SOURCE: “The World of Prose and Female Self-Inscription: Scudéry's Les Femmes illustres,” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 1983, pp. 37-44.

[In the following essay, Greenberg proposes that the literary culture of late seventeenth-century France was characterized by a kind of free play with social systems that enabled an active feminine authority. Focusing on Les Femmes illustres, the critic finds that Scudéry took this opportunity to write her own place in history.]

The use of language by educated groups such as libertines or precious writers during the baroque period reveals the uncertainty of changing codes and shifting referential contexts. The “art of conversation” was created and developed during what Michel Foucault has called the transition between the Renaissance's “Prose of the World” and classical, scientific discourse.¹ The very notion that conversation became an art, that is, that it became an aesthetic rather than a communicative act, implies that between Foucault's Prose of the World, wherein the world corresponded to linguistic categories, and the world of classicisme, wherein the effort began to find a language appropriate for observations in the world, there existed another historico-linguistic phenomenon, which I will call the “World of Prose.”

In the World of Prose, the play between language and referent was deliberate and apparent. The Hôtel de Rambouillet, where the novel L'Astrée dictated behavior, is an example of one form of this interplay. Sorel's Berger extravagant, where the hero set out to imitate what he had read in novels and, in the process, became the medium he sought to imitate, is another. The World of Prose was a world wherein art begat art, wherein reality was no longer decipherable, but art was; it was a world wherein syntax reached virtuosity even as referentiality atrophied. The relationship of such a world to history would be inherently problematic; yet, history could not be abandoned in the World of Prose. Structurally, history provided the notion of chronological progression necessary to both syntax and narration. Further, even the most hermetic language system requires some referential context. Although history was losing its role as that context, a new context derived from it—one we could call a history of the World of Prose—and came to function in its stead.

The salon world inhabited for so many years by Madeleine de Scudéry maintained a similar relationship to the society surrounding it. Itself a social system, the salon required some social rules involving requirements for behavior, speech, dress, and merit. Yet, the values according to which performance in these areas was judged were not those of society at large.² Even names, a clear mark of personal history, could be changed. A salon was a social system which, paradoxically, defined itself by its (self-)exclusion from society; by its collective desire to create a new culture, one which was highly language-oriented and which would serve to distance the salon from the very society after which it had patterned itself. The salon was to the world around it what the novel was to history: verisimilar by some evaluations, monstrous by others, but always structurally related and referentially problematic.

The salons allowed women to participate actively in the shift in referential contexts. Their nearly matriarchal predominance in the salons assured them positions of power in the World of Prose. Women set the tone of conversation, were frequently the topic of conversation, and did much of the conversing. They also produced a significant amount of the writing. In the gap created by the shift in referential contexts, the World of Prose provided women with a space for self-inscription.³

No writer participated more in that process than did Madeleine de Scudéry. As Nicole Aronson has pointed out, she is frequently looked upon by historians as the typical précieuse or précieuse ridicule.⁴ She helped fictionalize herself by creating her well-known self-portrait under the name of Sapho in Le Grand Cyrus, and, paradoxically, this fictionalization is frequently accepted as an accurate, historically true description of its author.⁵ As the person-become-type or as the character-become-historical figure, Madeleine de Scudéry used the play between fiction and reality to inscribe herself in both the history of the world and the history of the World of Prose.

In Les Femmes illustres ou les Harangues héroïques, published in 1642, an earlier version of Sapho-Madeleine argued that women could best insure their places in history by writing, rather than by being written about.⁶ Found in a harangue supposedly spoken by Sapho, this argument is only one manifestation of the inscription of the female writer in her work and the relationship of that inscription to the referential shift from the history of the world to the history of the World of Prose. An examination of some of the structural elements of Les Femmes illustres will help to demonstrate the textual dynamics of female self-inscription in the World of Prose.

Les Femmes illustres is a collection of harangues which the supposed author—who is more properly seen as a male narrator—admits are fictional and which are attributed, within the context of the fiction, to illustrious women of history, myth and legend. The combination of fictional texts and extratextual reference makes it reasonable to assume that the problem of history would subtend the entire work. The question of female self-inscription is more difficult to formulate since this self-inscription begins with the attribution of the text to Georges. The title page carries the name “Monsieur de Scudéry.” Yet, as is so often the case in the literary history of the Scudérys, at least joint authorship is generally granted to Madeleine. Georges Mongrédien cites Tallemant to argue for her partial authorship,⁷ and, more recently, Nicole Aronson has elaborated an interesting and convincing argument for Madeleine's authorship of the Sapho harangue (Aronson, pp. 118-9). We will return to this harangue as a specific example.

The use of the name “Monsieur de Scudéry” on the title page is, however, neither arbitrary nor trivial. In fact, it reveals a signifying relationship which will be at work at most levels of Les Femmes illustres. The choice of the name “Monsieur de Scudéry” is, of course, determined by several factors: Georges's possible co-authorship is one of those factors; another is his relationship to the co-authoress. Since the family name is accurate, the only incorrect or incomplete designation is the sexual one, “Monsieur.” The author's identity is not lost, it is simply couched in a different sexual identity—a technique which resembles that of the young girl who, in so many stories, dressed in men's clothing to accomplish so-called male deeds, all the time claiming to be her own brother. In our present example, the family name, that is, the historical term, includes both siblings, while the masculine name is a textual term—a probable pseudonym—standing for the sister. The name “Monsieur de Scudéry” is an historical term, that is, it is a sign whose apparent referent in history is Georges de Scudéry, Madeleine's brother. Yet, given what we know about the history of the text, our reading of that sign splits it into two parts: “de Scudéry” remains an historical sign, while “Monsieur” becomes a textual signifier. Even as it states masculinity, it signifies a woman, Madeleine.

This structure by which a sign whose referent is historical splits into a textual signifier signifying a woman or women through the context provided by the World of Prose is one which will reappear at many levels of Les Femmes illustres. The comments of the “author” on the book's title suggest that he had even foreseen the problematics of a textual term pointing to female inscription in the World of Prose. In an attempt to ward off criticism, the author asks female readers to defend the title:

Vous aurez encor à respondre, à ceux qui trouueroient estrange, que le titre de mon Liure soit

LES FEMMES ILLVSTRES,
OV LES HARANGVES HEROIQVES:

& qui diroient, que des Femmes & des Harãgues, ne sont pas la mesme chose: Vous aurez, dis-je, à leur respondre, que l'exemple d'Herodote m'authorise & les condamne: & que puis qu'il ne luy a pas esté deffendu, de nõmer les neuf Liures de son Histoire, Melpomene, Eraton, Clio, Vranie, Terpsicore, Euterpe, Thalie, Calliope, & Polymnie, qui sont les Noms des neuf Muses, elles qui qui [sic] sont Deesses, & non pas des Liures; ce que i'ay fait me doit bien estre permis.

(Les Femmes illustres, p. 5)

The anticipated objection is that the two parts of the title might be taken as symmetrical and that Femmes and Harangues be taken as interchangeable. The very fact that such an objection is foreseen, however, conveys the ambiguity inherent in the double title. In addition, it is the case that the two titles are interchangeable in some ways: they name the same text, and the adjectives illustres and héroïques do seem to encourage a parallel reading of the two.

The dynamics of the title recall those which we observed in the relationship between the name “Monsieur de Scudéry” and the authoress. The accurate words, illustres and héroïques carry with them an historical component which successfully describes both the traditional genre to be employed, the harangue, and the extra-textual, well-known women who are to speak them. Illustres and héroïques, both accurate and inclusive, refer to the history of the world and, therefore, function as did the family name Scudéry. Harangues functions as did the title Monsieur, it signifies the female term: in the case of Monsieur, the female term was Madeleine, while in the case of harangues the female term is femmes.

This reading of the title is reinforced by the fact that the structure of each of the harangues is parallel to this model. An illustrious woman and her circumstances are described in historically accurate terms. A text is posited which she could have spoken, but which was in fact written by a seventeenth-century French author according to rhetorical concerns,⁸ so that the harangue itself is a textual signifier functioning within the World of Prose. This text points, as the author tells us in the “Epistre aux Dames,” to the “glory of your [the female] sex”—always through its eloquence, and quite often in its substance, as well. This is the female signified.

Thus far, the shift in referential context has taken the form of a splitting of the historical sign into a textual signifier signifying a woman or women. In order to complete the shift to the World of Prose and the self-inscription of the female author in that World, a sign referring to the World of Prose must be reconstituted as the product of that splitting process. The final harangue of the first volume completes the shift. In this harangue, the poetess, Sapho, encourages her friend Erinne to write poetry also. In order to convince her, she launches into a defense of the female sex as a whole. Says the author, “C'est l'Argument de cette Harangue, que je donne en particulier, à la gloire de ce beau sexe; comme en general, je luy ay donné tout ce volume” (Les Femmes illustres, p. 410). Several factors effect the identification between Sapho and Madeleine. As Nicole Aronson has pointed out, we know that within the salon society the name Sapho was frequently applied to Madeleine de Scudéry, and she would use the name for her self-portrait in Le Grand Cyrus seven years later. The strongly feminist content of the argument which Sapho elaborates and the fact that much of the same reasoning will reappear in Madeleine de Scudéry's later works tend to confirm that Sapho functions as Madeleine's self-inscription in the text (Aronson, pp. 118-9).

In the reading of a work ascribed to a Scudéry, the name Sapho becomes a sign whose historical referent, the Greek poetess, is dislodged. Once the historical referent is dislodged, the sign splits and Sapho becomes a signifier pointing to the fictional persona. The resultant second sign refers to Madeleine de Scudéry, and can do so only through the history of the World of Prose. The creation of this sign within this history alters the processes of signification and of reference, even as it affirms the authoress's identity.⁹

The argument which Sapho-Madeleine elaborates tends to confirm the need for women to inscribe themselves in the World of Prose through the manipulation of language, rather than as objects of description.

Quelques Elogues que l'on vous puisse donner, il vous seroit plus glorieux, d'auoir fait des Vers pour tous les Illustres de vostre siecle, si vous les faisiez bien; qu'il ne vous le seroit, qu'ils en euss˜et tous fait pour vous. Croyez-moy, Erinne, il vaut mieux donner l'immortalité aux autres, que de la receuoir d'autruy: & trouuer sa propre gloire chez soy, que de l'attendre d'ailleurs.

