PFSCL XXXIX, 77 (2012) 55 Patrick Dandrey : Quand Versailles était conté : La cour de Louis XIV par les écrivains de son temps. Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 2009. 391 p. Attempts to breathe new life into the venerable interpretative schemes which started off as the Perrault-Voltaire “century of Louis XIV” have been coming along with increasing frequency. In 2007, Christian Jouhaud published Sauver le Grand Siècle? (Paris: Seuil), an alternative history of the Grand Siècle that centered on readings drawn from little-known contemporaries of the Sun King; and Olivier Chaline’s 808-page Le règne de Louis XIV (Paris: Flammarion, 2005) increased the levels of fact on virtually every topic, thus complementing the then-current fashion of the rise of the thousand-page biography that made its first major appearance with Michel Antoine’s Louis XV in 1989. Patrick Dandrey takes the same interpretive frames, often stating them in mordant, sophistic prose, and he inserts passages from the familiar writings of Saint-Simon, Madame de Sévigné, Molière, Méré, Madame de La Fayette, La Fontaine; La Bruyère, Bossuet, and last, and almost least because he is not considered to be a writer, Louis XIV. The recherché vocabulary, the playfulness with present-day meanings (“un sage peut en cacher un autre,” p. 226), and the informed comment might lead the casual reader to conclude that this is a book for the general public. It is not. Patrick Dandrey anxiously and repeatedly assures his readers that he considers court life to be depraved, and he does his best to keep a critical distance from its transhistorical powers. Harsh judgments against flattery, obsequiousness, and so forth, suggest that courtliness is an ever-present danger, and I would agree; but perhaps, as Dilthey might put it, sympathy sustains the efforts toward verstehen, in order that the judgments made will assure conviction. Will readers build a new narrative out of the sources included here, to deepen the understanding of the phenomenon that Norbert Elias first paralleled with state-building and the rise of Fascism? I doubt it. Patrick Dandrey remarks, before offering a carefully wrought definition of the court: “La sincérité de la flatterie plaît toujours comme une rafraîchissante nouveauté...” (p. 37). There is insight here that merits close attention, but the moral discourse about the court from the seventeenth century is so commonplace and thin that more fundamental connections with human nature, money, and social hierarchies remain elusive. At the very center of courtliness there lay, throughout the Ancien Régime, an anti-court moral perspective. Not articulated through major philosophical themes, anti-courtliness broke from its moorings in the sixteenth century as a choice between the life of withdrawal and contemplation, and the active, political, even courtly life. Pauline M. Smith’s The Comptes rendus 55 Anticourtier Trend in Sixteenth-century French Literature (Geneva: Droz, 1960) analyzes the constituent elements in this moral perspective and studies the process by which authorship and literature at least in part took on more authority as a result of an anti-court moral stance. Courtliness and moral depravity became at least mentally, if not philosophically linked, historicized and fictionalized. Patrick Dandrey does not explore the obscure corners of literary production in the last half of the seventeenth century, to present unknown or little-read moral aperçus of life at Versailles. Not all the writers included here have theological/ philosophical frames for criticizing the court; but from the first sentence Patrick Dandrey indicates to the reader that if there are, it is up to the reader to supply them. He says that he knows that readers are familiar with Pascal’s remark about the role of divertissement in monarchies, yet he does not add a phrase about the critique of the noncontemplative life that divertissement has in his general thought. Sometimes there are lengthy quotations with little interpretation; at other times, lengthy close readings follow, with the framing derived from them post-Voltaire cliché-ridden general interpretations of the reign. The age scheme - 1660-1680 pleasure court frame, followed by the devout decades brought on, it seems, by the rise of Madame de Maintenon - appears throughout the book. The question is not addressed of how the aged (sic) king is perceived in monarchical cultures, that is, by ticking off the deeper impulses in the lifecycle’s effects on court life. Had it been addressed, supporting passages from perhaps Sévigné or La Bruyère might have been included. France had not had a really old king for centuries (Louis XI died at sixty); thus there probably was little collective memory about such at court. Louis XIV’s grandfather’s quite frantic scrubbing of his usually dirty body, and his donning new clothes whenever he set eyes on a young damsel who returned his