teaching authority. Her challenge was to reconcile her attachment to an institution that she accepted as catholic, apostolic, and Roman, while rejecting a papal bull. The rationale she sets forth is in line with the conciliar arguments of Jansenist theologians. It is organized around a distinction between the Church of Rome, which she accepts, and the Roman or papal court that she sees a corrupt tool of the Jesuits and which she ultimately depicts as the Beast of the Apocalypse. While her arguments are standard among Jansenists, she casts them very personally as a debate in which she refutes the arguments proposed to her one after the other by the supporters of Unigenitus. Thus she incorporates into her last profession of faith the same sort of disputation that she had had with her bishop in 1708 and her pastor in 1736 and projects the same confidence that she has won them.
23 She again admits that her theological knowledge has limits. One of the arguments she refutes is that she is unable to give a complete accounting for her stance: “J’avoue que je ne suis pas capable, ainsi qu’on me l’a reproché plusieurs fois, de démêler et dire toutes les raisons [for her opposition to the bull].” She is even willing to attribute this failure to “cette incapacité ordinaire à mon sexe.” Her response is that the faithful are not required to give a full theological accounting for their beliefs. Simply recognizing that a teaching is contrary to the plain sense of the faith is enough: “Nous ne sommes pas obligés d’être assez savants pour pouvoir répondre à toutes les difficultés.”28 This gesture toward the rhetoric of female humility does not prevent the reader from recognizing Homassel’s essential mastery of the issues that goes well beyond the catechism.
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24 In the 1732 and 1754 professions she also takes a stand on two Jansenist issues that were not dogmatic as such: the healings and miracles that took place at the tomb of the Jansenist holy man, François de Pâris, at his tomb in the Saint-Medard cemetery beginning in 1727, and the convulsions that began among Jansenists in 1731. Most Jansenists agreed that the cures demonstrated divine approval of their cause. It was inconceivable to them that God would produce a miraculous healing when the deacon Pâris’s intervention had been invoked if he were indeed a renegade, as the official church maintained. She adduces these miracles in 1732 against Unigenitus. In fact, she says she has witnessed them. Although the phenomenon known as the convulsions had already begun when she signed her 1732 profession, she does not mention them. These trances, shakings, accompanied by impromptu discourses and prophecies that began in the Saint Medard cemetery and continued in private homes were much more controversial among Jansenists. Some saw them as the continuation of the healing miracles; others were embarrassed by them, and thought they were the product of illusion, if not fraud. While she says she witnessed early ones that took place in the cemetery, she does not mention participating in the later ones in private houses. In 1754, she sides with the centrist group of Jansenists who neither rejected them wholesale nor endorsed them without reservation. Instead, they had to be examined on a case by case basis with discernment. She is willing to attribute divine inspiration to the discourses pronounced during them. She describes such speechs, often delivered by women, as “des sentiments des lumières et même des interprétations du sens de l’écriture sainte … qui surpassaient infiniment en précision, en clarté solide et onction tout ce que la science et l’étude humaine la plus profonde et la plus étendue ont pu faire dire ou écrire aux plus savants”. (p. 20) Thus even in this profession of faith which displays her theological prowess as an apologist, she acknowledges a sacred wisdom, sometimes called the “sciences des saints” (although she does not use the term) that goes beyond learning acquired by study and which is available “à des simples, à des ignorants de tout état, de tout sexe, de tout âge”29. (p. 21)
25 In reviewing how these Jansenist women dealt with expectation stemming from Paul that their sex not engage in theology and remain in the private sphere, I will point to three issues: gender, learning, and self-portraiture.
26 First, the women’s relation to the male Jansenist leaders changed. The Port-Royal nuns had worked closely with their male advisors and supporting bishops and ultimately acceded to pressure from them to agree to the compromise called the Peace of the Church in 1668. By the late 1720s, the appellant bishops could do little to protect Jansenist nuns who looked to them now primarily for reassurance and moral support. They were impotent fathers who could only exhort the nuns to continue to believe Jansenist doctrine while they suffered and resisted largely in silence and out of sight. As a laywoman, Homassel had more freedom of movement. When family affairs permitted, she moved to Paris where she was under less surveillance. Like the nuns, she sought Soanen’s approval, but in her final profession of faith, written fourteen years after his death, she displayed more theological expertise than he approved of in women, all the while aligning herself with him in regard to the convulsions. Her 1730 professions of faith had been silent on them, even though her cousin, the famous Jansenist physician Philippe Hecquet, had rejected them as a natural phenomenon, as had Jacques-Joseph Duguet (1649-1733), the great Jansenist theologian whose books she
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owned. The stance she affirms in 1754 echoes Soanen’s position that the convulsions had to be examined case by case.
27 The grounds of learning shifted between the formulary dispute to the Unigenitus controversy from the fait to the droit. The few Port-Royal nuns who probably had read the Latin treatise hid this fact, and the convent’s official policy was based on the Pauline prohibition: it was not suitable for women to have read Jansen’s Augustinus and know whether it contained the condemned propositions. Unigenitus condemned propositions from a book written in French, many of which the Jansenist claimed came from the Fathers of the Church or even scripture. Now women discussed the content of the condemned propositions. They made great efforts to inform themselves on the issues. Jansenist women became learned to the extent that they were mocked in Bougeant’s plays. Yet they remained tributary to the restrictions on female learning. Two expressions that appear frequently in the declarations of the eighteenth-century nuns are évidence and sens commun. The ridiculousness of Unigenitus was obvious to anyone who could read, they maintained. No great learning, only common sense, was required to reject the bull. This tactic might have been effective in discrediting Unigenitus, but it also reinforced the common interpretation of I Timothy 2 11-12 that women were not to be theologians: it was suitable for women to testify to their faith, but not to examine it intellectually. In fact, it was rare for Jansenist women to take their learning into print30. Perhaps the only Jansenist contemporary of Homassel to publish was Armande-Isabelle Duguet-Mol (1675-1753), the niece of Jacques-Joseph Duguet. However, her publications remain intra muros; her polemics are directed at other Jansenists who did not reject the convulsions as her uncle had; she aims more at defending her uncle than elucidating theological issues31. Homassel’s one published book during her lifetime, the Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, is a work of circumstance, published to aid the wild girl. While it appealed to devout readers by testifying to the young woman’s faith in divine providence, it also attracted intellectuals by speculating on her Eskimo origins. The learning it displays is entirely secular.
28 In this context where women were expected to eschew displays of formal theological learning, it is useful to see these debates and especially the professions of faith as spiritual self-portraits, portraiture being a more accepted female genre. One might object that reciting a formulaic profession of faith like the Apostles’ Creed requires no theological expertise and seems on the surface almost the opposite of an intimate portrait. Such canonical creeds affirm dogmatic propositions that one accepts as a member of a group: they are an adhesion to a collective identity. However, the professions of faith of the Jansenist women allow scope for personalization32. The women pick and choose among available points of doctrine to express their most heartfelt beliefs. The professions are solemn declarations of what the women most want to be remembered for after their deaths. In the case of Homassel, she specifically targets her children and grandchildren. In her 1764 will, Homassel bequeathed the painted portrait of the pious aunt who had educated her to her only living daughter33. This portrait has been lost, but two of her professions of faith survive in the Archives Nationales because some of her children and grandchildren found them so compelling that they passed them from generation to generation in the family. In fact, neither the 1732 one nor the 1745 survive in holograph. The first was copied by her eldest daughter and the second by a granddaughter.
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29 Despite Paul’s injunction, despite her protestations of ignorance, Marie-Catherine became theologically “savante” as an apologist of Jansenism, even if she aligned herself largely on the positions of her hero Soanen. However, she remained tributary to Paul in that she avoided the public sphere and passed on her spiritual legacy in the form of witness in private textual self-portraits aimed first of all at her family.
NOTES
1. Relation des vexations essuyées au sujet du formulaire, (p. 121. Copies are found in the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (SJ Ms 8/558) the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal (BO 875). I quote from the Port-Royal manuscript. 2. Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans. Paris, n.p., 1755. The most convenient overview that situates the case in terms of gender and other feral children is Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment, Chicago, Chicago UP, 2002, (p. 29-53. 3. Nicolas Lyon-Caen’s Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV: Récits de vies marchandes et mobilité sociale: les itinéraires des Homassel, Limoges, Pulim, 2008 situates her life in father’s career and reprints her biography of her aunt. 4. Thomas M. Carr, Jr., “The Quebec Hospitalière and the Closeted Jansenist: The Duplessis- Hecquet Correspondence, with an Unpublished Letter by Hecquet”, Lumen: Select Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29, 2010, (p. 91-105. 5. Archives nationales, Minutier central, étude L, 502, October 20, 1764. 6. Examples for eighteenth-century nuns come from Françoise de Noirfontaine’s Croire, souffrir et résister: Lettres de religieuses opposantes à la Bulle Unigenitus, Paris, Nolin, 2009, abbreviated as CSR. 7. Translation of Louis-Isaac Lemaître de Sacy dans la “Bible de Port-Royal”. 8. Mita Choudhury’s chapter “Martyrs into Citizens: Nuns and the Resistance to Unigenitus, 1730-1753” in Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2004, (p. 33-69 examines the gender bind in which women, and particularly nuns, found themselves in much more detail than is possible here, although she does not refer to the droit/fait distinction as I will. See also her “Gendered Models of Resistance: Jansenist Nuns and Unigenitus”, Historical Reflections n° 35, 2009, (p. 28-51. 9. Linda Timmermans, “La ‘Religieuse parfaite’ et la théologie: l’attitude de la Mère Agnès à l’égard de la participation aux controverses”, Chroniques de Port-Royal n° 43, 1994, (p. 100-101. Daniella Kostroun, in her detailed study of the use of the Pauline interdictions in the internal debates among the nuns, points out that the fact that some nuns were more knowledgeable than others created a conflict between their collective identity as members of a community and their individual consciences. See especially (p. 117-140, in her Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism: Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011. 10. Louis Racine, “Diverses particularités concernant Port-Royal recueillies par mon père de ses conversations avec M. Nicole” in the Abrégé de l’histoire de Port-Royal. A. Gazier ed., Paris, Société française d’imprimerie, 1908, (p. 202. 11. Relation de ce qui s’est passé à Port-Royal depuis le commencement de l’année 1664 jusqu’au jour de l’enlèvement des religieuses, qui fut le 26 août de la même année. n. p., n. d., (p. 60.
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12. Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly, Aux portes des ténèbres: Relation de captivité, Paris, Table Ronde, 2005. Agnès Cousson thoroughly analyzes the tension in these captivity narratives, seen as “I” documents, between the Port-Royal’s official stress on humility and its reluctance to enter into disputes with the immediate need to win sympathy and to strengthen the resolve of the community by focusing on Angélique de Saint-Jean: L’Écriture de soi: Lettres et récits autobiographiques des religieuses de Port-Royal, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2012, (p. 539-562. 13. Bernard Chédozeau, “Port-Royal et le jansénisme: la revendication d’une autre forme du tridentinisme”, XVIIe Siècle, n° 171, 1991, (p. 57-74. See Joseph Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009, (p. 414-417 for a discussion of Jansenist pastoral practices. 14. The condemned propositions are cited in an appendix of an early Jansenist attempt to refute the bull, Les Hexaples ou les six colonnes sur la constitution Unigenitus. Amsterdam: Gérard Kuiper, 1714, 17. 15. This misogyny must be placed in the larger context of the access of lay persons to scripture. As Bernard Chédozeau pointed out in a 1988 article, revised in 2012, women represented the lay person “par excellence.” The competency of all lay people to read scripture in translation was questioned, with women considered the least comptent. He points out that that this position was disputed in France, and French Catholics had access to translations of the Bible when they were forbidden in Spain and Italy. “Aux sources éloignées de la Révolution: les laïcistes doctrinaux et la lecture de la Bible (XVIIIe siècle)”, Le Nouveau Testament autour de Port-Royal: traductions, commentaires et études (1697-fin du XVIIIe siècle), Paris, Champion, 2012, (p. 221-248. 16. See André Dabezies, “L’Érudition et l’humour: le père Bougeant (1690-1743)”, Dix-huitième siècle, n° 9, 1977, (p. 259-271 for an overview and assessment of Bougeant’s life and plays. 17. The sermon is known through its refutation, La Lettre des dames de la paroisse Saint-Louis-dans- l’Ile au révérend père Le Fèvre jésuite. n.p., 1734, which is more an anti-Jesuit tract than a defense of women’s right to discuss religion. It concedes that questions of doctrine are beyond women’s sphere: “Nous savons qu’il ne nous est pas permis de décider sur la religion”, but insists that women should be able to confess their faith and share it with others : “Ne nous ôtez pas la liberté de confesser J-C de bouche, de parler comme si Dieu parlait lui-même, de tenir des discours propres à l’accroissement et l’édification de la foi” (p. 1-2. 18. Instruction de Mgr. J. Joseph Languet de Gergy, évêque de Soissons contenant un troisième avertissement à ceux qui dans son diocèse, se sont déclarés appelant de la constitution Unigenitus, Reims, Multeau le jeune, 1718, (p. 199-200 (article 94). Elizabeth Rapley gives examples of Languet’s persecution of Jansenist nuns in her evenhanded account: “‘Personae non gratae’: Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus”, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001, (p. 64-77. 19. Dominique Dinet and Marie-Claire Dinet-Lecomte calculate that only one percent of nuns in France filed a formal appeal of the bull (“Les Appelants contre la bulle Unigenitus d’après Gabriel-Nicolas Nivelle”, in Au cœur religieux de l’époque moderne, Dominique Dinet ed, 2011, (p. 317-318). However, they note that a formal appeal was not the best measure of nuns’ sympathy with the Jansenist cause which tended to be expressed in other ways and later than the appeal mouvement. (p. 304-305. Françoise de Noirefontaine identified 866 nuns from 81 convents who wrote to Colbert de Croissy and Soanen (p. 21. Homassel witnessed at first hand one group of nuns who did formally appeal; the Franciscan Cordelières of Abbeville signed an appeal on October 3, 1718 which was printed: Acte d’adhésion des religieuses cordelières d’Abbeville à l’appel de monseigneur le cardinal de Noailles (n.p., n.d.). 20. For a lucid account of why the bull was a theological and tactical disaster, unfair to Quesnel and bordering on intellectual dishonesty, see the account by John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, vol. 2, (p. 370-77.
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21. Pasquier Quesnel, Lettre du Père Quesnel à M. L’Évêque de Poitier où il se justifie des excès que ce prélat lui attribue dans son mandement du 19 janvier 1716. n.p., 1716, (p. 45-46. 22. Vexations au sujet de la constitution Unigenitus, Bibliothèque de Port-Royal (BO 875), (p. 265-268. 23. Vie de Madame Fontaine in Nicolas Lyon-Caen, Un Roman bourgeois sous Louis XIV, (p. 122. 24. Letter to Soanen, May 30, 1736. Rijksarchief Utrecht, Ancien Fonds d’Amersfoort, 6614 for this quotation and the next. 25. Ibid. 26. “Je crois que nous sommes incapables par nous-mêmes de faire aucun bien qui puisse mériter le salut; et qu’il faut pour cela que Dieu nous donne la volonté et le pouvoir de commencer, de continuer et d’achever toutes nos bonnes œuvres. Je crois néanmoins que nous méritons en voulant et en pratiquant le bien, car quoique ce soit Dieu qui nous le fasse connaître et opérer, c’est néanmoins sans contraindre notre volonté; et lors même qu’il lui fait choisir ce qu’il lui a fait connaître être le meilleur et le plus avantageux, il lui laisse toujours la liberté de le rejeter. Et ainsi, il est vrai de dire que, quoique ce soit Dieu qui fasse le bien en nous, c’est nous cependant qui le faisons et que nous ne le faisons que parce que nous le voulons.”, Letter of May 30, 1736 to Soanen, Rijksarchief Utrecht, Ancien Fonds d’Amersfoort, fol. 6614. 27. La Vie et les Lettres de Soanen, Cologne, 1750, 2, p. 314-315. 28. Archives Nationales, t 77 1-3, “Profession de foi de Marie Catherine Homassel Hecquet, ma grand-mère”, fol. 14. 29. Catherine Maire found that 65% of the convulsionaries involved with such discourses were in fact women, and moreover they were likely to be of lower class origin. See Les Convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard: miracles, convulsions et prophéties à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard/Julliard, 1985, (p. 131. 30. Nicolas Lyon-Caen highlights the importance of Jansenist women in expanding forms of public expression, but points to no Jansenist women who participated in the public space constituted by becoming a published author: “‘Il faut qu’un party se sente bien faible quand il accepte et qu’il recherche de tels appuis.’ Femmes, jansénisme et publicité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle”, L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques [En ligne], 04 | 2009, mis en ligne le 26 juillet 2009. http://acrh.revues.org/1277, accessed February, 18, 2014. 31. See the notice on her by Hervé Savon for a list of her publications in the Dictionnaire de Port- Royal, Jean Lesaulnier and Anthony McKenna ed., Paris, Champion, 2004. The earlier contribution of Françoise-Marguerite de Joncoux (1668-1715) was more substantial and positive, but she died prematurely at age 47 before Homassel became active, and did not sign her publications. An excellent Latinist, in 1699 Joncoux published a translation into French of Pierre Nicole’s notes in his Latin edition of Pascal’s Provinciales. She collaborated in the publications of Jacques Fouillou and chafed at the restrictions on women displaying their learning. See the entries of Ellen Weaver-Laporte and Régine Pouzet in the Dictionnaire de Port-Royal and of Édith Flamarion in the Dictionnaire des femmes des Lumières, Huguette Krief and Valérie André ed., 2 vols, Paris: Champion, 2015. 32. The commentary that the editors of the clandestine periodical les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques added to accompany two such declarations of faith that it published which had been written by a favorite cousin of Homassel, Jacques Hecquet, the curé of Alléry, illustrates how Jansenist readers appreciated the individualization in such documents: “On trouve toujours dans tous ces actes des tours nouveaux et intéressants qui font voir en combien de manières différentes on peut réclamer et déposer contre la fatale bulle”, July 16, 1744, (p. 114. 33. Archives nationales, Minutier central, étude LXXVII, 297, July 7, 1764.
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ABSTRACTS
Following Saint Paul, women were excluded from public religious roles and expected to eschew theology for affective devotional practices. The article explores the gender bind this placed on Jansenist nuns and laywomen, who felt compelled to declare their stance, by focusing on Marie- Catherine Hecquet. She was pried from a convent and browbeaten into marriage. It compares her to her seventeenth-century models, the Port-Royal nuns in the formulary disputes, and to eighteenth-century nuns who protested against Unigenitus. It examines two kinds of “I” portraits of these women: professions of faith and autobiographical accounts of their persecutions which reveal acute theological learning.
Suivant Saint Paul, les femmes ont été exclues des rôles religieux publics et on attendait d’elles qu’elles évitent la théologie au profit de pratiques de dévotion affectives. L’article explore la contrainte de genre imposée aux religieuses et aux laïques jansénistes, qui furent forcées de déclarer leur position et détaille le cas de Marie-Catherine Hecquet. Elle fut retirée de force d’un couvent et contrainte de se marier. L’article la compare à ses modèles du XVIIe siècle, les religieuses de Port-Royal lors des disputes du formulaire et aux nonnes du XVIIIe siècle qui protestèrent contre la bulle Unigenitus. Il examine deux sortes de portraits à la première personne : professions de foi et récits autobiographiques des persécutions marqués par une appropriation des savoirs théologiques.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Homassel Hecquet (Marie-Catherine, interdiction de saint Paul, profession de foi, femmes jansénistes Keywords: Homassel Hecquet (Marie-Catherine), jansenist women, unigenitus, Pauline interdiction, profession of faith
AUTHOR
THOMAS M. CARR JR. University of Nebraska-Lincoln
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Painting the self: craft, skills, knowledge Savoir se peindre
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Inhabiting Flower Worlds: The Botanical Art of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte Une artiste en résidence dans le monde des fleurs: L’art botanique de Madeleine Françoise Basseporte
Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari
1 In a 2014 prose poem entitled The Albertine Workout, Anne Carson meditates on Marcel Proust’s comparison of his beloved Albertine to a plant: “24. The state of Albertine that most pleases Marcel is Albertine asleep./25. By falling asleep she becomes a plant, he says./26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.”1 Carson zooms in here on the Proustian scene of male voyeurism, organized around an illusion of passivity that promises the perfect availability of a delicate and intricately composed object, whether woman or plant, to the viewer. As Carson’s rendering makes clear, the use of plants (most often flowers) as emblems of femininity sidesteps the question of women’s sexual agency just as it engages the desires of the viewer; Albertine’s sexuality ‒ with all its ambiguities for Marcel ‒ becomes analogous to plants’ flowering (or exposure of their genitalia) ‒ an activity that we do not really “see” for what it is even (or especially) when we look right at it. The banal comparison of a beautiful woman to a beautiful flower is a convention that denies the agency of both person and plant even while highlighting the seductive power of these seemingly passive bodies. Carson suggests that Proust conveniently “forgets” that plants in bloom, far from being asleep, are in fact actively engaged in attracting pollinators (and human beings): their allure, while not the product of an action in the human sense, is for all that not an accident. The poem transforms the figure of the plant/woman from a passive and enigmatic object into a deliberately libidinal subject, one who does not care to conceal her motives. Desire becomes a form of agency that cuts across plants and human organisms. Yet the sleeping plantlike Albertine still functions, for Marcel, as a kind of lure or bluff, projecting his own desires back to him. “Marcel appears to think he is the master of such moments”, Carson writes2. The visibility of Albertine’s body ‒ sometimes in her
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sleep she throws off her covering and exposes herself to Marcel ‒ conceals not just the activity of her desire, but its logic, which is not shared by or with the spectator.
2 In the European context, the knowledge of sexual reproduction in plants goes back to the late seventeenth century, although the understanding of plants as having sexual distinctions is an ancient one. The eighteenth century in particular was marked by an increasing fascination, on the part of botanists and non-specialist publics alike, with the sexualization of plants, as Londa Schiebinger (among others) has brilliantly illustrated3. In what remains perhaps the best-known contribution to this widespread interest in plant sexuality, the prominent eighteenth-century botanist Carl Nilsson Linnaeus (1707-1778) developed a taxonomic system that identified plants according to their sexual organs. Linnaeus’s system met with considerable success, especially in England, although its scientific legitimacy remained in dispute throughout the century (which witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of systems for botanical classification)4. Linnaeus also claimed, correctly (pace Carson), that plants too sleep, bringing them in that sense closer to our conception of an animal. Indeed, the great classificatory schemes and natural histories of the eighteenth century ‒ including those of Linnaeus, Jussieu (1748-1836), and Buffon (1707-1788) ‒ not only establish distinctions among various forms of being (such as the three kingdoms of nature: plant, animal, and mineral) but expose new continuities traversing these divisions. Buffon, in the “Premier discours” to the Histoire naturelle (1749), gives us this scene: Imaginons un homme qui a en effet tout oublié ou qui s’éveille tout neuf pour les objets qui l’environnent, plaçons cet homme dans une campagne où les animaux, les oiseaux, les poissons, les plantes, les pierres se présentent successivement à ses yeux. Dans les premiers instants cet homme ne distinguera rien et confondra tout; mais laissons ses idées s’affermir peu à peu par des sensations réitérées des mêmes objets; bientôt il se formera une idée générale de la matière animée...5
3 In this description (prefiguring Condillac’s famous statue in the 1754 Traité des sensations), the clarity and precision of the differences separating diverse beings emerge out of a state of flux and confusion; yet, as Diderot will go on to point out in his commentary on Buffon’s text in the article “Animal” from the Encyclopédie, this flux can never be fully contained. In the eighteenth century, the sexuality of plantlife plays a part in this much larger debate around the status of animate and inanimate beings6. At the same time, the figure of the plant continues to function as a convenient emblem of passivity, and, in the case of flowers, of delicate femininity. The very tensions that Carson draws out in her rereading of the Proustian observer’s contemplation of Albertine are already inscribed in the eighteenth-century cultural and scientific understanding of plants.
4 The life of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (1701-1780), artist and scientific illustrator, nearly coincides with that of Linnaeus; she also kept up a decades-long correspondence with Buffon. At the age of forty, Basseporte succeeded Claude Aubriet (1665-1742), who was her teacher, as official painter of the Jardin du roi in 1741 and kept this position until her death in 1780. At the same time, she worked as “dessinateur” for the Académie des sciences. Before this period, from 1735 to 1741, she held the title of “peintre en mignature de sa Majesté” ‒ a position that, while distinguished, did not come with a pension.7 She also served as a teacher to the daughters of Louis XV, instructing them in the art of flower-painting, and may have worked for a period as the interior decorator of Madame de Pompadour. The most authoritative biographical source remains the “Notice”, written by Jean Castilhon and Louis Poinsinet de Sivry8, in
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the 1781 volume of Le Nécrologe des hommes célèbres de France, par une société de gens de lettres, which was republished in the Revue universelle des arts of 1861 (volume 13). While relatively little is known about her, Basseporte was in contact with the major botanists and naturalists of her period and was recognized by those who employed her for the rigor and beauty of her illustrations of plants and, more occasionally, of shells, animals, birds, and sea creatures. In a letter written by Jussieu to Linnaeus on January 30, 1749, the former mentions that Madame Basseporte “is very proud of the title you give her, of your second wife”9. With its polygamic image of a fictional second marriage that evokes the sexual classifications of Linnaean taxonomy, this insider joke among botanists suggests that Basseporte had a close relationship with both Jussieu and Linnaeus, while simultaneously underlining the fact that she had no other marriage in her own life ‒ no family or companionship that she cultivated apart from her close associations with scientists, patrons, and pupils. It also suggests that Linnaeus held Basseporte in particularly high regard.
5 If the analogy between woman and flower is on the one hand a form of longstanding and banal objectification10, on the other the putative decorousness of flower-painting allowed various seventeenth ‒ and eighteenth-century European women illustrators, naturalists, and miniaturists a point of entry into the interconnected worlds of science, collecting, and art11. Authors like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Erasmus Darwin encouraged women to botanize as a private hobby, and women artists like Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), Elizabeth Blackwell (1707-1758), and Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), who may have been taught by Basseporte, made botanical illustration or images of flowers an important part of their œuvres. However, although women who botanized or created botanical art in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries have begun to receive more attention from scholars12, the women who, like Basseporte, painted flowers along with other objects of interest for natural scientists and collectors in the earlier part of the period, remain less well-known, in part because they often worked anonymously13. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison note that the feminization of botanical illustration involved not only the daughters, wives, and sisters of male scientists but also women of modest social status who were excluded from the more prestigious genres of landscape painting or historical painting and sought a way to earn a living14. While women’s pursuit of original research in the sciences was often thought to represent a challenge to conventional standards of propriety, botanical illustration was considered a relatively acceptable feminine occupation, precisely because of the ornamental attributes of the flower. The invisibility of women who engaged in this illustration was an effect of both their subordination to male scientists and the marginalization of the genre in which they worked. As Daston and Galison write, “it is more speculative but still plausible to suggest that naturalists encouraged women artists because the double inferiority of their status as artisans and as women promoted the visual and intellectual receptivity that made the illustrator, as Albinus had put it, ‘a tool in my hand’”15. The Nécrologe makes clear that, in the eighteenth century, a woman illustrator like Basseporte could nonetheless gain significant social recognition. Even while laboring under the supervision of male naturalists, Basseporte was able to build networks of support and patronage for herself and her own protegés. Yet this recognition came at a price; later histories of the artists of the Jardin du roi almost invariably emphasize her inferiority to the men who held this same position (for which she was apparently paid less than her male counterparts).