(Les Femmes illustres, p. 425)

The use of the words illustres and glorieux points to previous appearances of related terms in the text. Illustres, although a noun here, has appeared as an adjective modifying femmes in the title. The nominal form, gloire, of the adjective glorieux appears in the introduction to the volume, and also in the introduction to the Sapho harangue, in the phrase, “la gloire de ce beau sexe,” meaning, of course, the female one. One can be illustrious when praised by others, but glory comes through active participation in the articulation of history. Similarly, the “illustrious” women of the title are made into speaking subjects through the fictional harangues the author gives them to speak. The result of this speaking activity is a tribute to the glory of the female sex. Linguistic activity is advocated over linguistic passivity. If we assume that gloire maintains what would later become its specifically defined cartesian meaning, gloire is the individual's own sense of having done good deeds.¹⁰ Thus, while an illustrious woman is well-known in history, a glorious woman is aware of her own achievements. She is not simply—or even necessarily—inscribed in history, she is self-inscribed in the history of the World of Prose.

This reading of the status of the Sapho harangue provides some insight into the dynamics of the relationship between self-inscription and referential shift. As we have seen, all the harangues carry the structural aspect of a shift from reference to a woman in history to signification of a female fiction. With this shift comes a loss of specificity, however. A fictional persona has less biography—less history, that is—than the historical figure from which she has been derived. But once the sign is reconstituted within the World of Prose, it reestablishes specificity. In the Sapho harangue, Madeleine de Scudéry declares more than the “glory of the female sex,” she declares her own glory, she declares herself.

As a writer, she also declares her origins, for the choice of the name Sapho is no more arbitrary than was the choice of the pseudonym on the title page. Unlike the pseudonym, Monsieur de Scudéry, however, here the sexual component is accurate. In the case of the name Sapho, gender and activity are correctly indicated, while time and geographical location are not. Accurate time and place designations belong to the history of the world, and not to the history of the World of Prose, as the most superficial reading of any of Madeleine de Scudéry's novels will show. Although gender and activity may topically belong to that history as well, it is rarely the case that this particular combination, female and writing, does. This combination belongs in the salon world, and it has meaning in the history of the World of Prose.

The “Préface” to Ibrahim ou l'Illustre Bassa, published in 1641 (and probably written by Georges, though equally expressive of Madeleine's views¹¹), states that novels should be based on history because readers will sympathize with the characters more. It also states that, though the novelist should know history, he should certainly not be bound by it. What amount to concerns with vraisemblance and bienséance require the novelist to know more than the historian. Yet, the “more” the novelist should know frequently seems to involve methods of bypassing or subverting history—methods which involve the subjection of the history of the world to the logic of the history of the World of Prose. As we have seen, the paradoxical nature of this view of history becomes a paradigm for a type of linguistic and creative relationship of the subject to the world. And it is at the point of paradoxical disjunction that Madeleine de Scudéry proposes that women should write themselves into history.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), esp. pp. 32-59. In both Les Mots et les choses and L'Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961), Foucault refers to the existence of a transition period in the development of classicisme. He does not concern himself with the period, however, and, in this, he follows a long tradition among historians of French culture—a tradition which tends to devalue the baroque period in France.

2. Virtually all the most traditional studies of salon life make this point, but the most interesting recent study of the salons, Carolyn C. Lougee's Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), does so in a most specific way. Social stratification was undermined in the salons in such a way as to put into question the notion of merit as it was normally conceived at the time.

3. On the importance of the salons for what he calls, “the social and literary ascendancy of the female sex,” see Ian Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610-1652, pp. 119-54.

4. Nicole Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry (Boston: Twayne Publishers [Twayne World Author Series], 1978), pp. 47-8, 152-3.

5. Aronson, p. 27. For the relationship of the précieuse and, specifically, of Madeleine de Scudéry's precious persona to the play between art and reality, see Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 26-9.

6. Les Femmes illustres, ou Les Harangues Heroïques de Monsieur de Scudéry (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1642), pp. 423-41. My main access has been to the 1661 edition (Lyon: François Comba), wherein the Sapho harangue can be found on pp. 410-29. Pagination will refer to this edition.

7. Georges Mongrédien, “Bibliographie des œuvres de Georges et de Madeleine de Scudéry,” Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France 40 (1933), p. 421.

8. A defense of “l'Art Oratoire” of women constitutes the greatest part of the “Epistre aux Dames” which opens Les Femmes illustres. The “author” argues that women have natural oratorical ability, while men must painstakingly acquire linguistic prowess through study. He then imagines an objection: if women are so gifted, why does he not make them speak according to the rhetorical elements taught in schools? He lists these, with a parenthetical apology to his female readers for the “terribles mots” which he is going to utter. The list includes “les Narrations, les Epilogues, les Exagerations, les Metaphores,” and others. He answers the objection by stating that “l'artifice le plus delicat, consiste à faire croire qu'il n'y en a point.”

9. A brief counterexample from the text might prove useful in illustrating the reconstitution of certain signs within the World of Prose and the simultaneous female self-inscription. In the third harangue of the first volume, Cleopatra tries to convince Marc-Anthony that she had not betrayed him, that she had saved his life by making him lose the battle. We know that the harangue is fictional. Whether or not it is verisimilar, it was not spoken by the Cleopatra we know from history. The name Cleopatra is a textual term which signifies the female persona who speaks the harangue. But she keeps the biography of history: at no point does she “become” (read: at no point does the name become a sign referring to) Madeleine.

10. The notion of “gloire” deserves some comment in any seventeenth-century context, but becomes even more problematic in the work of Madeleine de Scudéry. In 1671, she won first prize in a contest founded by Balzac and judged by the Académie Française for her “Discours de la gloire.” Nicole Aronson argues, along with F. E. Sutcliffe (see Aronson, p. 120), that Madeleine did not express her own ideas but those of Balzac in this essay. The issue is essentially the necessity for public acclaim in glory. This is obviously essential for Corneille, and, in the Traité des Passions, Descartes specifically includes public recognition along with self-awareness in the notion of glory: “Ce que j'appelle ici du nom de gloire est une espèce de joie fondée sur l'amour qu'on a pour soi-même, et qui vient de l'opinion ou de l'espérance qu'on a d'être loué par quelques autres. Ainsi elle est différente de la satisfaction intérieure qui vient de l'opinion qu'on a d'avoir fait quelque bonne action” (Art. 204). Aronson quotes a passage from Clélie which clearly points to the superfluous nature of public approval and to the essential nature of self-awareness in the acquisition of glory. While Aronson's argument is probably accurate for the most part, the frequent statement that Les Femmes illustres is being written for the glory of the female sex certainly seems to imply that glory has a possible, though not necessary, public side. Sapho's specific directions, coming as they do within a declaration that she hopes to overcome Erinne's “défiance d'[elle-] mesme” (p. 411), certainly do tend to support the necessity for self-awareness over public approval.

11. See Henri Coulet, Le Roman jusqu'à la Révolution (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), p. 176.

Helen Osterman Borowitz (excerpt date 1985)

SOURCE: “The Unconfessed Précieuse: Mme. De Staël's Debt to Mlle. de Scudéry,” in The Impact of Art on French Literature, University of Delaware Press, 1985, pp. 33-55.

[In the following essay, Borowitz establishes connections between Germaine de Staël's works—including Corinne and On Literature—to Scudéry's Artamèneand Clélie. The critic also explains how Scudéry, both as an author and through her salons, provided a model for women writers and for women's education in France.]

The peculiarly French delight in encounters between art and literature can be traced back to the seventeenth century when both visual and verbal portraiture flourished in précieux circles. The “literary portraits” were short, self-contained passages that served the dual purpose of providing detailed description of the appearance and personality of an individual character and inculcating a general lesson derived from understanding of the moral force of the character portrayed. Though brief character studies had appeared in French literature since medieval times, they attained new complexity and popularity in the novels of Mlle. de Scudéry. The literary portraits that ornamented her lengthy heroic novels paralleled the many paintings of heroic women produced in France during the reign of Marie de Médicis and the regency of Anne of Austria. One of Rubens's paintings depicting the life of Marie de Médicis presented the queen as the Roman war goddess Bellona, a symbol of the powerful woman. In the Palais Cardinal, Philippe de Champaigne and Simon Vouet painted Marie de Médicis, Anne of Austria, and Joan of Arc, among other French heroes and heroines. Images of heroines also appeared in books of pictorial poetry in which engravings were coupled with poems in the Classical tradition of the “speaking picture,” revived during the Renaissance.¹ The Italian poet Marino's Galleria, a series of poems on real and imaginary paintings, went into sixteen editions and inspired Georges de Scudéry to write his poems on a collection of pictures entitled Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry (1646). When in 1642 he wrote a tribute to Richelieu, Georges de Scudéry titled the literary description of the cardinal a “portrait.” He further emphasized his own role as a “portrait painter” by ending his essay with the words “there he is,” as though he had just laid down his brush.² In the same year he collaborated with his sister Madeleine de Scudéry on a series of essays on celebrated heroines, entitled Famous Women or Heroic Addresses (Les Femmes illustres ou les harangues héroîques), that set out to demonstrate the eloquence of women. Another such collection of feminist character studies was the Gallery of Forceful Women (La Galerie des femmes fortes) written by Le Moyne in 1649, which juxtaposed engravings of historical and legendary heroines with eulogies of their triumphs and made comparisons between these powerful figures and modern French women. In 1646-47 the Italian artist Romanelli, summoned to Paris to decorate the Galerie Mazarine, painted the portraits of the leading salonières as Muses in Apollo's entourage. Similarly Mlle. de Scudéry portrayed in her novels her salon friends in the guise of famous heros and heroines. These “disguised” portraits of contemporaries stimulated the curiosity of her readers, who could catch a glimpse of the social life in the exclusive salons of the précieux circle through her romans à clef. Artamène or the Grand Cyrus (1649-53), which featured the Prince de Condé as the hero Artamène and the Duchesse de Longueville as the heroine Mandane, included in the supporting cast many “disguised” portraits of other visitors to the blue chamber of Mme. de Rambouillet. Similarly, Clélie, A Roman History (1654-61) reflected the social life of Mlle. de Scudéry's “Saturdays.”

