Coups de maître

Figures

Figure 9.1. A Breakdown of Who Interacts with La Cour in Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves

Figure 9.2. Princesse de Clèves Ego-Network

Figure 9.3. Summation of Total Interactions of the Princesse Throughout Novel

Figure 9.4. Summation of Total Interactions by Nemours Throughout Novel

Figure 10.1. The Eavesdropper by Nicolaes Maes (1657)

Figure 16.1. ‘Integral Approximations’ Graph: y = √x, 0 ≤ x ≤ 1, 0 ≤ y ≤ 1

Figure 17.1. Title Page of François Rabelais’s Tiers Livre (1546)

Figure 18.1. The Four Philosophers by Pieter Paul Rubens (1611–12)

Tables

Table 9.1a. Breakdown of La Princesse de Clèves by Types of Exchanges of Top Five Characters

Table 9.1b. Percentage of Recipient/Subject Interactions Involving One Person

Table 9.2. Expected Distribution of Interaction

Table 9.3. Deviation between Observed and Expected Interactions

Foreword

JOHN D. LYONS

J’avais lu un certain nombre de ses ouvrages, admiré sans réserve sa connaissance du domaine auquel il consacrait son attention (sans compter quelques excursions plus lointaines), et surtout la finesse de ses lectures, non seulement informées mais surtout minutieuses et à mon sens parfaitement pertinentes. C’est à Avignon qu’en été nous nous sommes rencontrés, il faisait une chaleur très forte comme souvent en juillet dans la basse vallée du Rhône, il enseignait alors à Lyon pour une université d’été comme elles abondent heureusement dans le sud de la France. J’ai remarqué qu’il portait de fortes chaussures qui n’avaient rien d’estival. Nous nous connaissions par les textes de l’un et de l’autre que nous avions lus, et la rencontre physique a pris immédiatement un tour plus personnel et très vite amical. John était d’un tempérament réservé, peu expansif, mais visiblement ouvert et attentif aux autres. Peu à peu nous nous sommes apprivoisés, avons dépassé nos timidités respectives, et une amitié s’est nouée au fil des mois et des ans.

J’ai commencé ensuite à relire les études littéraires de John, ses livres, les publications qu’il a bien voulues me communiquer ; il a aussi participé volontiers à des entreprises collectives auxquelles je l’avais convié. Depuis toujours impressionné par son scrupule, son attention minutieuse à la lettre des textes, l’intelligence d’interprétation qu’il déployait, j’ai eu de plus en plus d’estime pour son acuité et sa modestie. Il s’intéressait pour l’essentiel aux textes du XVIIe siècle, ne se laissant pas enfermer dans l’étiquette « classique » et ouvrant au contraire au plus large le panorama.

John a une capacité hors du commun pour apprendre et s’assimiler les langues, bien sûr il parle français comme homme de France, mais aussi italien qu’il pratique avec aisance, s’est mis à l’allemand récemment, mais ←xv | xvi→aussi en accord avec ses origines au gaélique, et sans doute depuis que nous ne nous sommes pas vus, d’autres encore. Signe d’une insatiable curiosité, et d’une disponibilité à l’autre peu commune.

Preface

From the first time I met John D. Lyons, it was clear to me that he would be just the sort of graduate advisor every student hopes for: someone who pushes you and provides direction amid a sea of research, someone who understands when life forces you to take a step back and helps you chart a new path forward and someone who never stops believing in your potential to succeed. A class with John was a place where ideas flowed freely and the seventeenth century came alive. His passion for developing knowledge of the period and original critical thought in his students helped to form multiple generations of scholars. John was known among his graduate students for his detailed constructive suggestions for improvement that helped to refine an argument without inserting himself into it. John was always effusive in his praise of good work, but only when it was truly deserved, which made it all the more meaningful.

To write a doctoral thesis with John was to be given the freedom to think broadly and originally about one’s topic, but with clear guidelines and expectations to keep the work moving forward, despite several new jobs, major relocations and a growing family. I once asked John to advise me on some of these life choices and his response was clear: unconditional support of my academic work and the timelines I had set for myself, and a firm belief that I could accomplish whatever I set my mind to.

The studies contained in this book are a testament not only to John’s prolific critical contributions to the study of European literature and culture, but also to his generosity as a colleague, as a reader and as a human being. As this collection shows, John’s influence on the scholarship of the early modern period has increased exponentially through his students and colleagues to touch thousands of graduate and undergraduate students around the world.

