SOURCE: “Dialogue and Speakers in Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes,” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 78, No. 4, October 1983, pp. 793-803.

[In the following essay, Howells analyzes the significance of Charles Perrault's construction of the Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, as a dialogue between the Président, the Abbé, and the Chevalier.]

Charles Perrault's Parallèle (1688-97), the great manifesto of the Moderns in the ‘Querelle’, is usually regarded simply as a set of arguments.¹ The fact that it consists of dialogues between imaginary speakers is given little attention. My concern will be to look at the Parallèle as a didactic fiction.² Perrault's choice of the dialogue form has numerous implications. We may ask why he uses an Abbé, a Chevalier, and a Presiding Judge as his interlocutors; what positions and functions he attributes to each; and how their interaction contributes to the total effect. In part I shall be looking in a new way at the arguments. The historical interest of the Parallèle, however, lies also in its literary structure, and the ideology conveyed the more pervasively thereby.

To explore or expound ideas through the semi-dramatic form of a dialogue is an urbane form of writing. It is socially orientated in that it presents not one voice but two or more in conversation, and in that by dramatizing and personalizing the conceptual subject-matter it implies the author's desire to reach a wider audience. In the seventeenth century it was used quite frequently to treat all kinds of subjects. There were major classical antecedents for its use (Plato, Lucian, Cicero), but within the period and context of the ‘Querelle’ one might say that it was a form for the Moderns. The Moderns were, precisely, orientated to their own society. They did not merely celebrate the particular characteristics of their age, and treat them as universal standards. In its arts, its mores, and its language these were its socially-defined qualities of ‘goût’ and ‘politesse’. Indeed the more radical Ancients—Boileau, Anne Dacier—accepted that the Modern side spoke for the contemporary ethos, only they called it ‘mollesse’ and decadence instead. The Moderns also sought to enfranchize the literary judgement of a larger group. The criterion was wide contemporary assent, socially broader—though historically far more limited—than the assent of a long humanist tradition as argued by the Ancients. Moreover the Moderns themselves practised the contemporary virtues that they preached. The writing of Fontenelle, La Motte, and Marivaux reflects the values of social grace and literary delicacy. The genius of Boileau, on the other hand, is intensely individual and combative. In the latter's Art poétique there is one voice. In Perrault's Parallèle there are several.

Perrault uses three fictional speakers. They are designated not by conventional classical names (Ariste, Timoleon, …) nor by French proper names, but by titles which signify their social qualities. In fact they represent implicitly the whole of civilized society. The Abbé might be identified with the First Estate, the Chevalier with the Second or secular nobility, and the Président with the Third. They come together at Versailles, where the discussions occur. Therefore they come together under the patronage of Louis. Clearly Versailles represents both the point of meeting for all Frenchmen and a monument of specifically modern achievement.³

The Abbé argues for the Modern cause, the Président for the Ancients. Less erudite, and representing the larger constituency of ‘les mondains’, the Chevalier is supposedly neutral (I, 1-4).⁴ But almost by definition he is therefore Modern too, and indeed in the dialogues he habitually sides with the Abbé. Thus the Modern position is doubly comprehensive. It carries the universal prescriptive authority of Christianity, and has the approval of worldly society. Religious and worldly values joined imply a kind of syncretism. It is appropriate that the cause of Christian epic should be defended by Abbé and Chevalier together, evangelical and secular heroism, Grace and the best of Nature.⁵ Another kind of cultural authority is conferred on these two by the fact that both belong to Paris, the centre of all civilization, while the Président is a provincial (I, 6, 110). One should remark too that in the culture of the period, ‘chevalier’ and ‘abbé’ are the protean figures. They are classless and mobile, neither fish nor fowl or, to use a different figure, like fish in the water of society.⁶ In this sense each represents the collectivity.

As for the Président, it seems likely that he signifies a principle of division rather than comprehension. One might think of class analysis rather than classlessness. To differentiate him from the Abbé and Chevalier by class is not easy, for in the world of ‘les honnêtes gens’ he is their social equal. In a sense, nevertheless, as I have noted, they belong to the noble Estates and he to the bourgeoisie. They are what they are by birth (Chevalier) or royal and ecclesiastical preferment (Abbé), whereas he has bought his office. This particular judge is a provincial, which reduces his standing. To make the representative of the supposedly-rising middle class the anti-Modern might seem odd to us. But of course the Président is of the ‘bourgeoisie d'offices’, not the merchants. If we accept that in this period the authentic ‘Ancien’ is, like Boileau or Racine, a Jansenist, we have here a corroboration of Lucien Goldmann's thesis relating Jansenism to the ‘haute bourgeoisie’.⁷ Looking forward to the eighteenth century we find a clearer correlation in the meta-literary domain. How right Perrault is to choose two aristocrats to be the proponents of a modern literature which will indeed remain throughout that century—in contrast to the English—aristocratic.

