SOURCE: “Lovers, Salon, and State: La Carte de Tendre and the Mapping of Socio-Political Relations,” in Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 36, Fall 1996, pp. 15-22.

[In the following essay, Duggan argues that the social model Scudéry put forth in La Carte de Tendre applied not only to romantic interactions, but also to political concerns. Focusing on the structure of the French salons, Duggan suggests that Scudéry and other salonniers created a kind of utopian society in which the women were free to re-create themselves without regard to the limitations of either gender stereotypes or socio-economic status.]

The Carte de Tendre remains as familiar to students and scholars of French literature as its accompanying Gazette de Tendre, a document discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by Émile Colombey among the manuscripts of Valentin Conrart, does not. Those who have considered the Carte to be no more than Madelaine de Scudéry's “board game of the ways to a woman's heart” (DeJean 87) may find their interpretation reaffirmed by the Gazette, a legend to a novel-map that chronicles the trajectories of Scudéry's habitués from Nouvelle Amitié to Tendre. Yet, close inspection of the Gazette makes clear that the Carte is not simply a game of love, but an extensive attempt to formulate a utopic model for social and political relations within a salon or state, a model that was to challenge those being proposed by proponents of patriarchy and the absolutist state.

The Gazette appears to have been written within the context of Scudéry's salon as a group collaboration, and for two reasons. First, the Gazette, as well as the Journée des Madrigaux and Carnaval des Prétieuses which Colombey published together in 1856, is untitled, suggesting no single author, although Pellisson, the “chroniqueur” (Scudéry 1856:16) of the salon, may have recorded the text. Second, within the milieu of the seventeenth-century salon, authorship was perceived to be “the collective signature of the salon […] the ‘author’ is the woman who presided over the salon in which the novel [or in our case, the Gazette] developed, she who dictated the style of the salon” (DeJean 76-77). For this reason I will refer to Scudéry as the “author,” in the collective sense of the term, of the map and Gazette to be examined.

The Gazette's accounts serve as examples of particular routes habitués such as Paul Pellisson, Madame Aragonnès and Madame Bocquet took in order to arrive at Tendre. As their narrative itineraries crisscross each other, the possible significations of the Carte are complicated and the meanings of “Tendre” multiplied. The Carte de Tendre was originally composed by Scudéry and her salon to “map out” a response to Pellisson's question: what must one do to become a “tendre ami”? What the Gazette makes clear is that Tendre signifies not only a woman's heart, but also a salon, and an imaginary land called Tendre. I would like to examine how these three “dimensions” of the Carte de Tendre complement each other and reinforce the practices of social behavior, or “operations,” as Scudéry refers to them, that are inscribed as towns in the map, and to tie in these various practices to Scudéry's theories of love, of the salon, and of the ideal state.

Since at least the twelfth century, literature from the troubadours to the roman courtois dealt with how to “domesticate” a belligerent feudal nobility. In his celebrated study of Chrétien de Troyes, Erich Köhler argues that the love relation, which lies somewhere between instinctive life and political or religious life, became the principle for ordering subjectivity in chivalric literature; that is to say, regulating the love relation served as the point of departure for educating and “civilizing” the (noble) male subject, an education which had repercussions not only in the particular domain of the love relation, but in society at large. Ideally, love was to establish “une harmonie entre instinct et raison […] en vue du perfectionnement de l'homme” (Köhler 162). Loving a woman, according to certain principles, would transform a warrior into a prodhome. By the seventeenth century, the courtly notion of the prodhome, determined by both his physical prowess and his courtoisie, was replaced by the honnête homme, defined in strictly socio-ethical terms, and in particular, by his civilité.

Scudéry's social and political project is both a continuation and a modification of these earlier courtly models of the love relation, all of which could be circumscribed by the history of what Norbert Elias has termed the “civilizing process” (I:35-50). Whereas courtly literature concerned itself primarily with reintegrating the noblesse d'épée into a proto-capitalist society, Scudéry, also interested in civilizing the nobility, is engaged above all in the legitimation of the rising bourgeoisie, and furthermore, in the fusion of this bourgeoisie with the nobility. While she uses a strategy similar to that of chivalric writers, taking as her point of departure the love relation in order to change her society, the quest of the male protagonist has become a thoroughly moral one, with eloquent conversation and a new secular asceticism supplanting demonstrations of physical prowess.

