Instant Ebook Access, One Click Away – Begin at ebookgate.

com

Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern

France Lewis C. Seifert

https://ebookgate.com/product/men-and-women-making-friends-
in-early-modern-france-lewis-c-seifert/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD EBOOK

Get Instant Ebook Downloads – Browse at https://ebookgate.com

Click here to visit ebookgate.com and download ebook now
Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Gendered Touch Women Men and Knowledge making in Early

Modern Europe 1st Edition Francesca Antonelli

https://ebookgate.com/product/gendered-touch-women-men-and-knowledge-
making-in-early-modern-europe-1st-edition-francesca-antonelli/

ebookgate.com

Women on the Stage in Early Modern France 1540 1750 1st

Edition Virginia Scott

https://ebookgate.com/product/women-on-the-stage-in-early-modern-
france-1540-1750-1st-edition-virginia-scott/

ebookgate.com

Exemplum The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France

and Italy John D. Lyons

https://ebookgate.com/product/exemplum-the-rhetoric-of-example-in-
early-modern-france-and-italy-john-d-lyons/

ebookgate.com

Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature 1st

Edition Bernadette Andrea

https://ebookgate.com/product/women-and-islam-in-early-modern-english-
literature-1st-edition-bernadette-andrea/

ebookgate.com
Making a Living Making a Difference Gender and Work in
Early Modern European Society 1st Edition Maria Agren

https://ebookgate.com/product/making-a-living-making-a-difference-
gender-and-work-in-early-modern-european-society-1st-edition-maria-
agren/
ebookgate.com

Women Editing Editing Women Early Modern Women Writers and

the New Textualism 1st Edition Ann Hollinshead Hurley

https://ebookgate.com/product/women-editing-editing-women-early-
modern-women-writers-and-the-new-textualism-1st-edition-ann-
hollinshead-hurley/
ebookgate.com

Music and Musical Thought in Early India Lewis Rowell

https://ebookgate.com/product/music-and-musical-thought-in-early-
india-lewis-rowell/

ebookgate.com

Religion Reform and Women s Writing in Early Modern

England 1st Edition Kimberly Anne Coles

https://ebookgate.com/product/religion-reform-and-women-s-writing-in-
early-modern-england-1st-edition-kimberly-anne-coles/

ebookgate.com

Making Friends Training Your Dog Positively Linda Colflesh

https://ebookgate.com/product/making-friends-training-your-dog-
positively-linda-colflesh/

ebookgate.com
Men and Women Making Friends
in Early Modern France
 Women and Gender in the
Early Modern World
Series Editors:
Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA
Abby Zanger

The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative
challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a
decade now, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” has served
as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field.
Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series
strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of
early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia,
and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited
collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study.

Titles in the series include:

Education and Women in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Elizabeth Teresa Howe

Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World

Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández

Gender and Song in Early Modern England

Edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Women Writ, Women Writing
Domna C. Stanton

A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany

Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt
Judith P. Aikin

Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England

Sarah E. Johnson
Men and Women Making Friends
in Early Modern France

Edited by

Lewis C. Seifert
Brown University, USA

and

Rebecca M. Wilkin
Pacific Lutheran University, USA
© Lewis C. Seifert, Rebecca M. Wilkin, and contributors 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Men and women making friends in early modern France / edited by Lewis C. Seifert and
Rebecca M. Wilkin.
pages cm.—(Women and gender in the early modern world)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-5409-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4724-5410-2 (ebook)—
ISBN 978-1-4724-5411-9 (epub)
1. Friendship—France—History. 2. Interpersonal relations—France—History. 3. Man-
woman relationships—France—History. I. Seifert, Lewis Carl, author, editor. II. Wilkin,
Rebecca May, editor.
HM1161.M46 2015
302.0944—dc23
 2014045100
ISBN: 9781472454096 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781472454102 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN: 9781472454119 (ebk – ePUB)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
 Contents

List of Figures and Table   vii

Contributors   ix

1 Introduction: Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern

France   1
Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin

2 Was Montaigne a Good Friend?   31

George Hoffmann

3 The Power to Correct: Beating Men in Service Friendship   61

Michelle Miller

4 Redressing Ficino, Redeeming Desire: Symphorien Champier’s

La nef des dames vertueuses   81
Todd W. Reeser

5 Translating Friendship in the Circle of Marguerite de Navarre:

Plato’s Lysis and Lucian’s Toxaris   99
Marc D. Schachter

6 From Reception to Assassination: French Negotiations of

“Platonic Love”   119
Katherine Crawford

7 Friends of Friends: Intellectual and Literary Sociability in the Age

of Richelieu   135
Robert A. Schneider

8 Making Friends, Practicing Equality: The Correspondence of René

Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia   161
Rebecca M. Wilkin

9 The Gendered Self and Friendship in Action among the

Port-Royal Nuns   189
Daniella Kostroun

10 The Marquise de Sablé and Her Friends: Men and Women between
the Convent and the World   219
Lewis C. Seifert
vi Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

11 From My Lips to Yours: Friendship, Confidentiality, and Gender in

Early Modern France   247
Peter Shoemaker

Bibliography   267
Index   293
 List of Figures and Table

Figures

11.1 “Sincerity.” From Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, or Moral Emblems

(London, Benjamin Motte: 1709).  250

11.2 Francisco Goya (1746–1828). La confianza. Sanguine wash

with red chalk on paper. Museo Nacional del Prado. 254

Table

7.1 Groups, Associations, and Academies, circa 1620–1648 139

This page has been left blank intentionally
 Contributors

Katherine Crawford is professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She is

interested in the ways that gender informs sexual practice, ideology, and identity,
both in normative and non-normative formations. Her current project examines the
cultural questions around gender, sexuality and embodiment raised by castrated
men in early modern Europe.

George Hoffmann published Montaigne’s Career in 1998. Recent work includes

a forthcoming book on reformation satire, Alone unto Their Distance: French
Reformers, Satire, and the Creation of Religious Foreignness, “Can There Be
Conversions without Conversion Stories?” for the Early Modern Conversions
Project, and “Self-Assurance and Acting in the Essais.”

Daniella Kostroun is associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue University,

Indianapolis, specializing in the history of women and religion in early modern
France. She is the author of Feminism, Absolutism, Jansenism: Louis XIV and the
Port-Royal Nuns (Cambridge, 2011) and co-editor of Women and Religion in the
Atlantic World (1600–1800) (Toronto, 2009).

Michelle Miller completed her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 2008. She
has published articles on early modern French literature and culture in journals
such as Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Romanic Review, and Renaissance
and Reformation.

Todd W. Reeser is professor of French and director of the Gender, Sexuality, and
Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published two
monographs on masculinity, and his essay in this volume is part of his next book,
Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance.

Marc D. Schachter is lecturer in French at the University of Durham. Author

of Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity
to Early Modern France (Ashgate, 2008), he is currently working on two book
projects, one addressing translation in medieval and early modern France and the
other focusing on classical reception and the history of sexuality in early modern
Italy and France.

Robert A. Schneider is professor of history at Indiana University and, since

2005, editor of the American Historical Review. His books include Public Life in
Toulouse, 1463–1798 (Cornell, 1989) and The Ceremonial City (Princeton, 1995).
He is currently completing a large-scale study, “Dignified Retreat: Writers and
Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu.”
x Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

Lewis C. Seifert is professor of French Studies at Brown University. He is the

author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690–1715: Nostalgic
Utopias (1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-
Century France (2009). His current research concerns the notion of the modern in
seventeenth-century France.

Peter Shoemaker is associate professor of French at The Catholic University

of America and author of Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage
in the Age of Louis XII (University of Delaware, 2007). His research interests
include literature and sociability, food studies, and topical theater in seventeenth-
century France.

Rebecca M. Wilkin is associate professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University

and author of Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern
France (Ashgate, 2008). She edited Gabrielle Suchon’s work with Domna Stanton
(Chicago, 2010) and is currently studying social contract theory in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century French feminism.
 Chapter 1
Introduction:
Men and Women Making Friends in Early
Modern France

Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca M. Wilkin

Friendship appears to be enjoying a Renaissance in the twenty-first century, at

least as a subject of curiosity. The virtual cultivation of relationships poses anew
the age-old question: what constitutes a “friend”? Social media platforms such
as Facebook seem, paradoxically, to both valorize and trivialize friendship,
(re)connecting “friends” while enabling an ever expanding network of superficial
contacts in which work and leisure mingle. Turbulent economic times have also
put friendship in the spotlight. The Great Recession of 2008 led to talk of silver
linings: were people investing more time and care in personal relations?1 Even if
friends become more important when work-related stress, geographical dispersion,
and divorce atomize families,2 the tasks assigned to friendship have become
Herculean. Audiences are fascinated by hopeful stories of starkly unequal friends,3
as if friendship might single-handedly mitigate staggering increases in economic
inequality, when the benefits of friendship as a form of social capital seem to fall
disproportionately to the wealthy and the educated.4 The mainstreaming of gay and
lesbian lives has both lionized friendship—friends are “families of choice”5—and

1
A comforting story, if nothing else, according to Judith Warner, “What the Great
Recession Has Done to Family Life,” The New York Times Magazine, 6 August 2010.
2
Ray Pahl, On Friendship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 5.
3
The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010) recounts the reluctant friendship between
the stuttering George VI who must lead his country into war against Nazi Germany, and the
failed actor, Lionel Logue, who tutors him in public speaking. The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)
develops the friendship between a white college graduate and a middle-aged black woman
in the civil rights era South. Les Intouchables (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011)
tells of the improbable friendship between a Senegalese immigrant ex-con and the disabled,
wealthy white man to whom he becomes an in-home helper.
4
Pahl, On Friendship, 147. Mark Granovetter in “The Strength of Weak Ties: A
Network Theory Revisited” (in Sociological Theory, ed. Randall Collins, San Francisco,
CA: Jossey-Bass, 1983) suggests that the poor are limited by their friendships: “individuals
so encapsulated may then lose some of the advantages associated with the outreach of weak
ties. This may be one more reason why poverty is self-perpetuating” (1495).
5
Pahl, On Friendship, 3.
2 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

normalized queer friends. “Bromance”6 flourishes as gay marriage absorbs and

diminishes the homoerotic stigma surrounding male friends. And in disaggregating
sexual orientation from desire, coming out stories, albeit media sensations, de-
dramatize gay-straight friendships—as well, potentially, as friendships between
men and women.7 Meanwhile, the silver screen and book club lists continue to
celebrate friendship between women as a marginal phenomenon, with themes of
solidarity in hard times and subversion against oppression,8 even though women’s
access to higher education and participation in the workforce have vastly expanded
their palette of friends, both male and female.9
A vast body of historical research accompanies friendship’s present-day
growing pains, and Men and Women Making Friends joins this scholarship
in revealing the extraordinary dynamism of friendship in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Though chronologies and purviews differ, narratives of
decline dominate the historiography of early modern friendship. Brian McGuire,
in a massive study on friendship in medieval monasticism, argues that Renaissance
humanists terminated friendship’s happy coexistence with community. While
friendship co-existed with community throughout the middle ages, at the end
of the fifteenth century, ecclesiasts warned against the seductions of friendship,
which threatened not just the virtue of individual friends, but also the discipline of
the cloister. For McGuire, this suspicion toward friendship culminates in François
de Sales’s proscription of “particular friendship” from the cloister.10 “Particular
friends” preferred one another over other members of the community, undermining
Christian charity. But this expression was also a euphemism, still in force in after
World War II, for sodomy. It is ironic, McGuire notes in his epilogue, that François
de Sales is remembered for his friendship with Jeanne de Chantal rather than for

6
“Bromance,” a portmanteau term combining “brother” and “romance,” was
first used in the 1990s to describe the close friendships of male skateboarders. Recent
“bromance” films (I Love You, Man, John Hamburg, 2009) continue a long line of “buddy
films” stretching back to the 1970s.
7
To the question of whether men and women can “ever just be friends” in Nora
Ephron’s 1989 When Harry Met Sally, Harry answers, “the sex part always gets in the
way.” William Deresiewicz, “A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?” The New York Times, 7
April 2012.
8
Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple (1982), adapted to the screen by Steven
Spielberg in 1985, and the 1991 film, Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott, portray
women’s friendships that take on purpose in the face of controlling, abusive men. Patrick
Stettner’s The Business of Strangers (2001) subverts that narrative as two women bond over
avenging a rape that never happened, while in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (2014), an unwieldy
teen and an indifferent state precipitate friendship between two neighbors.
9
Pahl writes, “The expansion of higher education, especially among women, has
greatly increased the capacity for making friends” (On Friendship, 171).
10
In his Introduction à la vie dévote (1609). Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship
and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell
University Press, 2010), 418–23. This is a new edition of the 1988 Cistercian Publications
edition with a new introduction by the author.
 Introduction 3

his concerns about dangerous friendships between men. Commenting on Teresa

of Avila’s contemporaneous experience of friendship, which he calls “the last full
manifestation of a friendship elaborated and pursued in the religious life,” McGuire
argues that “if any explicit expression of friendship continued to manifest itself in
monastic and religious life beyond the Reformation in Roman Catholic Europe, it
was that between men and women rather than between men.”11
Addressing a very different context—the great house of the English
countryside—Alan Bray laments friendship’s decline over the course of the
seventeenth century in his magisterial study of the sacramental rites, mutual
obligations, and physical closeness that joined wedded brothers in medieval and
Renaissance England.12 Entering The Friend is like entering a crypt. A tombstone
graces the cover; the editor informs the reader that Bray left a complete typescript
of the present book at his deathbed; Bray recalls in the introduction his last meeting
with his “friend and colleague,” the French historian Michel Rey, whose unfinished
work on friendship evokes in turn the lives of other friends cut short by the AIDS
epidemic. So many dead friends prepare Bray’s mourning of friendship itself.
Pre-modern friends served each other in more fundamental ways and possessed
greater claims to one another than did friends following the emergence of civil
society in the seventeenth century, he argues. The “broad highway” on which so
many wedded brothers passed “has dwindled to a neglected bridlepath” on which
the wedded friendship of Anne Lister and Ann Walker in the 1830s and 1840s is
“little more than a rock or a signpost that seems to mark a continuing way” across
a wintry landscape.13 Though Bray assures his reader that that path is leading
somewhere, the present, he also asserts, is marked by “a crisis of friendship.”14
Less concerned with narrating the fate of friendship, Men and Women Making
Friends in Early Modern France draws inspiration from the work of Ullrich
Langer, who 20 years ago, in Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and
Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (1994), approached early modern
literary representations of friendship in a manner congruent with the way in which
Renaissance humanists approached the classical past. Early moderns adopted a
“palimpsestic” strategy: they brought traces of the past into contact with the scripts
of the present, either for purposes of appropriation or comparison.15 Renaissance
humanists truly believed Cicero’s bon mot, “historia magistra vitae”—history is

