SOURCE: “‘As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak’: Madeleine de Scudéry's Rhetoric of Conversation,” in Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, University of South Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 305-19.

[In the following essay, Donaworth focuses on Scudéry's art of conversation, arguing that her rhetorical skill granted her more social freedom than was usual for a woman of her time, and that it created a model for other women.]

Madeleine de Scudéry, the most popular novelist of seventeenth-century Europe, was also, I shall argue, a rhetorical theorist. She was the first of a series of women in the seventeenth century to appropriate the Renaissance and adapt rhetoric to women's circumstances.¹ Scudéry devised a new rhetorical theory for women: she revisioned the tradition of masculine “public” discourse for mixed gender “private” discourse in salon society, emphasizing conversation and letter writing.

From 1642 to 1684 Madeleine de Scudéry developed a theory of rhetoric and composition in many of her writings: in prefaces; in a fictional speech titled “Sapho to Erinna”; and in dialogue essays on conversation, the art of speaking, raillery, invention, and letter writing. By appropriating rhetoric, Scudéry was appropriating the Renaissance, since rhetorical Latin education was the center of humanist culture. Furthermore, she viewed the Renaissance as a myth, a discursive or rhetorical strategy, one formerly used by male middle-class and lower-gentry humanists in the interest of social mobility, and one that could be used for women's ends as well.² Seizing the opportunity, she presented women's education and women's right to speech as existing in this past, needing only a new renaissance for her female contemporaries to reclaim them.³

Today Scudéry is of special interest to students of rhetorical history because she is a woman revising a much-studied male tradition, and also to students of composition theory, since she anticipates current feminist emphases on sophistic and private models of women's writing.

ENTERING THE CONVERSATION: DEFENDING RHETORICAL EDUCATION FOR WOMEN

Carolyn Lougee has argued, in Le Paradis des Femmes, that the salon of seventeenth-century France centered on women and provided men and women a means of social mobility: the salon assimilated the new nobility and some bourgeois into aristocratic French society through marriage across class lines and through redefining nobility as educated behavior, not lineage.⁴ Addressed to women as an audience and published in 1642 under her brother's name, Madeleine de Scudéry's Les Femmes Illustres or the Heroick Harangues of the Illustrious Women promoted education for women rather than beauty and marriage as a means of social mobility. She offered to French women a justification for their participation in literary culture, especially speaking and writing.

Scudéry presents Les Femmes Illustres as a conservative text by appropriating a central tenet of the Renaissance: the return to classical literature. The volume contains twenty fictional speeches by women of classical antiquity, including Cleopatra, Mariamne, Sophonisba, Lucretia, and Volumnia. In the final speech the younger poet Erinna receives advice from Sapho (a character widely recognized as Scudéry's self-portrait, since “Sapho” was the name she used in précieuse society). Sapho urges Erinna to acquire an education and to write: “They who say that beauty is the portion of women; And that fine arts, good learning, and all the sublime and eminent sciences, are of the domination of men, without our having power to pretend to any part of them; Are equalie differing from justice and vertue” (Sig. V6^v); for “Our Sex is capable of every thing that it would undertake” (Sig. X2^v). In this fictional speech Scudéry presents two women from ancient Greece discussing standards of writing and, albeit privately, philosophical issues; thus she situates women in a valorized past and implies that French salon society can climb to intellectual eminence by imitating this past. Scudéry's recovery of the classics for women is safely nostalgic, since men's interests in philosophy had moved to empiricism and Cartesian rationalism by 1642, when Les Femmes Illustres was published.

Though Scudéry's text is presented as conservative, her goal is not. She aims to appropriate rhetoric for women as a means to political power: to appropriate the right to speak and so the opportunity to influence others. In the preface to Les Femmes Illustres, Madeleine and her brother Georges argue that eloquence is natural to women: “Certainlie among the thousands of rare qualities that the Ancients have noticed in your Sex: They have always said that you [women] possesse Eloquence, without art, without Labour, and without Pains, and that nature gives liberallie to you, that which studie sells to us [men] at a dear rate: That you are born the same which we become at last, and that facilitie of speaking well is naturall to you, in place of being acquired by us” (Sig. A2^r). Reworking the stereotype that women talk too much, the Scudérys argue that women have always been naturally good at speaking and that the ancients recognized this quality as a virtue in women. In this sense their use of the Renaissance is mythic, since ancient Greece and Rome were notably misogynistic and women did not generally receive rhetorical education. The Scudérys' argument is not conservative, even though its form is nostalgic, because they advocate a profound change in French society: rhetorical education for women.