I turn now to the roles of each speaker within the dialogues, and I begin with the Président, who is the least developed. His weakness is no doubt appropriate from the polemical point of view, though it lessens the work as literature. In his initial presentation Perrault tells us that the Président is a man of infinite learning and, unlike most Ancients, considerable personal genius too (I, 2-3). But his utterances do not bear this out. His erudition turns out to be of the most pettifogging variety; usually he is naively literalist and authoritarian in his attitude to classical wisdom (for example, I, 15; II, 52; III, 29). In two respects, however, he is given some positive qualities. Perrault at least allows him to be fair-minded on certain important matters which are not directly at issue in the Quarrel. Despite his ‘prévention’, when he sees Versailles he readily shares the enthusiasm of the Moderns (I, 112-25). In the final Dialogue he shows some interest in modern philosophy and science, joining with the others, for example, in the discussion on Cartesian beast-machines (IV, 182 ff.). Secondly, he acquires a certain authenticity by being permitted to voice the more serious Ancient concerns, though with no great vigour. He protests several times against the Abbé's claim that word-for-word translation is sufficient to convey in French what is important in a Greek or Latin author (II, 3 ff., 182; III, 87-88; IV, 15-16). On the issue of Christian epic Perrault puts into his mouth, almost verbatim, Boileau's objections as expressed in the Art poétique.⁸ Occasionally he asserts ancient qualities against modern decadence. ‘L'éloquence de Demosthene … sans fard et sans ajustemens superflus’, or ‘cette grave simplicité qui rend les Pieces de theatre des anciens si belles’, is contrasted with the mannered elaborations of Modernism (II, 163; III, 202). He may touch on broader social and moral issues. Thus he rejects ‘le goût des Dames’, and suggests that French literary language is effeminate (I, 30; IV, 7). He points out that modern trade, luxury, and material wealth are no guarantee of happiness: ‘L'or des Indes, et les porcelaines de la Chine, ne nous ont pas rendu plus heureux que nous l'estions’ (IV, 93). More fleetingly, in argument with the Abbé, emerges the allied notion of ancient stoic self-sufficiency contrasted with the moral fragmentation that accompanies complex modern societies (IV, 117-18, 252-53). But such sallies are rare, and are presented with little coherence or force.

The Abbé and the Chevalier have in effect complementary roles on the Modern side. I shall consider first the Abbé, whose verbal contribution is much the larger. It is the Abbé who sets out ancient and modern achievement in every field from sculpture to navigation. Such omnicompetence is not impossible within the seventeenth-century tradition of learned and cultured abbés. Within the fiction he is the ‘official’ Modern. It is he who articulates the criteria of judgement and presents the theories which establish modern superiority. Perrault in fact tells us that the Abbé's positions are his own (II, Preface). Certainly he is a protean figure in the further sense that he embodies the tensions in Perrault's own thinking: a Catholic yet an enthusiast for the new science, anti-pagan yet syncretist, a proponent of material progress yet a Platonist, a reductive rationalist and a mystic. I shall look at these various strands in his thought. The fact that Perrault has chosen to make the official theorist of Modernism a churchman must be my starting-point. No doubt this is in part a device to give added respectability to the Modern side. But it reflects too the genuine desire, in Perrault as earlier in Desmarets and the other mid-century Moderns, to identify the Modern and the Christian causes. I shall take first the Abbé's specifically Christian contributions, and then consider how well his other theoretical positions tie in with these.

His Christianity is given relatively little emphasis before the last Dialogue. In the first it is indicated a number of times, lightly but on significant issues (Biblical reference (pp. 47, 98); the question of submission and examination (pp. 13, 42, 92)). In the next two there is almost nothing until his first substantial a priori Christian argument appears near the end. Modern pulpit eloquence is superior to ancient forum eloquence not only by the more civilized nature of the occasion, but by the higher issues involved: not political quarrels but the Divinity and the salvation of the soul (II, 250-69).⁹ Dialogue 4 briefly lauds the Christian ‘merveilleux’, and the sublimity of the Old Testament as poetry (III, 13-14, 18-22, 264), but these are replies to Boileau. Only in Dialogue 5 is the Abbé presented as primarily a Christian. Pagan moral thought is declared inferior per se to Christian moral thought (IV, 134-52). The Abbé even seems inclined to deny the reality of ‘la vertu des Payens’ (p. 150). Yet this is the Dialogue in which he enthusiastically lists the secular triumphs of modern science. Modern philosophy, typified by Descartes, is both praised and partially rewritten to Christian requirements. The final Dialogue was published some time after the others, and it seems to be conceived as a sort of summum of Perrault's total position, though it is also a more conservative modification, as will shortly emerge from another angle.