look, did not enhance the dignity of the Bourbon dynasty, and probably had been forgotten. The shifts back and forth from conquests in war to conquests in bed had been a subject of conversation, as it would again be in the mid-eighteenth century, but it apparently was not in the post-1680s of the Sun King’s reign. The likelihood that Louis would have deepened his outward expressions of piety was part of the life-cycle program from the beginning. The intense devotional programs of his parents, late in their lives, might have come to mind as sermons followed eulogies about death and dying; Maintenon’s rise was more of a consequence than a cause of Louis’s great devotional transformation, though this may not have been perceived by the anti-court critics. PFSCL XXXIX, 77 (2012) 55 Central to the chapter on Seductions and Fascinations are the king’s own remarks (Périgny’s) about the powers that “honnête familiarité” may give over “peuples” (he does not say subjects), and the exchange between the king and Madame de Sévigné after a performance at Saint-Cyr of Racine’s Esther. Here the issue is not so much a philosophical-moral context, as the adroit use of commonplaces in conversation. Louis opens by saying, “Racine a de l’esprit.” Sévigné replies by her own version of the commonplace about lacking words to express her lofty, moving, and ineffable thoughts about the play. Patrick Dandrey has already recounted how a shift from a youthful court of pleasures and fêtes had, after about 1680, turned to one of religious devotion, outwardly expressed piety, and inward feelings of cynicism. With Sévigné, however, Louis does not mention the religious implications of the play, a more psychological remark than what might have been expected after attending a monumental work of art that Jean Orcibal once characterized as a prayer addressed to Louis XIV. The fantasies about the hopes and fears over addressing the king do not receive much attention in this book, but they were continually present and constituted the treppenwitz that sometimes lay behind literary and other creative initiatives. Sévigné’s satisfaction with herself does not efface the effects of Racine’s verses; it is her success in writing down a transcendental experience, the paedeia, not the king’s descent into conversation with her, that makes for a shift from “mythe solaire to mythe scolaire.” Anxious, self-conscious, and endowed with a prodigious memory, Louis took pleasure in giving pleasure to those who attended him, and of course the commonplace linking memory to tyranny comes to mind. The two writers selected for idealization of court culture are the Chevalier de Méré and Madame de La Fayette. In lapidary prose, Méré’s writing is characterized as that of a “théoricien qui jamais ne théorise...”; and because he spent little time at court, “la distance autorise le rêve” (p. 141). A close reading of the first of the Conversations captures the idyllic spaces that transform the roman de chevalerie, as perhaps reworked in pastorals; but that space was probably not the same as any of the idyllic spaces in the court’s pre-Versailles years, and certainly not after. The tissue of commonplaces that is Méré’s writing provides a clue to what conversation at Versailles consisted of. The spaces that La Fayette creates - the sixteenth-century court and the château at Coulommiers - are more explicit, yet minimalist, and contrast with the bombastic, maximalist emotional expression of the Sun King’s 1660s court. There were bigger and better fireworks. Méré and La Fayette Comptes rendus 55 may have been read as authors describing “a world we have lost,” of idealization and sensibility, and prefiguring that of Watteau and Marivaux. As might be expected from so eminent a reader of Molière, throughout the book there are prescient remarks about his plays. The “folie-Jourdain” is given the lengthier presentation, because the Bourgeois Gentilhomme maps the social and psychological foundations of courtliness as diffused in an urban family. Molière elucidates two distinct but complementary types of madness, the first being the obsessive, stubborn inability to perceive social reality (act III), and the second being the lunacies of the Mamamouchi farce in the final act. Patrick Dandrey remarks that Molière was the French Cervantes, a writer with his eyes squarely on the king, and less on the court. It is the de-ontologization of humanity that is offered up as in the Mamamouchi scene, not unlike the emperor’s new clothes. After noting an important shift toward a more Orientalist frame in the second group of La Fontaine’s Fables, published in 1678, Patrick Dandrey turns to a study of that king of the beasts, the lion, whose principal fault in his despotic rule is amour-propre. La Fontaine lets his readers wonder about so many things, for example how the idea of sacrifice, a scapegoat - in this instance an escape donkey - comes to the lion and is accepted