Nevertheless, the way of becoming a tendre ami parallels the allegorical journey made by protagonists of chivalric writers. The would-be friend must follow or adhere to town-operations such as Billet-Doux, Obéissance, and Générosité, avoiding any “égarements” into places such as Négligence, Orgueil, or Médisance: “si ceux qui sont à Nouvelle-Amitié prenoient un peu plus à droite, ou un peu plus à gauche, ils s'egareroient.”¹ Like the chivalric protagonist, the friend who desires to journey to Tendre must follow the droit chemin, which suggests more than simply passing through various towns.

In Clélie, Scudéry describes the towns leading to Tendre as such: “vous voyez ces agréables Villages de Jolis Vers, de Billet galant, et de Billet doux, qui sont les opérations les plus ordinaires du grand esprit dans les commencemens d'une amitié.”² While the chivalric protagonist, in order to prove his worth to his lady, must perform physically demanding tasks, the effects of which often concern re-establishing stability within society as a whole, Scudéry's friend must adhere to operations pertaining, it would seem, exclusively to the relation with the female friend. These operations articulate the very gestures, both linguistic and behavioral, of the male friend towards the female friend, and discipline him in at least two ways.

First, the town-operations are of a disciplinary nature in that they regulate the behavior of the male friend. In particular, they serve to sublimate the customarily male desire to dominate and to engage in physical love within relations between the sexes. By subjecting the male friend to such a trajectory, the female friend poses obstacles, with each operation, to what is perceived to be a dominating and physical male desire. Second, the map exposes the male friend, Pellisson, or the berger Acante, to the omniscient gaze of the female lover, Sapho, who waits and watches for him and the others at Tendre. In the Carte, Scudéry reverses what has come to be called the “male gaze,” for it is the woman who gazes at the male friend, not with desire, but rather, to test whether or not his appearance corresponds to his “being.” The success of this trial means that, in the very fact of becoming a “tendre ami,” the male friend not only claims to dominate his physical desires, but actually does so.

The relation between the sexes that results from these conditioning operations is a platonic one, implied by the expression tendre ami. Over the course of Scudéry's works, amour and amant come to signify physical love, whereas amitié and ami are employed to refer to a platonic relation. In Clélie, the significance of the terms ami and amant is clearly along these lines:

quelque insensible qu'il [Herminius-Pellisson] paraisse, il a le cœur très sensible à la gloire, à l'amitié, et même à l'amour. Mais il a ces deux derniers sentiments-là dans l'âme d'une façon particulière, car lorsqu'il n'est qu'Ami, il ne s'en faut guère qu'il ne semble être Amant, et lorsqu'il est Amant, il y a des occasions où l'on aurait sujet de croire qu'il n'aurait que de l'amitié. Cela ne vient pourtant pas de la tiédeur de son affection, mais de la générosité de son âme, qui fait qu'il est trop peu intéressé dans sa passion.

(Pellisson 98-99)

What makes for this imperceptible limit between the two terms is Herminius' indifference towards his own (physical) passion. By blurring the distinction between the lover and the friend, Scudéry is apparently proposing friendship as a mode of behavior that would temper, in the platonic sense of (se) maîtriser, the passions. As we will see, the notion of temperance will extend itself beyond male-female relations to include those within the salon, and within the nation itself, in the same manner that temperance governs relations in Plato's Republic: in order to attain such a utopian state, the mind must rule absolutely the body.