Part I, ‘Corneille, Racine and Molière’, honours John’s extensive work on the study of early modern theatre. From his first book A Theatre of Disguise: Studies in French Baroque Drama (1978) to his more recent book Tragedy and the Return of the Dead (2018), John’s invaluable contributions ←xviii | xix→to the study of early modern theatre span more than four decades. Hélène Merlin-Kajman opens this first part of the volume with a chapter that pays homage to John’s extensive work on chance and Pierre Corneille. Merlin-Kajman suggests the presence of a phantom in Corneille’s Clitandre that could be one of the keys to the avalanche of chance that Lyons has highlighted in his important work on the topic. This chapter further interrogates the meaning that literary interpretations have given to chance and the transitional function of literary objects (in short, between chance and exemplarity). Églantine Morvant turns our attention to questions of power and clemency, using Hannah Arendt’s reflections on freedom and authority and Lyons’s analysis of the ‘historical logic of Empire’ in Corneille’s Cinna to show how clemency is inscribed in a certain temporality. Time and the practice of power are two determining factors that bring Auguste back to his humanity, and lead him to renounce his tyrannical rule over Rome, a generous political act of clemency that legitimates his power and grants him authority.

We have chosen to end this part on the seventeenth-century dramatists with two chapters on Molière, as it is the subject of John’s current book project. Georges Forestier studies two versions of Le Malade imaginaire that were printed in official editions of Molière’s Œuvres, one in 1675 and the other in 1682. Forestier shows how the undoubtedly authentic truth of a text was deliberately put in doubt in order to replace it with another text that was better written, better matched with the burgeoning legend of Molière and more financially beneficial for Molière’s widow and her editors. Finally, Forestier wonders if the counterfeit text from the 1682 edition that has since become the ‘true’ text, due to its sacralization during the past three centuries, is not ultimately ‘truer’ than the original, authentic text. To conclude Part I, Noël Peacock’s contribution on Molière’s parody of tragedy considers the trend over the last thirty years towards a darker, more tragic interpretation of Molière’s plays. Peacock examines the action of three plays, L’École des femmes, L’Avare and Le Misanthrope, to assess the extent to which the modern reconceptualizing of a tragic Molière contrasts with what is known of perceptions in Molière’s time, and suggests that a way forward in regard to the generic hybridity is to view the plays as a parody of tragic form.

Part II contains four wonderfully diverse chapters on the collaborative literary milieu of the salon. Kathleen Wine’s contribution, on Georges de Scudéry’s Ibrahim ou l’illustre bassa, questions the interplay between collaboration, merit and chance in Scudéry’s romance, suggesting that the hero’s authorial manipulation of chance ensures recognition of his merit. Hélène Bilis inventories all of the social exchanges between characters in Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves through a quantitative network analysis approach. Bilis follows Lyons’s cue to home in on the exterior forms of interaction (i.e. verbal, narrated, physical, exchanges of objects) and suggests that in visualizing and quantifying the exchanges in Lafayette’s plot, we can draw back from the emotional paroxysms of the linear narrative and explore the novel’s varying ‘economies’ of communication and circulation from a new vantage point. Harriet Stone also considers Lafayette’s description of social interactions in La Princesse de Clèves, but through the gaze of The Eavesdropper, a genre painting by Dutch artist Nicolaes Maes. The Dutch model, with its emphasis on realistic details, highlights ←xx | xxi→description that is empirically accurate but that nevertheless encourages multiple meanings rather than privilege a unique interpretation. Applying this model to the aftermath of the princess’s confession to her husband, Stone reveals how Lafayette opens the text to new spaces of knowledge, much as the painting opens the rooms of the house. The final chapter in Part II, by Faith E. Beasley on François Bernier, explores how literature, indeed knowledge itself, in seventeenth-century France arose out of creative collaboration, with many voices, male and female, worldly and scholarly, all contributing to the development of new knowledge and written texts to express it. When read as part of a complex conversation with his varied contemporaries, Beasley argues, Bernier’s texts exhibit a plurality of meanings that we must understand to extend beyond the linguistic function of the words on the page. When revived, these conversations composed of interlocutors that have been silenced by succeeding centuries can enrich the history of ideas in significant ways.