Because of the gender role assigned to women in Renaissance Europe, Scudéry's appropriation of rhetoric was a radical thing to do. At the time, the ideal woman was “chaste, silent, and obedient.” As Lisa Jardine, Peter Stallybrass, and Margaret Ferguson have explored, conservatives feared education for women because they associated speech with sexual license: if a woman opened her mind and her mouth, she might very well choose to open herself in other ways.⁵ Scudéry attempts to evade these cultural anxieties through her nostalgic appeal to the myth of the Renaissance.

In the context of seventeenth-century upper-class women's material and social circumstances, Madeleine de Scudéry develops a rhetorical theory for new female consumers by modeling discourse on conversation rather than on public speaking. This new rhetoric requires new standards for judging women's speech and writings, which she and her brother outline in the preface to Les Femmes Illustres. They raise the question, “If Ladies be so naturallie Eloquent why do not I make them punctually observe all parts of Orations, as Rhetorick teaches in the schools?” And they provide an answer: “I have not thought that the Eloquence of a Zadie should be the same [as] a Master of Arts” (Sigs. A2^r-A2^v).⁶ Women speakers, argue the Scudérys, should not talk like men who went through a humanist rhetorical education. The Scudérys disparage “Exordes, Narrationes, Epilogues … and all the beautiful figures which usuallie doe enrich works of this kind”; such rhetorical techniques reflect men's minds and the artificial excesses of masculine education (Sigs. A2^r-A2^v). Instead, they offer: “The delicacie of art consists in making believe there is none at all” (Sig. A2^v).⁷

The Scudérys playfully rehabilitate the disparaging comparison of sophistic rhetoric to cosmetics that Socrates constructs in Plato's Gorgias. They substitute a female art that changes nature but “with such a subtile negligence and agreeable cairlessness” that the audience sees only nature, not art (Sig. A2^v). They compare rhetoric specifically to women's hairdressing, where “it might be judged raither the wind, then your hands had been helping to nature” (Sig. A2^v). The “harangues” of women speakers in Les Femmes Illustres also cite another female craft as a model for this female speech and writing: “The skill of these who make nosegayes, who mixe by a regular confusion Roses and Jassamine, the flower of Orange, and the Pomegranat, the Tulips and the Jonquille, to the end that from this so pleasing mixture of coulors there appear ane agreable diversitie” (Sigs. A2^v-A3^r). The writer's goal is like this mixing of flowers: “Just so heir I have chosen in historie the finest mater and the most different that I could; And I have so orderlie mixed, and so fitlie concealed them, that it is almost impossible but the reader shall be diverted” (Sig. A3^r). Thus, the Scudérys celebrate female triviality and sophistic rhetoric, unashamedly arguing for pleasure as the end of their literary and rhetorical efforts.

In the speech by Sapho, Madeleine de Scudéry extends this daring comparison of rhetoric to female cosmetic arts, arguing that the very success of women's personal arts demonstrates women's potential capability in poetry: “We have a good fancie, a clear sighted spirit, a fortunate memorie, a solid judgement, and must we employ all these things to frisle our hair, and to seek after Ornaments which can add something to our beautie?” (Sig. X1^v). Through these metaphors in Les Femmes Illustres, Scudéry positions herself as a sophist, against the dominant Platonic-Aristotelian rhetorical tradition. Although women have the ability to be orators, philosophers, and poets, argues Scudéry, they will best achieve a balance between study and society as poets: “It is there, that you shall acquire beauty, which time, yeares, seasones, old Age, nor Death it self can robb you of” (Sig. X2^v). Instead of trusting to men's praises to immortalize her beauty, which fades, a woman may make “her own Pictur her self” in her speech and writings: “You need but speak Elegantylie, and you shall be sufficiently known” (Sig. X3^r). Scudéry offers women the same social mobility that the salon offers men, the ability to achieve social status through education, rather than through marriage. If beauty will gain a woman a good marriage, a means of achieving social standing through her husband, education will put her in control of herself, allowing her to achieve advancement through her own abilities: she will be known through her speech.

