SOURCE: “Literary and Political Collaboration: The Prefatory Letter of Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus,” in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 45, 1996, pp. 491-500.

[In the following essay, Hinds asserts that the “ambiguous authorial figure” adumbrated in Scudéry's dedicatory letter to the Duchess de Longueville preceding Artamène models an alternative to absolutist political leadership.]

The prefatory letter of Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649-1653) treats the politically charged figure of the Duchesse de Longueville by means of literary investment performed by an ambiguous authorial figure. In their passage between multiple positions of subjectivity, between “je,” “nous,” and “on,” the figures of authorship manage to construct a portrait of the frondeuse that celebrates her personal, moral worth and correspondingly promotes her eligibility to reign. This reading is guided by a series of questions. What rhetorical strategies does the epistolary prose of preciosity employ to represent its collective, authorial origin? How can this rhetorical articulation of authorship open a discursive space that frees the expression of political opinion from traditional ideological constraints? What are some possible esthetic and conceptual origins of such gestures, and how do précieux and précieuses writers reintroduce and innovate them to further their literary projects and political agendas? Finally, does the figurative import of précieux writing come to inform subsequent images of political empowerment?

While the dedicatory letter addressed to the Duchess gives a glimpse of preciosity's reaction and concomitant indebtedness to libertine writing practices and political views, it also evidences the textual presence of collective authorship and preciosity's potential for multiple, political posturing through techniques particular to its esthetic: the moral and psychological valorization and elevation of female characters in the third person at the detriment of the speaker in the first person. In reaction to what Charles Sorel calls the “peinture naïve” of social types in the histoires comiques,¹ the letters and novels of preciosity glorify members of aristocratic and ennobled classes in heroic and amorous situations. In contrast with satiric and vilifying registers of expression in libertine poetry and narrative prose,² according to Abbé de Pure, the précieuse employs eloquence in conversation and writing to assign value (“le prix”) to something or someone in order to elevate it to a level of worth (“le mérite”).³ What these writers do retain from their free-thinking predecessors and contemporaries are practices of depicting authorial presence in texts by means of truncated signatures, which problematize the relationship between literary representation and reference. Furthermore, like Théophile de Viau's hostility toward the disparity between the king's personal, moral merit and the symbolic representation of royal power,⁴ the précieux and précieuses elaborate a critique of the personal embodiment of royal authority in their preference for the empowerment of certain individuals (most often women) over others. In the case of Madeleine de Scudéry and her collaborators, the Duchesse de Longueville's epistolary portrait specifically challenges the criteria determining the incorporation of political authority in the Regency during la Fronde. Nevertheless, this schematic review does not answer the fundamental question posed by the prefatory letter: how does political contestation necessarily arise from ambiguous authorial representation?

As Joan DeJean has shown, libertine writers sign with a praenomen and suppress the cognomen in an effort to obscure the relationship between the nominal sign and its unique referent.⁵ In a gesture mirroring them, the scribe of Artamène's preface suppresses the first name and signs with the family name, “De Scudéry.” Accompanied with allusions to works ascribed to either or both Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry (La Mort de César, Ibrahim ou L'Illustre Bassa), this signature designates both writers as possible contributors to the letter and to the novel. This elliptical signature serves to suppress reference to individual, personal engagement in literary production and to implicate the involvement of a multi-personal (or even impersonal) authorial source. Although both libertine and précieux writing use the partial signature as a ludic technique to interrupt reference to the author, the libertine privileging of the praenomen promotes an air of familiarity, which is reflected in the seemingly autobiographical narration in the first person; whereas the shortened signature of the précieux and précieuses underplays engagement of the individual to the advantage of a collectivity of characters in the third person, who assume both authorial and narrative functions in the letter and in the novel.⁶

