PFSCL XLIV, 87 (2017) Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch A NNE E. D UGGAN (W AYNE S TATE U NIVERSITY ) In their preface to Les Femmes Illustres (1642), Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry offer their book up as a “triumphal arch” erected to glorify illustrious women from history. 1 The “je” of the “Epître aux dames” states: “Et si l’arc de triomphe, que j’ai élevé à la gloire de votre sexe, n’est pas jugé indigne de vous, ce ne sera pas le dernier ouvrage que j’entreprendrai pour vous” (31). Whereas the first edition verbally posits the book as triumphal arch, it takes visual form in the title page of the second edition, which depicts a distinct triumphal arch that strengthens the opening epistle’s association between literature, architecture, and political space implicit in the notion of book as triumphal arch. This essay explores the implications of presenting Les Femmes Illustres in such terms. The triumphal arch was integrated into royal entries after coronations and conquests, functioning to legitimate the king’s authority and domination over various cities. A temporary structure, the triumphal arch allegorically represented the forces the king had conquered. At the same time that entries with their triumphal arches could be used to reinforce the authority of the king over French cities, city authorities also played an active role in the event by presenting to the king harangues that reaffirmed their rights. 2 The ephemeral nature of the event with its temporary structures, processions, and harangues was made permanent through the printed accounts of the entries, which included illustrations of the triumphal arches. 1 I will not enter into discussion about authorship of Les Femmes Illustres. I will treat the text as one that was co-authored by Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, foregrounding Madeleine’s role given her lifelong work on the defense of women. 2 In his study of Renaissance entries, Lawrence M. Bryant notes about one entry that the provost of merchants and the first president of Parlement, “within the rhetorical form of the harangue [...] also interjected some reminders about older constitutional customs at entries” (54). Anne E. Duggan 248 V. E. Graham (1986) observes that editors and engravers not only created commemorative albums of royal entries, often adorned with woodcuts, but they also used triumphal arches to decorate title pages, a trend launched by Geoffroy Tory. In The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996), Tom Conley remarks about Tory that his “writings in general [...] theorize the spatial imagination that had been nascently binding writing to geography” (63). As we know from her later work, Madeleine de Scudéry indeed binds writing and geography, tying the cartographic space - that of the Carte de Tendre - to the imaginary space of the novel, Clélie, Histoire Romaine (1654-1660). 3 Already in 1642 with Les Femmes Illustres, Scudéry arguably was reflecting upon relations between space, architecture, and the text in ways that were empowering to women. Les Femmes Illustres as triumphal arch functions as a symbolic territorial threshold, initiating each of the female characters into the public space of the book, and as such endowing them with authority. As geographical marker and architecture, the triumphal arch both commemorates and legitimates the glory - the authority, power, and legitimacy - of the women crossing into the space of the book. In what follows, I will situate the Scudérys’ Femmes Illustres with respect to the tradition of collections of illustrious women, particularly as they relate to the allegorical figures used in the frontispiece to represent the book; and to the genre of the harangue as exemplified by, among others, Georges-Baptiste Manzini. As we will see, the Scudérys’ strategy of shaping their collection of harangues given by illustrious women as a triumphal arch has implications for the construction of female subjectivity and authority, especially as it relates to political, historical, and literary space. This becomes all the more evident when thinking about how the structure of Les Femmes Illustres interfaces with the ceremonial triumphal arch as opposed to other spatio-architectural metaphors employed in other types of collections of illustrious women. Collections of Illustrious Women Scholars such as Ian MacLean and Catherine Pascal have documented the widespread popularity of collections of illustrious women, inaugurated by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Famous Women (1374), which provided readers with short biographies of historical and mythological women such as Semiramis, Isis, Penelope, and Lucretia. From Christine de Pizan to Pierre Le 3 On the relation of the Carte to the novel Clélie, see my Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, 62-90. Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 249 Moyne, authors of such collections consistently chose to “organiser allégoriquement la matière sous les formes diverses d’une ‘cité,’ d’une ‘nef,’ d’un ‘fort’ ou encore d’une ‘gallerie’” (Pascal 3). While many of these texts can be considered pro-woman to different degrees, each of the allegorical forms used to represent illustrious women has different implications for female subjectivity. For instance, Boccaccio presents his book as a “garden” (5) filled with famous women his female readers should emulate - particularly those exceptional women like his dedicatee, Lady Andrea Acciaiuoli of Florence, endowed with what he regards, problematically, as masculine virtue. 4 The book as garden - a collection of beautiful and fragile flowers that are the illustrious women contained within it - can be contrasted with Pizan’s representation of the book as an actively constructed city, built and founded by the character Christine and her allegorical helpers to protect the women inhabiting it from their detractors. Rather than a passive immaculate conception (Mary was “bénie entre toutes les femmes”), Dame Raison announces to Christine: “Ainsi, ma chère enfant, c’est à toi entre toutes les femmes que revient le privilège de faire et de bâtir la Cité des Dames” (43; my emphasis). Although Pizan provides a much more active model of female subjectivity than Boccaccio - comparing Christine to the king who founded Troy - her work shares with other authors the notion of the book or city as something that contains these illustrious women of history, protecting them from the médisance of male historians and philosophers. Part and parcel of the late medieval and early modern Querelle des femmes, several other works appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth century that represent the book as “containing” illustrious women as a means of defending them. 5 In La Nef des dames vertueuses (1503), dedicated to Anne de France, Symphorien Champier celebrates virtuous women like Penelope and Lucretia, as well as women from Biblical history. Helen Swift remarks that for Champier, these examples represent so many “implicit responses to previous maliciously drawn portraits” by “an unidentified host of pre-existing misogynists” (Men Defending Women 30). Early in the text the narrator explains the purpose of the text/ ship: “La nef des dames vertueuse [sic] / Du [sic] toute vertu est enclose. / Les gestes et le vasselaige / Des dames cy abbat la raige / De cil qui les dames accuse” (1). Later, when 4 After praising Acciaiuoli's “outstanding probity,” “elegance of speech,” and her superior intellect, Boccaccio associates her name Andréa with andres, meaning “men” in Greek, thus masculinizing her virtues. See Boccaccio 3, 5. 5 Helen J. Swift notes that this tradition of querelle texts are inscribed within “a tradition of forensic oratory” whose “proclaimed purpose [is] to defend women by advocating on their behalf” (Men Defending Women 134). Anne E. Duggan 250 discussing the wife of Noah, the reader easily associates Noah’s ark and Champier’s nef (figure 1), which figuratively protects virtuous women from the flood of male médisance. Dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre, Jehan Du Pré explicitly presents his Le Palais des Nobles Dames (1534) as a means to “defendre la querelle des honnestes femmes / et mienne.” 6 The character of the author is led by Noblesse féminine to the palace whose chambers contain illustrious women sharing similar qualities: women warriors are found in the basse cour; agile women in the adjacent gallery; women versed in the sciences are located in an interior room, near the chambers where chaste women and faithful wives can be found. In effect, the book mirrors the organization of the palace and its garden in which illustrious women are found (figure 2). 7 Brenda Dunn- Lardeau rightly maintains that “L’engagement pro-féminin de ce champion des femmes est composite, parfois avant-gardiste, le plus souvent traditionnel” (73). Interestingly, active women are found in the lower parts of the palace, while the upper chambers relate to more traditional and passive feminine virtues. Thus women whose physical qualities are privileged are positioned lower than those whose merit resides in more spiritual ones. Implicity then, inactive but chaste women carry more ontological value in the text than the woman warrior. All the while claiming to defend women, such texts often prove limiting in their defense, and these limits arguably take the figurative form of the enclosed spaces in which these celebrated women are contained. The figure of the gallery (Du Pré speaks of “galleries” within the palace) is continued through the work of, among others, Pierre Le Moyne in the seventeenth century. Although not engaged in the Querelle des femmes, his text does take up the defense of the queen regent, Anne d’Autriche, at a time of crisis. 