The novels in which Mlle. de Scudéry's literary portraits were interpolated included tales of adventure and love largely based on events from ancient history. Though her heroes bear famous names, they act out of love rather than devotion to country. Their chief concern is to win through deeds of bravery the esteem of their beloved. Although these novels were innovative in some respects, the author acknowledged her debt to earlier writers in her preface to Cyrus, where she named as her “only masters” Heliodorus and Honoré d'Urfé.³ Heliodorus's immensely popular Greek novels, translated into French in the sixteenth century, recounted the adventures of chaste lovers who were separated by overwhelming obstacles. These novels anticipated Mlle. de Scudéry's not only in the love theme but in the detailed descriptions of the lovers' great beauty. D'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607-27), a romance between a shepherd and shepherdess set in the pastoral land of Forez, which was ruled by women, had many feminist and romantic elements that appealed to the précieuses. D'Urfé created, in his story of courtly love, a romance that would be viewed by its readers as a guide to elegant manners. Mlle. de Scudéry's novels were influenced by the numerous subplots that embellished L'Astrée, as well as by the interruptions of plot for long descriptions of paintings or protracted conversations. She rejected, however, the many supernatural aids to plot used by both these earlier “masters.” No nymphs or fairies appeared in her novels, for though Mlle. de Scudéry's plots sometimes strained probability, they never relied on the miraculous.

The increased importance of literary and artistic portraiture in her fiction marked an advance in the direction of a more natural plot and motivation. She said in her preface to an earlier novel, Ibrahim (1641): “I am not interested in external things or the caprices of destiny: I wish to know the impulses of his [the hero's] soul and the way they are expressed.”⁴ Because of her interest in inner motivations, she expanded descriptions of characters, telling her reader not only about their physical attributes but about their moral qualities as well. In Clélie her “portrait” of the painter Nelante (Nanteuil) capsulized her own goals as a literary portraitist: “a mirror does not represent more justly those whom he paints … for he penetrates the hearts of men in order to animate their portraits; he makes visible their wit and their temperament; he expresses even the least movements of their soul in their eyes.”⁵

Though Mlle. de Scudéry's books were largely forgotten a hundred years after her death, still there were some readers who continued to be captivated by these early novels in the Romantic tradition. Rousseau had read Cyrus, and Chateaubriand recalled that his mother had learned it by heart. An unconfessed admirer of the précieuse author was Mme. de Staël, whose mother Mme. Necker continued the tradition of the précieuses in her literary salon. The pedantic Mme. Necker, characterized by William Beckford as a “précieuse-ridicule,” set rigorous standards for her daughter's education.⁶ Though disapproving of frivolous reading for Germaine, she may well have made an exception of the de Scudéry novels, since Mme. Necker (née Suzanne Curchod) had, in her youth, patterned her first salon—in Lausanne, 1757—on the seventeenth-century ruelles. Her literary group, known as the Académie des Eaux or Académie de la Poudrière, reflected the society pictured in Mlle. de Scudéry's works. As president of the Académie, Suzanne Curchod had taken the names Thémire and Sappho for herself and had had a new Carte de Tendre drawn up showing her temple situated on an island in the middle of the stormy sea of sentiment. The Académie had a literary and feminist cast: its members produced essays and verses, and some of its meetings were held to discuss the rights of women.⁷

It was probably during these years that Suzanne Curchod made her first attempts as a femme auteur. Though her passion for writing continued after marriage and generated her journal, and a stream of maxims and pensées, her husband's disapproval precluded a literary career. When she engaged in a competition with her daughter Germaine to produce literary portraits of M. Necker, that conservative paterfamilias showed some concern that his daughter might follow the path he had forbidden to her mother. His views did not escape Germaine who recorded his reaction in her journal:

My father could not put up with a woman author and during the four days that he saw me writing his portrait, anxiety already took hold of him, and he would call me jokingly “M. de Saint Écritoire” (Sir-Saint Writing Desk). He wished to warn me against this weakness of vanity. Mother had a powerful taste for literary composition; she sacrificed it to him. “Imagine,” he said to me often, “how worried I would be, that I would not dare enter her room for fear of disturbing an occupation which would be more agreeable to her than my presence. I would see her, in my arms, still pursuing an idea.” Ah how right he was, that women are seldom made to follow the same career as men.⁸

Though in her journal the dutiful daughter agreed with her father's views, she was to achieve in her career her mother's literary aspirations. Yet while she pursued the forbidden literary laurel, Mme. de Staël's persistent memory of the nickname her father had bestowed on her, “M. de Saint Écritoire,” with its covert threat of loss of femininity, seems to have merely kept her from owning a writing table of her own. Like her heroine Corinne, she developed many of the thoughts that were later to appear in print during the long spoken monologues that she performed in her salon. Only after the stunning success of Corinne, when she had established herself as a professional writer in the mode of the Muse with lyre, did she allow herself to purchase the furniture of her profession, the écritoire.⁹

Growing up in her mother's salon, Germaine, an authentic child prodigy, had a vast literary background and a conversational virtuosity that were admired by the visitors to Mme. Necker's Vendredis. Many eminent callers paid tribute to the young genius. Under the pseudonyms of Louise, Milane, Aglae, and Zulmé, word portraits described the extraordinary Germaine Necker. One of these literary encomia was presented to the eighteen-year-old Germaine by the salon gallant, the Comte de Guibert, famed for his success with women.¹⁰ He patterned his heroine Zulmé on the young Mlle. Necker:

Zulmé is only twenty, and she is the most famous of the priestesses of Apollo; … Her large black eyes sparkled with genius; her hair, the color of ebony, fell on her shoulders in wavy curls; her features were more pronounced than delicate; one sensed in them something above the destiny of her sex. In such a way one would paint the Muse of Poetry, or Clio, or Melpomene. … She takes the pitch of her lyre and speaks to the assembly of the great truths of nature, of the immortality of the soul, of love, of liberty, of charm and of the danger of the passions. … She becomes completely silent; then the temple resounds with applause. Her head bows with modesty; her long eyelashes lower over her fiery eyes, and the sun remains veiled from our sight.¹¹

This description of the young Zulmé as inspired Muse singing to the accompaniment of the lyre and drawing the overwhelming applause of the multitude was later to be transformed by Mme. de Staël in Corinne into the opening scene of the crowning of the Roman improvisatrice at the Capitol in Rome. Madame de Staël described Corinne in her first appearance as “a priestess of Apollo,” the very words with which Guibert had characterized Zulmé.¹²

But though this dramatic introduction of Corinne in the novel grew from the description of Zulmé in Guibert's word portrait, the characterization of the heroine had its ultimate source in the literary portraits of the précieuses. Both the use of a pseudonym and the portrait of the literary woman in the guise of a Classical poet were devices that had been established by Madeleine de Scudéry. Moreover, it was Mlle. de Scudéry's literary self-portrait under the pseudonym of Sappho that was to become the model over a century later for Mme. de Staël's fictional heroine Corinne. Renowned in her lifetime as “the Muse of our Century,” Mlle. de Scudéry offered to Mme. de Staël a model for the literary portrait of Corinne.¹³

The theme of the ancient lyric poetess had made its appearance over two decades before the publication of Corinne in Germaine's first attempts at verse. In 1784 when she was eighteen, she penned verses entitled Romance sur l'air: Nous nous aimions dès l'enfance that told the story of Sappho and Phaon. The theme of talent bringing with it lovelessness—the central theme of Delphine and Corinne—made its appearance in the very first stanza. Genius and love shine in Sappho's eyes and she attracts “a thousand lovers” as Corinne was later to do. Anticipating the later self-portrait, the young writer identifies herself in these verses with her tragic heroine.¹⁴

In 1785, a year after she had composed her poem on Sappho and Phaon, Germaine began inscribing in her journal word portraits of her friends.¹⁵ The depiction of Corinne, an idealized self-portrait, was in part inspired by Guibert's description of Germaine. But although Guibert had given her a dramatic image of her heroine as Muse, the details of Corinne's history and character were provided by Madeleine de Scudéry's literary self-portrait as Sappho in Cyrus.

Both Sappho and Corinne are high-born and independent of their parents. Sappho lost her parents at six and, according to Mlle. de Scudéry, her childhood is unnecessary to describe for by twelve, her wit and judgment were already formed. Corinne's birthplace is disputed, her family name unknown, and her first book carried “only the name of Corinne.” Her past too is mysterious: “No one knew where she had lived nor what she had been before this time” (bk. 2, chap. 1, p. 662); Sappho's claim to beauty is modest. Of middling height and lusterless complexion, she has one redeeming feature that has been charitably attributed to plain women through the ages: fine eyes. Mlle. de Scudéry, no beauty herself, was careful to give a full description of Sappho's amorous and sparkling eyes, which shine “with a fire so penetrating and have such a passionate sweetness that vivacity and languidness are not incompatible in Sappho's beautiful eyes.”¹⁶ Avoiding any close description of Sappho's face or figure, Mlle. de Scudéry praises her hands as “so admirable, that they are indeed hands which capture hearts: or, if one considered how beloved of the Muses this learned lady is, they are hands worthy of gathering the most beautiful flowers of Parnassus” (332-33). The source of Sappho's power is beyond physical beauty. The charm of her wit surpasses others, and she is capable of inspiring greater passions than “the greatest beauties of the earth.”

Corinne's pretension to beauty appears stronger than Sappho's, although Mme. de Staël emphasizes bearing and garb rather than a detailed picture of her features. Surrounded by the cortege of her admirers, she is hailed by the crowd, “Long live Corinne! Long live genius! Long live beauty!” Corinne, like Sappho, has an overwhelming effect on men, and when first viewed by the melancholy hero, Oswald, Lord Nelvil, the power of her attraction “electrified the imagination of Oswald.” Comparable to Sappho's admirable hands are Corinne's arms “of a striking beauty,” and her stature is described by the full-figured Mme. de Staël as “slightly robust in the mode of Greek statues” (663). Corinne's beauty and her dress recall antiquity, but, like Sappho before her, her charm is not closely linked to her appearance.

The power of attraction of both heroines recalls the Muses. Part of their charm is the mingling of genius with simplicity. Sappho, despite her literary genius, wants to learn how to do domestic tasks: “She knows how to play the lyre and to sing: she dances gracefully: and she wishes to know how to do all the work with which women who do not have her cultivated mind occupy themselves” (334). Corinne, too, is capable of both the extraordinary and the ordinary: “She gives the impression at once of a priestess of Apollo advancing toward the temple of the Sun and of a perfectly simple woman in the daily relations of life” (663).

