SOURCE: Longino, Michèle. “Bajazet à la lettre.” L'Esprit Créateur 38, no. 2 (summer 1998): 49-59.

[In the following essay, Longino considers the theme of communication in Bajazet.]

What happens to Bajazet when the play is taken literally?¹ Reading literally brings together two discourses, one of history, and the other of literature. The one privileges fact, the other fiction. When considering them together, distinctions between the two discourses tend to blur, since behind them both looms a greater force: the condition of all discourse, that is, communication.² My modest ambition is to offer a suggestive reading of some key points concerning this major condition, represented in both the news of the day (the literal) and the play (the fiction) that mirrored and assigned structure to that news.

From first preface to final act, the play relays the problem of communication like a mirror game into regressive infinity, deferring and ultimately defying resolution, ending abruptly yet inexorably where communication stops, at death's door as Zaïre strains to follow her mistress Atalide across that threshold. I will consider the issue of communication in Bajazet in some of its specific thematic forms: the issue of honesty—the formulation and directing of messages; of efficacy—the transmission of messages; the privileged concrete form of the message, that is, the letter; and finally the vital condition of belief or credulity—the reception of messages—all of these subject to interception and interpretation. Thus, even communication answers to a stronger power: context.

This play treats not so much the “détours” of the seraglio as the “détours” of language, those of the spoken word as well as of the material written one. Even body language is subjected to the “détour” in this examination of communication. Finally, all of communication is, in some form or other, a “détour.” Thus, the exotic framing of Bajazet is but a thin disguise.³ Little wonder that Corneille, hardly a neutral expert, should insist on the emptiness of his rival's portrayal of the Oriental other: “Il n'y a pas un seul personnage qui ait les sentiments qu'il doit avoir et que l'on a à Constantinople; ils ont sous un habit turc, le sentiment qu'on a au milieu de la France.”⁴ Corneille's insistance on the inadequacy of the representation at once willfully misses the point and makes it. He disregards the more profound subject of the play and critiques its surface. He is able to do this specifically by focusing on the history-literature, fact-fiction tension, and discounting the more global encoded problem of communication that the play addresses.

The issues of communication raised in Bajazet are just as readily pertinent to any closely watched and controlled leisure society, where not only women are contained but men as well, as they are to the seraglio. And therein, not in the authenticity of its representation of the Turkish seraglio, lies the value of the play. Racine suggests as much in the rhetorical question of his second preface as he justifies his choice of intensifying locale, encoding communication concerns as love concerns:

En effet, y a-t-il une cour au monde où la jalousie et l'amour doivent être si bien connues que dans un lieu où tant de rivales sont enfermées ensemble, et où toutes ces femmes n'ont point d'autre étude, dans une éternelle oisiveté, que d'apprendre à plaire et à se faire aimer?

(“Seconde Préface”)

The seraglio furnishes an exaggerated model to use as a vehicle for commentary on communication; hence, the ready answer: “yes, of course, Versailles,” to Racine's rhetorical question is shortsighted. The narcissistic French court audience resisted recognizing itself in Racine's oblique reference or in the play itself as much as we often do today.

The theme of communication is announced in the prefaces to the play, those texts that purport to contextualize and justify the workings of the plot. The story Racine stages is one he claims to have heard from the Chevalier de Nantouillet, who heard it from the ambassador M. de Césy, who was told the story since he was in residence in Constantinople at the time of the reported event.⁵ Racine claims also to have consulted another ambassador, M. de la Haye. Thus, while the play might, given such diplomatic input, constitute something of an “official story,” it is also at best a third-hand account of an event, no doubt modified and embellished through these several tellings, perhaps closer to gossip. One must view then with some suspicion Racine's claim for the “très véritable” (“Première Préface”) nature of his subject. Further, Racine claims to have authenticated his play through consultations of written histories of the Ottomans. But these, too, are second-hand accounts, produced by European outsiders (not that “insider” history would not have its own bias). The play reduces to a composite and imaginative rendering, using known facts simply as a point of departure, and Racine's truth claim must be reviewed beyond the stresses of fact and fiction, in the conditions of their mutual possibility.