11
McGuire, Friendship and Community, 423.
12
Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 2003.
13
Bray, The Friend, 219.
14
Bray, The Friend, 4. Bray’s passing inspired in turn an elegant eulogy by Valerie
Traub in “Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Making of History,” in Love, Friendship, and
Faith in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter, and Miri Rubin (New
York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–41.
15
Joachim Du Bellay urged his countrymen to enrich a lexically poor French by
appropriating Latin semantics in his Deffence, et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549).
Charles Perrault drew up his Parallèles des anciens et des modernes (1688). Pierre-Daniel
Huet in De l’origine des romans (1670) borrowed the notion of the cycle of civilizations
from Renaissance historiographers to predict France’s decadence.
4 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

the teacher of life. The past was alive, and the famous friends of antiquity were not
just commonplaces to call up, but exemplars to emulate.16 Today’s readers live on
the other side of the seventeenth-century crisis of exemplarity and are unlikely to
approach texts as sources of behaviors to imitate.17 Yet they still stand to gain from
studying early modern friendship. The “usefulness” of early modern representations
of friendship, Langer says, consists in their “imaginative experimentation … with
the multiple codes and values of an expanding civilization.”18
Men and Women Making Friends recognizes more overtly than Langer
did, however, that “codes and values” pertaining to gender and sexuality are
fundamental to any civilization. The publication of Langer’s book coincided
with the opening salvo of queer studies’ transformative exploration of friendship:
Bray’s “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Early Modern
England” (1994).19 Interpreting “signs” such as the kiss and the shared bed, Bray
explores what it meant for a man to express desire for the body of a male friend
in Renaissance England. But he offers no straightforward answers. Depending
on context, this desire might indicate social or political allegiance, affirm a
shared affective bond, express same-sex desire, or convey a combination of these
messages. In both this essay and The Friend (2003), Bray concludes that more
often than not, the relationship between intimacy and sexuality in friendship is
unknowable. It is impossible to determine whether expressions of affection
between friends reflect a physical relationship.20 Accepting Bray’s insight, queer
approaches resist categorical interpretations of friendship discourse—i.e., as

16
Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2011), 138–52.
17
John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and
Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
18
Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy
from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 28–9.
19
Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Early Modern
England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1994), 40–61. Other notable studies include: Laurie Shannon, Sovereign
Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2002); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship,
and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
1997); Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Traub surveys queer scholarship on
friendship in “Friendship’s Loss.” For early modern France, queer studies of friendship
center on Montaigne’s “De l’amitié.” See Marc D. Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and
the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2008), and Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance:
Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 191–243.
20
In The Friend, Bray avoids the question of eroticism in male friendship by
consistently privileging the ethical over the physical. According to Traub,“the materiality
of the body is displaced onto the memorials—the gravestones and churches—that populate
his account” (“Friendship’s Loss,” 23).
 Introduction 5

either erotic or non-erotic—revealing instead the tensions within it.21 Thus, rather
than speculate about the nature of Montaigne’s relationship with Étienne de La
Boétie, queer readings of Montaigne’s “De l’amitié” (I.28), the most celebrated
text of the friendship canon, show that the essay works at cross-purposes with
itself.22 “Montaigne intimates the impossibility of separating friendship from the
sexual, even at the same time as he attempts to do so,” observes Gary Ferguson.23
Analyzing Montaigne’s lexical choices, Ferguson asserts that although “friendship
may claim to fly high above sexual desire … it nevertheless stoops down to
borrow much of its language.”24 Marc Schachter argues further that “Montaigne’s
deployment of an erotic discourse in his characterization of his friendship with La
Boétie … serves precisely to put hegemonic virility into question.”25 In linking
eroticism in “De l’amitié” to the question of masculinity, Schachter reinforces the
connections queer readings make between sexuality on the one hand and norms
such as gender and social status on the other. In this critical perspective, texts
that queer intimacy within friendship also queer the broader social and political
ideologies that exploit friendship.26
Men and Women Making Friends is greatly indebted to the ways in which
queer studies has foregrounded questions of sexuality in the study of friendship.
However, the emphasis on loss that pervades much queer work on early modern
friendship—understandable given the AIDS epidemic—occults the “imaginative
experimentation” that, according to Langer, characterizes early modern
representations of friendship.27 Michel Foucault, whose legacy looms large in queer
studies, emphasized an unrecoverable, less repressive past. Yet he expressed an
almost utopian optimism with respect to friendship’s creative potential. In an often
cited interview, he calls upon gay men, whose friendships are incomprehensible in
a world where affective relations are limited to the nuclear family or “obligatory
comradery,” to create “as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships” with pleasures all
their own.28 Like Langer, Foucault recognized friendship’s capacity to conceive

21
Unlike Jaeger, for whom expressions of desire and affection were “social gestures,”
and the purpose of “the public manifestation of a sanctioned [and] idealized way of feeling”
was to display “the actor’s acceptance and embodiment of a society’s or a communities
ethical values,” which opposed virtue and sexuality (Ennobling Love, 7).
22
Ferguson, for instance, finds little if any evidence of a physical relationship between
Montaigne and La Boétie (Queer (Re)Readings, 221).
23
Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 206.
24
Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings, 207.
25
Schachter, Voluntary Servitude, 17.
26
This is the premise of Shannon’s Sovereign Amity, which explores the erotic,
gendered, and political dimensions of friendship in Elizabethan England.
27
The theme of loss traverses the important collection of essays edited by Jody
Greene, “The Work of Friendship,” special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 10, no. 3 (2004).
28
Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality,” in
Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence
D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1988), 301.
6 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

new forms of relationality that shape the “codes and values” of the culture within
which it arises. Before friendship becomes loss, therefore, it entails creation. The
essays in Men and Women Making Friends attend to that creative power, showing
how the activity of friendship in early modern France both embodies normative
interaction and reshapes it.

The Creativity of Friendship

First, this volume shows that making friends entails creative engagement with a
tradition comprising a diversity of ideals pertaining to gender and sexuality. All
of the essays explore the early modern French “palimpsestic” appropriation of
coexisting friendship texts. Humanists celebrated Aristotle’s and Cicero’s ideal
of “perfect” friendship, which stipulated that friends be of equal moral and social
stature. Specifically excluding women, this model was premised on homosociality,
the mimetic desire between men often involving the exchange of women.29
Montaigne celebrated perfect friendship in his essay “Of friendship”; yet most of
his own friendships, as George Hoffmann shows in his essay, did not adhere to this
ideal: for reasons of self-interest and personal affinity, he counted as friends men
of lesser rank and prestige and several women. Aside from Montaigne’s interested
use of it, however, perfect friendship is barely represented in this volume. Three
essays deal instead with the sixteenth-century reception of Marsilio Ficino’s
Neoplatonism, which Langer curiously dismisses because it did not conform to
perfect friendship. Unlike Aristotle and Cicero, Langer observes, Plato confused
“erotic love and friendship … especially in the opening of the Lysis.”30 In the
Lysis, in effect, Socrates initially distinguishes between two kinds of relationships
between men.31 The first, eros, features the unreciprocated desire of an older man
for a boy in an educational context. The second, philia, is a non-sexual, reciprocal
bond between men of the same age. Yet Socrates goes on to conflate the reciprocity
of philia with the utility of eros; he also undermines his definition of philia by
claiming that sameness precludes reciprocity.
Langer rightly describes the Lysis as “a somewhat inconclusive dialogue.”32
The ambiguity of Plato’s account of friendship was precisely what made it such
a versatile alternative to the categorical character of perfect friendship. Whereas
Aristotle described equality as a prerequisite for friendship, Katherine Crawford
explains in her essay that Plato accommodated hierarchy, since he situated friends
within an educational and political context. And while both the Nicomachean
Ethics and De amicitia tie the virtue enabled by friendship to masculinity, Marc
Schachter shows that humanists, adopting Socrates’ contention that like will not

29
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick developed this concept in Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985).
30
Langer, Perfect Friendship, 34.
31
Langer, Perfect Friendship, 22.
32
Langer, Perfect Friendship, 22.
 Introduction 7

befriend like, contemplate the possibility of friendship between women. The

homoeroticism of Platonic friendship remained an impediment to recuperation,
however, and French humanists, such as Symphorien Champier—the first to
grapple with Platonic friendship in the French language—tried to purge that
troubling element, as Todd Reeser demonstrates in his essay. Sixteenth-century
humanists “tried on” Platonic friendship, tailoring it to their own friendship
projects; but in the context of political crisis, ambiguities were liabilities, and they
abandoned the Platonic strand of the friendship canon after the wars of religion.
Considering friendship as a creative process means, second, addressing
friendship as “a relation that is essentially creative of the self.”33 Because friendship
participates in the construction of the self, historicizing friendship reveals the self
as a historically variable concept. In his multiple appropriations of the proverb
“the friend is another self ” (allos autos), which Erasmus made the very first of his
Adages, Aristotle characterizes friendship as the result of shared experiences over
time, and he describes the selves constituted through friendship normatively, as
“harmonizing, within their own lives, the claims of reason, emotion, and appetite.”34
Friends become more coherent selves, ever more assertive in their autarkeia (self-
sufficiency), albeit increasingly redundant with respect to one another and to all
other virtuous friends.35 Whereas for Aristotle, and the Stoics as well, friendship
enabled the actualization of the self, in the early modern period friendship allowed
for the discovery of the self. Construed by Aristotle as a virtuous and reasoned
tie between men of equal station, friendship between men in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries entailed a more intensely affective experience.36 Augustinian
theology inspired the notion of a self with hidden motivations,37 while confession,
which the Fourth Lateran Council made obligatory in 1215, cultivated a reflexive
gesture unknown to the ancients. Michel Rey argues that through the sharing of
secrets, early modern “friends entered into a specular relationship … that led
to self-discovery … [T]he other became familiar at the same time that the self
became other, and thus a potential object of knowledge.”38

33
Pahl, On Friendship, 163.
34
Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1995), 172–3.
35
Jean-Claude Fraisse, Philia: La notion d’amitié dans la philosophie antique: Essai
sur un problème perdu et retrouvé (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 276.
36
Daniel T. Lochman and Maritere López, “Introduction,” Discourses and
Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman,
Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 1–26.
37
Notably by Jansenius and his followers. This is one interpretation of Augustine’s
comments on the self. Aquinas, also inspired by Augustine, proposes the love one feels for a
friend as a model for understanding a good kind of self-love. See Michael Moriarty, Fallen
Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 162–7.
38
Michel Rey, L’amitié à la Renaissance: Italie, France, Angleterre (1450–1650)
(San Dominico: European University Institute, 1999), 179–86. We cite Peter Shoemaker’s
paraphrase. See 247, this volume.
8 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

The self, whether construed as an achievement enabled by friendship or reified

as an inner space to sound out through friendly confidences, is rarely gender
neutral. The consolidated self is implicitly masculine: the attainment of (manly)
virtue through friendship (with another man) results, in Aristotelian and Stoic
moral philosophy, in the actualization of the (male) self. Christian spirituality
introduced a dissolved self that was usually feminized. Saint John of the Cross, a
mystic in the “negative theology” tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
personified his soul as a woman.39 Because of the ostensible porousness of their
selves, women were thought to be more vulnerable to possession by the Devil and
his minions than were men.40 Men and Women Making Friends shows how friends
asserted themselves as male or female selves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
France.41 Michelle Miller addresses the way in which Clément Marot fashions the
masculinity that makes him worthy of François I’s friendship through poetry in
which he portrays his physical aggression toward other men. François’s sister,
Marguerite de Navarre, questioned the commonplace characterization of women
as leaky vessels in stories that illustrated men’s inability to keep confidences, as
Peter Shoemaker explains in his essay. And while Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia
cited the mind-clouding vapors of her female body as an impediment to her
understanding of Descartes’s dualism, which rooted the self exclusively in the
mind, Rebecca Wilkin shows that she also foregrounded her female body’s medical
needs to create a pretext for exchange with Descartes, and in this way circumvented
the masculinity of friendship. Friends either reinforced or undermined prevailing
ideologies as they gendered their selves through friendship.
Third, to say that friendship is a creative process means that making friends
is a collaborative endeavor, and that the things friends create together embody
their negotiation of gender and sexuality. The concept of collaborative production
is an intuitive one in a post-industrial age, when marriages are described as
partnerships, and when friendships, such as the one that animates this volume,
are deepened through shared work. Yet it is hardly anachronistic to think about
friend-making as collaborative production in the early modern period. The most
basic product of friend-making is, simply, friendship. Many of the texts that
give access to those friendships were produced together by friends.42 Attesting
to the awkwardness of friend-making between men and women, Marc Schachter
emphasizes male humanists’ studious avoidance of the idiom of friendship in

39
See his “Noche oscura” in The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, ed. and trans.
Willis Barnstone (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), 38.
40
Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment
in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
41
Katherine Kong considers “how gender emerges in epistolary practice as a central
way of understanding the self and positioning it in relation to others” (Lettering the Self in
Medieval and Early Modern France [New York, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2010], 11).
42
“[T]extuality … was constitutive of early modern friendship,” according to
Penelope Anderson (“The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early Modern Women’s
Friendship,” Literature Compass 7, no. 4 [2010]: 250).
 Introduction 9

dedicating their translations of classical friendship texts to the noblewomen who

commissioned them. Between men, he shows, such gestures were conventional;
but addressed to a noble female dedicatee, they would be read as presumptuous
flirtation. Friendships between men and women of letters that were identified as
such tended to support women’s writing. Peter Shoemaker explains how women
writers, such as Madeleine de Scudéry, avoided being perceived as “public
women” by publishing their works pseudo-pseudonymously, under cover of
male friends. The collaborative labor of men and women friends sometimes
produced divergent theorizations of friendship, as Wilkin shows in Descartes’s
and Elisabeth’s rhetorics of friendship, and as Lewis Seifert demonstrates with
respect to the Maxims of Madame de Sablé and of François de La Rochefoucauld.