The major philosophical interest of the Abbé's Christianity is its assimilation to other forms of transcendentalism. At several points he sketches a theory of progress in cultural achievement. Nature is immutable (and therefore genius should be no less common now than in antiquity); but the acquisition and spread of knowledge and techniques are cumulative over time, and therefore we can surpass the ancients. However, he seems to feel too that little progress is likely after his own age.¹⁰ Perfection is close. The Abbé hails the unique attainments of the age in strongly mystical terms. In anatomy, physics, and astronomy, man has learned to put aside old authority and seek ‘la connoissance immediate des ouvrages de la Nature’. The results have been astonishing: ‘Il n'est pas croyable quel plaisir elle [la Nature] a pris à se communiquer à ceux qui l'ont recherchée et qui luy ont donné tous leurs soins, elle leur a ouvert mille tresors et revelé un nombre infini de mysteres qu'elle avoit tenus cachez aux plus sages des anciens.’ To be blind to these discoveries is to prefer old worn-out garments to shining new ones, or to ‘aimer mieux regretter les oignons d'Egypte, que de se nourrir de la Manne nouvellement tombée du Ciel’ (I, 96-98). Science, revelation, and the way to the Promised Land are associated to suggest a Great Instauration. This passage occurs at the end of the first Dialogue, which provides the overview for the rest. The relation of Christianity to science is the principal subject in the final Dialogue. Thus both formally and in content this passage stands in the same relation to what precedes it as Dialogue 5 does to the whole work. The Christian synthesis of the last Dialogue might be read as a modified version of the syncretic optimism of the first.¹¹

There is a hint of Platonism in the vocabulary of ‘mystères’ now revealed. Platonism appears more clearly elsewhere, in the notion that the artist pursues ‘l'idée du beau’ (III, 214, 218; perhaps in an historical perspective too, I, 11). This serves to refute the claim that the art of antiquity is better because closer to the natural. In art, says the Abbé, as in moral life, we must, on the contrary, ‘corriger cette pure Nature qui est tousjours brutale’ (III, 212). As theology this strikes a jarring note. But as Christian Platonism it provides a satisfactory rationale for Modernism—for the strong preference for a culture of ‘politesse’ and ‘bienséance’ over the more brutal world of a Homer. The Abbé places a high value on ‘l'honnêteté’ in literary and social discourse. His interest in the spread of cultural refinement (linked to material advances, but in good part to Christianity too: II, 257-58, 294-96), and his objection to Boileau's attacks on persons rather than solely on their works (III, 236-66), both reflect this concern. Does it justify this Christian in defending the modern romances and opera, both notorious for their cult of profane love? The Abbé himself is mildly embarrassed by the contradiction (II, 34-35, 130-31; III, 286, 289).

The Platonist perhaps leads us to the geometrician. The Abbé deals in pure Idea in that, as Perrault approvingly tells us at the beginning, ‘il juge du merite de chaque chose en elle-même sans avoir égard ni aux temps, ni aux lieux, ni aux personnes’ (I, 4). This universal Reason, however, is thoroughly hostile to ‘les tenebres sçavantes et mysterieuses’ which the Ancients admire in antiquity (I, 13). Its criteria are precisely those which find Plato sadly lacking. ‘Pouvez-vous soûtenir par exemple qu'il y ait de l'ordre et de la methode dans les écrits de vostre cher et divin Platon?’, demands the Abbé. He makes his modern reference explicit by praising in contrast ‘Descartes … [qui] a expliqué sa doctrine d'une maniere claire, nette et methodique’ (II, 57-58). A similar criticism may be made of Homer, whose Iliad lacks both a ‘narration … claire et … intelligible’ and the ‘belle economie’ of thematic focus (II, 132; III, 40). The connexion with metaphysical values, however, is becoming tenuous. We move to the most significant of the three speakers, the Chevalier.

The Chevalier, claims Perrault initially, ‘tient comme le milieu entre le Président et l'Abbé’ (I, 4). In terms of his sympathies in the debates, this is quite untrue. But the assertion is valid in more profound ways. He is the ‘milieu’ to which they must both address themselves, the ‘honnête homme’ they must both convince. He is the ‘milieu’ between the issues and the reader. His common sense, ordinary decency, and limited attention-span keep the debates in touch with everyday norms. He is just a simple man. At least, this is how it is to appear.