The core story is that during de Césy's tenure as ambassador, Mourad IV had two of his brothers strangled, one of whom was the popular Bajazet, and the city was in consternation. Indeed, by his own admission, the closest the on-site witness de Césy ever got to Bajazet was a glimpse from the sea of him up on a seraglio parapet. What is gained and what is lost in the communicative circuit cannot be determined, but claims for veracity in the prefaces can certainly be viewed with some skepticism.⁶ Or these claims can be counted as the first “détours” staged by Racine himself in his dramatization of the problematic of communication.⁷

The issues of context reached beyond those staged, and spoke to the concerns of the new seventeenth-century press. There again, just as by Corneille, the accuracy of Racine's portrayal of Ottoman society was contested. In the first issue of Le Mercure galant (January 9th, 1672), Donneau de Visé displayed a quickly acquired expertise and denounced the play for its inauthenticity. Still beside the point, he located its worth in its faithful representation of the gallant Turkish character. He cited, as confirmation of this trait, the evidence of a letter: “La galanterie et l'honnêteté des Turcs n'est pas une chose sans exemples, et nous en avons une histoire très agréable dans une lettre de Monsieur du Loir, écrite à Monsieur Charpentier en 1641 que vous serez peutêtre bien aise que je vous rapporte.”⁸ Just as in the play itself—missives from Amurat to Roxane, Bajazet's letter to Atalide—the letter is privileged as an authoritative reliable truth source. Cited in the frame of a newspaper piece, du Loir's letter enjoys further enhanced status as a proof document. In the domains both of fiction and fact, the letter stands apart as sure truth text.

The French and Ottoman worlds, uneasy partners already in Mediterranean affairs, were coming ever closer together by virtue of increased trade and travel. These activities were accompanied by a steady flow of writing (letters, memoirs, histories, accounts, fictions, translations). The new newspaper genre combined literature and politics, and set a newsprint stage for journalistic realism while dramatizing the world. De Visé's review of Racine's Bajazet in Le Mercure galant confounded the distinctions. Was the seventeenth-century reader to understand his “Discours sur Bajazet, tragédie du Sieur Racine” as news or cultural commentary? Here the blur between fact and fiction is instantiated. More recently, Benedict Anderson links the newspaper with notions of theatricality and a consumer market, a readership eager to take in and evaluate a staged world-view in print:

If we now turn to the newspaper as a cultural product, we will be struck by its profound fictiveness … a juxtaposition of events, actors. … The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition shows that the linkage between them is imagined. … This imagined linkage derives from two obliquely related sources. The first is simply calendrical coincidence. The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection—the steady onward clocking of homogenous, empty time. Within that time, “the world” ambles steadily ahead. … The second source of imagined linkage lies in the relationship between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market.⁹

But Anderson does not tell us how to read Racine's prefaces. In order to justify treating the contemporary subject of Bajazet on the classical stage, Racine had insisted on the strangeness, the otherness, of the culture he was dramatizing. His argument is based on the proposition of physical distance and cultural difference being commensurable with distance in time:

L'éloignement des pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps, car le peuple ne met guère de différence entre ce qui est, si j'ose ainsi parler, à mille ans de lui, et ce qui en est à mille lieues. C'est ce qui fait, par exemple, que les personnages turcs, quelques modernes qu'ils soient, ont de la dignité sur notre théâtre. On les regarde de bonne heure comme anciens.

(“Seconde Préface”)

Racine's position, however, is inconsistent: at the same time in these prefaces, flaunting the daring of his argument, he underscores the recency of the event, its current relevance, and its as yet undigested status. In 1672 he boastfully opens his first preface: “Quoique le sujet de cette tragédie ne soit encore dans aucune histoire imprimée,” and he insists again: “C'est une aventure arrivée dans le sérail, il n'y a pas plus de trente ans.”

In 1676 he updates and insistently repeats himself: “Les particularités de la mort de Bajazet ne sont encore dans aucune histoire imprimée” (“Seconde Préface”). The subject matter is at once too close and too far away, as is any truth—which fact the play will demonstrate.¹⁰ Taking pains to highlight the currency of the story rather than passing it off more discreetly as “history,” he ties it genealogically to the present: “Le Sultan Mahomet, qui règne aujourd'hui, est fils de cet Ibrahim et par conséquent neveu de Bajazet” (“Seconde Préface”). Thus a good deal of the preface concerns itself with problems of communicating in the present about the present, problems that will be addressed more directly in the play itself. Racine's accommodating reasoning is at once in accord with and at variance with Anderson's development of the idea of “simultaneity,” of “conceiving of things happening in different places at the same time” (30), at the heart of the evolution of the press. Anderson plays up precisely what Racine at once attempts to play both down and up.

