Nowhere does male duplicity create greater uncertainty and fear than in marriage. Near the end of conversation on the second day, Virginia, now convinced of the dangers men pose to women, claims she no longer wishes to marry. Her mother, Adriana, responds that her uncles claim she must in order to keep the family fortunes safe.101 But what if her husband proves violent, boorish, prone to anger or jealousy? If this is the case, Adriana responds, her daughter will have to work to change his nature with compassion, constancy, and humility. Leonora repeatedly counters that none of these strategies work—men don’t change but if they do, they only change from bad to worse. In that case, the women agree that Virginia will have to choose carefully and make sure she finds one of the few decent men that exist. Sadly, masculine nature undercuts even the value of this seemingly sound advice. Male duplicity runs deep and long, unperceived for years, carefully and purposefully hidden until it is too late for the deceived woman to escape. Men who have no good qualities, certainly none of the qualities a woman would want in a lover and husband, Cornelia explains, “often succeed very well (much to our harm and peril), in concealing their falsity and ill intentions beneath an appearance of decency. So even if a man does seem, over a long period, to display that loyalty and true love that we have talked about, I should advise any woman who is sensible, well-respected, and virtuous to proceed cautiously, if she values her virtue and reputation.”102
Perhaps not every man is a liar, but sadly, Leonora and her friends have no choice but to assume otherwise.
MADELEINE DE SCUDÉRY, THE SALON, AND THE PLEASANT LIE
There are any number of ways to ruin a conversation. Discussing how to ruin them, it turns out, is not one of them.
Madeleine de Scudéry, the most popular author of the seventeenth century and sponsor of the Saturday Society, an influential Parisian salon, stages her conversation about bad conservations as a gathering of amiable and eminently polite men and women, placing it at beginning of her 1680 collection of interlinked set pieces, Conversations on Various Subjects. Of course, the point of this conversation is not to dwell on the incompetent, not to ridicule and insult the boorish and dull—that would hardly be polite and amiable. Rather, as Cilenie, one of the women, puts it, “Before we can determine what most contributes to the charm and beauty of conversation, everyone here must recall those annoying conversations that have most bothered them.”103 Focusing on the bad will help to illuminate the good, and the value of good conversation is inestimable according Cilenie, who describes it as the most essential bond of human of society. Good conversation is “the greatest pleasure of well-bred people, the most ordinary way to introduce, not only politeness to the world, but also the purest morals and the love of glory and virtue.”104 When conversation goes wrong, more than boredom is at stake.
Unlike Christine de Pizan, unlike Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, in her Conversations Scudéry neither attacks men nor defends women. Instead, she teaches them how to behave and how to converse, hardly a surprising role for an aristocratic woman in seventeenth-century France. Although often connected with the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, the salon, from its inception in the waning years of the sixteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, was ultimately a retreat for the rich and aristocratic. Offshoots of the royal and noble courts, places where women had long played a central role in maintaining harmony among potential adversaries through enforcement of the codes of chivalry and gallantry, the salons, too, were places where the rules of courtliness and courtly sociability held sway. And in the salon, just as in the court, it was women who played the role of peace-keepers and civilizers.105 Men must know how to talk and so must women, because friendship and society depend on it. Which, as Scudéry’s conversation about conversations develops, is little different from asserting that friendship and society depend on lies.
Given the seemingly trivial examples of bad conversations the group discusses, it is at first difficult to discern why Cilenie places so much importance on it. Several of the women bemoan the hours lost, as if doing penance, having listened to women who do nothing but complain about their servants, their daily chores, or one who rapturously described “syllable by syllable the first stutterings of her three year old son.” Some women speak incessantly about their clothes, lying about how much they paid for them or the trouble they had procuring them. Others gossip cruelly and insipidly about other women, their loves and losses and lack of looks.106 And the list continues with men coming off little better as they prattle on endlessly about the minutiae of their business affairs, estates, and sunken boats. While one or two of the women present suggest that when men converse they tend to be more rational, albeit more serious, than women, whose discussions too often devolve into nothing but inane triviality, this doesn’t prevent some men from disagreeably talking only of great historical events or others from focusing on nothing but the nonevents of daily life.107 In a later conversational set piece, “On Speaking Too Much or Too Little,” Amilcar pays a visit to Plotina, who makes him promise not to be so boorish as the two men she had met with earlier in the day, the one who spoke so much she was reduced to silence and the other who spoke no more than four words during his entire stay.108
Asked toward the end of dialogue what can be learned from these various examples of conversation gone wrong, Valerie suggests that most any topic is fit for proper conversation, but only if introduced at the right time and only if discussed for the right amount of time. “I believe that there is no topic that cannot be entered into; but it must be free and varied according to the time, the place and the people one is with; and the key is that one always speaks nobly of base things, simply of noble things and gallantly of gallant things, without undo haste or affection.”109 While successful conversation requires both the wit and judgment necessary to be able to fit our words to the moment and to the audience, truly refined conversation must appear effortless. Valerie adds that the sort of person she has in mind, the sort, no doubt, that Scudéry depicts herself and her friends to be, must speak so easily and gracefully that “they don’t seem to reject any of their thoughts, as if saying whatever comes to mind, without any affected design of saying one thing rather than another.”110 Conversation must flow smoothly among all participants, moving seamlessly from one person to the next, back and forth and always forward.
