PFSCL XXXV, 69 (2008) 768 un accès privilégié à ce phénomène culturel unique qu’est le siècle « classique ». Matei Chihaia K a rin e L a nini : Dire la vanité à l’âge classique : paradoxes d’un discours. Paris : Champion, 2006. 695 p. There are numerous literary and historical studies of the attitudes toward death that have no ideological engagement; but like the pioneering works on the subject, the brilliant book by Karine Lanini has profound moral and ideological resonances. From a Right-wing and virtually anarchist perspective, Philippe Ariès sought to destabilize social and institutional trends that he deemed Modernist, by writing the history of dying. From a very different perspective, Michel Vovelle sought to know if religious belief declined in the eighteenth century, and he researched the statistically secularizing impulses measured by the evocation of the divine in wills, paid masses, and so forth. Karine Lanini situates her study beyond areas of agreement shared by Ariès and Vovelle that consumerist culture from circa 1500 prompted increased anxiety about death, she then deepens the secularizing perspective by research on the “century of saints” and focuses on the literary, religious and artistic significance of vanity. Faced with the emptiness of dying, the discourses of believers are found to be inadequate or irrelevant when confronted with the corporal and mental decline of dying. A defense of modernity? Not quite. Lanini’s book reaches far deeper than that, by exploring fundamentally new, more intense notions of vanitas that she characterizes as “laïque” because the human condition that is elucidated is trans-historical and beyond the boundary of religions. Beginning with dictionary definitions, still-life and vanity paintings, and a close reading of the book of Ecclesiastes, Karine Lanini elucidates a specific, more intense thematic field around the word “vanity.” Still-life paintings are different from vanity paintings because skulls are present in the latter, not unlike the liturgical stripping of altars to denude a church of any iconographic presence of the religious, and the silencing of bells between Good Friday and Easter Morning. Pascal might be said to have radicalized the genre of the ars moriendi when he made the néant as meaningful and intimate as he does. Jean Delumeau’s 1983 work on how a movement within the clergy elaborated a spirituality centered on fear of hell, purgatory and dying, is noted in the Bibliography, but Karine Lanini does not engage this argument, perhaps because it does not square with her general perception of the Church as Comptes rendus 769 responsive to social and spiritual change, but not really initiating it. Pascal’s religious and scientific life was spent within the Church. He derives the néant in the Pensées partly from the Augustinian notion of bad and evil being an absence of good, and God. Baldly stated, then, divertissement is anything which impedes the sinner from devoting all his thought and action to establishing a satisfactory relation with the divine. The books, jewels, crown, skulls, etc. in vanity paintings are, as it were, explicit signs of the danger of divertissement. At this point, Karine Lanini takes up general historical questions centered on reception and diffusion of ideas as found in funeral sermons, consolations and epitaphs, in order to discern general or public attitudes toward death. She does not take up the question of how highly individual or private writings and experiences become public, but she already accomplishes so much that it would be unfair to ask her to do so. It is this process, however, that diffuses new reflections on the human condition within the Church. Karine Lanini finds that the genres that are supposed to sustain the faithful when dying, do not do so. Funeral orations generally recount the life of the deceased (gloire) and assume a serene passage to beyond the grave. Consolations and epitaphs offer the same type of non-solace and are written with the survivors in mind. The abyss of nothingness and death that we find in the Pensées and in vanité paintings is almost entirely absent from these genres. While generally true, as with everything there are exceptions: Bossuet mentions corruption, vers, cendres, and the pourriture of the body in his sermon for H. de Gournay, but the general point is certainly true. There follows a remarkable exploration of still more examples of these genres, an analysis of the articles on dying in Donneau de Visé’s Mercure galant for 1684, particularly on the queen’s death, and on close readings of Sévigné, Bussy-Rabutin, Ninon de Lenclos and Bossuet on death and dying. The articles on the queen’s death