Racine's first preface introduced only the first edition of the play, in 1672. The second preface accompanied the second, third, and fourth editions, and Racine suppressed its last paragraph after 1687. In this second preface, Racine appears to acknowledge a change in his audience/readership from 1672. Not only must he incorporate responses to criticisms of his play; this current readership needs more information, needs to be told the story of Bajazet. Whereas in 1672 Racine merely mentions in passing the Ricaut history of the Ottomans, presuming familiarity with current gossip, which allows him to move more readily into his play, by 1676 he is reminding his public that books (“il ne faut que lire l'histoire des Turcs,” “Seconde Préface”) support the tenor of his play. While the public has earlier critiqued the play and found it wanting in plausibility, thereby explaining Racine's defensive remarks, it is equally true that even the play itself, first produced in 1672, was slowly slipping into “history” (albeit contemporary) by 1676. Pedagogical as well as defensive, the second preface acts as a supplement to shore up the gaps of communication left by the play. The fact that two prefaces are needed attests to the inadequacy not of the one, both, or the other, but to the inefficacy of any preface and ultimately of the play itself as a series of communication acts—indeed, of any attempt at communication.

This communication motif is articulated in the frequent use of the term “détour” throughout the play. The first mention of “détour” is made by Bajazet when he protests against Atalide's plea that he pretend better to love Roxane so as to assure his own life (2.5.750-57). He sets himself and Atalide apart as belonging to a class of which honor is the mark, which admits of no falsehood. To make a false promise is to act out of class. Thus, circulation of truth would be class-restricted. The “détour” is a problem for Bajazet insofar as he belongs to a class, the Ottoman dynasty, that locates itself above the pragmatism of its vizir servant Acomat (“Nourri dans le sérail, j'en connais les détours” [4.7.1425]) and because he is in a situation where he must negotiate with someone, Roxane, of a lower class, slave of undetermined origin (however currently exalted in the Sultan's favor), who is not burdened with the same scruples, or so he believes.

Despite his qualms, Bajazet does obey Atalide. But in the letter that he finally sends to her, which, through a “détour,” will be their undoing, he will protest again against the demeaning behavior to which he has been reduced by his attachment to Atalide. Here it is apparent that although the “détours” have been necessitated by a cross-class situation, they are mandated by a shared in-class situation. After all, it is Atalide and Bajazet's legitimated, maternally approved love that is trying to survive.

The letter that Bajazet finally sends Atalide will bring them down. The document confirms for Roxane the bond she suspected but preferred to ignore. Up until the moment when Roxane is confronted with the material evidence, she can willfully dismiss what she only too rightly suspects. Once the written word surfaces, she must concede to the hard facts. On the one hand, this moment is pivotal: from here on, she must accept Bajazet's faithfulness to his own kind—to Atalide—and steel herself to seal his fate. On the other, the “absolute ruler” Amurat has already, from his distanced position, set everyone's destiny, Roxane's included; but we do not know that until after the fact. The incident of the letter turns out to be of minor importance in the greater scheme of things, and the issue of communication is subjected itself to that even greater force: context.

The issue of letters was a highly charged one for envoys to Constantinople. Hence, this key detail in the play. Elaborate encoding systems were set in place to protect the privacy of communications, official and merely confidential. Jean Chardin, the professional traveler and merchant, tells the story of the ambassador M. de la Haye, who used local customs to rid himself of an impoverished, hence potentially renegade, French decoder, Quiclet. In 1659, through an act of treachery, coded letters for the French ambassador passed into the hands of the Vizir:

Un français Vertament fut chargé d'un gros pacquet de Lettres pour l'Ambassadeur de France. Le Français qui n'avait d'autre dessin que de se faire Turc, se présenta au Caimacan de Constantinople, luy dit qu'il avoit quitté le champ des Chrétiens, parce qu'il vouloit abjurer leur Religion pour embrasser le Mahometisme, au reste qu'il avait un pacquet de Lettres de grande importance à mettre entre les mains du Grand Vizir.¹¹