Both women create literature, not as hard-working writers bent over their écritoires but, rather, as effortless improvisers of poetic song on the lyre in the manner of their ancient namesakes. Thus Sappho improvises a song more moving than written words: “an improvised song which is a thousand times more touching than the most plaintive elegy. … She expresses so delicately the most difficult sentiments, and she knows so well how to analyze the anatomy of an amorous heart” (333-34). Corinne, too, has a genius for improvising poetry to the lyre: “One said her voice was the most moving in Italy; another that she danced like a nymph, and that she drew with as much grace as invention: everyone said that no one had ever written or improvised such beautiful verses” (662). Yet while both women improvise song to the lyre and dance like ancient nymphs, they also converse with simplicity. Sappho's conversation is “so natural, so easy and so elegant” (334), and she has the talent to speak equally well on serious as on playful subjects. Corinne exhibits similar versatility: “in daily conversation she had by turns a grace and an elegance which charmed all” (662). Both women are beloved by their friends. At the official crowning of Corinne Prince Castel Forte pays tribute to both her genius and to her “qualities of soul” that only her friends can describe. Her talent as an improvisatrice is due not only to “her teeming wit” but to her “generous thoughts” (664). Sappho too is praised for her traits of generosity and interest in her friends: “she is loyal in her friendships; and she has a soul so tender, and a heart so passionate that it is a supreme joy to be loved by Sappho” (336).

Thus the portrait of Corinne, in her literary genius, her style of improvisation, and her personality traits, bears a close resemblance to the portrait of Sappho from Cyrus. Their charisma draws lovers to them, and their simplicity and generosity endears them to their friends. Their genius is marked by divine inspiration rather than mental concentration. Corinne's innate ability, her unlearned brilliance, parallel the effortless knowledge of Sappho that Molière mocked in his farce Les Précieuses ridicules with the comment: “People of quality know all without having learned anything.”¹⁷

Mme. de Staël, who had acted in Molière's Les Femmes savantes, was well aware of the criticism leveled against pedantic précieuses by the playwright who claimed in his introduction to Les Précieuses ridicules that he had only satirized their imitators from the provinces. This disclaimer seems to have mollified the Parisian précieuses, and Mlle. de Scudéry's later mention of the performance of Molière's plays at Versailles indicates she bore him no ill will. Several modern scholars have suggested she shared with the playwright a distaste for the type of pedants he parodied.¹⁸

In constructing her self-portrait Mlle. de Scudéry had been careful to disassociate herself from those women in her circle who flaunted their learning. She blamed the public disapproval of her circle on the foolish behavior of her imitators. In order to set apart her own literary salon from those of her emulators, she created a fictional character, the false précieuse, Damophile, who, as Victor Cousin pointed out, may well have been a model for Molière of Philaminte in Les Précieuses ridicules.¹⁹ Damophile, the provincial précieuse, surrounds herself with tutors and books in order to gain the reputation as a savante. Mlle. de Scudéry contrasts this pretentious behavior with the modest demeanor of Sappho: “there are more books in her [Damophile's] study than she has read, and there are fewer in Sappho's house than she has read.” Thus Mlle. de Scudéry warns that the trappings of scholarships are often an uncertain measure of learning.

Another example of Damophile's pedantry is her commissioned portrait as a Muse. She poses “decked out the way Muses are painted” beside a table “laden with a quantity of books, paintbrushes, a lyre, mathematical instruments which would mark her learning.”²⁰ Mlle. de Scudéry suggests here that to have oneself painted in the guise of a Muse is a display of unbridled vanity. Damophile's portrait beside a table piled with implements of music, mathematics, paintings, and literature also recalls the engraving by Abraham Bosse from The Foolish Virgins series (ca. 1635-41) in which the Foolish Virgins are depicted as Frenchwomen of the time of Louis XIII gathered around a table laden with globes, books, musical instruments, and geometrical devices. The gloss states that these women waste their time on music, dance, and books of love, an obvious gibe at the learned ladies of the artist's day.²¹

Mlle. de Scudéry created Damophile in an effort to blunt the force of antifeminist satire, as ten years earlier in Famous Women or Heroic Addresses she had delineated an antiportrait of a pedant in Sappho's address to Erinne.²² In Cyrus, she contrasted the ridiculous Damophile to her own self-portrait as Sappho, the unstudied and modest woman admired by all. The antithesis between the two portraits appears to have been consciously emphasized by Mlle. de Scudéry in order to disassociate her circle from the pretentious pedantry that contemporary detractors attributed to the précieuses.

Mme. de Staël took up the same emphasis on natural charm and spontaneity in painting her picture of Corinne. Additional support for the heroine's unstudied genius could be found in eighteenth-century literature, especially in the works of Rousseau. By the time Mme. de Staël was writing Corinne, the critics of literary women were even more outspoken than in Mlle. de Scudéry's day. Napoleon's antifeminism may have aroused Mme. de Staël's disdain, but Rousseau's writings on literary women probably caused her some concern, since the Swiss philosopher had been a household god of the Neckers, and her first published pamphlet was a defense of his writings.²³ Rousseau's attack on literary women as unworthy of love could scarcely have been ignored by the young Germaine who aspired to be a famous writer. Rousseau's description of the literary lady working at her disordered desk looked back to the satirists of the précieuses and anticipated M. Necker's nickname, “M. de Saint-Écritoire”:

Readers, I appeal to you on your honor—which gives you the better opinion of a woman as you enter her room, which makes you approach her with the greater respect: to see her occupied with the duties of her sex, with her household cares, the garments of her children lying around her; or, to find her writing verses on her dressing-table, surrounded with all sorts of pamphlets and sheets of notepaper in every variety of color? If all the men in the world were sensible, every girl of letters would remain unmarried all her life.²⁴

Mme. de Staël herself must have borne a close resemblance to Rousseau's woman writer absorbed in putting down her thoughts at her dressing table, for she was remembered by friends with pen in hand even when her hair was being coiffed. However, in creating her heroine, Germaine was careful to paint a vision of grace and beauty in which the pen was exchanged for the lyre. An image from ancient Roman and Renaissance art and literature, the lady with the lyre was appropriated by the précieuses as an emblem of Italian Renaissance culture and revived in the nineteenth century under the influence of Neo-Classicism. As we shall see in chapter 3, the Muse with the lyre carved in antique marble could scarcely have been ignored by Mme. de Staël on her tour of Italy to gather material for her novel. At the time the book was published, the lady with the lyre was to become not only a popular motif but also the emblem of many women writers among the French Romantics, who styled their salon recitations after Corinne.²⁵ Attributes of Muses, sibyls, and ancient poetesses were no longer clearly differentiated, and any woman with intellectual aspirations might don the sibyl's turban and strum the lyre-guitar in the manner of a Muse or poetess.

In Corinne the Muse with lyre becomes the living apotheosis of her own genius when, after the crowning at the Capitol, the heroine takes up her instrument and improvises poetry before the assembly. This scene was based on a real event on Mme. de Staël's trip to Italy when she was received by the Academy of Arcadia in Rome under the pseudonym of Telesilla, the fifth-century Greek poetess.²⁶ Such a triumph was a rare occasion for a literary woman, and Mme. de Staël was to treasure this moment and to create a permanent image of it in her book, an image that would kindle the aspirations of many nineteenth-century women authors. Though Mme. de Staël's triumph in Rome inspired the scene, it is my conjecture that Mlle. de Scudéry's Cyrus (pt. 8, bk. 2) provided some of the elaborate details of the crowning. In the homage paid to Cleonisbe, at the feast of the triumph of the sun, many elements of Corinne's crowning are anticipated. The gilded chariots, the ascent to the throne, the crowning with garlands, the music, the throngs of admirers are all described. Even the Prince of Phoceus who falls hopelessly in love with Cleonisbe on the spot anticipates the lovesick Oswald.²⁷

The scene of Corinne's triumph closes with an allusion to honors accorded women of genius since the days of Sappho: “The same mythological images and allusions must have been addressed to such women of celebrated literary talents across the centuries from the time of Sappho to our own” (663). Mme. de Staël's interest in the homage paid to women writers over the centuries would probably have made her aware of the recognition accorded the seventeenth-century French Sappho in her day. The earliest instance of official recognition of a woman by the French Academy was the award of first prize in eloquence to Mlle. de Scudéry in 1671 for her Discourse on Glory. Later her fame spread beyond France, and she was recognized as an Italian Muse with her election to the academy at Padua. Recognition by the Italian academy was particularly appropriate, since the ideal of the educated gentlewoman that she personfied derived ultimately from Castiglione's Courtier. The honors accorded Mlle. de Scudéry were probably the grandest ever bestowed on a seventeenth-century French femme auteur. Though she originally published under her brother's name owing to prevailing notions of propriety among the nobility, still in her late years her fame had spread throughout Europe.²⁸ And after her death she was memorialized in Mlle. L'H[éritier de Villandon]'s eulogy, The Apotheosis of Mlle. de Scudéry (1702). A sculptural tribute was paid her when she was included as a French genius in the form of a Grace on Titon de Tillet's monument The French Parnassus.²⁹

Thus Sappho's acclaim would have served as historic precedent for the tributes paid Corinne. That Mlle. de Scudéry was the most appropriate model for the feminine literary genius available to Mme. de Staël seems to have been overlooked by modern critics.³⁰

To Mme. de Staël, who longed for recognition of her literary genius, how fortunate must Madeleine de Scudéry have appeared, as the recipient of glory during her lifetime. No such possibility of official recognition seemed to exist for Mme. de Staël writing Corinne in exile from Napoleonic France. However, not only Classical echoes but also the memory of tribute paid to an earlier French woman may well have been in her mind when she related the scene of the crowning of Corinne to historic precedents “from the days of Sappho to our own.”

In several ways Corinne embodied attributes of Mlle. de Scudéry. The name Corinne, which Mme. de Staël is said to have borrowed from Propertius, was also a reflection of the earlier author's Greek pseudonym.³¹ In Mlle. de Scudéry's “History of Hesiod” in Clélie, Corinne is described pridefully as a woman poet who will triumph five times over Pindar and will teach him how to employ fiction in poetry.³² In Corinne, Mme. de Staël had her heroine say: “I tell no one my true name. … I take only that of Corinne which the history of a Greek woman, friend of Pindar and poet, has made me love” (bk. 14, chap. 4, p. 788). In an accompanying footnote Mme. de Staël explained: “Corinne was a Greek woman, famous for lyric poetry; Pindar himself took lessons from her.” Beyond the classical name, the association of Corinne with the Muse was also a seventeenth-century mode applied to literary women, like Mlle. de Scudéry, that suited the style of early nineteenth-century Neo-Classicism.