Cross-Gender Friendship

Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across
inequalities of class and race—perhaps because they inspire hope in the face of a
stubbornly unequal society, perhaps (more cynically) because they mask structures
that perpetuate such inequality. The friendships that exerted an analogous level of
fascination in early modern France were those that defied the ostensible impossibility
of friendship between men and women. Men and Women Making Friends in Early
Modern France argues that imaginative experimentation in friendships between
men and women was a distinctive feature of seventeenth-century French culture,
made possible by the intersection of the secular imperative of heterosociality, on
the one hand, and the Catholic Reformation’s celebration of spiritual friendships,
on the other. Friendships between male spiritual directors and penitent women,
together with interaction between mondain men and women in salon circles,
reframed the principles of reciprocity and equality integral to the Aristotelian ideal
of male friendship. The attention this volume brings to experimentation in cross-
gender friendships is one of its most important contributions.
To contextualize this development, the “palimpsest” provides evidence of
previous experiments involving friendship between men and women. Jaeger
argues that the phenomenon of courtly love (of men for women) grew out of an
ideal of ennobling love between men. Before the eleventh century, men could
only enhance their virtue while interacting with women by heroically resisting
a supposedly overpowering female carnality. But then an opposition emerged
between whore and matron that changed this formula; women, affirmed Marbod
of Rennes (c. 1035–1123) in his Liber decem capitulorum, could take the shape
of God’s image more easily than “stiff-necked” men.43 Now women could play
an ennobling role with respect to men, so long as sexuality was avoided. Jaeger
shows how sexuality was eventually incorporated into this discourse as an ever-
receding lure for virtue, which produced the dynamic of courtly love: “The deficit
of education and burden of vice shifts from woman to man; man recedes from

43
Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 93.
10 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

the virile warrior armed against sexuality to the one in need of moral instruction;
woman advances from the ruin of man to his tutor in ethics.”44
The reversal of roles that Jaeger traces enjoyed a kind of sequel in seventeenth-
century France. Celebrated as evidence of the renewal of urban life in the wake
of the Wars of Religion, the emergence of salon culture extended an ethos of
heterosociality to a broad public.45 Early seventeenth-century salons granted elite
women access to cultural forms produced by men as well as cultural authority over
men. Although scholars debate the extent of that authority, few contemporaries
doubted that the cultivation of honnêteté, the aesthetic and ethical ideal that
signified men’s success at court and in the city, depended on their interaction
with women.46 “Go into the city to see which noble Ladies are deemed to be the
most honnête women and in whose homes are the most beautiful salons,” Nicolas
Faret enjoins ambitious bourgeois men in his 1630 L’Honnête-homme ou l’art de
plaire à la court.47 Men were to achieve the refinement paramount to success by
conversing with women and practicing galanterie, a lighthearted form of courtly
love wherein men submitted to women’s tastes and judgments as an act of pseudo-
amorous homage. To be sure, the rhetoric of galanterie should not be mistaken
for evidence per se of friendship between women and men. A number of early
seventeenth-century male authors who pursued the advantages afforded by galant
devotion to salon women resented their subservience.48 Still, some genuine cross-
gender friendships did flourish in the salons, spaces in which women were not as
readily marginalized as they were in the tradition of perfect (male) friendship.49

44
Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 105.
45
Seventeenth-century salon culture originated in late sixteenth-century circles led by
aristocratic women such as the Maréchale de Retz, Madame de Villeroy, and Marguerite de
Valois, who were linked to humanist traditions promoted by the Valois court. The decline of
humanism and hostility toward pedantry during the reign of Henri IV led Madame d’Auchy,
Madame des Loges, and the Marquise de Rambouillet to set a different tone in their salons.
See Linda Timmermans, L’Accès des femmes à la culture (1598–1715): Un débat d’idées
de Saint François de Sales à la Marquise de Lambert (Paris: Champion, 1993), 63–71.
46
In addition to Schneider’s essay in this volume (155–6), see Erica Harth, “The Salon
Woman Goes Public … or Does She?” in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early
Modern France, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Deena Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1995), 179–93. For contrasting views of women’s influence in eighteenth-
century salons, see Deena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the
French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Antoine Lilti, Le
monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005).
47
“Il faut donc descendre à la ville, et voir qui sont celles d’entre les Dames de
condition que l’on estime les plus honnestes Femmes, et chez qui se font les plus belles
assemblées….” (Nicolas Faret, L’Honnête-homme ou l’art de plaire à la court [Paris:
Toussaincts du Bray, 1630], 226–7).
48
See Schneider, 158–9.
49
See, for example, the discussion of friendship between Sablé and La Rochefoucauld
in Seifert’s essay.
 Introduction 11

In his account of “the Big Bang of amatory ideals among the European
nobility,”50 Jaeger emphasizes not only that courtly love extended the homosocial
paradigm of ennobling love (between men), but also that it altered that paradigm
decisively. Whereas McGuire attributes worries about “particular [i.e., sodomitical]
friendships” between men to changes in the cloister, Jaeger locates the origin of that
worry in the advent of courtly love. Prior to the eleventh century, men’s expressions
of passionate physical love to other men were interpreted as displays of virtue,
while women represented—and thereby contained—the debasing effect of sexual
desire. However, courtly love eroded that gender-based compartmentalization of
virtue (between male friends) and sexuality (between men and women):

Admit women to the gentlemen’s club [of ennobling love] … and the smooth
surface of innocent erotic discourse shattered. It was invaded by irony, double
entendre, ambiguity, and shame. Its magic cloak of invulnerability lost its powers,
and gentlemen in love with women had to ward off dishonor and suspicion in the
ordinary ways, something they were spared when their only object of desire was
some quintessence of male virtue.”51

From the twelfth century on, men accompanied their friendly overtures to women
with reassurances regarding pure intentions, and they became more circumspect in
their expressions of affection to other men.52
Might the practice of galanterie in seventeenth-century French salons be
considered a bookend to the era of suspicion that began, according to Jaeger,
with the emergence of courtly love? While in the eleventh century, the inclusion
of women in the paradigm of ennobling love put male friendship on the
defensive, in the seventeenth century heterosociality provided cover for men’s
friendships with other men. Structured interaction with women in the salons was
instrumental to men not only because it polished their manners and enhanced
their wit; but also because it protected them against insinuations of suspicious
male friendships. Charges of sodomy had been central to the Catholic League’s
propaganda campaign against Henri III, which scrutinized his relationship with his
“mignons.” These charges resurfaced after the Edict of Nantes (1598) in attacks on
libertinage, the catchphrase coined by Ultramontane factions to target heresy and
debauchery. In the trial against the period’s most infamous libertin, Théophile de
Viau, the prosecution targeted homoerotic verse attributed to him as “evidence” of
sodomitical friendships with men. Though he was exonerated, censorship became
unavoidable after his trial.53 Writers submitted to constraints imposed by a state
determined to control the diffusion of print, and men became more attentive to

50
Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 157.
51
Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 157.
52
Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 99.
53
On the development of censorship following Théophile’s trial, see Joan DeJean,
The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 29–55.
12 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

the way in which their associations with other men might be interpreted. The
pressure on male friends to avoid homoerotic insinuations created an imperative of
heterosociality of which the salon was a major beneficiary. Male friends deflected
suspicions of sodomy through observable interaction with women.54
While salons provided a forum for practicing and theorizing heterosociability,
the Protestant Reformation’s ideal of companionate marriage—appropriated to a
lesser degree by Post-Tridentine Catholics—tempered the traditional opposition
between heterosexuality and friendship. Sexual intimacy need not preclude
friendship between the betrothed, François de Sales insisted; rather, spouses could
be fully compatible so long as a “completely holy, sacred, and divine love” united
them.55 François Poulain de la Barre, a promoter of the equality of the sexes and
a convert to Calvinism, imagined marriage as “the most perfect friendship” in
which “there should be no more subordination and dependence than between two
reasonable friends.”56 Such marriages existed: the Comte de Grignan and his third
wife, the daughter of the Marquise de Sévigné, were good friends, according to
Sévigné at least. Yet the negotiations involved in becoming friends leaves little
trace in marriage, and as a legal contract, marriage imposed dependence on women.
In a letter to the Duchesse de Montpensier, Madame de Motteville characterizes
marriage as “the honorable slavery that the Church dignifies by calling it a
sacrament.”57 Motteville anticipates Poulain de la Barre’s feminist reworking of
Hobbes’s social contract story in the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673)—which
he dedicated to Montpensier—when she laments “[t]he authority that men have
appropriated for themselves by unjust usurpation.”58
The salon sanctioned heterosociability, and the Church blessed matrimonial
amity. Without an accepted model to emulate, however, men and women would have
struggled to create friendship with each other. More than companionate marriage,
it was women’s only alternative to marriage—the religious life—that provided

54
The writer François de Boisrobert was accused of using his friendships with salon
women as a cover for his same-sex attractions. See Lewis C. Seifert, Manning the Margins:
Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2009), 176.
55
“un amour tout saint, tout sacré, tout divin” (François de Sales, Introduction à la vie
dévote, in Oeuvres, ed. André Ravier [Paris: Pléiade, 1969], 234).
56
“la plus parfaite amitié”… “pas plus de subordination et de dépendance qu’entre
deux amis raisonnables” (François Poulain de la Barre, De l’excellence des hommes, in
De l’égalité des deux sexes, De l’éducation des dames, De l’excellence des hommes, ed.
Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin [Paris: Vrin, 2011], 313; On the Excellence of Men, in Three
Cartesian Feminist Treatises, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch, trans. Vivien Bosley [Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 280–81).
57
“cet honnête esclavage que l’Eglise honore du nom de sacrament” (undated letter
from Françoise Bertaut, dame de Motteville, in Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de
Montpensier, Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle, ed. and
trans. Joan DeJean [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 63).
58
“Cette puissance que les hommes se sont attribuée par une injuste usurpation”
(Motteville, in Montpensier, Against Marriage, 62).
 Introduction 13

this model. The Catholic evangelical movement in the early sixteenth century
and then the Catholic Reformation following the legalization of Protestantism
in 1598 endowed friendships between women and men with a kind of counter-
cultural cachet.59 Aspiring saints—both female penitents and their spiritual
directors—imitated Church fathers and early Christian women in published
correspondences.60 Referring to the correspondences that Jerome maintained with
the wealthy Roman matrons Marcella and Paula, and Chrysostom, with Olympias
the Deaconess of Constantinople, Elizabeth Clark explains how the practice of
friendship often contradicts ideological certitudes: “in so many social movements,”
Clark writes, “the vision of the new order precedes its actualization; for Jerome
and Chrysostom in contrast, the living reality of their friendships with women was
in the vanguard of the theoretical baggage they dragged with them.”61 “Spiritual”
friendships between male confessors and female penitents, as prescribed by
devotional manuals like de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life, provided a
framework for cross-gender friendship alongside that of companionate marriage.
Urging his pious readers in the “world” to establish “a holy and sacred friendship”
amongst themselves, he does not restrict them to same-gender friendships and
cites the cross-gender friendships of early Church fathers.62 Such cross-gender
friendships were a model for the secular Republic of Letters, as Wilkin shows in
her essay. Friends of opposite sex were superior souls; by defying temptations of
physical intimacy, they demonstrated either holiness (from a Counter-Reformation
perspective) or noble generosity (in Stoic ethics). For these men and women, the
benefits of friendship—they could be social, physical, spiritual, or intellectual
in character—were commensurate with the risk of passion averted. Friendship
moreover subverted the hierarchy entailed in the male confessor/female penitent
relationship. As Daniella Kostroun shows in her essay, Abbess Angélique Arnauld
collaborated with her friend Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran,
on the reform of Port-Royal. Similarly, Seifert argues that the Marquise de Sablé
developed her independence as an author by eschewing the galanterie typical of
salon culture and cultivating frank exchanges with her friend La Rochefoucauld.
Historians of friendship have not ignored cross-gender friendships, but they
have given them short shrift. McGuire alludes to the new acceptability of friendships
between men and women in a discussion of the impact of cross-gender spiritual

59
Constance Furey, “Bound by Likeness: Vives and Erasmus on Marriage and
Friendship,” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe,
1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2011), 29–43.
60
Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450–1750
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
61
Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations
(New York, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1979), 79.
62
“une sainte et sacree amitié” (de Sales, Introduction, 185); “Saint Augustin
témoigne que saint Ambroise aimait uniquement sainte Monique, pour les rares vertus qu’il
voyait en elle, et qu’elle réciproquement le chérissait comme un Ange de Dieu” (de Sales,
Introduction, 186).
14 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

friendship in the seventeenth century, yet he portrays friendships between men

and women as the last vestige of a fading ethic.63 Indeed, whether as friends
of men or of other women, women figure the end of something great. Bray
normalizes the extraordinary marriage of Anne Lister and Ann Walker in terms of
a crepuscular wisp of a once ordinary worldview.64 Penelope Anderson captures
the impoverishment that the narrative of decline has caused to the study of women
friends through a series of oppositions—public vs. private; power vs. affect; men
vs. women: “Friendship changes from being a feature of public life, with embraces,
letters, and shared beds signifying power and influence … to being something that
occurs in the now private domestic sphere, a relation relegated to women.”65 Being
attentive to “imaginative experimentation” reveals, to the contrary, the power of
friends to transform the meaning of friendship and to remake the contexts in which
friendship signifies.

The Essays

We begin in media res with the text that has come to epitomize “perfect friendship”
in the Renaissance: Michel de Montaigne’s encomium to his friend, Étienne
de La Boétie. In contrast to queer approaches to “Of friendship” that proceed
from a hermeneutics of suspicion,66 George Hoffmann measures the claims in
the essay against the actions of its author. “Was Montaigne a Good Friend?”
he asks. Montaigne and La Boétie had very good reasons to become friends,
Hoffmann contends, as each man “embodied a realized exemplar of the other’s
ambitions.”67 Montaigne’s family pedigree and patrimony appealed to La Boétie,
while Montaigne admired La Boétie for his scholarly accomplishments and
aspirations. Montaigne, however, dodged the question of why he loved his friend:
“If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,
except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”68 For the ancients,
friends cultivated virtue through mutual beneficia. Aristotle distinguished in
the Nicomachean Ethics between utility, pleasure, and perfection as categories

63
McGuire, Friendship and Community, 422–3.
64
Bray, The Friend, 241–6.
65
Anderson, “The Absent Female Friend,” 243–53.
66
Such as those by Marc Schachter (in Voluntary Servitude) and Gary Ferguson (in
Queer (Re)Readings). Paul Ricoeur developed the notion of a hermeneutics of suspicion in
De l’interprétation: Essai sur Sigmund Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965).
67
Hoffmann, 36.
68
“Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l’aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer
qu’en respondant: ‘Parce que c’estoit luy; parce que c’estoit moy’” (Montaigne, Les Essais,
3 vols, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier [Paris: PUF, 1965], I.28.188; The Complete
Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1958], I.28.139). Subsequent references to the essays will provide the volume number,
essay number, and page number of the Villey edition, followed by the page number of
Frame’s translation.
 Introduction 15

of friendship. Cicero portrayed “the mutual love of friends” as the foundation of

both the family and the state.69 In construing God as the only friend one should
love for his own sake, however, nominalist theologians in the Middle Ages emptied
human friendship of its ethical content. Loving a human friend for his own sake,
no matter how virtuous, amounted to idolatry. Consequently, when Renaissance
humanists returned to the ancients, they were convinced that loving the friend “for
his own sake” must mean loving him for something more essential than for the
goodness he revealed through beneficent actions—for to appreciate these would
now mean instrumentalizing the friend.70 Montaigne’s refusal to name the reasons
for his love of La Boétie reflects this concern.71
Leaving “Of friendship” aside, then, Hoffmann attends to the characteristic
practices of perfect friendship to determine whether Montaigne was a good friend.
Aristotle emphasized the importance of togetherness in shared space—what we
might call “unity of place” (borrowing from seventeenth-century interpretations
of the Poetics): “The mere presence of friends is pleasant both in prosperity and
adversity.”72 The Hellenistic schools and their early modern emulators took presence
for granted too. Justus Lipsius cultivated a contubernium in his home, where
scholar-friends lived in intimate daily contact with one another.73 The Epicurean-
minded cohorts of the early seventeenth century that Robert Schneider studies in
this volume also prized face-to-face contact—so much so that each friend group
became associated with a physical space. Montaigne and La Boétie were neighbors
in Bordeaux, yet Hoffmann identifies notable moments when Montaigne chose
to be absent from his friend. Literary friendships cultivated through letters were
commonplace at a time when “the proto-Republic of humanist letters was literally
an epistolary world,”74 but Montaigne stands out for electing epistolarity when
he could have made house calls.75 Moreover, even though La Boétie “bequeathed