A RHETORIC OF CONVERSATION

After her brother's death, Scudéry continued her development of a new rhetoric in Conversations, a series of dialogues published in the 1680s. These Conversations treat popular subjects in salon society: conversation, the art of speaking, invention, raillery, and letter writing. She continues her appropriation of the Renaissance, imitating classical dialogues such as Plato's Gorgias or Cicero's De Oratore, although she often focuses on a woman—Valeria or Euridamia, rather than Socrates or Crassus. Constructing a nostalgia for a classical past through place names and names of speakers, Scudéry creates a mythical past where women have the right to speak, even to pronounce rules for speech. She re-creates history so that it will justify the ideal of one who “speaks as becomes a rational woman to speak” (Sig. F7). In this way she rewrites Renaissance dialogues, as well, such as Castiglione's famous Courtier, in which men speak and women serve as listeners. She incorporates into her view of the intellectual equality and autonomy of women many of the qualities that her society attributed to the honnête homme (the ideal representative of polite society) and salon culture. As Domna C. Stanton has suggested, the seventeenth-century French rhetorical ideal of the honnête homme was defined by the elitist space of the cabinet or salon; the conversational literary form as an indication of aristocratic leisure; and the classical names, the “crypto-classical morphology” suggesting “the emulation of an idealized past, a mythical place distant from the everyday, contingent world” (Stanton 1980, 81, 83, 91).

In these Conversations Scudéry revises classical rhetorical theory to accord with the lives of aristocratic women in seventeenth-century France, who were excluded from the bar, the pulpit, and public political speech. She centers her theory of rhetoric on conversation as the model for discourse. In the dialogue “Of Conversation” Cilenia throws out public speech, “when Men only speak strictly according to the exigency of their Affairs,” in favor of the higher art of conversation, “the bond of all humane society, the greatest pleasure of well-bred People; and the most ordinary means of introducing into the World, not only Politeness, but also the purest Morals, and the love of Glory and Vertue” (Scudéry 1683, 1: Sig. B1^r). Here Scudéry returns the conception of speech as civilizing, which Cicero imported into Roman public oratory, back into salon conversation, where the sophists originally developed it.⁸ She also follows the sophists in stipulating pleasure as a central goal of speech.⁹

Although she draws from the classical rhetorical tradition, Scudéry's revision is so thorough that it constitutes an original contribution. For example, she describes the ideal woman conversing by adapting Cicero's influential five divisions of oratory—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Plotina, says Aemelius, is the ideal speaker, “for all her expressions are Noble and Natural at the same time; she studys not for what she is to say; there is no constraint in her words; her Discourse is clear and easie; there is a gentile turn in her ways of speaking; no affectation in the sound of her Voice; a great deal of freedom in her actions; and a wonderful coherence between her eyes and her words, which contribute highly to the rendring Speech the more agreeable” (Scudéry 1683, 1: Sig. F7^v). Plotina's speech shows her adept at invention (“she studys not”), arrangement (“clear and easie”), style (“expressions … Noble and Natural”), memory (“no constraint”), and delivery (“Voice,” “actions” or gestures, and “eyes”). Elsewhere Scudéry adapts many other classical rhetorical conceptions to conversation: for example, Aristotle's division of sophistries (1: Sig. F2^v), Quintilian's advice on diction (1: Sig. F3^v), Cicero's on wit (2: Sigs. D5^v and D9^v), and, from Cicero and Quintilian, the debates on art vs. imitation and practice, and art vs. nature in the ideal speaker (1: Sig. F9^r and 2: Sig. D9^v).