The Chevalier holds firmly to the values of his own age. He is of course a Christian and a monarchist, like the other two speakers (though the Président is given less chance to declare it). He is proud of his King (I, 192-93, 231-32; IV, 291), and sufficiently devout to see the Delphic Oracle as ‘rendu par le Diable’ (II, 110). He shares with the Abbé a strong concern for ‘l'honnêteté’: thus he is sharply critical of ‘l'air mocqueur et ironique avec lequel Socrate parloit aux gens’ (IV, 139), and relieved to learn that Boileau's victims are in fact thoroughly decent fellows (III, 242-43). He is struck by the superiority of the modern age in the treatment of women: ‘Est-ce que l'honnesteté, la civilité et la deference pour le beau sexe, vertus presque inconnues aux anciens, et qui ont esté portées si loin par les modernes, ne sont pas quelque chose de beau et de louable?' (II, 33). It is he who first adduces in the arguments the literary tastes of women, which he and Abbé consider a relevant criterion while the Président does not (I, 27 ff.). Not that he would countenance any suggestion of unmanliness in his own sex: ‘Les chevaliers les plus galands ont esté les plus braves … dans les combats’ (II, 34); he criticizes the ‘fausse douce’ in contemporary literature which turns a Cyrus into a Céladon (II, 131-32).¹²

He seems to be widely familiar with the arts, especially the current forms of theatre. He enjoys the new opera and all music (III, 284; IV, 260). In literature, he appreciates epigram and sonnet for their ‘esprit’ and conciseness (III, 277-78). His favourite writers appear to be Scarron, Voiture, and La Fontaine. Though his preferences are expressed through enthusiasm and quotation rather than analysis, what he seems to value most in all these is the combination of wit and a certain mimetic ‘naturel’ or even ‘naïveté’, making for variety and charm (see II, 121-22, 135, 143-44; III, 262-63, 293-94, 303-306).¹³ He follows with interest the advances of his own day in applied science, from ear-trumpets to the measurement of longitude (IV, 35-40, 76-109). He takes for granted the desirability of technology and trade, celebrating the luxury—‘des millions de richesses et de commoditez pour la vie’ (IV, 92)—that they have brought. Concomitantly he finds absurd the cult of primitive simplicity. He is automatically contemptuous of material indigence, which he observes in all periods before his own, not only the time of Homer or of Augustus but even that of Ronsard (I, 67; III, 213; IV, 283-84). Many ancient writers he finds seriously wanting and he is not afraid to say so. In Greek lyric poets his circle encountered only ‘des choses … si simples et si communes, qu'après avoir baîllé sufisamment en les lisant, on les a laissez là’ (III, 164). Socrates and Plato, on the other hand, are frequently incoherent and obscure, dealing in ‘un galimatias mystérieux’ (II, 111). In any writer he values brevity and clarity, and has a horror of the boredom that otherwise results. ‘La longueur et le grand circuit de paroles me font mourir’ (II, 121); ‘je veux voir clair, et sçavoir où je vais, car sans cela je m'ennuye effroyablement’ (II, 71).

It is important that the representative of the silent majority—‘mondains’ or readers—should turn out to be strongly Modern. The significance of his Modernism however lies less in its content than in its forms. It is a position that he arrives at, or finds himself in, rather than starts from (thus the initial claim of neutrality may be said to be true). Or, it is a synthesis that is made from the various attitudes and reactions of his that I have listed. He is not a man of theory. He proceeds by pragmatic judgments, and takes as the criterion of truth his own experience. This makes his positions more modest and more difficult to refute. He draws upon the simple facts of his culture (‘si cela est fort joli en Grec, il ne l'est guère en françois’ (III, 96)) and himself (‘je ne suis pas un grand personnage, mais …’ (IV, 139)). His judgments are sometimes rather forcefully expressed, for the same reason. This man is down to earth.