69
Cicero, De amicitia, 7.23: “[Y]ou may understand how great is the power of
friendship and of concord from a consideration of the results of enmity and disagreement.
For what house is so strong, or what state so enduring that it cannot be utterly overthrown
by animosities and division?” (De senectute, de amicitia, de divinatione, trans. William
Armistead Falconer [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953], 135). Horst Hutter
argues that Aristotle believed friendship to be more fundamental to the state than did Cicero
(Politics as Friendship: The Origins of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and
Practice of Friendship [Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1979], 26).
70
Langer, Perfect Friendship, 47–64.
71
Langer, Perfect Friendship, 174–5.
72
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1962), 9.11.2, 569.
73
According to Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
74
Langer, Perfect Friendship, 25.
75
Katherine Kong argues that the friendship of Montaigne and La Boétie was above
all “a textual affair”: “What Montaigne achieves through his varied writing and publishing
projects is a textual, instead of a sexual, ‘alliance’ with his friend” (Lettering the Self,
233, 228).
16 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

his library and his papers” to Montaigne, 76 Hoffmann observes that Montaigne
contradicted La Boétie’s most important ideas and thus Cicero’s claim that perfect
friends “have the same ideals and the same tastes.”77
Montaigne’s tepid practice of friendship leads to Hoffmann’s central question:
Why did Montaigne infuse the memory of this friendship with the sacramental
overtones of marriage in an essay published seventeen years after La Boétie’s
death? Exclusion, Hoffmann argues, was the purpose of this most perfect friendship.
Celebrating an exclusive friendship allowed Montaigne to minimize obligations
while maximizing opportunity. Projecting a perfect friendship with La Boétie
protected Montaigne from the demands that colleagues might make of him. Spared
the obligations emanating from his immediate social and professional cohort,
he could pursue what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “the strength of weak
ties,” the connection-making opportunities afforded by disparate acquaintances, as
opposed to a group of closer associates who all know each other already and whose
connections are redundant.78 In the tradition of wedded brothers that Montaigne
develops in “De l’amitié,” La Boétie’s death should have freed Montaigne for
another best friend. However, spurning the overtures of the equally distinguished
Lipsius, he befriended men 10 to 15 years his junior, to whom he played the kindly
uncle. Montaigne adopts an avuncular attitude toward the reader as well throughout
the Essays, and Hoffmann identifies the exclusive tone of “Of friendship” as an
anomaly. Those who assign great biographical significance to this essay, Hoffmann
argues, must also contend with the misanthropic Montaigne that it projects.
In revealing that the “perfect friendship celebrated by Montaigne could prove
deeply impoverishing,” Hoffmann extends, sociologically, Langer’s remarks
about the impoverished language of perfect friendship.79 He also challenges the
nostalgia that infuses Bray’s work—a nostalgia that according to Langer inheres
in the discourse of friendship in the Renaissance. If “Of friendship” served to
extract its author from friendship’s reciprocal economy, as Hoffmann argues, what
loss do we mourn when we lament the passing of the “Renaissance friendship”
it is said to epitomize? And what might we gain in attending more closely to the
practice as opposed to the ideal of friendship? Hoffmann’s essay suggests that this
approach may bring less perfect, but more diverse friends to light—such as the
women whom, in theory, Montaigne excluded from friendship.80

76
“il [me] laissa … héritier de sa bibliothèque et de ses papiers” (I.28.184; 136).
77
Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1947), 1.17.56, 59.
78
Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,”
Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–33.
79
On the “lexical and semantic poverty” of Montaigne’s rationale for his friendship
with La Boétie, see Langer, Perfect Friendship, 172.
80
Perfect friendship exempla boil down to a half dozen or so couples, leading
Langer to speculate that “the very limitedness of the examples is proof of the perfection
of the friendships involved; perhaps perfection is obscurely felt to be redundant” (Perfect
Friendship, 23).
 Introduction 17

Montaigne confirms one of the pillars of perfect friendship when he claims that
women’s souls are too flimsy “to endure the strain of so tight and durable a knot”
and discounts marriage as “a bargain ordinarily made for other ends” that has “no
dealings or business except with itself.”81 It is nevertheless with respect to women
that Hoffmann observes the most flagrant distinction between Montaigne’s ideal
and practice of friendship. Allusions to card games in the Essays allow Hoffmann
to reconstruct a convivial domestic environment in which Montaigne enjoyed
the companionship of his wife and daughter, his mother and two of his sisters.
Here Hoffmann’s essay raises an epistemological problem: if the practice of
friendship is more than—or different from—its written expression, how do we
know what it means to practice friendship without resorting to criteria that may
be anachronistic? How can we know that time spent together around a card table
weighs more heavily on the scales of friendship than the time spent composing
a letter? Montaigne’s dedications to five noblewomen as well as his publicized
bond with Marie de Gournay indicate that his relationships with women were
not bracketed to a domestic sphere beyond the elective arena of friendship. Did
the claim that Gournay would one day be capable of the “most sacred kind of
friendship”82 foreclose the friendship potential of other women, as that of La
Boétie does for other men? Or might women readers respond to this perfect amie
manquée as a perfectible exemplar?
In “The Power to Correct: Beating Men in Service Friendships,” Michelle
Miller tests Bray’s claim that friendship between men gradually “became less
public, less expressive, and less acceptably part of ethical and political life” over
the course of the early modern period. Miller confronts Bray’s thesis—which
pertained to England only—with one of the master-narratives of early modern
French studies: Norbert Elias’s study of the rise in bodily and affective restraint
from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. In the companion volume to
his History of Manners, Elias attributed the gradually chastened habitus following
the late medieval period to increasingly complex networks and differentiation in
social hierarchy that accompanied early modern state formation. Miller cites “the
civilizing process” as a possible explanans for Bray’s thesis regarding increasing
circumspection in the expression of friendship. One might speculate that physically
demonstrative friendships became uncouth as a result of a newly chastened
decorum. But this is not what Miller argues. Rather than using the civilizing
process to corroborate the claim that men became more restrained in their friendly
overtures, Miller uses the civilizing process to explain the endurance of intense
physical interaction, a feature of friendship that, according to Bray, began to wane
in the early modern period. She sharpens Elias and Bray against one another to
suggest, first, that the modes of physicality in friendship are themselves variable
and contingent, and second, that aggression has its place in the civilizing process.

81
“leur ame ne semble assez ferme pour soustenir l’estriente d’un noeud si pressé et
durable” … “marché qui ordinairement se fait à autres fins” (I.28.186; 137–8).
82
“cette tressaincte amitié” (II.17.661; 502). Did Montaigne write this allongeail or
did Gournay herself interpolate it? See Hoffmann, 58.
18 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

Miller examines physical aggression as a function of friendship—of the

friendship, specifically, of the poet Clément Marot for François I. The reign of
François I (1515–1547) was a transformative one in terms of the civilizing process.
François I’s ideology of translatio studii et imperii joined literary emulation with
continual military campaigns in Italy to claim France as the heir to Rome’s greatness,
and the French language as the new Latin. The genteel conversants in the handbook
of Renaissance civility, Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528),
praise this king for his attention to letters and the arts. Within France, bureaucratic
reforms, such as the replacement of Latin by French as the administrative language
and the registration of marriages, baptisms, and deaths within parishes, brought
knowledge more directly under the control of the crown. Miller links the notion
of correction to the agenda of the state: the friend of the sovereign advances
his claims by correcting the bourgeois men who transgress distinctions of rank
through beatings doled out in poetry. She shows that Marot’s poem redirects his
own experience of correction: his Protestant sympathies had earned him a flogging
and exile to Italy. By redeploying violence against a social equal, Marot recovers
his place in “Team François”—at the king’s side, with access to his bedchamber.
Violence that serves the friend, Miller concludes, strengthens social bonds.
Clément Marot’s impolite actions on behalf of François I attest to the association
of friendship with masculinity not just in perfect, equal friendships, but all the
more so among friends of unequal rank. One of Bray’s most important insights
in The Friend is that rank-unequal friendships between men were vulnerable to
charges of sodomy insofar as disregard for social order mapped easily, in political
polemics, onto the transgression of natural order.83 Marot’s self-styling as the
enforcer of François’s corrections obviated sexual interpretations of their unequal
friendship. His lowliness allowed him to engage in fisticuffs unfitting for kingly
comportment; he advertised aggression, not sex, as the nature of his utility to his
friend and king. Given Marot’s efforts to assert a shared masculinity, it is surprising
that the dedicatee of his poem is not François I, but the king’s cousin, Renée de
France. Renée supported the Reform and was Marot’s patron during his exile in
Italy. In Renée’s kitchen, Miller shows, servants plot to avenge wrongs done to
her and to her cousin. By situating the origins of his mission in the for intérieur of
Renée’s home, Marot codes correction as an activity protected by royal patron(s)
and constructive of the civilizing process.
Correction participated in the constructive project of self-improvement that
philosophers identified as the principle justification for and benefit of friendship.
It was also a feature of humanistic activity with respect to the friendship canon.
In “Redressing Ficino, Redeeming Desire: Symphorien Champier’s La nef des
dames vertueuses,” Todd Reeser examines Symphorien Champier’s importation
of Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism to France in support of the pro-woman side of
the querelle des femmes. Reeser argues that correction is a function of translation

83
Alan Bray first developed this argument in “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male
Friendship.”
 Introduction 19

as well as of friendship, for Champier presses Plato’s privileging of the sexless

soul over the sexed body into an argument for the equality of women and men, all
the while disguising the homoerotic content of Ficinian Neoplatonism. Champier
“corrects” Neoplatonic friendship by “heterosexualizing” it when he replaces
Ficino’s tale of Achilles and Patroclus, which exemplified love between men,
with Boccaccio’s story of two brother-like friends, Titus and Gisippus, who marry,
respectively, each other’s sister and fiancée.
Champier’s La nef begs a question also raised by Marot’s poem to Renée de
France: to what extent are women imagined as potential friends and to what extent
do they mediate access to other men? This question arises in Champier’s case
with respect to the humanists he emulates. Champier acknowledges deviating
from his sources when he retells a tale recounted by Ficino about a wayward
daughter, Lucilia. Lucilia’s father advises her to correct her promiscuity by trading
lascivious outfits for modest attire. Reeser links this sartorial switch to Champier’s
hermeneutic “redressing” of Ficino: in excluding from his appropriation of Plato
the attractive young men whom Lucilia also renounces, Champier has strayed
from the father—for in the Symposium, Plato states that love between men is the
highest form of love. Champier enters fraught textual territory to recruit Plato for
his pro-woman polemics, and Lucilia serves him in the same way that women
serve Titus and Gisippus: as a bridge between men over pesky obstacles. Lucilia
mediates Champier’s bond to Ficino and ultimately to Plato by allowing him to
selectively claim their legacy.
The question of humanist homosociality, particularly in the friendship canon,
deserves closer scrutiny. Lorna Hutson, in The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship
and the Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994), distinguishes
between a medieval pattern of gift-exchange, in which women served as the
“signs of credit” that bonded men, and literary reciprocity between humanists in
sixteenth-century English literature. Texts, she argues, took the place of women as
objects of exchange.84 Reeser’s analysis of Lucilia’s changing outfits nuances this
opposition: sixteenth-century humanists may not have traded their fiancées and
sisters like Titus and Gisippus, but Champier at least established the legitimacy of
his link to other humanists (Ficino) by leaning on Lucilia. Did other humanists call
upon women to iron out the kinks in their appropriations of the friendship canon?
Female patronage, a theme in Miller’s essay, is central to Marc Schachter’s
contribution, “Translating Friendship in the Circle of Marguerite de Navarre:
Plato’s Lysis and Lucian’s Toxaris.” Focusing on the humanist activity surrounding
François I’s older sister, Schachter queries the purpose and effect of dedicating
translations of friendship texts to women. Marguerite de Navarre commissioned a
translation of Plato’s dialogue, Lysis, from Des Périers, her valet de chambre, as
one of many evangelical humanist projects involving translations of Neoplatonic
texts about love. Schachter shows that in his French translation, Des Périers
adapted Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the Greek original to conjure an

84
Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in
Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 2–13.
20 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

evangelical interpretation of perfect friendship that included women. Like Reeser,

therefore, Schachter reveals the perception that Plato’s philosophy was woman-
friendly. The friends that Ficino talks about in his commentary on the Lysis are
men, but Des Périers, glossing the same text, ignores the friend couple as well
as marriage in favor of a more capacious and diffuse notion of friendship. In Des
Périers’s commentary and translation, God becomes both the origin and the goal of
friendship. The quest for this most perfect friendship unites a community of women
linked “by contiguity and consanguinity.” When “grace and biblical inspiration are
the keys to salvation,” Schachter explains, “singular earthly attachments must be
attenuated.”85 Imagining God as the perfect friend softened the sharp demarcations
that structure Aristotle’s version of perfect friendship—demarcations between
friendship and love, between friends and family, between men and women.
Dedications were gifts, and gift-giving was integral to the reciprocal economy
of friendship, as Hutson and Natalie Zemon Davis have shown.86 Dedicating a
text on the theme of friendship was a particularly overt friend-making gesture.
Erasmus, for instance, alluded to friendship in dedicating his Latin translation of
Lucian’s Toxaris to Bishop Richard Foxe. Jacques de Rozières dedicated the same
text to Marguerite de France, daughter of François I (the niece of Marguerite de
Navarre), lifting much of Erasmus’s dedicatory epistle. Schachter shows however
that De Rozières did not copy Erasmus when it came to characterizing his
dedicatee as future friend. “In de Rozières’s letter, something—perhaps both social
status and gender—prohibits the deployment of the power of friendship to bridge
difference, while this is precisely the use Erasmus seeks to make of it in the original
epistle.”87 Eschewing the reciprocity of friendship, De Rozières offers his work in
a one-way dynamic reminiscent of courtly love. Was De Rozières engaging in the
homosociality observed in Champier’s humanistic practice, appealing to Marguerite
de France to claim the countenance of her deceased brother, who had originally
commissioned the work? Or was De Rozières seeking to cultivate a friendship
that could not be named? De Rozières’s awkward dedication to Marguerite de
France leads the scholar of early modern friendship to a nominalist knot. Does a
friendship that cannot be named exist? Alternatively, do concrete gestures—such
as dedications—hold more weight than abstractions such as “friendship”?
By the end of the sixteenth century, Neoplatonic texts were readily available
in French. The homoerotism of Platonic friendship was familiar, too, despite the
“corrections” administered by early humanists like Champier and Des Périers.
Katherine Crawford emphasizes the political utility and liability of Platonic
friendship in “From Reception to Assassination: French Negotiations of ‘Platonic
Love.’” Where Schachter shows that Neoplatonic friendship provided an inclusive
basis for an evangelical community of women, Crawford reveals the attraction
of an “exteriorized, social ethics of friendship” for a monarch trying to rise

85
Schachter, 114.
86
Nathalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 46.
87
Schachter, 116.
 Introduction 21

above sectarian strife. An account of friendship that supported hierarchical social

order, such as Plato’s Lysis, appealed to a king who struggled to contain warring
enemies, and whom nobles undermined and debt crippled. Blaise de Vigenère,
Henri III’s secretary, characterized friendship as the building block of peace and
the solution to the nation’s civil war. Yet like Socrates in Lysis, Henri III mixed
up philia and eros and got neither one right. His friends were young—too much
like him to offer sage counsel—and undistinguished—too different from him to
deserve the affections he showered on them. The elements that humanists had
tried to purge from Platonic friendship surfaced with a vengeance in League and
Huguenot propaganda alike, and following Henri III’s assassination, the French
monarchy turned its back on this strand of the classical friendship canon. To the
old theme of the solitude of princes,88 political theorists such as Jean Bodin and
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet grafted the ideology of political absolutism that further
isolated the king, extricating him from all vestiges of reciprocity.89
The implementation of absolutism was a gradual and an imperfect process that
depended initially on the crown’s ability to subordinate the groups of friends that
cut across Paris’s highly compartmentalized social landscape after the Edict of
Nantes.90 In “Friends of Friends: Intellectual and Literary Sociability in the Age
of Richelieu,” Robert Schneider reconstructs the cohorts of friends in Paris during
the 1620s and 1630s that comprised the diffuse literary field from which Richelieu
formed the Académie française. Schneider builds on the inquiry begun by Christian
Jouhaud in Les pouvoirs de la littérature, but reaches different conclusions about
the composition of the literary field and its relation to power. Jouhaud construes
the emerging literary field and political power as mutually constitutive. Writers’
dependence on royal patronage, he argues, allowed them to construct individual
voices free from corporate identification, and their authority as literary figures in
turn augmented the power of the crown. Examining the emergence of the literary
field through the lens of friendship, Schneider recognizes multiple cohorts with
which writers associated. This diversity complicates the mutuality of literature
and power, because in Richelieu’s own time and until the advent of the Fronde,