Scudéry frequently borrows directly from the sophists, adapting to the needs of conversation the concept of kairos, timeliness, and the importance of circumstances.¹⁰ Conversation “ought to be free and diversified, according to the times, places and persons with whom we are,” suggests Valeria in one dialogue; and she adds:

To speak with reason, we may for certain affirm, that there is nothing but may be said in Conversation, in case it be manag'd with Wit and Judgment, and the Party considers well where he is, to whom he speaks, and who he is himself. Notwithstanding though Judgment be absolutely necessary for the never saying any thing but what is to the purpose, yet the Conversation must appear so free, as to make it seem we don't reject any of our thoughts, and all is said, that comes into the fancy, without any affected design of speaking rather of one thing than of another.¹¹

(Scudéry 1683, 1: Sigs. B9^v-B10^r)

After a lengthy discussion with everyone participating, Valeria comes to the following conclusion about the subjects that should be excluded from conversation: none, after all, can be excluded, but all are appropriate only at some times and with some people, and when handled with judgment. Thus, although influenced by classical rhetorical theory, especially sophistry, Scudéry is original in her development of standards and strategies for communication in conversation: an art of rhetoric for “private” communication.

Scudéry transforms rhetorical precepts from “public” debate and lecture as she applies them to the “private” spaces reserved for women in seventeenth-century France. She reconceptualizes rhetoric to fit the circumstances of privileged women's lives. For example, in the passage just discussed, the topics of conversation to be appropriately included at some times cover what colors of cloth best suit one's complexion and how well one's children are doing, as well as gallantry and science.

Scudéry changes the dialogue form itself by introducing the ideal of “the agreeable” as a goal of the exchange. In the dialogues of classical rhetorical theory, authors typically present their explorations of rhetoric as a debate that is settled eventually by an authoritative answer. In contrast, Scudéry's dialogue imitates conversation: each speaker either agrees with some aspect of the previous person's speech or apologizes for differing, and the speaker who provides core definitions builds on the ideas of those who went before her, rather than overthrowing them. In Scudéry's form there is frequently room for more than one right answer. She expresses these rules of politeness through her central female speaker in the dialogue “Of Rallery,” who denies the appropriateness of wit for most occasions, while also giving rules for it, the central rule being never to place it before politeness to friends. More often than requiring “spirit” or “esprit” (in context a borrowing of the Italian idea of sprezzatura for gentlefolk's conversation, [Scudéry 1683, 2: Sig. B10^v]), conversation requires of its practitioners the “agreeable,” l'agréeable (2: Sig. B10^r and 1 & 2 passim). To agree could scarcely be farther from the purpose of classical masculine debate and argument.¹²

EXTENDED CONVERSATION: WRITING LETTERS

In the end, however, Scudéry succeeds not in establishing separate spheres of influence for women and men, but in blurring the boundaries of public and private communication. Such blurring adapts rhetoric to Scudéry's political circumstances, since “private” salons offered much more opportunity to influence through speech than did the “public” court of an absolute monarch. In her dialogue on “The Manner of Writing Letters,” for example, she disposes of all the volumes of classical and contemporary letters that her friend has sent her as cold, meant more for the general public than for the intimate friend (Scudéry 1685, Sigs. B2^r-B2^v). In their stead, she establishes the necessary genres of letter writing as mainly private ones. Besides business letters and serious letters of important affairs, the genres she establishes are private writing: letters of consolation, congratulation, recommendation, news, and gallantry; polite letters of compliment; and most important, billets d'amour (letters of love).

Scudéry centers her conception of proper letter writing on conversation. As a standard for letter writing, Scudéry's characters use spoken language, as opposed to more ornate written language. “I do not make a point of fashioning my notes,” says Clariste; “I write as I speak, I speak what I think, and provided that I make myself understood, I am content” (Scudéry 1685, Sig. B3^v).¹³ And Berise agrees: “In the case of letters one must simply say what one thinks and say it well” (Sig. B4^r). These aristocrats understand that speaking naturally is an art, not natural at all, and they establish standards for such speech: neither “grand words” nor the words “of the people” (Sig. B4^r) but wit “that tastes of books and the study,” a style that is “easy, natural, and noble—all at once.”¹⁴ Indeed, letters of gallantry are called by Berise “a conversation between absent persons” (Sig. B8^v). By using these standards of spoken language for written language, Scudéry furthers the blurring of the line between private and public spheres, and so provides women letter writers with a rhetorical space in which to exercise their influence.

