The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

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The Dynamics of Gender 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:

Representing Judith in Early Modern French Literature

Kathleen M. Llewellyn

Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800

The Cloister Disclosed
Barbara R. Woshinsky

Publishing Women’s Life Stories in France, 1647–1720

From Voice to Print
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith

Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France

Mastering Memory
Faith E. Beasley

The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France

Print, Rhetoric, and Law
Lyndan Warner
The Dynamics of Gender in
Early Modern France
Women Writ, Women Writing

Domna C. Stanton
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
© Domna C. Stanton 2014

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.

Domna C. Stanton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author 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:

Stanton, Domna C., author.
The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing / by
Domna C. Stanton.
pages cm. — (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-4201-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4724-4202-4 (ebook)—
ISBN 978-1-4724-4203-1 (epub)
1. French literature—16th century—History and criticism 2. French literature—17th
century—History and criticism 3. Gender identity in literature. 4. Women and literature—
France—History—16th century. I. Title.
PQ239.S73 2015
840.9’003—dc22
2014012049
ISBN: 9781472442017 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781472442024 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN: 9781472442031 (ebk – ePUB)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
 contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments x

introduction   1

Part I Women Writ

1 recuperating Women and the man Behind the screen: (Un)classical

Bodies in Les caquets de l’accouchée (1622)?   37
2 The Daughters’ Sacrifice and the Paternal Order in Racine’s Iphigénie
en Aulide   63
3 The Female Mind Reformed:Pedagogical Counter-Discourses,
Radical and Regressive, Under Louis XIV   89

Part II Women Writing

4 The Heroine at War: Self-Divisions in La Guette’s “Extraordinary”

memoirs    123
5 From the Maternal Metaphor to Metonymy and History:
Seventeenth-Century Discourses of Maternity and the Passion of
Mme de Sévigné   149
6 Overreading, Without Doubt:Ambiguity and Irony in La Princesse
de Montpensier   179
Afterword   207

Bibliography   215
Index   245
This page has been left blank intentionally
 list of illustrations

cover abraham Bosse, Les femmes à table en l’absence de leurs maris

(Women at Table when Their Husbands Are Absent), c. 1635–1636.
museum of fine arts, Boston. legend: While our husbands go off
and give themselves free rein / and take their pleasure in town or in
the fields, My Ladies, let’s have our banquet (Tandis que nos Maris
s’en vont donner carrière / Et prendre leurs plaisirs à la ville ou
au champs, / Mes Dames, banquetons)

i.1 Peter Paul rubens, Le bonheur de la Régence (The Happiness

of Regency). scala / art resource, ny. 8

i.2 abraham Bosse, La vraye femme (The Real Woman).

Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 15

i.3 abraham Bosse, Contentement d’une dame noble (Contentment

of a Noble Lady). Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 20

1.1 abraham Bosse, Visite à l’accouchée (Visit to the Woman

Lying-in), 1633. museum of fine arts, Boston. 43

1.2 Charles Estienne,“La partie interieure de l’arrierefaiz …” (“The

Interior Part of the Afterbirth …”). From La dissection des
parties du corps humain divisé en trois livres (The Dissection
of the Parts of the Human Body, Divided into Three Books)
(Paris: Simon de Colines, 1546). New York Academy of
Medicine Library, Rare Book Room. 47

2.1 illustration from Jean racine, Oeuvres (Paris: Thierry, 1679),

reprint of (Paris: Barbin, 1676), opposite p. 232. Book Division,
the New York Public Library. 66

3.1 abraham Bosse, La maîtresse d’école (The School Mistress),

1638(?). Snark / Art Resource, NY. 95

3.2 Jean sauvé, after Pierre Brissart, frontispiece to Les femmes

savantes (The Learned Women), from Les oeuvres de monsieur
de Molière (Paris: Thierry, Barbin & Trabouillet, 1682). In the
Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State University
Libraries. 97
viii The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

4.1 Frontispiece of La Gallerie des Femmes Fortes (The Gallery of

Strong Women) by Pierre Le Moyne, published in Paris, 1647
(engraving), Cortona, Pietro da (Berrettini) (1596–1669)
(after). Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal, Paris, France / The
Bridgeman Art Library. 127

4.2 Claude Deruet, Portrait equestre d’ Alberte Barbe Ernecourt,

Dame de Saint Balmont (Equestrian Portrait of Alberte Beard
Ernecourt, Lady Saint Balmont), 1640(?).© RMN-Grand Palais /
Art Resource, NY. 129

5.1 Frontispiece to Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London:

T. and R. Cotes, 1631). Huntington Library, San Marino
California. 154

5.2 Adrian van der Spieghel, Pregnant Woman with Fetus and
Placenta Displayed in De formato foetu, 1626. Legend: “Femme
enceinte dans un paysage [planche anatomique d’une femme
gravide, écorché] (“Pregnant Woman in a Landscape [anatomical
plate of a pregnant woman, écorché].”) New York Academy of
Medicine Library. 155

5.3 Louis le Nain, Le repos de la sainte famille (The Rest of the

Holy Family). From Tout l’oeuvre peint des Le Nain, edited by
Pierre Rosenberg. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. 156

5.4 Louis le Nain, La famille heureuse (The Happy Family, or the

Return Following the Baptism), 1642. © RMN-Grand Palais /
Art Resource, NY. 157

5.5 Louis le Nain, Intérieur paysan au vieux joueur de flageolet

(Peasant Interior with an Old Flute Player), c. 1642. Kimball
Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas / Art Resource, NY. 158

5.6 Georges de la Tour, Le nouveau-né (The Newborn Child)

[Nativity], c. 1645. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. 159

5.7 Pierre Mignard, La famille de Louis de France, fils de Louis XIV,

dit “le Grand Dauphin” (The Family of Louis de France, the Son
of Louis XIV, Called “le Grand Dauphin”), 1687. © RMN-Grand
Palais / Art Resource, NY. 160
 List of Illustrations ix

5.8 Louis Ferdinand (The Younger) Elle, Portrait de Françoise

d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon avec sa nièce
Françoise-Amable d’Aubigné, future Duchesse de Noailles
(Portrait of Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon with
Her Niece Françoise-Amable d’Aubigné, the Future Duchesse de
Noailles), c. 1688. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 161

6.1 Final page of La Princesse de Montpensier. Bibliothèque

Nationale de France, MS 1561. 196

6.2 La Princesse de Montpensier (Paris: T. Jolly, 1662) (first

published edition), p. 142. Book Division, the New York Public
Library. 197
 acknowledgments

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France represents decades of making

and remaking. courses, seminars, dissertations, lectures, conferences, papers and
essays in embryonic and slowly more elaborated forms have all played their parts
in the readings and thinking embedded in this work. it has been shaped by the
students, colleagues, scholars, critics and theorists i have worked with, and whose
ideas are incorporated with grateful thanks in the body and notes of the book’s
chapters. The acknowledgments of my indebtedness are, of course, impossible
to enumerate fully. i begin with abby Zanger for her enthusiastic support in
submitting the manuscript to ashgate, for its series on Women and Gender in
the early modern Period; then with erika Gaffney for shepherding me
through the acquisition process with expertise, flexibility and efficiency; next,
editor seth f. hibbert for his knowledge and support throughout the editorial
process; finally, copyeditor Rachel Martens for her attentive, detailed work on the
manuscript. i am grateful to sheryn Goldenhersch, my able and devoted assistant
in life and work, to Amy Martin for her unflagging help with bibliography, library
work, copy editing, illustrations, and computer literacy, and to lucie chloe
Rousseau for her assistance in navigating permissions from French institutions.
Thanks, as ever, to alexandra and sam, whose supportive understanding of
workaholism comforts me, and whose love gives me daily joy.
Early drafts of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared under the titles of “Recuperating
Women and the man Behind the screen,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early-
Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, edited by James Grantham Turner
(cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1993), 247–65, and “from the
maternal metaphor to metonymy and history: seventeenth-century Discourses
of maternity and the case of sévigné,” in The Mother in/and French Literature,
french literature series 27 (2000): 1–32. i thank the editors of those publications
for their knowledge and help.
 introduction