88
See Shoemaker, 249.
89
On Bodin’s reworking of feudal reciprocity, see Rebecca Wilkin, Women,
Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2008), 59–61. Practice did not necessarily follow theory; Louis XIII had notorious favorites:
his falconer, Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes and Henri Coiffier de Ruzé d’Effiat, Marquis
de Cinq-Mars, executed for conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu in 1642.
90
In Paris in 1600, writes Orest Ranum, “clergy, merchants, artisans, and royal
officials … lived oblivious to one another in exclusive corporations, notably chapters,
guilds, and courts.” Architecture reinforced this social compartmentalization: “Their
residences, abbeys, hotels, and even bourgeois houses were built like fortresses, with high
walls, barred windows, and iron-reinforced doors.” No common language, food source, or
tax burden led the inhabitants of Paris to transcend their narrow corporate interests. Orest
Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism: An Essay, 2nd revised ed. (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 42.
22 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

friends spelled revolt. Whereas Jouhaud portrays literature and power as mutually
constructive entities, Schneider underscores mutual wariness. In his analysis,
(male) writers’ acceptance of corporatization—and the servitude it implied—was
a kind of defeat, which they romanced as deliverance from the rule of women.91
In Schneider’s empirical approach to friendship, friend groups appear almost as
spaces that individuals can enter and exit, reflective of the fact that friends defined
the tenor of their friendships spatially. During the wars of religion, Neostoics
administered their harsh therapy in lush gardens92 far from the fracas of the city
and the intrigue of the court. Private retreats in bucolic spaces retained their appeal
well after the Parlement de Paris’s registration of the Edict of Nantes. The model
for the friend-groups studied by Schneider was not the austere Stoa, for whom
friendship was a means to virtue, however, but the pleasure-seeking Epicureans,
for whom friendship was an end in itself.93 By tracing the comings and goings of
two relatively obscure literary figures (Guillaume Colletet and Michel de Marolles)
and the shifting composition of two friend-groups—the circle of Valentin Conrart
(from which Richelieu recruited the nucleus of the Académie française) and the
“Bergers illustres”—Schneider reveals a range of coteries whose memberships,
ideologies, and aesthetics overlapped with those of the academy, peopled by men
devoted to erudition, and the salon, hosted by women opposed to pedantry and
concerned with questions of linguistic refinement. From this landscape, Schneider
draws three intriguing conclusions.
First, he argues that the salon—notably the Marquise de Rambouillet’s
Chambre bleue—did not comprise one coherent group, but that it brought together
subgroups whose members enjoyed a sociability of their own. Consequently,
cultural innovations associated with the salon, such as honnêteté, are perhaps more
appropriately attributed to these more elemental groups of friends. The friend-
groups that Schneider identifies as constitutive of salon sociability were exclusively
male, and so, similar to Antoine Lilti’s work on eighteenth-century salon culture, this
argument has the effect of minimizing the cultural influence of women.94
Second, Schneider observes a gender gap with respect to social capital. When
friendship is construed in spatial terms, mobility emerges as an important ingredient
of cultural agency. Men such as Colletet and Marolles accumulated ties by frequenting
a diversity of venues. Women, in contrast, received but did not frequent.95 Women
had fewer opportunities than men to hone their skills and exert influence through

91
Robert A. Schneider, “Political Power and the Emergence of Literature: Christian
Jouhaud’s Age of Richelieu,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 357–80.
92
Justus Lipsius, De Constantia in publicis malis (1583). Lipsius was no doubt aware
that Epicurus had met his disciples in a garden. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire:
Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1994), 119.
93
Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 250.
94
Lilti, Le monde des salons. Goodman makes a strong claim for women’s cultural
influence in The Republic of Letters.
95
Schneider, 156.
 Introduction 23

patterns of accumulated friendships; they were less able than men to take advantage
of “the strength of weak ties.”96 Here Schneider takes issue with Daniel Gordon’s
characterization of the salons as early spaces of social equality predating Habermas’s
public sphere on the grounds that Gordon ignores the structural inequalities in
seventeenth-century sociability, not least women’s restricted mobility.97
Third, Schneider clarifies the gender politics that allowed cohorts of male
friends to embrace subjugation to political absolutism. Richelieu’s founding of
the Académie française was a means, Schneider argues, of coopting “friends of
friends.” It is easy to understand that a dense network of friends comprised a
parallel polity that Richelieu was eager to access and control. It is less obvious,
Schneider concedes, why men who had celebrated the freedom of retreat and
who characterized literary activity as a by-product of sociability rather than as
its raison d’être, should exchange freely cultivated friendships for the yoke of
royal patronage and the imperative of productivity. He finds some clues in the
words of salon regulars Jean Chapelain, Guez de Balzac, and Antoine Godeau:
membership in an unquestionably virile group, close to the seat of power,
represented delivery from the emasculation of idleness. Schneider’s intuition is
nicely supported by Ziad Elmarsafy’s work on the interrelated notions of freedom,
slavery, and absolutism in seventeenth century French literature. While La Boétie
in De la servitude volontaire wondered what could possibly motivate a whole
nation of people to willingly enslave themselves to an absolute monarch, “the idea
of absolutism as liberation was part and parcel of the endoxa of the seventeenth
century.”98 Elmarsafy shows that Pierre Corneille’s plots hinge on an opposition
between the tyranny of the passions—usually involving love for a woman—and
liberating submission to the king. And Schneider shows that the friends of
friends who became the first members of the Académie française rationalized
the loss of the leisure they cultivated in similar terms: subjugation to the crown
meant freedom from the “tyranny” of women. In a poem dedicated to Richelieu,
Colletet insinuates that it is because Richelieu has been smitten by women—the
muses—that he has chosen to patronize poets. Yet the poet himself looks forward
in entering into the exclusively masculine Académie française to “being more
solitary” and to “possessing [him]self.”99

96
On Granovetter’s “weak ties” concept, see above, 16, and Hoffmann, 45.
97
Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French
Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
98
Ziad Elmarsafy, Freedom, Slavery, and Absolutism: Corneille, Pascal, Racine
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 18.
99
Richelieu “[e]st épris de la muse, & ravi de nos Vers! / Et par une faveur digne
de son courage, / Enfin la recompense égale nostre ouvrage! … Je veux plus que devant
frequenter leurs deserts [des Muses], / Estre plus attentif a leurs doctes concerts, / Observer
de plus pres leur dance, & leur mystere, / Me posseder moy-mesme, estre plus solitaire, /
Avoir tousjours l’Esprit attaché dans les cieux, Et quitter les Mortels pour ne voir que des
Dieux” (Guillaume Colletet, Le triomphe des muses, à Monseigneur le Cardinal duc de
Richelieu [Paris : Veuve Jean Camusat, 1640], 3–4).
24 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

Clearly, there was deep ambivalence, on the part of some men, about the codes
of heterosocial galanterie that regulated much of the cross-gender interaction in the
salons.100 Yet friendships between men and women flourished in early seventeenth-
century France. In “Making Friends, Practicing Equality: The Correspondence
of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia,” Rebecca Wilkin parses
the letters of the French philosopher—an expatriate to the Netherlands—and the
German refugee to reveal the construction of a philosophical friendship between
a man and a woman. Wilkin reveals two different strategies for friend-making
across gender lines. Similar to De Rozières with respect to Marguerite de France,
Descartes never dared to call his noble addressee a “friend.” He nevertheless
outlines a stoic ideal of friendship that implicitly includes the princess: knowledge
and virtue are the stuff of friendship, and she has them in abundance. Elisabeth in
turn balances gender and rank through a dual medical metaphor. On the one hand,
the Calvinist princess calls Descartes the “doctor of her soul,” an epithet common
in the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, but used in the seventeenth century
by female penitents with respect to their spiritual directors. On the other hand,
Elisabeth places the philosopher in a servile role by soliciting medical advice from
him; she treats him as a court physician, reflective of his inferior rank. In this way,
Elisabeth balances his philosophical authority with her social superiority.
Wilkin shows that the two correspondents construe equality through rhetorical
frames that hinge on opposite approaches to gender difference. Descartes, true
to the universalism of ancient stoicism (and in contrast to the masculinism of
contemporary Neostoicism), makes gender and rank irrelevant to friendship;
he emphasizes their essential sameness. Elisabeth, in contrast, foregrounds her
sick female body to create a pretext for their exchange (medical advice). Wilkin
borrows from Alison Weber’s work on Teresa of Avila to show that through a self-
deprecating “rhetoric of femininity,” Elisabeth justifies her continuing adherence
to skepticism, the very school of thought that Descartes claimed to overcome
by means of his dualist metaphysics. Whereas equality for Descartes means
sameness, Elisabeth’s skeptically derived notion of equality embraces difference.
Gesturing toward political implications, Wilkin compares Elisabeth’s construction
of friendship to the contractarian philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which also
acknowledged difference within equality.
In Descartes’s correspondences with men, philosophical disagreement led
invariably to personal enmity. By showing that Elisabeth’s body mediated a
relation of equality in which divergent philosophical commitments could co-exist,
Wilkin corroborates Miller’s claim that the physicality of friendship contributed
to the civilizing process rather than being disciplined by it. Of course in the case
of Marot and Elizabeth, the bodies being corrected or offered up for healing were
first and foremost words on paper. Marot punched another man in a poem, and

100
Claude Habib, Galanterie française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Alain Viala, La
France galante: essai historique sur une catégorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’à la
Révolution (Paris: PUF, 2008); Seifert, Manning the Margins, 57–97.
 Introduction 25

Descartes only observed Elizabeth’s symptoms in her handwriting. How much

importance should we attribute to “paper” gestures? The essays in this volume
offer an array of answers to that question. Hoffmann casts doubt on the sincerity of
the literary friendship that Montaigne crafted in essays and in letters and narrows
his evidence down to time spent together in a shared space.101 Wilkin, however,
considers epistolary exchange a practice of equality that should be considered
alongside theoretical statements promoting the equality of the sexes, such as Marie
de Gournay’s De l’égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) and Poulain de la
Barre’s De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673), in keeping with Anthony J. La Vopa’s
“rhetorical approach” to intellectual history in which “philosophical argument …
is permeable to stylistic practices, and particularly to uses of figurative language,
from other rhetorics in the culture at large.”102
Daniella Kostroun grapples directly with the question of rhetoric in “The
Gendered Self and Friendship in Action among the Port-Royal Nuns.” She responds
to McGuire’s claim that the interpersonal environment cultivated in medieval
monastic communities determined representations of monastic friendship. This
premise makes McGuire wary of idealization and curious about the unsaid: if the
temptation was great to account for individual friendships in light of friendship
ideals, then how can we know what friends really felt, believed, or did? Kostroun,
in contrast, is not worried that Angélique Arnauld, abbess and reformer of Port-
Royal, might have simulated an ideal at odds with an independent “reality,” or
dissimulated “what really happened” through a veneer of friendly conventions.
Rather, she argues that Angélique interpreted her life struggles through available
discourses of friendship. Kostroun’s empathetic reading of Angélique’s disparate
accounts of her desires and decisions exemplifies Paul Ricoeur’s claim that “there
is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the
final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these
mediating terms.”103 Just as friendship does not exist as an independent entity
outside of or beyond the language of friendship, Kostroun reveals that friends are

101
John Jeffries Martin shows how Montaigne oscillated in his Essays between the
ideals of sincerity—the correspondence between an individual’s affective disposition and
his or her words, which he traces to Calvinist sources—and of courtly prudence, both in
public and in private contexts in Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Palgrave MacMillan,
2006), 119. See also Alan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century
Social Theory and Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1990):
1474–1504. Silver argues that the emergence of consumer society in the eighteenth century
led to a shift in the requirements of friendship from mutual obligation to sincerity.
102
Anthony J. La Vopa, “A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel’s Enlightenment,”
The Historical Journal 52, no. 3 (2009): 717–38, 731.
103
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), 15. Translation corrected by Bernard Dauenhauer and David
Pellauer in “Paul Ricoeur,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta,
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/ricoeur/. Ricoeur’s title contains an
obvious reference to the tradition of perfect friendship.
26 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

not just characters who people the life story of an autonomous self. Friendship is
an experience through which the self becomes intelligible to itself.
As Abbess of Port-Royal, Angélique was to enforce the Benedictine rule,
originally crafted for male religious. It fell to the abbot in the Benedictine rule
to discourage favoritism toward individual friends that undermined charity
toward all. Angélique found herself ill-suited to this paternalistic role, so much
so that she sought to join the Order of the Visitation. Not only had the Visitation
been founded by her close friends François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, but
Angélique believed that she could be both a better friend and a better nun under the
Augustinian rule, originally designed for women. She only acquiesced to remain at
Port-Royal as a result of a newfound friendship with Jean Duvergier de Hauranne,
abbé de Saint-Cyran, which she experienced in terms of “the traditional ‘soul mate’
friendship trope that linked heterosexual friendships and monastic reform.” Parting
paths with that tradition, however, Kostroun explains how Angélique Arnauld
“downgraded the heterosexual friendship between male confessor and female
penitent to the level of mere catalyst for the more significant friendships among the
nuns.”104 And interestingly, while the female penitent/male spiritual guide couple
served in secular contexts to make cross-gender friendships intelligible, the model
through which Angélique Arnauld later construed the solidarity of the nuns who
refused to sign the formulary condemning Jansenius’s interpretation of Augustine
was of pagan origin. Through their will to chastity, Diana and her fellow bathers
transformed their reclusive space into a moral high ground in the face of a petulant
male intruder (Acteon) on a par with that arrogated by perfect (male) friends with
respect to a tyrant. Kostroun shows that “associative female chastity” of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses provided a frame for interpreting the persecution that the nuns
of Port-Royal endured when Louis XIV set about disbanding the convent.105 This
collective of women—of “sisters”—recalls the contiguous and consanguineous
notion of friendship among the women in Marguerite de Navarre’s evangelical circle.
Though the convent comprised a distinct culture, Kostroun’s analysis of
friendship tropes in the letters of Angélique Arnauld suggest that it was not
entirely isolated from “the world.” Lewis Seifert makes this point explicitly in
his essay on female and cross-gender friendships in the salon of the Marquise
de Sablé. Like Wilkin, Seifert explores how a friendship model created for
spiritual relationships was adapted to secular interactions. In “The Marquise de
Sablé and Her Friends: Men and Women between the Convent and the World,”
he argues that this salonnière created a discursive space that mediated between
two ostensibly opposed ideals of friendship—on the one hand a “spiritual” ideal
promoted by among others François de Sales and on the other the “worldly”
ideal of galanterie practiced in many salons of the day. From the apartment she
had built within the walls of the Abbey of Port-Royal in Paris, with one door
opening onto the convent and another onto the street, Sablé negotiated between