In her dialogue on letter writing, Scudéry again emphasizes the sophistic conception of kairos—timeliness or appropriateness, accommodation of the audience, and all the worldly circumstances that surround speaker and speech. Scudéry's Berise treats this quality as an inborn characteristic of the aristocrat, a marker of class:

So that when one has wit and judgment, one thinks about each thing pretty much what it is appropriate to think, and consequently one writes what it is appropriate to write. In effect, if I am writing on important business, I will not write as if I had nothing more than a simple compliment to make; if I send some news, I will not play the wit; if I am composing a friendly letter, I will not express myself in high style, and if I wish to write love letters, I will consult only my heart.

(Scudéry 1685, Sig. B4^r)

Avoiding self-expression, the successful speaker assesses the desires of each particular audience and fulfills those desires. Even in letters devoted primarily to news and gossip, the content must be appropriate to the audience: “It is very necessary to know the humour and the interests of the people to whom one writes, when one meddles in handing on some news to them” (Sigs. B7^v-B8^r).¹⁵

Scudéry also draws on the sophistic tradition by emphasizing the place of emotion in letter writing, especially by the preeminence she gives to love letters in this dialogue. Most private letters draw on emotions in ways that for public forms of writing would be called sentimental or sophistical, but which are appropriate to these forms. For example, her speakers give directions for expressing grief and sympathy in letters of condolence, for responding to another's good fortune in letters of congratulation, even for eliciting pride to do a favor in a letter of recommendation. Nowhere is emotion more significant, however, than in Scudéry's discussion of billets d'amour, where it overrules all other considerations. In love letters “the fire of wit” used elsewhere is replaced by “the heat of passion”; and “expression in these letters must be very tender and very touching, and one must always say those things that move the heart, mixed with that which entertains the spirit” (Scudéry 1685, Sigs. B9^v-B10^r).

Passionate love is not the only emotion, however, to be expressed in love letters, for the distracted aristocratic lover is not supposed to be able to control emotional response—that is how one tells sincerity in love. Once that is said, however, Scudéry's speakers agree to give practical advice on what emotions to include: “If I am not wrong, one should likewise include a little anxiety, because happy letters get you nowhere in love. It is not that one is not able to have joy; but, after all, it must never be a peaceful joy, and when one does not have a subject for complaint, one must make one up” (Sig. B10^r).

The emphasis on emotions in love letters makes love letters the most difficult to judge, since the excessive feeling and the disordered form will be comprehensible only to another lover, for the lover's “heart is so distressed that it does not very well know what it feels” (Sig. B11^v). The love letter thus presents Scudéry with some representative problems for dealing with private forms in rhetorical theory: to the degree that the form of the love letter is controlled by advice of theorists, in this case a group of characters in fictional private conversation, the letters become insincere; good letters are supposedly those that escape theory, that remain in an intimate private realm. Actually, of course, even love letters, it becomes clear during the course of the conversation, are documents to share with at least one other confidante, and some collections may even be printed.

Scudéry suggests that women are better writers of love letters than men. The material circumstances of her female contemporaries require them to be modestly private, and privacy is an important element of the successful love letter: “For when a lover has resolved to write openly about his passion, he does not require more art than to say ‘I die for love.’ But with a woman, since she cannot ever admit so precisely what she feels, and she must keep it a great secret, this love that one can only catch a glimpse of, she delights more than someone who puts [himself] on display” (Scudéry 1685, Sig. B10^v). In love letters the social requirement of modesty in women becomes an artistic benefit, since it helps to create the aesthetic quality of private mystery. In addition, women may be better writers of letters of news and gallantry, for while men excel in the kind of eloquence practiced in public assemblies, there is another eloquence “that sometimes conveys a more charming effect with less noise, principally among ladies; for, in a word, the art of speaking well about trifles is not known to all sorts of people” (Sig. B9^r). Here Scudéry slyly adopts what is usually attributed to women as a fault, their triviality, to the end of social gaiety, putting it in the service of communal pleasure.

The boundaries of private and public were also blurred in the seventeenth century by the custom of letter reading. Families and close friends expected to hear the letters received by any of their members, perhaps with the exception of love letters. Private letters were even likely to turn up in print, to be consumed by a wider public audience, if only, as in Scudéry's dialogue, as models for further “private” communications. In “On the Manner of Writing Letters” Aminte's friends send her a library of published collections of letters—by Cicero, Voiture, Balzac, Costar—to convince her to write letters to them. They argue that she has neglected a social responsibility in neglecting her correspondence with friends.