Terms such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are notoriously changeable; there are
social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon
geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and
for what purpose. That the terms recur is interesting enough, but the recurrence
does not index a sameness, but rather the way in which the social articulation
of the term depends upon its repetition … Terms of gender designation are thus
never settled once and for all but are constantly in the process of being remade.1

in Butler’s Undoing Gender (2004), unlike her earlier work, gender figures
prominently as “an historical category” whose “framework for understanding how
it works is multiple, shifts through time and place … and is open to a continual
remaking” (9–10). at any point in time, the prescriptions of gender, embodied
in “masculine” and “feminine,” and by extension the set of terms that make up
their semantic networks, constitute an historical norm, a distinctive regulatory
and disciplinary regime that Butler examines in Undoing Gender. Gender norms
exceed human subjects in the broader sociality, they govern our intelligibility
and determine our social recognition (11, 32, 41); as Butler writes, “[we] depend
on there being norms of recognition that produce and sustain our viability as
human” (33). Thus we cannot do without norms, but the fact that their forms are
historically changeable and that they need to be sustained by constant repetition
means that they only persist “to the extent that they are acted out in social practice
and reidealized and reinstituted in and through” the rituals of daily life (48, 207).
This, then, “provides the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we
have” and the site where norms can be challenged and transformed over time (33).
at this normative juncture, the dynamics of history in Undoing Gender
dovetails with Butler’s dominant concern, in both her earlier and more recent
works, for setting out the limits of constructionism and delineating the critical
place of human agency—arguably, the central issue of our post-modern times.
however, this agential resistance to regulatory regimes is problematically
articulated in Butler’s work, in my view. in Undoing Gender, for example, she
suggests that if “gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and
feminine are produced and naturalized,” then “gender might very well be the
apparatus by which such terms are deconstructed and denaturalized. indeed, it may
be that the very apparatus that seeks to install the norms also works to undermine
that very installation, that the installation is, as it were, definitionally incomplete”
(42). Although definitional incompleteness makes sense in a specific historical
context, it is more difficult, I believe, to situate agency in “the apparatus” itself and
to account for its workings. in so doing, Butler aims to foreclose the presence of
a subject engaged in denaturalization prior to its coming into gendered existence,
but she does not explain why and how one self denaturalizes gender and another
2 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

does not; she asserts the historical determination of “‘one’s own’” sense of gender
in relation to existing “social norms … that support and enable the act of claiming
gender for oneself” (7), but she does not describe the complex acts and processes
involved in this claiming of gender for “oneself.”
The same problem appeared in the closing chapter of Gender Trouble (1989)
where, in a move that recalls Lévi-Strauss, Butler describes agency as a kind of
bricolage. Affirming that “there is no self that is prior to … its entrance into [the]
… cultural field,” she claims that “[there] is only a taking up of the tools where
they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there” (185),
without explaining, yet again, the nature of this enabling nor the constellation of
factors that account for who does the taking up and who—what subject—does
not. From Gender Trouble on, and in the quote from Undoing Gender with which
I began, Butler also insists on the agential possibilities of the repetition of norms,
where “the injunction to be a given gender” produces a variety of “incoherent
configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction,” and thus
represent failures of the regulatory norm and make possible “a subversion of
[gender] identity.”2 And yet, variety, multiplicity, even proliferation (41–2) do not
necessarily produce an “incoherence” that in turn allows for a defiance of norms,
since variable constructs can be part and parcel of the sign system that makes up the
“masculine” and the “feminine” at a particular historical moment; indeed, Butler
recognizes that repetition per se is not subversive; on the contrary, it can further
attach and subjugate human subjects (GT xxi, 76–7, 178–89).3 Nevertheless, I
would agree with Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) that when normative
gender identity is figured as always already comprising ambiguities as well as
contradictions, this does engender “incoherences” that can be exposed, explored
and exploited to make the norm a contested site of meaning.4 In that circumstance,
then, we can speak of what Butler calls “recirculation,” “resignification” (GT 41–
3, 184)5 and, after Irigaray (and Derrida), “citationality” as a miming that is critical
of dominant (gender) scripts. Discussing the ambiguities of Irigaray’s concept of
miming, Butler’s Bodies that Matter observes that the author of Speculum, From
the Other Woman (1974) “performs a repetition and displacement of the phallic
economy. This is citation, not as enslavement or simple reiteration of the original,
but as an insubordination that appears to take place within the very terms of the
original” (45).6
Although Butler iterates the subversive possibilities of repetition and
resignification in other works, in The Psychic Life of Power (1997) she also cites
and resignifies Foucault’s “reverse (or counter-) discourse” to deploy yet another
instance of resistant agency that is meaningful for gender analysis, even though
such analysis did not preoccupy Foucault.7 The concept first appears in History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1: in Foucault’s much debated analysis, power does not emanate
from some central site—such as a sovereign—but rather, it represents an immanent
“multiplicity of force relations … produced from one moment to the next … in
every relation from one point to another … [and] that comes from everywhere
… force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states
 Introduction 3

of power … [that] are always local … unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable and

tense.”8 But power is also productive of “the process which, throughout ceaseless
struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses” these force
relations (92). For Foucault, the very existence of power relations “depends on a
multiplicity of points of resistance,” a “swarm” of “mobile and transitory points”
that do not only represent “a reaction or rebound … an underside that is in the end
always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat” (96). On the contrary, power relations
are modified over time by “continual shifts,” some strengthened some weakened,
“so that there has never existed one type of stable subjugation, given once and for
all” (97, 99).
In this process, one of power’s most productive forces is to generate discursive
forms of knowledge (savoir-pouvoir). Foucault describes the discursive
possibilities of opposing and undermining power, which is always fragile:

We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby
discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance,
a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing
strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also
undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it
… there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same
strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from
one strategy to another, opposing strategy. (101–2)

Pursuing this multivalent view of discourse’s relation to power in the construction

of human subjects, Foucault concludes that the marginalized—the hermaphrodite,
the homosexual, for instance—can engage in “the formation of a ‘reverse
discourse’,” through which subjects can speak on their own behalf to demand
legitimacy, even by enlisting the same categories that rendered them unintelligible,
illegitimate in the first instance (HoS1 101).9
In evoking these Foucaultian unstable and shifting power relations that
generate resistances to (gender) norms, Butler defines reverse discourse as one
“possibility of subversion or resistance … in the course of subjectivation” (Psychic
Life 92–3). And in resignifying this interlocked notion of power-and-resistance,
she introduces a (gendered) subject always “in the process of being produced, it
is repeatedly produced (which is not the same as being produced anew again and
again),” adding her own emphasis on a constant, historical process of “repetition
with a difference” and a proliferation of resistant effects: “It is precisely the
possibility of a repetition which does not consolidate … the subject, but which
proliferates effects that undermine the force of normalization. The term which …
forms and frames the subject … mobilizes a reverse discourse against the very
regime of normalization by which it is spawned” (93).
These notions of unstable historical norms of gender, and the possibilities for
resisting and resignifying them in and through shifting contextual power relations
undergird The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France and are embodied in
the idea of a dynamics—a seventeenth-century term coined by Gottfried Leibnitz
4 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

(1646–1716) in studying the forces that impel motion and the interactions between
bodies in collision working to remove obstructions, a problem that preoccupied
New Scientists and philosophers from Descartes and Hobbes to Newton and
Kant.10 The set of readings that make up the six chapters of this book center
on the French seventeenth century, with forays back into the sixteenth and
fifteenth centuries and forward to the eighteenth (c. 1715), examine the textual
conjunctures and negotiations of, and the accommodations and resistances to,
unstable and changing contextual gender norms, themselves fraught with tensions
and contradictions. Building on Butler’s and Foucault’s constructs, which I also
rework, I cast the norms of gender emblematically as a normative repertory of
types (each with constituent concepts) that coexist (and conflict) at any particular
historical moment. These types, whose semes, to put it in stark binary terms,
have positive connotations in some cases, negative in others, are contained in the
usages and practices of different actors who are all socially legible, and who can
take up (repeat with a difference), cite and resignify them counter-discursively.
In this repertory of terms, individual meanings for types shift over time, and the
repertory itself proliferates or contracts in different discourses—legal, economic
and political, religious and cultural, scientific and medical, for example—and
manifests internal incongruities and contradictions. In what constitutes their
own process of constant formation and re-formation, human subjects act to make
certain normative choices among the available normative options, and not others,
a practice whose etiology still and always remains opaque, Butler to the contrary
notwithstanding. Nevertheless, the early-modern texts (and discourses) on which
I focus inscribe the overt and covert factors that account for accommodations,
negotiations and resistances, in ways that make textuality particularly revelatory
for (re)constructing the workings of gender norms. In the early-modern works
I examine, subjects can repeat with (some) difference, depending on contextual
freedoms and limitations within a horizontal of expectations and possibilities, and
thus can effectuate resignifications and subversions, some more salient and more
consequential than others. Indeed, it could be argued that the repetition of—or
conformity to—one or more normative notions of gender, a repetitiveness that a
gender system requires to sustain itself and that a subject needs to be recognizably
human, represents the contingent precondition in texts for the articulation and
practice of (some degree of) resistance and oppositional differentiation—a
dynamic, dialectical process that is truly “never settled once and for all.”
In the seventeenth century, this process of gender conformity, negotiation
and resistance is embodied in the querelle des femmes, a debate that involved
thousands of works and lasted over several centuries—some would say, to this
very day. In its pre-Revolutionary forms, it has wrongly been characterized, in my
view, as a static repetition of the same tired arguments about women, as Kelly, for
example, argued in an early and still highly influential essay.11 As Butler rightly
suggests, however, the mere recurrence of a term does not index sameness; after
all, the articulation is embedded in a different historical and social context and
may have different speakers with different goals (UG 10). Already established in
 Introduction 5