The sibylline quality of Corinne, brought out by Mme. de Staël through a comparison of her costume with that of the Sibyl in Domenichino's painting, had historic connections with Mlle. de Scudéry.³³ Visitors to the aged writer noted in their memoirs Mlle. de Scudéry's resemblance to an antique sibyl. Her oracular manner of speech as well as her aging face appeared sibylline to her respectful admirers.³⁴ Besides biographical links, Mlle. de Scudéry had introduced the prophetic power of the sibyl into the pages of her novels. In Cyrus the plot is often advanced through the words of prophesying sibyls. Though Sappho herself is too modest to recite her poetry in the course of the novel, the sibyls gave their pronouncements in poetic form.³⁵ Mlle. de Scudéry did not, however, endow Sappho with the prophetic powers of a sibyl. Mme. de Staël, on the other hand, showed no such restraint. Corinne's improvisations, written in poetic form, were presented as “inspired” utterances.

Beyond its associations with Mlle. de Scudéry, the tradition of the sibylline woman genius (which still continues in twentieth-century interviews with femme auteurs³⁶) was very much in vogue during the Neo-Classical period at the turn of the eighteenth century. Mme. de Staël and her portraitist Mme. Vigée-Le Brun were among the many women who liked to wear turbans as emblems of their genius. In describing the turban of Corinne as “twined around her lustrous black curls” the author was surely thinking of her own luxuriant tresses rather than of the smooth neatly parted hair of the Sibyl in Domenichino's painting.

Domenichino's painting of the Sibyl offered to Mme. de Staël a youthful image of inspired genius whose uplifted eyes could be neatly contrasted to the demure lowered gaze of Correggio's Madonna de la Scala, the emblem in the novel for Corinne's rival for Oswald's love, the conforming and domestic Lucile. Lucile prevailed over Corinne in winning the love of Oswald. But the Scottish lord was to suffer pangs of conscience. In Bologna he stood before Domenichino's Sibyl until his wife asked him nervously “if the Sibyl of Domenichino spoke more to his heart than the Madonna of Correggio.” He replied tactfully, “The Sibyl no longer sends forth oracles; her genius, her talent are finished: but the angelic figure of the Correggio has never lost her charms” (bk. 19, chap. 7, p. 854). Thus motherhood won out over genius.

Mme. de Staël brought her characters into direct juxtaposition with works of art in several scenes in the book. When Oswald and Lucile stand before Correggio's painting the devoted husband marks the resemblance between his wife and the painted Madonna. Earlier Corinne takes him to visit Canova's studio where she and the famous sculptor concur on Oswald's resemblance to the figure of the genius of death from Canova's tomb for Pope Clement XIII.³⁷

Mme. de Staël's use of famous paintings to symbolize the virtues or express the mood of her fictional character was a device that may have developed from the literary portraits of the précieuses with their frequent comparison of their subjects to mythological or literary heroines. Transposing legend into life, the précieuses enjoyed dressing up in the guise of mythological or literary characters for their entertainments and also for their portraits. In fact the frequenters of the ruelles revived the portrait déguisé as a fashion in art.³⁸ While Mme. de Staël merely analogized her characters to a painted or sculpted image of a Classical or religious figure, the précieuses often dressed for the stage or the atelier as the personnage with whom they chose to be identified. Popular classical goddesses were Minerva, Diana, and the Graces and Muses. In a letter of 1646 Mlle. de Scudéry refers to the fashion for portraits as Pallas armata. The vogue of the allegorical portrait spread from the bourgeois ruelles to the court, when Giovanni Francesco Romanelli decorated the vaults of the Galerie Mazarine by painting the portraits of several salon ladies as Muses. Mazarin had close ties with the précieuses, and this decoration demonstrated official assimilation of their taste.³⁹

The fondness of the précieuses for collecting portraits of their circle was exemplified by the taste setter the Marquise de Rambouillet in whose blue chamber hung likenesses of many friends; probably these were given as keepsakes. Portraits were presented as tokens for loyal service, as, for example, the Duchess of Longueville's gift to the Scudérys after the Fronde. A similar gift appears in Clélie when Princess Elismonde tries to win her subjects' loyalty by bestowing her portrait upon them. These portraits were often in Classical guise. Mme. De Longueville was drawn by Dumoustier as a warrior, and Mme. de Rambouillet was painted by Van Mol as Thetis grieving over Achilles after the death of her son at the battle of Nordlingen.⁴⁰ The précieuses did not limit themselves to figures from Classical mythology and history for their portraits. A literary heroine, Astrée, the chaste shepherdess from the romance by d'Urfé (who was probably a caller at la chambre bleue) set the vogue for using the shepherdess's attire in portraits déguisés. In Cyrus, Sappho decides on a ragged shepherdess's dress for her portrait, because, as she tells the painter, “Nelante” (Nanteuil), she does not want to resemble Damophile whose portrait as Muse with attributes he is also painting. The simple dress of the shepherdess points up Sappho's modesty. She is so pleased with the finished painting that she has it copied for her friends. In real life, after Nanteuil painted her portait (now lost), Mlle. de Scudéry sent him a quatrain in which she said, “I hate my eyes in my mirror / I love them in his work of art.” In answer the learned painter responded gallantly in rhyme that by painting her he would be rendered immortal through her writings.⁴¹ Mlle. de Scudéry's mention of Sappho's portrait in Cyrus no doubt enhanced the popularity of the shepherdess portrait, a vogue that continued into the eighteenth century.⁴² Sappho's choice was no doubt inspired by an actual portrait painted around 1645 by Claude Deruet of Mme. de Rambouillet's daughter, Julie d'Angennes de Rambouillet as Astrée. Julie's identification with Astrée drew attention to the sitter's reputation for chastity. The portrait was probably painted before her marriage following a fourteen-year engagement. With crook in hand, surrounded by lambs and flowers, Julie is seated before a Classical landscape, the temple of the Sibyl in Tivoli. Deruet may have chosen this background as an allusion to the Italian ancestry of Julie as well as to her reputation as a woman of Classical learning.⁴³

The temple of the Sibyl reappears in the famous portrait of Mme. de Staël as Corinne painted by Mme. Vigée-Lebrun (ca. 1808) shortly after the novel appeared. Mme. de Staël chose to follow the précieux mode of having herself painted in the disguise of a heroine from literature, in this case from her own novel. In a letter dated August 7, 1807, Mme. de Staël remarked to Henri Meister: “I do not know if I dare to have myself painted as Corinne by her [(Vigée-Lebrun)].”⁴⁴ Though the painting was started in Coppet, Mme. Vigée-Lebrun finished it in Paris. Writing to the sitter, the artist expressed her preference for a background of the Bay of Naples instead of the temple of Tivoli suggested by the author:

Your steward, Madame, has informed me that your friends desire in the background of the painting the temple of Tivoli and the cascades instead of the gulf of Naples which I should wish to place in the distance. I am going to reflect on it. As I have done both of these [scenes] from nature, if this can be suited to the composition and the lines which give altitude I will follow your preference.⁴⁵

Mme. de Staël got her wish. Posed seated with lyre in hand like an antique statue, she improvises her song against the mountainous background topped by the temple of Tivoli. We can only wonder whether Mme. de Staël was familiar with the background of the Deruet painting. Was the temple a link with précieux portraiture or merely a symbol for the intellectual woman?⁴⁶

Mme Vigée-Lebrun appears to have solved her compositional problems with the background by looking at the self-portrait of Angelica Kauffmann choosing between the allegorical figures of Music and Painting, set before a rocky landscape topped by a circular Classical temple.⁴⁷ For portraits of women artists and writers, the temple of the Sibyl seemed to provide the appropriate Classical setting. The emblem is presented with full significance in Corinne:

Corinne's house was constructed above the noisy waterfall of Teverone; at the peak of the mountain her garden was the temple of the Sibyl. … What spot could be more appropriate for the dwelling of Corinne, in Italy than the place consecrated to the Sibyl, to the memory of a woman animated by a divine inspiration! (bk. 8, chap. 4, p. 730).⁴⁸

In the novel, the temple of the Sibyl houses Corinne's collection of paintings through which Lord Nelvil is guided by the improvisatrice who plays the role of cicerone. The description in Corinne of a tour of the heroine's imaginary private collection to point up the taste and the views of the collector was not an original device but had its source in précieux literature. Descriptions of paintings interrupted the plot in L'Astrée. Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry (1646), a guide to an ideal collection written in verse by Madeleine's brother Georges, was an early example of such a tour published by a Frenchman. The Cabinet, a series of poems about pictures that the author owned or admired, was modeled after the Galleria of the Italian poet Marino, as de Scudéry announced in the introduction.⁴⁹

Several parallels exist between the use of art in Corinne and in the literature of the précieux: not only are actual paintings referred to as analogies or symbols of fictional characters in the mode of the portrait déguisé, but imaginary collections of art are described for the purpose of defining the taste of the collectors and expressing moral viewpoints. In the Cabinet, the author introduces himself as knowledgeable in art both of the ancient world and of his own time. Most of the works are mythological and their themes are love and courtship. The précieux point of view on courtship prevails, with paintings of faithful lovers like Orpheus and Eurydice, Pyramus and Thisbe, Venus and Adonis, favorite subjects. A recurrent theme is the punishment of the insistent lover depicted in paintings of the flight of Daphne, of Atalanta, of Europa, and of Syrinx. The fickle lover who causes pain is castigated in a poem on a painting of Dido committing suicide. Thus the etiquette of courtship, a central strand of précieux literature, is presented as a series of moral lessons illustrated in art.⁵⁰

Though the perfect lover is expected to restrain his passion in order to win the ideal woman, passion itself was not rejected by the précieuses. Mlle. de Scudéry has been characterized by Antoine Adam as an “apologist of passion,” who believed in directing passion not stifling it. Her concept of love derives from neo-Platonism and anticipates Romantic doctrine. Underlying her opposition to the arranged marriage was her disapproval of indifference.⁵¹ Her novelistic portrayal of virtuous love based on respect was a civilizing ideal, far from the brutal realities facing Frenchwomen of her day. The ideal but often unattainable love between the honnête homme and the précieuse put forth in her novels was transposed into art in her brother's Cabinet.