In its sublimation of the physical body and regulation of desires, Scudéry's platonic “friendship” opposes itself to the courtly model of fatal love, or fol amor. Fatal love occurs when the body governs the mind through desire. It destabilizes the person stricken by it in the form of sickness and loss of both propriety and sense of duty: fatal love, evident in French, is akin to madness. Whereas fatal or passionate love begets madness and domination, taking the form of various “social sins” such as jealousy or envy, platonic or “tendre” friendship is a rational relationship based on reciprocity. Maintaining reciprocal relations assured by temperance, whether between tendres amis, salonniers, or citizens of Tendre, is the aim of the Carte's conditioning operations.

Keeping in mind Scudéry's theory of love based on temperance and reciprocity, the result of transcending bodily or physical desires, let us look at the Carte de Tendre as the map leading to a salon. The seventeenth-century salon may be characterized as an unofficial institution within French society: it was organized according to a particular set of beliefs, employed a specialized “précieux” language, established criteria for membership, and finally, it entered into a “gendered competition” with French academies for “intellectual space” (Harth 17). Moreover, the salon, as an institution, performed the particular function of redistributing (as well as redefining) social prestige in conformity with the redistribution of wealth which resulted from the development of a precapitalist economy and the growth of the bourgeoisie.

The new economic hierarchy, in which nobility no longer corresponded to wealth, demanded a new social hierarchy which would fuse the class of economic superiority, the rising bourgeoisie, with the traditional nobility, which still maintained its social superiority. In essence, the salon was an institution which produced elite subjects, taking the raw material of “money” and refining it into a civilized, sophisticated person of the Parisian “monde” (Lougee 53). In the words of the Abbé de Pure, the précieuse had to be formed: “comme la perle vient de l'Orient, et se forme dans des coquilles par le ménage que l'huitre fait de la rosée du ciel; ainsi la Prétieuse se forme dans la Ruelle par la culture de dons suprêmes que le ciel a versé[s] dans leur âme” (I:63).

Just as the operations of the map discipline the behavior of the potential tendre ami, so they form those persons wishing to become salon habitués. Prospective habitués who desire to reach the salon of Tendre must successfully be disciplined by means of the various towns or operations. This “processing” of subjects is constitutive of the salon as a utopic space, which transcends the particular socio-political conflicts of contemporary society, mainly the conflicts created by the ambiguous status of the rising bourgeoisie.

In order to break with the outside social order, the salonniers gave themselves Greek or Roman names. This re-naming of themselves served several purposes. First, according to André Pessel, these names permitted women to break with the “outside” masculine order, in which women played the roles of mother and wife so they could freely engage in intellectual or cultural pursuits.³ Second, such names effaced any distinction between bourgeois and noble, and furthermore, it could ennoble a bourgeois. For instance, the Gazette refers to Madame Aragonnès as the “Princesse Philoxène,” a name which permits her to transcend her actual status as a bourgeoise. In a like manner, Paul Pellisson becomes the berger Acante, a reference to d'Urfé's novel Astrée, in which shepherds are nobles in disguise. By breaking with and “transcending” the conflicts of the outside order, names of this kind, which function much like condensed portraits, permitted the salonniers to refashion themselves as ideal, elite subjects.

Also part of the constitution of subjects and of the utopic space of the salon is conversation. According to Elizabeth Goldsmith, “[c]onversation created its own social space with carefully marked boundaries” (2). In the Journée des Madrigaux, another text among Conrart's salon manuscripts, the exclusion of certain topics, particularly those related to the outside world or to anything physical, is played out as the habitués enter the space of the salon: Acante (Pellisson) and Polyandre (Sarrasin) forget about state affairs; Trasile (Ysarn) his lovers; Méliante (Doneville) his fever; and Sapho, the concerns of the century. When the Chevalier de Méré, an acquaintance of Scudéry, was asked about the proper way to converse, he replied that one would have to know how “on s'entretient dans le Ciel” (II:101).

The juxtaposition of these two passages brings to the fore that which constitutes the subjectivity of salon habitués. The purification of anything particular or physical within the space of the salon qualifies this space as being somehow “universal,” like heaven. Accordingly, the conversations that apparently took place in Scudéry's salon, “des plaisirs, de la politesse, de la gloire” (Scudéry, Choix de conversations 155-57), all concern concepts that were perceived to be universal, timeless by nature. Hence the subjects, both constitutive of and constituted by this space and conversation, must also be “universal” in some way.