the writings of medieval clerics, views on the nature, characteristics and capacities
of women were both iterated and questioned throughout the early modern period,
as men and women reworked—and were reworked—by gender norms in their
responses to specific local and societal developments and events. A basic set of
binary oppositions pitted critics against advocates des femmes, and propounded
conflicting views of the proper or potential role in culture and society of le sexe,
as the second sex was reductively known, in both dominant discourses and
counter- or reverse discourses. To be sure, it is difficult to characterize the “two
sides” of this querelle, much less all the intervening sides that subjects take up in
particular discourses and texts. Since “feminist” and “anti-feminist” are, of course,
anachronistic, I choose, as a convenient short-hand, albeit unsatisfactory solution,
the term “misogynistic” for what are contextually, negative, even hate-filled
representations of women, which often contain clichés about le sexe ranging from
the imbecilic and the demonic to the modest, unloquacious saintly female who
accepts authority and her ordained place in the private sphere. Now “misogynist”
is used in the ancient works of Antipater, Chrysippus, Gallen and Menander,
with which the learned in the seventeenth century would be familiar; and in the
early modern period, the ironically entitled The Praise of Women (La louange des
femmes, 1550), features the writer, Andre Misogyne; in fact, Edmond Huguet’s
Dictionnaire de la langue française du XVIe siècle defines misogyne as “Enemy
of women” and quotes Jean de Marcouville’s Bonté et mauvaisité des femmes
(c. 1560): “That’s the way that misogynous men and enemies of the feminine
sex, thinking they were acting in their own favor and against women, turned to
the praise and exaltation of women,” probably a reference to the querelle des
femmes.a12 On the other side, and equally problematic, I favor, “pro-woman,” an
empty signifier that can assume meanings only in relation to hommes at a particular
historical moment, here the French seventeenth century, and in resistance to—and
deviation from—dominant discourses, which were essentially conservative and
yes, misogynistic. Both, however, are subject to historical (and dynamic) shifts of
meaning within the time frame I examine in this book.
And yet, these early-modern gender wars should more properly be named
la querelle des femmes et des hommes. Even though there was no formalized
querelle des hommes, there was in relation to women and by contiguity, an
extensive discourse on the excellence and frailty, the dignity and misery of man,
as Warner has shown for the French Renaissance, and as the emerging field of
masculinity studies for the French early modern period confirms.13 Both genders

a
“Voila comment cela que les mysogines et ennemis du sexe feminine pensoient
faire pour eux à l’encontre des femmes est tourné à la louange et exaltation d’icelles.”
In The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France, all translations are mine unless
otherwise indicated. Only translated passages from early-modern French works that are a
sentence or more in length and that are cited in the body of a chapter’s text will be footnoted;
those cited in the endnotes will be preceded there by their English translation. Where I have
revised a published translation to provide a more accurate version, I bracket these changes.
6 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

in the seventeenth century were “an ambivalent commodity,” to cite Roper’s

term,14 both “women” and “men” were contested notions and were defined and
redefined in relation to each other according to numerous and shifting contextual
factors. Thus it is important not to impose a single dominant interpretation of
men, masculinity and the male body against which a fully constructed, victimized
female is set. As Mclive’s “Masculinity on Trial” argues, male privilege was
linked to proof of potency and the capacity to engender progeny. But in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sodomitical monarch, Henry III (1551–
1589), had no children and thus became the last of the Valois rulers; and Louis
XIII (1610–1643) did not father an heir for some twenty some years after his
marriage to Anne of Austria for reasons that the Historiettes of Tallemant des
Réaux (1619–1692) attributed in part to his distaste for sexual coupling with
the queen and yet again, to sodomitical tendencies. This generative inability,
coupled with a protracted difficulty to procreate produced a crisis of sovereignty
that potentially also emasculated the emerging nation. On a more private level,
that the granting of divorce was predicated on proving the husband’s impotence
placed enormous strains on men to perform under the surveillant eyes of medical
and juridical authorities, as Darmon’s Le tribunal de l’impuissance shows. This
institutionalized ritual also contributed to the notion of perilous male bodies that
could be, as McLive concludes, unstable, uncertain, opaque and equivocal, and
thus the source of anxieties.15 This is not to deny the marked privileges of (elite)
masculinity in the early modern period, and the new patriarchal rights of the
father as head of the family over mothers and children, a status that reflected and
sustained the widely propagandized notion of the king as father to his people,
what Hanley has called the family-state compact.16 But it is to question the
longstanding idea that the male aristocracy was emasculated during the reign of
Louis XIV. Recent studies have properly highlighted the complex ways in which
the monarchy made sure to maintain the nobility’s prerogatives, even as its stature
was compromised by the creation of la noblesse de robe to fill the monarchy’s
emptied coffers, and by the appointments of bourgeois to important royal offices,
which became hereditary over time as their holders’ fortunes grew exponentially
in comparison to la noblesse d’épée.17
Although these ambiguities, which complexify the status of elites, are analyzed
in some chapters of The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France, my primary
focus remains “women,” viewed here not as a unity based on oppression but as
a sign where multiple corporeal, cultural and political semes converge, which
is definitionally incomplete, temporally unstable, and which remains the site of
contested meanings. To be sure, there are exclusionary implications to “women,”
as Butler reminds us (BTM 18–21), but she also insists that “women” continues to
be “absolutely … a category without which we cannot do,” at bottom because “it
denotes … something like the relationship of a presumed masculine symbolic order
to what it must exclude and how that same presumed masculine order requires
this excluded feminine to augment and reproduce itself.”18 By extension, then, a
focus on women can be meaningful for studying all subjects who are excluded or
 Introduction 7

othered in specific contexts and for understanding the workings of gender norms
in their intersections with a host of factors. This is certainly true of the binary
system of the early modern period, which perpetuated tropes from classical times
that opposed male to female as mind to matter, reason to unreason, spirituality
to carnality. In the French seventeenth century, women were legally not persons,
except if they were widowed or single above the age of 25. Not only were they
marginalized and abjected as perpetual minors, subject by law and custom to
fathers and husband, but their legal and professional status steadily worsened, as
Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” perhaps first demonstrated.19
And yet, the forces that affected and inflected the position of women in the
seventeenth century are also complex and contradictory, both progressive and
regressive relative to a particular context. Thus elite women played an active
military role in the civil wars of the Fronde that divided France (1648–1653),
and pitted the nobles and the parlement against the king and Cardinal Mazarin,
in a way that did not happen again until the Revolution of 1789, even though
the Fronde ended with the monarchy’s triumph. Royal women (as widows) were
also able to govern (temporarily) over men through the male child they produced,
even though France was the only European country that made it a fundamental
law of the kingdom never to allow a woman to occupy the throne.20 For the first
and only time in French history, this possibility became a reality three times in
the period 1550–1650, in the regencies of Catherine de Médicis (1519–1589),
Marie de Médicis (1573–1642) and Anne of Austria (1601–1666). These queens
commissioned works to celebrate their rule—the most famous are the ten epic
paintings by Rubens depicting Marie’s reign (see Figure I.1)21—and favored
writers who extolled them, in part to offset the constant denunciation of their
regency for causing and embodying social disorder(s), an over-riding societal
threat in a period that had witnessed not one but two regicides by the dawn of the
seventeenth century in France.22
La querelle des femmes et des hommes reveals particularly intensive activity
at three moments in the seventeenth century in relation to social, cultural and
political developments. The first, marked by a plethora of misogynistic texts—
such as Olivier’s Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (1617)23—
coincides with the time and the aftermath of the Regency of Marie de Médicis,
and the establishment of Mme de Rambouillet’s chambre bleue, the first and most
celebrated of the salons that women founded and ran in the seventeenth century.24
The second phase (c. 1654–1660) follows the Regency of Anne of Austria and
the Fronde, with which the salons were associated; and it ends with Louis XIV’s
assumption of monarchic rule fully in 1660, and his attempted (but failed)
formation of a centralized, absolute state, based on the theory of the divine right of
kings.25 It involves a mid-century outpouring of male satires against the précieuse
as a ridiculous female who thinks she is made of a precious essence, prudishly
loathes the material and the corporeal, and strives to regulate relations between
the sexes by a reworked code of courtly conduct imposed on slavish men. The
antithesis of the honnête femme, she is a pretentious know-nothing who arrogates
8 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Fig. I.1 Peter Paul Rubens, Le bonheur de la Régence (The Happiness of

Regency). Scala / Art Resource, NY.

the Adamic right to name, to define taste, to criticize men’s works, even to wield
the pen herself.26 The third and final phase, after the 1670s, represents what
Linda Timmermans has called “the battle over learned women” (la querelle des
femmes savantes),27 a period marked by repressions of deviations from Catholic
orthodoxy—the persecution of Protestants that culminates in the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes (1685), and the elimination of unorthodox Catholic sects
(Quietist mysticism and later Jansenism), and of othered populations through the
promulgation of the infamous Code Noir (also 1685), which aimed to regulate
the treatment of slaves (classified as meubles or material possessions), while also
banning Protestants and Jews from the French New World Colonies. This third
phase of the querelle coincides with Louis XIV’s muscular pursuit of imperial
wars in Europe, North America and the Antilles: the height of the French army’s
successes occurs in Flanders, in 1678, after which military losses and political
defeats coupled with the staggering and sapping costs of war, and the famines of
1693–1694 and 1709 that annihilated three million French subjects, cast a pall
over the declining years of the century and then the end of Louis XIV’s long reign.
 Introduction 9