Not only do the historical circumstances of Artamène's fast-paced production indicate the involvement of a literary collective,⁷ but its liminal text also attests to writing in the first-person plural and the neuter singular, whose linguistic functions plot a new subjective space for authorship and for contestatory, political pronouncements. The first person, singular pronoun opening the prefatory letter, transforms into a collective “nous,” and often into an undefinable, neuter “on,” which according to Monique Wittig “can represent a certain number of people successively or all at once … and still stay singular.”⁸ In its malleable signification, its multiple and simultaneous designation of “one,” “they,” “people,” “we,” “I,” etc., “on” mitigates language's constraining assignation of gender and number to writing subjects and performs a parallel re-patterning of the locutors' roles in forming political discourse.⁹ Consequently, the letter's paradoxical depiction of neuter, collective singularity resists attribution to an individual writer, and thus interferes in the referential relationship between author and work, between the personal opinion outside the text and the political pronouncement within it. Because of these textual complexities due to the inclusive (and inconclusive) signature and the slippage of pronouns into the indefinite, it is not so surprising that the degree of individual contribution to Artamène's composition has eluded readers for centuries.¹⁰

Even the few occurrences of the first-person, singular pronoun, which opens and closes the letter, defy any identification with a single, authorial figure as the source of Madame de Longueville's laudatory portrait and as the leader of a triumphant march through her Condéian lineage. This “je” of undefined gender gives itself authorial status in its claims to previous literary works and the present novel Artamène, and immediately divests itself of that role in its treatment of Artamène as an autonomous historical figure capable of assuming authorship. This “je” subordinates itself to the position of “l'Interprète de ce Prince,”¹¹—an agent of undefined grammatical gender and multiple responsibilities. Jean Rousset sees this confluence of authorship between agents from different social ranks as a growing tendency in heroic and précieux novels:

… les premiers rôles ne se racontent pas eux-mêmes. Comme la hiérarchie de ce personnel romanesque correspond à la hiérarchie sociale, les protagonistes sont des rois ou des princes destinés au trône; on en conclut que c'est leur haute qualité qui ne leur permet pas de se confesser en personne. Quoi qu'il en soit, ils délèguent ce privilège à un substitut de rang subalterne, mais assez proche pour bien connaître leur vie et jusqu'à leurs pensées intimes. …¹²

Since it is the first-person, neuter interpreter who merges with Artamène to translate from one language to another, to channel the voice of the Persian Prince, and to transmit his affects and wishes, it is impossible to identify who really explains the parade of historical figures and describes the portrait of the Duchess.¹³

In the initial presentation of the Duchess's value, the interpreter uses the third person to designate the fictionally invested, historical figure of Artamène:

Ce Vainqueur de la moitié du Monde, qui croit avécque raison que Vostre Altesse seroit digne de le commender tout entier: vient mettre à vos pieds ses Palmes & ses Trophées, & advoüer ingenûment, qu'il a moins conquesté de Sceptres & de Couronnes, que vous ne meritez d'en avoir.

The interpreter, subordinate to Artamène, remains invisible while it relates the Prince's actions (“vient mettre”), and translates his thoughts (“croit”) and his speech acts (“advoüer”). From this invisible and impersonal authorial position emerges a statement of the addressee's worthiness to command Artamène in his military exploits. Although the Duchess appears as Artamène's worthy paramour, his performance on the battlefield and his conquests fall short of what she deserves—in this case, more than half the world. This portion of global conquest appears in a metonymic relationship with Scepters and Crowns, signs of royal authority, which rightfully belong in the hand and on the head of the Duchess.

The speaker then appears in oscillation between the collective position of “on” and its objective position as “me” in its justification for the match between Artamène, the heroic champion, and Mme de Longueville, the heroic paramour: “En un mot, il [Artamène] a esté seul de qui l'on puisse dire comme de Vostre Altesse, qu'il avoit toutes les vertus & pas un defaut. … Cette glorieuse conformité, que l'on voit entre un Heros & une Heroine, me fait esperer qu'il sera bien reçeu de vous. …” Although Artamène is objectified as “il” and the Duchess is formally addressed as “vous,” the positions of “on” and “me” are much less clear. “On” fulfills elocutionary (“l'on puisse dire”) and perceptive (“l'on voit”) functions, whereas “me” seems to be the affected object of hope (“espérer”). The authorial function in the text divides itself between individual and collective agents in order to establish a moral comparison between Artamène and Mme de Longueville. Realized by means of linguistic performance, perception of characteristics, and emotional expression from at least two subjective positions, the moral comparison mutually valorizes the historical-fictional figure and the historical referent. Already different agents in the text collaborate in the project of establishing moral resemblance through literary activity.¹⁴