8 In his preface, Le Moyne explains that the femmes fortes have assembled in his gallery, functioning as a symbolic court, to pay homage to the queen regent, thus legitimating her authority at a time that it was being 6 Swift notes: “on remarque la touche d’ironie de l’adendum ‘et mienne,’ qui ne signale pas seulement que l’auteur bien avisé a embrassé la querelle en faveur des femmes comme porte-parole ou avocat littéraire, mais, en plus, que dans l’acte même de défendre le sexe féminin il plaide sa propre cause comme écrivain à la recherche du mécénat de Marguerite de Navarre” (“Circuits de Pouvoir” 61). 7 On the context of the Palais and its relation to Marguerite de Navarre, see Swift, Men Defending Women, 177-78. 8 Sophie Vergnes situates Le Moyne’s text among “un courant intellectuel de défense des femmes, qui se trouve considérablement renouvelé dans les années 1640-1650 […] [en partie] en raison du contexte politique qui exige de valoriser le pouvoir de la régente” (n.p.). Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 251 undermined during the Fronde. 9 In her honor, the allegorical qualities of la magnificence, les grâces, la force, la justice, and la piété construct the statue seen in the center of the frontispiece (figure 3). Commenting on the frontispiece, Derval Conroy remarks: “While clearly the volume can be read as a glorification of the monarchy, and as a panegyric portrait of the queen, a monument to her virtues, it also seems possible to read it as a monument to containment, an attempt to fix in stone, as does the sculpture of the frontispiece, the guiding principles of good governance” (“Verbal Painting” 12). Conroy’s notion of the book “as a monument to containment” in its prescriptive nature can be extended to the way the book-monument contains the femme forte, both celebrating her virtues but also limiting her sphere of action. 10 In 1555 appeared a more ostensibly militant type of collection by François Billon, entitled Le Fort Inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe féminin, dedicated to Catherine de Médicis, Marguerite de France, Jeanne d’Albret, Marguerite de Bourbon, and Anne de Ferrare. Billon presents his collection of illustrious women as a forteresse and himself as the ouvrier, who constructs the fortress to protect women from “la trop ancienne et injuste Guerre de mespreis qui encores se fait a l’encontre de toute Princesse et Dame en son Sexe, par tant d’Hõmes qui plus tost s’arment de coustume que de Raison” (n.p.). 11 In several respects Billon’s book-as-fort recalls Pizan’s walled city, but with a stronger emphasis on the theme of war and the need to mount a defense against men (figure 4). Armed by custom rather than by reason, these men attack women whom Billon arms with symbols of female perfections so that women can affirm their authority. The frontispiece includes a female figure lighting a canon, a display of weapons and defensive towers, and at the top of the page we can see the armor of two soldiers, which suggests their defeat - a reference to the skirmishes and the taking of prisoners mentioned in the prologue and which are acted out in the first 9 Pascal remarks about the use of galerie: “Ce thème de ‘la gallerie,’ terme emprunté à l’architecture, qui désigne à l’origine un passage couvert servant à se déplacer d’un lieu à un autre mais qui s’est progressivement transformé pour devenir un lieu de promenade, voire de réception, souvent décoré, à ces fins, avec une richesse ostentatoire, connaît en effet une certaine fortune littéraire à cette époque” (3). 10 At the same time that Le Moyne wishes to celebrate the femme forte, he also presents the book as a pedagogical tool. Conroy discusses the ambivalence of the text and the ways in which Le Moyne sought to make actions not typically associated with female decorum palatable. See Conroy, “Verbal Painting.” 11 As Breitenstein remarks, “Cet écrit promeut la défense des femmes dans sa forme même, un édifice à vocation militaire” (“Traduction” 100). Anne E. Duggan 252 chapters of the book. Billon is most adamant about women’s “capacite de Science et vertu.” He refers to misogynistic attacks on women not as merely “cete ingrate opinion” but as a “Frenesye.” He insists that God “créa l’Hõme semblable a soy Masle et Femelle,” their distinction limited only to corporeal difference for the purposes of reproduction: “[Il] donnât a l’un et a l’autre semblable et mesme forme d’Ame, de sorte qu’entre icelles Ames ny à diference de Sexe. La Fême à la pareil entendement de l’Hõme, la mesme raison” (1). Although the first sections of the book focus on domestic matters and appear relatively conservative, Billon later moves from women’s roles within the family to women’s contributions to knowledge and nation building, among other areas. 