Now the complex and contradictory dimensions of the querelle des femmes et
des hommes are evident not only in the case of gender, but of sexual difference as
well. Here, I do not view the relation of sex to gender as the difference between
unconstructed nature and culture, but rather, in the wake of Foucault and Butler,
as norms elaborated by that regime of power-knowledge known as sexuality; thus,
sex is as constructed as gender itself (GT 11). It is a regulatory ideal that produces
bodies, the multiple ways they are differentiated and what those differentiations
mean (BTM 1–2). Always already comprised of a multitude of cultural signs,
bodies incorporate the behavioral and sensorial norms of gender on their surface,
where gender performativity occurs. By that token, sexual difference, like gender,
as Butler puts it, is not a given; it is negotiated in specific contexts and its definitions
shift according to particular events and developments within a specific normative
order (UG 181–6).
In the early modern period, “woman” was primarily identified with the matter
and materiality of the body. She was viewed as weak and fragile, subject to the
assaults of her sensory impressions and imaginations, a passive, receptive vessel
on which form was imprinted solely by the male seed, in a kind of immaculate
conception. This gender division was replicated in the humoral system that was
formulated in classical Greece after Aristotle, Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE) and
Galen (second century CE), developed by Arabic writers in the ninth century and
by Europeans in the eleventh, and that continued to be deployed until the end
of the seventeenth century, even among early-modern anatomists like Andrea
Vesalius (1514–1564) and William Harvey (1578–1659): they quietly ignored
humor theory, because they could not discover anatomical proofs of its existence,
but they still spoke of women’s and men’s character and temperament on the basis
of their humors. According to this humoral scheme, the human body contained
four fluids—blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile—thought to correspond to
the four elements of air, fire, earth and water, associated with qualities of hot, dry,
cold and wet. While one humor could transform itself into a different humor or
into any other fluid that the body produced under certain conditions, by and large
men were believed to be hotter and drier, women colder and wetter in a gendered
classification where heat was upheld as the most positive element, rising naturally
toward the heavens and the brain, and thus to rationality and to creativity, while
also making it possible for blood to concoct into semen. Women’s lack of heat was
seen as the reason they menstruated (men burned up unneeded blood internally,
whereas imperfect women had menstrual blood as an excess or residue) and they
had wider hips and narrower shoulders because they did not have enough heat
to drive matter toward their heads; more positively, feminine lack of heat meant
a surplus of moisture that took the form of blood to nourish the fetus in utero or
breast milk after childbirth.28 Aristotelians tended to describe women as imperfect,
misbegotten or mutilated males, whose lack of body heat kept their sex organs
inside, rather than pushing them out, as in the most perfect male; Galenists were
prone to regard men and women as equally perfect and stressed male and female
complementarity, a view that became more common after 1600.
10 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

However, with the advent of the New Science in medicine, and with anatomies
practiced in theaters and published in new print forms, including dissections of
female bodies, as Park’s Secrets of Women shows, the internal body could now
be seen and exposed. Although scientists could not always speak what they saw,
attached as they were to “repeating” gendered norms and forms, new developments
threatened to undermine the dominance of men, which was hypothetically based
on their seminal capacity to engender. Chief among these was the “rediscovery”
of the clitoris, described as a small penis, more phantasmatically, as having the
size of a goose’s neck, even more, as a hypertrophied organ in same-sex practices
between tribades or fricatrices, and invariably associated with the bodies of
African women, in medical treatises such as the Anatomy of Thomas Bartholinus
(1610–1680), and popularizing works, such as Dr. Nicolas Venette’s Tableau de
l’amour conjugal (1687).29 Unquestionably as significant, as I show in Chapter
5, was the scientific discovery in the 1660s and the 1670s of the primary role
of the ovum in reproduction, which eliminated the etiology for male dominance
in the sex-gender system. This discovery led to the theory of preformationism,
articulated by Harvey in On the Generation of Animals (1651), according to which
all animals come from eggs—ex ovio omnia. In the work of Nicolas Malebranche
(1638–1715), all of humanity, present and future, is embedded in the female egg.
Concomitantly, and perhaps not purely by coincidence, the early modern
period was obsessed with monsters and prodigies in nature, as chief surgeon to four
sixteenth-century monarchs, Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), entitled his work, but in
particular with the phantasmatic figure of the hermaphrodite, whose prodigious
“appearances” preoccupied early-modern medical and legal scholars. For Paré,
such monsters could only appear when “the woman furnishes proportionately
as much seed as the man,” thereby undermining proper gender asymmetry that
organized the world.b30 He thought it permissible for women to become men,
but not for men to “degenerate into” women, since “Nature tends always toward
what is most perfect” (Monsters 33).c Beyond Paré, the hermaphrodite appears in
a variety of works, ranging from Montaigne’s Essays, Thomas Artus’s political
allegory, Description de l’isle des hermaphrodites (1605), and competing medical
treatises on the organic basis for this “creature” (such as Jean Riolan’s Discours
sur les hermaphrodites [1614]and Jacques Duval’s rebuttal in Des hermaphrodites
[1612]), down to and including science fiction: in Gabriel de Foigny’s La terre
australe connue (1676), a hermaphrodite flees France to find an island of
hermaphrodites where “he” might discover how they are engendered, a secret
about his origin that, unlike the myth of Oedipus, is never revealed to him.31 The
hermaphrodite was unintelligible as human, or as Butler writes, after Foucault,
of the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin, s/he was “the sexual
impossibility of an identity … [who] deploys and redistributed the terms of a

b
“la femme fournit autant de semence que l’homme proportionnément” (Des
monstres et prodiges 23).
c
“Nature tend tousjours à ce qui est le plus parfaict” (Des monstres 30).
 Introduction 11

binary system … [in a way that] disrupts and proliferates those terms outside the
binary itself (GT 31).32
Over and beyond these highly gendered contestations in medical and scientific
discourse, the meanings of specific norms with their constituent scripts, themes
and terms in the querelle intersected or were in tension with other factors, such
as class and wealth. One notable case is Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse
de Montpensier (1627–1693), Louis XIV’s first cousin and the richest woman in
Europe, who took up arms against the crown during the Fronde and, as result, was
exiled by the king.33 During her banishment and later, however, she commissioned
the building and renovation of castles as no other woman had before her; and she
wrote memoirs, novels and letters, notably a series of epistolary exchanges in
which she envisioned a retreat led by women as a peaceful and happy alternative
to marriage.34 But Montpensier also suffered at the hands of her powerful father
and the absolutistic king, both of whom she challenged and with whom she had
difficult relations. Although she aspired for many years to marry Louis XIV, when
he did marry, she selected for her own husband, the Duc de Lauzun, a seductive
and cunning man of conspicuously lower rank; Louis XIV first approved this mis-
alliance and, in a stunning reversal, then forbade it with no appeal. Symptomatically,
La Grande Mademoiselle, as she remained and is still known, embodies both the
constraints of gender and the advantages of wealth and exalted status, which she
also clearly exploited and lorded over others.
Yet another example of the complex intersections of gender and class is the
relationship between Descartes and his royal patron and learned correspondent,
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680). In their epistolary relationship,
Elizabeth assumes the gendered figure of a woman suffering from incapacitating
melancholy,35 who wishes to be cured by the wisdom of the doctor-philosopher.
But these tropistic roles are complicated by the disparate socio-economic ranks
of the interlocutors: a wealthy royal princess and a poor bourgeois philosopher
who pens properly admirative dedications to a sought-after female patron.36
Moreover, Elizabeth’s aptitude in mathematics and natural philosophy informs
the substantial challenges she posed to Descartes’s dualism, by emphasizing the
powerful impact of the body’s humors and passions on the mind, and thus on her
public responsibilities; as a result, she had what is now recognized as a marked
effect on Descartes’s later works—The Passions of the Soul (1650) and Treatise
on Man (1664)—and more broadly, on his ethics and his conception of the human
subject. To be sure, Descartes’s (possibly ironic) affirmation of a universally
shared “good sense” in the opening lines of the Discourse on Method, and his
assault on prejudices and superstitions placed him in the camp of the Moderns, in
the century-long Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, and thus on the side with
which elite women were identified—indeed his work was defended by a group of
seventeenth-century “Cartesian women,” as Erica Harth called them. And yet, in
his provisional ethic, Descartes never argued in favor of reforming customs, such
as those that circumscribed the condition of women, however much they may
fail the test of reason. And in what remains his only known comment on women,
12 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

Elizabeth’s interlocutor ironized that he had published his Discourse in French

because he “wished that even women could understand something, but that the
most subtle minds could also find enough substance to occupy their attention,”d
an iteration of the gender binary, articulated by the misogynistic faction in the
querelle des femmes, according to which men have the subtle and women the
feeble minds.37
In the early modern period, as in our own times, gendered associations
were reflexively embedded into societal, national and supra-national issues
and conflicts. Thus although concerns over unchecked upward mobility, and
as a result, over widespread dis-order and decay are expressed throughout the
seventeenth century, notably by conservative observers, such as the Duc de Saint
Simon (1675–1755), from the outset, this societal problem is traced to Eve’s
descendants, as the first three chapters of The Dynamics of Gender in Early
Modern France demonstrate. A case in point is the identification of disorder with
envious women in satires of the period (see Chapter 1), and more broadly, with
the blurring of class distinctions in the female-led salons.38 On a European level,
the generalized sense of radical dis-order in the early modern period derived from
numerous political and religious factors, foremost among them, the fissure of
Christian Europe: it catalyzed wars of religion that continued in some form until
1715, and powerfully affected conceptions of the monarchy in both Protestant
and Catholic states, while in France, it exacerbated the monarchy’s conflicts with
the Pope and with the Emperor for the dominance of Catholic Christianity. Still,
the religious schism in Europe took on gendered dimensions, as Protestants,
constructed in Catholic treatises and edicts as demonic and duplicitous heretics
who had rebelled against Church and State,39 were more closely identified with
the diabolical, witch-like female, and with tropes of femininity than the male
and the masculine. In his Histoire du Calvinisme (1682), for example, Louis de
Maimbourg insisted that Protestant psalms have “that certain air of a soft and
effeminate song, which has nothing devout or majestic about it, as does the
chant of the Catholic Church established by Saint Gregory.”e40 Analogously, in
widespread efforts to underscore their national superiority, the French assigned
gendered characteristics to particular European states, contrasting, for example,
the virile free man (the Frank) with the effeminate (and sodomitical) Italian, the
negative correlative to the cultural and artistic refinement Italy symbolized, and
that the monarchy made every effort to equal and to outdo, in part by importing
Italian artists and artisans.41 On a broader scale, French travel and missionary
narratives projected femininity onto treacherous, duplicitous and sensual Orientals
to reaffirm superior, civilized, masculine Frenchness and Europeanness, as well
as onto the “savage,” non-rational, animalistic inhabitants of their colonies in the

d
“voulu que les femmes memes pussent entendre quelque chose, et cependant que
les plus subtils trouvassent aussi assez de matière pout occuper leur attention.”
e
“un certain air de chanson mol & effeminé, qui n’a rien du tout de dévot & de
majestueux comme le chant de l’Eglise Catholique reglé par Saint Grégoire.”
 Introduction 13