Corinne's gallery is similar in some respects to the Cabinet. Like the précieux collector she has several paintings on literary love themes. Virgil's Dido by Rehberg, Tasso's Clorinda by an unidentified artist, and Racine's Phaedra by Guérin all illustrate the theme of tragic love. In this sense the paintings Corinne collects foretell her doom. But at the same time as they reflect the mood of the love story they also become the subject of Corinne's critical appraisal, based on Mme. de Staël's reading of Lessing, that painting is not as effective as literature in presenting narrative sequence or in expressing depth of emotion.⁵²

In the tour of Corinne's gallery the paintings are interpreted as aesthetic analogies for many of Mme. de Staël's philosophical ideas. History paintings exemplify the undeserved suffering of the statesman whose loyalty brings him only sorrow. Corinne discusses three well-known paintings, David's Brutus, Drouais's Marius, and Gérard's Belisarius. All paintings of exemplum virtutis, they become illustrations of the tragic consequences of overwhelming love of country. As an exile whose outspoken opposition to Napoleon was well known, her interpretation of these paintings had special resonance. The moral lesson taught is: “in Brutus are virtues which resemble crime; in Marius, glory, causing misfortune; in Belisarius, services requited by the blackest persecutions” (bk. 8, chap. 4, p. 731). The human misery brought about by political oppression is assuaged, according to Corinne, by religion. Thus she follows Schlegel and Chateaubriand in endorsing religious subject matter in painting.⁵³ In this area her taste differs from that of the précieux author whose interest in religious painting was minimal.

Corinne ends her tour with two landscape paintings that include allusions to history and fable, a literary requirement she demands of the genre. The paintings by George Augustus Wallis not only have literary or historic themes but are interpreted as visual evidence supporting the culture-climate theory on which the novel rests. A southern landscape of Cincinnatus exemplifies the culture of the South and is contrasted with a northern scene from Ossian. A contrast between the sunny, southern landscape of Italy and the northern vaporous landscape of Scotland serves to illustrate her own theory of the dichotomy between northern and southern culture. Like the paintings, the visitors to the gallery, Corinne and Oswald, stand for the southern Classical culture of Italy as opposed to the northern Ossianic literature of Scotland.

While the imaginary collections of Georges de Scudéry and Mme. de Staël both provide thematic interpretations of art, and both reveal the rather conservative taste of the collector, they also reflect the salon worlds whose taste they record. The précieux circle's concern with problems of amorous etiquette is apparent in the moral lessons drawn from the art in de Scudéry's Cabinet. Similarly Corinne's temple of Sibyl displays important history paintings in which conflicts between private conscience and public duty are held up to scrutiny. Mme. de Staël's choice of paintings and her comments reflect the upheavals in her native land and her status as an exile. Furthermore, the difference between the two collections indicates the change in function of the salon between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. This change was noted by Mme. Necker who said: “Women speak of the constitution with the same warmth with which they analyzed sentiment at the hotel de Rambouillet.”⁵⁴

Though the conversation in her salon had broadened considerably since the time of the blue chamber, still Mme. Necker as salon hostess continued to play the role originally established by Mme. de Rambouillet as taste maker of her circle. Diderot, a frequent caller at her “Fridays,” submitted to his hostess his art Salons before publication. This compliment to Mme. Necker's taste in the field of art may not have been entirely lost upon her daughter, who endowed Corinne with the expertise in art that had traditionally been associated with the salonnière since the seventeenth century.⁵⁵

Perhaps in part inspired by the Cabinet of her brother, Madeleine de Scudéry had included several descriptions and evaluations of paintings in her novels. However, her interest was aroused more often by architecture and gardens than by painting. The tasteful house and gardens of Mme. de Rambouillet were much admired by her circle of friends and were described in the Grand Cyrus.⁵⁶ But while Mlle. de Scudéry paid tribute to the refined taste of her friend as evidence of the sensibility of the educated woman, she seems to have believed that descriptions of the beauties of the wider world had educational value for her readers, and that, like travel, literary descriptions of foreign monuments were instructive.

In the Promenade of Versailles (1669) she showed the palace of Louis XIV to a visitor from abroad, “the beautiful foreigner.” While the background material for her novels was generally derived from the writings of historians and travelers of the past,⁵⁷ in the Promenade she observed and recorded the palace firsthand. In the opening of the Promenade, as she took on the role of cicerone herself, she drew attention to the important function she was performing. Since the Promenade was the introduction to Celinthe, a novella, she felt called upon at the very outset to justify the lengthy description of a real place in imaginative literature. She pointed out that from Homer to Ariosto depiction of real monuments served to instruct the reader. Furthermore, real backgrounds lent an “air of truth” to the tale. But beyond the educational and literary value, she emphasized the importance of such documentation for posterity: “If someone who knows how to write describes Versailles well, have no doubt that this description will be useful to posterity in understanding the construction of this palace where so many great designs were conceived.”⁵⁸

Although the tour leader is anonymous, it is made clear that she is a fictional incarnation of Mlle. de Scudéry. She pauses on the walk to answer, in the mode of her précieuse creator, questions of courtship decorum addressed to her by two young cavaliers whose verses on the subject she reads, and she even refers to Clélie in the course of conversation. These hints as well as the use of the first person in the narration identify the author as the guide. Having attended a fête in July of 1668, Mlle. de Scudéry lets her readers know that she has been honored by an invitation to the king's new palace. By taking the role of the guide herself, she renders a modest thank-you to the king and at the same time sets the tradition for the femme auteur as cicerone.

The tour of Versailles presents Louis XIV's new palace as the embodiment of the king's genius, displaying at once his virtue as an honnête homme and his triumph at “embellishing nature with art.” Tribute is paid to his support for the arts, his establishment of the academy, and his interest in natural science. One sight that arouses the astonishment and praise of “the beautiful foreign woman” is the “galerie de Dames,” a series of portraits ordered by the king shortly after 1660 and installed at Versailles at the time of the Promenade. Painted by the Beaubrun brothers, favorites of the précieuses, these portraits indicate continuation of the galleries of famous women so popular earlier in the century. The visitor admits that there is nothing like the “Gallery of Ladies” in her country.⁵⁹

Like Mlle. de Scudéry's “beautiful foreigner,” Corinne's tourist is a melancholy visitor, but in contrast to the visitor to Versailles who marvels at Louis XIV's grand conception, Oswald fails to respond to the monuments of ancient Rome. Governed by rigid moral principles, he denigrates the architectural ruins of Rome as reminders of ancient decadence. To the half-Italian Corinne, these remnants of the ancient world are emblems of the survival of artistic genius beyond the life span of temporal power. Though Corinne continually tries to communicate her belief in the triumph of genius in art through the masterpieces and monuments of Italy, Osward is incapable of sharing her enthusiasm. Her first chant celebrated the literary and artistic glories of Italy. In her final song, she bemoans having given up her genius for an unworthy love.

Though Oswald fails Corinne as both lover and pupil, he is still an attentive listener. Spellbound by her eloquence he follows her from Rome on sidetrips to Pompeii and Naples. Her lectures inspired by historic places reach beyond the landscape of Italy to treat a broad range of topics. Many of the subjects on which Corinne discourses recall themes from the writings of Mlle. de Scudéry. Both authors celebrated the capacity to understand the arts—literature, music, and the visual arts—as essential for the educated person. Since literature was their primary interest, they share a predilection for interrupting their narrative with literary criticism. Mlle. de Scudéry's “History of Hesiod” in Clélie anticipated the chapter on Italian literature in Corinne. As a well-educated woman, Mme. de Staël, as Mlle. de Scudéry before her, showed concern over the illiteracy of her sex and urged women to develop their intellectual potential. The two writers were united in expressing feminist scorn for husbands who prefer uneducated wives.⁶⁰ Their concern with feminine education may have been one of the reasons these authors chose the love novel format, which assured them a reading audience of women.

Since the seventeenth century, the femme auteur had used the love novel as her literary form. The concept of the love novel unfolding against the background of a grand and distant place, which we see in Corinne, began in the very early examples of the genre, Cyrus in Persia and Clélie in Rome. The unfamiliar settings of these novels supplied an element of exoticism demanded by Romantic taste, but in the hands of the two novelists exoticism came under a purposeful restraint. Even before Mlle. de Scudéry wrote her famous novels she had already enunciated in her preface to Ibrahim (1641) the aesthetic of la vraysemblance. For the writer of imaginative literature Mlle. de Scudéry paraphrased Horace's rule of mixing the lie with the truth as the effective method of creating a believable story. She declared that in order to give her own works a believable setting, however outlandish the locale, she had observed the details of local color: “I have observed the customs, the costumes, the laws, the religions and the tastes of the population.”⁶¹ Mlle. de Scudéry's list of the elements that she had observed in order to give an authentic background to her novels closely parallels the local color in Corinne. Mme. de Staël described not only the monuments and landscape of Italy, but the customs, the religion, the dress, and the character of the Italians she observed. Thus Mme. de Staël included in her novels many of the elements of vraysemblance identified by Mlle. de Scudéry.

The opening scenes of Corinne also reflected the views of Mlle. de Scudéry. Although Mlle. de Scudéry criticized the excessive use of the miraculous in telling a story, an example of which was the device of numerous shipwrecks in Greek novels, still she used disaster scenes in moderation to establish at the outset the courage of her hero.⁶²Cyrus begins with the taking of Sinope by Cyrus who then nobly helps the inhabitants to put out the fire that threatens to destroy the city. The blaze is followed by a tempest that destroys the ship on which Cyrus's beloved Mandane has been abducted. Mme. de Staël reverses the two disasters in book 1 of Corinne, entitled “Oswald.” The hero makes his appearance in the novel as a man of action. He pilots his ship through a storm at sea and then on landing puts out a raging fire in Ancona. These episodes in Corinne have been puzzling to modern critics. Ellen Moers states, “For no apparent novelistic reason, Mme. de Staël sets fire to Ancona.”⁶³ The explanation appears to be that Mme. de Staël was following the method of Mlle. de Scudéry in introducing her heroine's lover in a properly heroic fashion. Not only are the disasters Oswald survives similar to those of Cyrus, but he even manages to save a group of Jews from death just as Cyrus did. Thus both heroes are shown to have the virtue of religious tolerance. After his courageous exploits in book 1, Oswald lapses into passivity as honnête homme mélancolique to whom Corinne lectures on the wonders of Italy.⁶⁴

Though the setting and plot of Corinne, as has been seen, owe much to the writings of Mlle. de Scudéry, Mme. de Staël never acknowledged her debt to the earlier femme auteur. Her reticence on this point is not surprising. The reputation of Mlle. de Scudéry had been badly damaged by Molière and was not to be refurbished until 1850 when Victor Cousin reexamined her Cyrus. Mme. de Staël may have been referring to Molière's treatment of the précieuses when she called attention in On Literature to the problems facing talented women who are discouraged by accusations of pedantry or assailed by mockery.⁶⁵ She had acted in Molière's Les Femmes savantes and was likely aware of Beckford's sneering description of her mother as a “précieuse-ridicule”; her experience might have made her loath to admit the strong impact on Corinne of Mlle. de Scudéry's life and works.