12 Each of these collections of illustrious women constructs the female subject in terms of more or less agency: Pizan’s Christine founds a city; Champier provides his illustrious subjects with a lifeboat of sorts; Du Pré and Le Moyne build their women palaces and galleries where women can both be protected and socialize; and Billon provides his Amazonian women with a fortress. Works are anchored in a more medieval knightly tradition (Billon) or a more courtly one (Du Pré and Le Moyne). But they all share the notion of a space that contains - that protects but that can also immobilize - the women enclosed within it. In their re-imagination of collections of illustrious women, the Scudérys radically move away from this type of spatial metaphor and arguably construct female subjects with a much broader agency than previously conceived. This shift is captured not only by the figure of the triumphal arch, but also by the use of the genre of the harangue, which makes illustrious women active agents in their construction of self. The Scudérys’ Femmes Illustres The Femmes Illustres can be viewed as a hybrid text that draws both from the tradition of illustrious women, and the spatial and architectural allegories that are inseparable from it; and from the genre of the harangue as exemplified by the work of Georges-Baptiste Manzini, whose Harangues ou discours académiques Georges de Scudéry translated and published in 1640, two years before Les Femmes Illustres appeared. 13 Like Billon, the Scudérys’ 12 On Billon’s Fort, see Breitenstein 160-61. 13 On the connection between Manzini and Les Femmes Illustres, see for instance Bricco 168-69. Bricco suggests 1642 as the publication date of Georges’s translation, but in a note Eveline Dutertre gives March 3, 1640 as the date of the privilege and May 12, 1640 as the date of its first print run (29). Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 253 text draws on figures of battle, most evident in the frontispieces for both the first and second editions of the text in which we see a selection of arms (1642) and a woman warrior (1655). (See figures 5 and 6). But by presenting the book as a triumphal arch and representing illustrious women through the genre of the harangue, the text moves away from the idea of the book as containing and showcasing illustrious women, towards a model based on women speaking and acting in their own name; from a narrative of their story, often recounted by a male author (with the exception of Pizan) to a first person narrative in which illustrious women recount their own story; and from an architecture that limits or immobilizes its female subjects to one that frames or punctuates its female subjects’ movements, who enter into and conquer a space from which women have traditionally been excluded. 14 Critics such as Catherine Pascal and Elisa Bricco have argued that the use of an oral genre such as the harangue, which has affinities with judicial discourse as well as tragedy, speaks to the intention that such a text was to be read out loud within the space of the salon. Pascal characterizes the harangues as “Un monologue dont nous pouvons supposer qu’il était écrit tout autant pour être ‘joué’ que pour être ‘lu’ dans les salons” (7). For her part, Bricco remarks that “le choix de publier des harangues - un genre rhétorique très codé et qui n’appartient pas forcément à la sphère littéraire, mais plutôt à l’art oratoire judiciaire - était sans doute aussi dicté par la pratique de la lecture à haute voix, très répondue dans les salons, de la part des gens de lettres qui présentaient en avant-première leurs écrits au jugement des gens qu’ils fréquentaient” (167). While acknowledging the importance of orality within the context of salon-based compositions, we also cannot emphasize enough the importance of a work in which women give “public” speeches (quite literally through the publication of the book), a tradition grounded in the male-dominated genre of the legalistic harangue. Even if the preface of volume 1 of Les Femmes Illustres makes mention of the increasingly common notion that women naturally possess eloquence, the structure of the harangues indeed demonstrates a very scholarly knowledge of juridical eloquence. Joan DeJean has viewed the Femmes Illustres as an “explicit attack on Ovid’s heroic model [or Héroïdes]” (101), in which women from Antiquity present complaints or lamentations in 14 In her analysis of Les Femmes Illustres, Donna Kuizenga notes specifically in relation