New World to justify enslavement and economic exploitations.42 As these examples

suggest, genderization can be used for a host of tactical and strategic ends,43 and
the querelle des femmes could be deployed to transform the representations, and
thus the perceptions, of political and religious economic and social issues that had
ostensibly little to do with women.
Connecting various regressive gender trends, Albistur and Armogathe in the
1970s highlighted “the great confinement of women” after 1650—a term that
gendered le grand renfermement, which Foucault had coined to characterize the
birth of the asylum and the internment of marginal populations, including beggars
and prostitutes.44 In what subsequently became an accepted view, Albistur and
Armogathe claimed that women suffered generalized repression during the long
reign of Louis XIV, as compared to their social and political powers prior to
1653, the end of the Fronde. And yet, this “great confinement” also witnessed the
largest body of women writers in the early modern period, authors who enjoyed
remarkable success, at least until the Revolution, when their work was denied
republication and was effaced from what was to become the canon of classicism
and of the literary curriculum in schools after 1830.45 Implicitly accepting this idea
of repression, regression or “confinement,” DeJean argued in Tender Geographies
that after the Fronde women could no longer be political actors, and thus that
they displaced their contestatory practices onto collaborative forms of writing in
the salons.46 However, this scheme bifurcates the discursive and the political in
gendered subjects, in a way that denies the political implications and consequences
of discourse, which Butler, Foucault and Deleuze, among many theorists, have
demonstrated.47 This bifurcation reproduces a binary opposition that Williams and
other critics worked to bridge with the concept of praxis, a conjunction that de
Certeau and Chambers, for example, upheld when they cast discourse as the locus
where resistant subjects have political “room to maneuver.”48
As a case in point, this “confined” view of women in post-Fronde France
denies the enormous political power that Mme de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s
morganatic wife, whom he married clandestinely probably in January 1684,
wielded during the last 30 years of his reign. However much some of us may
find her religiosity offensive, and her conservative views on social hierarchies
and women’s properly subordinate roles misogynistic, Bryant convincingly
documents the fact that Maintenon became the most powerful person in France,
second only to Louis XIV, and a leading European stateswoman, especially after
Minister of War Louvois’s demise in 1691, when there emerged a significant
gap in the state’s administration that she filled astutely, in a deliberately self-
effacing manner—a position that fulfilled many of the functions of a first minister,
especially as the king became increasingly fragile and maintained an ever more
informal system of governance.49 Although Maintenon was excluded from official
ceremonies, given public wariness of—and objections to—her power, the axis of
the court nonetheless shifted to the marquise’s apartments after 1700. It was there
that the ministers, military commanders, clergy (including representatives of the
Pope) and ambassadors, the royals, leading courtiers and all manner of petitioners
14 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

sought her decisive influence and her favor with the isolated and mistrustful king,
both for foreign policy (in relations with Spain, for instance, in the Flanders
campaigns of 1692–1694, and the misguided French-sponsored Stuart invasion
of Scotland, 1708), most especially, for appointments, promotions and protection
in the vast network of clients and contacts she consolidated, as her enormous
correspondence confirms. To be sure, because of her inexperience in matters of
state, and arguably, her social and religious ideology, the results of Maintenon’s
efforts were mixed, as Bryant documents. Still, as her friend, Mme de Sévigné,
had shrewdly observed in 1684: “Mme de Maintenon’s position is unique: there
has never been such a position and there never will be” (in Bryant, “Partner,
Matriarch, and Minister” 77).f
More importantly, the notion of “the great confinement” obscures the
multivalent developments that characterize the long seventeenth century, until
Louis XIV’s death in 1715, and its conceptions of women (and men) embedded
in a shifting repertory of normative terms. For women, these ran the gamut from
the most negative to the most positive and a number of (sometimes conflictual)
negotiated and resistant combinations in-between that changed over time. They
were also inflected by the particular situatedness of their subjects and their agential
capacity to repeat with a subversive difference. It is to this dynamic repertory of
terms, formed by/through a number of discourses—literary and cultural, medical,
juridical and religious (moralistic discourses above all)—that I now turn.50

*****

The image of woman (see Figure I.2) that Abraham Bosse, the seventeenth
century’s most famous French engraver, produced to admonish his own misguided
gender does not simply reproduce in its legend the age-old binary of angelic Mary
and demonic Eve (with the reference to Adam’s ribs [costes]). It defines woman as
an irrational, constitutionally duplicitous monster,51 which would logically cast the
Angel in the House as a sham as well. Moreover, this monster has two mask-like
heads and two bodies, the one, basely animalistic, dark-skinned, satyric, priapic;
the other, a feminine form holding a delicate fan, which is contradicted, however,
by its bulging, muscular arm. Within the sharply divided image, the right side
figures a church setting, with the virgin and a cross at the base, and a kneeling,
implicitly supplicant wife. The left, the sinister side, represents its mirror image, a
world upside down,52 in which the cowed male is kneeling in supplication before
a dominant, browbeating wife with unruly hair (replicating the flagellate branches
and the satyr’s whip), in front of a doorknocker depicting a male head with a ring
through its nose.
The association of the female with the demonic and the monstrous in Bosse’s
engraving finds expression in early-modern medical, juridical and religious

f
“la place de Mme de Maintenon est unique: il n’y en a jamais eu, et il n’y en aura
jamais.”
 Introduction 15

Fig. I.2 Abraham Bosse, La vraye femme (The Real Woman). Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.
16 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

discourses. In On Monsters and Marvels (1579), Ambroise Paré regards “monstrous

children” as the product of “[an] ardent and obstinate imagination that the [woman]
might [have] at the moment she conceive[s],” based on the widespread idea that
the weaker sex has no defenses against the onslaught of sensory or oneiric images
(38).g Monsters could even be formed if the pregnant woman sat too long, or had
her legs crossed—anodine activities that further exposed the inherent teratogeny of
female bodies.53 Paré mentions acts committed by demons and witches, sorcerers
and sorceresses, succubi and incubi (85–96), but in the early modern period no text
described the demonic monstrousness of women—far beyond that of men—more
violently and obsessively than the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer,
1486) by German Dominican monks, the Inquisitors, Henrich Institoris and
Jacobus Sprenger. The reason that “the demons carry out their practices through
women and not through men,” the authors explain, citing classical and Christian
texts but especially their own “experience,” is that women are more deceptive
and superstitious, unwilling to be ruled, prone to flux and insatiably carnal (117–
19, 259–69, 299). A chimera, a “triple-shaped monstrosity … befouled with the
stomach of a smelly she-goat and armed with the tail of a poisonous snake,” all the
more treacherous when coupled with a lovely face and voice, the female sorcerer,
in a highly corporeal version of the Circean myth, does not simply change men
into beasts, she even takes away their procreative limbs, and keeps 20 or 30 of
these seminal organs alive in a cabinet.54 Monstrous women include midwives in
the Malleus, for they are in league with demons, to whom they offer newborns.55
Phantasms about the Demonology of Witches, the title of the first French text on
demonology, written by jurist Jean Bodin in 1580, translated into a historical
cataclysm: the witch hunts that marked Europe (and parts of North America) in
the early modern period. In France, these occurred most virulently in the periods,
1580–1630 and 1640–1680, says Muchembled, particularly in the troubled rural
North-Eastern frontier, in newly conquered territories and/or regions resistant
to the rise of absolutism; they predominantly targeted women, according to his
estimates, representing 80 percent of those prosecuted for witchcraft.56 Supporting
the views of demonologists, doctors, such as Edward Jorden in A Briefe Discourse
of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), associated bewitchment
and possession by the devil with the condition that was said, since Hippocrates, to
afflict women of all ages—a malady marked by choking sensations, unexplained
seizures and deliriums that were labeled as hysterical, for instance, in Jean de
Varandée’s Traité des maladies des femmes (1656).57
Closest to this monstrous pole that conjoins deviance, illegitimacy and power
was the normative identification of woman with insatiable sexuality. It was derived
from the notion of female instability, the correlative to her humoral coldness and
wetness, linked to the earth’s matter. Jacques Olivier’s Alphabet de l’imperfection
et malice des femmes (1617), for instance, deploys biblical and classical references

g
“une ardente et obstinée imagination que peut avoir la femme cependant qu’elle
conçoit” (Des monstres 35).
 Introduction 17