Despite her reluctance to acknowledge her borrowings from Mlle. de Scudéry, it is evident that in both style and content her novel followed in the tradition of Mlle. de Scudéry's work. Both authors forced their philosophical thought into the format of the love novel that had served as the traditional literary form for women writers. In On Literature Mme. de Staël perceived the love novel as an expression of feminine sensibility. She traced the development of the love novel by women writers to the winning of social equality for their sex: “In reading books composed since the renaissance of letters, one should note on each page the ideas that would not have been expressed before women were accorded civil equality.”⁶⁶ Her insistence on the close connection between the post-Renaissance love novel and women's literary ideas demonstrates her cognizance of the précieuse tradition. What could be more natural for her in seeking a model for Corinne than to look back to the love novels of the seventeenth century, especially those written by the preeminent woman writer of that age? There, I believe, she found an exemplar for the interweaving of fictional romance and moral instruction.

Sainte-Beuve in his essay on Mlle. de Scudéry recognized the stylistic problems of the interweaving of passion and precept in the format of the novel. He described Mlle. de Scudéry's method as transforming “the delicate” into “the didactic” through her penchant for analysis and classification and gave her the rather patronizing title of “governess” of society. Mme. de Staël in Corinne followed the tradition of Sappho. The lovers who caught the imagination of her readers probably interested the author less than the ideas she was able to expound through their dialogue. Their tour of Italy is accompanied by the lecture as well as the lyre. Sainte-Beuve's metaphor for Mlle. de Scudéry's pursuit of ideas in the course of her romantic novels might well describe Corinne's wanderings through the Italian landscape: “in the middle of the parks and gardens which she described, she took care to always place an écritoire.”⁶⁷

Notes

1. Ian MacLean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610-1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 209-12. Deborah Marrow, The Art Patronage of Maria de' Medici (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 65-70.

2. Rebecca Tingle Keating, “The Literary Portraits in the Novels of Mlle. de Scudéry” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970), p. 71.

3. Ibid., pp. 17-65, on antecedents to Mlle. de Scudéry's novels.

4. As quoted in Nicole Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, trans. Stuart R. Aronson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), p. 56. This is an excellent modern source for background on Mlle. de Scudéry's life and works. Other important books are Rathery and Boutron, Mademoiselle de Scudéry; Sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris: Techener, 1873); Georges Mongrédien, Madeleine de Scudéry et son salon (Paris: Tallendier, 1946); André Bellessort, Heures de parole (Paris: Perrin, 1929); René Godenne, Les Romans de Mademoiselle de Scudéry (Geneva: Droz, 1980); and, in English, Dorothy McDougall, Madeleine de Scudéry, Her Romantic Life and Death (London: Methuen, 1938). For Mlle. de Scudéry and the preciosité movement see Roger Lathuillière, La Préciosité, étude historique et linguistique (Geneva: Droz, 1966).

5. As quoted in Alain Niderst, Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pellison et leur monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976), p. 419. This study concentrates on the keys to the novels.

6. As quoted in J. W. Oliver, The Life of William Beckford (London: Oxford, 1932), p. 189. For background on Mme. Necker's salon see Gabriel-Paul-Othenin de Cléon, Comte d'Haussonville, The Salon of Madame Necker, trans. Henry M. Trollope, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1882). On Mme. de Staël's salon experience as a girl see Catherine Rilliet Huber, “Notes sur l'enfance de Mme. de Staël,” Occident et cahiers staëliens 2, no. 2 (1932): 41-47.

7. Comte d'Haussonville, Madame Necker, 1:18, 27-30. On seventeenth-century salons see Jacques Wilhelm, Le Vie quotidienne au marais au XVII siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1966), pp. 197-223. For the popularity of Mlle. de Scudéry's novels in the eighteenth century see Daniel Mornet, J. J. Rousseau La Nouvelle Héloise, Les Grands Ecrivains de la France, ed. Gustave Lanson (Paris: Hachette, 1925), p. 10.

8. As quoted in Béatrice d'Andlau, La Jeunesse de Madame de Staël (de 1766 à 1786) avec des documents inédits (Geneva: Droz, 1970), pp. 109-10. Author's translation. A good biography of Mme. de Staël is Christopher J. Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Mme. de Staël (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). See also Gabriel-Paul-Othenin de Cléon, Comte d'Haussonville, Madame de Staël et M. Necker d'après leur correspondance inédite (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1925). For an example of M. Necker's novel writing see Baroness de Staël-Holstein, “The Fatal Consequences of a Single Fault,” Memoirs of the Private Life of My Father to Which are Added Miscellanies by M. Necker (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), pp. 354-416.

9. Mme. Necker de Saussure, “Notice sur le caractère et les écrits de Mme. de Staël,” Oeuvres complètes de Mme la baronne de Staël-Holstein, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1838), 2:47. Madelyn Gutwirth, “Mme. de Staël, Rousseau, and the Woman Question,” PMLA 86, no. 1 (January 1971): 103.

10. On Guibert see Pierre de Ségur, “Un grand homme de Salons,” Gens d'autrefois (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1812), pp. 195-270. See also Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de Staël, “L'éloge de M. de Guibert,” Oeuvres complètes, 2:412-22.

11. As quoted in Mme. Necker de Saussure, “Notice sur le caractère et les ecrits de Madame de Staël,” Oeuvres complètes, 2:7-8. Author's translation.

12. Mme. de Staël, Corinne, ou l'Italie, bk. 2, chap. 1, Oeuvres complètes, 1:663. Subsequent citations in the text refer to this edition (n. 9 above). English translations are taken from Corinne, or Italy, trans. Isabel Hill, with metrical versions of the odes by L. E. Landon (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857).

13. Michel Abbé de Pure, La Prétieuse, ou le mystère des ruelles, ed. Émile Magne, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1939), 1:143. See Germaine Brée, Women Writers in France: Variations on a Theme (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973), pp. 37-38, on Madeleine de Scudéry as a model for French women novelists.

14. For her juvenalia see d'Andlau, La Jeunesse, pp. 125, 129, 130; and David Glass Larg, Mme. de Staël, Her Life as Revealed in Her Work, 1766-1800, trans. Veronica Lucas (New York: Knopf, 1926). Mme. de Staël many years later was to write a drama Sapho et Phaon in 1811. See Oeuvres complètes, 2:491-509.

15. These first exercises in character study followed the mode practiced by the précieuses and probably developed from her mother's suggestion of their pen portraits of M. Necker. See d'Andlau, La Jeunesse, p. 106, for influence on Mme. de Staël's writing as a girl of “une préciosité due à l'exemple maternel.”

16. Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène ou Le Grand Cyrus, 10 vols. (1649-53; reprint Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972), 10:pt. 10, bk. 2, p. 332. Subsequent quotation from portrait of Sappho will be cited to this edition parenthetically in the text. Author's translations.

17. Molière, Les Précieuses ridicules, scene 9, as quoted in Les Précieux et les Précieuses, ed. Georges Mongrèdien (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963), p. 125, n. 1.

18. For Molière's debt to Mlle. de Scudéry see Henri Cottez, “Sur Molière et Mademoiselle de Scudéry,” Revue de Sciences humaines (1942), pp. 340-64; J.H. Whitfield, “A Note on Molière and Mlle. de Scudéry,” Le Parole e le Idee 5 (1963): 175-87.

19. Victor Cousin, La Société françaî au XVII siècle d'après Le Grand Cyrus, 2 vols. (Paris: Perrin, 1886), 2:141, 277-82. See also Gustave Charlier, “La fin de l'Hotel de Rambouillet,” Revue Belge de Philosophie et d'Histoire 18 (1939): 409-25, which proves the Rambouillet salon, run by the marquise's daughter Julie, lasted through the 1660s, longer than Cousin (following Roederer) realized. See Lathuillière, La Préciosité, pp. 130ff on Damophile and Molière.

20. As quoted from Cousin, La Société, pp. 141-44. On Damophile as model for Molière's Philaminte, see Armand Gaste, Madeleine de Scudéry et le “Dialogue des Heros de Roman” de Boileau (Rouen: Cagniard, 1902), p. 33.

21. See André Blum, L'Oeuvre gravé d'Abraham Bosse (Paris: Morance, 1924), pp. 9, 48; plate 20. See also “La Querelle, le mouvement populaire anti-feministe,” in Les Salons littéraires au XVII siècle, exhib. cat. (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1968), sec. IX, for popular engravings against the précieuses, including several engravings by Bosse.

22. MacLean, Woman Triumphant, p. 153.

23. Madelyn Gutwirth, “Mme. de Staël, Rousseau,” pp. 100-109. See also Jane Abray, “Feminism and the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 80 (February 1975):43-62 for a description of the antifeminist climate that may explain Mme. de Staël's reticence on feminist issues.

24. Rousseau's Émile, ed. W. H. Payne (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), p. 303.

25. Mario Praz, “The Lady with the Lyre,” in On Neoclassicism, trans. Angus Davidson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 255-67.

26. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de Staël, Les Carnets de voyage de Madame de Staël, ed. Simone Balayé (Geneva: Droz, 1971), pp. 178-81, hereafter cited as Carnets. Geneviève Gennari, Le Premier Voyage de Madame de Staël en Italie et la genèse de Corinne (Paris: Boivin, 1947), pp. 72-77. For Mme. de Staël and A. W. Schlegel, her cicerone in Italy, see Comtesse Jean de Pange (née Broglie), Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël, d'après des documents inédits (Paris: Albert, 1938).

27. Madelyn Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 175, asserts: “But even after we have assayed all these sources and echoes, biographical or literary, for the light they shed on the origin of this work [Corinne], we have still failed to account for the very extravagance of this vision of the priestess of Apollo cum sibyl we find at the outset of the novel, borne in on a chariot led by white horses.” Gutwirth failed to consult Cyrus as a source for Corinne or to associate Mme. de Staël with Mlle. de Scudéry (see n. 30).