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6 Working alongside prominent scientists to illustrate the objects from the royal collections allowed Basseporte to participate in a more prestigious genre than that of flower-painting (in France, “peinture des fleurs”), which was a decorative art developed in seventeenth-century florilegia and pattern books16. In the Nécrologe, the authors are careful to distinguish between the practice of painting flowers and that of painting plants. As they put it: On appelle ordinairement Peintre de fleurs, l’Artiste qui, sans étudier la fleur en elle-même, sans en détailler toutes les parties constitutives, s’attache uniquement à en rendre l’effet, & à la peindre telle que nous la voyons.17
7 The authors go on to explain that Basseporte, rather than being a simple “Peintre de fleurs”, was in fact working in the genre of “peinture des plantes”, which takes a scientific approach to the beautiful objects it represents and draws our attention away from the flower and toward the structure of the plant as a whole. According to the Nécrologe, her images of plants, which allow viewers both to appreciate their beauty and to penetrate the secrets of plant physiology, stand up to comparison with those of the great Nicolas Robert (1614-1685), who painted the plants in the Jardin du roi under Louis XIV. The authors write: Il est un genre qui, sans être moins agréable [que la peinture des fleurs], est plus utile, plus vrai, et qui ne se contente pas des formes extérieures; dans lequel la plante avec sa fleur, doit plaire comme tableau, & se présenter comme un objet d’étude, de manière que l’illusion faite pour séduire l’Artiste même, ne cache ni ne déguise aux regards perçans du Naturaliste aucun des détails anatomiques les plus secrets de la plante: tel est le genre qu’embrassa Mademoiselle Basseporte, genre hérissé de difficultés, & dans lequel elle a si parfaitement réussi, que les nombreux morceaux qu’elle a donnés à la Bibliothèque du roi, depuis 1732 jusqu’à sa mort, se soutiennent à côté de ceux du célèbre Robert...18
8 This comment not only aligns Basseporte with one of the most celebrated flower painters of the early modern period, but also praises her for her ability both to “please” the untrained eye with her images and to allow the naturalist access to the inner secrets of the plant itself. The beautiful flower is thus a kind of concealing illusion that allows the not so decorous nature of plant anatomy, what Carson calls plants’ exposure of their genitalia, to remain veiled (even when in plain sight!). This illusion also serves to veil the artist, insofar as the plants, seashells, insects, and animals that Basseporte painted are as “naturally” alluring in their beauty and detail as they are challenging to read into or beyond.
9 The Nécrologe also refers to a comment supposedly made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in praise of Basseporte; according to Rousseau, “la nature donnait l’existence aux plantes, mais... Mademoiselle Basseporte la leur conservait”19. This remark, if it was indeed Rousseau’s, is probably in reference to Basseporte’s vélins (watercolors done on vellum), of which she was obliged to produce twelve every year.
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Madeleine-Françoise Basseporte. Fleurs. Gouache sur vélin, ca. 1750.
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, reserve jd- 33 -pet fol
10 Where flowers are often conventionally depicted as fragile and short-lived, this praise assigns a certain vigor to Basseporte and her art that counters the ephemerality and delicate materiality of the plants themselves. The amazing energy that appears to have characterized Basseporte’s approach to her profession is in fact stressed throughout the Nécrologe, from its vivid images of her hard-working determination as a young girl copying paintings under the guidance of Robert himself, to its description of her painting flowers in the heat of the mid-day sun for Madame Pompadour, “pour saisir l’instant le plus favorable à certaines fleurs”20. Most importantly, the Nécrologe dedicates considerable space to describing Basseporte’s relentless efforts to teach and support her protégé(e)s, young men and women of art and science (often in need of powerful and rich patrons) who included the anatomist Marie-Marguerite Bihéron (whose “disgust” of corpses Basseporte supposedly dispelled) and the chemist Rouelle. These accounts of (successful) patronage give us a sense of a woman actively inserting herself into networks of recognition, while also limiting these activities to the socially acceptable feminine attitudes of devotion to others and charitable self-sacrifice. Still, much of the status granted to Basseporte in the late-eighteenth-century Nécrologe will be eclipsed in the post-Revolutionary accounts of her, in part because this status seems to depend upon Basseporte’s resistance to any public form of self-assertion. In the first sentence of the Nécrologe we read, “Magdelaine-Françoise Basseporte, Peintre et Dessinatrice des plantes au Jardin du Roi…, mérite une place distinguée dans le Nécrologe des Artistes et des Gens de Lettres, moins encore par ses rares talens, que par des vertus dignes de servir d’exemple aux uns et aux autres.”21 If her talents are great,
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her selfless commitment to the advancement of her pupils (and of her art) is even greater.
11 Her gifts as an artist and scientific observer notwithstanding, in her official capacity as “peintre du Jardin du roi” Basseporte still had her work scrutinized by Jussieu and, later, Buffon, to verify the accuracy of her images against the objects that they depicted. In this sense, her portraits of flowers, animals, and other natural objects seem, in their very commitment to regimes of classification that prioritize practices of observation, the ultimate gesture of self-effacement –the erasure, rather than the making or fashioning, of the woman artist as persona. Within the lineage of female artists and scientific illustrators, then, Basseporte stands out as both exceptional and representative. According to Anne Lafont, “La carrière de Madeleine Basseporte est doublement emblématique de la place des femmes dans les milieux des arts and des sciences du XVIIIe siècle: elle l’est par le caractère exceptionnel de son destin mais elle l’est tout autant par le fait que ce destin, loin d’être isolé, est comparable à celui que nombre d’autres femmes connurent à la même époque.”22 Her status as painter to the king was remarkable – and the recognition that she received from the major naturalists of her period was surely unusual – but the restrictions that came with being a “femme peintre” working in a “secondary” genre (as opposed to the more prestigious genres of landscape and history painting) were constraints that she shared with other women at the time. Despite the success she achieved over the course of her lifetime – a success for which the 1781 Nécrologe provides ample evidence – she often remains nothing more than a footnote even in histories of the “peinture des plantes”, eclipsed by Robert, Aubriet, and certainly the great painter of Romantic flowers, Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). The Mercure de France refers to her as an “Artiste distinguée” and notes the esteem in which she was held by Buffon in particular, but neither the intensity of her dedication to her work (the Mercure describes her as having died “pinceau à la main”) nor the prestige of her connections, both scientific and royal, were enough to sustain her public legacy23.
12 Basseporte’s relatively long career coincides with a widespread intensification, in France and elsewhere, of interest in the natural sciences and related disciplines – a shift that is linked to the development of new practices of observing, collecting, classifying, and experimenting with objects and their representations. As Lafont puts it, “à l’époque de la Lettre sur les aveugles de Diderot [...] la conquête du monde passait par l’observation de ses objets ou de ses specimens naturels”24. This “mise en ordre” of objects and forms of knowledge itself corresponds to an increasing institutionalization of science, and brings with it an emphasis on visibility as a technique and mechanism for ordering and assessing things (and persons). As Daniela Bleichmar has written in her essay on the great eighteenth-century collector and art critic Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, “what brought things like gardens, shells, and paintings together was a concern with visual expertise, with outlining and deploying practices of specialized diagnostic looking”25. Yet the extensive emphasis on the domain of the visual, the training of the eye that, as Bleichmar describes it, reunites scientific knowledge with new forms of connoisseurship and taste, once acquired, did not guarantee visibility to the artist and illustrator, like Basseporte26. As we can tell from an examination of the reception of Basseporte’s work, both past and present, this elaborate visual culture operated based on its own economies of concealment.
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13 If women illustrators participated actively in the culture of the unveiling of nature, this process obscured them and others. For instance, Anne Lafont includes her article on Basseporte in her volume likewise dedicated to Dezallier d’Argenville on the grounds of an absence of any mention of her in his writings. Lafont goes on to analyze the ambiguous praise Dezallier d’Argenville lavishes on women of science other than Basseporte (often but not exclusively foreigners), whom he tends to portray as both talented and unwomanly or somehow “denatured”. She shows that in this way d’Argenville obeyed the socially imposed rules of decorum that demanded “modesty” from women, a demand that women themselves, who responded to the need the natural sciences created for their skills, had to develop strategies to work around. To be sure, the flowering plants that appear to make themselves infinitely available to viewers in Basseporte’s images conceal a secret life of their own – one whose principles were only beginning to be understood thanks to books like Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Staticks (1727) and Linnaeus’s controversial Somnus plantarum (1755). It was almost exclusively male scientists who in the course of the eighteenth century acquired great prominence by studying the physiology of plants and establishing logical systems or taxonomies for describing them. (In the field of classification, the systems of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Jussieu, Linnaeus, and Buffon, among others, all vied for prominence with one another.) With a few notable exceptions, such as Emilie du Châtelet in France and Maria Agnesi and Laura Bassi in Italy, women received scant recognition for their work as natural philosophers, and in France were gradually shut out, over the course of the century, from institutionalized forms of training in the sciences.
14 Despite the difficulties they faced in gaining access both to scientific knowledge and opportunities for scientific practice, by the nineteenth century, some amateur women botanists had taken an active part in engaging with plants and, to some extent, identifying with them, as Theresa Kelley has reminded us. These women’s scientific and personal investments in plants that failed to fit neatly into classificatory schemata – or otherwise seemed to push back against attempts to categorize them – allowed them to intervene in philosophical discourses that devalued women and matter in opposition to spirit, talent, and reason. As Kelley points out, plants have long served as epistemologically ambiguous objects of study, from antiquity through the Romantic era and into modernity. Like Aristotle in the 5th century B.C.E., Linnaeus places plants between minerals and animals, an ambivalent ontological position from which they “convey a resilient hiddenness that defies the Linnaean regime of visibility”27. Kelley’s work focuses on women’s involvement with botanical figures that occupy a zone of epistemological instability, where both flowers and the women who studied and represented them issue an unruly challenge to efforts to contain and define their essence or nature. As Kelley writes of the nineteenth-century British women artists whom she studies: “As I read them, these botanizing women deflect normative accounts of how women could be identified with plants, in part by creating botanical figures instead of themselves becoming such figures.”28 Yet it is hard to find such non- normative elements in Basseporte’s flowers, both because little about her is known and because the systems of taste and scientific knowledge to which her plants seem to beautifully conform tend to eclipse any sense of individual involvement. Unlike the Romantic women whom Kelley discusses, who are singularly interested in those plants that are not fully classifiable in the Linnean system (lichens, mosses, and ferns, for example), Basseporte’s flowers appear most often to confirm, rather than to strain
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against, both the aesthetic and scientific conventions of her time. Where Kelley’s nineteenth-century women botanists tend to focus on bizarre and unusual examples, Basseporte paints those flowers that readily reflect back to the spectator the distinctions that they are meant to illustrate, as in her paintings of trees and other plants that were reproduced as engravings in the second volume of Noël-Antoine Pluche’s popularizing Spectacle de la nature (1732-1750).
Madeleine-Françoise Basseporte. “Feuillage de chêne” et “L’Olive greffée”
Gravure de J. Mynde (English edition), in Noël-Antoine Pluche, Spectacle de la nature, Nature display’d, Vol. 2 of 7, London, J. Pemberton (et al.), 1736. Les gravures sur cuivre de l’édition en anglais sont copiées de l’édition française originale, avec renversement des images de droite à gauche. Courtesy of University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Libraries Special Collections.
15 In this sense, we are not privy, in Basseporte’s images, to the artist’s own encounter with the plant in its destabilizing singularity or individuality. Instead, we are left with accounts of Basseporte’s attachment to her work that tend, often implicitly, to attribute to the artist herself the qualities of a plant, albeit not a seductive (and potentially man-eating) plant like Proust’s Albertine, but a graceful and ephemeral one. In his preface to a volume of plates entitled Les Vélins du Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Paris (published by the Librairie des Arts Décoratifs in 1928), head librarian of the museum Léon Bultingaire writes of Basseporte: “Madeleine Basseporte..., guidée par les Jussieu, appliqua une grâce aimable à toutes les tâches qui lui furent confiées.”29 This description of a kind of perfect receptivity stands in contrast to Bultingaire’s presentation of the other painters for the Jardin du roi, remarkable for their productivity and verve (Robert and Joubert); their travels in the company of botanists like Tournefort (Aubriet); and their ability to revitalize a fading genre (Van Spaendonck). Moreover, both women artists and scientists could be rhetorically equated with plants not only as (ideally) decorous and beautiful objects but also as fragile creatures that needed care. For example, Joseph Philippe François Deleuze, in his early-nineteenth-century history of the Musée d’histoire naturelle at the Jardin du roi, notes about Basseporte that at the end of her career “son zèle ne s’était point ralenti, mais son talent inférieur à celui d’Aubriet, auquel elle avait succédé, était encore affaibli par l’âge”30. Because Basseporte is represented here as lacking the immortal talent that Aubriet had, it is only her failing eyes and body, and her zeal, that supposedly support her artistic endeavors. This description of her inferior talent and her increasing feebleness is already very much at odds with the eighteenth-century
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assessment of her incredible commitment to her work, both in the Nécrologe and the Mercure de France.
16 To consider Basseporte’s flowers as somehow “portraits” of her is of course to continue in this tradition of conflating her persona with her objects of study, in a gesture that conceals as much as it reveals. Just as Basseporte is described by Bultingaire as most notable for her diligent willingness to accept those tasks given to her by others, her flowers threaten to become reflections not so much of their own “secret life”, whatever this may be, as of the desires of the viewer for an unreachable interiority that the flowers refuse, in their candor, to make visible. In the Nécrologe, self-effacement is not only the effect of her keen eye for plant physiology but the symbolic gesture that inaugurates Basseporte’s entry into the career of an illustrator, for she began her life as an artist producing pastel portraiture before she changed course and devoted herself to botanical and zoological drawings and paintings. (She also ornamented “objets de luxe,” including clothing and porcelain-ware, as was common for the artists documenting the French royal collections). Despite the fact that Basseporte appears to have painted a self-portrait at a time when it was unusual for French women artists to do so – and despite her obvious talent for portraiture – Basseporte’s work as a botanical illustrator has almost completely overshadowed her contributions to other genres, even as the act of botanical illustration is one that itself eclipses the artist (male or female) who practices it. (The pastel portrait that was traditionally considered her self- portrait has recently been reattributed to the artist Antoine Rivalz31, but another portrait whose existence is known from an entry in the inventory of her possessions after her death was probably a self-portrait painted by her32.) The Nécrologe suggests that Basseporte abandoned portraiture in favor of illustration in order to avoid the necessity of seeking out clients, an activity that required the regular cultivation of social connections, and to find a more stable means of income to support her aging mother. Yet her self-effacement within the genre of botanical illustration is also a form of self-assertion that allows her to maintain a household and preserve a certain level of financial independence.
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Madeleine-Françoise Basseporte, Jeune femme, ca. 1727.
Source: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
17 In commemorating Basseporte by means of creating a social persona for her, in order to enumerate the achievements that form the basis of her social recognition, the authors of the entry in the Nécrologe cannot help but remark that the artistic and financial autonomy she achieved were limited, that for seven years she worked for free as a botanical illustrator for the king, and that even afterward she received a lesser pension than other (male) illustrators did. Moreover, Basseporte was never invited to join the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, and, while the authors state that she earned the respect of several scientists and eminent thinkers, “of foreigners visiting Paris” such as Rousseau, and of the royal family, they also indirectly tell us that she never quite got the praise she in fact deserved. Throughout, the Nécrologe celebrates Basseporte for effacing herself in acts of patronage and self-sacrifice that it interprets as testaments to her diligence and virtuous conduct toward others, including, initially, her own mother and, later, her pupils and protégés (including Anne Vallayer-Coster, a much better-known artist than Basseporte herself, who did eventually achieve membership in the Académie royale as a still-life painter). The genre of “peinture des plantes” participates in this act of self-effacement in a complex and ambivalent way, both by highlighting the supposedly feminine attributes of the artist in the images that she paints (self-sacrifice, attentiveness, care, grace) and by erasing her from the presentation of the objects on the canvas.
18 In his “Préface”, Léon Bultingaire describes Basseporte’s illustrations as “dignes à coup sûr de figurer dans les galeries d’art les plus sévères”; yet they were nonetheless never exhibited there. We can find in Bultingaire’s assessment as well as in the Nécrologe an uneasy negotiation of the tension between artifice and truth33. This tension
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corresponds to and exacerbates the ambivalent position of the artist-as-illustrator, both present in and absent from her works. (Basseporte’s style is both invisible – the mimetic representation of truth of nature visible to the scientist’s mind – and somehow still striking.) On the one hand, Bultingaire affirms, we might be tempted to see the images of these plants as renderings of “les fantaises les plus osées”. However, as he reassures us, we in fact find in these paintings not an “effort de stylisation” – the product of artifice detached from its objects, in other words – but a “rigoureuse exactitude” which is protected from disfiguration by the seriousness and observational precision of the artists themselves (who are distinctive precisely for their ability to erase themselves from the scene of the object). At the same time, Bultingaire portrays the flowers on the canvas as if they were human subjects, writing of their seductive manner and their graceful attitudes. In fact, it is not enough to say that his language implies an anthropomorphic dimension to these “portraits”; Bultingaire’s “flowery” rhetoric stresses the fulsome femininity of their “modèles,” who lend themselves so readily to observation. Similarly, the Nécrologe plays on the division between “illusion” and physiological accuracy that Basseporte’s images seem to navigate so handily, even while intimating that Basseporte’s paintings are most valuable as signs of her virtuous dedication to the welfare of others. In an economy of truth and artifice, science and art, authority and seduction, she remains awkwardly positioned between the two terms.
19 Basseporte’s visibility-in-invisibility (her authority as a painter of nature in its most “scientific” of attitudes) is an inversion of the position of the plant as object of our gaze, its invisibility-in-visibility. The flower, in the most successful botanical illustrations, pleases the eye “comme tableau,” at the same time as it offers up to the “regard perçant du naturaliste” the most intimate of its secrets. In this contrast between the flower’s capacity to induce pleasure with its grace and to satisfy scientific curiosity with the exposure of its secrets to the naturalist’s curious eye, we find plantlife portrayed as both attractive and enigmatic. We might also find, in the ability of the flower both to stimulate and to evade the curiosity of the scientist, an echo of the Encyclopédie’s claim that “l’organisation d’une plante est un arrangement de filets si déliés, de corpuscules si minces, de vaisseaux si étroits, de pores si serrés, que les modernes n’auroient pas été fort loin sans le secours du microscope”34. The smallness and delicacy of plants – the mysterious order of their inner nature – makes them both difficult to penetrate and the ideal object of scrutiny. In this, of course, they come once again to resemble the figure of a woman. Their intricacy draws us in, but even the act of identifying plant structures does not necessarily bring us nearer to understanding their functions, insofar as the latter do not involve or require us.
20 In reading Basseporte’s flower paintings as particularly decorous – even in the “naturalism” of their renderings – and in collapsing her eminent career as an illustrator into a model of feminine generosity (to her mother, to other artists, to her patrons), we find ourselves once again taking up the position that the work women do with and on flowers involves a kind of mise en abyme of feminine attributes, wherein both the flower and the female botanist acquire each other’s qualities, in a closed economy of ornamental intimacy. Women’s relationship to botany – as expressed in images like Basseporte’s flower paintings – thus seems to provide the counterpoint – or the antidote – to a destabilizing botanical imaginary in which the dividing line between plant and animal is shifting, with sometimes alarming results. Basseporte, like the plants themselves, seems to “reveal” her secrets best in the (selfless) act of never having told them, a silence that cannot for all that be called a lie. Nothing about
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Basseporte’s botanical works suggests an autobiographical preoccupation on the part of the painter; yet the flowers themselves are persistently read through both the painter’s absence – Basseporte effaces herself before nature – and through her insistent presence – the flowers stand as a sign of Basseporte’s virtuous femininity, of the “local” world consisting of the king’s residences, libraries, her deserving but poor protégés, and, until her death, her mother, to whom she was devoted. She is “in them” through the observation and painstaking depiction that they manifest, as a hard-working artist- artisan who participates in – but does not shape – the modes of production that shore up the French monarchy in the eighteenth century or as a virtuous woman who nurtures nature in its capacity of pushing life to its limit, in its manifestations of finitude. The Nécrologe, written at a moment shortly after her death, strives then once again to contain and present these local worlds – from the plants she observed, to the family she sustained, to the elite society in which she circulated – that were her diligent life-long care.
21 Basseporte, who has received recognition largely for the moments at which she withdraws from forms of self-assertion and self-representation, is for this reason paradoxically identified with the images of plants (and, to a lesser extent, animals and shells) that she produced and with the physical and affective expenditure needed to produce them. As contemporary critics of her work and of her legacy, we need to question this identification, but not necessarily to refuse it entirely. The eighteenth- century attraction to botany and botanical inquiry coincides with a rise of interest in the plant as a creature that unsettles as well as confirms our assumptions about the differences among various forms of life. Moreover, the materialist consideration of the human being as one animal among others runs alongside the revitalization of the plant as an animate being in its own right. The comparison of women to plants can clearly function in damaging and misogynist ways, just as the association of women with flowers can be (and was) used to justify their subordinate status in a wide range of contexts. On the other hand, if the perception of botanical artists like Basseporte can be said to be (problematically) intertwined with the perception of their objects of study (including flowers and plants), we can also find, in the story of her life told by Nécrologe, an openness to a representation of Basseporte as something other than an underrecognized illustrator, toiling in relative obscurity until her abilities failed her, of small creatures and small objects. In the Nécrologe’s emphasis on her unusual strength, her diligence, and her success as a teacher, another portrait of Basseporte emerges, one that moves us away from the question of the circulation of her name (or image) and toward that of the enduring effects of her work – on her pupils, on her friends, and on the community of naturalists that she seems to have cultivated with success. Her relative visibility is not an index of her relative significance within the worlds she helped construct. In this way, perhaps her legacy indeed retains something vigorously plantlike about it. Regimes of visibility can seem to entrap both woman artist and plant in an economy of decorous (or, in the case of Proust’s flowers, indecorous) self-display. At the same time, Basseporte’s flower paintings serve as emblems of an impressive capacity to prosper and endure in often unpropitious circumstances.
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NOTES
1. Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout, New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #13, New York, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2014, p. 10. 2. Carson, op. cit., p. 11. 3. See Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, Boston, Beacon Press, 1993, in particular Chapter 1, on “The Private Lives of Plants,” for a by-now classic account of this phenomenon. Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World Cambrige, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2004, examines the place of gender relations in the “global culture of botany” that develops during the eighteenth century. Schiebinger writes that “Plant sexuality exploded onto the scene in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” (19) 4. Schiebinger notes, “By the middle of the eighteenth century, the sexualist metaphor had swept the botanical world, except for France” (Nature’s Body, 29). For an analysis of the French reception of Linnaeus in the later part of the eighteenth century, see Pascal Duris, Linné et la France: 1780-1850, Geneva: Droz, 1993. 5. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histroire naturelle, in Œuvres, Stéphane Schmitt and Cédric Crémière eds., Paris: Gallimard, 2007, p. 47. 6. In France, see Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s L’Homme-plante (1748), a treatise playing on the famous analogy established in L’Homme-machine in which he discusses similarities between plant and human sexuality. 7. Aline Hamonou-Mahieu, Claude Aubriet: Artiste naturaliste des Lumières, Paris, Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2010, p. 81; quoted in Anne Lafont, “Basseporte”, 1740, Un abrégé du monde: Savoirs et collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville, Anne Lafont ed., Lyon, Fage éditions, 2012. 8. According to the “Nouvelles littéraires” section of the June 20, 1781 edition of the Mercure de France, which reviewed volume 16, in which Basseporte’s entry appears. 9. James Edward Smith, A selection of the correspondence of Linnaeus and other naturalists, from the original manuscripts, vol. 1, London, 1821, p. 221. Schiebinger notes of this same passage that Linnaeus “simply tended to see anything female as a vif”, Nature’s Body, n° 26. 10. For a feminist analysis of this analogy in philosophical context, see in particular Elaine P. Miller’s valuable study of the relationship between nineteenth-century philosophies of vegetal life and femininity, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine, Albany, New York, SUNY Press, 2002. More recently, Michael Marder has examined the plant as a philosophical figure of a non-oppressive ethical subjectivity characterized, among other things, by “atelic dispersion”, taking us outside the binary logic of active/passive beings. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 181. 11. For an excellent overview of an important moment in the development of this culture of collecting, classifying, and observing, see 1740, Un abrégé du monde. Savoirs et collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville, Anne Lafont ed., Lyon, Fage éditions, 2012. For a perceptive account of connoisseurship and scientific observation in Dezallier d’Argenville’s milieu, see Daniela Bleichmar, “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France”, in Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.1, fall 2012, p. 85-111. 12. In the British context, see in particular Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012; Sam George, Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing 1760-1883: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester:
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Manchester University Press, 2007) and Ann Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 13. Maria Sibylla Merian is an exception to this general rule. See Janice Neri’s The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 for a perceptive study of Merian that discusses among other topics the Neues Blumenbuch (1675), Merian’s first illustrated publication consisting of floral designs for use as needlework patterns. In Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, Mary Terrall includes a fascinating discussion of Hélène Dumoustier, who made thousands of drawings for R.A.F. de Réaumur, and whom he did not name in print (although he made her his heir). 14. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books, 2007, p. 89. 15. Daston and Galison, op. cit., p. 89. 16. For an overview of the different techniques of flower-painting, see Gill Saunders, Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995. 17. Castilhon and Sivry, “Notice sur Mademoiselle Basseporte, peintre du roi” in Nécrologe des hommes célèbres de France, par une société de gens de lettres, vol. XVI (Paris: Chez Moutard, 1781), p. 159-187, p. 162-163. See also “Mademoiselle Basseporte, peintre”, in the Revue universelle des arts, vol. 13, Paris: Veuve Jules Renouard, 1861, p. 139-147. 18. Nécrologe, op. cit., p. 163-164. 19. Ibid., p. 170. 20. Ibid., p. 168. 21. Ibid., p. 159-160. 22. Lafont, “Basseporte”, in Un abrégé du monde, op. cit., p. 58. 23. Mercure de France, p. 226. 24. Lafont, Introduction, Un abrégé du monde, op. cit., p. 8. 25. Bleichmar, “Learning to Look...”, op. cit., p. 87. 26. The problem of the invisibility of the woman artist, who might be employed for her skill but remained unrecognized for her genius, was faced by women working in a variety of genres, and not just botanical illustration. See, for instance, Melissa Hyde’s discussion of the miniatures produced by the artists working for the Menus-Plaisirs in her article “Women and the Visual Arts in the Age of Marie-Antoinette”, in Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie Antoinette, Eik Kahng ed., New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002. For the exclusion of women from the discourse of creative genius, see in particular the essay by Hyde in this volume and Mary D. Sheriff’s “The Woman-Artist Question,” in Royalists to Romantics, ed. Jordana Pomeroy, Washington, D.C., National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2012. 27. Kelley, op. cit., p. 5. 28. Ibid., p. 93. 29. Léon Bultingaire, “Préface,” n.p. 30. Joseph Philippe François Deleuze, Histoire et description du Muséum de l’histoire naturelle, Paris, Roye, 1823, p. 54. 31. The reattribution was made on the basis of a print identified as a portrait of Rivalz’s wife, showing the same woman in the same pose as appears in the pastel once thought to be of Basseporte. It was listed as by Rivalz at Christie’s Paris sale of Old Master Drawings on April 1, 2011, lot 76. We thank Sarah Vowles for this information. 32. See Melissa Hyde’s article in this volume. We thank Melissa Hyde for her especially illuminating discussion, in private correspondence, of the inventory of Basseporte’s paintings held in the Archives nationales, and listed in Neil Jeffares, “Madeleine-Françoise Basseporte”, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, London, 2006, online edition www.pastellists.com/Articles/ Basseporte.pdf, accessed/update July 13, 2015.