are particularly striking in their morbid detail, and Karine Lanini interprets them as if they were absolutely true. The words curieux and curiosité appear frequently in these intimate accounts, almost as something to satisfy. Gérard Defaux shows how the term curieux, like divertissement, derives from purely human, sinful impulses, in that curiosity pulls the Christian toward the world, the non-divine. It could be argued that the queen’s householders had a Christian duty to tell their mistress of the danger she was in, and this reviewer finds it difficult to believe that, unbeknownst to the others, one of them did not quietly whisper to her that she was dying; but on this point Donneau is perhaps the only source. Still, taking a single source to present facts as true is a danger as one shifts from interpreting literary texts to history tout court. PFSCL XXXV, 69 (2008) 770 Sévigné’s ruminations on death become intense, not only because she was with an elderly relative who was taking a long time to die, but also because they derive from an ineluctable pursuit of intimacy with a loved one. Jean Racine’s letters to his son Louis are also filled with anxiety about his own death, as a pursuit of intimacy, and perhaps as parental obsessive control over a beloved child. When death finally was near, Sévigné asked her daughter to leave, almost as if she recognized that things of this world, including children, and intense intimacy, did not conform to the ideal of a Christian death. Though the great state funerals were a form of entertainment, and though Bossuet’s sermons plowed the emotions in ways that certainly did not help relieve anxiety about dying, note that Sévigné accepts that she will die, and that earlier she had almost looked forward to shedding tears over someone else’s demise. She is curious about dying and apparently does not think her curiosity is sinful. Bussy-Rabutin’s relaxed, disengaged ways of writing about dying are matter-of-factly stated, but there seems to be no philosophical or religious frame to shed light on his views. Are we left with the commonplace about battlefield experience and lack of anxiety about death? As a friend and cousin of Sévigné’s, Bussy may have considered it his duty to do what he could to calm her. With Madame de Scudéry, Bussy lifts the veil somewhat more when he says that “l’esprit humain” is not capable of long, deep mourning, for “milles agréables sujets” come along (p. 473). This argument based on an idea of human nature merits further study. In her letters to Saint-Évremond, Ninon de Lenclos confronts the bodymind (esprit) dilemma, and it is doubtful that, in what was an Epicurean milieu, the latter term ought to be thought of as the same as the soul. The last case study is none other than Bossuet himself, and his is a very poignant example of the failure of consolation literature to bring about peace and recognition in the face of physical pain and death. Two accounts of Bossuet’s last months, decline and death, are presented in order to elucidate the profound differences between the first, which is a conventional, edifying relation of a Christian death, and the second, which is a seemingly honest account of delusions, secretiveness, extreme anxiety, pain, attempts to deceive oneself and others, and death. The first, by a certain Abbé de Saint-André who was close to Bossuet, tells how, although the “pain was great, his patience ... and tranquility of spirit were always greater,” and clearly is an account that could be distributed and published about the death of a major spiritual and public figure. The second, by Abbé Le Dieu, a secretary to Bossuet, apparently was written for Le Dieu alone. His motives remain unstated, but there is no reason to suspect that Le Dieu wished to embarrass his employer by making Comptes rendus 771 public this account of a pathetic and horrible death. Karine Lanini carefully dissects Bossuet’s physical, psychological and spiritual descent from a hardworking researcher-writer and spiritual leader, to a dying man racked with pain, and to a cadaver being autopsied. Sickness, doctoring, deciding whether to agree to an operation for the stone, inability to work, crying out in despair, and increasingly less frequent moments of spiritual comfort and resignation, leave Bossuet nothing but a body, a total deontology. In her summary of the key words marking Bossuet’s inability to come to terms with dying, Karine Lanini omits the words and moods that do not support her argument (p. 512). According to Le Dieu, Bossuet accepted the last rites and as in “une parfaite tranquillité ... laissant paraître une grande résignation” (p. 509), yet she does not mention this in