to Le Moyne, “à la différence des héroïnes du père Le Moyne dans ses Femmes fortes, les femmes illustres des Scudéry ne sont pas des sujets passifs” (302). While most of the collections of illustrious women are pro-woman to some degree or another, the Scudérys truly endow their heroines with an unprecedented level of agency. Anne E. Duggan 254 epistolary form about their abandonment by men. For DeJean, the Héroïdes provides a model of “spontaneous passion” (101) for the Femmes Illustres, citing Artémise’s opening harangue as an example of “improvisation” (102) as opposed to “the calculated flourishes of a practiced orator” (101). However, along with connections to Ovid’s Héroïdes, the Femmes Illustres also and quite clearly draws on the genre of the harangue in the tradition of Cicero and Manzini. Interestingly, Pierre Du Ryer, who was a fellow playwright of Georges de Scudéry, published a translation in 1639 of Les Philippiques de Cicéron, a collection of harangues, one year before Scudéry published his translation of Manzini’s Harangues. Notwithstanding the influence of the Héroïdes, the translations of Cicero’s Philippiques and Manzini’s Harangues bear a more immediate resemblance to the Femmes Illustres in that first, the harangues represent spoken language (speeches), as opposed to written (epistolary); second, both collections of harangues are written in prose, as opposed to the verse of the Héroïdes; third, Cicero and Manzini’s harangues are structured in term of an “argument” and a “defense”; and fourth; the speaker often presents his or her “case” to reclaim their reputation. For instance, in Cicero’s second philippique, Cicero defends himself against his accuser, Marc-Antoine, whom he accuses of “calomnie” (Cicéron 46), a term that frequently appears in the Femmes Illustres. The influence of Manzini’s harangues is most evident. Manzini organized his harangues in terms of an introductory “Argument,” followed by the direct discourse of an important historical figure, concluding with the “Effet de cette harangue.” The same exact structure and terminology is used in Les Femmes Illustres. In both cases, the harangues abound in the use of the apostrophe and ecphonesis, regularly punctuated by the interjection “ô,” with each speaker taking the position of supplicant for their own or another’s fate. However, Manzini characterizes his harangues in very gendered terms. In his preface as translated by Georges, Manzini complains about the affectation of contemporary oratory, filled with superfluous words akin to verbal “desbauche” (n.p.). Instead, he will present his lecteur with the style of the Ancients, declaring: “leur stile estoit plus masle, et plus vigoureux, le corps de leur Oraison plus fort; et il empruntoit sa couleur du sang et non du fard” (n.p.). Such descriptions of “proper” oratorical form speak to the perceived masculinist character of juridical rhetoric, which the book of Les Femmes Illustres will contest, at the same time that it is firmly grounded within this tradition. Artémise’s apparently spontaneous and passionate harangue is indeed quite calculated. In the harangue to Isocrate, whom she wishes to commission to write her husband’s history, Artémise conceals (out of feminine Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 255 modesty) and reveals her very astute political skills through a clever rhetorical ruse: “Je ne veux point que vous disiez que, quoique femme, j’ai pourtant eu l’Art de régener souvereinement [...] Je ne veux point que vous disiez que je fis le voyage de Grèce avec lui [Xerxes]. Je ne veux point que vous fassiez connaître que j’avais la première place à son conseil [...]” (36). This very performative utterance demonstrates how women’s glorious actions were excluded from history, feminine modesty and bienséance serving as filters for what might be considered “improper” actions for women. At the same time, the harangue reinscribes Artémise’s actions within historical narrative. In the same vein, the Scudérys both conceal - by suggesting that women “naturally” possess eloquence - and reveal - by making public these harangues through the publication of the book - the very mastery of rhetorical skills these illustrious women demonstrate. Conroy foregrounds the import of the Scudérys’ project: “the choice of harangue as genre presents women as orators, publicly engaged in the demonstration of rhetorical skill - a field from which they are traditionally excluded - with the explicit aim of valorizing the perceived female capacity for natural eloquence… This female prise de parole has the further advantages of, firstly, granting women a level of self-affirmation and agency through their speech, and, secondly, allowing them to inscribe themselves in a collective memory through the