Under the government of an autocratic ruler in seventeenth-century France, there was little room for public speech that moved assemblies. Other rhetorical activities were more important for gaining political power: the public rhetoric of praise (Goldsmith 1988, 60), the private persuasion of people who might influence Louis XIV, and the private conversation and writing that circulated news. The line between private and public is thus especially blurred in the letter of gossip and news, and Scudéry is as attentive to the political potential of writing les nouvelles du Cabinet (the news of the salon) as to the news of grand choses (great events) (Scudéry 1685, Sig. B7^v). Scudéry is careful to remind her readers that the notes sent while in town are often as important as the letters between far away places, for notes keep aristocrats in touch with the people they employ (perhaps an allusion to representatives placed at court to keep them informed of events and gossip). Notes are also important because they pass on to friends the small details of everyday life that at any moment might assume political significance—“a thousand little things they would not otherwise know, because one would have forgotten them by the time one saw them” (Sig. B12^r). Indeed, in seventeenth-century France, a despotic monarchy, power often operated through private rather than constitutional channels of communication: the letters of Paul Pellison, Madeleine de Scudéry's special friend and secretary to the disgraced Nicolas Fouquet, were seized as evidence, and while he was in prison, Scudéry says that she burned the nearly five hundred letters that he sent her, including poems. In her dialogue on letter writing, Scudéry suggests that in the letter of news there is always “something one should never hand on” (Sig. B8^r)—something one should never put into writing. Scudéry offers a rhetoric that takes into account such movements of “public” power through “private” communication.

CONCLUSION

Scudéry was skilled herself in the performance of conversational rhetoric. Through her dialogues she may very well have been initiating her audience into successful trade secrets, just as did Isocrates and Cicero. It was the conversational practices of Madeleine and her brother Georges at Mme de Rambouillet's salon that gained Georges his preferment and political post. Madeleine refused marriage: it was her conversation at the salons and her published works, not her beauty, that gained her eventual financial security—a pension from the king. And the letters from her and her friends did eventually help to gain Paul Pellison's release from the Bastille. Her texts helped to change the climate in France for education for women, as well: her Conversations were used to teach conversation to the girls at Mme de Maintenon's school from 1686 to 1691, and this school became a model for others (Goldsmith 1988, 66). Scudéry suggests that even private words are rhetorical: they are events with material and social consequences. Her life demonstrates what her writings claim: there is a great deal of power to be gained by one who “speaks as becomes a rational Woman to speak.”

Notes

1. On the life and achievements of Madeleine de Scudéry, see the biographies by Aronson (1978) and McDougall (1922). The standard histories of rhetorical theory include almost no women. Howell (1961, 166-67) mentions only Mary Queen of Scots, for a speech in defense of women's education in rhetoric. A recent anthology by Bizzell and Herzberg (1990) includes a few women before 1900—Christine de Pisan, Laura Cereta, and Margaret Fell from the Renaissance. I have developed the argument (1995) that a group of women in the seventeenth century—Margaret Cavendish, Margaret Fell, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell, as well as Madeleine de Scudéry—adapted the Renaissance as a rhetorical strategy to argue for women's rhetorical education. Other women of the Renaissance to consider as rhetorical theorists are Bettisia Bezzidini, a thirteenth-century Italian professor of rhetoric, and Beatrix Galindo, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Salamanca, who taught Catharine of Aragon (Bassnett 1989, 21).

2. Retha Warnicke (1983, esp. 100-101) argues that some sixteenth-century aristocratic English parents adopted this strategy for daughters who ranked high enough to become royal brides, educating those daughters in Latin, Greek, and humanist arts to make them attractive marriage partners.

3. On rhetoric as the center of Latin humanist culture, see Kristeller (1961), Howell (1961), Doran (1954, 26), and Waller (1986, 48-59). On women's exclusion from rhetorical training in favor of grammar alone, see Gibson (1989).