her summary, where she characterizes Bossuet as having an “attitude faite d’angoisses, de négation, de révolte et de plainte devant une misère très vive” (p. 512). The summary is undoubtedly consistent with what happened, but is it complete? The probable consequence of rigorous argument is mitigated by the presence of the texts which permit the reader to evaluate summaries and decide for himself whether Bossuet’s was a bonne mort, or whether his was a descent into le néant. The rigor in the argument, and very probably lack of space, led Karine Lanini to concentrate on one major thread in Christian attitudes toward death. She notes that paintings such as Saint Jerome (Joseph de Ribera) and Saint Mary Magdalene are “rather” close to vanité paintings; but she does not pursue the texts and images that reveal anguish, fear and pain when reflecting upon death. After all, in Gethsemane, and in anguish, Jesus hoped he would not have to die. Bossuet tried to hide his physical condition, but Le Dieu witnesses his candor, anguish, fear, and inability to accept death. Was Bossuet actually more secretive and deluded about his illness than about the signs of death? And agony while dying was, of course, penance for earlier sins. Did Bossuet believe that, as a result of his doubts and suffering, he would spend less time in Purgatory? Did Bossuet perceive his own agony as unworthy of a Christian? Attempting to do justice to Karine Lanini’s book in a brief review is a very humbling experience. Have I been a correct and fair reader? Karine Lanini is not only a formidable close reader of many different genres (including the Bible! ), she is illuminating in her prose analysis of still-life and vanité paintings. Her command of the literature on Western attitudes toward death is very strong, and her writing about Pascal, Bossuet, Lenclos, Sévigné, Claesz, Champaigne and Stoskopff inspires awe. She graciously acknowledges the works of others, notably Jean Wirth, Hélène Germa- Romann and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani. PFSCL XXXV, 69 (2008) 772 The progressivism in French culture, and particularly in historical research and publication, might lead editors to operate on the prejudice that the history of attitudes toward death and dying belongs to the 1980s and is essentially complete, if not old-hat. Here is an important exemplary exception. Philippe Sellier and Honoré Champion are to be commended for producing a superb book that is appropriately illustrated, both in color and in black and white. It is to be hoped that the author will write a stripped-down version, and that some editor will buck the trend by publishing a more mass-market and less expensive book! A final question: What were Sévigné’s and Bossuet’s tastes in painting? Did still lives and vanities hang on their walls? The overall effect of the paintings in Bussy’s chateau is anything but morbid. Orest Ranum C ha rl e s M a zo u e r : Le Théâtre français de l’âge classique, I. Le premier XVII e siècle. Paris : Champion, coll. « Dictionnaires & Références », 16, 2006. 612 p. Faisant suite à un Théâtre français de la Renaissance (Champion, 2002), et précédant neuf autres volumes consacrés au théâtre jusqu’à l’an 2000, dont deux traiteront encore du XVII e siècle (Le plein classicisme et La fin du siècle), le présent ouvrage fait le bilan de ce demi-siècle de vie théâtrale que l’auteur persévère à qualifier de « premier XVII e siècle » au détriment d’un plus attendu « baroque ». Charles Mazouer récuse cette option terminologique au prétexte que cette « notion fascinante » (p. 14) serait trop imprécise, mais n’interdit nullement à « l’épithète ‘baroque’ [...] strictement définie [de] revenir sous [sa] plume » (ibid.). Ch. Mazouer dresse un panorama consciencieux d’une période théâtrale encore largement méconnue dans un diptyque dissymétrique dont le premier volet traite de « L’Époque d’Alexandre Hardy, 1610-1628 » (p. 17-129) et le second du « Premier classicisme. De 1629 à la Fronde » (p. 131-532). Cette partie est elle-même divisée entre « La Vie théâtrale » (p. 135-213) et « Les Œuvres » (p. 215-497). L’ensemble est agrémenté d’un cahier d’illustrations variées : gravures, plans de théâtre, croquis de décors, frontispices, et s’achève non sur une conclusion mais, étant donné que cette époque est perçue comme un « premier classicisme », sur une logique « Ouverture » (p. 533-536). L’étude s’accompagne d’une bibliographie idoine, suivie d’un précieux « Index des noms » (p. 579-590) et d’un indispensable « Index des pièces de théâtre » (p. 591-604). Considérant comme il se doit que le théâtre est, pour citer le regretté Jean Duvignaud, un « fait social total », le pro-