Thus while the Abbé offers universals and theory, the Chevalier deals in everyday reality. As a value the latter is already conveyed implicitly in the judgments of his that I have quoted. He is most interested in the uses of the new science. Material progress is something tangible. In society the day-to-day virtues are important. Similarly, his preference in literature goes not to the elevated genres of epic and tragedy but to the more modest forms: comedy, fable, epigram, letters. By their ‘naturel’, wit, variety, and brevity these recognize the reality of the wider contemporary audience, the non-specialist majority who wish to be amused and charmed. For himself and for his peers of both sexes, the question is less what one should admire than what one actually enjoys. Already, then, he seems to be bringing the abstract issues down to something more verifiable. His most consistent contribution takes the device much further. In the main, during the dialogues he does not offer direct judgments on the theoretical questions at all, but looks for everyday comparisons which will help him or ourselves to come to terms with them. As the Abbé excellently puts it, ‘Monsieur le Chevalier va au solide’ (III, 317). He both particularizes and appears to test the abstract arguments of both sides by finding equivalents within the commonplace, the immediate, the concrete, indeed the base. In a word, he proceeds principally by reductive analogy.

The Chevalier therefore has a number of roles. He is the ordinary decent fellow, surrogate for ‘les mondains’ in his assumptions, for natural judgement in his lack of a priori commitment, and for the reader in both. He is the naïf or rather the pseudo-naïf who may ask the necessary leading questions and offer his unmediated views. He has the explanatory role of giving abstract theory concrete reference. This last function clearly suggests the new scientific principle, praised by the Abbé, of experimental verification. Therein lies much of its persuasive force. But it is equally or more a matter of cultural verification. It is examination by wit. The Chevalier has no time for the boring pedantry of proof. ‘Le President: Croyez-vous, Monsieur le Chevalier, qu'une comparison prouve rien? Le Chevalier: Je ne veux rien prouver, Monsieur le President, je n'ay dessein en tout cecy que de m'instruire et de me rejouir’ (IV, 5). It is the Abbé who serves him in his first positive purpose, the Président in his second. Modern discourse his reductive analogies illustrate, Ancient discourse they burlesque. Let me demonstrate his varied functions from the text.

The Chevalier is described as going for ‘le solide’ when he intimates at one point that he is hungry (III, 317). It is always he who makes reference to the material conditions of the discussions: it is hot, it is raining, it is time to eat (I, 106, 126, 243, etc.). Here indeed he is already defined as the one conditioned by his environment, embodying his own culture and dealing in the particular. He it is also who usually suggests or changes the subject (II, 3, 39; IV, 44, 46). Like the material reference, this too is a form of punctuation, acknowledging a limited attention-span and the need for variety. He may punctuate to bring about elucidation, asking questions or seeking information (‘D'où vient que … ?’, ‘En quel temps croit-on que … ?’ (IV, 30, 35)). In turn he may then add his own modest contribution. The mechanism is exemplified in Dialogue 2, when the Abbé is refuting certain false ideas about ancient sculpture. The Chevalier interrupts to obtain an explanation, signals his satisfaction, asks further questions; then he adduces corroborative experience of his own; finally comes the analogy. The incipits of his six successive interventions run thus: ‘Je ne comprens pas …’, ‘Je comprens presentement …’, ‘Quelle est … ?’, ‘Pourquoy … ?’; ‘J'ay ouy conter de semblables histoires …’; ‘C'est donc comme …’. The Abbé then approves his acolyte's illustration: ‘C'est la même chose’ (I, 149-61). The reader has been led to understanding, and acceptance.

The Abbé offers the general truth, the Chevalier the particular anecdote or comparison. The Abbé then hails the excellence of the analogy: ‘Ce conte explique parfaitement ma pensée’ (II, 38); ‘Votre comparaison me fait plaisir, car elle explique parfaitement bien ma pensée’ (II, 56). The complementarity is equally one of form. The total discourse is more readable because varied, by turns abstract and concrete, but also lengthy then brief to produce a pleasing rhythm. The Abbé's long statements are punctuated by the Chevalier's short—reductive in this sense too—sallies: a four-page speech on architecture from the Abbé, then ‘Il en est donc de ces ornemens d'Architecture comme de nos habits …’ in half a page from the Chevalier, then ‘Justement, rien ne peut mieux expliquer ma pensée’ in two closing lines from the Abbé (I, 136-40); two pages from the Abbé on Ancient attitudes as vanity, summary in four lines of epigrammatic verse from the Chevalier, ‘Vous avez mis le doigt dessus’, concludes the Abbé (I, 99-101); a page from the Abbé affirming the circularity of Ancient argumentation, an illustrative line out of Molière from the Chevalier, ‘C'est le mesme raisonnement et la mesme logique’, approves the Abbé (I, 90-92). These last two examples bring out other aspects of the method. The importance of shared cultural reference becomes apparent. Not only rhythm but recognition is involved in the use of a witty verse epigram or a line from a familiar play. In this highly social writing there is a close relation between quotation and closure.¹⁴ When, as in these cases, the epigram is satirical doggerel, and the quotation originally spoken in a comedy by a ‘fat’, we are dealing with the particular form of reduction called the burlesque.