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33. Daston and Galison underscore that the true-to-nature tradition of scientific illustration in which Basseporte, along with other early modern illustrators, worked introduces an element of artifice in the truthful depiction of natural objects, which are not shown exactly as they are seen in nature but in an idealized form that best reveals their essence. While artists (who were often women) had to create these representations, the rational idea of the object was supposed to belong to the scientist, who had to control the artist and keep any flights of fancy in check. 34. Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville and Denis Diderot, “Anatomie de Plantes”, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. eds., University of Chicago, ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, Spring 2013, Robert Morrissey ed, http://encyclopedie.uschicago.edu/, vol. 1, p. 437.
ABSTRACTS
In “Inhabiting Flower Worlds”, Meeker and Szabari examine the production and reception of botanical illustrations by Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (1701-1780). The article presents the relationship between image and artist as a form of visibility-in-invisibility – a chiasmic reversal of the invisibility-in-visibility of plants, long thought to conceal a hidden life. Basseporte’s oeuvre attests both to the marginalization of woman illustrators typical of the period and to the vivacity of a woman artist who achieved relative fame under unfavorable conditions.
Dans cet article, Meeker et Szabari examinent la production et la réception des illustrations botaniques de Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (1701-1780). Elles présentent la relation entre image et artiste comme une forme de visibilité dans l’invisibilité – un renversement en chiasme de l’invisibilité des plantes, dont on a longtemps pensé qu’elles recélaient une vie cachée, en visibilité. L’œuvre de Basseporte atteste à la fois la marginalisation des femmes illustratrices caractéristique de la période et la vivacité de la femme artiste qui a obtenu une certaine gloire dans des conditions défavorables.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Basseporte (Madeleine Françoise), illustration botanique, la vie des plantes, visibilité, femmes artistes Keywords: Basseporte (Madeleine Françoise), botanical illustration, plantlife (theories of), visibility, women artists
AUTHORS
NATANIA MEEKER University of Southern California
ANTÓNIA SZABARI University of Southern California
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“What Do I Know? Who am I?” Self-Portraits and the Literature of Intimacy in the Eighteenth Century”
« Que sais-je ? Qui suis-je ? » Autoportraits et écriture intime au XVIIIe siècle
Catriona Seth Translation : Colin Keaveney
1 A key scene in Letters from a Peruvian Woman shows the heroine, Zilia, newly arrived in France, overcome by emotion upon seeing a young woman dressed as a Sun Virgin for the first time since she was kidnapped from the Temple of the Sun in her native Peru. This miracle is soon explained when it is revealed to her that she is standing in front of a mirror1. She thus comes face to face with her own appearance for the very first time. Her description to Aza of the human figure she glimpsed is, in fact, a self-portrait. Françoise de Graffigny intended this scene as a condemnation of the obsession with appearances and artifice so prevalent among her French contemporaries. We should note what this reveals about interior decoration at the time: the proliferation of mirrors, and the increasing opportunities thus afforded to people to see themselves. The greater ease with which one could now observe one’s own physical appearance seems to have contributed to the spirit of self-examination which underlies the literature of intimacy. There are many other contributing factors; the publication of Rousseau’s Confessions at the end of the century being, of course, the foremost. But, let us not get ahead of ourselves.
2 In order to explore the question of self-reflection in the literature of intimacy, I shall draw on a broad range of memoirs, diaries and autobiographies in an attempt to examine how women portray themselves, consciously and otherwise, and also to explore their relationship with self-portraiture, whether avowed or denied. I will consider a variety of cases: from physical to psychological portrayals, from direct to allusive depictions, and even examples of self-effacement. In the process, I shall suggest a possible typology. And, I will mention a certain number of analogies with painted portraiture along the way.
3 Let me begin by pointing out that for most of the Eighteenth Century introspective writing was not produced with an eye to publication – a man or woman in the Age of Enlightenment would have been astonished by the space taken up by the
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“Autobiography” shelves in certain bookstores today or by the mere existence of the Association pour l’Autobiographie. When texts were intended for publication, they were meant to appear much later, either after the death of their author (as in the case of Marie-Jeanne de Staal-Delaunay), or as part of a self-justificatory or public relations enterprise (as in the case of Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, whose Souvenirs added further weight to a campaign she had been waging for many years by means of her painted self-portraits).
4 Let us take another telling example, that of Mary Robinson, an actress celebrated for her talent, her immense beauty, but above all for her love affair with a very young Prince of Wales. While the caricatures dating from the period of her liaison were often unflattering, portraits that would be repeatedly exhibited or reproduced as engravings attempted to promote a more authentic likeness, as did descriptions of the highlights of Mary Robinson’s career in her autobiographical writings. Thus, the memoirs, unfinished at the time of her death in 1801 – completed and subsequently published by her daughter – aimed to set the record straight and to depict Mary Robinson as a virtuous woman, and a victim of circumstances. Aware of the importance of her image, the author went out of her way to describe herself repeatedly dressed in outfits that were widely imitated in her heyday. At the time when she was a fashionable young woman, Mary Robinson was eager to live in the limelight, to be at the centre of attention, making use of the experience she had gained on the stage. Revisiting her youth through writing, she repeated this tactic, but now the emphasis was how, though absent, she could influence others – a change from the clear and present impact she had wanted to make in her younger days. Here is an example of this: A new face, a young person dressed with peculiar but simple elegance, was sure to attract attention at places of public entertainment. The first time I went to Ranelagh my habit was so singularly plain and Quaker-like that all eyes were fixed upon me. I wore a gown of light brown lustring with close round cuffs (it was then the fashion to wear long ruffles); my hair was without powder, and my head adorned with a plain round cap and a white chip hat, without any ornaments whatever.2
5 This allusion suggests a memory for appearances. It shows that Mary Robinson thought of herself as a fashionable character, and even as someone capable of setting trends. She shaped her identity by means of the attention she got from others. She presents herself as someone to watch, and thus to portray, pushing vanity so far as to shun extravagance in order to be better noticed. The subsequent paragraphs of the same passage – and I could have found many other examples – reinforce this point. The second place of polite entertainment to which Mr. Robinson accompanied me was the Pantheon concert, then the most fashionable assemblage of the gay and the distinguished. At this place it was customary to appear much dressed; large hoops and high feathers were universally worn. My habit was composed of pale pink satin, trimmed with broad sable; my dear mother presented me a suit of rich and valuable point lace, which she had received from my father as a birthday gift, and I was at least some hours employed in decorating my person for this new sphere of fascination: I say some hours, because my shape at that period required some arrangement, owing to the visible increase of my domestic solicitudes. […] I observed two persons, evidently men of fashion speaking to her, till one of them, looking towards me, with an audible voice inquired of the other, “Who is she?” Their fixed stare disconcerted me; I rose, and, leaning on my husband's arm, again mingled in the brilliant circle. The inquiries followed us; stopping several friends,
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as we walked round the circle, and repeatedly demanding of them, “Who is that young lady in the pink dress trimmed with sable?”3
6 Mary Robinson thus created a public persona for herself, one based on a visual identity. These written self-portraits of herself as a young woman were composed when she was prematurely aging and physically diminished. Just as engravings can be used to reproduce a painting, the text can offer the seemingly endless projection of a portrait designed to immortalise a beautiful woman, one who, as it happens, no longer exists. Here the word does the work of the engraver’s tool. Moreover, after being duped by several lovers, Mary Robinson, who had written poems and then novels in order to make a living, was skilled in wielding the instruments of self-promotion. The self- portrait in this case is a form of publicity. Its goal is to rehabilitate an image post- mortem, thus impressing a version of the truth on contemporary minds – as well as on posterity – from beyond the grave.
7 After her heyday as a woman of fashion, Mary Robinson used the artistic medium she had made her own – writing – in order to display herself. Early in the century, a female painter famous for her portraits, wielded both pen and pastel, but to very different ends. She was part of a distinguished tradition of artists who painted themselves, both because they were the cheapest and most available of models, and because a well- executed self-portrait displayed in their studio could serve effectively to advertise their talents and their wares. Such canvasses often included representations of the artist’s trade-painters showed themselves at their easel, surrounded by their students or work4. Rosalba Carriera depicted herself in this manner, holding a portrait she had made of her sister5. We have no equivalent written description in which she refers to her physical appearance. We do, however, have letters and diaries. The latter are mainly concerned with the practicalities of her profession: she records commissions, keeps track of her income, and so on. If we are looking for a portrait in her own words, the best we can do is to try to construe it from some of her personal touches. Just because she includes remedies for earache or rheumatism, we cannot assume that she suffered from either, merely that she was practically minded. Sometimes, she records a little anecdote that reveals a particularly keen sense of observation or, occasionally, of humour. And, might one conclude that she was conscious of her appearance when she mentions lavish outlays for stockings or the purchase of a mirror? Nothing in her words, however, allows us to envision the woman herself as well as her paintings do.
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Rosalba Carriera, Self-portrait holding a portrait of her sister (1715 or 1709, pastel on paper)
8 Rosalba Carriera was exceptional in the eyes of her contemporaries. First of all, there is her unusually high level of professional activity: she was the breadwinner in the household when she lived in Paris with her mother, sister and brother-in-law – himself an artist. Her exceptional talent was recognized by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture which welcomed her and made her a fellow. The last woman before her to have been granted membership – albeit of a qualified sort, “académicienne de circonstance”6 –, Catherine Perrot, inducted in 1682 when she was in her sixties, apparently owed the honour to the fact that she had taught the Regent’s daughter painting, as well as to her husband’s social connections – he was apostolic proto-notary. But, it was Rosalba Carriera’s talent alone that earned her this recognition. The minutes of the Académie reveal that this was not the sign of a new norm, but rather a case that was clearly intended to remain exceptional: when she was made a fellow of the Académie, the decision was “not to constitute a precedent” according to the minutes7. This acknowledgement of artistic ability was accompanied – as would be the case with Germaine de Staël later in the century – by derogatory talk about her looks. Everything suggests that in order to reach a level of which a man could be proud, a woman was forced to abandon (or, from the outset, to be deprived of) her femininity. Dezallier d’Argenville was one of those who stressed the link between Rosalba Carriera’s ugliness and her talent as an artist: instead of being beautiful, she apparently had qualities of the soul and artistic gifts, as well being fortunate (!) that she did not run the risk of attracting lovers8.
9 A second self-portrait speaks for Rosalba Carriera, one which was painted thirty years after the first, and which reflects how much she has aged9. The crown of laurel we can make out on her head of greying hair reminds us that we are looking at an exceptional woman. There is, however, no concession to idealisation of any sort. On the contrary,
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the uncompromising exactitude of the portrait allows us to spot the eye problems which meant the artist would undergo cataract surgery, followed by a temporary improvement in her eyesight, before going blind10. The operation took place in 1744. In this extraordinary portrait from 1745 we can detect a slight deviation to the right in the right eye, a discoloured iris, and decentring of the pupil, all signs of progressive degeneration. There is no attempt made to gloss over or improve the appearance. On the contrary, there is a marked effort to get as close as possible to reality, regardless of what it may show.
10 The artist’s eye was used to scrutinising models. We sometimes find the same merciless attitude in the texts. A case which is exceptional in many respects is that of Victoire Monnard, born in Creil in 1777, the daughter of farmers who spent much of their time living from hand to mouth. She went to Paris and, at the outbreak of the Revolution, was a quasi-illiterate apprentice to a seamstress. She would later learn to read and write. Reading Rousseau made her understand the power of books to open up new worlds and legitimated her own self-narration. Her physical description of herself as a girl is completely free of idealisation: Though I was five foot two, I was nothing to look at and I seemed much older than my age. I was thin and tall, with big fleshy hands and feet. I walked with a nonchalant spring in my step. My appearance was of the sort to which no one pays the slightest attention. I had small, regular features – not bad really –,black hair and brown, expressive eyes with a piercing and somewhat severe gaze. My teeth were small and regularly spaced, but not very white. I had a nice, sweet little mouth. When I talked, I was lively and expressive. What ruined everything I had going for me was a horrible complexion, not so much really brown as yellowish.11
11 This physical portrait – unusual in the memoirs of eighteenth-century women – is tendered to justify an explication given by the author: with a little nest egg and a lot of ingenuity, she opened her first business – neatly wrapped bundles of straw made it look as though she was running a well-stocked store. She explains that suitors came to call. She claims they courted her as they were attracted by her business prospects, not by her looks, which explains her inclusion of the rather unforgiving description of her appearance. It seems to me that the two instances of word portraits, by Mary Robinson on the one hand, and by Victoire Monnard on the other, represent two diametrically opposed approaches, both because one of them is jotting down her memories for herself while the other has propagandistic motives, and also because one considers her physical appearance to have been her stock-in- trade while for the other it was the opposite. I should like to add a further self-portrait, which feigns not to exist, and would seem to indicate how difficult it was for a woman to legitimate self- representation. While in prison, in the shadow of the guillotine, Jeanne-Marie (“Manon”) Roland wrote her Mémoires particuliers (Private Memoirs) for her daughter, Eudora. She describes her (Manon’s) return from the wet nurse as a toddler: No one expects me at this point to describe a little two-year-old brunette, whose dark hair went so well with a bright and lively face, and who was as happy and hearty as any child of her age. There will be a more appropriate time for me to paint my portrait, and I am not so careless as to get ahead of myself.12
12 When other memoir writers and autobiographers mention their body, it is more often than not at moments when it has let them down: in other words, when they are sick. In these cases, we sense that the hesitation in speaking about such things, a reticence instilled by their education, is being set aside as their body takes over, interfering with their normal way of life. I shall offer two cases in point. The first is Adélaïde de
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Castellane, née Rohan-Chabot, an unhappily married woman. Her own mother had died in childbirth. She feared that her second pregnancy would cost her her life: I am with child, and quite weak; the thousands of hardships I have endured in my life have diminished me. I may, therefore, expire while giving birth, and this is why I am writing these notes on the education of my son. If I am unlucky enough to not be able to bring him up myself, I wish at least to put down my ideas so that they can be of use to him.13
13 The reference to her person – in cursory fashion – merely serves to legitimise her putting pen to paper. Adélaïde de Castellane appears to have taken on board that it is not appropriate to speak of oneself; and that a woman has no business writing. She reacted in an exceptional manner to a particular set of circumstances – according to her son, she suffered from “dreadful ill-health”14. In the whole text, she never talks about herself, so to speak. This makes another testimony we have, typical of social activities at the time, even more interesting. It is worth noting that in autobiographical texts there are many portraits. Observing others was encouraged. Both physique and character are commented upon.
14 So, let us take a look at the anonymous portrait we have of Adelaïde de Castellane, who is referred to by the nickname Adéla: The man who sees Adéla for the first time will probably not find her pretty in a conventional way, but if he sees her regularly, if he manages to appeal to her or move her, he will soon prefer her to all those more beautiful than her. He will admire the fine grain and whiteness of her skin, her smallness of foot, her delicate fingers, her expressive eyes and above all her delightful physiognomy, which obeys the movements of her soul so faithfully that the most skilled painter would be incapable of showing it all or even of recording a mere hint of the overall effect. Perhaps he will never even get to experience Adéla’s charming physiognomy.15
15 This example shows that most of the time we are forced to rely on a third party for a portrait of a woman during the Enlightenment. Self-portraits were rare and, when they do exist, they are mostly critical.
16 Let us return to the idea of the body coming to the fore when it is not in its normal state. Françoise-Radegonde Le Noir, a mystic from Limoges, undertook to write about her life and experiences at the behest of her confessor. She refers on several occasions to her failing health, as in this short passage where she talks about her childhood: The chronic poor health I suffered from even when I was still being nursed as a baby, played havoc with my temperament and indicated that my future held constant sickness, or even impending death in store for me. At the age of four or five, I could literally say to misery, like the saintly Job: You are my mother; and to the worms: You are my brothers; for the infection and putrefaction of my body had begotten them in the bed in which I slept.16
17 The nun interpreted her health problems as messages from God. This seemed particularly clear to her, if we go by her account, once she had taken holy orders. Her physical trials are read by her as direct messages from the Lord. So as to render her commitment visible, she mutilated herself, making her body a witness to her faith–a literal martyr. She shaped her own stigmata in order to resemble the Christ of the Passion whom she held to be her Lord. Using a white hot piece of hewn brick, she branded the sacred heart of Jesus over her own heart, the instruments of the Passion on her arms. She did what she could to match her image of Christ or of a being entirely given over to God. Her body had become the communion host, a sacrifice. She wanted to be nothing more than the Lord’s servant. Her physical existence thus became a way
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for her to express her spirituality and was used by her to proclaim a way of being and thinking about herself.
18 Psychological self-portraits occur more frequently than physical ones in female autobiographical texts. Let us return to Victoire Monnard who wrote disparagingly of her looks. I have a strong, determined character, and base my judgments on my feelings and what I see with my own eyes, not on words, but on actions. I consider and decide what I am going to say or do quite swiftly; when I make a promise, I keep it, and I am unswerving in my commitment to my feelings and projects. I am active, dynamic, hard-working, fearless and enterprising in everything I do; the more ambitious the plan, the better it suits my character and mindset. I feel sadness and pleasure keenly. I am not stubborn, but I am firm in my resolutions, and have the character of a man, more than of a woman. I prefer the conversation of men; that of women does not interest me except if it concerns feelings. I am not haughty, but I do have the pride of a peacock, an ardent and positive outlook. This ardent nature has occasionally led me to judgments I have been obliged later to revise; this can also be put down to the fact that I am a little extreme in my ways of feeling and expressing myself.17
19 The assessment seems objective. It includes qualities and faults. And, it contains the author’s surprising statement that she has a character of a man, rather than of a woman. Could this be the flip side of the coin? like Dezallier d’Argenville writing about Rosalba Carriera, Victoire Monnard seems to be indicating that her natural way of being implicitly betrays her ugliness, even if she does not make the latter into a virtue.
20 All the evidence is that these women compared themselves to the contemporary standards of beauty. Manon Roland is a case in point: A broad forehead, with a little fringe at the time, supported by high eye sockets, and in the middle of it a ‘Y’ formed by two veins that swelled at the slightest emotion, meant that its presence was far from being as unremarkable as it is in so many faces. As for the chin, which is quite perky, it has precisely those characteristics that physiognomists associate with voluptuous natures. Insofar as I am concerned, I doubt that anyone so suited to such a passion ever indulged in it less. The brightness, rather than the whiteness, of my complexion, frequently heightened by sudden blushes caused by my blood boiling and my sensitive nerves being excited; soft skin, curvaceous arms, fair hands which are not too small because their long slender fingers reflect their dexterity and make them graceful, sound and regular teeth, and a healthy figure – these are the treasures that nature had bestowed upon me.
21 Beyond normative æsthetic standards, the memoir writer brings scientific – or rather what were taken to be scientific – criteria to bear. She makes use of her unusually extensive education to analyse herself. The self-portrait thus betrays her knowledge. It extends over several lines. Age matters to Jeanne-Marie Roland. We recall that she had described herself as a two year-old while feigning no to do so. Here, she draws vanity, or perhaps consolation, from the discrepancy between appearances and expectations: The charms, which I still retain, conceal, without any effort on my part, five to six of my years; and even people who see me every day need me to remind them of my real age, otherwise they assume I am thirty-two or thirty-three at most.
22 In the case of this cultivated woman, the self-portrait provokes thought, a sort of self- questioning which paradoxically legitimises the various things she has to say about herself:
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It is only since I lost what I had that I have come to appreciate it; I did not know the full value of what I had until I lost it, and perhaps that ignorance made it all the more valuable. Today, I do not miss what I had, because I never misused it; but if duty could accommodate desire in order to make what I still have less futile, I would not be displeased.
23 Character portraits were perhaps more frequent than physical ones because they fulfilled some of the purposes traditionally pursued in the literature of intimacy – like the self-examination which gave rise to Françoise-Radegonde Le Noir’s life narrative. Indeed, self-examination was used in the Protestant tradition, but also occasionally by Catholic confessors, as an instrument to persuade the authors to better themselves or mend their ways. The daughter of a pastor, Suzanne Necker, Germaine de Staël’s mother, imagined an “internal spectator”18, who could be given the task of acting as a critic: From childhood, we should keep a diary so as to train our mind to be our counsellor, and our conscience to be our tutor – two aids we shall need throughout our lives. In this diary, we would study ourselves constantly; we would compare our character with our principles, our religious beliefs with our faults, our sensibilities with our vanity; we would thus attempt to correct our faults using our qualities, and to avoid wrongdoing using our principles. We would apply the fruits of this experience to all sorts of useful objects, and would thus complete a work, which throughout our life would serve as our code of moral, religious, domestic, emotional and civil conduct; which would guide us, in a word, in all of our dealings, be they ones of affection, gratitude, fortune, health, or happiness. This book, to which we would add observations each day, would help to make us better and happier. We would never read it without profit; it would make any other work of morality and conduct superfluous, with the exception of the Gospels.19
24 The daughter of pastor Curchod was obviously influenced by the protestant tradition. The members of reformed denominations, particularly in the English-speaking world, were encouraged to compose conversion narratives. Their preferred reading material was the same as Suzanne Necker’s: the Gospels. It is noteworthy how she turns the cult of appearance into a process of self-inspection and how she channels the worldly energies of the Spectator into a capacity for self-analysis aimed at self-improvement.
25 In the case of Marie-Aimée Steck-Guichelin, a Frenchwoman who had a Swiss husband and spent the second half of her life in Berne, we get self-examinations that offer a real picture of her interior life. She converted to Protestantism when she married, and her Cahiers are probably a reflection not only of her character, but also of a whole social climate. They include remarks such as these: In order always to act well, one must not scrupulously weigh each of one’s actions, but rather strive without respite to purify the source of all action: feelings and thought. It is the inner movements that one must survey with care. It is not exterior acts, but the habits of the soul that make for true virtue. How many times have I found myself harbouring thoughts which, if not criminal, are at least unworthy of the dignity of my Nature! What terrible effects are wrought by such habits of pettiness, superficiality and frivolity, which I fall into without noticing, such careless abandonment to frequently reprehensible thoughts, to incoherent ideas that lead neither to truth, goodness or beauty? When will I manage to train my soul to be constant in its pursuit of all that is noble and useful, to acquire that instinct for goodness and beauty which would cause me to avert my eyes and my thoughts, as if involuntarily, from everything that does not display these two qualities? I feel how necessary it is to be able to command one’s thoughts, forever to channel them towards a worthy end.20
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26 In writing where authors deal with their innermost being, there is a rejection of the stasis of the portrait. While painting focuses, by its very definition, on a single moment that encapsulates, as in the case of Nattier’s portraits, a certain perfection, which seems, at least superficially, immune to corruption or even evolution – in the process smoothing over the details in order to produce an unified ideal –, writing allows them to gauge change, to express regret about it, and to imagine further transformation in the future.
27 One adolescent, who would in her lifetime become the woman who had the most likenesses drawn and painted of her in France – and probably in the world –, Marie- Antoinette, expressed her dismay at the idea of being reduced to one expression consigned to a two-dimensional canvas. Her mother had asked her for a portrait. Proud of her large family and her many children who had survived a variety of diseases which had struck down so many of her contemporaries, she liked having pictures close to hand, much like we carry photos of our loved-ones in our wallets or on our phones. This request of Marie Thérèse also had a political dimension: she wanted a large portrait of her daughter in majestic pose in order to remind her entourage of the success of her matrimonial policy, which remained faithful to the old Habsburgian adage: Tu felix Austria nube. The letters between the Dauphine and the Empress return frequently to this demand for a picture. On 13 August 1773, the young woman complains: “I am being painted at the moment. The painters have certainly not yet managed to catch my appearance. I would willingly give all I own to anyone who could convey in my portrait how overjoyed seeing my dear mama would make me feel.”21 The common idea that appearance is something fleeting and difficult to grasp finds an expression here – the French verb used is “attraper”; in addition, Marie-Antoinette offers a glimpse of a never-to-be realised portrait of her as her mother died before they were able to meet again. Paradoxically, words allowed her to set down something that would never take place, while the brush struggled to capture a satisfactory resemblance.
28 When autobiographical texts offer a set appearance, as though frozen in time, they do so in the manner of the preterit referring to a bygone past. Manon Roland picks out what has changed and what has stayed the same. She conveys her current likeness, both relative to shared norms and to what she no longer is: At fourteen, as now, I was about five feet tall, having already reached my full height. I had good legs, firm feet, well-rounded hips, a broad and gorgeously ample bosom, narrow shoulders, a firm and gracious demeanour, a lightness and fleetness of step – that was the overall picture. My face was in no way exceptional, apart from its great freshness, gentleness and expressivity. If one were to list its features, one might wonder where its beauty lies – none is regular, yet they are all appealing. The mouth is a little big, thousands are prettier, but none has a more tender or seductive smile. The eyes, on the other hand, are not very big, and the iris is brownish grey; however, with their openness, as well as the frankness, liveliness and gentleness of their gaze, which looks out from under well shaped eyebrows of the same brown as the hair, their expression varies in accordance with the affectionate soul which they reflect. Serious and proud, they sometimes surprise, but more often caress, and always stimulate. The nose was an annoyance; I found it a little big at the tip. However, all in all, and above all in profile, it did nothing to spoil the rest.
29 Aware of the changes time had brought, the muse of the Girondins managed to see her younger self again – or rather to see herself in a way in which she could not see herself
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as an adolescent. She was now able to judge with the benefit of hindsight. She made this portrait knowing full well not only that she was no longer as fresh as in her youth, but also, I think, that her death was imminent. (It is worth remembering that prisoners in the Revolutionary gaols had their pictures drawn or painted – Suvée made portraits of Chénier and Roucher, for instance.) In these cases, it was a matter of saving something from the impending abyss. The instinct was that of preserving oneself from total oblivion.