The distinction between Artamène and the authorial figures begins to fade at the advent of the collective, ungendered “on,” which gives the Duchess entrance into the history of her lineage: “En effet, si l'on regarde la haute Naissance de Vostre Altesse, quelle splendeur n'y verra t'on pas? Ce ne sont que Throsnes; que Sceptres: & que Couronnes; & cette longue suitte de Rois dont vous descendez, vous couvre d'un si grand éclat, qu'il en est presque inaccessible.” Within the context of translation and interpretation by “on,” it is impossible to distinguish individual figures of subjectivity, because the pronoun can simultaneously signify collectivity and singularity. From this undefined origin of speech emerges an invitation to the Duchess to view a representation of her family's past as once invested with the authority to reign. This defile of authoritarian attributes in capital letters—Thrones, Scepters, Crowns—begins the valorizing ascent of the addressee to a virtual point of worthiness of royal authority. To reach the representation of an “éclat … presque inaccessible,” however, the speaking agents must assume some authority thus far unassigned to them.

In order to approach the more intimate aspects of Mme de Longueville's biography and personality, these undefined authorial entities must lure into their party a figure worthy to be her interlocutor, Artamène himself. These authorial figures co-opt and assimilate Artamène, as a fictionally embellished historical figure, in order to give value to Mme de Longueville and demonstrate her worthiness to assume royal authority. The speakers, having invited the addressee into a group admiration of lineage, adopt a royal “nous”:

Que si du Sang Royal de Bourbon, nous passons au noble Sang de Montmorency, dont est la Princesse adorable qui vous a donné la vie … nous verrons autant de Heros, que nous aurons veû de Monarques: & nous verrons aussi la Grandeur de cette illustre Maison, plus ancienne que la Monarchie Françoise.

The speaking agents establish the confluence and equivalence of two sources of Royal Blood and the precedence of the maternal line (Montmorency) before the paternal one (Bourbon). In anticipation of the Duchess's future ascendancy, the speakers project the primacy of her collective royal blood (Montmorency-Bourbon) over the singular line (Bourbon) of Louis XIV.¹⁵ The future and past future tenses point to the virtuality of such a historical and genealogical representation, which requires the temporary transfer of royal authority from a figure on par with the Duchess (in this case Artamène) to the speaking agents. Here literary collaborators strategically have the collective, inclusive “we” coincide with the traditionally exclusive, royal “we,” which signifies the amalgamation of a single enunciator and an abstract construct of political authority.¹⁶ Indeed, it is this ambiguous representation of the source of enunciation which permits the subalterns' characterization of the referent as a candidate for royal authority.

After having placed emphasis on the maternal blood of Montmorency, the speaking agents then judge that it is not “à propos” to parade before the addressee “ces magnifiques Mausolées de Rois, de Princes, de Connestables, & d'Admiraux … ces Grands Morts.” Through preterition,¹⁷ the refusal to display the family tombs becomes their display—a melancholic reminder of the assiduities of Henri IV to elope with the Duchess's mother, Charlotte de Montmorency, to cuckold her late father, Henri II Prince de Condé, and of the execution of her uncle, Henri II de Montmorency, for having protected libertine writers, such as Théophile de Viau, and having rebelled with Gaston d'Orléans against Louis XIII and Richelieu.¹⁸ This recapitulation of past, political resistance and the future, heroic potential of the Bourbon-Montmorency line places the Duchess at the historical intersection between a past of challenges to predominant royal authorities and her projected accession to a position of authority.