Scudéry had already emphasized the importance of effortless conversation nearly forty years earlier in the introduction to her 1642 work, Illustrious Women or Heroic Harangues, in which she imagined twenty great speeches delivered by famous women of the past, such as Cleopatra, Agrippina, and Sappho. Although Scudéry was widely known to be the work’s creator, her brother Georges appears in it, as he so often does, as the alleged author. The introductory letter, written in his voice, takes up an objection that some men might make to her depictions of these women. Some men, Scudéry writes, might find it strange “that I have chosen women to express my thoughts because they imagine that the art of oratory” is unknown to them. If the ancients really did praise women for possessing great oratorical skills, then why doesn’t Scudéry assiduously follow the rules of rhetoric as taught in the schools, organizing her speeches with such key rhetorical elements as exordiums, narrations, exaggerations, metaphors, digressions, antitheses, “and all the other beautiful figures that typically enrich works of this sort?” These figures of speech are present, Scudéry responds, but hidden, for “the most delicate art consists in pretending there is none at all,” just as a woman might carefully set the curls and ringlets of her hair with a negligence so subtle and a nonchalance so agreeable that “anyone would suspect it was the wind, rather than her hands” that had arranged it so beautifully.111
Artifice concealed behind an effortless facade defines Scudéry’s conception of conversation, and she explicitly contrasts it with the rhetoric of the schools, with the language of lawyers at court, merchants at their trading houses, generals before their armies, and kings before their counselors. Amilcar a
nnounces the basis for this distinction at the very beginning of “On Conversation,” when he asserts that “all of these people speak expertly of their concerns and affairs, but they lack the agreeable talent of conversation which is the sweetest charm of life and is, perhaps, more rare than is commonly believed.”112 Of course, the distinction between these two types of rhetoric mirrors a social distinction between places where women were allowed to speak and places where they were institutionally and legally barred from speaking. Women were not allowed to participate in such public arenas as the Sorbonne, courts of law, and the military. In opposition to these sites of public speech, Scudéry proposes the salon as a place with its own superior form of rhetorical practice, where both men and women can participate as equals.113 Just as important, Scudéry delimits the field of private rhetoric through a series of exclusions. It is not like public speech. It is not like all those examples of conversation gone wrong. As Amilcar’s comment suggests, self-interest governs these other types of speech. The lawyer wants to win his case, the merchant seeks to maximize his profits, and bad conversationalists insist on imposing their personal obsessions on anyone and everyone who will listen. Polite conversation bonds together noble society because in the privacy of the salon, removed from the competitive hustle and bustle of the outside world, the participants put personal interest aside in favor of entertaining conversation that has no end beyond itself.
If conversation is the bond of all civil society, then complaisance is the most basic bond of conversation.114 Complaisance names that all-important skill that allows individuals to conceal their own interests and yield to the wishes of others. In “On Complaisance,” Clearque notes that “complaisance yields without weakness, praises without flattery … without affectation and baseness, renders society agreeable, and life easier and more diverting.” Sometimes, for the sake of others, we will pretend happily to discuss topics we don’t much care about, participate eagerly in activities we would rather forgo. Complaisance names the ability to ignore the foibles and eccentricities of others, to cede our own personal pleasures to the pleasures of those we are with, and so with “a thousand other little things, which without offending reason, and going against justice, manage effectively to make mankind better.”115 More than merely ceding to the wishes and desires of others, for complaisance to do its work, we must appear sincere. We must conceal our own wishes and desires behind an effortless facade of agreement so that those we are with can truly believe we mean what we say, otherwise our alleged agreement will reveal a not so hidden self-interest. “There is nothing more insupportable,” announces Clearque, “than those people who adopt a false complaisance and who are willing to do whatever you want to do, so that you will be willing to do what they want.”116 Finally, we mustn’t be overly complaisant, agreeing with everything proposed so that conversation dwindles into the boring silence of automatic agreement. There must be enough disagreement and wit among the participants to lend conversation its needed traction, to allow it to progress and for everyone to come together in a shared act of entertainment, but not so much that it grinds to a halt in strongly held positions, silence, boredom, or anger.117