30 The idea of disappearance or erasure seems a useful one to understand further ramifications of the female self-portrait. Indeed, the presence of women of the Eighteenth Century often needs to be sought out as it is hidden in the shadows – we can make it out directly in financial accounts, as in the case of Rosalba Carriera, but also obliquely reflected elsewhere. Let me explain what I mean: the authors of memoirs more often than not give precedence to third-party depictions. As studies of Madame de Genlis among others have shown, one genre enjoyed an unprecedented success at the end of the Enlightenment: the educational diary. Numerous mothers wrote about their children. They only mentioned themselves in passing, when it was absolutely necessary to their depiction of their main protagonist – Adélaïde de Castellane, whom I mentioned above, or Charlotte-Nicole Coquebert de Montbret are good cases in point. They did not obey the rules of traditional memoirs, whose goal was to depict affairs of State about which the author might have some personal insights to offer, but, rather, they placed front and centre an individual in the process of being educated, not yet fully capable of expressing him or herself, a person who was still an infans, in the etymological sense of the term: even if the child had learned to speak, he or she still had growing up to do. In such works, more often than not conceived for a small private audience, the author only appears occasionally, mostly in the shadows or indirectly illuminated by the light emanating from the being who occupies centre stage. The pedagogical function of such works is sometimes clearly expressed, as in this case, where Charlotte-Nicole Coquebert de Montbret writes: I imagine my Cécile aged between twelve and thirteen years of age, reading the notebook which is about her, noticing with interest the remarks I made about her when she was five or six, eager to reach the final page to see what I think of her now. I can see how moved she will be reading all the good things I have to say of her, and her distress if I criticise her. I can look into her heart in advance and read all the resolutions she will make, and if, a few months later, she makes the same mistakes, I will l only have to say: “What about the notebook?” I am sure she will not do a good deed just for it to be written down in the notebook, but if she does something good that she suspects I have failed to observe, and then reads about it in my handwriting, she will experience a warm feeling that is legitimate in addition to the reward that doing good already provides.22
31 In this passage, we learn more about the educator than about her pupil. The fact that it is by proxy confers legitimacy on her self-depiction. She places the maternal role at the heart of female existence as a result of social pressures: denying women access to public freedom of expression and to many professions, leads to them indirectly to consider they are forbidden to think of themselves independently from the family.
32 In a world which cultivated appearances but refused to idolise them, the female self- portrait was always treated with suspicion. It was acceptable only when in the service of something else: a practical goal, as in the case of Rosalba Carriera, who had professional interests to pursue; or an edifying one, as in Françoise-Radegonde Le Noir’s pursuit of self-improvement through the telling of her life. The self-portrait
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could constitute a stage in one’s personal development, as evidenced by the notion of Internal Spectator invented by Suzanne Necker. Indirect or implicit portraits show how it was often easier for a woman to envision herself through a role, particularly that of a mother. Let us leave the last word to Victoire Monnard, a woman who would have been amazed to learn that her memories had been preserved, but who felt herself reborn when she gave birth to her son: It is difficult to put into words what I felt upon seeing my first child. My heart and my eyes strove to uncover what was going on in those of my visitors. I feared they might not sufficiently appreciate the beauty of what I had produced, and I resented them if they failed to show a desire to contemplate him. If they paid him too much attention, holding on to him for too long, I became worried, jealous, and wanted him back close to me, all to myself. The pleasure at seeing myself reborn made me ecstatic for it is in the very nature of women to reach the pinnacle of happiness by reproducing.23
NOTES
1. See Françoise de Graffigny, Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747, 1752), Rotraud von Kulessa ed., Paris, Garnier, 2014, p. 95-96. 2. Mary Darby Robinson, Memoirs of Mary Robinson (1801) , Joseph Fitzgerald Molloy ed., Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1895, p. 63-64. 3. Ibid., p. 64-65. 4. The self-portraits of Vigée-Lebrun or Labille-Guiard, among others, come to mind. 5. Uffizi, inv. 1786, A 189 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalba_Carriera#/media/ File:Rosalba_Carriera_Self-portrait.jpg. See Neil Jeffares, « Carriera, Rosalba », Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800. The online edition, updated November 2013, p. 2-3. 6. Élisabeth Lavezzi, « Catherine Perrot, peintre savant en miniature : les Leçons royales de 1686 et de 1693 », Femme savante. Savoirs des femmes, Colette Nativel ed., Geneva, Droz, 1999, p. 230. This article suggest that Catherine Perrot was perhaps elected to close the gap opened by the overly- talented Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron, who painted in the major genres. 7. “Academies of Art”, in Dictionary of Women Artists, Delia Gaze ed., Chicago, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997, vol. I, p. 46. 8. The reference here is to the introduction to the Abrégé de la vie des peintres les plus fameux (Paris, De Bure, 1762, vol. I, p. 314) by Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville: “Beauty, which is the common lot of women, was missing in Signora Rosa Alba Carriera. This deficiency, if it is indeed one, was well compensated for by the qualities of soul and by the superior talents with which nature had provided her.” A few lines later, we read: “Moreover, love could not divert her from her course; a woman shielded by ugliness is safe from lovers.” 9. This portrait is in the holdings of the Accademia, inv. 873. http://www.wga.hu/support/ viewer/z.html, Rosalba Carriera depicted herself in other works too. See Jeffares, op. cit. 10. Philippe Lanthony, Art and Opthalmology. The Impact of Eye Diseases on Painters, Piribebuy, Paraguay, Wayenborgh publications, 2009, p. 241. 11. Jeanne-Marie Roland, Mémoires particuliers, in C. Seth, La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 507. 12. Ibid.
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13. Adélaïde de Castellane, Notes sur l’éducation de mes enfants, in C. Seth, La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 913. 14. Esprit-Victor-Élisabeth Boniface de Castellane, Journal, published by Ruth-Charlotte-Sophie, comtesse de Beaulaincourt-Marles and by Paul Le Brethon, Paris, Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1895, vol. I, p. 4. 15. See Ibid., p. 909-910. 16. Vie de la vénérable sœur Françoise-Radegonde Le Noir, in C. Seth, La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 274. 17. Victoire Monnard, Souvenirs, in C. Seth, La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 1116. 18. On this notion of the internal spectator, see Dena Goodman, « Le Spectateur intérieur : les journaux de Suzanne Necker », Littérales, L’Invention de l’intimité au siècle des Lumières, Benoît Melançon ed., n° 17, 1995, p. 91-100. 19. Suzanne Necker, Sur un nouveau genre de spectateur in La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 259. 20. Marie-Aimée Steck-Guichelin, Cahiers, in C. Seth, La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 1004-1005. 21. Letter of 31 August 1773 from Marie-Antoinette to Marie-Thérèse, in Marie-Antoinette. Anthologie et dictionnaire, Paris, Robert Laffont, « Bouquins », 2006, p. 31-32. 22. Charlotte-Nicole Coquebert de Montbret, Journal d’Ernest et de Cécile, in C. Seth, La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 857. 23. Victoire Monnard, Souvenirs, in C. Seth, La Fabrique de l’intime, op. cit., p. 1118.
ABSTRACTS
In their life-writing, Enlightenment women (un)consciously depict themselves. This article examines different attitudes on the basis of texts by Mary Robinson, Victoire Monnard, Adélaïde de Castellane, Françoise-Radegonde Le Noir, Jeanne-Marie Roland, Suzanne Necker and Charlotte-Nicole Coquebert de Montbret, as well as of painted self-portraits by Rosalba Carriera and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Dans les écrits du for privé, les femmes des Lumières se représentent consciemment ou non. Cet article examine différentes attitudes en s’appuyant sur les textes de Mary Robinson, Victoire Monnard, Adélaïde de Castellane, Françoise-Radegonde Le Noir, Jeanne-Marie Roland, Suzanne Necker et Charlotte-Nicole Coquebert de Montbret, ainsi que sur les autoportraits peints de Rosalba Carriera et de Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Mémoires, autobiographie, Robinson (Mary), Lebrun (Vigée), Carriera (Rosalba) Keywords: Memoirs, autobiography, Robinson (Mary), Lebrun (Vigée), Carriera (Rosalba)
AUTHORS
CATRIONA SETH Université de Lorraine-Université d’Oxford
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Fragmented and Oblique Autobiographies and Memoirs The Case of Madame de Genlis Autobiographies et mémoires fragmentés et obliques : l’exemple de Mme de Genlis
Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol Translation : Colin Keaveney
1 The context in which fragmented and oblique autobiographies and memoirs were written at the turn of the Eighteenth into the Nineteenth Century is revealing of the status of women writers. One of the ways women could gain entry into the Republic of Letters was by means of the memoir. There was a simple reason for this, one which is true of educational texts in general: the progressive emergence and legitimization of women took place in the minor genres, which touched on the roles and qualities usually assigned to them. Thus, while they were not acknowledged as historiographers – i.e. writing about history in an official capacity – publishers were wont to turn to women to reflect on a world turned upside down by regime change, or engulfed by the Revolution. The Restoration vogue for memoirs, particularly by women, either published singly or as part of collections, is well known; it reveals the strength of publisher and reader demand, which emerged from the expectations of an audience encouraged to engage with these personal accounts. This responsiveness is in play from the start in the choice of a title. Thus, Madame de Caylus’ work, as well as others more recently published, prompted the following retort from Madame de Boigne: “Memories: Madame de Caylus has made this title difficult to bear and recent publications have done much to sully it.”1 The same intertextuality, albeit with opposite effects, lay behind Madame de Genlis’ choice of title for one of her numerous autobiographies; these two contrasting examples of how such works were received (or how they were reportedly received) are revealing of the ethical debate that surrounded female memoirs: In French, we already had two works bearing the title of Memories. The first was the (in every respect) charming volume authored by Madame de Caylus. Everything
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about this work is perfect – the feelings, the narrative style, its grace. […] As for the Memories of Madame Necker, readers judged it in a manner that her supporters may have found severe, but which is merely fair. I even venture to say that, without the reputation this famous woman deservedly enjoys, without the unblemished character of her conduct and life, this pitiful work would have seriously tarnished her image in the minds of all persons of feeling.2
2 Since these were women writing their memoirs, the fundamental ambiguity lay in the particular value given to their views, which stemmed from their ability to conjure up former splendors, in accordance with the role that parallel histories allowed them: they were prized in their capacity as hosts in the world of intellectual salon culture, as guardians of Old Regime3 sociability, and less as witnesses (not to mention historical “actors”) of a period they had lived through but which, out of dutiful discretion, especially in the case of aristocrats, they refused to depict and analyze “historically”. This huge body of texts and the problems it raises has excited a good deal of interest among researchers and the scholarly literature is abundant4. This is why I shall concentrate on Madame de Genlis, whose varied contributions to these interrelated genres seem to me to be exemplary for several reasons.
3 Despite what she says, and particularly because of what she remains silent about, spins, or factually modifies, Madame de Genlis was a political player. Hers is not simply an “I saw” type of account; there is plenty of “I did” in her writings, although the revelations in this regard are full of gaps. Moreover, her longevity and productivity gave rise to parallel bodies of work, literary and memoir, which occasionally intersect and tend to create a fragmentary and oblique picture of her life, hence my title. Born in 1746 and deceased in 1830, she was appointed as “governess” to the children of the House of Orleans. During this period of about eight years (1782-1790), which she conceived of in terms of a mission, she wrote a number of pedagogical works idealizing her methods, such as Adèle et Théodore (a work which would not receive the Montyon prize, given instead to Madame d’Epinay’s Conversations d’Émilie) and Les Veillées du château. Emigration did not put paid to her productivity and, once back in France, she pursued a highly industrious career wielding moral conservatism and didacticism in all literary genres she turned to her ends. Among this highly multifarious production, the texts which contain self-depictions – including those where these depictions are fleeting and would subsequently be reprised in other rather more obviously autobiographical texts – are numerous and varied. Among the non-autobiographical works in which Madame de Genlis portrays herself “obliquely”, in chronological order, there are the educational works of the Pavilion of Bellechasse period (in Paris, where she used to live with her pupils): • 1779-1780 : Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes, 4 vols., Paris, M. Lambert et F.-J. Baudouin. • 1782 : Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation contenant tous les principes relatifs aux trois plans d’éducation des princes, des jeunes personnes et des hommes, 3 vol., Paris, M. Lambert et F.-J. Baudouin. • 1782 : Les Veillées du château ou Cours de morale à l’usage des enfants par l’auteur d’Adèle et Théodore, 4 vols., Paris, M. Lambert et F.-J. Baudouin. • 1785 : Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes, 7 vols., Paris, M. Lambert. • The works of the Revolutionary period, which stemmed directly from a need to make political justifications for the Orleanist movement of which she was a strong supporter, as well as her positioning taking with regard to the political maneuvers of her pupil, Louis Philippe, include:
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• 1791 : Leçons d’une gouvernante à ses élèves ou fragments d’un journal qui a été fait pour l’éducation des enfants de monsieur d’Orléans par madame de Sillery-Brulart (sic), 2 vols., Paris, Onfroy. • 1796 : Précis sur la conduite de Mme de Genlis, depuis la Révolution, suivi d’une lettre à M. de Chartres et de réflexions sur la critique, Hamburg, B.G. Hoffman.5
4 To this group, it is appropriate to add, because of its 1796 date of publication and its content, l’Epître à l’asile que j’aurai, suivie de deux fables, du Chant d’une jeune sauvage, de l’Epître à Henriette Sercey et des réflexions d’un ami des talents et des arts, Hamburg, P.F. Fauche.
5 Finally, the autobiographical period6 stretches from 1804 to 1828, quite openly articulated around the hefty Mémoires inédits of 1825, and includes: • 1804 : Les souvenirs de Félicie L***, Paris, Maradan. • 1807 : Suite des souvenirs de Félicie L***, Paris, Maradan. • 1825 : Mémoires inédits de madame la comtesse de Genlis sur le dix-huitième siècle et la Révolution française depuis 1756 jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, Ladvocat, 10 vols. • 1828 : Le Dernier voyage de Nelgis ou Mémoires d’un vieillard, 2 vols., Paris, Roux.
6 To these already highly diverse works – in terms of their form, intended audience and putative subject – should be added an abundant correspondence, unpublished in Madame de Genlis’ lifetime, which already offers insights into to what we now call “private life” – in particular the love letters, and those written to offspring offering motherly advice. In the order in which they appeared: • Lettres inédites de Mme de Genlis à son fils adoptif Casimir Becker (1801-1830), publiées avec une introduction et des notes, d’après des documents nouveaux, Ed. Henri Lapauze, Paris, Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1902. • L’Idylle d’un « gouverneur ». La comtesse de Genlis et le duc de Chartres [correspondance], Éd. Gaston Maugras, Paris, Plon-Nourrit et Cie., 1904. • Madame de Genlis et la grande duchesse Élisa (1811-1813). Lettres inédites suivies de l’ouvrage sur les « Mœurs de l’ancienne cour », Ed. Paul Marmottan, Paris, E. Paul, 1912. • Le Dernier amoureux de madame de Genlis, Correspondance inédite de la Comtesse de Genlis et du comte Anatole de Montesquiou, Ed. André Castelot, Paris, Grasset, 1954. • The Unpublished Correspondence of Madame de Genlis and Margaret Chinnery and Related Document in the Chinnery Family Papers, Ed. Denise Yim, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2, 2003.
7 This excessively long presentation of the context in which Madame de Genlis was writing is nevertheless necessary in order to differentiate her memoir writing from her oblique autobiographies, both of which took divergent paths to arrive at fragmented and reconstructed images of the private self.
Madame de Genlis’ Conception and Practice of the Memoir7
8 We shall take as our focus the Mémoires of 1825, which, at least in their title and organization, give every appearance of belonging to this genre. As with Baroness d ´Oberkirch, Madame de Boigne and Madame de Chastenay, her memoir does not emerge ex nihilo, but was inspired by previous texts – both literary or non-literary. Generally composed some time after the events it reports – the amount of time varies – the memoir as a genre often drew on correspondence and diaries, two analytical forms
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of writing about the self used by young women and girls. Madame de Genlis was no exception. For long periods of her life, she kept diaries or kept various notes which could serve as memory aids when it came to finally writing her books. The work methods she mentions are closely related to the moral stance and the supposed genesis of the Mémoires. Following a method mentioned in most of her paratexts, Madame de Genlis claims to have read the memoirs of all her contemporaries up until 1812 and to have cross-referenced them with a “personal diary”8 updated each evening over the previous 15 years, a period she had spent in “the very best circles”9. Her approach to history was complex and original: it was not limited to the genre of memoir since Madame de Genlis wrote several historical novels on, among other topics, the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, and she also openly practiced parallel history as evidenced by the following title: Les Chevaliers du cygne, ou la cour de Charlemagne, contes pour servir de suite aux « Veillées du château » et dont tous les traits qui peuvent faire allusion à la Révolution française sont tirés de l’histoire10 ([…] in which Every Feature that can be read as an Allusion to the French Revolution is drawn from History). On the memoir front, she combines an engagement in public political debate, and even political activism, with a discretion pact. Nevertheless, even if her prefaces or opening pages of her autobiographical accounts generally rehash a variation on the theme of retirement, Madame de Genlis makes use of her status to justify publishing during her lifetime: “I felt that it would be repeated that one should not draw attention to oneself, that women should be especially careful to avoid the public glare, etc. etc.”11. It is precisely because she is a woman of letters, a title she lays claim to in 1825, that publishing holds no fears for her: An author who has printed a large number of volumes and, for 50 years has constantly attacked misguided doctrines in other word the philosophists, is only too accustomed to being the center of attention; I am also utterly unaffected by the injustices, satirical writings, broadsides and the fear of being the center of attention.12
9 The preface to tome I and the first four pages of the text itself make clear her position, this time from a moral standpoint. Every author is obliged to stand by their work – that goes without saying –,since it is also understood that it is cowardly to publish criticisms anonymously. […] To leave memoirs behind that one would have been afraid to publish during one’s lifetime is to render their veracity suspect.13
10 She then goes on to explain her motives. She intends to bear witness to history (“the times I lived through, the things which happened before my very eyes14”) to literary affairs (“Firstly, I knew almost all the famous writers in this century and in my youth I was acquainted with those of the previous century”15), to a bygone and forgotten age (“I could paint a faithful portrait of an extinct or fragmented group of people, and of a century that is not only past, but erased from the memory of those who are alive today”16). The apparent contradiction between the traditional self-effacement expected of women, her own character, and this acceptance, not to say downright cultivation, of publicity, is not concealed, as is clear when she gives the following moral justification, which is supported by her actions defined in moral and religious terms, particularly her struggle against the philosophes: At any rate, I considered that my literary life was not devoid of interest, and that it would be intriguing to see how someone so attached to solitude, the quiet life and the arts, and someone so gentle, timid and reserved of character could have resolved to speak so loudly, to play such a public role, and to engage in endless battles.17
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11 Her desire to tell the truth in the face of her enemies (“to clear the record”18), her age (“In one’s seventies, when one has suffered so much, when one is worn down by a long effort”19), the dialogue with God, which should be read as a riposte to the opening of Rousseau’s Confessions20, as well as the factual simplicity of the book’s first line (“I was born on the 25 January 1746 in a small corner of Burgundy”21) bolsters this explanation. Her conception of history is indebted to Bossuet: religion should be the only guide in writing history, as is clearly evident in chapter 15 of tome VIII of the Mémoires, as in her constant criticism of secular histories. This conviction allows her to put forward a strict moral rule: be content to tell things as they were, to point out errors without accusing anyone, but judge rigorously works that are contrary to morality. Truth and criticism must be guided by morality and religion, not resentment. She claims thus to have even praised her enemies in good faith as long as they were “irreproachable in this respect22 ”…
12 Out of the many available, three examples, each of a different type, dealing with criticism, the private realm, and political activity, show how these declarations have real consequences in the 1825 edition of the Mémoires.
13 Regarding the contemporary figures she criticizes, we shall only deal with Madame de Montesson, while setting aside what she has to say about the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, or the Princess de Lamballe. Madame de Genlis had a strained relationship of rivalry with the woman she nicknamed “tantâtre” (the evil step-aunt), whose literary ambitions she ridiculed and talents as an actress she criticized against the prevailing view held by almost everyone in polite society. The topic is so sensitive that Madame de Genlis takes it on immediately after setting out her good intentions. She stresses that she has not told all (“I’m far from having gone into all the details”) and foregrounds her closest family members (“it was impossible for me to sacrifice [the reputation] of my mother and brother”). Her relation with her aunt is depicted as being exemplary; she is only telling the truth: “proving based on facts that Madame de Montesson has never been my benefactor, that she has never once in her life done me the slightest favor, and that she has harmed me a good deal”. At the same time, Madame de Genlis defends her against a false accusation (“I even vindicate her against a particularly libelous accusation believed by many”) and, moreover, praises her in an original way: “I recount a charming aspect of her character that no one else knows about”23.
14 One suspects that, conceived and executed in this spirit, the Mémoires excluded everything that could be considered personal and that anything private was out of bounds. They make no mention, of course, of her affair with the Duke d’Orléans24, or of an adulterous pregnancy disguised by a trip to Forges, and they give a morally acceptable explanation of her adoption of the young English orphans; the same goes for her estrangement from the Duchesse of Orléans25. This disparity between autobiography and biography is even more striking given the fact that contemporary broadsides never spared the governess-mistress and that these different events (affair, suspicious adoptions, rivalry, estrangement ending in de facto separation from the Count de Genlis) were widely known to a public imbued with misogyny and hostility to Madame de Genlis’ moralizing and anti-Enlightenment stance26.
15 Just like the private realm, the role of the political is denied or, at least, played down. The political campaign Madame de Genlis had her pupil lead and the writings of that period (in particular the Discours) confirm her engagement in the cause of change. The facts and the Lettres d’une gouvernante à ses élèves27 echo her commitment and that of her
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pupil to the cause of 1789. Under the Restoration, she had to deny the role of political motives in favor of those of morality and religion, the pillars of the regime: Christian charity (not beneficence…) became the sole explanation for her militancy against hunting, primogeniture and prisons (the Bastille or the iron cage on the Mont Saint- Michel). The Lettre de Silk28 goes even further in confirming her break with the initial political project constructed around Louis-Philippe…
Masks and Oblique Self-Portraits
16 These are precisely the difficulties that gave rise to workaround strategies and hybrid essays like theatrical or narrative self-fiction, or occasionally to even rarer genres combinations. Certain articles in the Dictionnaire critique et raisonné des étiquettes...29 are revealing in this respect. The text is itself problematic and lends itself to number of different interpretations and uses30, even more so because it was reprinted at the end of Tome X of the Mémoires31(1825). To take just one example: the article “Governess of Children of Princes” commences with a definition and concludes with a thinly disguised self-portrait, which refers of course to Madame de Genlis, but also to all the texts, fictional or not, depicting her: It is clear that only once has a single person, charged with the education of the princes of the blood, carried out all the duties of a tutor, given five to six hours of lessons herself, supervised the other lessons and, in addition, selected all the readings. This person accomplished something really extraordinary because there was no example to follow, but she never overdid anything; this is the duty of any governess of princes or private individuals.32
17 These idealized figures of “governess”, mother and educator are to be found throughout the theatrical works where they must have stood out very sharply for the audiences of these plays, which physically depicted Madame de Genlis surrounded by her children and her pupils. The oblique portrait could take two distinct forms: one where there is a double in the text (as in La Bonne mère33, a comedy typical of this approach which we also find in the pedagogical novels of Madame de Genlis) or where there is a transposition whose rules are explained in the peritexts. Thus, the biblical play Ruth et Noémie in tome I of the religious plays in the 1785 edition includes, between the list of the dramatis personae and the notice which deals mainly with sources and their treatment by Madame de Genlis, a preface to Pamela, her adopted daughter, in which its “applications” are explained. Madame de Genlis had read the story of Ruth to Pamela, who was taken by it and asked her adoptive mother to write a play on the topic, a play which is not only dedicated, but addressed to her (in the full meaning of that word). The reader is thus tempted to imagine all sorts of parallels: No one is better placed than you to judge if I have faithfully represented the gratitude and attachment that the tender care of an adoptive mother should inspire. If you find that Ruth, when she speaks to Noémie, expresses what you feel, I will be satisfied with what I have written.
18 Similarly, several memories that would later be published in the Mémoires had already been depicted in the theater. A case in point is the metamorphosis of the little girl (the future Madame de Genlis) into a Parisian in order to go to a ball34: dressed up as the type of shepherdess one saw in the city, decked out with an enormous hairdo, a wig, squeezed into a “corset”, with a hoop and a garlanded dress, she was unable to dance and was utterly bored at a ball she had so been looking forward to. The
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autobiographical details were first given a humorous, yet instructive, treatment by the heroine of La Colombe, one of the plays included in Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes35. Similarly, Madame de Genlis also uses on several occasions her participation in Rosière de Salency ceremonies. To recall, in 1766, Le Pelletier de Morfontaine, intendant in Soissons, attended the Salency ceremony and the inhabitants requested via the bailiff that he crown the rosière (rose queen). He added forty écus to the prize after his death to the dowry of the rose queen for one year after their crowning. Thus began a long line of personalities who would lend their moral, political and artistic support to the event. Accompanied by the Marquise de Genlis, the Count and Countess de Genlis, Le Pelletier de Morfontaine gave a huge ball in a refitted barn, where the men wrote couplets (some of which were published, notably in Le Mercure). Madame de Genlis handed out presents, played the harp and sang. This phase of moral and political utopianism in the Feast of the Rosière is recounted in the Mémoires36, as is Madame de Genlis’ support for the townspeople of Salency when they defended their right to name the rose queen. In addition to the Plaidoyer en faveur de la rosière, pour les syndic (sic) et habitants du village de Salency, contre le Sieur Danré, seigneur dudit Salency37 by Maître Target, we also find a report to the prior of Salency written by Madame de Genlis, which is also mentioned in the Mémoires.38 This first visit to Salency inspired the play La Rosière de Salency published in tome V of the Théâtre d’éducation, aimed “at the children of merchants and artisans”, published in 1779. The comedy, conceived as a dramatized account as given by a female merchant form Noyon, was preceded by a notice in which Madame de Genlis mentions Target while omitting any reference to his part in the polemic39 and avoiding any mention of herself. On the other hand, in L’Aveugle de Spa40, which is part of the literary vein dedicated to virtuous anecdotes in which the second half of the Eighteenth Century abounds, she makes clear reference to herself in the opening notice to the reader: The subject of this play is not an invention; three years ago in Spa, we saw this virtuous woman, Madame Aglebert, and we got this story from the poor blind woman herself. All the details about Madame Aglebert in this play are strictly true; we have changed nothing, not even her name, those of her children, how many they are and her husband’s profession. It is also true that an English lady, who was in Spa at the time, did much to help this respectable family.