Thus was the discovery made of a “commerce caché” (16) between the French and the Venetians. The Vizir was anxious to know the contents of the letters. In need of money, the decoder, Quiclet's wife, threatened that if the ambassador was not forthcoming, her husband would offer his expertise to the Vizir and decode the letters for him. De la Haye acted decisively:

Monsieur de la Haye, qui savait la grande envie qu'avoit Cuperli d'apprendre ce que contenoient les lettres interceptées, qui apprehendait qu'il n'y eut des choses qui le perdissent, et tous les Français du Levant, et qui savait la pauvreté du déchiffreur français, l'envoya quérir, le mena sur une terrasse du Palais qui regarde le jardin, et apres luy avoir fait quelques tours, l'entretenant de discours qu'on n'a point sçeus; il fit signe à des gens apostés qui lui firent sauter la terrasse; d'autres gens postés aussi à l'endroit où il tomba, voyant qu'il n'étoit pas mort de sa chute, l'achevèrent, et l'ensevelirent secrettement.

(Chardin, 17)

This incident spelled the end of de la Haye's tenure as ambassador to the Porte. But he was not alone in his concern for confidentiality. Another French gentleman, Monsieur du Loir, the same person cited earlier by Donneau de Visé, explained to his correspondent, Monsieur Charpentier, why he hesitated to write letters:

Je vous apprendrais des aventures d'amour que vous ne seriez pas fâché de savoir, si j'osais fier ici à l'écriture des mystères que la discretion m'ordonne de réserver à un entretien de vive voix. Une lettre, comme vous savez, peut être interceptée, et nous ne sommes pas ici tant de français qu'on ne put découvrir l'auteur. Et outre que ces secrets sont de la dernière importance entre des Chrétiens et des Turcs, ce serait dommage après tout, qu'une lettre de cette nature vînt à périr sur mer.¹²

This preoccupation with security and censorship of the written word was not restricted to travellers and diplomats in Constantinople. Within France itself, along with the development of an efficient postal system came Louis XIV's “Cabinet Noir.”¹³ Surveillance was a given condition of seventeenth-century correspondence. Codes were established, elaborated, and changed regularly in order to disguise meanings of messages to third parties; letters were addressed to fictitious people in order not to attract attention, or they were sent by means other than the conventional channels.¹⁴ Letters were misplaced in fiction, as in Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves; they were stolen and then published (Mlle de Montpensier);¹⁵ they were invented and then passed off as real (Les Lettres portugaises by Guilleragues). And the unfortunate Mme de Villedieu saw her personal correspondence published by her own husband. Any number of variations bore witness to the fact that letters were a genre to treat with care, precisely because of their status as truth documents.

The “détour” of Bajazet's letter will come back to him in a devastating way, through the voice of Roxane. The very person whose powerful but lowly self occasioned the need to prevaricate expresses contemptuous shock at Bajazet's own debased behavior:

Mais je m'étonne enfin que, pour reconnaisssance,
Pour prix de tant d'amour, de tant de confiance,
Vous ayez si longtemps par des détours si bas,
Feint un amour pour moi que vous ne sentiez pas.

(5.4.1478-81)

Thus the differences of class are challenged. Bajazet is gallingly reminded that even he is subject to the moral judgment of someone he considers his inferior, and that this person, by invoking his principles, claims to share them. Both Atalide and Bajazet have been blinded to the dangers of trying to dupe Roxane by their firm belief in her class-marked tendency to credulity as well as by the success until that point of their enterprise.

The characteristic of credulity is introduced and assigned early on in the play, in a passage treating the people: “Je sais combien crédule en sa dévotion, / Le peuple suit le frein de la religion” (1.2.235-36). Shortly following, Roxane is linked to this tendency: “De ses moindres respects Roxane satisfaite / Nous engagea tous deux, par sa facilité, / A la laisser jouir de sa crédulité” (1.4.374-76).¹⁶ Credulity is a quality which will be assigned generally to the Turks by Chardin as he analyzes European dealings with them: “Il n'y a pas de gens au monde plus aisés à tromper, et qui aient été plus trompez que les Turcs. Ils sont naturellement tres simples, et assez épais, gens à qui on en fait aisément à croire” (Chardin, 8). If the people are condescendingly cast by Chardin as credulous, so also are the elite:

Le Caprice des femmes et des Eunuques, qui gouvernoient durant le bas âge de Mahamed quatrième, le fit Grand Vizir [Cupruli]. … Il commença par le Serrail, où il fit étrangler plusieurs Eunuques, et [se rendit] Maître en peu de temps de la credulité, et des affections de son jeune Prince. …

(Chardin, 52)

Not only is Roxane, like the people, characterized as credulous; she is cast as the agent responsible for Atalide's and Bajazet's unworthy behavior, thereby exonerating them in their own eyes. Bajazet will chafe against the dupery to which he is reduced in order to survive: “Je ne puis plus tromper une amante crédule” (2.5.742). Moreover, he will express feelings of guilt for leading her on: “Moi-même, rougissant de sa crédulité”; “Je me trouvais barbare, injuste, criminel” (3.4.991, 995). Nevertheless, he persists in this direction, encouraged by Atalide, until found out.

For her part, Roxane is not as credulous as one might be led to believe by Atalide and Bajazet. Several times she has reflected on the nature of Bajazet's attachment to her, and has expressed doubts. She questions the difference between Bajazet's mode of addressing her, and Atalide's when she speaks in his place. Atalide's representation of Bajazet's love is more convincing than his own, and Roxane does not fail to note the difference: “Pourquoi faut-il au moins que, pour me consoler, / L'ingrat ne parle pas comme on le fait parler?” (1.3.275-76). At regular intervals, she interrogates her own perceptions, having detected signs of the couple's love for each other: “De tout ce que je vois que faut-il que je pense? / Tous deux à me tromper sont-ils d'intelligence?” (3.7.1065-66).

If she does not leap to conclusions, it is not because she is credulous but because she doubts her own perception, and believes too close and too prompt a scrutiny can be just as misleading as too distanced and too considered a one (precisely the lesson drawn from the prefaces). She vacillates between what she sees and what she wants to see, visions that do not coincide, and seeks to accommodate them both: “Mais peut-être qu'aussi, trop prompte à m'affliger, / J'observe de trop près un chagrin passager” (3.7.1075-76). This statement is the reluctant thinking of a clear-sighted strategist, not of a woman blinded by love.

Having confirmed to her (dis)satisfaction Atalide's love for Bajazet, Roxane must decide how to proceed: her initial decision is to choose deliberately not to know. She lucidly opts for blindness: “Il faut prendre parti, l'on m'attend. Faisons mieux: / Sur tout ce que j'ai vu fermons plûtot les yeux” (4.4.1235-36). She concludes her meditation on what she now knows with a resolution: “Je veux tout ignorer” (4.4.1250). This position is hardly that of a credulous person. It is rather a position assumed in the face of unpleasant facts. But, confronted with letter proof of Bajazet's love for Atalide, Roxane finally accuses her own self of credulity: “Avec quelle insolence et quelle cruauté / Ils se jouaient tous deux de ma crédulité!” (4.5.1296-97). She recognizes that she has been duped: her desire to believe that Bajazet loved her, and her love for him, blinded her to the truth even as she saw it.

But what would she have seen otherwise? Reserve, coldness, indifference, inability to speak the language of love? It is unclear, beyond Bajazet's well-founded refusal to marry and his failure to pronounce the love vow, whether he was actively leading Roxane to believe in his love for her. After all, how is one to know, beyond Bajazet's claims and Acomat's reporting, what is really happening between Bajazet and Roxane? What is it that Acomat claims to have seen?

J'ai longtemps, immobile, observé leur maintien.
Enfin, avec des yeux qui découvraient son âme,
L'une a tendu la main pour gage de sa flamme;
L'autre, avec des regards éloquents, pleins d'amour,
L'a de ses feux, Madame, assurée à son tour.