by the other animals. Of course the historical literary sources are noted, but when transported to the animal kingdom, scape-goating takes on something primordial. The perception of despotic politics remains not only oblique but perhaps more consistent with Antique thought (the exception being Tacitus), rather than the more beastly image “translated” by Amelot de la Houssaye from Machiavelli and developed by Montesquieu. La Fontaine’s great achievement was the transformation of the univocal, and universal, fable genre into the conversational. Having noted that La Bruyère shared many of the moral imperatives of La Fontaine, and his controlled sense of moral outrage, it is the location of the chapter on the court, in the exact center of Les Caractères, and the fact that the author belonged to Condé, that grounds his critical perspective. The principal salvo goes far deeper than personalities and ceremonies; as a genre, from Castiglione to Méré the courtesy book fosters illusion and delusion, rather than reality. La Bruyère almost goes back to La Boëtie when he asserts that humans want and seek enslavement. The venerable analogy of the theater as court, and the court as theater, has its starting point in the seductive powers of the visual, the great destroyer of reality. Patrick Dandrey breaks out of the self-imposed courtly framework when he turns to edification, since up to this point anti-court comment has scarcely included thoughts about dying. Perhaps the most courtly canard on the theme comes from (if I recall correctly) Saint-Simon’s remark about how PFSCL XXXIX, 77 (2012) 5 some courtiers wished they were dead in order to harvest the sort of praise given to someone at court who had recently died! But such an anecdote, if courtly, was not edifying. When Bossuet climbed into the pulpit to eulogize Madame Henriette d’Angleterre, he doubtlessly faced not only expectations of a great rhetorical performance but also, out of custom and decorum, persons who sought acceptance, hope, and reconciliation with the divine whose actions, or inactions, broke the rules about age, goodness, and badness. Why should a gay, pleasant young princess die, when there were plenty of cranky, nasty hags about? Despite the bevy of priests already present around the dying woman, it was decided that, in the middle of the night, only Bossuet, who was in Paris, could console the princess who expressed a desire to die “selon les formes.” Arriving in time, Bossuet found “tout consterné excepté le cœur de cette princesse,” according to a letter he wrote to his brother that recounts all the facts about the death, without using in the eulogy the metaphors on darkness and light, or the other literary devices that Patrick Dandrey characterizes as the “vertige des prénoms et les tourbillons des référents” (p. 275). The spare prose of this private letter has an eloquence of its own, certainly not the same as in the famous eulogy he addressed to the court. Each is edifying in its own way. Readers will be interested in the parallel between Bossuet’s double account of Madame’s and the accounts of his own death as analyzed by Karine Lanini in Dire la vanité à l’âge classique (Paris: Champion, 2006), where one account by a secretary, Abbé Le Dieu, still terrifies the reader by describing with precision pain, doubt, and a prolonged last agony (see my review in PFSCL, XXXV, 69 (2008), and the account by Abbé Saint-André, which witnesses to Bossuet’s faith, strength and resignation. The eulogy of a public figure, and Bossuet certainly was one, edified by conforming to the belle mort genre. A death could momentarily empower the clergy at court. They did not hold a monopoly over the power to console, but their roles in this instance did not depend on the king. Louis XIV’s death is briefly narrated: outside his final moments, he perhaps did not die “selon les formes,” but there was no Abbé Le Dieu present to record in painful detail what actually happened. Like a final fireworks bouquet, Patrick Dandrey turns to a close reading of Saint-Simon on his plot to arrange a marriage for the Duc de Berry. Throughout the book he refers to the Mémoires without questioning their veracity or impartiality, but here the “petit duc” is recognized for what he was, an “idéologue” and a “vibron de cour.” Comptes rendus 5 Arranging marriages was one of the central spheres of power that the aristocracy maintained (along with a near monopoly over military appointments, and dying for the king), though it had lost political deliberative influence in the royal council. Saint-Simon sets out to make a coup: despite the intense divisions and rivalries between the Orléans and Condé “parties,” he would arrange a marriage that would cut through the passion for winning and losing among both groups. A conscious and reasoned assembling of apparently contradictory, but in reality complementary, arguments that transforms gossipy narrative into a set piece