19 These idealized doubles are at the center of Madame de Genlis’ pedagogical novels, notably Adèle et Théodore and Les Veillées du château which take place in family and educational settings where the focus is on mothers: Madame d’Almane in the first (even if the character of Mr. d’Almane, in charge of instructing his son, allows for the outlining of certain gendered aspects of childhood education) and Madame de Clémire in the second. The reflexivity becomes even more complex: the children read the works of Madame de Genlis, in which the fictional mothers are actually the authors of the books that are later brought by traveling salesmen to the castle; the pedagogical décor of the d’Almane’s chateau was inspired by Bellechasse, notably the historical vignettes by the painter Sylvestre-David Myris; and a whole apparatus of footnotes underpins the system of reference, just in case the reader might have had any doubts that the experiment really had taken place... And, finally, an onomastic play on the names of the children tops off the referential framework: Adèle is Adélaïde d’Orléans, who was nicknamed Adèle by Madame de Genlis; César the son of Madame de Clémire is a reference to César Ducrest, Madame de Genlis’ nephew, whose sisters in the novel are called Caroline and Pulchérie like the real daughters of Madame de Genlis…
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20 Even if they allowed her to present educational projects founded on real and verifiable experience, this play on names did not permit Madame de Genlis to speak of her own memories. Before the weighty memoir of 1825, her memories were committed to print in two works, Les souvenirs de Félicie L*** and la Suite des souvenirs de Félicie L***, in 1804 and 1807 respectively41. The peritexts reveal the poetic, generic and editorial choices of Madame de Genlis. The dedication “For Mr. Ducrest” refers to her brother and justifies the absence of any personal secrets: “You will not find those [memories] in this collection, as they could be of interest only to us and I had no need to write them in order to remember.”42
21 The preface explains her reasons for publishing: it was a matter of gathering memories spread out over thirty volumes of the Bibliothèque des Romans and preventing counterfeit editions. All the while following the lead of Madame de Caylus and Madame Necker, whose book she criticizes even though she herself “received favorable and flattering mention”43 in it, Madame de Genlis’ intention is to reassert certain truths and she takes the opportunity to set out her principles: My personal feelings of resentment will never prompt me to be unfair, even in my first reactions […] I do not wish to take credit for this moderation; mere good taste would have been enough to dictate it. The virtue and exceptional merit of Madame Necker temper any criticism one might have with the respect she deserves.44
22 The extremely loose structure of the text allows for the inclusion of recollections or anecdotes about Lekain, Cardinal Richelieu’s testament, Madame de Sainval, among others, including Madame Louise in Saint-Denis; but also for a few witticisms or comments on a range of topics such as questions of style or the theatrical figure of the valet. These Souvenirs even include other texts by Madame de Genlis, which are inserted, a tactic used in the later tomes of the Mémoires (1825), which resemble miscellanea, and in Le Dernier voyage de Nelgis ou Mémoires d’un vieillard (1828). Beyond the so-called memoirs, Les souvenirs de Félicie L*** includes a short story, Gustave, a Journal du voyage d’Italie satirical in tone, a Dialogue entre un académicien et un jeune voyageur (which is also included in tome IX of the 1825 edition of the Mémoires) a tale built around a character named Théophile (“Yesterday, at supper, I heard a someone tell a fine tale. Here it is”45) and a variety of texts against such fashions as Anglomania, sentimentality and affectation. The common thrust of the anecdotes, the textual interpolations and the views expounded, suggest that behind Félicie L*** lurks its author, who furthermore plays around with disguises, a move aimed at readers familiar with her life and work. This is announced from the outset in the Préface, where Madame de Genlis declares she was “encouraged to publish a portion of [her] diaries under the assumed name Félicia L***46”. The Avertissement de l’éditeur des Œuvres posthumes de madame de L*** continues in this playful vein, declaring : Madame de L*** had lived in high society from a very young age: she was spirited, curious, simple and gay. She rarely speaks of herself in her memoirs. However, her character is reflected in her way of seeing, of telling, and of writing. This superficial and frivolous work is meant neither for thinkers nor philosophers, but will perhaps appeal to those who appreciate simplicity and variety.47
23 Félicité, the narrative voice of these Souvenirs, pretends to have no intellectual abilities, but reminds us that she learned to play an instrument at a young age, something she has in common with the future Madame de Genlis. She recounts at length her visit with Voltaire at Ferney48, which is identical to the account in the Mémoires49 (arriving too early, her towering hairstyle, the impiety of the author, the painter Ott accompanying
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him, the presence of Marie Françoise Corneille). Similarly, the meeting with Jean- Jacques Rousseau and the error of Madame de Genlis (who thought she was talking with Préville disguised as Rousseau, and who thus indulged in all sorts of banter) appear in the Souvenirs50 and the Mémoires51. A single memory thus supplies several texts. The description of the cemetery in Zug, visited during her period of emigration, is a clear example of this type of multiple use: included in Les Souvenirs de Félicie L***52, it is reused in the Mémoires53, but also as early as 1805 in Les Monuments religieux, ou Description critique et détaillée des monuments religieux, tableaux et statues [...] églises [...] tombeaux et monastères [...] qui se trouvent maintenant en Europe et dans les autres parties du monde54… This flow from one work to another, whether autobiographical in content or not, was a constant, even a systematic trait, as suggested by the following statement from the Souvenirs: “If ever I become an author, I shall write a work on mythology55”; she actually went on to publish such a work in 1810 with the title Arabesques mythologiques ou Les Attributs de toutes les divinités de la fables en 54 planches gravées d’après les dessins coloriés de Mme de Genlis56.
24 Le Dernier voyage de Nelgis ou Mémoires d’un vieillard57, published three years after the Mémoires in 1828, returns to these games of masks with the anagram in its title, of course, but also by its use of an eighty-year-old narrator, the Count de Nelgis, born in Champcéry, who moved to Cosnes at 18 months and Saint-Aubin at four; a traveler, a courtier, an emigrant…Several identity markers are deployed to create a slight distancing of Nelgis from Genlis, between this work and her Mémoires, while encouraging the reader to still identify the two together. This is also the function of the engraving preceding the title page which portrays the chateau of Saint-Aubin, of the dedicatory epistle addressed to the Marquis d’Aligre and, more generally, of the important episodes of his travels, which are just so many memories and occasions to make moral points.58 Indeed, the memories attributed to Nelgis are in fact Madame de Genlis’ and had already been recounted ‒ at least in the case of the most striking among them ‒ in the Mémoires, which serves as intertext for this final self-fictionalizing text. A case in point is the scene where the future Madame de Genlis carries out her teaching vocation from up on the terrace of the family chateau: Between the house and the pond ran a little path covered in rushes and reeds, and it was on this path that a few bargemen’s children received the lessons, the young canoness, daughter of the deceased lord of the manor, gave to them from high up on the top of the wall.59
25 Not only was the anecdote known and published but, as she does throughout the Dernier voyage de Nelgis, she includes a note referring to the Mémoires of 1825 60. The notes thus intensify the parallels between Nelgis and Genlis, as in this one inserted on the topic of “the little town of Bourbon-Lancy, […] located two leagues from Saint- Aubain, and where her father was the local lord”: The author of this work, received as a child, at age six, into the noble chapter of Alin, close to Lyon, as a canoness, bore the name of Countess de Lancy from that moment until her marriage, at which time, aged sixteen-and-a-half, she married the Count Brûlart de Genlis.61
26 Notes are also used to mention Madame de Genlis’ projects, like the one which compares Doctor Pinot favorably to Tronchin in the treatment of smallpox: “I have not forgotten this marvelous remedy and I shall talk about it in detail in a new edition of the Veillées de la chaumière62”…
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27 Overall, the ideas professed by Nelgis, in the text and footnotes, on religion, mythology, Protestantism, and the disasters of the Revolution, lend themselves to a convergent reading in these years when Madame de Genlis was repeating herself from one text to another. Morality sometimes changes the complexion of the anecdotes and gives to these works differing tones. Thus, Nelgis meets an old beggar who reminds him of the role he played in his family theater production during his youth: he was Pleasure, while Nelgis (in reality the young Félicité) was Love. The private parties organized by the mother of the future Madame de Genlis, the costume of Love worn by the little girl that she is so taken by that she didn’t want to take it off are all dealt with at length in the Mémoires63, which celebrate aristocratic sociability. Any reader familiar with this text can spot the reference to an authentic memory. Divorced from this context, reduced to the pitiful memory of an old man reduced to begging out of laziness, this encounter functions as a moral commentary on the Marquis d’Aligre’s policies with regard to indigence: the events told in chapter XV64, entitled “A Touching Conversation- Encounter”, are followed by a chapter entitled “Reflections on Sloth”…
28 Female memoirs play off the complex status of personal testimony. In theory the products of a private conscience and aimed at the writing of private life, these writings are involved in a double intertextuality: with historians and with their immediate contemporaries with which they have resonance. The multifarious works of Mme de Genlis are a fascinating example of the tensions running between memoirs, remembrances, portraits and anecdotes that are there hidden under the surface of these hybrid texts. Her Mémoires of 1825 are highly instructive, but not as a dependable eye-witness account, as certain biographers of Madame de Genlis inclined to literalism have thought. Less an image of the aristocracy of the Ancien Regime (à la the brothers Goncourt), they are instead the difficult, nay impossible account, of the life of a woman at the end of the Enlightenment, as she was caught up in the upheavals of successive political regimes and irreconcilable positions. Above all, they make up a monumental work toward which converge a number of early texts and fragments of various types, in which the author is not above indulging in self-portraiture by means of oblique, onomastic, narrative and ideological references, conceived of as a treasure hunt for the regular reader, who becomes in the process an interlocutor.
NOTES
1. Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d’Osmond, récits d’une tante. Edition presented et annotated by Jean-Claude Berchet, Paris, Mercure de France, 1971, t. I, p. 21. 2. Les souvenirs de Félicie L***, Paris, Maradan, 1804, Préface, p. 5-6. Note: In the interest of clarity and consistency, we have opted to make our own translations of all quotations. 3. To mention just two books among many : L’Esprit de société : cercles et salons parisiens au XVIIIe siècle [texts selected, introduced, presented and annotated ; bibliography and index], Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h, prefaced by Marc Fumaroli, Paris, Garnier, 2000 and Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des salons : sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Fayard, 2005.
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4. For instance, Henri Rossi, Mémoires aristocratiques féminins: 1789-1848, Paris, H. Champion, 1998; Mémorialistes de l’exil : émigrer, écrire, survivre, François Jacob and Henri Rossi eds., Paris, Budapest, Torino, L’Harmattan, 2003; Repenser la Restauration, Conference Proceedings, Paris, Musée de la vie romantique et Châtenay-Malabry, Maison de Chateaubriand, septembre 2003, Jean-Yves Mollier, Martine Reid et Jean-Claude Yon eds., Paris, Nouveau monde, 2005; Le Moi, l’histoire, 1789-1848, texts collected by Damien Zanone in collaboration with Chantal Massol, Grenoble, ELLUG, 2005; Damien Zanone, Écrire son temps, Les Mémoires en France de 1815 à 1848, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2007. 5. Republished in 1828 under the title Étrennes politiques pour 1828. Lettre au duc d’Orléans par Mme la comtesse de Genlis, son institutrice, ou Profession de foi politique en harmonie avec ses actions depuis plus de trente ans en réponse aux pamphlets passés, présents et futurs, Paris, E. Babeuf. 6. We are purposely overlooking Madame de Genlis’ editorial involvement in Mémoires de Mme la Mise de Bonchamps, rédigés par Mme la Ctesse de Genlis, Paris, Baudoin frères, 1823. 7. Some of the passages in this section dealing with Madame de Genlis’ 1825 Mémoires are taken from my article “Les Mémoires de Madame de Genlis: apprentissage et reconstruction de l’Histoire”, séminaire de l’Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, CNRS, ENS, Histoires d’historiennes, Études réunies et présentées par Nicole Pellegrin, Publication of l’Université de Saint- Étienne, Saint-Étienne, 2006, p. 177-187. 8. A note by Madame de Genlis says that this source text has been lost, which is plausible given the large number of preparatory documents and the political situation. Mémoires inédits de madame la comtesse de Genlis sur le dix-huitième siècle et la Révolution française depuis 1756 jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, Ladvocat, tome I, p. 1 (note 1 p. 1-3). 9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Paris, Lemierre, 1795. A second edition was published the same year by P.F. Fauche in Hamburg. 11. Mémoires inédits..., op. cit., tome I, p. vii. 12. Ibid., p. vii-viii. 13. Ibid., p. iii. 14. Ibid., p. 1. 15. Ibid., p. 2-3. 16. Ibid., p. 3. 17. Ibid., p. 3-4. 18. Ibid., p. 2. 19. Ibid., p. 4. 20. Ibid., p. 5. 21. Ibid., p. 6. 22. Ibid., p. v. 23. Ibid., p. v-vii. 24. See among others J. Harmand, Madame de Genlis, sa vie intime et politique, 1746-1830, Paris, Perrin, 1912 and G. de Broglie, Madame de Genlis, Paris, Perrin, 1985. J. Harmand (see above) has published various letters intercepted by the “black chamber” (mail censor) between 1771 à 1774. 25. Her fraught relationship with the Duchess d’Orléans was blamed on maternal jealousy. 26. On this topic, see my article, « Aimer ou haïr Madame de Genlis », Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, Portraits de femmes, Roland Mortier et Hervé Hasquin eds., (Groupe d’étude du XVIIIe siècle), Bruxelles, éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2000, p. 89-98. 27. Lettres d’une gouvernante à ses élèves ou fragments d’un journal qui a été fait pour l’éducation de Monsieur d’Orléans par madame de Sillery-Brulart (sic), Paris, Onfroy, 1791. 28. Lettre de Mme de Genlis à M. de Chartres, à Silk, pays de Holstein, 18 février 1796. 29. Dictionnaire critique et raisonné des étiquettes de la Cour, des usages du monde, des amusements, des modes, des mœurs, etc. des Français, depuis la mort de Louis XIII jusqu’à nos jours; contenant le tableau de
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la Cour, de la société et de la littérature du XVIIIe siècle ou l’Esprit des étiquettes et des usages anciens comparés aux modernes, 2 vols., Paris, P. Mongié, 1818. 30. See among others, Fabrice Preyat, “Apologétique féminine”, in Dictionnaire des femmes des Lumières, V. André, H. Krief eds., Paris, Champion, 2015. 31. This insertion between page 241 and 400 creates a mirroring effect between the memoir and the article which goes beyond the scope of this paper, but which we intend to explore elsewhere. 32. Dictionnaire critique et raisonné, op. cit., p. 249-250. 33. Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes, tome 1, Paris, Lambert, 1780. 34. Mémoires, 1825, tome I, p. 12-13. 35. La Colombe, Scene 3, eome II in both editions of Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes. 36. Tome I, p. 246-250. 37. Paris, impr. de Knapen, 1774. 38. Tome I, p. 250-251. 39. Regarding the Feast of the Rosière, see my article in Dictionnaire des femmes des Lumières, op. cit., tome 1, p. 479-483. 40. Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes, Paris, Lambert, 1785, tome III. 41. Both published in Paris by Maradan. I shall focus on the first. 42. Les souvenirs de Félicie L***, Paris, Maradan, 1804, p. 3. 43. Ibid., p. 6. 44. Ibid., p. 8. 45. Ibid., p. 264-281. 46. Ibid., p. 7. 47. Ibid., p. 10. 48. Ibid., p. 197-216. 49. Mémoires, tome II, p. 320 sq. 50. Les Souvenirs, p. 290 sq. 51. Mémoires, tome II, p. 1 sq. 52. Les Souvenirs, p. 216 sq. 53. Mémoires, tome IX, p. 152 sq. 54. Paris, Maradan, 1805, p. 138 sq. 55. Les Souvenirs de Félicie L***, p. 53. 56. The complete title is Arabesques mythologiques ou Les Attributs de toutes les divinités de la fable en 54 planches gravées d’après les dessins coloriés de Mme de Genlis. Le texte contenant l’histoire des faux dieux, de leur culte, le détail des cérémonies religieuses, etc. précédé d’un discours sur la mythologie en général et particulièrement sur l’influence que dut avoir le paganisme sur le caractère, les mœurs et la littérature des anciens Grecs et des Romains, 2 vols., Paris, Charles Barrois, 1810. 57. Le Dernier voyage de Nelgis ou Mémoires d’un vieillard, 2 vol., Paris, Roux, 1828. 58. This work, like Les souvenirs de Félicie L***, is made up of a series of texts integrated in a variety of ways, including short stories such as: Une Femme seule (already published in Le Petit portefeuille des dames, 1826, tome I, Paris : [editor missing], p. 10 sq., and Tout sentiment, p. 106 sq. ; but also tales told by a protagonist like the story of Carillon the dog, p. 35 sq as told by the Marquis d’Aligre; or that of Séraphie as told by Bléval, p. 59 sq.; the story of the d’Aligre family read by Bléval p. 89 sq.). 59. Ibid., tome I, p. 30. 60. See the Mémoires quoted above, Ibid., tome I, p. 30, note 2. There is also this formula: “See the author’s memoirs where this matter is recounted in detail”, Ibid., p. 27. 61. Ibid., p. 4. 62. Ibid., p. 73, note 1. 63. Mémoires, tome I, p. 36 sq. 64. Le Dernier voyage de Nelgis, p. 153 sq.
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ABSTRACTS
Female memoirs play off the complex status of personal testimony. The multifarious works of Mme de Genlis are a fascinating example of the tensions running between didactic texts, memoirs, remembrances, portraits and anecdotes that are there hidden under the surface of these hybrid texts. Above all, they make up a monumental work toward which converge a number of early texts and fragments of various types.
Les mémoires féminins s’appuient sur un statut complexe du témoignage. L’œuvre polygraphe de Mme de Genlis constitue un exemple passionnant de ces tensions entre textes didactiques, textes mémoriels, souvenirs, portrait et anecdotes qu’esquissent à la dérobée des textes hybrides. Et surtout, ils constituent un massif vers lequel convergent nombre de textes ou de parties de textes antérieurs, de nature très variée.
INDEX
Keywords: autobiographies, Genlis (Mme de), memoirs, witness, women writers Mots-clés: autobiographies, Genlis (Mme de), mémoires, femme écrivain, témoignage
AUTHORS
MARIE-EMMANUELLE PLAGNOL Université Paris-Est Créteil
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« Peinte par elle-même? » Women artists, teachers and students from Anguissola to Haudebourt- Lescot « Peinte par elle-même ? » Femmes artistes, professeurs et élèves, d’Anguissola à Haudebourt-Lescot
Melissa Hyde
I.
1 Wandering1 through the Salon of 1827, a naïve Scotsman comes upon a self-portrait by Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot (possibly her self-portrait of 1825, now in the Louvre)2. Upon being told that it is a portrait of her “peinte par elle-même”, the Scotsman exclaims to his French companion: “En vérité; quoi! c’est de la peinture de femme? Quelle fermeté de ton et de pinceau!” The Frenchman replies: “C’est une femme d’un talent véritable, et qui cette année semble avoir encore fait des progrès.”3
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Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Autoportrait, v. 1825
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
2 This imaginary conversation comes from a chapter in Augustin Jal’s critical commentary on the famous Salon of 1827. The conversational form and the device of the naïve outsider that he adopts in his little sketch, are a love-letter to eighteenth- century Salon criticism4. Perhaps also taking a cue from certain enlightened men of the eighteenth century, Jal himself – who plays the enlightened man in the conversation – takes “la peinture de femme” seriously. This was a surprisingly progressive position for a notoriously truculent art critic writing in 1827, a time when the degree of cultural acceptance, the professional gains and visibility achieved by women artists at the end of the Ancien Régime and during the Revolution were being eroded, even though female artists were regarded as a major presence in the art scene at this time5. That said, at a later point in the text, Jal nevertheless expresses his own wonderment at the existence of such a talented (read: exceptional) woman artist6.
3 In this respect Jal fell into line with a long history of cultural attitudes towards women artists that ranged from patronizing amazement to skepticism, ridicule, and outright hostility. According to Jal, Haudebourt-Lescot, like many successful women before her, had long endured the skepticism of critics who cast doubt on the authorship of her works, preferring instead to attribute them to her teacher, Guillaume Guillon Léthiere7. Thus when Jal characterized Haudebourt-Lescot’s self-portrait as “peinte par elle- même,” he made a statement that cut two ways: he was reminding readers of the rumors about her work, even as he was refuting them. The allegation that they did not paint their own works suggests one basic reason (among many) that women painted portraits of themselves as artists8.
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4 To this day, the authorship of one of the first, and still most compelling, essays in self- portraiture (by man or woman) of the early modern period continues to be contested. I refer to Sofonisba Anguissola’s 1558-1559 painting, in which she depicted her teacher Bernardino Campi painting her portrait.
Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-portrait with Bernardino Campi
Oil on canvas, 1110 x 1095mm (43 3/4 x 43 1/8"). Pinacoteca Nazionale, Sienna, 1550. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
5 Besides the long-standing tendency to ascribe works of women artists to their male teachers, doubts about whether Anguissola had a hand in making this picture hinge on its central conceit: that it is Campi’s self-portrait. The consensus now seems to be, following Giovanni Morelli who first made the identification in 1890, that the painting is in fact by Anguissola.9 As such it falls into a category I call the “self-portrait of another;” by which I mean a painting that does not look like a self-portrait, but is.10 Other examples of this and its corollary, the portrait that looks like a self-portrait, but is not, will figure in the present essay, along with examples of more or less conventional self-portraits by eighteenth-century women artists. My aim is to consider what such portraits can tell us about women artists, their self-representation, and their relationships to their teachers. These teacher/student relationships do not usually involve the Oedipal dramas we have come to expect in narratives of filiation relating to male artists and their male students, but are no less complex, and in many cases are fraught with their own tensions and conflicts11.
6 One trope that historically recurs in discussions of women artists and their male teachers is that the student is the creation of the master. This is exactly how one of Anguissola’s contemporaries referred to her in a letter to Campi. In casting her as “the creation” of her master, the letter essentially attributed her abilities to Campi12. At first
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glance, Anguissola’s painting would seem to confirm this idea – thereby respecting the double hierarchy of gender and of the student/teacher relation. But, as numerous scholars have pointed out, a second look reveals a more complicated picture13. In the painting’s current state, Anguissola made the apparently deferential move of presenting herself as a figure of Campi’s making. But what Campi is shown painting is in reality Anguissola’s self-portrait, and of course, she is also the actual author of his image, here, as well as of her own. This kind of visual play is entirely in keeping with the Mannerist taste for riddles and teasing the viewer.
7 But let us consider for a moment how she presents herself: she appears as a slightly aloof, beautiful and beautifully dressed young woman, gloves in hand like an aristocrat. Just how beautifully dressed she originally was, can now be seen thanks to the recent restoration of the portrait, which uncovered an elegant red brocade gown beneath the far more austere black one, which so closely echoes Campi’s. Posed impassively, Anguissola downplays her own identity/practice as an artist, as Campi is shown putting the finishing touches on the gown. But if Anguissola presents herself as modest, demure, deferential, her self-portrait-cum-portrait is also illuminated and central, her figure dominates the composition. So there is a tension here between Campi’s image of Anguissola and the visual complexity of the overall painting as it signals the sophistication and complicity of her thinking. The tableau itself playfully subverts the proprieties by the very fact of her being its true author. As such, it engages in a kind of resistance to norms of femininity that (in a different context) have been usefully termed “a delicate kind of revolt”14.
8 The image becomes that much more intriguing when we consider what else the restoration uncovered: originally, Anguissola positioned her left-hand differently: not holding gloves, but touching Campi’s hand in a way that suggests her hand is guiding his, or is at least working in conjunction with it15. Whatever her reasons for changing the composition, it would seem that at some point in the process, Anguissola thought of presenting herself more actively as an artist and less as Campi’s “creation.” Thus, in the story behind this painting there is quite literally more than meets the eye. While that may in some sense be true of all pictures, I want to suggest that it is especially so for the work of women artists, because typically we know so little about the work, and often, even less about their authors. How many of them might also have considered a less delicate kind of revolt in their self-presentations and then thought better of it?
9 Haudebourt-Lescot’s self-presentation suggests she did not have to. Neither young nor beautiful, she was the first woman to adopt the male artist’s beret, and modeled herself directly on her artistic fore-fathers. Whichever self-portrait she exhibited at the Salon of 1827, it was well-received by the critics, as was the other portrait she showed that year: the two flanked François Gérard’s famous St Thérèse (Infirmirie Marie-Thérèse, Paris). This was a portrait of her mother (untraced), a move that suggests a definition of self not in terms of conventional ideals of femininity or the artist/father – or not only in terms of that, but also in terms of the mother. Haudebourt-Lescot’s highly public gesture raises questions about the possibilities of a “mother/daughter plot” when it comes to narratives of filiation16.
10 I have begun by highlighting Anguissola and Haudebourt-Lescot, not to suggest that there was a European tradition of female self-portraiture, for there was not – not in the sense of a conscious understanding of what had gone before, and certainly not in France until the end of the eighteenth century. Rather, I am interested in how these
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very different self-portraits speak to issues of artistic identity, authorship and filiation that consistently circulated around women artists well into the nineteenth century. The Anguissola painting offers an example of the importance of the artist/father; and how, from the first, women artists worked within cultural conventions of femininity, while also subverting them, often in subtle and sophisticated ways. Haudebourt-Lescot not only offers a quite different sense of the horizon of possibilities by the early nineteenth century, but reminds us that women artists had mothers and often were mothers themselves, sometimes symbolically (as progenitors of other artists) rather than biologically. How the mother – a figure too often overlooked in the history of women artists – factored into women’s self-representations (or did not) is of interest to me in this essay, and I will be returning to it at the end of this essay, though I will not be able to do the subject full justice here17.
II.
11 There are many images of French women artists dating from the eighteenth century – and it is often difficult to tell whether or not they are portraits “peints par elle même”. One of the most superb instances of that is an unattributed portrait of an unidentified woman artist in the Art Institute of Chicago18. It depicts a woman seated before an easel, with palette, brushes, and a piece of paper (a small sketch? a letter?) in one hand. The other hand rests lightly on the arm of her chair as she turns away from her canvas to look off to her right, beyond the frame of the picture. Though beautifully dressed in a splendid blue-green brocade robe volante, this woman who, like Haudebourt-Lescot, is neither especially pretty nor particularly young, is frankly portrayed without affectation or cosmetic enhancements. Her demeanor, pensive gaze and the hint of a smile playing at her lips, suggest a keen and lively intelligence. The countenance of this sitter, with her heavily lidded and slightly protruding eyes, cleft chin and rounded cheeks, has a specificity and individuality to it, and her expression conveys a sense of interiority. These aspects of the portrait, combined with the prominence of the palette, brushes in the sitter’s hand and the canvas behind her, make it a portrayal of an artist who is a woman, more than a woman who is an artist. Together these qualities suggest that what we are presented with here is the candid likeness of a person, an actual woman, and almost certainly not an allegory of painting19. Yet there are peculiarities in the picture that make it seem to be about more than capturing a likeness or personality of a particular artist and that beg for explanation.