Part III, ‘Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal’, our final author-specific section in the volume, contains five chapters on these prominent penseurs of the early modern period. George Hoffmann explores some of the pseudo-scientific theories of imagination that began to take shape in the seventeenth century. He argues that the demonological objectification of doubt, more than Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne, inspired Descartes’s reflections on imagination in the Meditations. In particular, Hoffmann argues, Descartes’s promotion of indubitability as a standard for philosophical proof coincided with the rise of standards of absolute certainty for faith. Hall Bjørnstad’s contribution considers Montaigne’s and Pascal’s use of the gradation from beasts to angels in order to express the all-too-human effort to overcome our creaturely condition and the inevitable downfall to which such an angelism leads. Bjørnstad argues that both authors stage a failure of traditional exemplarity that is so spectacular that this failure itself becomes exemplary and highlights the extreme difference in world view between the two authors: two radical and radically different early expressions of the ills of a secular modern world that is still ours today. Erec Koch also offers a comparative study of Montaigne and Pascal, but from the perspective of intertextuality. Koch employs plagiarism software to examine the citation of Montaigne by Pascal, with the aim of ←xxi | xxii→delimiting how citation functions within Pascal’s Pensées, on one hand, and on the other, of reconciling two different models of citation used in Pascal’s text: elaboration and displacement.

Shifting our focus more exclusively to Pascal, Nicholas Hammond considers questions of exemplarity and conversation at Port-Royal through the lens of a lesser known Entretien avec M. de Sacy, held between Louis-Isaac Le Maistre de Sacy and his secretary Nicolas Fontaine around 1650 on the subject of reading and education, five years before the famous Entretien between Pascal and Sacy that was noted down by Fontaine. In the final chapter of Part III, Richard E. Goodkin gestures towards Lyons’s Phantom of Chance (2012) in order to examine chance’s role in the mathematical work of Pascal, Fermat and d’Alembert. Goodkin highlights the conflict between the empirical and the conceptual at the heart of calculus, and the early modern (and modern) conflict between quantitative and qualitative knowledge.

Parts IV and V are organized more broadly around the themes and literary mo(ve)ments that have been most influential in John’s research, but that also, like John’s work, extend beyond the borders of France and the seventeenth century. Part IV, ‘Renaissance, Baroque, Classicisme’, brings together studies that consider certain lesser known texts and authors, or challenge commonly held interpretations of other better-known authors of the period. Virginia Krause begins this part by evoking Mireille Huchon’s controversial hypothesis that Les Euvres de Louise Labé was a hoax by a group of male poets. Krause expands this example of potentially disguised authorship to consider the definition of sixteenth-century authorship more generally, focusing on the peritextual spaces surrounding François Rabelais’s Tiers Livre.

Turning again to philosophy, Christopher Braider’s contribution to the volume examines the puzzle posed by Pieter Paul Rubens’s friendship portrait, The Four Philosophers. By including a self-portrait alongside the likeness of three friends, the Renaissance humanist Justus Lipsius and two students, Rubens claims a philosopher’s role of his own. Braider contrasts this depiction with traditional humanist philosophy to suggest that if painting does indeed secure philosophical authority, it aligns itself with the emergent ‘natural’ philosophers of the baroque era: Bacon, Galileo and ←xxii | xxiii→Descartes – all determined enemies of the ancients Lipsius revered. Michael Moriarty places Jean-Pierre Camus’s discussion of love and friendship in his treatise on the passions in the context of the traditional conception of friendship derived from Aristotle and in the context of scholastic discussions of the difference between ‘love of friendship’ and ‘love of concupiscence’. Moriarty then analyses the handling of the theme in Camus’s short tales and compares this vision of love and friendship to their presentation by late seventeenth-century moralists – especially La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère – as incompatible relationships.

Emma Gilby’s contribution on bouts rimés and seventeenth-century satire examines Jean-François Sarasin’s mock-epic entitled Dulot vaincu, ou la defaite des bouts-rimez, a parody of the popular salon genre of rhymed-ends in which an author first identified a series of rhyming couplets, with a view subsequently to building the rest of the sonnet around them. This chapter gives a reading of some bouts rimés and of Dulot vaincu, in order to suggest that these texts have an interesting role to play in the subsequent development of seventeenth-century satire, notably in the work of Nicolas Boileau. Continuing our exploration of different genres of the seventeenth century, Anne Régent-Susini considers the funeral sermon not as a singular performance, but rather as a literary form that bloomed in social and cultural life and was also intensely discussed in letters and diaries. These sources show that funeral sermons acted as a catalyst which assembled, ←xxiii | xxiv→well after the performance itself, a virtual community who reflected upon what speaking publicly about the deceased meant and implied. In the final chapter of Part IV, Guy Spielmann questions the concept of Classicisme, not just as an aesthetic, but as a world view that supposedly contradicted, and even negated the Baroque. Spielmann argues that while truly significant and structuring oppositions did exist in French seventeenth-century political, cultural and intellectual life, the notion of ‘Baroque versus Classicisme’ fails to account for any of them; and his chapter attempts to navigate possible solutions to this quandary.