rewriting and redressing of history” (Ruling Women 73). In many respects, Les Femmes Illustres is about women figuratively entering into spaces - whether we think of the virtual space of history and oratory or that of the male-dominated courtroom - previously restricted to male subjects. As such, the text thus represents a conquest of the space of juridical oratory and, through the moving speeches that work to redress the historical wrongs male historians have brought upon illustrious women, a conquest of History as well. It is in the broader context of these conquests that the Scudérys’ shift away from the enclosed spaces used as figures for previous collections of illustrious women and move towards the triumphal arch as the figure for the book, emphasized visually in the frontispiece of the second edition, takes on all of their significance. The Frontispieces and/ as Triumphal Arch As a representative example of the design and function of triumphal arches in the period in which the Scudérys were writing, we may briefly consider the well-known example of Abraham Bosse’s engraving of Louis XIII’s royal entry into Paris in 1629. The engraving depicts an arch that commemorates the king’s defeat of the Protestants through devices similar to those we later find in the triumphal arch in the 1655 edition of Les Anne E. Duggan 256 Femmes Illustres (figure 7). Marie-Claude Canova-Green describes the 1629 arch used in the king’s ceremony as follows: An overarching rainbow, symbolizing peace [...] topped the arch. According to the text [...] standards depicting [...] the principal exploits of the war were paraded in front of the king’s chariot. Behind it were several vices chained together epitomizing ‘l’esprit des rebelles’ [...] i.e., Impiety, Perfidy, Audacity, Fury, Cruelty, and Pride, and which are shown perhaps as the dishevelled and semi-naked figures depicted at the left-hand margin of the tableau. (84). Just as the king conquered the Protestants, represented by the allegorical figures of Impiety and Perfidy, among others, so, as we will become evident, the Femmes Illustres will conquer Ignorance and Envy. For Canova-Green, the triumphal entry had two purposes: “On the one hand there were ‘victorious’ entries into captured towns [...] in which the ritual functioned as a way to occupy the urban space and impose royal order on it by force, in an attempt to normalize the national territory. On the other hand there were ‘triumphal’ entries given to celebrate the return of the victorious king, in which, after its unleashing on the battle field, violence appeared as controlled and force was represented as power” (78). Nicolas Russel and Hélène Visentin more generally characterize the royal entry as a symbolic means to establish authority over a space: “From the king’s perspective, the entry provided an opportunity to be seen by his subjects and thus to establish or to reinforce his authority” (16). Symbolically, then, the triumphal arch of the 1655 frontispiece celebrates the victory of illustrious women over male ignorance and malice in the same manner that the king’s triumphal arch celebrates his victory over impiety and perfidy. Putting the 1642 and the 1655 frontispieces in dialogue with each other, we could consider the first edition to represent the battle, with all of its references to arms, while the fronstispiece of the 1655 edition marks the text’s ultimate triumph. Like a true triumphal arch, it commemorates the success of the battle in which the text was engaged. When examining the frontispiece of the 1642 edition of Les Femmes Illustres, we can see objects related to the wars referenced in the harangues that could also be read as emblematic instruments of this conquest of juridical oratory and historical space. As Bricco has observed: “Dans la gravure, des hommes habillés en guerriers anciens entourent et indiquent avec leurs mains un autel, au-dessus duquel se trouvent tous les objets appartenant aux femmes illustres: des armes - épées, arcs, flèches et carquois, lances et piques -, des armures, des couronnes, des sceptres, des heaumes avec les plumes, des couronnes de laurier, des voiles” (170). Such objects make implicit reference to, for instance, an Artémise sailing with Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 257 Xerxes; a Cleopatre who fights alongside her lover Marc Antoine; Queen Amalasonte, who gives up the scepter to the ungrateful Théodat; and Lucrèce who calls the Roman people to arms. With the opening and the closing of the 1642 edition focusing on the importance of writing, the war is also about combatting the will of many men to prohibit women from study and consequently from professional writing out of fear of being surpassed. Whereas the frontispiece of the 1642 edition alludes to a conquest, the frontispiece of the 1655 edition explicitly presents the book as a triumphal arch and in fact sheds light on the function of the text. Alfred Touroude provides a detailed description of the image: Sous une vaste arcade se dresse un piédestal supportant une guerrière armée de pied en cap; casque en tête et lance au poing, elle appuie sa main gauche sur un cartouche en forme de bouclier, où l’on lit: ‘Les femmes illustres.’ Au bas de ce piédestal deux hommes se tordent, enchaînés; celui de droite, qui représente l’envie, a de nombreux serpens dans la chevelure; celui de gauche, qui représente l’ignorance, est gratifié d’oreilles d’âne. C’est ainsi que la gravure venge les femmes de l’ignorance qui les veut forcer à rester ignorantes et de l’envie qui les met en tutelle par crainte de les voir régner. Tout en haut de l’arcade, une banderolle déployée est adornée de ces mots: ‘A la gloire du sexe.’ (52-53). In some respects, this iconography proves more powerful and unified in message than that of the first edition. The image of ignorance and envy come up in the introduction to the harangue about Mariamne, whose speech works to reclaim her reputation that was slandered by her husbad Hérode: “Des deux historiens, qui ont parlé d’elle, l‘un n’était plus de son temps et l’autre était des flatteurs de son mari; ainsi c’est à nous à chercher la vérité, parmi l’ignorance de l’un et la malice de l’autre” (39-40). Malice here is arguably connected to envy. In her speech, Mariamne explains that, whereas she was born to reign, she is now subject to the whims of the usurper Herode, of lower social status, who falsely accuses her of infidelity in order to tarnish her reputation. Ignorance is evoked in a different context in the final harangue of the first volume, in which Sapho criticizes men’s desire to prohibit women from studying out of fear of being surpassed by them, that is, out of envy. The figure of ignorance conquered alludes to both the ignorance in which men wish to maintain women but also the ignorance about the truth, including the ignorance about the historical significance of illustrious women. Ignorance and envy work together (the ignorance of men about illustrious women out of their implicit envy of women, the envy of men driving them to keep women in ignorance), but they are conquered through the book of Les Femmes Illustres. Significantly, the 1655 frontispiece foregrounds the terms of this conquest. Anne E. Duggan 258 What I find particularly compelling about the Scudérys’ use of the figure of the book as triumphal-arch is the ways in which it is suggestive of movement, of women marching triumphant into a space, specifically the space of History and juridical oratory. Indeed, we might view each of the harangues as a performative utterance in the Austinian sense of the term: each illustrious woman gives a speech that has a very concrete effect that results in movement or action: Artémise gets Isocrate and Theopompe to write about her husband Mausole; Mariamne succeeds in defending her reputation for posterity; Cleopâtre persuades Marc-Antoine to follow her to Alexandria; Lucretia moves the Roman people to revolt against Tarquin; and Sapho persuades Erinne to take up the pen. Each of these “movements” also represents women moving into the space of oratory, and their success in persuasion marks so many conquests in oratorical performance and reconquering historical space. The book as triumphal arch does not function as a space that contains illustrious women; rather, it marks their movement and conquest of spaces traditionally dominated by male orators and historians. 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Duggan 260 V ERGNES , Sophie. “De la guerre civile comme vecteur d’émancipation féminine: l’exemple des aristocrates frondeuses (France, 1648-1653).” Genre & Histoire 6 (Spring 2010). http: / / genrehistoire.revues.org/ 932. 10 August 2017. Illustrations Figure 1. Image from the frontispiece of the 1503 edition of La Nef des dames. Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 261 Figure 2. Jehan Du Pré, Le Palais des Nobles Dames. Lyon, 1534. Anne E. Duggan 262 Figure 3. Pierre Le Moyne. La Gallerie des femmes fortes. 1647. Paris: Jacques Le Gras, 1663. Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 263 Figure 4. François Billon. Le Fort Inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe féminin. 1555. [taken from Gallica] Anne E. Duggan 264 Figure 5. Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustres. 1642. Les Femmes Illustres, or the Book as Triumphal Arch 265 Figure 6. Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustres. 1655. Anne E. Duggan 266 Figure 7. Engraving from Machaud by Abraham Bosse, Eloges et discours sur la triomphante Reception du Roy, Paris 1629.