12 First and foremost is the unusual detail of the blank palette that the painter holds in her left hand, and second is the blank canvas behind her to her left, which might not be so remarkable, were it not for the way her shadow is projected onto it, thanks to the strong directional lighting coming from an unseen source at the left. Given the de- emphasis on the work of the depicted artist’s hand, the elision of her engagement with the materiality of paint itself and her abstracted gaze directed away from the easel, perhaps what is on offer here is an image of the artist doing generative intellectual work, which would be especially noteworthy, since much of the discourse about women – particularly later in the eighteenth century, argued that women lacked precisely the powers of intellection demanded by the great genres, though there were always dissenters on this subject20. If it is indeed a première pensée that she holds in her hand – the horizontal format of the sheet, the sketchy suggestion of pictorial forms on it hint
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that it is – this feature again suggests the idea of a work begun, but not yet realized. In this stage before the creative process is fully materialized, first through dessein on paper and then in color on canvas, she seems to be receiving the light of inspiration. That is suggested by the golden hues illuminating her face. But what of her shadow? Might it be a projection of a self-portrait she is about to begin? Or could it be a device to suggest a posthumous portrait? Whatever the answer, the enigmatically bare palette that the unknown woman artist holds, is a singular detail that when taken together with the empty canvas and its shadowy effigy, introduces a somehow melancholic sense of absence that perfectly thematizes the double loss of both the actual and the depicted artists’ identities.
13 Aside from these enigmatic elements (which may argue against its being a self- portrait), the image is remarkable on several other counts. To begin with, there were no “women artists” in France until the latter part of the eighteenth-century. As early as 1711, one can find references to “femmes peintres”, or less often, to “peintresses”, but not to “femmes artistes”21. We first encounter the term in 1762, in an essay written by one of the female editors of the Journal des Dames, but it does not become common parlance until the 1780s. This is significant because of the crucial, qualitative differences between the terms peintre, which pertains to craft and the work of the hand, and artiste, which refers to the work of the mind22. The problem of nomenclature is more than just a matter of semantics: it is, rather, an indication that the very category of the woman artist was itself a vexed, even paradoxical, one23. Not only was there traditionally no word for a woman who was an artist, it could be difficult to conceive of such a thing, even when presented with it (still true in the nineteenth century, as the example of Haudebourt-Lescot attests). Yet here is the Chicago portrait, representing a woman who falls into this category which was not one.
14 The date of the image makes it all the more extraordinary, because in France, unlike Italy, England and the Netherlands, there were few images of women artists before the 1780s. Of these, fewer still can be identified as self-portraits24. Sophie Chéron, one of the first women admitted to the Académie, in 1672 produced a ground-breaking self- portrait for her reception piece (Musée du Louvre). But after Chéron, the next certainly attributed self-portrait by a woman is by the little known académicienne, Marie-Suzanne Roslin, and was probably not painted until the 1760s. We know that French women actually did paint self-portraits before Mme Roslin painted hers – the young Madeleine Basseporte did, for example25. But until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there were remarkably few reference points for any French woman artist seeking a female model for defining and representing herself.
15 Is the Chicago painting a self-portrait? Of all the attributions that have been proposed (Jospeh Aved, Carle Van Loo) the possibility has never seriously been entertained26. I prefer to leave the possibility open. Whether or not the Chicago picture is a self- portrait, it speaks to many concerns that arise when considering women’s self representations, including the most fundamental questions about the artist herself: who is she? what is her name? how did she get to be an artist? who were her teachers, and how did she navigate that relationship? what kinds of choices did she make in becoming an artist?
16 The example of Maurice Quentin de la Tour and his female students offers some insights into these questions. La Tour was among the first male artists (in France) to take women as students, starting around the middle of the eighteenth century. (These
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included the Scottish portraitist, Katherine Read27, and Madame Roslin in the 1750s, and later, the amateur artist from Holland, Isabelle de Charrière, and possibly also Adelaide Labille-Guiard). One might imagine that Read and Roslin would have sought to identify themselves with their celebrataed predecessor, Rosalba Carriera. As a pastellist and a woman, Carriera would seem to offer an ideal (and uncontroversial) example for emulation by other female pastellists28. But in fact, in their self-representations both Read and Roslin went out of their way to model themselves on the example of Quentin de la Tour.
17 The depth of Read’s study with La Tour has been questioned by recent scholars because her pastels bear very little resemblance to his stylistically29. But her self-portrait “pointedly”, as it were, insists on her association with him. While working in Rome, she said in a letter to her brother: “I have succeeded beyond my expectation, and do not despair of doing something yet before I die that may bear a comparison with Rosalba or rather La Tour, who I must own is my model among all the Portrait Painters I have yet seen”30. There is more than a little irony in the fact Read was dubbed the “English Rosalba” by contemporaries31.
18 Looking at Read’s self-portrait: she refers to Quentin de La Tour’s famous Portrait de l’auteur qui rit (1735), but the changes she makes are significant. There is the change of setting, which evokes British, rather than French portrait traditions; other changes might be ascribed to proprieties of gender: her garb is faintly classicizing, rather than the casual studio attire adopted by La Tour (adopting the dishabille of real working attire was a taboo that was almost never broken by women artists); and there is the more decorous facial expression. The decorousness of her expression is borne out by comparison to a variation on La Tour’s self-portrait by one of his male students, Joseph Ducreux, entitled Le Moqueur (1793, Musée du Louvre)32. I am inclined, too, to think that the change of medium is an important one: Read painted this portrait in oil, though the vast majority of her work was as a pastellist. Her self-portrait served both to identify and distinguish herself from her teacher – the challenge faced by every artist who worked with a master.
19 La Tour’s other female student in the earlier years was Mme Roslin. She was one of the first women in France to explore problems of women’s artistic identity and is the subject of a future essay. For now, I note that her remarkable pastel self-portrait shows a fashionably dressed Marie-Suzanne Roslin in the act of copying La Tour’s L’auteur qui rit33. Visually and conceptually, Roslin’s self-portrait is considerably more complex than Read’s. And where Read hoped to bear comparison to La Tour, Mme Roslin’s self- portrait laid claim to being his émule34. But both Read and Roslin capitalized on their affiliation with La Tour, while nonetheless making clear a wish to assert their own artistic identity (in Roslin’s case, largely through the distinctions in dress, comportment and through differences between the teacher’s “original” image within the image and the student’s “copy” of it). By re-presenting or performing the work of their teachers, Read and Roslin (like Anguissola) subtly call into question the hierarchy of the student/master relation. This model of female identification with male artists went against social expectations that daughters should mirror their mothers – a point I will come back to at the end.
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Suzanne-Marie Roslin, Self-Portrait, 1775
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
20 The wish for autonomy and the desire to assert an artistic identity of one’s own also informed the work of Rose-Adelaide Ducreux35. One might see in her splendid self- portrait playing the harp (1791, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)36 a complete disavowal of any filial affinity with her father’s work. He is best known for his remarkable series of self-portraits in which he variously mocks, grins, yawns, gesticulates37.
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Self-Portrait with a Harp, 1791
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
21 Primarily a pastellist, Ducreux père did sometimes paint in oil, but his attempts did not please critics. One of them described the paint brush as “his enemy”38. Ducreux fille also worked successfully in pastel, but unlike her father, the brush was clearly her friend, too – a point that was emphasized in the first self-portrait she exhibited publically. Shown at the Salon de la Correspondance in 1785, it was a pastel (untraced), but showed her painting: “elle prend de la couleur sur sa palette au moment de peindre”39. The full-length, life-sized Met self-portrait, exhibited in 1791 at the first open Louvre Salon, impressively displays her ability to paint in oil on a large scale and was well received. Critics inevitably compared father and daughter to one another, as their works were displayed in the same gallery at the Salon. Joseph Ducreux portrayed himself as Le Bâilleur, (Getty Museum) prompting the author of La Béquille de Voltaire au Salon to quip: “Chacun à son genre. M. Ducreux réussit parfaitement dans celui de faire bâiller”. But of his daughter, “peinte par elle-même,” the same critic effused: “vous êtes pétrie de grâces, Mademoiselle.”40 Another critic, also commenting on the pair in the same breath, remarked that “Mlle Ducreux [my emphasis] peut occuper une place très distinguée parmi les peintres.”41 Whether or not Rose Ducreux intended her self- portrait to be a form of delicate revolt, in its assertion of her complete difference from (and perhaps also surpassing of) her father, the task was nonetheless accomplished. It is perhaps a sign of her independence that she was only once listed as her father’s student – in the livret for the Salon of 1799, her last before her death in 180242.
22 Fathers and father-figures had long been essential to the formation of women artists43. No doubt Joseph Ducreux was similarly important in his daughter’s training as a professional artist44. Yet, her known portraits and self-portraits, all painted in oil and
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on an ambitious scale, suggest closer affinities with other artists of her time, particularly with Antoine Vestier, and perhaps also with Louis David, to whom her works have been mis-attributed.
23 Rose Ducreux’s earlier self-portrait seated at a piano-forte (c. 1785, untraced, formerly Erlanger Collection) is a case in point. Attributed to David by Ducreux family tradition, the painting has been convincingly ascribed to Mlle Ducreux. It has been suggested also that this self-portrait was inspired by Vestier’s main submission to the Salon of 178545. Vestier’s picture represented his daughter, Nicole, palette and brushes in hand, before an easel, a piano-forte just behind her. Given the similarities in style and composition, it might very well have offered an appealing model for Ducreux, who, like Nicole Vestier, was both musician and painter.
24 Like her later self-portrait, Rose Ducreux’s ambitious self-portrait at the piano-forte demonstrated that she could vie with her more privileged Academic contemporaries: not only could she too produce a large scale composition, she could beautifully depict the fashionable female figure, and dazzlingly capture a range of textures and surfaces – white and yellow satin, lace, ribbon, coiffed hair, flawless complexions, marble, ivory, gilt and polished wood. Like the Met self-portrait, it presents an image of a professional artist who displays ideal feminine graces and disarmingly radiates civilized pleasures46. What it does not do, however, is present her as a daughter. Perhaps her own delicate form of revolt, this is one way that the Erlanger portrait differs from the Vestier, which actually includes representations of both of the sitter’s parents47. On this point the Ducreux differs too from the other major portrait of a woman artist shown at the Salon of 1785, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait with Students, which also takes up the theme of daughterly filiation48.
25 By the late eighteenth century, the Parisian public was far more accustomed to seeing portraits and self-portraits of women artists than it had been theretofore, thanks to the Exposition de la Jeunesse, the Salon de la Correspondance, and the Salon of the Académie de St Luc49. But in 1785 the woman artist was still unusual iconography at the Salon du Louvre; the full-length format of the Vestier and Labille-Guiard portraits was virtually without precedent, which could be why they caught the eye of so many commentators50. The marked visual affinities between these two works, which hung within sight of one another, undoubtedly account for the comparisons that contemporaries drew between them, even if none of them commented on the unusual subject matter per se51.
26 Both were works of signal importance for their authors. Vestier’s portrait was one of the paintings he presented for his agrégation into the Académie that year, and it was the “chef d’œuvre qui allait décider sa carrière”52. Though Labille-Guiard had been admitted two years earlier, hers was the first large-scale work she had presented to the public, and one that clearly aimed and succeeded in promoting her career to a new level, as Laura Auricchio has shown in her study of Labille-Guiard. In comparing Labille-Guiard’s magisterial work to the Vestier picture, Auricchio has also argued that Vestier’s portrait frames the representation of his daughter by his patriarchal gaze, and she contrasts this with the nuances and complexities of the Labille-Guiard portrait53. Vestier’s portrait is seen a celebration of his daughter’s talents in a way that is couched entirely in terms of his own abilities; Labille-Guiard’s is an image of the transmission of artistic knowledge from one artist to another of the kind traditionally associated with fathers/sons. By showing Nicole in a domestic interior (and not in the
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act of painting) rather than in a studio, by alluding to her talents as a musician as well as a painter, Vestier is said to highlight his daughter’s accomplishments as elegant pastimes, not a profession. In sum, Vestier figures Marie-Nicole as a vision of proper bourgeois femininity, as a well-bred hobbyist, rather than a professional woman artist54.
27 While not discounting the merits of these arguments, I do think there is more going on in the Vestier painting than this reading allows. To begin with, rules of painterly bienséance called for a fit between what is represented and how it is represented. Thus the scale, and the solemnity (verging on theatricality) of the Vestier portrait, endows Nicole Vestier with a dignity and importance that would seem to be out of step with an image of a merely accomplished young woman. Listed in the Salon livret as Full-length portrait of Mlle Vestier Painting the Portrait of her Father, the work showcased Nicole Vestier’s talents as a painter, as well as her father’s. What is more, it so vividly evokes the visual language of a self-portrait, that it looks like Nicole represented herself at work. So here then, is a father’s portrait of his daughter which looks like her self- portrait, but isn’t55. The plot thickens when we look at “her” picture of him on the easel. She is doing work that perfectly emulates Vestier’s own. But, in fact, the painting on the easel is actually recognizable as one of Antoine Vestier’s own self-portraits.
28 Even more than his émule, Nicole is so closely identified with her father that she can substitute for Vestier himself. Is Mlle Vestier here perhaps a “real” allegory of her father’s artistic practice? That is how he depicted her at the next Salon, in which he again depicts her as an artist and as a Vestier (in every sense) under the title of Allegory of Painting (Horvitz Collection, Boston). And yet, the fact that Nicole was herself an actual painter suggests the possibility of another relation or dynamic here; one that involves a father’s identification with the daughter as artist or a blurring of their two identities. Might we see here a manifestation of the process of intersubjective exchange that is intrinsic to the operations of portraiture itself56? If so, does Vestier’s ventriloquized “my daughter/myself” approach leave any room for Nicole Vestier to be an artist in her own right? I prefer to think that it does, for although no commentators remarked on her status as a woman and an artist, the picture did prompt the Mercure de France to refer to her as the “painter” in the portrait, and at the very least made her visible (then as now) as an artist in a way that she would not otherwise have been. In essence, Antoine Vestier made it possible for Nicole to exhibit at the Salon du Louvre, something Rose Ducreux would not be able to do until the Revolutionary Salon of 179157.
29 As to how Nicole Vestier conceived of her own status as an artist, we can glean some idea from her own self-portrait, which was shown at the Salon of 1793. Entitled The Artist at her Occupations, she painted it not long after the birth of her first child – the happy result of her marriage to the miniaturist François Dumont58. From the title it appears that her primary identity is that of “the artist”. In the picture itself she is still also musician, and daughter – it is again a portrait of the father on the canvas behind her. But she is also of course, mother. Though she appears equally divided between her occupations, one gets the sense that the needy child in the cradle will soon win out. And indeed, Nicole Dumont seems to have stopped painting in her own right after 1793, following the birth of her other children.
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III.
30 Though Salon critics in 1785 declared Labille-Guiard’s self-portrait to be “inferior” to Vestier’s, in our own time, it is the académicienne’s painting that has garnered most of the scholarly attention. For feminist art historians, it holds particular interest because it appears to be the first portrait (or self-portrait) that shows a woman artist with her students/artistic progeny. In so doing, it evokes a more familiar model of filiation (usually of fathers who pass on their knowledge to sons) than that presented by Vestier’s “self-portrait of another”. By way of conclusion, it seems right to ask whether the dynamics of filiation are the same for women artists as teachers and/or as students.
31 Even a cursory sampling of representations of mothers and their biological daughters reveals how often female offspring are figured as miniature versions of their mothers – almost as mirror reflections of them, in fact59. This idea had broad cultural currency. It was, as Katherine Jensen has argued, an ideal particularly embraced by ambitious women in early modern France who “were preoccupied with representing a certain kind of mother-daughter bond: one in which a daughter was supposed to mirror her mother”60. Among others, she cites the examples of Mme de Sévigné, Isabelle de Charrière and Vigée-Lebrun. One might also add to the list, Mme Geoffrin and also Mme Necker whose critics (including her daughter, Germaine de Staël), said “she only sought to form her daughter in her own image”61.
32 Jensen notes that the mother-daughter mirror metaphor is one that figured in conduct books for women. She cites a seventeenth-century example that is particularly apposite in the present context because of the way it evokes the metaphor of mother as artist and daughter as self-portrait: Les femmes ne servent pas seulement à les [les honnêtes filles] former, mais comme elles en prennent le dessein sur elles-mêmes, et que pour produire une fille la mère fait son image; on peut encore dire qu’elles ont le même droit sur leur ouvrage qu’un Peintre sur son portrait.62
33 The works by Anguissola and Vestier that I have discussed here both identify the portrait of the artist-daughter as the “self”-portrait of an artist-father (whether elective or biological), rather than as his émule. But this self-reflective model more typically describes or relates to artist-mother/daughter relations. Jensen convincingly makes the case for its importance in Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs, where the artist was very much invested in the idea of her daughter as a reflection of herself. Vigée-Lebrun wanted Julie to frequent the same social circles as she did, and evidently wished that Julie would also become an artist. At one point when she is enumerating Julie’s charms and talents, Vigée-Lebrun comments “ce qui me charmait par-dessus tout, c’étaient ses heureuses dispositions pour la peinture”63. Mary Sheriff and others have discussed Vigée-Lebrun’s self-portraits with her daughter in terms of how the artist figures the relationships between biological and artistic production64. Perhaps these self-portraits can be understood also to give visual form to the idea that to have a daughter is to make a self-portrait. However, as Jensen has shown, in “real life” the mother/daughter mirror metaphor creates an overdetermined confusion between the mother’s identity and the daughter’s. This “identity confusion, born of mother’s and daughter’s profound and vexed dependence on one another for self-definition, produces painful misunderstandings and separation anxiety for both women” 65. The result in the case of Vigée-Lebrun, and indeed of Mme Necker and Mme Geoffrin, was complete filial
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rebellion66. Julie never became an artist and there was a painful rupture in the relationship between mother and daughter as she asserted her own will and insisted upon her own, separate identity.
34 Daughter-as-self-portrait is a markedly different model of filiation from the one defined by the conventionally “masculine” ideal of emulation, where sons wrestle anxiously with the burden of the father’s influence. In that model, the tension between “the wish to follow and the desire to out-do the great master sets into motion a productive interaction between sameness and difference”67. As anxiety-ridden as that model is, it is predicated on the expectation that difference was the desired goal. When women were in the position of émule, it was perhaps easier for them to assert that difference in their self-portraits (viz. Mme Roslin, Rose Ducreux), because women were always already different from their male teachers. But difference rarely translated into independence or “greatness,” as these women seem so often to have been relegated by critics, by art history, to the status of permanent students, denied an artistic identity of their own68.
35 But what of the daughter (natural or symbolic) who elects to emulate or mirror her mother? How does she (or does she?) become an independent self? Haudebourt-Lescot’s choice to exhibit her self-portrait along with a portrait of her mother at the Salon of 1827 is suggestive here – as are other examples of artists who in some way evoked their mothers in their work. (The first self portrait Constance Mayer exhibited at the Salon – in 1796 – was entitled Portrait de la citoyenne Mayer présentant une esquisse du portrait de sa mère69.) These alas are questions that must wait for another time70. But I do want to suggest that Labille-Guiard’s student Gabrielle Capet falls into this category and seems to have grappled with these questions in her early self-portraits. In them, she seeks to define herself as an artist in terms very similar to those used by Labille-Guiard for her own self-images. But Capet’s version of emulation seems not to have involved competition with her teacher or the desire to outdo her. In the end, Capet became a real daughter to Labille-Guiard. She never wed, but lived and worked with Labille- Guiard, and continued to do so after Labille-Guiard and François Vincent married in 1800. In 1808 Capet would paint a poignant and moving homage to her teacher (Alte Pinakotek, Munich) – a picture that is yet one more example of a self-portrait of another. Yet Capet’s “self” here is defined not just in terms of her teacher/mother- figure, but also in terms of a world that includes men as well as women; a world where identity is collective, collaborative and communal – a reminder that no artist really ever paints by him (or her)self.
NOTES
1. This essay is developed out of a paper presented at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in connection with a seminar on gender and representation organized by Anne Lafont and Frédérique Desbuissons. I am grateful to them for the opportunity to participate in the seminar, and for the excellent feedback I received from those who attended the talk. I would also like to thank Caroline Trotot and Natania Meeker for the invitation to contribute to the present volume.
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2. Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Autoportrait, v. 1825, Louvre, RMN, http://www.culture.gouv.fr/ public/mistral/joconde_fr?ACTION=CHERCHER&FIELD_98=AUTR&VALUE_98=HAUDEBOURT- LESCOT%20Hortense&DOM=All&REL_SPECIFIC=3, accessed on 16 may 2016. 3. Augustin Jal, Esquisses, croquis, pochades ou Tout ce qu’on voudra sur le Salon de 1827, Paris, A. Dupont, 1828, p. 290. 4. For the trope of the naïve outsider in eighteenth-century Salon criticism, see Anne Lafont, “Comment peut-on être critique? Jugement de goût et relativisme culturel”, in Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle: théorie, critique, philosophie, histoire, C. Michel et C. Magnusson eds., Rome, Somogy, 2013, p. 143-158. 5. See Susan Siegfried in “Expression d’une subjectivité féminine dans les journaux pour femmes,” Mechthild Fend, Melissa Hyde and Anne Lafont, eds, Plumes et Pinceaux. Discours de femmes sur l’art en Europe (1750-1850), Paris, 2012, p. 245-70. She notes that out of 550 artists who exhibited at the Salon of 1827-1828, 80 were female. For detailed studies of women exhibiting at the Salon see Margaret Oppenheimer, “Women Artists in Paris, 1791-1814”, PhD Dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 1996, chapter one and Séverine Sofio, “’L’art ne s’apprend pas aux dépens des moeurs!’ Construction du champ de l’art, genre et professionalisation des artistes. 1780-1848 », Thèse du doctorat, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris 2009. On Jal, see Sebastien Allard, et al., Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, exh. cat., London, 2007, p. 338. 6. On Haudebourt-Lescot’s portrait of her mother: “C’est une chose fort remarquable, qui sort des habitudes du talent de son auteur, qu’aucune femme n’aurait pu faire...” Jal, Esquisses, p. 335. In his L’Ombre de Diderot et le Bossu du Marais: dialogue critique sur le Salon de 1819, he has Diderot comment about another work of Mlle Lescot’s, “Il est difficile, au premier coup d’œil, de se persuader qu’une telle composition soit sortie d’un pinceau féminin”, p. 177. 7. Jal, Esquisses, p. 269. He notes that people questioned whether David had actually painted works by his student Angélique Mongez, p. 268. He also mentions that Mlle Lescot’s detractors questioned her authorship of her paintings previously in his L’Ombre de Diderot, p. 19. 8. An infamous instance of the question of authorship occurred with the disgrace of Marguerite Haverman, a Dutch flower painter admitted to the Académie in 1722, who was struck from the registers when it was suspected that she had passed off works by her teacher as her own. Later, when Mme Therbouche first presented work to the Académie to be considered for admission, she was shocked to be asked if she had painted the works herself. Both Vigée-Lebrun and Labille- Guiard had to endure allegations by critics that their own paintings were in reality the work of Ménageot and Vincent, respectively. See: Bernadette Fort, “Indicting the Woman Artist: Diderot, Le Libertin, and Anna Dorothea Therbusch,” Lumen, 23, 2004, p. 9; Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 180; and Laura Auricchio, “Self-Promotion in Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait with Two Students”, The Art Bulletin 89, March 2007, p. 45-62. 9. Jordana Pomeroy et al., Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque, New York, Skira, 2007, p. 120. 10. Melissa Hyde, “Getting into the Picture: Boucher’s Self-Portraits of Others”, Rethinking Boucher, M. Hyde & M. Ledbury, eds., Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2006, p. 12-38. 11. See the compelling version of this narrative, in which sons “are brought over and over again to the troubled territory of filiation and inheritance” in Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, New Haven and London, 1995, p. 1. For a feminist critique of this narrative and Crow’s use of a “single-sex frame”, see Mechthild Fend and Abigail Solomon- Godeau, “Noch einmal: Väter und Söhne”, Texte zur Kunst 20, 1995, p. 118-125. Norman Bryson was the first scholar to bring Harold Bloom’s Oedipal model, The Anxiety of Influence, London, 1975 to bear on art history in Tradition and Desire, Cambridge, 1984. 12. “From the works by the hand of the beautiful [Anguissola], your [Campi’s] creation, which I am here able to view with amazement, I am better able to understand your beautiful intellect.”
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Cited in Babette Bohn & James Saslow, eds., A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art, Wiley & Sons, 2013, e-book, n.p. 13. As Kathleen Russo has put it, “Anguissola is the only known artist who depicted her teacher in a painting with the following illusions or trompe l’oeil effects: a painter painting a portrait, a painter painting a self-portrait, and a painter painting another painter, painting what is in fact her self portrait.”, Kathleen Russo et. al., Self-Portraits by Women Painters, Aldershot, 2000, p. 54. See also Frederika Jacobs, “Woman’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola”, Renaissance Quarterly n° 47, 1994, p. 74-101 and Mary Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Renaissance Quarterly n° 47, 1994, p. 556-621. 14. Masafumi Monden, Japanese fashion cultures: dress and gender in contemporary Japan, London and New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, p. 100-103. 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofonisba_Anguissola#/media/File:Self- portrait_with_Bernardino_Campi_by_Sofonisba_Anguissola.jpg, Consulted 15 May 2015. See also Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall, et al, Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary, exh. cat., London, 2005, fig. 17. 16. The phrase comes from Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1989. For more recent reflections on models of artistic generation as they relate to women, see Lisa Tickner, “Mediating Generation: The Mother-Daughter Plot”, in Carol Armstrong, Women Artists at the Millennium, Cambridge, The Mit Press, 2004, p. 85-120. 17. A notable exception is to be found in Gretchen van Slyke’s refreshing account of the abiding importance of Rosa Bonheur’s mother in her life, “Reinventing Matrimony: Rosa Bonheur, Her Mother, and Her Friends,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 19:3/4, 1991, p. 59-77. My thanks to Mary Sheriff for bringing this article to my attention. 18. http://www.artinstituteimages.org/formorderinfo.asp?image=00050629-01, accessed 16 may 2016. 19. Compare to The Allegory of Painting from this period by Jean-François de Troy (1733). http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/jean-francois-de-troy-an-allegory-of-painting-4230950- details.aspx?pos=40&intObjectID=4230950&sid=, accessed 16 may 2016. 20. See for example, Mme de Genlis, Les Veillées du château, ou Cours de moral à l’usage des enfants, vol. 2, Paris, Garnier frères, 1784, p. 431-438. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k62607816.r=genlis veilles du château; accessed 17 may, 2016. See also Mme Beaumer referenced in footnote 20. More generally speaking, the Marquis de Condorcet was a committed believer in women’s capacity for genius. See, Joan Landes, “The History of Feminism: Marie-Jean- Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet”, Edward N. Zalta ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2016 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/ entries/histfem-condorcet, accessed 17 may, 2016. 21. “Paintress” is a term that Rousseau and Mme Marie Anne de La Tour used in their correspondence of 1763. Rousseau is often erroneously credited with coining the term. It appears fifty years earlier in Abel Boyer, The Royal Dictionary, French and English and English and French, London, D. Midwinter, 1711. However the term was still unusual enough in 1777 that when the Abbé Le Brun used it in his Almanach historique to describe Mme Vien, the author of a review of the Almanach commented that it was an “expression nouvellement forgée, et qui n’a pas été adoptée par les Amateurs”, L’Esprit de journaux, françois et étrangers n° 7, juillet, 1777, p. 129. An early usage of “femme artiste” is to be found in an essay by Mme Beaumer, who was for a time editor of the Nouveau journal des dames. See “Invitation de Madame de Baumer, aux femmes qui se distinguent dans les arts”, Nouveau journal des dames, n° 1, mars, 1762, p. 289, 290. On Rousseau’s use of the term paintress, see Mary MacAlpin, Gender, Authenticity and the Missive Letter in Eighteenth-Century France, Bucknell University Press, 2006, p. 67.