to cast le sexe as “a Monster in Nature” (349), the emblem of concupiscentia

carnis (“concupiscence of the flesh”), a rapaciously lascivious beast, much like a
blood-sucking leech or vampire. And at the end of the century, Nicolas Venette’s
Tableau de l’amour conjugal (1687), a text that continued to be reprinted and
consulted until the twentieth century, claimed that women are prone to sexual
promiscuity, and that their imagination leads to “erotic (uterine) fury,” or then
to la suffocation de la matrice, which Varandée traced to an unfulfilled need for
sexual intercourse (128–38); in 1771, D.M.-T. de Bienville (1726–1813) defined
this condition as nymphomania.58 This excessive, uncontrolled and uncontrollable
female sexuality extended to the whore and to the same-sex loving tribade or
fricatrice, both associated with a hypertrophic-sized clitoris.59
In less extreme forms, the threat of unfettered female sexuality was projected
onto the coquette, a negative figure from the 1630s on featured in treatises and
plays of the 1650s and 1660s. In François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac’s Histoire
du temps, ou Relation du royaume de coquetterie (1654), a hostile response to
Madeleine de Scudéry’s famous Carte de tendre in Artamène, ou, Le grand Cyrus
(1649–1653), the coquette is identified with the vices ascribed to salon women:
moral duplicity, false religious devotion, lack of modesty (pudeur), frivolous
speech, above all, dissolute pleasure-seeking living (la débauche), uncontrollable
sexual appetites and as her most common trait, the conquest of multiple suitors
(des galands) at any one time.60 In Félix de Juvenel’s Portrait de la coquette,
ou La lettre d’Aristandre à Timagène (1659), in which an “outstanding man”
(Arist-andre) strives to instruct his provincial nephew about women in the crime-
filled capitol, the coquette is deemed the most evil woman he will encounter: the
incarnation of artifice and hypocrisy, with no taste, judgment or reason, despite
her pretensions, she treats learned and ethical men with contempt, and ruins
her galands to satisfy her whims and pleasures. Although decorum prevents
Aristandre from being explicit about her sexual activities, he nonetheless indicates
that the coquette both arouses “violent desire” and puts off possession as long as
possible.61 This sexually frustrating serial collector of men foreshadows Molière’s
Célimène in The Misanthrope (1666), with her numerous amants and biting wit at
their expense. Exposed in the end and abandoned by her suitors, Célimène admits
that she does not want to marry again, but to enjoy freedom and her seductive rule
over salon life.62
As Célimène suggests, the coquette was linked to the emerging figure of the
libertine, emblematically identified in the French seventeenth century with Ninon
de Lenclos (1620–1705). Although shifting meanings and individual usages
make it difficult to define le libertin, much less la libertine, lack of belief in—
or condemnation of—orthodox religious beliefs, as well as licentiousness and
dissolute behavior, including sexual promiscuity and sodomy, were identified
with libertine men of this period.63 Nevertheless, Ninon managed to sustain
her irreverent views of religion, after a brief imprisonment in the Madelonettes
Convent in 1656, at the behest of Anne of Austria for her reputed impiety and
libertinage; she took on a number of notable and wealthy lovers, including the
18 The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France

king’s cousin and Mme de Sévigné’s son, while achieving financial independence;
and she ran a lively salon in the Marais and maintained a sought-after aristocratic
profile, counting among her close friends both La Rochefoucault and Mme de
Maintenon.64 Ninon was possibly the author of the anonymously published La
coquette vengée (1659), a dialogue in which Eléonore warns her niece, Philomène,
to avoid philosophers, especially the “salon philosophers who dogmatize in their
armchairs,” but have nothing to say. One such philosopher censures everybody,
especially le sexe, with such great presumption and self-satisfaction he engenders
a “universal conspiracy” against him by all of Eléonore’s worldly friends, and is
beaten to a pulp, then thrown out of her home—a satisfying revenge by the author
against Félix de Juvenel, who had reputedly targeted Ninon in his Portrait de la
coquette.65
The coquette was also linked to the threatening figure of the widow. The
principal female considered a person in seventeenth-century France, the widow
would revert to being legally incapable if she remarried, thus part of the imbecillitas
sexus that should be subservient to her husband by law and custom.66 By contrast,
as Pierre de Brantôme (1540–1614) emphasized in Les dames galantes (published
in 1665–1666), widows “are in full freedom, and in no way slaves of their fathers,
mothers, brothers, relatives and husbands, nor moreover, of any law court”;h67 and
according to the trope of the lusty widow, which Brantôme deployed, she stood
for sexual freedom.
The political correlative to the threat that this sexual figure represented was
the widowed female regent. In François Hotman’s La Gaule française (1576) and
Claude Malingre’s “De la loi salique” (1615), biblical, mythical and historical
queens form a catalog of infamous women, invariably depicted as Jezebels and
denounced for causing profound upheavals. Richelieu’s Testament politique
(1688) is explicit: “just as a woman doomed the world, nothing can harm states
more than this sex, when it gets a foothold over those who govern them, and
makes them move about as it wishes, well or badly.”i68 In Louis XIV’s Mémoires
pour l’instruction du Dauphin, a text heavily reworked by editors, the Appendix
for 1667 warns the king’s son and heir to beware of women, for they invariably
“make us fall without our knowing it into whatever side they take,” thus “we”
must “take pains to prepare never to believe them about anything that concerns
our affairs or the people who serve us”: to fail to do this is to ignore history, which
provides “so many fatal examples of extinct dynastic houses, overturned thrones,
ruined provinces, destroyed empires”—another phantasm of being unmanned,

h
“sont en leur plaine liberté et nullement esclaves des peres, meres, freres, parents et
marys & n’y d’aucune justice qui est plus.”
i
“comme une femme a perdu le monde, rien n’est plus capable de nuire aux Etats
que ce sexe, lorsque, prenant pied sur ceux qui les gouvernent, il les fait mouvoir comme
bon lui semble et mal.”
 Introduction 19

here from the “absolute” king by divine right.j69 Analogously, the threat of queen
regents is dramatized in several plays, including Corneille’s Rodogune (1644–
1645, thus during Anne’s regency, r.1643–1651), where the widow, Cléopâtre,
who had her unfaithful husband murdered, plays off the passive, hapless twin
princes (and legitimate male rulers) against each other, killing one son and
attempting to poison the other, so that she can retain the reigns of power, which
she desires above all else. A monster who refuses to allow patriarchal monarchy
to perpetuate, and thereby endangers the perpetuation of the state, as Menke has
shown, Cléopâtre also figures the perverted mother who threatens the foundations
of the family.70
Her opposite, the chaste and modest widow, is so faithful to her husband’s
memory she renounces the world and refuses remarriage. In dramatic literature,
her exemplar is undoubtedly Racine’s eponymous Andromaque, loyal wife and
uniquely devoted mother, who would even commit suicide to save her son and
safeguard her own honor.71 In prescriptive moral and religious literature, including
texts by Père Caussin (1583–1651) and Saint François de Sales (1567–1622), the
good widow regards remarriage as a weakness, somehow regains her immaculate
chastity, and does eleemosynary works for the sick and the poor; as Roger
Duchêne observes, she will live like a nun in the world.72 In fact, some widows
gave up secular life to assume religious professions and vocations. Like Jeanne
de Chantal, Mme de Sévigné’s grandmother, who was extolled as “the saintly
widow,” and upheld as a model for all women, they established schools for girls,
became abbesses, and founded religious orders.73
In secular life, the good widow, like the exemplary maiden and lady, is
identified with the private space (espace particulier). In Abraham Bosse’s The
Contentment of a Noble Lady (Contentement d’une dame noble) (see Figure I.3),
with its “emblematic sonnet,” this woman is enclosed in her chamber, and with
downcast eyes, she studies her lessons and plays her luth, banishes the sparks of
love and of feminine envy, and personifies honor, blushing modesty (la pudeur)
and virtual silence, in contrast to the female who gads about in public, never ceases
to move or talk and who displays the acts of a mad person.74 The positive portrait
here can also be identified with l’honnête fille or l’honnête femme, the dominant
ideal for the conduct of le sexe throughout the seventeenth century, for instance in
the treatises of Christian moralists, such as Jacques Du Bosc’s L’honneste femme
(1632), François de Grenaille’s L’honneste fille (1639) and Abbé Goussault’s Le
portrait d’une femme honnête, raisonnable et véritablement chrétienne (1694)—a
titular reminder of women’s ‘unreasonable’ and ‘untruthful’ nature.75
In contrast to the honnête homme, in his urbane, seductive and aesthetic
conception (which was synonymous to le galant homme), the honnête femme