(3.2.884-88)

Is Acomat's interpretation of what he sees here influenced by what he in turn wants to see? Roxane's belief in Bajazet's love for her could well be justified, if one is to believe Acomat's witnessing. After all, is Acomat (“nourri dans le sérail”) not the very character who claims to know how to know? He has underscored repeatedly the importance of body language as a more reliable message medium than speech (4.6.1342-43). But then he is also the old warrior who himself has earlier acknowledged that he knows nothing of love (1.1.177-80), so how would he know to read its signs? His credentials as truth purveyor are lacking in this instance. In the end, if Roxane acknowledges her own credulity (4.5.1296-97), it is not so much that she has behaved credulously throughout the play. Rather, she has been duped by others, not by herself; her keen vision sets her apart from the credulous. In any case, the timing of her coming face to face with the facts has been too slow to outwit the inexorable action that has been set in motion from outside the seraglio, at the right time, from the right distance, by Amurat. He knows how to read the failure of communication and how to use silence to his own advantage, hence his power.

A final instance of credulity in the play occurs in a conversation between Acomat and his confidant Osmin. Osmin misinterprets Acomat's motive for lingering. Acomat does not want to stay in order to be witness to Bajazet's death and to claim Atalide for himself, as Osmin thinks: “Que veux-tu dire? Es-tu toi-même si crédule / Que de me soupçonner d'un courroux ridicule?” (4.7.1370-71). Now credulity circulates: not only has Roxane been cast as credulous, Osmin as well might be. From its assignment to “le peuple” to its imputation to Roxane, and here to Osmin, credulity moves contagiously to the inner and upper circles until finally no one is exempt. In the end, who is more credulous than Bajazet and Atalide themselves, who thought that they could stage such a coup against Roxane just because she was not of their class, who imagined they could survive their own dupery? They have been blinded, the two of them, by their class bias that led them to believe in their moral superiority and in the gullible nature of the people. Here is not a factual or fictional representation of a historical moment in an exotic setting, but a lesson on the “détours” of communication for all times and all people.

Notes

1. My title pays homage to Richard Goodkin's reading of Bajazet; it is a citation from his “The Performed Letter, or How Words Do Things in Racine,” PFSCL 17.32 (1990): 85-102.

2. I do not mean to examine all possible sources of Orientalist discourse circulating in France around the time of the production of Bajazet, and thereby to evaluate the veracity of Racine's play; to do so would simply reproduce without equaling René Jasinski's magisterial study Vers le vrai Racine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1958), vol. 2: 1-109.

3. I agree with Jean-Marc Moura, Lire l'exotisme (Paris: Dunod, 1992), 58, 149.

4. Pierre Corneille, Segraisiana; cited in Pierre Martino, L'Orient dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1906), 36.

5. Mark Gross, “Bajazet and Intertextuality,” in “Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality,” ed. Richard E. Goodkin, spec. issue Yale French Studies 76 (1989): 146-61, has focused on this same transmission of facts as evidence of the “oral tradition.”

6. After all, Segrais invented his Floridon ou l'amour imprudent out of much the same material, but with quite different results.

7. See Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 54.

8. Donneau de Visé, Le Mercure galant (Paris: Théodore Girard, 1672), 65-72; cited in Orhan Kologlu, Le Turc dans la presse française: des débuts jusqu'à 1815 (Beyrouth: Maison d'édition Al-Hayat, 1971), 149.

9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 37-38.

10. See on this point the excellent article of Jacques Huré, “A la recherche de l'Orient racinien dans Bajazet,” Travaux de linguistique edités par le centre de philologie et de littératures romanes de l'Université de Strasbourg 24.2 (1986): 57-71.

11. Jean Chardin, Journal du voyage du chevalierr Chardin en Perse et aux Indes, par la Mer Noire et par la Colchide: Première partie, qui contient “Le Voyage de Paris a Ispahan” (London: Moses Pitt, 1686), 16.

12. Sieur du Loir, Les voyages du Sieur du Loir ensemble de ce qui se passa à la mort du feu Sultan Mourat dans le Serrail, les cérémonies de ses funérailles, et celles de l'avènement à l'Empire de Sultan Hibraim son frère qui lui succèda, avec la relation du siège de Babylon fait en 1639 par Sultan Mourat (Paris: François Clouzier, 1654), 254.

13. Eugène Vaillé, Histoire générale des Postes (1668-1691) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 4: 123-24.

14. See Michèle Longino Farrell, Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), 276.

15. See Eva Posfay, “Ecrire l'Utopie au féminin en 1660,” Cahiers du dix-septième 6.1 (1992): 221-34.

16. Of course, like many “Turks” (the Janissaries for example), Roxane is of unclear origin (1.1.98-99).