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22. See Natalie Heinich, Du peintre à l’artiste: Artisans et académiciens à l’âge classique, Paris, Minuit, 1993. She notes in chapter VII that “artiste” only comes into usage in the modern sense of word around the middle of the eighteenth century. 23. A point playfully acknowledged by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, when they pointed out that in English there is no female equivalent of the term “old master”, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London and New York, I. B. Tauris, [1981] 2013, p. xix. 24. This is not surprising in view of the fact that there were so few portraits of male artists before 1654. See Hannah Williams, “Autoportrait ou portrait de l’artiste peint par lui-même? Se peindre soi-même à l’époque moderne”, Images Re-vues, 7, 2009, imagesrevues.revues.org/574, 2, accessed 1st May, 2014. 25. An inventory after Basseporte’s death in 1780 lists various portraits by Basseporte, including “le portrait de Mlle Basseporte et celui de Mme sa mère”, Paul Ratouis de Limay, Les Pastels du XVIIIe en France, Paris, Baudiniere, 1946, p. 159. 26. Anne Coypel, wife of the sculptor François Dumont has been proposed (and doubted) as the sitter. But there is a whole list of possible sitters, women artists who were in one way or another connected with the Coypel, Dumont, and Silvestre families including: Geneviève de Lance (Lens), wife of Louis-Charles Hérault (brother-in-law en premier noces of Anne Coypel’s father); Anne Hérault (wife of François Hutin) and Marie-Catherine Hérault, wife of Louis de Silvestre. For connections between the families see the Dumont marriage contract reproduced in “Documents nouveaux sur les Coypel, et les Boullogne, Peintres; et sur les Dumont, sculpteurs 1712-1788)”, Nouvelles Archives de l’Art Français, 1877, p. 240. On attribution and identity of the sitter, Susan Wise et al., French and British Paintings from 1600-1800 in the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 1996, p. 68-70. 27. Neil Jeffares cites a letter of 1751 of Read’s mentioning “my old master La Tour”. See “Katherine Read”, in Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800, http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/ Read.pdf, Accessed 15 April 2014. 28. Mme Beaumer presents female emulation as a desirable thing. Nouveau Journal des Dames, 1 (1762): 291. Apparently inspired by the example of Carriera, whose works she copied, Basseporte had started out in the 1720s as a portraitist, until she abandoned the genre for scientific illustration. Ratouis de Limay, Le Pastel en France, Paris, Baudinière, 1946, p. 158-159. 29. Jeffares, “Katherine Read,” in Dictionary of Pastellists, online edition, 1, accessed 26 October, 2011. 30. Quoted in F. Steuart, “Miss Catherine Read, Court Paintress”, Scottish Historical Review, 1904, p. 41. Read’s self-portrait is reproduced in color in Margery Morgan, “British Connoisseurs in Rome. Was it Painted by Katherine Read?”, The British Art Journal 2, 2006, p. 43. 31. Nearly every woman artist for 50 years was called the Dutch, German, etc. Rosalba no matter whether there was any resemblance to her work. Vigée Lebrun was called “modern Rosalba.” Frances Borzello, Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1998, p. 70. 32. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/joconde_fr? ACTION=CHERCHER&FIELD_1=REF&VALUE_1=000PE001081, accessed 16 May, 2016. 33. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Suzanne_Roslin. Accessed 12 June, 2015. Also reproduced and discussed in Marie Jo Bonnet, “Femmes peintres à leur travail: de l’autoportrait comme manifeste politique (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles)” in Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine, n° 49-3, juillet- septembre 2002, p. 140-167 and Thea Burns and Philippe Saunier, The Art of the Pastel, New York, Abbeville Press In, 2015. 34. On the problems presented for women artists by the eighteenth-century ideal of emulation see Laura Auricchio, “The Laws of Bienséance and the Gendering of Emulation in Eighteenth- Century French Art Education,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no° 2, January 2003, p. 231-140 and Mary Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 61-63, 74-77, 168-69.
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35. Jeffares, “Joseph Ducreux”, Dictionary of Pastellists, http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/ Ducreux.pdf, accessed 15 May, 2015. 36. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436222, accessed 16 May, 2016. 37. His self-portraits have taken on new life as an internet meme. See Miles Klee, “Vanishing Point: (Your Memes Reviewed): the Joseph Ducreux Self-Portrait”, http://www.theawl.com/ 2010/04/vanishing-point-your-memes-reviewed-the-joseph-ducreux-self-portrait, accessed 15 February, 2015. 38. Anon. [P.-J-B Chaussard] [Salon de 1801], cited in Jeffares, “Joseph Ducreux”, 3. http:// www.pastellists.com/Articles/Ducreux.pdf, accessed 15 February 2015. 39. E. Bellier de la Chavignerie, “Les artistes du français du XVIIIe”, Revue universelle des arts n° 20, octobre 1864-mars 1865, p. 125. 40. Quoted in Georgette Lyon, Joseph Ducreux, Paris, La Nef, 1958, p. 81. 41. Anon., “Exposition au Salon du Louvre...”, Affiches, annonces et avis divers...1791, cited in Jeffares, “Joseph Ducreux”, Dictionary of Pastellists, 2. http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/ Ducreux.pdf Accessed 2/15/15 42. Livrets for subsequent Salons indicate she was his daughter, but she is only once listed as his student – in the Livret for the Salon of 1799. 43. Certainly this was the case for Anguissola. The importance of fathers was first raised by Linda Nochlin and Germaine Greer. Nochlin’s foundational essay, “Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists?” was first published in 1971, and is reprinted in Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power, New York, Harper & Row, 1988, p. 145-78. Germaine Greer discusses the role of fathers in less positive terms in The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, New York, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 1979. 44. I use the term “professional” training, because in 1786 Pahin de la Blancherie explicitly refers to Mlle Ducreux’s “profession”, Lyon, Ducreux, p. 81. 45. The attribution to David was asserted by Joseph Ducreux’s great granddaughter when she sold the family collection. See D.S. MacColl “Jacques Louis David and the Ducreux Family”, The Burlington Magazine 72, n° 2, June, 1938, p. 263-279. Joseph Baillio reatrributes the painting to Rose Ducreux and draws comparisons between it and the Vestier. Joseph Baillio, “Une artiste méconnu: Rose Adélaïde Ducreux”, L’œil, n° 399, 1988, p. 20-27. See Laura Auricchio, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Artist in the Age of Revolution, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009, figure 37, p. 47, https://books.google.fr/books? id=XJkvjgxwby4C&lpg=PA47&dq=ANtoine%20Vestier%20Portrait%20of%20Marie- Nicole%20Vestier&hl=fr&pg=PA47#v=onepage&q=ANtoine%20Vestier%20Portrait%20of%20Marie- Nicole%20Vestier&f=false, Accessed 15 May 2016. 46. A stratagem also taken up by Ducreux’s slightly older contemporary, Vigée-Lebrun, in her pre-Revolutionary self-portraits ‒ a point made by Borzello, Seeing Ourselves, op. cit., p. 75. 47. Mme Vestier is figured in the sculpted bust behind Nicole, while Antoine Vestier’s portrait sits on the easel. 48. The painting includes a sculpted bust of the artist’s father. See Auricchio, “Self-Promotion”, op.cit., as in n° 6. 49. For discussion and an exhaustive list of women’s self-portraits at the Exposition de la Jeunesse and elsewhere, see Bonnet, “Femmes peintres à leur travail”; see also Eva Kernbauer, Der Platz des Publikums: Modelle für Kunstöffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert, Köln, Böhlau, 2011, p. 113-121. 50. Paintings of women artists at the Salon were very rare: two notable exceptions were Gilles Allou’s portraits at the Salon of 1737 of his wife Anne Raguenet, “dessinant une figure optique” (engraving by Michel Dossier on Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8530052v. Accessed 12 June, 2015); and another of Marie-Maximillienne de Silvestre (daughter of Louis de Silvestre) holding a palette at the Salon 1739 (untraced).
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51. The “inescapable similarities between the Labille-Guiard and Vestier paintings encouraged one critic of the time to compare them to the disadvantage of Labille-Guiard: ‘Le tableau de Madame Guyard, quoiqu’inférieur à celui de M. Vestier, n’est pas sans quelque mérite.’”, Laura Auricchio, “Portraits of Impropriety: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and the Careers of Professional Women Artists in Late Eighteenth -Century Paris”, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2000, p. 153. 52. Anne-Marie Passez, Antoine Vestier, Paris, La Bibliotheque des Arts, 1989, p. 134. 53. Laura Auricchio, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, op. cit., p. 47-49 54. For useful discussion of the amateur woman artist, see Lisa Heer “Amateur Artists” in Delia Gaze, ed. Dictionary of Women Artists, vol. 1, New York, Routledge, [1997] 2001, p. 50-67. 55. One wonders whether Vestier might have been inspired by the Erlanger self-portrait of Rose Ducreux, rather than the other way around; or perhaps also by Labille-Guiard – as Jean-Laurent Mosnier was for his own self-portrait at the next Salon. Auricchio and Labille-Guiard, Artist in the Age of Revolution, op. cit., p. 44. 56. Angela Rosenthal, “She’s got the look! Eighteenth-century female portrait painters and the psychology of a potentially ‘dangerous employment’” in Joanna Woodall, ed., Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 147-166. 57. Contrast this with the authoritarian Joseph Boze, who, out of jealousy, is said to have prevented his daughter, Ursule, from developing a public profile. Olivier Blanc, Portraits de Femmes, Paris, Carpentier 2006, p. 86. 58. Reproduced in Borzello, Seeing Ourselves, op. cit., p. 35 59. Examples include: Jean-Marc Nattier, Mme Marsollier et sa fille, 1749 (Met, NY), François-Hubert Drouais, Family Portrait, 1756 (National Gallery, Washington D.C.) Jean Valade, Portrait de Mme Théodore Lacroix et de Suzanne-Félicité, 1775, Louvre. 60. Katharine Ann Jensen, “Mirrors, Marriage, and Nostalgia: Mother-Daughter Relations in Writings by Isabelle de Charrière and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, n° 19-2, 2000, p. 286. 61. Dena Goodman, “Fillial Rebellion in the Salon: Madame Geoffrin and her Daughter”, French Historical Studies, n° 19-1, 1989, p. 29. 62. François de Grenaille, L’Honnête fille (1639-1640), quoted in Jensen, op. cit., p. 286. 63. Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Souvenirs, Paris, H. Fournier1986, tome II, p. 49. 64. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman, op. cit.; Paula Rea Radisich, “Que peut définir les femmes? Vigée Lebrun’s Portraits of an Artist”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, n° 25, summer 1992, p. 441-467 and Lesley Walker, A Mother’s Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France, Cranbury, Bucknell University Press, 2008. 65. Jensen, op. cit., p. 287. 66. On Mme Geoffrin and her daughter, see, Goodman, as in n° 56. 67. Mieke Bal on Bryson’s Tradition and Desire in Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, p. 26. For further discussion of Bryson’s use of the Oedipal model, see Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman, op. cit., p. 52-54, 57-59. 68. One thinks of the unequal relations between Constance Mayer and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, or François Gérard and Marie-Eléonore Godefroid. Even Labille-Guiard, after she married François Vincent at the age of 50 and thirty years into her career, was listed in the Salon Livret of 1800 as “élève de son mari”. Marguerite Gérard is one of the few female artists to have emerged from the shadow of her teacher, but even then, the relationships between her work and that of Fragonard are complicated. 69. Reproduced in Blanc, op. cit., p. 89. 70. Tickner usefully suggests that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “rhizome” which is “’an anti-genealogy’: multiple, diverse, heterogeneous, generative, resistant to hierarchies and
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productive in its channeling of desire,” might offer a useful alternative to the Bloomian focus on genealogies (strong precursors and the anxiety of influence). Tickner, op. cit., p. 91 (as in n. 14).
ABSTRACTS
This essay considers what portraits and self-portraits of several women artists can tell us about problems of authorship and artistic identity as well as relationships between female students and their teachers often represented on the paintings. These relationships, though not usually defined by the Oedipal dramas that feature so prominently in narratives of filiation about male artists, are no less complex, and in many cases are fraught with their own tensions and conflicts.
Cet article analyse ce que les portraits et autoportraits de plusieurs artistes femmes peuvent nous dire au sujet des problèmes d’attribution et d’identité artistique en même temps que sur les relations entre les élèves féminines et leurs maîtres en peinture qui sont souvent représentées par les autoportraits. Si ces relations ne sont pas marquées par les drames œdipiens qui émaillent de manière si caractéristique les récits de filiation des artistes masculins, elles ne sont pas moins complexes et dans bien des cas sont remplies de tensions et de conflits qui leur sont propres.
INDEX
Mots-clés: autoportrait, émulation, filiation, relation mère-fille, femme artiste Keywords: self-portraiture, emulation, filiation, mother/daughter plot, woman artist
AUTHOR
MELISSA HYDE University of Florida
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“Portrait of the Artist at Work” Painting Self-Portraits in Late Eighteenth-Century France « Portrait de l’artiste à son chevalet ». La pratique de l’autoportrait par les artistes femmes et hommes dans le dernier tiers du XVIIIe siècle
Séverine Sofio Translation : Colin Keaveney
1 Self-portrait is as old as painting itself. As Pierre Vaisse reminds us, “self-portrait is a genre much too widespread and common, its forms and functions too varied” for it to be amenable to a single and unambiguous interpretation1. But despite the great number of books dealing with the self-portrait in painting or sculpture, there are few attempts to answer this simple question: from an artist’s point of view, why depict oneself? I shall first examine, in what might be referred to as a ‘materialist’ approach, the practice of self-portraiture among artists of the late eighteenth century, with a focus on the social and material conditions that could lead artists to depict themselves. Then, I shall examine more particularly self-portraiture as practised by women; the analysis of this practice, which was particularly fashionable for women at the time, will allow me to deal with the unprecedented process of feminisation the art world was then undergoing, one of the consequences of which was the sudden vogue for images of women at their easels.
2 The most obvious reason why an artist might choose to depict himself/herself is one of convenience: in terms of practicing portraiture, nothing could be easier than painting oneself (which explains why young artists, in particular, did so), especially when there was no one to model and when artists wished to try out such and such a pose, or such and such play of light and shadows. Unfortunately, since they were intended as exercises, these drawings or paintings have seldom survived to the present day2. In the same way, out of a need to practice or a desire to paint unusual expressions (in line with the treatises on physiognomonics, so in vogue at the time, for instance), artists sometimes depicted themselves in original poses or in uncharacteristically realistic ways3. This type of self-portrait was a sort of studio exercise, which could (or could not) be intended for public consumption. Showing a particularly well executed self-portrait was doubtless the best proof of the artist’s talent and capacity to paint lifelike portraits:
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in these cases, self-portrait could be specifically designed to attract customers wishing to commission portraits4.
3 It was also common at this period for artists to give self-portraits to their friends or family members, as tokens of gratitude for example; it should be remembered that, in an era when drawing and painting were the sole means of preserving the likeness of a loved one, portraits were indeed very precious5.
4 In addition to being exercises in style or tokens of affection, self-portraits could also be made in pursuit of glory6. Indeed, self-portraits were signs of social success, validations in painted form; which is why artists often delighted in depicting themselves as refined individuals surrounded by books and precious objects, or in allegorical poses suggestive of their exceptional status7.
5 Finally, some self-portraits were meant to send a message – a thanksgiving or homage to some patron or master. Certain aesthetic loyalties could be proclaimed via self- portrait, for example when one adopted in his/her painting a motif (or a pose, an expression, etc.) known to refer to another artist whose follower he/she thus claimed to be8. These declamatory self-portraits often contain utterly unrealistic depictions of painting: while artists tended to depict themselves at their easel or palette in hand, it was frequently either in attire not particularly suited to the action of painting in the real world, or surrounded by objects depicted there only for symbolic significance. Some self-portraits must therefore only be seen as allegorical representations of painting, or as idealised or metaphorical illustrations of what painting meant to the artist. There are, in this latter category, enigmatic canvases, like the Van Dyck’s famous self-portrait9, or Courbet’s Atelier du peintre, which is an allegorical depiction of the painter’s life, entourage and work10. In this perspective, a few women artists also depicted themselves as the muse of painting (Artemisia Gentileschi was supposedly the first to have done this) or as Dibutade, the mythical inventor of drawing11.
6 Finally, it is important to point out that these different categories of self-portrait (as exercise, gift, homage, or allegory) are not mutually exclusive. Likewise, none of them was limited to one sex or another: men and women throughout history have turned their hand to every kind of self-portrait.
7 Works by female artists do nevertheless offer a further category of self-portraiture, one that is very gendered and very much the product of the unique circumstances pertaining in the last third of the eighteenth century in France: the “circumstancial” self-portrait. These were painted by a generation of women who perfectly understood that being noticed by the public (instead of the Academy) as well as attracting press attention was now ever more important for artists who wanted to be recognized as such12. Indeed, fine arts were fashionable as never before in the 1780s: publications about the arts, technical treatises (on drawing, pastels, watercolours and painting) and specialised periodicals had never been so various and their readership so large; Salons and exhibitions (Salon de l’Académie royale ou de l’Académie de Saint-Luc, Salon de la Correspondance) drew a wider and more numerous public; above all, with knowledge of the fine arts spreading in affluent circles, the actual practice of drawing and painting became, at that time, a mark of distinction for the privileged classes. This is one of the reasons that facilitated the integration of artists in the most select circles of polite Parisian society; it is also one of the drivers of the soaring demand for instruction in drawing and painting among the elites13.
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8 In affluent families, drawing and painting occupied an ever-growing place in the education of children, and in particular that of girls – such a thing had never occurred before to this extent. It was in this context that the studios of the most famous artists of the day began, for the first time, to accept these young women from the privileged classes. Greuze, it would seem, had initiated this trend as early as the 1770s, followed a few years later by the young academicians who would come to be known under the label of neo-classicism. David, Suvée, Ménageot, then Meynier, Regnault, Lethière, Girodet... trained dozens of young women to paint beginning in the 1780s. It was also at this time that the Royal Academy inducted two women into its ranks: Elisabeth Vigée- Lebrun (who, little interested in pedagogy, soon closed her teaching studio, leaving her students to go join David’s) and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. The latter, an accomplished teacher, depicted herself in triumph next to her students in the Salon of 1785, while the young members of her studio participated regularly in various exhibitions.
9 This period thus saw the arrival of a whole generation of female painters, often specialising in history painting – the most prestigious genre –, born into the most affluent circles of Parisian society, blessed with an excellent education and, above all, with the finest artistic training available at the time. These young girls, who – and this is a vital point – were not daughters of artists (which is utterly new, since the overwhelming majority of female artists up until then had been daughters, wives, nieces, or sisters of artists) took the world of exhibitions by storm from the second half of the 1780s on: first of all the Exposition de la Jeunesse, then the Salons of the Académie de Saint-Luc and the Salons de la Correspondance. A note of caution, however: it is important to point out that the numbers of female artists did not go through the roof at this time. This new generation of female painters who were not daughters of artists probably only numbered thirty or so. Moreover, there was a larger number – perhaps twice as many? – of women present and working in studios belonging to (male) artists who they were related to. Their work was often invisible (which is also the main reason why it is difficult to know today how many there were exactly) just like the work of the other members of the studios – compagnons, apprentices, or various employees14. With the corporation system, the art world was organized along studio lines where collective work, often in a family environment, took place under the supervision of the master, the only one allowed by law to take commissions and to sell works15. Therefore, the particularity of the 1780s, in this regard, is that female artists suddenly became visible. For the first time, they were to be seen, talked about and listed. Above all, since they arrived ‘as a group’, so to speak, on the painting market, female artists were not spoken of as exceptions for the first time in the history of painting. Their presence, nevertheless, was seen by contemporaries as a new and noteworthy phenomenon, one which was often linked to the dynamism of the French School, whose remarkable renewal at all levels was evident to all16.
10 Women painters were the main focus of debate – we know this thanks to the periodicals, letters and diaries that have come down to us. Indeed, the gazettes’ interest in these young artists was a constant feature of the decade. In its accounts of the Exposition de la Jeunesse, the Mercure de France reviewed the works of nine female and six male artists in 1780; of five women and five men in 1784; of seven women and seven men in 1785 (the longest description being dedicated that year to the paintings of a pupil of David, Mlle Guéret), while an editor at the Journal général de France observed, at
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the same moment that “today, many ladies are picking up painting brushes; and the best paintings at the Place Dauphine this year were by female artists...”17.
11 Meanwhile, between 1782 and 1786, Pahin de la Blancherie sustained the interest for the work of female artists by hosting many of them at his Salon de la Correspondance18, and by dedicating pages of glowing praise to their paintings in his Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Arts: Vigée-Lebrun et Labille-Guiard benefited from this praise, as did Marie-Anne Fragonard and Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux, whose Self-portrait at the harp was noticed at the Salon de la Correspondance in 1786. Probably the same year, works by the Lemoine sisters, Victoire and Elisabeth, were also shown19. More generally, La Blancherie was the first to put forward the idea, taken up in many texts by exhibition reviewers up to and during the Empire, that this period represented some sort of pinnacle of female talent in the arts20. For that matter, this was very much in this spirit that La Blancherie published an article entitled “Femmes Peintres”, which offered a short history of female creativity since Antiquity, ending with praise for Vigée-Lebrun, deemed to be one of the most illustrious female painters in history21.
12 Hence, this general interest on the part of commentators for female artists was driven not only by the fact that they were particularly active at this period (although few in number, truth be told, they were to be seen in all the exhibitions), but also thanks to the strategies these artists managed to put into practice – probably more or less consciously – in order to make the best of the popularity they were enjoying in the art world. The rapid rate at which they produced self-portraits (or portraits of their fellow female artists) was one of these strategies. In 1783, for example, the pupils of Labille- Guiard exhibited at place Dauphine: Victoire d'Avril and Gabrielle Capet, showed self- portraits22,
Gabrielle Capet, Portrait de l’artiste, 1783
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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and Madeleine Frémy exhibited a portrait of Victoire d'Avril. Capet and Frémy are the two pupils depicted by Labille-Guiard in the famous full length self-portrait she presented at the 1785 Salon23.
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-portrait with Two Pupils, 1785
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
13 This self-portrait should also be seen – in my view – as a response to Vigée-Lebrun's, which had been shown at the previous Salon, in a subtle allusion to their induction into the Académie two years earlier24. Indeed, Labille Guiard was then the legitimate candidate, voted for by her peers, while Vigée-Lebrun was the Crown's choice, inducted into the Académie “byordre”25.
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Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Self-portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In her 1785 self-portrait, Labille Guiard thus depicts herself as the master of a school, surrounded by her two best students, and offering a discreet homage, via the presence of a bust of her father sculpted by the academician Pajou, to those who had supported her candidacy for admission26. The message put forward by this canvas was thus in direct opposition to that of the self-portrait known as “in a straw hat”, painted in 1782 and exhibited at the 1783 Salon by Vigée-Lebrun, just after their induction: she is shown in a scene directly inspired by Rubens27. The artist, who highlights her own beauty, depicts herself in place of Suzanne Fourment, Rubens’ model, but the palette she is holding puts her on an equal footing with Rubens himself: as beautiful as the model, as skilful as the master, Vigée-Lebrun depicts herself as an accomplished woman and artist, who owes nothing to anyone, everything to her own talents.
14 But talk about female artists was not limited to exhibition commentaries: they were also at the heart of more general debates on the state of society in the press. Thus, at the close of the Exposition de la Jeunesse in 1785, a debate was sparked and remained alight throughout the summer about the legitimacy of women being artists. The catalyst was the publication of an article, probably by l’abbé de Fontenay, in the Journal général de France, in June 178528. The author remarked upon the “new fad for women to turn artists”, so characteristic of the period, and he counselled prudence to those “parents of the bourgeoisie” who were encouraging their daughters to become painters, thus “depriving them of the opportunity of getting married”.
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Peter Paul Rubens, The Straw Hat, 1622-1625
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
15 This article, with its radical attack on parents and artists, sparked several responses in the same newspaper, which were perhaps written by Fontenay. But the most virulent of the reactions was published in a different newspaper – Le Journal de Paris – by none other than the secretary of the Académie, Antoine Renou29.
16 In this text, Renou presented himself as the “knight of female artists”; he poked fun at Fontenay who “decries the indecency of it all” and “inveighs against guilty parents who allow their daughters to pick up a paintbrush”: “I do not know”, he explained, “whether it is worth it to pile up a great many reasons in order to prove that teaching women to paint is not to spoil them. Holding a paintbrush does not require one to be sturdier, it seems to me, than would holding a needle...”. As a professional artist, he reminded the reader that artists, whether men or women, were not ‘inflamed’ by the sight of naked models, for that was part and parcel of their profession. Finally, against the argument that “there are already too many painters”, Renou responded by naming all the female artists of the century, which proved that “talent does not recognise sex”. He ended with a question: “in a nursery, which young tree will you choose to pull up? Do you not fear destroying one that might have become the pride of the orchard?’ For the secretary of the Académie, the kingdom did not have enough painters of genius for it to have the luxury of snuffing out vocations before the artists – whatever their sex – got to show what they were capable of.
17 As if in answer to Renou, spring 1786 saw female artists given pride of at place Dauphine, and there was a particularly large number of self-portraits by these artists that all the commentators were talking about30. It is difficult to believe that female artists were unaware of the extreme popularity they had been enjoying for the past few
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years. Given the circumstances, it was logical that they take advantage. This is, in my view, the explanation for the fashion of the female self-portrait in this period: these self-portraits were not campaigning in character, but – in a sense – opportunistic; they capitalised on a fashion which had consecrated them. These self-portraits thus apparently formed part of a promotional strategy followed by these young artists. And it was a winning strategy! They became more and more talked about.
18 The most famous example of the efficacy of self-portraiture in promoting these artists is the famous article published by the Mercure de France in June 1786 31, one which is often quoted, but often poorly interpreted, for there is still a tendency to take literally the description drawn by the critic of these young and pretty female artists taking their places on the balconies above their self-portraits in order to allow the viewers to compare at their leisure the works and their models. This scene, which was mentioned nowhere else at the time (neither in papers, nor in letters or in the Mémoires secrets whose author just loved this type of episode), seems more the product of wishful thinking than of a realistic description. The critic whips up the attractive theme of self- portraits by young female artists into a piece of whimsy, which concludes with a moralising call on artists to embrace work and modesty.