j
“nous fait tomber insensiblement du côté où elles penchent; … de nous preparer
avec étude à ne les croire en rien de ce qui peut concerner nos affaires ou les personnes
de ceux qui nous servent; … tant de funestes exemples des maisons éteintes, des trônes
renversés, des provinces ruinées, des empires détruits.”
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 LE DERNIER CACIQLE 289 du peuple, aussi le peuple
l'adorait. Malheur à celui qui eût osé toucher seulement un cheveu
de la Grenadilla ! Le gouverneur faisait souvent venir la Grenadilla
dans ses appartements. Il était grand amateur de fandango, et fort
enthousiaste du talent de la danseuse. Plusieurs affirmaient même
qu'il n'était pas insensible à ses charmes, mais que Grenadilla se
moquait de lui. Ce qu'il y a de sûr, c'est qu'après le départ du
commandant, la Grenadilla étant venue, selon sa coutume, danser
sur la place du palais, un estafier du gouverneur vint lui dire que Son
Excellence l'attendait. Après le fandango, il lui apprit qu'un auto-da-
fé aurait lieu prochainement à Mexico ; Grenadilla répandit cette
nouvelle dans la ville. Le soir, le peuple se rendit en masse sous les
fenêtres du palais, et fit retentir J'air de ses acclamations en
l'honneur du gouverneur. Don Alvarez Mendoça y Palenzuela y
Arnam s'endormit en se disant qu'il était vraiment né pour le
gouvernement et la politique. V LE DESCENDANT DE MONTÉZUMA
Pendant que toutes ces choses se passaient, le cacique Tumilco
dînait tranquillement à la posada de la petite place San-Esteban. ••
37
 290 LES FLEURS ANIMÉES Il était arrivù au dessert, et il
demandait une seconde bouteille de vin. Le cacique Tumilco avait de
bonnes raisons d'être content : il s était défait fort avantageusement
de toutes ses marchandises, et il emportait le produit de sa vente en
bons doublons à l'effigie du roi d'Espagne. Le sergent Trifon entra
comme l'hôte mettait la bouteille ç^;^ de vin demandée sur la table
de Tumilco. — C'est vous, sergent? dit le cacique. — Moi-même. —
Vous arrivez fort à propos pour m'aider à vider cette bouteille.
Mettez-vous là. — Impossible. — Comment, impossible.' Je vous dis
que vous boirez. — Pas cette fois du moins. Il m'est défendu de
boire. — Alors que venez-vous faire? — Hélas î — Parlez. — Je viens
vous arrêter.
 Lli DERNIER CACIQUE 29J — Le seigneur Triton est plaisant
aujourd'hui. — 11 ne plaisante guère. Regardez. Il montra au
cacique la porte de la posada cernée par son escouade. Il lui fit
signe d'entrer. — Emparez- vous de monsieur, dit-il, en montrant le
cacique. Cette fois, Tumilco comprit qu'il s'agissait d'une affaire
sérieuse, et il pâlit légèrement. Il avait eu dans sa vie quelques
démêlés avec le fisc, et pour être vrais, nous devons dire que sur ce
point sa conscience lui reprochait quelque chose en ce moment. Le
descendant de Montézuma se mêlait peutêtre un peu plus de
contrebande qu'il ne convenait à sa noble origine. 11 fit cependant
contre fortune bon cœur. — Et de quoi m'accuse-t-on ? demanda-t-il
au sergent. — C'est l'affaire du grand inquisiteur; vous vous en
expliquerez avec lui. — Du grand inquisiteur ! s'écria Tumilco au
comble de l'effroi ; il ne s'agit donc pas de contrebande? — Il s'agit
du soleil. Il pîiraît que vous persistez à vouloir adorer cet astre, fort
incommode par la chaleur qu'il fait
 292 LES FLEURS ANIMÉES aujourd'hui; mais je vous
connais trop pour croire ù cette calomnie, vous n'aurez pas de peine
à prouver votre innocence. En attendant, suivez-moi. — Cil me
conduisez-vous ? — Dans les cachots de la très-sainte Inquisition. VI
LE PROCES Une fois entre les mains du saint Office, le procès de
Tumilco fut bientôt fait. On le tint pendant un mois dans un cachot,
loin de toute société, privé de la lumière du ciel, avec du pain noir
pour nourriture et de l'eau. Au bout de ce temps, on le fit venir
devant ses juges. Le président prit la parole pour l'interroger. —
Comment t'appelles-tu ? — Tumilco. — Ton état ?
 LE DERNIER CACIQUE 293 — Cacique. — Récite-nous un
Pater et un Ave. Tumilco ne connaissait ni Pater, ni Ave, ni aucune
espèce de prière. Il garda le silence. Les membres du tribunal se
regardèrent les uns les autres, comme pour se dire : Voyez, nous ne
nous étions pas trompés ; c'est un mécréant, un hérétique. Le
président recueillit les voix. Tumilco fut condamné à être brûlé vif sur
la place publique de Mexico, la tête couverte d'un bonnet orné de
diables roug-es et le corps enveloppé dans un sac. Les g'ardiens
firent redescendre Tumilco dans son cachot ; le lendemain on le mit
en chapelle. VII L'AUTO-DA-PE Cependant les Mexicains
s'impatientaient. On se demandait de toutes parts : A quand l'auto-
da-fé?
 294 I^ES FLKLRS ANIMÉES Est-ce pour demain, ou après-
demain? Est-il convenable et juste de faire attendre si longtemps
pour brûler un méchant petit hérétique ? C'est montrer bien peu de
zèle pour les intérêts de la religion et de respect pour les bons
catholiques. On répétait tous ces propos au gouverneur, qui
répondait : — Cela ne me regarde pas : il est entre les mains de
l'Inquisition, qu'elle en fasse ce qu'elle voudra. Le fait est que le
gouverneur, épris plus que jamais des attraits de la Grenadilla, aurait
peut-être adoré le soleil pour lui plaire ; mais Grenadilla n'était pas
capable d'exiger une telle énormité. Un beau jour, enfin, les
habitants de Mexico virent se dresser sur la place publique le bûcher
si impatiemment attendu. Les cloches sonnaient à toute volée, les
confréries de pénitents, bannières en tète, se rendaient chez le
grand inquisiteur pour lui faire cortège ; une estrade lui avait été
réservée sur la place publique en face du bûcher. L'exL'Cution devait
avoir lieu à deux heures. Bien avant dans la matinée la foule avait
envahi la place ; on voyait des tètes aux fenêtres, des tètes sur les
arbres, des tètes sur les toits.
 LE DERNIER CACIQUE 295 Cette multitude gesticulait,
parlait, appelait le patient à grands cris. Enfin, à l'extrémité de la
place, on vit paraître le cortège : d'abord le clergé, puis les
pénitents; à la fin, le patient au milieu des archers de la Sainte-
Hermandad. Ce fut un moment de calme et de solennelle attente. Il
faut vous dire que ce jour-là, le gouverneur avait ordonné qu'on fit
entrer Grenadilla par l'escalier secret du palais. Il voulait que, cachée
derrière une jalousie, elle pût jouir de tous les agréments de la fête
sans être incommodée par le soleil, la poussière et la foule.
Grenadilla était trop bonne Mexicaine pour refuser sa part d'un auto-
da-fé, aussi s'empressa-t-elle d'accepter l'invitation et de se rendre
au poste qui lui était assigné. Notre impartialité d'historien nous fait
un devoir de convenir que le gouverneur se tenait à côté d'elle, et lui
adressait une foule de galanteries auxquelles la danseuse semblait
ne pas faire grande attention, et qu'elle recevait en femme qui a
l'habitude de semblables compliments. — Cruelle ! lui disait le
gouverneur. Grenadilla riait. — Ingrate î
 296 LES FLEURS ANIMÉES Elle riait de plus belle. —
Tigresse d'Hyrcanie. Le rire continuait. — Mais enfin, que vous faut-
il? Ma puissance, mes trésors, je mets tout à vos pieds. Que
demandez-vous? parlez ! Si à cette époque-là on eût connu la
fameuse romance : La fortune Importune Me paraît Sans attrait,
etc., etc., c'est avec ce refrain que Grenadilla lui eût répondu.
Néanmoins, il est à supposer qu'elle avait trouvé l'équivalent. Cette
fois, le vice-roi avait employé les mêmes effets d'éloquence, et suivi
la môme progression. — Cruelle, ingrate, tigresse d'Hyrcanie, que
demandez-vous ? parlez ! Grenadilla se retourna vivement, et
répondit en montrant Tumilco qui venait de monter sur le bûcher. —
La vie de cet homme.
 LK DERNIER CACIQUE 297 VIII LE GOUVERNEUR DANS
L'EMBARRAS — Oh ! pour ceci, ma chère, s'écria-t-il, c'est
impossible; Mexico me lapiderait; et puis, cela regarde le grand
inquisiteur. — Alors, reprit Grenadilla avec véhémence, laissez-moi
partir, je ne veux pas être témoin d'un pareil spectacle. Adieu, vous
ne me reverrez de ma vie ! Elle voulut partir. Le gouverneur la retint.
— Songez donc qu'il y va de ma place. — Et moi de mon bonheur. —
Mais quel intérêt si vif prenez-vous à cet homme? — Vous le saurez
quand vous l'aurez sauvé. — Je perdrai ma place. — Ou moi.
Choisissez. Jamais gouverneur ne fut aussi perplexe. A la fin, il
s'écria : f- 38
 298 LES FLEURS ANIMÉES — Il me vient une idée. Qu'on
fasse surseoir à l'exécution, et qu'on m'amène le cacique. Il donna
des ordres en conséquence. Il était temps; on allait mettre le feu au
bûcher. IX UNE CONVERSION On amena le cacique chargé de
chaînes devant le gouverneur. Comme le temps pressait, celui-ci
entra brusquement en matière. — Cacique, dit-il à Tumilco, tenez-
vous énormément h adorer le soleil ? Tumilco, étonné, le regarda
sans répondre. — Consentiriez-vous à ne plus lui immoler de
victimes humaines et à recevoir le baptême ? — A quoi bon, puisque
je vais mourir ? — Mais si l'on vous fait grâce? — Alors, c'est bien
différent.
 LE DERNIER CACIQUE . 299 Cette réponse laconique parut
suffisante au gouverneur ; il prit une plume et écrivit au grand
inquisiteur : « Notre sainte religion peut faire une grande conquête ;
Tumilco aspire à s'abreuver aux sources de la vraie foi. Sa
conversion serait d'un boa exemple. Ce néophyte vous ferait
honneur. Je demande sa grâce. » Le grand inquisiteur était sur la
place publique, fort incommodé de la chaleur ; de plus, il n'avait
jamais converti de cacique. L'idée d'en amener un dans le giron de
l'Église lui sourit. Il écrivit au bas de la lettre : « Accordé. » — Je
triomphe, dit le gouverneur, tout le monde sera content. Une
immense clameur vint le troubler au milieu de sa joie. C'était le
peuple qui murmurait et demandait à grands cris qu'on commençât
l'exécution. — Diable ! diable ! murmura Son Excellence, je ne
songeais pas au peuple. Comment l'apaiser?
 300 LES FLEURS AiMMÉES X COMMENT ON APAISE LE
PEUPLE Comme le bruit augmentait sans cosse, et qu'on ramassait
des pierres pour briser les vitres de son hôtel, le gouverneur parut
au balcon pour haranguer la multitude. — Senores, s'6cria-t-il, la
divine Providence a fait un miracle. Les yeux de Tumilco se sont
ouverts à la lumière; il veut devenir chrétien. Nous lui avons fait
grâce. De sourds murmures couvrirent la voix de l'orateur; il se hâta
de poursuivre : — Mais vous ne perdrez rien pour attendre. Le
baptême cacique Tumilco aura lieu dès demain. Pour célébrer ce
grand événement, il y aura procession générale et course de
taureaux. Entre l'auto-da-fé et le baptême, le peuple hésita un
moment, puis il se décida à accepter la compensation qui lui était
offerte. Mille cris de joie témoignèrent de la satisfaction générale.
Aussitôt le gouverneur rentra pour jouir de sa victoire et des
remercîments de Grenadilla, mais elle n'était pins là.
 LE DERNIER CACIQUE 301 C'est en vain qu'il la fit chercher
dans tout le palais. Personne ne put lui donner de ses nouvelles. XI
INTERMEDE Le lecteur s'est sans doute imaginé que Grenadilla, fière
et belle comme la fleur dont clic porte le nom, a néanmoins un
penchant secret pour le cacique, jeune et beau sauvage de vingt
ans. Les lois du roman le voudraient ainsi , mais la vérité a ses droits
qu'il nous faut respecter. Tumilco est laid, vieux, cassé, et si
Grenadilla l'aime, comme le chapitre précédent nous en fournit la
preuve, c'est que le cacique a pris soin de son enfance ; c'est que,
pauvre enfant abandonnée, elle fut recueillie par lui, et protégée
jusqu'au jour oîi il fut obligé de s'expatrier pour des raisons qu'il
serait trop long de rapporter ici. Grenadilla venait de s'acquitter
envers Tumilco en lui sauvant la vie. Satisfaite d'avoir rempli son
devoir, elle partit le soir même pour l'Europe. C'était le seul moyen
de se soustraire aux poursuites du gouverneur. Après trois mois de
traversée, le vaisseau qui la portait fit
 302 LES FLEURS ANLMÉES naufrag"e. Le corps de
Grenadilla fut porté par la vague sur le rivage d'Espagne. La Fée aux
Fleurs, qui se trouvait en ce moment dans ces parages pour
surveiller le Jasmin, recueillit le corps de Grenadilla, et permit qu'on
élevât, à l'endroit oii elle l'avait trouvé, un magnifique bosquet de
grenadiers dont les fleurs et les fruits réjouissent la vue, comme
Grenadilla la récréait autrefois par sa beauté et ses talents. XII
POUR EN REVENIR AU CACIQUE Une fois baptisé sous le nom
d'Esteban, il se fixa à Mexico, où il vécut d'une pension modique que
lui laisait le gouvernement en qualité de descendant de Montézuma.
Des doutes s'étaient élevés plusieurs fois sur la sincérité de sa
conversion, et on songeait à le faire passer de nouveau devant le
saint Office, lorsqu'il tomba gravement malade. Il demanda à voir un
médecin : ses voisins, plus charitables, lui envoyèrent un prêtre. —
Frère Esteban, lui dit le prêtre, le moment est venu de recommander
votre âme à Dieu.
 !.E DER.MEll CACIQUE 303 — Je ne m'appelle pas Esteban,
dit le cacique, on me nomme Tumilco. Allez-vous-en. — Songez à
Dieu, mon frère. — Ton Dieu n'est pas le mien, reprit Tumilco; qu'on
ouvre les fenêtres. On obéit à ce désir. Le soleil ù son déclin brillait
encore à l'horizon. — Voilà mon Dieu, s'écria le cacique, c'est celui
de mes pères. Soleil, reçois ton enfant dans ton sein ! Le prêtre se
cacha les yeux avec la main, fit le signe de la croix et murmura :
Vade rctro, Satanas. Tumilco était mort. — Vous empêcheriez plutôt
le tournesol de suivre la marche du soleil, que ces hérétiques de
revenir au culte de leur astre. Voilà ce qu'on a gagné à ne pas le
brûler. Le voisin charitable qui prononçait cette oraison funèbre ne se
doutait pas que Tumilco le cacique n'était autre chose que
l'incarnation du Tournesol. En adorant le soleil, il ne faisait que
suivre la loi de la nature.
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 ,-\^->- V \/'\J'\^^ /\/-\^^>"s^-\/0NOCTURNE LE PAVOT
ETAIS autrefois la fleur du sommeil ; mais le sommeil ne suffit plus à
l'homme pour oublier ses maux. L'homme ne veut plus i.{[{f
^l^^'^j^rTP dormir, il faut qu'il rêve. J'étais l'oubli, je mis devenue
l'illusion. Il m'a frappée au cœur, et il a bu le sang qui coulait de ma
blessure. I. 39
 306 LES FLEURS ANIMÉES Hélas ! pour moi, depuis ce jour,
plus de tranquillité, plus de bonheur, plus de joie ! Dès que ma tige
s'élève un peu au-dessus de la terre, le fer s'approche de moi, on
me perce le sein, d'oii s'échappe la liqueur qui donne des visions, ces
longues ivresses de la tète et du cœur. Dès que l'homme m'a
approchée de ses lèvres, son âme prend des ailes; elle quitte la
terre. Elle retourne vers le passé ou s'élève vers l'avenir. Ile plane
sur le souvenir ou sur l'espérance. Oii est le temps où je me
promenais le soir dans l'espace, laissant tomber ma graine innocente
sur le front des humains ? J'appelais auprès de moi le doux sommeil,
fils du travail, père des rêves paisibles. A la mère endormie, je
montrais son nouveau-né frais et souriant; à l'orphelin, je faisais voir
sa mère doucement inclinée sur ses lèvres pour lui donner sa
bénédiction dans un baiser. Ma vie s'écoulait heureuse et paisible,
courte et radieuse, comme le printemps.
 LE PAVOT 307 Quel gvnic malfaisant a révélé à l'homme
l'existence du philtre renfermé dans mon sein, de ce philtre qui est la
cause funeste de ma mort? Mais pourquoi me plaindre ? Je suis
semblable au poète : les hommes lui doivent leurs plus douces
jouissances, leurs plus charmantes illusions, et il est leur première
victime.
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accurate