The burlesque is an effect of comic incongruity, achieved by taking an utterance in an elevated register and reproducing some of its elements in a low register. Of course, these notions of ‘elevated’ and ‘low’ are culturally determined. That is the point. That is why it is the Chevalier who regularly uses the burlesque. That is why it is so effective within a closed culture, and is the only effective weapon against the humanist traditions of the Ancients. It demystifies the prestige of the ancient culture which cannot be refuted—connotation cannot be refuted—but can be mocked. It can be nullified or inverted by changing the way it is seen, through reduction. Everything associated with those prestigious ancients, (everything, that is, which gives them cultural authority) is to be associated instead with what we consider undignified, base, and ridiculous.

I may begin, again, with food. One of the Chevalier's first interventions is an anecdote mocking the mystification that surrounds classical literature. A modern writer was unable to discover in a collection of Greek epigrams the uniquely Attic salt which its admirers claimed. He nevertheless bowed to the chorus, until one day at dinner an Ancient asked his opinion of a curiously insipid soup, to which he replied that it was no doubt a Greek soup (I, 35-37). The derogatory association of the Ancient cause with eating is made several more times by the Chevalier (I, 72, 200-201; II, 230, 274; III, 61, 213; IV, 277-78). Food implies the body, which in its particularity is ridiculous. Aristotle's doctrines can be turned so many ways that he is like a man with a wax nose (II, 62; the literalization of metonymy is typical burlesque). How can we take the ancient warriors seriously, when they were practically unclothed (I, 162)? The inspired nakedness of Archimedes is compared to that of a modern astronomer running naked down the Rue St Jacques to announce some new discovery (IV, 113).

Certain domestic animals constitute another category of reductive reference. The donkey is obviously suitable. If it is true that the foot-soldier of earlier times was equipped for self-sufficiency, remarks our satirist, he must have carried ‘la charge d'un Mulet d'Auvergne’ (IV, 117). Again, the famous story of the bird who tried to eat the grapes which were so well depicted by the painter Zeuxis is capped by one about an ass that licked the thistle painted by Le Brun (I, 200-201). A mock-epic simile features a cow (III, 59-60); Homer's literal and figurative references to pigs are used to make fun of him (III, 86-90). Carp and gudgeon are rather ridiculous in their connotations, though dolphins and whales are not (III, 265). Allusions to the peasantry serve to mock or demean. The Chevalier uses this comparison especially in relation to Homer: the palace of Alcinous, the behaviour of the gods, a proverb invoked by Telemachus, all provoke the analogy (III, 55-56, 74, 98). The sententious speech attributed to certain ancients reminds him of the utterances of peasants (II, 291). Modern literature is superior to ancient, by its ‘forme reguliere’, as Court dances are superior to peasant dances (III, 179-80). At several points the Chevalier also mocks Homer's imaginative world by likening it to that of a child, or of folk-tale (III, 56, 85, 120). One need hardly stress how completely the disabling effect of these comparisons depends on cultural norms. The analogies themselves are not unperceptive on a certain level.

The belly and the peasantry are among the stock-in-trade of farce. The comic stage is a frequent source of reductive reference for the Chevalier. Ancient orators are compared to Arlequin, and ancient allegory associated with Trivelin and Scaramouche, from the grosser levels of the Italian tradition (II, 140, 263). From that of the French, Plato's incoherent dialogues remind him of those of Mondor and Tabarin (II, 115-17). Ancient tragedies, as well as Socrates and Plato, are likened to charlatans at the fairs (II, 111; III, 200). The modern champions of classical literature he mocks more gently as ‘ces Matamores de Parnasse’ (II, 301). It is the Chevalier who compares the Président to Alceste, and the circularity of Ancient argument to that of Molière's marquis in the Critique de l'École des femmes (I, 91; III, 287-88).