19 With the advent of the Revolution, this motif of the female artist changed and took on a different aspect. From the very first months of the Revolution, women artists once again were appearing publicly, this time not as talented professionals, but first as representatives of the community of artists, then as representatives of the female community. On September 7, 1789, eleven women, either artists and/or parents of artists, led by Adélaïde Moitte (draughtswoman and wife of the sculptor, Jean- Guillaume Moitte), arrived at the Constituant Assembly in Versailles, dressed all in white and wearing a tricolour belt32. Standing before the French deputies, they would offer their jewels to the Nation as a contribution towards paying off the national debt. Everyone at the time made the link between the artists’ gesture and the mythical generosity of the Roman matrons, anxious to save the imperilled Republic – an episode in Roman history perfectly familiar to everyone at the end of the eighteenth century. Before the Assembly, these women were introduced as “wives or daughters of artists”, but the majority (Mrs Vien, Moitte, Suvée, Duvivier, Fragonard, David, as well as Ms Vestier, Gérard, etc.) were themselves artists. A few days later, a certain Mme Rigal, a goldsmith, made a new appeal, in the name of women artists, for a voluntary contribution which, this time, was addressed to all the women of France. We know, thanks to the engraver Wille, that Mme Pajou passed on this appeal to the artists at the Louvre33. We are artists, we are citizens; we are either mothers, or sisters or wives of artists and citizens. [...] The fatherland is our common family. [...] Two virtuous farmers from Champenil have set an example for their sex. A few artists from Versailles have set an example for ours. Their noble gesture has touched us, and through us, will touch all the women of France.34
20 These two successive public expressions of patriotic virtue by women artists show that, at the end of the eighteenth century, they constituted a group sufficiently recognizable and respected to be able to claim an exemplary role with regard to all the women of the realm. After this episode, women artists no longer appear as a special category, but they remained at the forefront in all the changes that were marking the art world during the revolutionary period. Perhaps it would be useful at this point to quickly recall what these events were before returning to the question of self-portraiture35.
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21 All of 1790 was taken up with a debate in the Académie, since the need for reform of the artistic scene was clear to all. In July, the painters Restout and David broke with the other members of the Académie, taking with them some of the agréés36 and, in September, uniting with a number of artists who were not members of the Académie, they founded the Commune des Arts ayant le dessin pour base. This latter institution was open to all, as long as one could claim a certain number of years of professional experience in “one of the arts that were based on drawing”. At the same time, several points of contention divided members of the Académie. On September 23, 1790, Labille- Guiard rose to speak during a meeting and proposed that members vote in favor of equality between the sexes (which they unanimously did). But the director of the Académie, the painter Vien, was not present at this meeting and took this pretext to refuse the vote on the admission of women. This episode subsequently led the Officers of the Académie to break away and form a third independent group.
22 Meanwhile, however, the deputies of the Constituant Assembly were pressuring artists to get around to providing reform proposals that would allow the representatives of the Nation to make decisions in this regard. At the end of 1790, the group of the Officiers, on one side, and the “reformers” (led by the painters Vincent and Labille- Guiard, as well as their friend, the engraver Miger, all three members of the Académie), on the other, each tendered their reform proposals to the National Assembly. The “reformers” proposed the founding of a Central Academy for the Arts, based on the notion of equality between the sexes of the artists and between the genres of art. A few months later, in the spring of 1791, the Commune des Arts would do the same and hand their own project of reform. This last proposal left unresolved the question of the acceptance or not of women to their body. They actually recommended the exclusion of women, but left the decision “to the lawmaker”. The issue may seem of secondary importance; in reality, it was crucial. By asking the Constituent Assembly to decide whether women should be allowed among them, they were in fact asking for a clarification of what sort of group they were: if women were refused, the Commune des Arts was an assembly of representatives for the community of artists (i.e. where some artists, nominated by political authority and thus selected on criteria that were not artistic per se, represented the others); if women were accepted, the Commune des Arts was an assembly of professionals (i.e. where every professional artist is a rightful member).
23 In June 1791, however, the Flight to Varenne threw the Constituent Assembly’s agenda into lasting disarray. Moreover, most of the summer was given over to the organisation by the Ministry of the Interior of the first Salon libre, which took place in August. In September, the Constituent Assembly, in an effort to bring about a reconciliation between the deputies and the monarchy, commissioned a double portrait of the King swearing allegiance on the Constitution. Symbolically, this commission was crucially important. Two painters were approached: David and Labille-Guiard, representatives of the two rival parties not only within the world of art (the secessionists of the Commune de l’art versus the reformers of the Central Academy for the arts), but also within the world of politics (Jacobins to whom David was close, versus Feuillants to whom Labille- Guiard was close). This double commission put them on an equal footing and made it seem as if the reform of the Académie was still very much in the cards. But, the road to war and the tensions within the National Assembly regarding about whether the King should be maintained or not meant that the arts were once again side-lined. In August
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1792, the monarchy was overthrown once and for all; in September, David was elected to the Convention among the Montagnards. He became a central figure in the world of art, influential in matters where aesthetics met politics. When the Convention needed a partner in the field of the fine arts, they thus naturally turned to the Commune générale des arts, co-founded by David the year before. The Académie royale, which had been effectively irrelevant for months, was abolished in August 1793; the idea of a Central Academy was all the more easily shelved now that its spokesmen – Vincent and Labille-Guiard – had left Paris; the Commune générale des arts could then take over as the sole institution capable of attracting and representing artists. The minutes of the meetings in September 1793 show that women attended and spoke at will37: the recommendations made by the founders of the Commune générale des arts regarding the possible exclusion of women had thus not been acted upon between the end of August and the middle of October 1793. We even possess a list of the artists admitted during this period because it was decided that the names of the new artists should be recorded in the minutes. Over these six weeks, a hundred or so artists entered the Commune générale des arts, in the proportion of one woman for every five men (a rate much higher than the one-in-10 exhibitors at the revolutionary Salons).
24 At the end of 1793 however the Commune générale des arts came into conflict with the Convention over the question of admission criteria. The Société populaire et républicaine des arts was created in the wake of these tensions by the engraver-deputy Antoine Sergent: this Société replaced the Commune des arts, and allowed anyone interested in the arts (whether artists or not) to join, as long as they were good and active citizens. Henceforth new members entered by being co-opted (four recommendations by existing members were required), then a “purification” committee examined the Republican credentials of each candidate. In other words, admission was not based on artistic skill, but rather on the type of citizen the applicant was. At the close of 1793, the session during which women were excluded was particularly stormy: the minutes reveal that women were present and took part freely in the debate. As a result of this meeting, however, they no longer had the right to either vote or speak in this assembly (which did not mean, of course, that they were no longer permitted to be artists – no one, then, questioned the fact that the Salon could be open to all, and to women in particular).
25 In the summer of 1794, the events of Thermidor once again changed the situation. Robespierre was put to death, David imprisoned. At the end of October 1794, at the Société populaire et républicaine des arts, the debate on the admission of women was spontaneously reopened by the members who were present (thus, men), and a majority voted for the return of their female counterparts38. In the end, women would only have been statutorily excluded from the community of artists for the ten months during which that community no longer defined itself along purely professional lines, but rather based on exogenous criteria (whether civic, moral, or political).
26 All these debates, however, took place in the realm of law and politics. In reality, no one ever considered excluding women from the actual business of painting during the Revolution. Thus, in the Salon libre during the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century, we find several of these women artists who had made a name for themselves on the place Dauphine in the 1780s. Self-portrait remained a genre they were drawn to. It is, needless to say, difficult to work out why: the focus was not on women anymore then, so one cannot really talk in terms of “circumstantial” self-
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portraiture. Motivation probably varied from artist to artist, for the art market was going through an economic crisis that left it languishing from the middle of the 1790s on.
27 Without drawing general conclusions, we can nevertheless give some raw statistics.
28 First of all, self-portraits, in the strict sense of the term, were a very small part of the works exhibited by artists of either sex during this period. Between 1791 and 1799, out of approximately 5200 works exhibited at the Salon, there were only forty or so self- described self-portraits put on show by either men or women, i.e. less than 1% of the overall total.
29 Now, while 7% of the works (taken as a whole) were exhibited by women over this period, in the case of self-portraits it was 16%, which indicates a slight overrepresentation of women in this genre – however, given the very small numbers, the trend is not conclusive39. Moreover, due to a lack of time, the Salons from 1800-1810 have not been included in these statistics of exhibited works. We do know, however, that several well-known female self-portraits, were shown to the public during this decade, like the ones by Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Constance Mayer, Henriette Lorimier ou Nisa Villers, which all date from 1800-180140.
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Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Autoportrait, 1800
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Constance Mayer, Portrait de l’artiste, c. 1800
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Constance Mayer, Portrait en pied d’un père et de sa fille
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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Henriette Lorimier, Autoportrait, c. 1801
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Marie-Denise (aka Nisa) Villers, Jeune fille dessinant, 1801
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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Let us also mention the very moving Atelier de Mme Vincent en 1800, by Gabrielle Capet (1808), which combines self-portraiture and portraits of artists from her circle of friends in a fictional scene illustrating to perfection the notion of artistic inheritance41.
Gabrielle Capet, L’atelier de Mme Vincent vers 1800, 1808
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
30 Finally, since it seems to me that the vogue for depicting women at their easels is not limited to self-portraits, I have put together a category of “works featuring artists”, which includes, in addition to self-portraits, portraits of painters, sculptors and draughtsmen of both sexes (not an easy task, since at this time the word “artiste”, frequent in the titles of exhibited paintings, could as easily refer, without any further indication, to a painter, a musician or an actor), whether named or anonymous. I have also taken account of allegorical or mythical representations of the act of pictorial creation (such as scenes involving Dibutade or Zeuxis for example). Of course, in the absence of the paintings, many canvases have also been set aside due to their titles not being explicit. In this perspective, representations of museums, for instance, which were frequent at the time, have not been counted, even though they often included depictions of women drawing42. Likewise, the painters of several portraits depicting artists in the act of drawing or painting, did not necessarily mention this fact in the title. These paintings are thus not counted either. On the other hand, I have included paintings that are strongly suspected of being self-portraits (such as Geneviève Bouliar’s Aspasie 43) or portraits of other artists like the Portrait d’une élève de David, attributed to Aimée Duvivier44.
31 Thus, between 1791 and 1799, ‘works featuring artists’ numbered 130, i.e. between 2 and 3% of the total number of works exhibited. Above all, 20% of works in this category were exhibited by women. As for the subjects depicted: among the works featuring
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artists (apart from self-portraits of course), women tended to depict other women; the same holds for men, who were more likely to depict – in the same proportions – men. Moreover, when the subject was a woman, whether painted or sculpted by a man or a woman, two thirds of the works depicted an anonymous artist (in the tradition of Boilly on this theme45); when the subject depicted was a man, on the other hand, his identity was given in 80% of cases. All of this confirms that there was indeed a marked public taste at the time for images of women painting or drawing. As we have already seen, this fashion is attested to by the fact that self-portraits by the new generation of women artists were regularly exhibited in the 1780s. But, as these figures also show, male artists also managed to find a place in this visual space by devoting a number of works to genre scenes or allegorical scenes depicting a woman with a stylus or paintbrush in her hand.
32 In post-revolutionary France, with the image of women painting becoming so commonplace that it even made it into fashion engravings46, the idea of a ‘natural alliance between female faculties and fine arts’47 seems to have become part of the collective imagination. This radical change in discourse on the arts can be illustrated, for instance, by the report written in April 1796 by Victor Chapelain, a deputy from the Vendée region, following a complaint made to the Conseil des Cinq Cents by a painter, Mme Quévanne, whose maiden name was Chézy48. Mme Quévanne, a candidate for the post of professor of drawing which had opened up at the Ecole centrale de Chartres, had been rejected in the end ‘because of her sex’. Judging that she had been unjustly treated, she drew up a petition and submitted it to the National Assembly. This case is extremely interesting, firstly because it shows that the idea of a woman applying for a teaching job in a boys school was completely conceivable, so much so that the protests of the rejected candidate were deemed worthy of consideration by the deputies, who were called upon to make a discussion. Here is what Chapelain wrote in his report: It would be socially harmful if women, leaving their sphere, were to give in to the mania for science [...] [But] I think we should encourage their education rather than curbing it. We have neglected them too much; it is a delight to have enlightened women around us. [...] The nervous system of women is not sufficiently robust to allow them to penetrate the intricacies of the abstract sciences: the nerve bundles are too sensitive, the fibres tense up, and the machine goes into convulsions. [...] The same is not true of the arts,
33 Because “drawing is an institution common to both sexes”, the deputy proposed that the Conseil des Cinq Cents accede to the request of citizen Quévanne, and henceforth authorise women to apply to teaching posts in the arts. Indeed, since the educational reforms begun under the Revolution and continued under the Consulate and the Empire, sciences had shared an equal place in the public teaching curricula aimed at boys. Sciences, like politics, were associated with Reason, Culture, Action – virile pursuits if ever there were any; in this respect, they were clearly distinct from the arts —instinctive, imitative and emotional pursuits , in which women were supposed to naturally excel. These associations were so obvious to Chapelain that he proposed to break with the principle of non-mixing in teaching (despite the fact that it featured in the law on education of Brumaire, Year IV) by encouraging deputies to vote in favour of the naming of women as teachers of drawing in the écoles centrales.
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34 It is clear then that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the arts were still a matter of ‘sensitivity’, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment had explained, but, while it was seen as a universal attribute in a period where the “honnête home” was the cultural ideal, at the beginning of the following century it gradually became a character trait linked with youth and femininity, which both had in common a tendency for irrationality.
35 After Chapelain’s report had been delivered, the issue was debated in open session, but with the Assembly failing to reach a consensus, the decision was postponed. Then, with political turmoil causing the agenda to be changed, no decision was reached in the case of Mme Chézy-Quévanne. This failure of the legislative branch to take a decision, in the end, highlights the place of women in the fine arts at the turn of the nineteenth century: directly benefiting from the inertia of post-Revolutionary institution in this domain, from favourable conditions created in the world of art at the end of the Ancien Régime (notably, in terms of access to the same types of training as men50) and from this new ‘feminised’ perception of the fine arts which paved the way to making the status of professional female painter relatively unremarkable, women artists during the first decades of the nineteenth century enjoyed a golden age (which could be described as an “enchanted parenthesis”), without any official measure helping them on their way.
36 The frequency with which women artists indulged in self-portraiture at the end of the eighteenth century should thus be resituated in the larger context of the conspicuous fashion for images of “women painting”. As a consequence, the image of women in front of easels, or drawing, became extremely common in the early nineteenth century: this phenomenon can be linked to the evolution of the fine arts and their “feminisation” in the collective imagination in the wake of the Revolution. As a more positivist and masculine conception of technical and scientific progress took hold, the fine arts became associated with sensitivity and attention to detail which, in the imagery of the period, were feminine traits. It is understandable from then on, that, in an art world where, if not encouraged, their vocation was at least tolerated, and where they benefited from training and working conditions very close to those of men, women had little to gain from banding together to lay claim to a specifically female tradition of creativity. It would not be until 1880, with the creation of l’Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, that a shared female identity in the fine arts would once again be foregrounded. By that time, the situation had considerably changed, the arts having become virile again in the public mind, and the academic system having fallen into crisis. But that is another story…
NOTES
1. Pierre Vaisse, “L’artiste face à lui-même”, in Alain Bonnet and Hélène Jagot eds., L’artiste en représentation. Images des artistes dans l’art du XIXe siècle, Lyon, Fage, 2012, p. 31.
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2. See, for example: Amédée Van Loo, Autoportrait présumé, 1769, washed drawing in pencil and red pencil, private collection. 3. See, for instance: Joseph Ducreux, Autoportrait en homme surpris et terrorisé, c. 1791, private collection, http://www.wikiart.org/en/joseph-ducreux/autoportrait-en-homme-surpris-et- terroris-1791, accessed 17 May 2016; Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Autoportrait à l’abat-jour vert, pastel, 1775, Louvre, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Sim%C3%A9on_Chardin#/media/File:Jean- Baptiste_Sim%C3%A9on_Chardin_023.jpg, accessed 17 May 2016; Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Autoportrait au monocle, 1777, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Anna_Dorothea_Therbusch#/media/File:Anna_Dorothea_Therbusch_001.jpg, accessed 17 May 2016. 4. Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits. European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990. 5. See, for instance: Thomas Gainsborough, Self-Portrait, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1787. This is a self-portrait in evening dress which was a gift to his friend Abel, and which he expressly hoped would be used as a model for engravings to be made after his death. 6. See, for example: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Autoportrait, Florence, Galerie des Offices, 1790, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lebrun,_Self-portrait.jpg, accessed 17 May, 2016. 7. See, for instance: Angelica Kauffmann, Portrait de l’artiste hésitant entre la Musique et la Peinture, Moscow, Pushkin Museum, 1792. 8. See, for example: Louis Michel Van Loo, Louis Michel Van Loo peignant le portrait de son père, Musée national du Château de Versailles, 1762. 9. Anton Van Dyck, Autoportrait au tournesol, 1632-1633, private collection. 10. Gustave Courbet, L’Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 1854-1855. 11. See, for example, what is presumed to be Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s first self-portrait, an allegory of painting: La Peinture, 1774, private collection (exhibited at l’Académie de Saint-Luc). On the myth of Dibutade, see Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux “La ‘fille de Dibutade’ ou l’inventrice inventée”, Les Cahiers du Genre, “Genre, féminisme et valeur de l’art”, S. Sofio, P. E. Yavuz and P. Molinier eds., n° 43, 2007/2, p. 133-151. 12. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1985. 13. For more information about this important social and cultural change, I refer the reader to the work I have already published on this topic: Séverine Sofio, La Parenthèse enchantée. Genre et production des beaux-arts 1750-1850, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2016. 14. Melissa Hyde, « Les femmes et les arts plastiques au temps de Marie-Antoinette », in Anne Vallayer-Coster, peintre à la cour de Marie-Antoinette, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, Somogy, 2003, p. 75-93. 15. In this respect, the situation changed after 1777, when a royal edict created the category of independent artist (“artiste libre”) open to all as long as the work produced was artistic by nature. On this topic, see Séverine Sofio, « Vivre de son pinceau, de la corporation des maîtres peintres à l’émergence du marché de l’art (1750-1850) », in Agnès Graceffa ed., Vivre de son art: histoire du statut de l’artiste, XVe-XXIe siècles, Paris, Hermann, 2012, p. 65-76. There were an estimated 300 artists of both sexes active in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. For details and the sources for this estimate, see S. Sofio, La Parenthèse enchantée, op. cit., chap. 1. 16. With the establishment of the category of independent artist and the return from Rome of the first “neo-classical” artists (at the end of the 1770s-very beginning of the 1780s) occurring at the same time, contemporaries were quick to speak of a ‘regenerated’ French School and a new golden age for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, whose glory and monopolies had been restored after the elimination in 1776 of its rival, the Académie de Saint-Luc. 17. Journal général de France, 14 juin 1785, p. 282.
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18. See Laura Auricchio, “Pahin de la Blancherie’s Commercial Cabinet of Curiosity (1779-1787)”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36, n° 1, 2002, p. 47-61. 19. Marie-Elisabeth Lemoine, Self-portrait, circa 1785, private collection; Marie-Victoire Lemoine, Self-portrait, 1786, Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts. 20. “A propos of the artist in question [Labille-Guiard], it has been said: Let’s go see a woman who is a deft man with a brush. We have today several artists, to whom, to the glory of their sex, the same remark applies…”, Pahin de la Blancherie, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Arts, 8 janvier 1783. 21. Pahin de la Blancherie, “Femmes Peintres”, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Arts, 2 April 1783. 22. Gabrielle Capet, Portrait de l’artiste, 1783, Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, https:// fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Gabrielle_Capet#/media/File:Marie-Gabrielle_Capet_-_1783.jpg, accessed 17 May 2016. 23. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-portrait with Two Pupils, 1785, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436840, accessed 17 May 2016. 24. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Self-portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782, London, National Gallery, https:// www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/elisabeth-louise-vigee-le-brun-self-portrait-in-a-straw- hat, accessed 17 May 2016. 25. This phrase figures in the minutes of the proceedings of the 31 May 1783 meeting. 26. The self-portrait doubtless left an impression on her contemporaries, since Jean-Laurent Mosnier took inspiration from it in a self-portrait the following year: Portrait de l’artiste dans son atelier, 1786, St. Petersbourg, The Hermitage Museum. 27. Peter Paul Rubens, The Straw Hat, 1622-1625, London, National Gallery, https:// www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-portrait-of-susanna-lunden-le- chapeau-de-paille, accessed 17 May 2016. 28. Journal général de France, n°71, 14 juin 1785, p. 283. 29. Journal de Paris, 9 juillet 1785, p. 787-789. 30. For instance, Marie-Guillemine Laville-Leroulx, Portrait of the Artist, 1786, (private collection), in which the artist, already known as having inspired verses by Charles-Albert Demoustiers, depicts herself with a good deal of bare flesh. This painting attracted comments from many critics at the time. 31. “On the 22nd of this month, I entered the Place Dauphine, and […] I heard people around repeatedly say: That’s the portrait of Mlle..., painted by herself. Right afterwards, I heard again people repeatedly saying: You can decide for yourself how good the resemblances are, for the originals are here. Take a look at the windows, you’ll see them. I raised my eyes, and I indeed saw half a dozen balconies on which were young ladies, some adorned with nothing but their natural charms, others with every sort of enhancement, and I have to admit that this spectacle was at least as interesting as the one it had diverted my eyes. My head held high, my monocle focused in their direction, I was delighting in the image that was before me, when a man […] I recognised as an artist, woke me out of my ecstasy by speaking in the following terms: “[…] What is this desire to show oneself off? What use is it? […] Moreover, I never see any good coming from talent that is coquettish”. Struck by the truth of these observations, I pulled my hat down on my head, and I turned my mind from these creators whose eyes had almost dominated my judgement, and I devoted my attention thereafter only to their works. Mlle Verrier, Mlle Alexandre et Mlle Rosemond were among them.”, Mercure de France, samedi 1er juillet 1786, p. 30-32. 32. Le don patriotique des Illustres Françaises, 1789, engraving, Vizille, Musée de la Révolution française. 33. Wille thus wrote in his diary: “on 15 September I received a letter Mme Pajou had addressed to my wife, obviously believing her to be still alive, in order to invite her to send her jewels, like
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other female artists had done, in order to make a collective patriotic donation to the Nation”, Mémoires et Journal de J.-G. Wille, graveur du Roi, Paris, Renouard, 1857, t. II, p. 312. 34. Discours prononcé par Mme Rigal..., s.l., s.d.[1789], p.1-7 35. For a more detailed analysis of the art world suring the Revolutionary period, see S. Sofio, La Parenthèse enchantée, op. cit., chap. 3. 36. Part of the Académie, the agréés were members with no rights within the Compagnie. The membres reçus were the next rank above; then came the Officiers, who made up the governing elite of the Académie. 37. H. Lapauze, Procès verbaux de la commune générale des arts et de la société́ républicaine des arts, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1903, p. 52. 38. H. Lapauze, Procès verbaux, op. cit., p. 334. 39. See, for instance, the two self-portraits by Constance Charpentier, which she exhibited at two successive Salons: Portrait de l’artiste, 1798 and Portrait de l’artiste avec sa fille, 1799, private collection. Also, Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, Portrait de l’artiste, 1799, Rouen, musée des Beaux-Arts. 40. Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, Autoportrait, 1800, Louvre, http://art.rmngp.fr/fr/library/ artworks/hortense-haudebourt-lescot_portrait-de-l-artiste_huile-sur-toile accessed on 17 May 2016; Constance Mayer, Portrait de l’artiste, c. 1800, Bibliothèque Marmottan, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Constance_Mayer_%281801%29.jpg accessed 17 May 1016 and Portrait en pied d’un père et de sa fille. Il lui indique le buste de Raphaël en l’invitant à prendre pour modèle ce peintre célèbre, 1801, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Constance_Mayer#/media/ File:Constance_Mayer_Portrait_en_pied_d%27un_p%C3%A8re_et_de_sa_fille.jpg, accessed 17 May 2016; Henriette Lorimier, Autoportrait, c. 1801, private collection; and Marie-Denise (aka Nisa) Villers, Jeune fille dessinant, 1801, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http:// www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437903 accessed 17 May 2016. 41. Gabrielle Capet, L’atelier de Mme Vincent vers 1800, 1808, Munich, Neue Pinakothek, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie-Gabrielle_Capet_-_Atelier_of_Madame_Vincent_- _1808.jpg, accessed 17 May 1016. 42. Voir par exemple: Hubert Robert, Projet pour la Grande Galerie, c. 1798, Paris, Musée du Louvre ; et La Salle des Saisons au Louvre, 1804, Paris, Musée du Louvre. 43. Geneviève Bouliar, Aspasie, v. 1796, Arras, Musée des Beaux-Arts. 44. Aimée Duvivier, Une femme peinte à son chevalet (Portrait d’une élève de David), 1791, private collection. 45. See, for instance: Louis Léopold Boilly, La leçon de dessin, 1796, Williamstown, Clarks Institute or Une peintre, 1785, Saint-Petersbourg, The Hermitage Museum. 46. This iconography is frequent, notably in Le Journal des dames et des modes under the Empire. 47. Albertine Adrienne Necker de Saussure, L’éducation progressive, ou Étude du cours de la vie (Tome 3e, Étude de la vie des femmes), Paris, Paulin, 1838, p. 152. 48. Mme Chézy-Quévanne was a portraitist, and a student of Michel-Honoré Bounieu. She exhibited at the 1802 Salon. See P.[aul] L.[acroix] “Les femmes exclues de l’enseignement des beaux-arts par la République française”, Revue universelle des arts, n°17, 1863, p. 55-61. 49. Rapport Chapelain, séance du 5 floréal an IV [25 avril 1796], reprinted in Lacroix, art. cit. 50. See Séverine Sofio, “‘Mon élève que je regarde comme l’un de mes meilleurs ouvrages...’ Former les jeunes filles à la peinture dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle”, Alain Bonnet and France Nerlich eds., Apprendre à peindre. Les ateliers privés à Paris 1780-1863, Tours, Presses de l’Université François Rabelais, 2013, p. 105-116.
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ABSTRACTS
In this text, I study the practice of painted self-portraiture in late eighteenth-century France, with a focus on the social and material conditions that could lead artists to depict themselves. Then, I examine self-portraiture as practised by women in the context of the unprecedented process of feminisation the Parisian art world was then undergoing – one of the consequences of which was, precisely, the sudden vogue for images of women at their easels.
Ce texte traite des aspects sociaux et matériels de la pratique de l’autoportrait peint, en France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Est ensuite spécifiquement abordée la pratique de l’autoportrait par les peintres femmes, dans le contexte de la féminisation inédite du monde de l’art parisien qui caractérise cette période et dont un des corollaires est, justement, la vogue soudaine des images de femmes à leur chevalet.
INDEX
Mots-clés: autoportrait, peinture, artistes femmes, salons, critique, mode Keywords: self portrait, painting, women artists, salons, critics, fashion
AUTHORS
SÉVERINE SOFIO CNRS Cresppa-CSU (UMR 7217)
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