Having thus situated Mme de Longueville, the undefined “on” reappears to construct a portrait of personal value and corresponding worthiness to justify the addressee's access to authority—the Duchess doubled as a self-sufficient, astral body:

Et puis à dire les choses comme elles sont, ce n'est pas seulement de ces lumières empruntées dont on vous voit briller, comme en brillent tous les Astres inferieurs, qui prennent leur éclat d'un plus grand Astre: Vous avez des rayons & des clartez, que vous ne prenez que de vous-mesme. …

The speaker effaces itself as the source of rhetorical elaboration in order to invest the Duchess with a symbolic, autonomous body. The infinitive “dire” has no connection with a pronominal subject and the speaker “on” again takes the position of a passive perceiver of royal authority. It absconds as the source of political discourse lest it draw attention to the radical shift between two contradictory representations of the Duchess's personal worth: although the confluence of patrilinear and matrilinear legacies covered her with brilliance before (“cette longue suitte de Rois … [la] couvre d'un si grand éclat”), she now appears to produce it all by herself, independent of the speaker's empowering rhetoric.

While the speaking subject plays the role of passive witness to the elaboration and ascent of the Duchess's celestial figure, it transforms again into “nous.” This is not, however, the royal “we” which assimilated Artamène to become a peer of Longueville, for this “we” is dazzled by the very source of brilliance - the omniscient mind of Mme de Longueville's astral manifestation: “… ce Grand Esprit a des clartez qui nous ébloüissent: il brille, & brille tousjours: ses rayons percent l'obscurité des choses les plus cachées; il penetre tout; il voit tout; il connoist tout; & rien ne se dérobe à sa veüe.” The speakers, once again in the position of passive perceivers, also take the place of a collectivity of subjects to royal authority. While the Duchess's light penetrates all things and sounds all human intentions, her mind blinds the perceivers (“nous”) by its brilliance. Furthermore, her astral mind not only apprehends beautiful things, but produces them as well: “Mais il ne voit & ne connoist pas seulement les belles choses, car il les produit luy mesme … l'Or, les Perles, les Rubis, les Esmeraudes, les Diamans, & toutes les autres Pierreries, qui sont ses demiers Chefs-d'œuvres. …” In depicting Mme de Longueville's sidereal consciousness as autonomous, self-generative and self-ornamental, the collective subject pretends to surrender its own rhetoric of valorization, elaboration, and elevation to the mind of royal authority in the person of this historical referent.

In a final declaration, the contestation of the embodiment of royal authority in the Regency culminates with what seems to be the representation par excellence of absolutist political authority: the encompassing gaze of the monarch's symbolic body; the lucidity of the royal mind to supervise, perceive, know, order, and regulate.¹⁹ The Duchess's judgment is indeed a monarch who regulates its own actions, and in so doing, qualifies as the regulatory force to dispense royal authority in the kingdom:

… vostre jugement … est un Monarque qui regne Souverainement: qui regle toutes vos actions, à l'infaillible Compas de la raison: & qui agit en vous avec tant d'ordre & tant de justesse, que le cours du Soleil dont je vous parle, n'est pas plus justement reglé. Ouy Madame, le plus grand Roy de la Terre, pourroit se reposer sur la prudence de vostre Altesse, de la conduite de tous ses Estats: & tant qu'elle veilleroit à cette conduite, il pourroit dormir en assurance, quelque tempeste qui peut s'eslever contre luy.

In the last gesture of rhetorical hoodwinking, the authorial subject ostensibly presents itself as a witness to a recapitulation of a hierarchy of merits that it itself surreptitiously assigns to Mme de Longueville: “… le cours du Soleil dont je vous parle. …” Through a series of linguistic acrobatics in the course of the letter, the authorial figure ends its multiplicity of postures as a conciliatory agent, who depicts Mme de Longueville's mental awareness as a safeguard against the dangers faced by the dormant boy-king. Artamène's prefatory letter presents Louis XIV in his minority (“le plus grand Roy de la Terre”) as having a base of support in the embodiment of royal authority in his cousin, the Duchess, at the detriment of the Regent, Anne d'Autriche, and her counselor, Mazarin. The successive roles played by authorial agency add up to a clear statement: the contestation of the consolidation of royal authority in the persons of Regent and counselor and the espousal of its investment in Mme de Longueville.²⁰