104
Kostroun, 205.
105
Kostroun cites Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 82.
 Introduction 27

the spiritual and worldly spheres, receiving or corresponding with a wide range
of friends, including Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. The Marquise did not create
a synthesis of the spiritual and the galant models as much as she adapted both of
them to the life she forged for herself. Some of her friendships, with both men
and women, centered on spiritual concerns (though not exclusively) and allowed
her to effect through correspondence the sort of retreat from the world she could
not perform materially. In more worldly friendships with men, she eschewed the
amorous pretext of galanterie to enjoy equitable and substantial exchange—about
their literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific works and about her own
writings. Sablé thus provides a counterpoint to the salonnières marginalized by
the groups of male habitués that Schneider studies.
Sablé’s revision of friendship ideals extended beyond lived experience to
theoretical discussions; Seifert shows that her maxims on friendship oppose the
thought of her friends Jacques Esprit and La Rochefoucauld. Nuancing their
cynicism, Sablé asserts repeatedly that friendship is possible as long as it is
grounded in virtue, and she draws out numerous exceptions to La Rochefoucauld’s
condemnation of friendship. Sablé’s stance is friendlier to her readers, Seifert
argues, since, by making explicit these exceptions, she allows them the possibility
of inclusion in true, virtuous friendship. Furthermore, unlike the vaguely
Aristotelian model she invokes, Sablé rejects the requirement that friends be
of equal status, joining cross-gender friends such as Descartes and Elisabeth in
defending the possibility of difference in friendship. Although the Marquise never
addresses the question of cross-gender friendship, she distinguishes between love
and friendship, thereby countering the notion that friendship between men and
women inevitably leads to love, a position held, paradoxically, by her friends Esprit
and La Rochefoucauld. Presumably exempting her from their negative views
of women as friends, both men collaborated extensively with Sablé on writing
maxims. No passive hostess, the Marquise critiqued their work and shared her
own with them. In preparing the way for the publication of La Rochefoucauld’s
collection, she became increasingly aware of her own distance from his moral
philosophy and enacted the role of friend-as-counselor, in the spirit of correction
central to the masculine friendship tradition. As Seifert shows, even though La
Rochefoucauld did not accept all of Sablé’s advice, the frank exchanges he had
with her were made possible by a practice of friendship that straddled spiritual
and worldly ideals. Though Sablé’s friendships with men prefigure later examples
of cross-gender bonds premised neither on romance nor on spirituality, Seifert
notes that the secularization of society did not result in greater acceptance of male-
female friendships, which our culture is still reluctant to acknowledge.
Trust, grounded in confidentiality, was crucial to the relationship between male
confessor and female penitent on which the cross-gender friendships studied by
Wilkin, Kostroun, and Seifert were modeled. Peter Shoemaker focuses on the
importance of confidentiality, or more specifically, of “confidence” (confidence or
confiance), to early modern friendship in “From My Lips to Yours: Friendship,
Confidentiality, and Gender in Early Modern France.” From Aristotle forward,
28 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

a good friend was understood as a person to whom one could safely unburden
one’s deepest, most secret feelings. In the early modern period, intimate disclosure
to the friend was a matter of ethical and social obligation as well as of self-
expression. Shoemaker shows that confidentiality in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries followed a code of conduct that paralleled laws surrounding the dépôt, a
precious item one deposited with another person for safe-keeping. The dépôt was
not subject to the inventory of its keeper’s goods, nor could he use or exchange
it. Most importantly, the dépositaire was sworn to secrecy, making him analogous
to the confidant. Conceived as sort of human lockbox, the confidant bore a weighty
responsibility in an era when secrets held strategic importance, particularly at
court. Not surprisingly, friends were reluctant to disclose information that might
be used against them, and so with the trust they placed in their confidants came
restraint and distance.
The gender of the confidant was crucial in this code, Shoemaker argues. Women,
went the commonplace, could not be trusted with confidences made to them. Their
undisciplined tongues precluded restraint and prudence, without which they were
unequal to the responsibilities of the confidant. However, as Shoemaker shows,
several women writers challenged this supposition. In Marguerite de Navarre’s
novellas X, XXI, and LXX, men betray the confidences made by women, who
go on to make God or Christ their friend of choice and the recipient of their
confidences. For Marguerite, confidence is the foundation for affective bonds
between men and women, but it is ultimately an impossible ideal. Madeleine de
Scudéry was less pessimistic about the sharing of confidences between women
and men—and more optimistic about the possibility of cross-gender friendship. In
the “Story of Sapho” in Scudéry’s novel Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, Sapho and
Phaon brave obstacles to become each others’ (chaste) confidants.
Confidence was crucial not just to friendships between men and women, but
also to women’s writing. One of the obstacles on the road to confidence for Sapho
and Phaon, Shoemaker shows, is Phaon’s voyeuristic desire for her. To thwart
his untoward curiosity, Sapho controls his access to the meaning of her writing
with help from her confidants, Cydnon and Démocède. Shoemaker describes this
episode as an allegory for the publishing practices of many early modern women
writers. By making a dépôt of her work to a male confidant who would publish
it, Scudéry styled herself as an “enlightened amateur” rather than as a pedantic
femme savante. More generally, Shoemaker describes “confidence” as a key to
understanding the ethics of early prose fiction, wherein narrative is a private
speech act that constitutes the reader as a confidant.
The figure of the reader-friend invites us to collaborate, through our
interpretations, in the meaning of early modern friendship. At the same time,
it reminds us of the responsibility we bear in adjudicating that precious dépôt.
Montaigne’s exclusion of the reader in “Of Friendship” was anomalous in the
Essays and in the early modern period generally, when, as Shoemaker shows, it was
conventional to include the reader as a confidant. So too, perfect friendship was
anomalous in the time—and impoverished, as McGuire, Langer, and Hoffmann all
 Introduction 29

argue.106 Far more common and much richer were the friendships across difference
studied throughout our volume. The diversity of interpretations and creativity of
methodology on display in the following essays are testament to the variety and
inventiveness of the friendships in early modern France.

106
McGuire concludes his book on the theme of the “radical isolation” of “modern
friendship” (Friendship and Community, 425) exemplified in Montaigne’s “De l’amitié.”
Though we question the extent to which this essay is representative of Renaissance,
modern, or any other kind of friendship, Hoffmann certainly confirms McGuire’s claim
that for Montaigne, friendship (or the representation of friendship) “served as a refuge
for the individual rather than as a point of departure for involvement in [the] community”
(Friendship and Community, 424).
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 2
Was Montaigne a Good Friend?
George Hoffmann

Since Alan Bray first taught us to look at early modern friendship with new
eyes, Montaigne’s “Of friendship” has acquired a sort of canonical status. The
essay now figures as an exemplary witness of pre-modern European masculine
culture.1 Yet, as even the cursory reader will note, Montaigne’s essay is
exceptional—anomalous—in its unrestrained expression of feelings and idealism
regarding his dead friend Étienne de La Boétie: the Essays as a whole is far
better known for its skepticism and arch irony. Even if one avoids anachronistic
suspicions, as Gérard Defaux would have us do,2 the problem hardly dissolves.
Montaigne promotes the ideal of perfect friendship in ways quite uncharacteristic
for him and, I will argue, for his age.
My purpose is not to add directly to discussion of Montaigne’s proper place in
the history of early modern “passionate friendship,” much less challenge such a
history. Rather, I would like to raise a question of an entirely different order: how
well did Montaigne practice the friendship of which he could speak so movingly?
Just how good of a friend was he? Along the way, I hope to shed some new light
on the practical ends such idealistic friendships in fact fulfilled in the early modern
France of Montaigne’s time, uses which may go some way toward explaining
their popularity. Finally, I want to ponder how Montaigne transforms perfect
friendship’s practical, if hidden, function into a claim for absolute exclusivity that
breaks with the openness one generally finds in the rest of the Essays and must
ultimately lead one to qualify the popular impression of its author’s affability.

1
“Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History
Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 1–19, expanded and significantly modified in The Friend
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); see, also, Alan Stewart, Close Readers:
Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997). Studies on Montaigne that apply and extend Bray’s ideas include Marc
Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship from Classical Antiquity to
Early Modern France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), and Gary Ferguson, “Perfecting
Friendship: Montaigne’s Itch,” Montaigne Studies 9 (1997): 105–20, reprised, in longer
form, in Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 191–243. Jeffrey Mehlman anticipated some of these
developments in “La Boétie’s Montaigne,” Oxford Literary Review 4, no. 1 (1979): 45–61.
I thank Katherine Almquist, Rebecca Wilkin, and Michelle Miller for reading a draft of this
chapter and for their helpful suggestions.
2
Montaigne et le travail de l’amitié: Du lit de mort d’Étienne de La Boétie aux Essais
de 1595 (Orléans: Paradigme, 2001).
32 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

Naturally, one must return to his friendship with La Boétie and the circumstances
surrounding it. But, more importantly, one needs to examine how the ideal of
their friendship, as Montaigne posthumously celebrated it, continued to function
in his later life. How did it inform his interactions with the likes of Pierre de
Brach, Florimond de Ræmond, Étienne Pasquier, and Justus Lipsius? Whether
those interactions can be termed friendships—and whether his published ideal of
friendship would have allowed him to see them as such—proves a very real part
of the problem with Montaigne as a friend. The Montaigne that the record reveals,
contrary to what “Of friendship” would have us believe, suggests someone who
preferred to spend his time mentoring younger men and who enjoyed the company
of women: his wife, his daughter, and Marie de Gournay.

Why Did La Boétie Become Friends with Montaigne?

Who is it that says most, which can say more

Than this rich praise, that you alone are you.
—Shakespeare, sonnet 84

Discussion of the short-lived but apparently intense friendship with La Boétie

has tended to concern itself with Montaigne’s decision to remove his friend’s
masterpiece, The Will to Serve, from its originally projected place in the Essays,
immediately following “Of friendship.”3 This may well remain the decisive question
to settle, but one can nonetheless widen the scope of consideration to include a few
matters that bear on other issues. How did Montaigne and La Boétie meet, and
what can we ascertain about the rhythm and length of their encounters thereafter?

3
Montaigne initially intended his essay (and, perhaps, the Essays as a whole) to
present and frame La Boétie’s provocative political discourse for a reading public larger
than the confidential one among which it had circulated in manuscript during the preceding
two decades, Michel Simonin, “Œuvres complètes ou plus que complètes? Montaigne
éditeur de La Boétie,” Montaigne Studies 7, no. 1–2 (1995): 5–34. Did his elimination of
La Boétie’s work imply a covert disavowal of his friend’s incendiary proposals, or did the
conspicuous absence of The Will to Serve act rather as a pointed finger accusing France’s
repressive political climate? André Tournon, “Notre liberté volontaire: le Contre Un en
marge des Essais,” Europe 68, no. 729–30 (1990): 72–82. Did the rest of the Essays stand as
an elaborate framework within which Montaigne could entertain a sense of conversing with
his departed friend whose political ideas continued to haunt the central essays of each of its
three books? Michel Butor, Essais sur les Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); Patrick Henry,
“Return to the Tomb of La Boétie,” Montaigne in Dialogue: Censorship and Defensive
Writing. Architecture and Friendship, the Self and the Other (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri,
1987), 73–100. Or, did the Essays’ very bulk—which far outweighs “Of friendship,” even
had The Will to Serve been appended to it, and, indeed, outweighs the entire surviving
corpus of La Boétie’s writings—argue instead for a hidden rivalry between the two friends
in which Montaigne eventually surpassed his initially more talented and accomplished
friend? François Rigolot, “Montaigne’s Purloined Letters,” Montaigne: Essays in Reading,
ed. Gérard Defaux, Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 145–66.
 Was Montaigne a Good Friend? 33

Most crucially, what brought the two together? Asking what the two men might
have seen in each other reopens a question Montaigne sought to forestall with the
famous enigma: “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be
expressed, except by answering: because it was he, because it was I.”4
Although they knew each other by reputation, Montaigne and La Boétie’s
first encounter had to await a public event: “We sought each other out before
we met because of the reports we heard of each other … at our first meeting,
which by chance came at a great feast and gathering in the city.”5 Whatever the
pretext, Montaigne could have attended no official occasion in Bordeaux without
being identified with his father who, in addition to acting as mayor, had served
terms as alderman, provost, and vice-mayor of the city. Fathers loomed large in
early modern male friendships which often served both to perpetuate a patriarch’s
memory and perpetuate his family ties and alliances into the next generation.
As an orphaned son of an assistant to the seneschal in the small town of Sarlat,
La Boétie did not bring the same kind of social patrimony into his relation with
Montaigne. True, he could boast Parlement connections through his mother’s
family, and a prominent one in the person of his maternal uncle, Jean de Calvimont.