4. On the social mobility furthered by salon conversation, see also Goldsmith (1988, 2, 6, 8). Stanton (1980, esp. 90) alternately argues that it is the aristocrats who promote the ideal of honnêteté and the exclusivity of the salon as a means of regaining prestige from the bourgeoisie.

5. See Ferguson (1988, esp. 99-102); Jardine (1983, esp. 121-33); and Stallybrass (1986, esp. 126-27). See also Belsey (1985) and Grafton and Jardine (1986, 32). In fifteenth-century Italy, in a letter to a male humanist, Isotta Nogarola apologized for transgressing “those rules of silence especially imposed on women” (Grafton and Jardine 1986, 37-38).

6. It is unclear whether “Zadie” is a name for the heroine of the romance, since Scudéry frequently uses such classicized names in her dialogues, or a printer's mistake for “Ladie.”

7. See Stanton (1980, 178) on the aesthetic of the invisibility of art for seventeenth-century French aristocrats: the aristocrat is aware how much art it takes to construct the natural, how art is the process of making itself invisible.

8. On the sophistic idea that language preceded and caused the civilization of humanity, see Isocrates' “Nicocles” (vol. 1 pp. 77-81) and “Antidosis” (vol. 2 pp. 327-29). On Cicero's adaptation of this goal exclusively to public speech, see De Inventione I.ii.2-3, De Re Publica III.ii.3, and especially De Oratore I.viii.23 (see Cicero 1960, 1928, 1948, respectively). Scudéry is also adapting the antiprofessionalism of the ideal of the honnête homme in salon society to the subject of rhetoric: the ideal speech is not the professional speech of the trained rhetorician, who speaks (for profit) as a lawyer, statesman, or priest, but the leisured woman who converses in the interest of knowledge for its own sake and graceful beauty. See Stanton (1980) on the antiprofessionalism of the ideal of the honnête homme (95-97) and on the art of conversation (139-46).

9. On pleasure as a central goal of speech for sophists, see Jarratt (1991, 110).

10. See Kennedy (1963) on Gorgias's discovery and Isocrates' development of kairos, “the concept of the opportune” (66); “‘the adaptation of the speech to the manifold variety of life, to the psychology of the speaker and hearer: variegated, not absolute unity of tone’” (67, quoting Untersteiner on the sophists); “what is opportune and fitting and novel” in the good speech (68, quoting Isocrates, “Against the Sophists”). See Carter (1988) for an explanation of kairos that links it not only to relativism but also to communal decision and discourse.

11. Note that I am using a seventeenth-century English translation here that supplies the masculine pronouns—Scudéry's French does not gender this ideal.

12. See Stanton (1980, 124) on charm or agreeableness, not beauty, as signaling the status of the aristocrat in seventeenth-century France. See Goldsmith (1988, 10-13, 41-75) on reciprocity as an ideal of salon conversation throughout seventeenth-century handbooks, and especially in Scudéry's Conversations.

13. For the dialogue “Conversation de la Manière d'Ecrire des Lettres” I have found no seventeenth-century translation into English; the translations here are my own.

14. Scudéry (1685, Sig. B8^v), recalling Quintilian's standard of “the language of educated men,” Institutio I.vi.45; see Donawerth (1984, 35, 52-53 n. 66).

15. This section on adjusting the telling of news to the audience is worth quoting at length: “But in my opinion when one composes these letters where one recounts the latest news, one should think up some news that would please the people to whom one writes. For I am sure that there are people who do not love all the news with which fame is ordinarily burdened, and who do not desire to hear about battles won or lost, sieges of cities, fires, floods, shipwrecks, uprisings of the people, and other similar great events; there are those also who scarcely care about the great happenings that one finds in the newspapers, who prefer what one calls the news of the “cabinet” [salon, study, private sitting room, dressing room, boudoir], which are not told except in a low voice, and which are not well known except to worldly, well informed people, who have exquisite judgment and delicate taste” (Sig. B7^v).

I would like to thank Stephanie Lenky for her comments on my English translations of Scudéry's dialogue, “Conversation de la Manière d'Ecrire des Lettres.”

References

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Aronson, Nicole. 1978. Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Trans. Stuart R. Aronson. Boston: Twayne.

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