\ .4^ IV.VA\ rvo ||\NG F. 1^ l-arnier :rercs. Editeurs

 ÉPITHALAME -OO^^XhOLA FLEUR D'ORANGER -0 ]|gii ''"
[S' '2i^ s O -s ''Z. "'Z',. "C" °~ ES compagnes, ô jeune fille! ont
cherché ce matin dans la campagne humide de rosée une fleur pour
former ta parure virginale. ^^-5-^' Xu vas nous quitter pour suivre
celui que tu aimes ; tu ne partageras plus nos danses et nos jeux.
Accepte cette fleur d'oranger ; c'est son doux parfum qui nous a
conduites vers elle.
 310 LES FLEURS ANIMÉES Nous nous sommes approchées
de l'arbre, et la fleur d'orang-er nous a dit — Vous cherchez un
bouquet pour orner le sein d'une fiancée, cueillez-moi. Je suis
blanche comme elle, douce comme elle; semblable îi la chasteté,
mon parfum dure longtemps encore après qu'on m'a cueillie. —
Fleur des fiancées, lui avons-nous demandé, pourquoi portes-tu des
fruits sur ta branche ? Elle nous a répondu : — Je suis l'emblème de
la mariée; amante encore, elle est mère ; la femme vit auprès de ses
enfants, la fleur à cùté du fruit. Alors nous l'avons cueillie. Partage
cette branche d'oranger, jeune fille; mets-en la moitié dans tes
cheveux, l'autre moitié sur ton sein. C'est le dernier don de tes
chères compagnes. Ce soir nous te conduirons à l'église, et ta mère,
en t'embrassant, fermera derrière toi la porte de la maison de
l'époux.
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accurate

LA FLEUR D'OUANGEU 31 1 Conserve notre g'uirlande et

notre bouquet, jt-une lille; conserve-les bien, et puisses-tu, quand lu
fleur d'oran-er sera fanée, ne pas regretter le temps oii lu étais
blanche comme elle. «lu ' ,11,
 •w \y ^■\y~^/-\ L'ANE RECOUVERT DU PALETOT DU LION
CE QU'ON DISAIT DANS LE QUARTIER N disait que M"* Rose
Chardon était une grande et belle fille, marchant la tête haute, un
peu vive dans ses reparties, par exemple, mais excellente au fond,
quoique fière; quelques-uns même prononçaient vaniteuse. On disait
qu'il ne fallait pas l'approcher de trop près ; dans 40
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