Such frequent reference to stage farce and comedy is appropriate in various ways. It fits the fictional persona of this man-about-town. Theatre is itself the most social of the arts. The effect of burlesque is obtained by the very fact of juxtaposing Ancient solemnity with some allusion to stage comedy. But, more specifically, the Chevalier mainly evokes the farcical forms, which themselves rely substantially upon the burlesque. His evocations of Tabarin and Arlequin show these two counterfeiting respectively a learned ‘philosophe’ and an ancient orator. The mockery of those in cultural authority—the doctors of philosophy, law, or medicine who stalk through the farces brandishing their books and their Latin—involves the demystification of arcane knowledge. The Chevalier is using the same techniques with the same effect of democratic demolition, to more clearly ideological ends. It is notable that he also quotes verbatim a dozen lines of narrative verse by Scarron, and half a dozen by La Fontaine (III, 293-94, 304-305). These are offered not for satirical purposes but in celebration of two writers in whom he delights. Both, however, in their different ways, are themselves burlesque writers. Scarron is the very model of the genre; the titles of the Baronéide, the Virgile travesti, or the Roman comique are programmatic. The author of the Fables also proceeds by changing registers, creating more delicate incongruities of linguistic level and of cultural level as he retells by reduction (exemplary tales featuring animals, peasants). The same could be said of the Chevalier's other favourite, Voiture.

The Chevalier has an excellent memory for verse. In the course of the dialogues he quotes on a dozen occasions. His repertoire ranges from twelve lines of Martial which he has himself translated into alexandrines (I, 19-20) to a quatrain of gross mock-epitaph in the octosyllabic form (which was known as the ‘vers burlesque’) (III, 71). Four of these pieces are deliberate ‘galimatias’ for comic and polemical purposes (II, 23; III, 71, 185-86, 245). Almost all are epigrammatic and almost all are sceptical, that is, reductive in form and content. The whole work ends with the Chevalier modestly quoting fourteen lines of his own, which argue by analogy through a series of mildly reductive instances that prima facie the moderns may equal the ancients (IV, 294). Some of the verse quotations serve as provocation, others as closure like the last.

Perrault achieves similar effects by furnishing the Chevalier with a few prose ‘one-liners’ or burlesque epigrams. The brutality of the ancients towards women is encapsulated as ‘they did their wooing not with a lyre but a hatchet’ (II, 33). Ancient literature for us is an imposition rather than a choice: a student friend was punished one day in the morning for not reading Homer and in the afternoon for reading Clélie (II, 133). The Roman comique shows us not great heroes and their great crimes but the more useful lesson of our everyday follies: we usually need remedies not against tigers but fleas (II, 137). Again—more ideologically than in Scarron's literary burlesque, less subtly than in La Fontaine's fables—the effect may be achieved through proverbial popular idiom. Ulysses is reductively summarized as ‘un homme au poil et à la plume’ (III, 54). His fellow heroes are as rustic as Homer himself: ‘à gens de village, trompette de bois’ (III, 99). I noted that the Chevalier's short and concrete interventions work in counterpoint with the Abbé's longer and more abstract disquisitions. More directly inspired by the comic theatre perhaps are a few ‘routines’ that they do together. The Abbé provides a lengthy and nominally neutral account of some piece of classical writing; his narrative is punctuated by sarcasms from the Chevalier (II, 220-23; III, 73-104). Where the target is the Odyssey, there is no need for the jarring juxtapositions from the Chevalier. As he eventually remarks, Homer's writing is already—by the rigid norms of 1690—burlesque (III, 300-302). The Président is shocked; the Abbé is not.

Overall, of the three speakers in the Parallèle one might say that the Président represents ‘then’, the Chevalier ‘now’, and the Abbé ‘always’. Or one might classify them as, respectively, ‘historical error’, ‘present truth’, and ‘eternal truth’. The complementarity of the last two is the interesting pattern. The Abbé deals in general verities, the Chevalier in the particular cultural language familiar to the readership. In one sense the Chevalier interprets the universals. If the Abbé's Christian-Platonic discourse, with its cosmological pretensions, is taken seriously the Chevalier is his neophyte, the apostle of the Idea. The Chevalier of the Abbé is, more than etymologically, the Knight of the Father. At the other extreme, they are a comic duo feeding each other lines, a more ideological Tabarin and Mondor (or Abbé and Costello). They are engaged jointly on the enterprise of demolishing the prestige of the ancients. They work by the apparently opposed principles of the universal and the particular, towards demystification. The Abbé wants to abolish history, or the connotations of the past, in the name of pure Reason. The Chevalier tries to abolish history by recognizing only the assumptions of French high culture in 1690, and (wrong) connotation by a further reduction to the concrete. Together they realize through a literary fiction the formula that Voltaire will make his own: the dialogue as systematic polemic; the ‘sage’ and the ‘naïf’; Reason, ‘raillerie’, and reduction through highly urbane writing.

Notes

1. For a bibliography of studies on the Parallèle in the Quarrel, see Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer's Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 164-65.

2. Assumptions about authorial intention will guide my analysis, but will not circumscribe it.

3. On these and other typological functions of the royal palace and gardens, see my article ‘The Uses of Versailles in the Parallèle des anciens et des modernes’, Newsletter of the Society for Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 5 (1983), pp. 70-77.