A common strategy used to justify any elite is to posit elite subjects as being somehow “ontologically superior” to the rest of society. Méré's statement suggests that salonniers (the “on” of the sentence), those best versed in the art of conversation, are some type of angels, and the salon, a sort of “realm of the angels.” Taking on Greek and Roman names, excluding anything “particular” or “physical” from the space of the salon, and engaging in conversations revolving around “universal” concepts all create an illusion of ontological superiority, based not on blood or caste, as was the case in feudal society, but on one's social virtues, or in other words, on a new secular asceticism.

Another aspect of polite conversation, which is constitutive of both the relation between friends and salonniers, is reciprocity. The principle of reciprocity ensures that equality reigns, between men and women, noble and bourgeois, within the space of the salon, and it does so by means of its potlatch-like functioning. As Goldsmith points out, conversation “must be conducted according to the principle of pure reciprocity […] of gift-giving […]. Social contact is a kind of constant circulation of verbal gifts” (11). Such gifts may take the form of portraits, and in the Carte de Tendre, of Jolis Vers, Billets galants, and Billets doux. The underlying rule of such gift-giving is to please one's interlocutors, to compliment them, to hold up to them an ideal mirror. Conversation is a situation in which, according to Jean Starobinski, “des perfections fictives s'autorisent mutuellement” (136). Just as everyone is an ideal mirror for everyone else, so literature such as the Journée des Madrigaux and the Gazette de Tendre serve as ideal mirrors of the group as a whole. And this group, whose relations are based on their conversation, consists of equals: “il ne doit point y avoir de la tyrannie dans la conversation […] chacun y a sa part, et a droit de parler à son tour” (Scudéry, Choix de conversations 27).

There should be no such “tyranny” in the country of Tendre either. One might argue, based on the idea that relations between bourgeois and noble, woman and man should be equal and reciprocal within the new elite, that Scudéry was proposing a model for an aristocratic republic. In Clélie, Scudéry makes clear that Tendre has a Greek model: “comme on dit Cumes sur la mer d'Ionie, et Cumes sur la mer Tyrrhène […] on dit Tendre sur Inclination, Tendre sur Estime et Tendre sur Reconnoissance” (Clélie 399-400). Plato's Republic itself could arguably be considered such a government, in that the intellectual class forms a sort of “aristocracy” which governs the “body,” or artisan class of the state, and in which women were allowed to exercise functions similar to or the same as those of men.

The fact that Scudéry inscribed three different dimensions in the Carte de Tendre indicates that she followed Plato's example even further in that she re-established the association between political science on the one hand, and ethical and pedagogical principles on the other, an association implicit in the term “civilitas” or “civilité.”⁴ In a sense, civilité suggests that a particular, “civil” behavior corresponds to the fact of being a “free” citizen of the Republic. Such a concept would facilitate the fusion of new money with old names by valuing a person for his or her civility rather than his or her nobility, and according to Carolyn Lougee, this was the case for our period: “The cultural development of the seventeenth century was […] the process by which behavior superseded birth as the criterion of status” (52).

The question then becomes: which institution of society will have the right to establish norms of civil behavior and the responsibility for the education of free citizens? Although Scudéry's salon shared many values with those of members of the Académie Française or the Parisian collèges, it was vehemently opposed to the role they assigned to women in the newly-forming state. Writers like Pierre LeMoyne and Charles Perrault proposed a patriarchal model of the state, the micro-unit of which would be the family governed solely by the father, a sort of “absolute monarch.” A state organized in such a way would socialize its citizens primarily through the patriarchal family, whereas Scudéry and other précieuses were proposing to structure society based on the micro-unit of the salon, which would serve as the central “civilizing” institution of the Republic, and which would permit women to serve their society as thinkers and politicians rather than as wives and mothers.