Scudéry’s conception of conversation as a model of social cohesion depends on the concealment of self-interest beneath a carefully contrived appearance of nonchalance and naturalness. The most clever bit of carefully planned banter must appear as if it springs immediately and naturally to mind. Even a moment’s hesitation between saying one thing or another betrays the possible hidden presence of a self-interest calculating between its most beneficial options. Conversation succeeds, society forms and bonds, when nothing disturbs these smooth exterior appearances, when nothing gives us cause to worry about what those appearances might hide. In a different conversation, “On the Knowledge of Ourselves and Others,” for example, Cephise claims that in order “to pass one’s life sweetly, it is necessary to remain on the surface of things, for should you penetrate any deeper, a person may find that those same pleasures are bitter.”118 In our dealings with others, we should be satisfied with facades and appearances. Hoping to discover and know something more, something deeper, something real, will only lead us into “a thousand sorrows.”119 When another person complains that Cephise would have us lead our lives potentially deceived about our dearest friends, Cephise simply acknowledges that to “look deeper is to risk those surfaces being proven false.” We can think we have known someone for years only to discover, suddenly and unexpectedly, the most dismaying imperfections in their character. The best we can do is make conjectures about others, knowing full well that more often than not we will be proved wrong.120
Invoking the sort of world-weary truism found in critiques of court life from as early as the eleventh century, Telesile supports Cephise’s favorable assessment of superficial human relations when he adds that it is simply impossible to know when and if people are disguising themselves. Who can tell if anyone is the person he presents himself to be: the courtier before his lord, the lover before his lady, even a friend before his friend? “One cannot know the heart,” he concludes, “through words or actions.”121 Significantly, Scudéry complicates this vision of global uncertainty and latent duplicity with a dose of Jansenist self-loathing. Not only can we never be sure if others are being truthful, worse, we cannot even be sure about ourselves. We continually mask our own passions and envies, disguising them without realizing it, so charmed by our defects that we believe ourselves noble and caring when we are actually base and cruel. “People love themselves more than all the rest of the world,” Cephise notes, “and though they do not know themselves, they esteem themselves, they praise themselves without knowing why and even as they attempt to deceive others, they deceive themselves as well.”122 Although the bulk of the dialogue consists of a friendly debate between Cephise and Telesile about whether, with work, it is easier to know something of ourselves or others, the final word belongs to a third participant, Timocrates. “I believe that the two of you will agree,” he concludes, “that the greatest difficulty in knowing others well, and even ourselves, derives from the same cause that makes us see distant objects confusedly and makes us unable to discern those things that are too near to us. Similarly, we can say that others are too far from us and we are too close to ourselves in order to know either the one or the other perfectly.”123 Too close to ourselves and too far from others, everything becomes blurred, uncertain, unknown.
Whether truthful or false, society coheres so long as it skirts smoothly along a polished surface of diverting pleasures that conceal the possibility of ulterior motives and self-interest, of jealousy and envy. Universal civility, Cephise will claim, is a way of living, a tool we can use to make our way through the world as we see fit. Others can interpret our civility however they wish, and many may interpret our actions “as the beginning of friendship. This being so, wouldn’t it be brutal to disabuse them of their error?”124 Predictably, it is precisely this gap between what appears and what exists, between superficial complaisance and hidden interests, that renders the utility and convenience of civility problematic. Essential for social harmony, complaisance is, at the same time, dangerous, capable of abetting vice as much as virtue. On the one hand, as Clearque states in “On Complaisance,” “It is necessary to the society of all mankind, it promotes all pleasures; maintains friendship and without it we should be ever in a state of war and irritated.” On the other hand, he adds, “As sincerity is of all virtues that which is most peculiar to persons of honor, complaisance is of all virtues that which the sordid, the self-interested, the treacherous and flatterers most commonly abuse.”125 Behind a mask of complaisance, we can flatter and goad and harm others for our own benefit.
Amilcar, a little later in “On Complaisance,” attempts to limit its domain and potential for abuse. “In proper speech,” he asserts, “we can say that complaisance is the queen of trifles, and it is appropriate when the question is whether to stroll in one direction or the other, to dance or not t
o dance, to sing or not sing.”126 But it is clear that complaisance’s kingdom extends much further than the realm of mere social niceties, that it extends into every aspect of our dealings with others. Clearque will point out that there are “self-interested complaisances, habitual complaisances, complaisances of love, esteem and friendship, ambition, sordid and counterfeit complaisances, complaisances of the court and the city, serious complaisances, jocund and eloquent complaisances, true and false ones and thousands of other sorts.”127 Ideally, complaisance has no “particular interest,” aiming instead at “the world’s convenience” even as it strives to avoid dissimulation, lying, and flattery. But these are less rules than mere suggestions, for complaisance has no rules, and its proper performance requires judgment and virtue.128 Sadly, our inability to know either ourselves or others renders these moral decisions suspect, a situation made all the more problematic because flattery is simply complaisance misused. “The civility and gallantry of the world,” Scudéry writes, “at first conceals flattery, then custom admits it, and we are so used to it we are no longer capable of recognizing it.”129 Behind every act of complaisance lurks the possibility of flattery, deceit, and deception.
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