4. References are by volume and page-number to the original edition of the Parallèle, five Dialogues in four volumes, reprinted with introductions by H. R. Jauss and M. Imdahl (Munich, 1964).

5. Compare the Dedication of Perrault's narrative Christian poem Saint-Paulin (1686), where he cites with approval the phrase ‘une âme naturellement chrétienne’, and argues the need for a Christian literature which will show ‘toutes les vertus héroïques des grandes âmes, pour en rendre une gloire immortelle à l'Auteur de la nature et de la grace’, in J. B. Bossuet, Correspondance, edited by C. Urbain and E. Levesque, 15 vols (Paris, 1909-25), III, 138-39.

6. In the theatre of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the ‘Chevalier’ is an almost ubiquitous role in social comedy, occasionally the lead, as in Dancourt's greatest success, the aptly-titled Chevalier à la mode (1687), but more usually a secondary role, as in Regnard, Lesage, Dufresny, and Marivaux. There could at this time be no question of putting on stage anyone in religious orders, but the ambiguities of the ‘abbé’ are the more sharply observed by social moralists. Voltaire will write of ‘cet estre indéfinissable qui n'est ni Ecclésiastique ni Séculier, en un mot, ce que l'on apelle un Abbé’ (Lettres philosophiques (1734), V). Forty years earlier La Bruyère is more ferocious about ‘certains abbés, à qui il ne manque rien de l'ajustement, de la mollesse et de la vanité des sexes et des conditions’, likening them to something between a cardinal and a woman (Caractères, ‘De quelques usages’, §16).

7. One might also read into the choice of a Président as Ancient some suggestion about the habits of a legal mind reliant on musty precedent (contrasted with the Antinomian originality of the Abbé's thinking), or an allusion to Guillaume de Lamoignon, Premier Président du Parlement de Paris, a famous Jansenist and Ancient. But Perrault the Modern is not likely to want to satirize French justice, and of course he himself—like Boileau—is from a legal family. See, too, note 9, below.

8. Parallèle, III, 6-7, 15-16, 19; from the Art poétique, III, 189-204, 234-42. That Boileau's own arguments here are evasive and rather weak is not Perrault's fault. But one may suspect that Perrault is consciously using the figure of the Président to attack Boileau when he makes the Président become angry (IV, 15-16; the Abbé shows sweet forbearance in return), and when he is compared to Molière's ‘Mysantrope’ (III, 287-88). Perrault may well have known Boileau's claim that Molière based Alceste's behaviour in the sonnet scene on Boileau himself (see H. Rigault, Histoire de la Querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris, 1859; reprinted, New York, n.d.), p. 157).

9. One may observe also, to rival the eloquence of Cicero, the choice of a modern passage of legal eloquence by Antoine Le Maître (II, 237-46). It is fairly evident that this long passage, reproduced in the text, has been chosen not for its style but for its content, which is a celebration of Christian civilization.

10. The theory: I, 88-90; III, 153-56. Little further progress: I, 51-60, 99. Bernard Magne argues that not only Perrault but most of the Moderns saw the present age as the nec plus ultra: see his La Crise de la littérature française sous Louis XIV: humanisme et nationalisme, 2 vols (Toulouse, 1976), pp. 795-817. H. R. Jauss puts Perrault's theory into a context of cyclical theories of history widely current since the Renaissance (in Parallèle, ‘Einleitung’, pp. 12-33).

11. The synthesis of Christianity and science in Dialogue 5 is less sympathetic to the latter, as witness the Abbé's revisions of Descartes, or the fact that he declines to choose between Copernicus and Ptolemy (IV, 30-31) whereas previously he seemed to opt decisively for the modern (I, 98). The desire to integrate the two cultures where separation threatens is nicely figured by the reference to Galileo making scientific observations in a church (IV, 99-100).

12. His attitudes on sexuality—as in other fields—remain strongly normative: the women of Socratic Athens are dismissed almost in so many words as whores, and the men as pederasts (II, 110, 119).

13. The Chevalier's tastes might be described as rococo. This appears more clearly in his one sustained account of an aesthetic experience, that of a firework display (IV, 288-91). This passage is discussed in my ‘The Uses of Versailles’ (see note 2).

14. Raymond Naves nicely suggests that in Montaigne quotation serves as ‘matière à penser’ but in Voltaire as illustration or summary (see his Le Goût de Voltaire (Paris, 1938; reprinted, Geneva, 1967), p. 165).