for political action of this sort, is worthy of being listed along with Cardinal Retz’s account of selecting Conti as a straw chef de faction in the Fronde, and with Machiavelli’s beginning “conversation” in the Art of War. What is so interesting is how Saint-Simon puts together a single message that could be told to all prospective members of the cabal. Retz would say different things to different people, and would up the ante, change his own views and, inevitably, if charmingly, would fail as a plotter. Not so Saint-Simon. His single message worked its way through the court, right up to the king, who in effect enters the plot by accepting to convince his son to favor a marriage proposal that had previously been anathema to him. But there is more. From the beginning, Saint-Simon recognized that for the Bourbons it would be impossible to arrange a marriage with a legitimate foreign princess; thus he effectively helped the old king’s efforts to socially legitimate his only legally legitimate children. Patrick Dandrey accepts Saint-Simon’s claims to a courtly triumph, and refers to him as a courtisan absolu; but this reviewer remains skeptical about just how the cabal machine got stared in Saint-Simon’s mind. The fracas over Madame de Saint- Simon’s future at court suggests that the intrigue was not over when the Duc thought it was. In one of those semi-silent remarks, 2 + 2 = 6, the old lion may have suggested the idea of the marriage in the first place. After the debacle that was the polysynodie, and the rise of still another clerical tutor-favorite (this one did not enrich himself), the alienated wouldbe grand, like Retz, used his pen to settle accounts in an essentially spleenfilled political discursive sphere. Referring to Saint-Simon’s Mémoires as a “vrai roman,” that is, a “roman vrai,” Patrick Dandrey trivializes the work. The court at Versailles recovered the size, grandeur and cost under Louis XIV that it had had under Francis I and Henry II; but over the centuries the numbers, the displacements to Saint-Cloud, Marly, etc., and the magnificence and the fairly predictable turns to overt piety, scarcely altered the anti-court moral perspective. Only its articulation in the innumerable guises created by Molière, La Fontaine, and Saint-Simon gave it meaning. Death, and discourse about death, temporarily sobered the court PFSCL XXXIX, 77 (2012) 5 6 but did not stop it. Patrick Dandrey has provided a thoughtful and deeply personal vision of it all. Orest Ranum Jean Leclerc (éd.) : L’Antiquité travestie : anthologie de poésie burlesque (1644-1658). Édition établie et commentée par Jean Leclerc. Québec (Québec) : Presses de l’université Laval/ Éditions du CIERL, « Sources », 2010. 549 p. + Annexes, Variantes et corrections, Glossaire, Répertoire des expressions, Index Nominum, Bibliographie. Victimes des vers méprisants de Boileau, mépris abondamment orchestré au XIX e siècle par une critique hostile au burlesque, voici bien longtemps que les travestissements du XVII e siècle de l’épopée et de la mythologie antiques n’avaient plus connu les honneurs de la publication, à l’exception notable du Virgile travesti de Scarron (édité par Jean Serroy, Classiques Garnier, 1988), le seul à bénéficier d’une certaine réputation. Sort injuste, et injustifié, car la floraison des travestissements des années 1640-1660 nous dit en fait beaucoup sur tout ce qui dans la langue, les mœurs, les goûts et la littérature du XVII e siècle échappe aux représentations conventionnelles du Grand siècle - du côté de la transgression, ludique ou violente, des normes inextricablement esthétiques et éthiques qui définissent à nos yeux le « classicisme » et le siècle de Louis XIV… à condition de bénéficier de quelques clés de lecture. C’est ce à quoi s’emploie cette édition de J. Leclerc. Il faut donc saluer cette entreprise qui redonne à lire des textes fort rares, choisis parmi la trentaine de travestissements de la période, selon un principe de variété et de rareté (pour l’essentiel, ils n’ont pas été réimprimés depuis le XVII e siècle) : Aventures de la souris (Jean-François Sarasin, vers 1644-1648) ; L’Orphée grotesque et la Suitte de l’Orphée (anonyme, 1649) ; L’Hératotechnie (D.L.B.M., 1650) ; Le Jason incognito (Nouguier, 1650) ; La Nopce burlesque (Jean du Teil, 1651) ; L’Icare sicilien (anonyme, 1652) ; Lucain travesty (Georges de Brébeuf, 1656) ; Juvénal burlesque (François Colletet, 1657) ; La Batrachomyomachie (anonyme, 1658). On peut s’étonner de l’absence des travestissements de Dassoucy, mais ceux-ci mériteraient une édition particulière. Ces textes sont publiés avec un très grand souci philologique : outre les notes de bas de page éclaircissant les allusions à l’actualité contemporaine et les emprunts aux hypotextes antiques (ce qui est complété, en annexe, par quelques traductions d’époque pour Ovide, Lucain et Juvénal), l’édition est accompagnée d’un riche glossaire et d’un relevé des ex-