The melange of studies in Part V, ‘Example, History, Imagination’, refer primarily to John’s foundational and thematically far-reaching book Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (1989), his many published works on history in Corneille, Montaigne and Bossuet, among others, as well as his influential book Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (2005). Stephen G. Nichols starts this part with a chapter on castration as exemplum. Nichols examines the depictions of self-castration in Saint Augustine’s De civitate Dei contra Paganos, which are so vivid that they transform the historical act into a moral concept: an exemplum against Roman religion. Kevin Brownlee’s contribution on Jean de Meun’s Rose and Boccaccio’s Teseida considers the medieval literary practice of ekphrasis, the elaborate depiction in words of works of art that are visual and/or tactile, concluding that in both the Rose and the Teseida, the protagonist is systematically differentiated from the author figure, while the narrative structure of the medieval text as a whole is placed in relief. Continuing on the theme of the representation of physical objects, Timothy Chester’s study on communication and countenance in Blaise de Monluc’s Commentaires examines Monluc’s writerly fixation on the face in the Commentaires (published posthumously in 1592) – both his own as a military leader able to influence others and that of the three successive kings (François I, Henri II and Charles IX) in which he himself sought traces of approval and encouragement. In doing so, Chester aims to expose the governing obsession of a writer whose true face literary posterity has, if not obscured, not yet dared fully to unmask.

Éric Méchoulan’s contribution analyses a piece of the famous quarrel of Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac’s letters that concerns the writer’s status in ←xxiv | xxv→the early seventeenth century. It contextualizes and transcribes the text, and reflects on the very notion of example and exemplarity in relation to questions of power and knowledge. In a similar vein but within a different framework, Malina Stefanovska develops the link between example, power and discourse by exploring a particular parallel between Machiavelli and the Cardinal de Retz: namely their method of reading history and incorporating it in their reflections. Taken together, these chapters expand upon the importance of example as a rhetorical strategy in seventeenth-century French texts. With Marina S. Brownlee’s contribution on María de Zayas, we move from the French seventeenth century and the Italian Renaissance to the Spanish Golden Age. Zayas exploits magic and the supernatural in a number of the twenty tales of her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647), offering an innovative approach to the normative allegory of the traditional exemplum. These two narratives serve to illustrate the ways in which Zayas allegorizes the shift from Renaissance example to Baroque excess. In the final chapter in the volume, Katherine Ibbett takes us clear across the Atlantic to consider the significance of the Canadian beaver (castor canadensis) as an example of industry, organization or, eventually, French delight in the surprises of the so-called New World.

Acknowledgements

A project such as this requires collaboration among many people to come to fruition. We wish first to thank all of the contributors without whom this volume would not be possible. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the Medieval and Early Modern French Studies Series and Peter Lang, the editors Laurel Plapp and Philip Dunshea for overseeing the publication, the entire production team at Peter Lang for their help with the illustrations, and the series editor Noël Peacock for his unwavering enthusiasm for the project and his close reading of the final script. The errors that remain are, of course, our own.

Richard E. Goodkin’s chapter incorporates several pages of translated materials from his article ‘Pascal et le calcul des partis: unité de temps scientifique, mathématique, littéraire’, Littératures classiques 85 (2014), pp. 81–96. Some portions of Michael Meere’s chapter were published in ‘The Politics of Transgenericity: Pierre Du Ryer’s Dramatic Adaptations of John Barclay’s Argenis’, Studia Aurea 10 (2016), pp. 313–34. We thank Philippe Chométy at Littératures classiques and Eugenia Fosalba at Studia Aurea for their kind permission to republish these materials in this volume. We also wish to acknowledge the Uffizi Gallery and the Dordrechts Museum for allowing us to reproduce and for providing us with high-definition images of Pieter Paul Rubens’s The Four Philosophers and Nicolaes Maes’s The Eavesdropper.