That Scudéry thought of her salon as a model for the state is evident in the Carte and the Gazette. The two sides of Tendre (Tendre-sur-Reconnaissance and Tendre-sur-Estime) reproduced the “real” division that existed in Scudéry's salon. It separated those who are referred to as the Ancienne Ville, the salon chez Madame Aligre and Mademoiselle de Robineau, where the Samedis were usually held, from the Nouvelle Ville across the river in the Marais, referring to the salon chez Madame Bocquet, a new bourgeoise of the neighborhood. In the Gazette, Aligre and Robineau, les dames exilées, have been exiled from Tendre for having expressed their jealousy towards the Nouvelle Ville, and were allowed to return on the condition that they observe exactly the “coutumes du païs de Tendre” (Scudéry 1856:76).

At the same time that this account fictionalizes a “real” conflict within the salon, it also inscribes contemporary problems, such as the rivalry between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, in a utopic space in order to resolve them. Those of the Ancienne Ville want to control the admission of newcomers in the same manner that the nobility tried to limit annoblissements. A further analogy could be made with the Fronde, for the rivalry threatens to break the members up into “factions”: “Il y a, pourtant, toujours quelque petite disposition à de nouvelles factions” (Scudéry 1856:76).

Sapho is forced to negotiate with the Anciens, and this results in the establishment of a sort of tribunal, consisting of “citizens” of Tendre, the function of which is to regulate the entry of all newcomers. Each potential citizen (or habitué) is put on trial: Agathyrse (DeRaincy) might be refused because his character is that of a leader; the Princesse nouvelle-venue (Countess de Rieux) might be refused because of her status; Méliante (Doneville), it is said, is a liar; Acante must be quarantined in order to dissipate the rumor that he caught a contagious disease on the way to Tendre.

The route leading to Tendre makes visible behavior, which is the basis for a new social criterion of exclusivity. It does so largely by means of “gossip,” for, according to the Gazette, observers from each of the towns, as well as fellow travelers, inform those in Tendre about the activities of potential citizens or habitués. Not only is the dominating gaze of the female friend inscribed in the map, so are omnipresent gazes emanating from all directions: the path to Tendre is populated with anonymous observers, with “on dit,” “on raconte,” “on assure icy que.” Although gossip and médisance are officially excluded from Tendre, they provide a corrective rather than idealizing mirror for the salonniers. They are necessary “operations” in the formation of ideal subjects in that they assure the correspondence between who a nouveau venu appears to be and who he or she is. Gossip and médisance serve the purpose of maintaining order in the Republic of Tendre.

In Scudéry's Tendre, as well as in Plato's Republic, the frontiers separating the public from the private are abolished: as the map shifts constantly from one set of relations, for example relations between women and men, to another, relations among habitués of all classes, the same codes of behavior, the same modes of surveillance are employed. In all cases, a state of temperance or self-mastery is the objective of these operations. They should result in the imposition of reciprocal relations between men and women, noble and bourgeois, and of stability in the state. Like the Carte de Tendre, Scudéry's salon produced a space for social experimentation in which strategies were devised to overcome the social and political conflicts of the “outside” society. These strategies were successful due to the mapping within the salon of a “utopic” space in which, within the limits of “house rules,” its members could re-fashion themselves, regardless of their “outside” status, as a new aristocracy.

Notes

1. Scudéry, Clélie I:403. Also cited by Colombey in Scudéry 1856:60.

2. Scudéry, Clélie I:400-01. Also cited by Colombey in Scudéry 1856:59.

3. “Le prix de la précieuse est sa féminité, qui lui permet de rompre avec l'ordre du masculin comme donateur de nom, de rang, de richesse: avoir le droit, dans la relation du désir et de la parole, de choisir en quelque sorte son pseudonyme; c'est-à-dire le nom par lequel elle entend être interpellée” (Pessel:22).

4. Dino Pastine argues that the Machiavellian revolution in political science did away with the politico-ethical notion of civilitas: “La scienza politica ha ormai perduto i suoi lontani riferimenti ai valori etici e pedagogici dell'antica polis” (330).

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