28. Bellessort, Heures de Parole, p. 176, credits Mlle. de Scudéry with “Europeanizing” the French genius. For the many translations of her books made during her lifetime see Georges Mongrédien, “Bibliographie des oeuvres de Georges et Madeleine de Scudéry,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France 40 (1933): 224-36, 413-25, 538-65. For the impact of her novels on Richardson and other English readers see McDougall, Romantic Life and Death, pp. 119-32. On Mlle. de Scudéry's modernity see Antoine Adam, Histoire de la littérature française au XVII siècle, 5 vols. (Paris: Mondiales, 1962), 2:138-40.

29. Judith Colton, The Parnasse François: Titon du Tillet and the Origins of the Monument to Genius (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 22, 57-58, 98.

30. Gutwirth, who recognizes in Mme. de Staël, Novelist, p. 204, “learned or literary ladies like Heloïse, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet, Marguerite de Navarre,” asks, “but where had there been one who, like Corinne, was the glory of her nation and her age?” The historic model for Corinne as literary woman is, I believe, Madeleine de Scudéry, called by her contemporaries “the Muse of our century” but disregarded by Gutwirth, who describes her merely as a “publicist of Preciosity” and, mistakenly, as “author of Astrée.” That Mlle. de Scudéry's honors were known among nineteenth-century literary women is demonstrated in Stephanie Félicité Ducrest de Genlis, De L'Influence des femmes sur la littérature française (Paris: Mardan, 1811), pp. 95, 112-13, which records her honors and quotes from an elegy on her death by Mme. de la Roque-Montroune: “Le Ciel dut Aristote au siècle d'Alexandre; / Il ne donna Sapho qu'au siècle de Louis.”

31. Necker de Staël, Carnets, pp. 105, 215; Gutwirth, Mme. de Staël, Novelist, p. 174; Propertius's poem praises the young Cynthia's verses as rivaling those of “Antique Corinna.” The comparison of a living woman to a famous poet of the past accords with the relationship of Mme. de Staël to Mlle. de Scudéry.

32. Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, Histoire romaine, 10 vols. (1654-60; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973), 8:pt. 4, bk. 2, p. 809. See also Lawrence A. Wilson, “The Cyrus and the Clélie of Mademoiselle de Scudéry as Reflections of XVIII Century Life, Ideas and Manners” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1941), pp. 65-71.

33. On the Domenichino painting see Esther Renfrew and Simone Balayé, “Madame de Staël et la Sibylle du Dominiquin,” Cahiers staëliens (January 1964), pp. 34-36. Necker de Staël, Carnets, pp. 184f.

34. For accounts of visitors Martin Lister, Mme. du Noyer, Leibnitz see Claude Aragonnes, Madeleine de Scudéry, reine de Tendre (Paris: Colin, 1934), pp. 237-45; Georges Mongrédien, Madeleine de Scudéry et son salon, pp. 206-9. See also “Les Précieuses, leur modèles, le mouvement précieux,” no. 193, in Les Salons littéraires, sec. IX, for several engravings of sibyls by Abraham Bosse.

35. Wilson, “The Cyrus and the Clélie” p. 170.

36. Interview with Marguerite Yourcenar, New York Times, December 3, 1979, p. D9. Speaks of her “face of a sibyl.”

37. See Necker de Staël, Carnets, pp. 248-49.

38. See Émile Magne, Voiture et l'Hotel de Rambouillet, 2 vols. (Paris: Émile-Paul, 1929-30), 2:183-86 for divertissements at l'Hotel de Rambouillet that involved disguised portraits in literature: the jeu de metamorphoses and the gazette allégorique. On the revival of the portrait déguisé and the Mannerist taste of the précieux circle in art see Anthony F. Blunt, “The Précieux and French Art,” in Fritz Saxl, 1890-1948: A Volume of Memorial Essays from His friends in England, ed. D. J. Gordon (London: Thomas Nelson, 1957), pp. 326-38.

39. See “Les Précieuses, leurs modèles, le mouvement précieux,” no. 194, in Les Salons Littéraires, sec. IX, on Romanelli's fresco decorations (reproduced).

40. Georges de Scudéry, Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry (Paris: Courbé, 1646), p. 95, describes a painting by Van Mol of Mme. de Rambouillet as Thetis weeping over Achilles. This personification through a mythological subject of her grief after the death of her son at battle of Nordlingen looks forward to Corinne's identification of the mourning Oswald with Canova's genius of death.

41. Niderst, Madeleine de Scudéry p. 364.

42. Myra Nan Rosenfeld, “Nicolas de Largillièrre's Portrait of the marquise de Dreux-Brézé,” Apollo 109 (March 1979): 202-07.

43. F. Ed. Schnéegans, “Note sur un portrait de Claude Deruet au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg,” Archives Alsacienne d'histoire de l'art 6 (1927): 60, points out that Deruet could have painted the Tivoli landscape from nature when he visited Rome in his youth. On dating of the portrait see Blunt, “Précieux and French Art,” p. 335.

44. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de Stael, Lettres inédites de Mme. de Staël à Henri Meister, ed. Paul Usteri and Eugene Ritter (Paris: Hachette, 1903), p. 193.

45. As quoted in Yvonne Bezard, Mme. de Staël d'après ses Portraits Paris: Victor Attinger, 1938), p. 17.

46. According to response of Christine Speroni, documentaliste, Musée de Ville de Strasbourg, to my query on provenance, the Deruet portrait was acquired by the museum in Paris in 1926. Since I have not yet succeeded in obtaining more detailed provenance, it is still impossible to ascertain whether Mme. de Staël could have known the portrait. See Magne, Voiture, 2:305 for a list of writings by Julie d'Angennes.

47. Reproduced in Eleanor Tufts, Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists (New York: Paddington Press, 1974), fig. 63, p. 116, See Lady Victoria Manners and Dr. G. C. Williamson, Angelica Kauffmann, R.A. (London: John Lane, 1924), pp. 13, 206-7 for description of painting dated Rome, 1794. See also Bezard, Mme. de Staël d'après, p. 14, for mention of Angelica Kauffmann's drawing (now lost) of Mme. de Staël executed in Italy in 1805.

48. Necker de Staël, Carnets, p. 252-54. See Simone Belayé, “La Génie et la gloire dans l'oeuvre de Mme. de Staël,” Rivista de Letterature Moderne e Comparate (December 1967), pp. 202-14, on Mme. de Staël's idea on Italy as a refuge for Corinne's genius.

49. Georges de Scudéry, Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry “au lecteur.” See Aronson, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, p. 21, for Scudéry's ownership of works by Durer, Bruegel, and Callot; and Blunt, “Précieux and French Art,” p. 334, for his admiration of Callot.

50. In her novels Mlle. de Scudéry warns her readers of the dangers of inconstant lovers, who will destroy a woman's reputation (gloire). This warning is reiterated in the Cabinet when Dido is told: “Ce n'est qu'en l'aimant encore, / Que vous offendez la gloire.” For discussion of woman's gloire in Cyrus see Lucien Arthur Aube, “Aspects of Reality in the Grand Cyrus of Madeleine de Scudéry” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1970), pp. 184-209.

51. Adam, Histoire de la littérature, 2:138-39.

52. Necker de Staël, Carnets, pp. 103-5, 245-49.

53. Jean Ménard, “Mme. de Staël et la peinture,” in Colloque de Coppet, Mme. de Staël et l'Europe (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), pp. 253-62.

54. Suzanne Curchod de Nasse Necker, Nouveaux mélanges extraits des manuscrits de Mme. Necker, 3 vols. (Paris: Pougens, 1801), 2:26.

55. On Diderot see Madame de Staël et l'Europe, exhib. cat. (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1966), p. 10, no. 42. On the salon tradition see Roger Picard, Les Salons littéraires et la société française, 1610-1789 (New York: Brentano's, 1943), esp. pp. 339-47.

56. On the Rambouillet art collection and decor see Inventaires de l'Hotel de Rambouillet, à Paris en 1652, 1666, 1671 et des Chateaux d'Angoulême et de Montausier 1671, publiés par Charles Sauze pour la Société Archéologique de Rambouillet (Tours: Deslis, 1894), pp. 39-41, 74-76, for list of contents of la chambre bleue.

57. See Nicole Aronson, “Mlle. de Scudéry et l'histoire romaine dans Clélie,” Romanische Forschungen 88 (1976): 183-94, for historical sources used by Mlle. de Scudéry for Clélie.

58. Madeleine de Scudéry, La Promenade de Versailles (1669; reprint, Paris: Devambez, 1920), p. 7. In Clélie Mlle. de Scudéry had included a description of another contemporary marvel of architecture, Foucquet's chateau de Vaux (Valterre). See René Godenne, “Les Nouvelles de Mlle. de Scudéry, Revue des Sciences Humaines 37, no. 148 (October-December 1972): 508-11 for the late nouvelles as a response to taste for shorter novels. See Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1973), esp. chap. 6 for the promenade as a divertissement.

59. De Scudéry, Promenade, pp. 29-30. See also Les Salons littéraires, XII, “Le cabinet de dames de Louis XIV,” nos. 269-91.

60. Mme. de Staël discussed several other topics that had already been treated by Mlle. de Scudéry: monarchal versus republican government, the relation of climate to culture, and the conflict between love and ambition.

61. As quoted in Arpad Steiner, “Les Idées esthétiques de Mlle. de Scudéry,” Romanic Review 16 (1925): 175. Steiner points out that nineteen years later the same conception of the novel was put forth by the character Anacreon in “History of Hesiod,” in Clélie, and extracted from Clélie to be republished in 1680 in Conversations sur divers Sujets.

62. “Ce n'est pas que je prétende bannir les naufrages des Romans … mais comme tout exces est vicieux, je ne m'en servis que moderément pour conserver la vraysemblance,” as quoted in Steiner, “Les Idēes esthétiques,” p. 176, with spelling modernized by the author.

63. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Anchor Press, 1977), p. 272.

64. Oswald is the typical melancholy lover of Mlle. de Scudéry's novels. Cf. Victor Cherbuliez, L'Idéal romanesque en France de 1610 à 1816 (Paris: Hachette, 1911), pp. 61-63. See also Lathuillère, La Préciosité, pp. 587-91 for Mlle. de Scudéry's conception of the honnête homme.

65. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de Staël, “Des Femmes qui cultivent les Lettres,” De la littérature, ed. Paul van Tieghem, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Minard, 1959), 2:334-39.

66. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de Staël, “De l'Esprit général de la Littérature chez les Modernes,” De la Littérature, 1:151. Author's translations.

67. C. A. Sainte-Beuve, “Mademoiselle de Scudéry,” in Causeries du lundi, 15 vols. 3d ed. (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), 4:141. Author's translation.