The conclusion of this letter raises an important question: what are the ideological consequences of preciosity's innovation of libertine stategies and political statements? What is the legacy of its representation of political authority during and even after la Fronde? Although Madeleine de Scudéry and her literary colleagues propose a collaborative model of political leadership from a position of collaborative authorship, they inadvertently seem to posit the figurative pattern for the codification of absolutist monarchy: the Sun-King as the Subject who determines the existence of all other subjects, political and authorial. Whatever the consequences of salon writing, this letter illustrates most clearly the exchanges of authorial power and the transformations of authorial presence necessary for the literary and historical representation of political authority, whether collaborative or absolutist. In the texts of Madeleine de Scudéry and her contemporaries, not only do characters and authorial figures collaborate in trade-offs of power with one another in metamorphoses of gender, number, and identity, but they also engage themselves in the political arena of letters. Indeed, it is in the very arena of preciosity in the mid-seventeenth century where malleable manifestations of authorship and their accompanying contradictory pronouncements subtend the figurative representation of models of political authority to come.

Notes

1. Charles Sorel, Advertissement aux lecteurs, Polyandre, histoire comique (1648; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972) n. pag.

2. For a short discussion of preciosity's refinement of language as a reaction to “l'ancien esprit de gossièreté et de réalisme, voire même de vulgarité,” see Georges Mongrédien, La Vie littéraire au XVII^e siècle (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1947) 188.

3. Abbé de Pure's characterization of preciosity's techniques of valorization is more equivocal than the etymology of the term suggests: “Une précieuse donne un prix particulier à toute chose, quand elle juge, quand elle loue, ou quand elle censure: comme, par exemple, les choses les plus communes et les plus triviales qui ramperaient dans un discours, ou du moins n'iraient tout au plus qu'à la superficie du goût, et ne donneraient qu'un tendre et faible plaisir, ou à celui qui le lirait, ou qui l'écouterait, augmenteraient de prix par le seul débit de la précieuse, à qui l'art est familier d'élever les choses et de les faire valoir.” Cited by René Bray, La Préciosité et les précieux de Thibaut de Champagne à Jean Giraudoux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948) 137, and Jean-Claude Tournand, Introduction à la vie littéraire du XVII^e siècle (Paris: Bordas, 1984) 64.

4. Antoine Adam, Théophile de Viau et la libre pensée française en 1620 (Paris: Droz, 1935) 253-254, and Jean-Vincent Blanchard, “‘Les Rois courent partout’: Politique du corps et de l'espace dans Pyrame et Thisbé de Théophile,” Paper presented at the First Joint Conference of the North-American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature and the Centre International de Rencontres sur le XVII^e siècle, Santa Barbara, CA, 18 March 1994.

5. Joan DeJean, Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in Seventeenth-Century France (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981) 4, 6, 8, 20, 62.

6. In Clélie, Madeleine de Scudéry and her collaborators present a narrator, Amilcar, who explains his preference for disguised names and third-person narration to fashion autobiography: “Mais quand on dit soy mesme son Histoire, tout ce qu'on dit à son avantage est suspect à ceux qui l'escoutent: & il est si difficile, si c'est une Femme qui face une narration, de luy faire dire de bonne grace, j'ay donné de l'amour: & si c'est un homme de luy faire raconter à propos qu'il a esté aimé, ou qu'il est brave: qu'il est mille & mille fois plus raisonnable que ce soit une tierce Personne qui raconte, que de raconter soy-mesme.” Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, histoire romaine suite de la Premiere Partie, tome II (1660; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973) 1378-1379. Cited in Jean Rousset, Narcisse Romancier: Essai sur la première personne dans le roman (Paris: Corti, 1973) 52, and DeJean, Libertine Strategies, 68.

7. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 72-73, and by the same, “La Fronde romanesque: de l'exploit à la fiction,” in Roger Duchêne and Pierre Ronzeaud, eds., La Fronde en question, Actes du dix-huitième colloque du Centre Méridional de Rencontres sur le XVII^e siècle (Marseille: Université de Provence, 1989) 181-192.

8. Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 68.

9. Wittig 67.

10. While Antoine Adam argues for Georges's large role in the composition of the first five books of Artamène (see his Histoire de la littérature française: L'Epoque de Pascal, tome II (Paris: Domat, 1951) 127-129), Joan DeJean admits the possibility of Huet, Ménage and Pellisson's collaboration (see Tender Geographies, 73, 236-237 n.5-6). Thomas DiPiero attributes the letters and prefaces of Ibrahim and Artamène to Madeleine de Scudéry in his literal reading of allusions. See his Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992) 92-93, n.1.

11. Madeleine de Scudéry, À Madame la Duchesse de Longueville, Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus, Premiere Partie (1656; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972) n.pag. All citations from Scudéry are from this prefatory letter, unless otherwise indicated. References to the narrative indicate Part by a large case Roman numeral, book by a small case Roman numeral, and page number by an Arabic numeral.

12. Rousset 50.

13. All these functions can be accounted for in the semantic accumulation of “interprète” from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century. Paul Robert, “INTERPRETE,” Le Petit Robert I (Paris: Le Robert, 1990) 1023.

14. Personal, moral qualities shared between agents of different gender come to inform the equivalence of social rank and the formation of amorous unions in the larger narrative itself. For example, the heroine of the novel, Mandane, finds Artamène's modesty not only an appealing, but also a striking quality in a man of his military prowess. This one appealing quality among others eventually aligns the two characters as members of the same class and as candidates for pairing in the love intrigue: “La modestie (luy dit la Princesse en sous-riant, & se tournant vers les Dames qui estoient les plus proches d'elle) est une vertu qui apartient si essentiellement à nostre Sexe, que je ne sçay si je dois souffrir que ce genereux Estranger l'usurpe sur nous avec tant d'injustice, & que ne se contentant pas de posseder la valeur eminement, où nous ne devons rien pretendre; il veüille encore estre aussi modeste, quand on luy parle de la beauté des actions qu'il a faites; que les femmes raisonnables le sont, quand on les loüe de leur beauté” (I: ii, 237).

15. In addition, this phase of the dedicatory letter seems to anticipate the problematic transfer of royal authority from King to historian in order to write the royal history envisioned by Pellisson in his Projet de l'histoire de Louis XIV (1670). Cf. Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981) and Milad Doueihi, “Traps of Representation,” Diacritics (Spring 1984): 66-77.

16. Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni, L'Enonciation: De la subjectivité dans le langage (Paris: Armand Colin, 1980) 41, 232.

17. Preterition is defined as “feindre de ne pas vouloir dire ce que néanmoins on dit très-clairement, et souvent avec force.” See Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours, intro. and ed. Gérard Genette (Paris: Flammarion, 1977) 143.

18. Vicomte de Noailles, La Mère du Grand Condé, Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency, Princesse de Condé (1594-1650) (Paris: Émile-Paul Frères, 1924) 85-149, 202-221.

19. Mme de Longueville's portrait entails figures strikingly similar to Louis XIV's Carrousel of 1662, for both employ an astral body around which are organized political subordinates and both imply the universal penetration of the royal gaze. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-Machine (Paris: Minuit, 1981) 41-48.

20. Constant Venesoen also considers the assignation of royal authority as a recurrent theme in the moral portraits within the narrative itself and as an instrumental qualification for the valorization of women's gallant activities and intellectual pursuits: “L'ambition féminine n'est-elle pas toute dans la réalisation de sa royauté? En effet, l'image qui hante Madeleine est celle de la femme-reine, ou, mieux encore, de la femme-déesse. A l'instar de la Marquise de Rambouillet, cette inimitable Cléomire, Sapho est ‘digne de porter une Couronne’ (X: ii, 331).” See Constant Venesoen, “Madeleine de Scudéry et la ‘défense du sexe,’” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 13.25 (1986): 128, 137, n.19.