4
“Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l’aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer,
qu’en respondant: Par ce que c’estoit luy; par ce que c’estoit moy” (Les Essais de Michel de
Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and V[erdun]-L[ouis] Saulnier [Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1965], 188; trans. Donald M. Frame, The Complete Essays of Montaigne [Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1958], 139). Unless otherwise indicated, as here, all
translations are my own.
5
“Nous nous cherchions avant que de nous estre veus, et par des rapports que nous
oyïons l’un de l’autre … à nostre premiere rencontre, qui fut par hazard en une grande feste
et compagnie de ville” (I.28.188; 139). Lengths of time Montaigne later specified for the
duration of their friendship place its origin from 1554 to 1559, Donald Frame, Montaigne:
A Biography (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 344. A date toward the
later end of this range seems the more likely: Montaigne indicated that the Will To Serve
“me fut montrée longue piece avant que je l’eusse veu” (I.28.184; 136). Guy Demerson
has conclusively dated La Boétie’s discourse to circumstances arising from the Edict of
Fontainebleau in March of 1554 (not 1548 as Montaigne suggested and scholars have
often assumed), “Les exempla dans le Discours de la servitude volontaire: une rhétorique
datée?” Étienne de la Boétie: Sage révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin. Actes du Colloque
International, Duke University, 26–28 mars 1999, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Champion,
2004), 195–224. The “great feast” at which the two finally met could have corresponded to
the traditional election banquet on 1 August 1554, on the occasion of Montaigne’s father
being sworn into office as mayor of Bordeaux, as Katherine Almquist has suggested to me.
Or, opting for a later date, it might have marked either the visit to the city by the Duke of
Alba on 12 September 1559 or Elizabeth of France and Antoine de Navarre on 6 December
1559, Gabriel de Lurbe, Chronique Bourdeloise (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1594), 2nd ed.;
Jean Darnal, Chronique bourdeloise composee cy devant en latin par Gabriel de Lurbe.
Advocat en la Cour, Procureur & Syndic de la ville de Bourdeaus. Et par luy de nouveau
augmentée & traduite en François … Depuis continuée et augmentée par Jean Darnal
(Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1619), 43v–44r; Jean de Gaufreteau, Chronique bordeloise, ed.
Jules Delpit, 2 vols. (Bordeaux: G. Gounouilhou, 1876–1878), 1:88–90.
34 Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France

But in one of the few surviving records in which La Boétie expressed his feelings
for Montaigne, he begins by identifying Montaigne with his father, “To you, who
in your father’s footsteps are struggling / To climb the arduous paths to virtue.”6
Montaigne, himself, linked their friendship to his father, publishing in 1571 a
letter on La Boétie’s death as having been addressed to his father.
In addition to Montaigne’s father, his uncle, Raymond Eyquem de Bussaguet,
served as one of the senior counselors in the Parlement’s Grand’Chambre. A second
counselor, Richard de Lestonnac, had married Montaigne’s sister. Montaigne’s
cousin, Joseph d’Eymar, acted as one of the leading counselors in its First Inquest
Chamber. Another cousin, Antoine de Belcier, would shortly become a President
of Parlement; Montaigne’s mother’s cousin, Jean de Villeneuve, and his son,
Bertrand de Villeneuve, also served at Parlement. Like Montaigne’s father, most
of these relatives had held leading positions in the municipal administration, and
together, they formed one of the leading families of the urban patriciate.
Given such a highly endogamous setting,7 La Boétie could not have helped
but see in Montaigne an impressive array of associated family offices, municipal
positions, and inherited privileges. Conversely, Montaigne’s peers perceived
public administration not in terms of offices but the persons that occupied those
positions—more precisely, the families that owned them. When a counselor
purchased an office, it was considered not a transaction entered into by an individual
so much as an investment contracted by a family who wished to add the position
to its permanent patrimony. Thus bureaucracy did not appear an abstract entity to
sixteenth-century eyes, but more as components of various families’ property. Even

6
“An te paierais passibus arduos / luctantem honesti vincere tramites,” Ad Michaelem
Montanum, in Poemata, ed. James S. Hirstein, trans. Robert D. Cottrell, Montaigne Studies
3, no. 1–2 (1991): 20–21. Anne-Marie Cocula points to the Bordeaux Parlement’s resistance
to incorporating into its body members of short-lived Cour des Aides de Périgueux,
which included Montaigne, to argue that La Boétie would have enjoyed superior status to
Montaigne when they first met, Étienne de La Boétie (Bordeaux: Editions du Sud-Ouest,
1995), 86. But if one takes account of the sum of family connections and alliances, it seems
clear that Montaigne was better positioned among Bordeaux’s elite.
7
Although Montaigne would not marry Françoise de La Chassaigne for several years,
he was already related through marriage to her father (Raymond de Bussaguet’s brother-
in-law), a future President of Parlement, Joseph de La Chassaigne, son of Geoffroy de
La Chassaigne, who had himself been President since the early 1540s. When Geoffroy
returned after an absence to the Parlement in 1560, a rival complained that not only were
his son Joseph and son-in-law Raymond members of the body, but so were “plus de 40
parens ou allies,” letter from Christophe de Roffignac to Charles, cardinal of Lorraine,
4 December 1560, Archives Historiques de la Gironde 13 (1872): 144–5; Anne-Marie
Cocula, “Le Parlement de Bordeaux au milieu du XVIe siècle,” Étienne de La Boétie: Sage
révolutionnaire et poète périgourdin, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Champion, 2004), 421–36.
Nepotism proved such a problem that in one case brought before Parlement by Bordeaux’s
mayor, 54 out of the body’s 111 members were asked to recuse themselves because they
were related to him, Arrêt dated 9 December 1559, Archives Historiques du Département
de la Gironde 19 (1879), 468–72.
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Interesting
Incidents Connected With the Life of George
Bickers
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Interesting Incidents Connected With the Life of George

Bickers

Author: George Bickers

Release date: May 8, 2020 [eBook #62060]

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1882 G. S. Cook edition by David

Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTERESTING

INCIDENTS CONNECTED WITH THE LIFE OF GEORGE BICKERS ***
Transcribed from the 1882 G. S. Cook edition by David Price, email
[email protected]
Spes tutissima Cælis.

Interesting Incidents
Connected with the Life of
GEORGE BICKERS,

Originally a Farmer’s Parish Apprentice at

Laxfield, in Suffolk, but now
RESIDING IN OULTON,
In the same County,
Being an
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Of the above,
From 1809 to 1881,
Inclusive.

All Rights of Re-production reserved

Lowestoft:
G. S. Cook, Nelson Printing Works.
The writer of these pages was born at Laxfield, a village in the
County of Suffolk, on the 16th day of January, 1809, the forty-eighth
year of our good King George the Third’s happy reign. That eventful
day was to me the commencement of a long and sometimes tedious
journey: oftimes I have had to encounter great perils and dangers,
but out of all the Lord hath delivered me.
That eventful day witnessed the closing career of a great British
General, Sir John Moore, at Corunna, a seaport of Spain, whither he
had gone to take the command of the English forces, in order, if
possible, to relieve that unhappy country, then being sorely harassed
by the armies of Napoleon I., under the command of the Duke of
Dalmatia (Marshall Soult), but the campaign proved a failure,
resulting in the death of the Commander-in-Chief, and the re-
embarkation of the troops, with a loss of about eight hundred of our
countrymen, Soult being more than a match for the valour of British
arms on that memorable and trying occasion. But France was
destined to be humbled, and six years later on, Napoleon and his
generals felt the weight of British prowess at Waterloo.
I was the second son of my parents, Benjamin and Charlotte, poor,
but industrious people, my father being an agricultural labourer:
and, having but a slender income, yet felt a wish their children
should acquire a little education, which might prove useful to them
in their future stations in life under which they might be called.
When about four years of age, while one day playing in the road
with other children, near my father’s cottage, there happened to be
a horse, belonging to a miller of the name of Heffer, quietly feeding.
Being then (as since) very forward in mischief, I threw my cap at the
quiet creature, and then must needs go too near its heels to pick it
up; the sad consequence was I was kicked on the head, and my
right eye nearly perished, but, under the skilful treatment of Mr.
Alling, a surgeon in the village, my eyesight was preserved, and,
although I am writing more than sixty years later on, yet the scar
still remains, and also the seam in the bone is still perceptible. But
what of the poor horse? He came to grief very soon after, as one
day being loose in the stable, and the master, going in to take him
some food, omitted to shut the door, the horse ran out, and, before
the man could recover him, he was struck by one of the sails of the
windmill, and was killed thereby. This accident reminded the owner
of that dangerous machine that it would be much better to raise it
higher, which was soon after accomplished. And, perhaps, I may be
permitted to observe that, by the kind care of a watchful and loving
Jehovah, my life was preserved; and, in looking back, can praise the
Lord for His goodness, and for the care extended unto me at this,
the beginning of my journey of a long life.
The time had now arrived when school must be attended, and my
first schoolmaster was Mr. Benjamin Chenery, at that time clerk and
sexton of the parish, and was no ways sparing of the heads and
backs of his pupils, but we hope, on the whole, he followed a
rightful course, for he had in his vocation many grave and solemn
duties to perform, both as to the interment of the aged, as also the
education and training of the young.
Under the care and tuition of Benjamin, I first learned to read, to
write upon a slate, and do little sums, after having mastered the
figures. Easy spelling also came on, as a matter of course; and
there was no lack of errands to perform, as well for the mistress as
the master, and I occasionally assisted in sweeping up the church,
the chancel being occupied as a schoolroom during the summer
season, when fire was not needed, as the master was not usually at
a loss to supply a warming.
The churchyard, too spacious as it was, proved a most excellent
playground; there were plain spaces for marbles and tops, piers and
buttresses for hide-and-seek; graves, and stones, and tombs, to
jump over and jump from, without any restriction, and readily did we
unite in these healthful exercises, however dangerous or
mischievous they might be in other respects.
There was another school near, kept by Mr. John Goodwin; the pupils
were more advanced, some being farmers’ sons. That being a free
school, yet the master was allowed to take private pupils. Females,
also, were instructed, having a room to themselves opposite the
master’s desk, called the “Ladies’ Room.” The boys at those schools
were not allowed to play together, the smaller ones possessing the
protection of the sacred enclosure, which was at the larger ones’
peril to invade. We could see them at their play, as we looked
through the openings of the gate; and there was sometimes
displayed a germ of hostility among the youthful students.
In attending this school I was taught to read, and also easy spelling,
as before observed; then came little sums in addition, subtraction,
and multiplication. I soon became able to read in class; we daily
read the Psalms from the book of Common Prayer. We did not have
bible reading at this school, as many families at that time did not
possess the sacred volume, my parents being among that number;
but our immediate neighbours were in possession of a bible, and
were always willing to lend it to my parents of an evening, and the
owners, being aged people, would often invite me to stand and read
to them from their bible, of Adam and Eve, of Noah, of Abraham,
and Lot, of Isaac and Jacob, and also that remarkable narrative of
Joseph and his brethren. These exercises were to me helps in the
right direction. My master found I was getting on, and set me to
read to him pieces from history, principally from Goldsmith’s “Vicar of
Wakefield.” The closing paragraph of the 7th chapter I will here
insert, because, although more than sixty years have rolled away,
yet I well remember the concluding sentences. Here is a sample:—

“My wife now kept up the conversation, though not the

argument. She observed that several prudent men of our
acquaintance were freethinkers, and made very good
husbands. And she knew some sensible girls that had skill
enough to make converts of their spouses. ‘And who knows, my
dear,’ continued she, ‘what Olivia may be able to do? The girl
has a great deal to say upon every subject, and to my
knowledge is very skilled in controversy.’ ‘Why, my dear, what
controversy can she have read?’ cried I. ‘It does not occur to
me that I have ever put such books into her hands; you
certainly overrate her merit.’ ‘Indeed, papa,’ replied Olivia, ‘she
does not. I have read a great deal of controversy. I have the
disputes between Thwackum and Square, the controversy
between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the savage, and I am now
employed in reading the controversy in ‘Religious Courtship.’’
‘Very well,’ I cried I, ‘that’s a good girl; I find you are perfectly
qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to
make the gooseberry-pie.’”

And the master added, “you shall have a piece on’t, mister, when it
be enough.” I had wondered a hundred times in what book the
above passage could be found. At length the discovery was made,
and now the concluding portion of the 17th chapter, together with
the verses—six of them—have passed through my mind, in the
absence of something better, a great many times:—
 “‘It was within about four days of her (Olivia’s) intended nuptials
that my little family, at night, were gathered around a charming
fire, telling stories of the past, and laying schemes for the
future, busied in forming a thousand projects, and laughing at
whatever folly came uppermost.’ ‘Well, Moses, my boy, we shall
soon have a wedding in our family; what is your opinion of
matters and things in general?’ ‘My opinion is, father, that all
things go on very well, and I was just now thinking that when
sister Livy is married to Farmer Williams, we shall then have the
loan of his cider-press and brewing tubs for nothing.’ ‘That we
shall, Moses,’ cried I, ‘and he will sing us ‘Death and the Lady’ to
raise our spirits into the bargain.’ ‘He has taught that song to
our Dick,’ cried Moses, ‘and I think he goes through it very
prettily.’ ‘Does he so?’ cried I, ‘then let’s have it. Where is little
Dick? Let him up with it boldly.’ ‘My brother Dick,’ cried Bill, my
youngest, ‘is just gone out with sister Livy, but Mr. Williams has
taught me two songs, and I’ll sing them for you, papa. Which
song do you choose, ‘The Dying Swan,’ or ‘The Elegy on the
Death of a Mad Dog?’ ‘The elegy, child, by all means,’ said I. ‘I
never heard that yet, and Deborah, my life, grief you know is
dry; let us have a bottle of the best gooseberry wine to keep up
our spirits. I have wept so much at all sorts of late that,
without an enlivening glass, I am sure this would overcome me,
and Sophy, love, take your guitar, and thrum in with the boy a
little.”

This is then the sample of the taste of a master store the mind of a
young scholar; but we must have the “Elegy on the Death of a Mad
Dog:”

THE ELEGY, ETC.

Good people all, of every sort, give ear unto my song,
And if you find it won’drous short, it cannot hold you long.
In Islington there was a man, of whom the world might say
That still a godly race he ran whene’er he went to pray.
 A kind and gentle heart he had, to comfort friend and foe,
The naked every day he clad, when he put on his clothes;
And in that town a dog was found, as dogs there many be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, and curs of low
degree.
This dog and man at first were friends, but when a pique
began,
The dog, to gain some private ends, went mad and bit the man;
Around, from all the neighbo’ring streets, the wond’ring
neighbours ran,
And swore the dog had lost his wits to bite so good a man.
The wound it seemed both sore and sad to every Christian eye,
And while they said the dog was mad, they said the man would
die;
But soon a wonder came to light, that showed the rogues they
lied,
The man recovered of the bite—the dog it was that died.

The master did not attempt to enlighten me. At the close of the
elegy, he merely observed as approval, “Oh, the dog died, did he,
mister?” But no doubt Oliver Goldsmith could see something
underlying its surface, as there were then political dogs in Islington,
whose virulent bites were very painful; surely also, are there to be
found elsewhere in our day.
My neighbours were farmers on a small scale: they had a son to
whom I was much attached. They kept several cows, and a horse
named Depper. She was a useful creature, having carried me many
miles. I could spend many half-days with Depper, instead of being
at school, and I believe those in charge liked my company, so that
the time passed away. I had often little jobs to perform for the old
people which sometimes brought me a meal of good food; at other
times a good farmer’s cake, which was always a luxury; and I had
charge of the cows when they were fed in the lanes and roads. This
brought a few pence to my parents, so much needed in those days
of low wages—about eight or nine shillings per week when labourers
made full time.
It would have been a curious sight in our day, as then, to see the old
couple mounted upon Depper’s back, when they were going out to
see friends. A light cart was a scarce article in those days with small
occupiers (my neighbours had only a tumbril as a carriage); an
appliance called a pillion was fastened upon the rump of the horse,
and secured to the saddle, the greatest difficulty being to mount and
dismount; but that difficulty was overcome.
I have not yet done with my old friend Benjamin; perhaps he did not
trouble about my being absent for a week or two, if I did not return
a bigger dunce. He usually had some of that class to try his
patience. He appointed me many jobs, more to my mind than
studying in the school. The town clock required to be wound up, the
dial of which was at an elevation of about fifty feet, adorning the
south side of the old tower, with its four neat pinnacles. I was
appointed often to wind up the weights of that clock: the larger
weight requiring the power of two boys, with a crank as large as a
grindstone. Then, again, at funerals, the master would set me to
toll the church bell, the rope being so fixed upon its tongue that an
easy jerk would cause it to strike against the bell’s side, instructions
being given that when the procession arrived, and at a signal from
the master, ten strokes were to be given in quick succession, and
then immediately to cease. Then, again, after the funeral service
was over, the grave had to be filled in by willing hands, which was
after a time accomplished, the implements being afterwards stowed
away, and thus ended the school service of another day.
Four schoolboys were usually selected to convey the funeral bier to
the late residence of the deceased, sometimes half-a-mile or more
distant. Regardless of the solemnity of the occasion, we enjoyed the
outing, and were not in a very great hurry to return to our studies;
and perhaps the master did not trouble that we should, for I do not
remember to have heard him express much sorrow or inconvenience
respecting the absentees.
I continued to attend Benjamin’s school until I was about ten years
of age; at that time my parents thought they would like me to
attend the larger school, that my education might be forwarded
thereby. I learnt the inscription on the fly-leaf of master’s book,
which I had often read through. I could not remember the title.
The lines were these:

Whose book I am, if you wish to know,

By letters two I will you show;
The first is B, to all men’s sight,
The next is C, to spell it right;
But if you chance to spell amiss,
Look underneath, and here it is:
Benjamin Chenery.

Farewell! to my first schoolmaster, and gooseberry-pie book.

It was not very long before a vacancy occurred in the larger school,
and I was elected to fill up the gap. I felt somewhat timid, but that
soon wore off. I was placed at a desk with others, and had soon to
go in for sums in earnest. All had to be worked out on a slate, and,
when passed as correct, had to be set down in a book. This was our
morning work; afternoon we had Bible-reading in class, spelling, and
afterwards writing with ink in copy book. There was a very patient
usher of the name of George Bilney; but he was not there long after
I joined the school. The discipline here was more stringent; each
free scholar had to wear a badge of distinction, a school cap, to be
worn every Sunday, and to be present at church, two seats being set
apart for the boys of this school, under the supervision of the master
and his usher; and all absentees had to give a satisfactory account
on Monday mornings of the why’s and the wherefore’s, or feel the
weight of the cane in the master’s hand, however distasteful it might
be.
At this school I made progress; we were allowed to use
“Walkingame’s Tutor’s Assistant;” a great deal could be learnt from
this useful work. Said tables on Fridays, and also Church Catechism,
with hard and difficult spelling at the close thereof, and the first
three boys were rewarded with a ticket each. Often heavy tasks
were awarded for disobedience, and, altogether, the general routine
was one of forced vigilance, obedience, and activity, as no trifling
was permitted during school hours.
After a few months my being in this school, Mr. Bilney, the usher left,
and his place was subsequently filled by Mr. Benjamin Moulton, who
afterwards followed the occupation of an auctioneer and valuer, at
Woodbridge, in this county. I wrote to that gentleman in 1878,
enquiring if he was the same B. M. whom I had previously known at
Mr. Goodwin’s school. He returned an answer, thanking me for the
enquiry, that he was the same; that he was now about seventy years
of age; that his health was fair; and that there was at least one of
the old scholars who had thought about him; but said, also, he
never much liked the situation, so he did not much regret leaving
the village and its associations.
I attended at this school about one year and a half. There were a
better class of pupils (farmer’s sons) on the Opposition benches,
who were instructed in the higher rudiments, such as land
surveying, mapping, printing, English grammar. “English Reader,”
“Introduction,” and “Speaker” were books not prohibited to the free
boys, and, for one, I was very fond of reading them at every
opportunity, for we had the range of the school from twelve o’clock
till two, when all could play outside in fine weather very comfortably
together, regardless of station in life, as two in the same school were
my future young masters.
I continued to improve in the acquisition of knowledge, as there
taught, from Multiplication of Integers to Money, and so on, as in
subsequent rules; Division short and long, Reduction, Practice, and
“Rule of Three,” all requiring close attention to bring a “Good” mark,
implying the approval of the master or usher before any sum was
allowed to be entered in the book, and even that was a tedious
operation. There must be no mistakes, no blots, nor any smearing
on the surface; when the master came round, the cane accompanied
him, and sad woes were inflicted on the careless, which were not
soon forgotten.
But it came to be desired that I should begin to work more closely,
and earn my support, for most likely it was thought that a little help
in that direction was, no doubt, very needful, and being a final
decision, I left the school in that eventful year, 1820, and forthwith I
soon found my destiny was “buckle to work.” I have said “eventful”
year, in proof whereof here is an extract from the Evangelical
Magazine of that year:—“George III. died at Windsor Castle, on the
29th January, 1820 in his 82nd year. His son, the Duke of Kent,
expired a few days previous, at Sidmouth, in Devonshire, in the 53rd
year of his age, leaving an infant daughter—our good and virtuous
Queen.” Long may she reign.
The way is now apparently open for the Prince Regent to occupy the
throne, but the perplexing domestic troubles occupied the lawyers
and barristers more than twelve months ere the ground could be
anything like cleared; but the road in which I was destined to travel
was not so mystified. A master was found for me, in the person of
Mr. Simon Smyth, of Ubbeston, farmer. I was employed in hoeing,
weeding corn, picking grass, and such-like jobs. I was there ten
weeks, or about half that summer, and more happy was I than the
Prince Regent. My next master was Mr. Robert Scace, of Laxfield,
farmer, and was employed, first keeping sheep, then working in the
hay field, and other odd jobs which might present themselves to my
notice. I got on nicely with Mr. Scace, and after the hay season was
told that I might continue on, and board in the house during the
harvest, and have the same amount of money weekly. I was glad to
hear that, and never found it a source of regret to anyone. Those
were cheerful seasons to both men and boys, and for my own part I
felt that I was advanced to a post of honour when entrusted with
the commands of a horse or two, and was no longer compelled to go
about the fields gleaning, which occupation I so much disliked.
There was but one son in this family, but he had to work in harvest-
time, and bend down with the sickle, as with that instrument the
wheat-crop was reaped in those days, and it was my lot to assist
Master Robert, when he sought a little rest. He was a little older
than myself, being born in 1806. He lived near my parents’ dwelling,
and I was often allowed to play with him before we began to work.
His was but a short course. I have since read in Laxfield
Churchyard, near the porch, upon a stone, this inscription:

Robert Bullock Scace,

Born September 17th, 1806;
Died March 30th, 1853.

How quickly the four dozen years passed away!

The joyful harvest being completed, it was arranged that I should be
further detained to keep pigs and other stock in the fields from off
which the corn had been taken. This employment I was engaged in
for several weeks, being always supplied with a good dinner on each
Sunday, sent to the field from the farmer’s table, which was very
much enjoyed and welcomed, these and such-like comforts which
came to me on the Day of Rest.
I know not how long I might have continued here, but Michaelmas
drew on, and it was agreed that I should go into service, at a farm-
house in the parish. This did not give to me at first a very
favourable impression, but undoubtedly it was the right way into a
“city of habitation.” Thenceforth, on the 11th day of October, 1820.
I was received into the family of Mr. John Garrard, of Laxfield, to be
trained and disciplined as a veritable farmer’s boy, and held myself
ready to obey any instructions and orders that might be presented.
My training commenced, I did not at all dislike my new
acquaintances, and after a few days felt quite at home in my new
position. There was plenty of work, plenty of food, and a goodly
supply of company.
The family consisted of the master, mistress, four sons, and five
daughters. There were also a man-servant, a maid servant, and
myself. Later on there came into the family a nephew, who was
called Jonathan, and frequently the master called him “Jonter.” His
father was brother to the master, and having died April 22nd, 1811,
aged 29 years, left him and a sister to the frowns of an ungodly
world, as also to the care of their mother, who removed from
Laxfield, to a place called Hartley Row, in the county of Hants, there
to revive old associations or to form new ones, and in those
engagements it did seem Jonathan could be spared from his mother,
then being about sixteen years of age when he came to live with his
uncle.
As regards myself, my business was to do what every one of the
others left undone, and bear the blame for all; but was so far
favoured, there was a standing rule that no stripes were to be
administered but by the hands of the master, so that, on the whole,
amongst bulls and cows, pigs and sows, children and chickens, and
other bipeds, and quadrupeds, I was not very lonely, and sometimes
felt, after having to endure some pain and privation, occasioned by
the terrible sharp wintry storms that prevailed, I could go on my way
rejoicing.
Things went on, as far as I could observe, pretty easy. The
establishment was a hive of industry; all that were able must work,
and good it was for us to be superintended by a good and careful
master and mistress. About this time, the eldest son, John, was
married, and left us. The second son, George, was bound
apprentice to Mr. Kent, of Beetles, a brazier and tin-plate worker.
The maid-servant was discharged at the next coming Michaelmas,
and I had to learn to milk the cows, and carry the milk into the dairy,
and empty it into the places assigned for its reception. Two of the
daughters, Emma and Caroline, were now requested to assist their
mother in the duties of the house, while the three youngest
daughters and youngest son, Jesse, were continued at school, so
being prepared to occupy the vacant places when the elder ones
left.
But we must have a word or two respecting the new king, George
IV. He had been so proclaimed in London and the provinces, but by
reason of unhappy differences subsisting between the king and his
royal consort, a fixed aversion and a formal separation had taken
place. He had ordered her name to be struck off the Liturgy when
Princess of Wales!
It was said she had raised a favourite Italian, in her employ, from an
humble station, to one of honour; had instituted a new order of
knighthood called the Order of St. Caroline; had decorated this
person with the insignia of that order, and had in other respects
acted in a manner unbecoming a British princess, which brought
upon her the continued displeasure of the king. He ordered
evidence to be taken against her, and it was determined she should
be brought to trial by the peers of the realm. This trial, which lasted
fifty-three days, being ended, violent debates took place in the
House of Lords on the principle of the Bill, and the proposed
measure of depriving the queen, of her title, prerogatives, rights,
and privileges, formally abandoned. This was hailed as a complete
acquittal by her friends, and was celebrated as such by public
rejoicings and illuminations, reaching my parish.
But the King’s anger was not appeased. The 19th day of July, 1821,
was the day fixed for the coronation service. It was said to have
been a magnificent ceremony, surpassing anything that had ever
occurred on former occasions. But the queen, who had repeatedly
applied to have a place appointed for her to see the ceremony, on
going to the Abbey was refused admittance by the door-keepers,
they not daring to let anyone pass who had not a coronation ticket.
Thus mortified and humbled, she returned to her house, and the
impression it made on her mind was never eradicated. Harassed by
severe and bitter trials, she was seized with a sudden illness, which
baffled the skill of her physicians, and on the 7th August she
breathed her last, being in the fifty-fourth year of her age, her body
being conveyed to Brunswick, and deposited in the vault of her
ancestors.
But, perhaps, the narration of those circumstances would seem to be
a digression, yet they are to my mind full of interest, and so closely
interwoven among my early associations that I cannot easily pass
over them. I well remember the exhibition which took place in my
native village. On one of the large painted pictures was displayed a
figure of the queen in her robes, and beneath was the brilliant
motto,

“Regina” still, in spite of them,

Here then we rest. The universal cause
Acts to one end, but acts by various laws;
Let this great truth be present night and day,
But most be present if we preach or pray.
Pope’s Essay on Man.

There was nearly as much for me to do on a Sunday, during the

winter season, as on other days; the cattle must be fed; turnips
within, and straw without, must be placed ready for the cows to eat,
and the fat pigs were to be attended to, of which there was a good
number, but sometimes I had an opportunity of going to chapel, on
an afternoon, when my work was forward; and there were reading
services in the family on Sunday evenings, implying there was a
desire to serve and obey the true and living God.
Thus much for a beginning. I soon learned to drive the tumbril, the
harrow, the roller, and the wagon, and was, perhaps, nearly as
useful as was expected to be; and on one occasion the master made
me draw a furrow across a field with a pair of horses, he following,
and pronounced himself satisfied with the result.
During my sojourn here, I was several times mercifully preserved
from death. On one occasion I was driving a loaded tumbril from
the yard, where it was filled, to the manure heap, about a quarter-
of-a mile on the road, and then on to the meadow. A horse which I
was using, a wild young creature, annoyed by the flies, started off as
soon as I got upon his back. I was quite powerless, and lost all
control over him. He went at full gallop straight home, and though a
cart shed, that was standing by the road-side, having beams across,
and so constructed that there was little height more than was
required for an empty wagon. I pressed my head down as low as I
could, and the interposing mercy of my God preserved me, or I
should have been dashed to pieces. The horse ran quite through,
and then stopped as if by magic. The men came out of the yard,
seeing the danger, and expected to have seen me killed, or seriously
injured; but neither myself nor the horse suffered any harm. I did
not think much about it at the time, but I have many times looked
back with a thankful heart.—“Thou shalt remember all the way the
Lord thy God hath led thee.”
Another instance of great danger I will relate. One summer’s
morning, being ordered to fetch the cows from the meadow,
amongst them being a furious bull, I found on my arrival that one of
the cows had calved during the night, close to which the dangerous
male had taken up a position. I hastened home with the rest, and
told the master what I had seen. It was considered that if I had
attempted to drive him he might have killed me. The master
directed me to take the barrow, and he would go with me to the
meadow, and take with him a hay-fork. We went and found them as
I have stated, and no sooner had I placed the barrow near the bull
than the infuriated creature at once drove at me, and knocked me
down, but the master beat him off, and I was thus preserved from
further danger at that time, and escaped unharmed.
At another time, later on, the same beast attacked me in the cow-
yard, drove me against the faggots, and had got me completely in
his power. My peril was witnessed by Josh Miles, who was thrashing
in a barn. He came with his flail—a very formidable instrument—and
the beast fled immediately, and leaped over a high gate like a
hunting horse, and then looked about him for the next point of
attack. These, then, are some of the deliverances extended unto me
by the great and unceasing favour of my God, for the which I desire
to be devoutly thankful.
I am unable to enumerate all the dangers from which I have been
providentially delivered. That same horse which ran away with me
kicked me afterwards in the side, but my hand caught the blow, and
thus warded off serious injury. I was accustomed to have one-
footed kicks from the cows, but found the horse struck out with
more effect. Another peril was: As myself and one of my young
masters (Suffolk) were scarifying a pea-stubble field we had two
horses at length, and took turns, one to ride on the scarifier, and the
other to drive the horses. We were going on very cheerful and
comfortable, when, suddenly, something distasted the fore horse,
and it came round to where I was sitting, and was entangled among
the counters with the horse’s feet. In the fright and the danger we
had some little difficulty to extricate the poor horse, but we did
accomplish it. I escaped with a few slight scratches on my hands
and legs, and what was better the horse was not much hurt, so that
ultimately we were able to accomplish our work, and to give an
account of our mishap to the master, without incurring much blame.
Here, again, I feel good cause for thankfulness that I was so
mercifully preserved, so that—

“I muse on the years that are past,

Wherein my defence Thou hast proved,
Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
A sinner so signally lov’d.”—Toplady.

I might here be permitted to state my master, Mr. Garrard, at this

time, occupied a small farm in the parish of Stradbroke, distant
about three miles, to which myself and others were often sent, to do
different kinds of work, such as putting in the corn with the drill,
sometimes getting in a good lot of turnips, at other times getting up
the hay and the corn in harvest, when we had a wagon to be
conveyed through the pleasant journey. Adjoining our farm was one
occupied by Mr. William Davey, and he also kept a lad a year or two
older than myself. He felt himself sometimes aggrieved, because he
had so much to do in waiting upon his young masters, so he thought
he would cut the matter short, and, being sorely irritated, he got up
Welcome to Our Bookstore - The Ultimate Destination for Book Lovers
Are you passionate about books and eager to explore new worlds of
knowledge? At our website, we offer a vast collection of books that
cater to every interest and age group. From classic literature to
specialized publications, self-help books, and children’s stories, we
have it all! Each book is a gateway to new adventures, helping you
expand your knowledge and nourish your soul
Experience Convenient and Enjoyable Book Shopping Our website is more
than just an online bookstore—it’s a bridge connecting readers to the
timeless values of culture and wisdom. With a sleek and user-friendly
interface and a smart search system, you can find your favorite books
quickly and easily. Enjoy special promotions, fast home delivery, and
a seamless shopping experience that saves you time and enhances your
love for reading.
Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and
personal growth!

ebookgate.com